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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 26, 2025

By Tony Wikrent

The Trump “Litmus Test” 

Scott Ritter [via Naked Capitalism 01-25-2025]

…I’ll take this moment to remind President Trump that one of the “crimes” I was accused of committing by the Ukrainian government which put me on their State Department-funded death lists, was to claim that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict was a direct result of NATO expansion.

Which is, of course, the same assessment put forward by President Trump.

If you were an average American citizen, Mr. President, your name would be on that list.

Now is your chance to stand up in defense of the average American citizen and shut these lists down while terminating all connectivity between the US and Ukrainian governments which target US citizens for speaking out against Ukrainian propaganda talking points.

“The First Amendment to the United States Constitution,” you wrote, “an amendment essential to the success of our Republic, enshrines the right of the American people to speak freely in the public square without Government interference.”

You promised to defend this right.

Prove it with action, not just words.

Strategic Political Economy

”a way for those who want something from Trump to transfer money directly to him”

Heather Cox Richardson, January 20, 2025 [Letters from an American]

The tone for the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 47th president of the United States at noon today was set on Friday, when Trump, who once trashed cryptocurrency as “based on thin air,” launched his own cryptocurrency. By Sunday morning it had made more than $50 billion on paper. Felix Salmon of Axios reported that “a financial asset that didn’t exist on Friday afternoon—now accounts for about 89% of Donald Trump’s net worth.”

As Salmon noted, “The emoluments clause of the Constitution,” which prohibits any person holding a government office from accepting any gift or title from a foreign leader or government, “written in 1787, hardly envisaged a world where a president could conjure billions of dollars of wealth out of nowhere just by endorsing a meme.” Salmon also pointed out that there is no way to track the purchases of this coin, meaning it will be a way for those who want something from Trump to transfer money directly to him.

Former Trump official Anthony Scaramucci posted that “anyone in the world can essentially deposit money” into the bank account of the president of the United States….

Walter Schaub, former head of the Office of Government Ethics under Trump in his first administration, who left after criticizing Trump’s unwillingness to divest himself of his businesses, wrote to CNN: “America voted for corruption, and that’s what Trump is delivering…. Trump’s corruption and naked profiteering is so open, extreme and pervasive this time around that to comment on any one aspect of it would be to lose the forest for the trees. The very idea of government ethics is now a smoldering crater.”

The Land of Greater Fools: America as a big con.

Hamilton Nolan, January 21, 2025 [How Things Work]

Watching Trump launch a crypto coin days before his own inauguration that instantly made him billions of dollars richer is kind of impressive, in the way that you might be impressed by watching the planes strike the twin towers on 9/11. People said this was bad, yes. But do you understand the level of corruption that is on full display here? This is—I don’t want to be hyperbolic here—a level of public corruption that is, let’s conservatively say, one thousand times worse than the Watergate scandal. That was just an instance of a paranoid president trying to steal secrets from his political opponents and then covering it up. This, on the other hand, is the president-elect of the United States of America putting out a big bucket that says “BRIBE ME” right before he takes office. Anyone can now buy an imaginary “coin” and the money will go directly into the pockets of the Trump family, as they run the United States government. That is what happened here. Donald Trump’s net worth went up by tens of billions of dollars in one day. In one day! The day before his inauguration! Out of thin air! And then his fucking wife made a coin, too! This is not even the same as the Trump family launching a business, building hotels that wealthy interests might stay in to try to curry favor. There is no business here. This is just saying, “Give the president money and we’ll give you this token we made up.” It is a tip jar that sits on the desk of the Oval Office. You almost have to laugh. The way that I know that people have not quite internalized how outrageous this is is that everyone is not still talking about it, right this minute.

Imagine a grainy undercover FBI sting video of a crooked politician being handed a paper bag full of money. Now imagine that the bag contains ten billion dollars. Now imagine the camera pulling back and the guy taking the bag also controls the FBI. That’s what is happening, my friends. It is not hidden. It is the opposite of hidden. Boldness is the way of the wise crook. Hiding things implies that you think that they are wrong.

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By Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Can nonviolent struggle defeat a dictator? This database emphatically says yes

[Waging Non-Violence, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 01-14-2024]

“[T]he Global Nonviolent Action Database, or GNAD, built by the Peace Studies department at Swarthmore College. Freely accessible to the public, this database — which launched under my direction in 2011 — contains over 1,400 cases of nonviolent struggle from over a hundred countries, with more cases continually being added by student researchers. [T]he database details at least 40 cases of dictators who were overthrown by the use of nonviolent struggle, dating back to 1920. These cases — which include some of the largest nations in the world, spanning Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America — contradict the widespread assumption that a dictator can only be overcome by violence. What’s more, in each of these cases, the dictator had the desire to stay, and possessed violent means for defense. Ultimately, though, they just couldn’t overcome the power of mass nonviolent struggle.”

[Lambert Strether: “I would like for this to be true. I would also want to check those 40 cases for contamination by spook-driven color revolution, and the geopolitical context.”]

How the West Was Lost

Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski [American Affairs Journal, via Naked Capitalism 01-18-2025]

REVIEW ESSAY
Le Défaite de l’Occident

by Emmanuel Todd

Gallimard, 2024, 384 pages

….European elites have yielded to what Todd calls the anti-ideology of “Europeanism.” It is an anti-ideology insofar as it does not allow for any active political community to emerge: the upper classes have been captivated by the belief that nations should not exist. In this respect, Europeanism is very similar to Anglo-Saxon ultraliberalism, which also dismisses the nation as a pernicious fiction. According to Todd, this belief manifests in various ways, primarily through efforts to abolish nations via European integration or to fragment them by geo­graphically separating minorities, ultimately increasing atomization in the name of multiculturalism.2 Without a shared moral compass, society disintegrates “into isolated bubbles, confined to their own problems, pleasures and pains.” In this condition, the governing establishment constitutes nothing more than another “autistic group,” says Todd, with the only difference being its greater visibility.3

At a more practical level, the abandonment of the national framework in economic thinking has led to many policy mistakes that have weakened European states. Alternatives to liberalism have been stamped out, reducing economic policy exclusively to making the labor market more flexible or to cutting public spending. Another consequence of rejecting the concept of the nation is the neglect of demographic issues….

Why Biden May Matter

David Leonhardt [New York Times, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 01-16-2024]

“one major part of Biden’s agenda has a decent chance of surviving. It was the idea that animated much of the legislation he signed — namely, that the federal government should take a more active role in both assisting and regulating the private sector than it did for much of the previous half-century. This idea has yet to acquire a simple name. The historian Gary Gerstle has called it the end of the neoliberal order….

The philosophy didn’t originate with Biden, but he meaningfully shifted the country toward it, first as a candidate in 2020 and then as president. He moved the Democratic Party away from decades of support for trade liberalization and imposed tariffs on China. He pursued an industrial policy to build up sectors important to national security (like semiconductors) or future prosperity (like clean energy). And his administration was more aggressive about restraining corporate power than any in decades, blocking mergers, cracking down on ‘junk fees’ and regulating drug prices….

Trump will surely undo major parts of the Biden agenda, especially on climate change and some aspects of corporate regulation. In other ways, though, Trump is part of the shift away from neoliberalism. He romped through the 2016 Republican primaries partly because he was more hostile to trade, China and cuts to Medicare and Social Security than other Republican politicians. Some of Trump’s second-term nominees, including for labor secretary and head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, are hardly small-government neoliberals. Neither is Vice President-elect JD Vance.”

Wall Street could get a boost from $1 trillion in buybacks, Goldman says 

[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 01-18-2025]

Goldman estimates that companies could spend some $1.07 trillion on buying back their own stock this year

The Competency Crisis Is Not About DEI

Ian Welsh, January 15, 2025

That DEI (women and brown people) are responsible is a constant right wing cry.

The competency crisis is a result of an economy where making money without making a product is easier than making something. We prioritized financial profits—multi generational rises in asset prices that were faster than inflation. Housing went up. Stocks went up. Private equity earned money buy buying companies, larding them up with debt, and running them into the ground. Profits were juiced by moving production offshore and engaging in regulatory and labor arbitrage.

The best profit came from playing financial games and rentierism. You didn’t have to make anything or delivery anything, you just had to find a way to squeeze money out of something by making it go up faster than inflation, or by destroying something which was already built, taking all the future value now and giving it to yourself….

Everyone wanted to make money without having to create to get it. Mostly they either wanted to get unearned money from appreciation, to destroy what others had built, or to capture a market in an oligopoly or monopoly so they could juice prices.

Meanwhile, the manufacturing floor moved to China and elsewhere. The people who knew how to make things retired, moved to other jobs, retired and eventually died.

We can’t build most things because we haven’t prioritized building things, or getting better at building things since the 70s. The eighties are where predatory capitalism took hold, and since then the whole game has been rentierism, unearned gains, predation and arbitrage….

Global power shift

The State of Western Warcraft 

Lee Slusher [via Naked Capitalism 01-15-2025]

Britain’s post-imperial delusion 

[Unherd, via Naked Capitalism 01-15-2025]

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By Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

The Lost Memos That Predicted This Era

David Sirota, January 07, 2025 [The Lever]

THE PLUTONOMY MEMOS: As we welcome in 2025, it’s worth noting that this year is the 20th anniversary of the release of the so-called Plutonomy Memos — a series of Nostradamus-like reports that predicted much of the world we live in today.

The memos written in 2005 and 2006 came from Citigroup, and they effectively admit that Wall Street and its neoliberal political allies were creating a feudal American economy. These documents — which you can find here, here, and here — survive on economist Brad DeLong’s blog and in a few old media mentions, book references, and tweets but barely exist on the internet (Citigroup reportedly worked to get them memory-holed off the Internet).

“There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take,” the Citigroup analysts wrote. “There are the rest, the ‘non-rich,’ the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.”

Underscoring the accuracy of these predictions, a new UBS report finds that billionaires’ total wealth has more than doubled over the past ten years to $14 trillion.

In 2005 Citigroup Saw Canada, the U.S. & UK as “Plutonomies” – Economies Where Only the Rich Mattered.

Dougald Lamont, January 09, 2025

Their plan? Figure out how to make even more money from making the rich richer, and the poor poorer. Spoiler: Citigroup flamed out three years later….

Now, if you’re looking for some kind of morality in this tale, you should know Citigroup and its leaders managed to create the conditions for the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. They had lobbied for the 1990s-era repeal of the New Deal Era Glass-Steagal Act, which kept commercial banks and investment banks separate.

The “Plutonomy” is a study in Icarean Hubris. In the Global Financial Crisis, Citigroup crashed and received more in bailout money than it was worth;

“The U.S. Treasury extended a $45-billion credit line, and gave it a guarantee for $300 billion in “trouble assets” junk mortgages whose market price had fallen by 60 to 80 percent. Thic actions saved the bank and its bondholders, but Citigroup stock plunged belov a dollar by March 2009 as its equity value fell by more than 90 percent, to just $20 billion compared to $244 billion in 2006….

“Little of this note should tally with conventional thinking. Indeed, traditional thinking is likely to have issues with most of it. We will posit that: 1) the world is dividing into two blocs – the plutonomies, where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few, and the rest. Plutonomies have occurred before in sixteenth century Spain, in seventeenth century Holland, the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties in the U.S. What are the common drivers of Plutonomy?….

4) In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take.

There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.

Global power shift

Collapsing Empire: RIP ‘Overt Operations’ 

Kit Klarenburg, January 05, 2025 [Global Delinquents]

In recent months, a remarkable development in the Empire’s decline has gone almost entirely unnoticed. The National Endowment for Democracy’s grant database has been removed from the web. Until recently, a searchable interface allowed visitors to view detailed records of Washington-funded NGOs, civil society groups, and media projects in particular countries – covering most of the world – the sums involved, and entities responsible for delivering these initiatives. This resource has now inexplicably vanished, and with it, enormous amounts of incontrovertible, self-incriminating evidence of destructive US skullduggery abroad.

Take for example NED grant records for Georgia, the site of recent repeated colour revolution efforts, at the forefront of which were Endowment-bankrolled organisations. While still accessible via internet archives, they were deleted during the summer. Today, visitors to associated URLs are redirected to a brief entry simply titled “Eurasia”. The accompanying text describes in very broad terms the Endowment’s aims regionally and the total being spent, but the crucial questions of where and on what aren’t clarified….

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

The dream of a free Middle East is coming true 

[The Telegraph, via Naked Capitalism 01-06-2025]

Israel built an ‘AI factory’ for war. It unleashed it in Gaza. 

[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 01-06-2025]

Chris Hedges: Genocide — The New Normal 

[Consortium News, 01-08-2025]

New York Times rejects Quaker ad for calling Israel’s actions “genocide” 

[American Friends Service Committee, via Naked Capitalism 01-09-2025]

Oligarchy

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

By Tony Wikrent

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

[The Register, via The Big Picture 01-01-2025]

Perplexity offers several advantages over Google as a search engine, making it a compelling alternative for many.

Stand Out: How to Prevent Obeying in Advance 

[3 Quarks Daily, via Naked Capitalism 01-03-2025]

Wikileaks has just put all its files online. It’s all there!

DefendDemocracy.Press, January 1, 2025

Wikileaks has just put all its files online.

It’s all there: Hillary Clinton’s emails, McCain’s guilt, the Vegas shooting perpetrated by an FBI sniper, Steve Jobs’ letter on HIV, Pedo Podesta, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Iran, Israel, the military-financial complex, the mafia/mafias, CIA agents arrested for rape, conspiracies, CIA false-flag attacks, the WHO pandemic, etc…..

Strategic Political Economy

How Fascism Came

Chris Hedges, December 29, 2024

For over two decades, I and a handful of others — Sheldon Wolin, Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Barbara Ehrenreich and Ralph Nader — warned that the expanding social inequality and steady erosion of our democratic institutions, including the media, the Congress, organized labor, academia and the courts, would inevitably lead to an authoritarian or Christian fascist state. My books — “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2007), “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “Death of the Liberal Class” (2010), “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012), written with Joe Sacco, “Wages of Rebellion” (2015) and “America: The Farewell Tour” (2018) were a succession of impassioned pleas to take the decay seriously. I take no joy in being correct.

“The rage of those abandoned by the economy, the fears and concerns of a beleaguered and insecure middle class, and the numbing isolation that comes with the loss of community, would be the kindling for a dangerous mass movement,” I wrote in “American Fascists” in 2007. “If these dispossessed were not reincorporated into mainstream society, if they eventually lost all hope of finding good, stable jobs and opportunities for themselves and their children — in short, the promise of a brighter future — the specter of American fascism would beset the nation. This despair, this loss of hope, this denial of a future, led the desperate into the arms of those who promised miracles and dreams of apocalyptic glory.”

President-elect Donald Trump does not herald the advent of fascism. He heralds the collapse of the veneer that masked the corruption within the ruling class and their pretense of democracy. He is the symptom, not the disease….

The End of New Deal Liberalism, by William Greider, exactly 14 years ago

Tony Wikrent, January 04, 2025 [RealEconomics]

Bill Greider was the former national affairs editor at Rolling Stone, who left us in December 2019. The man was a prophet — from exactly 14 years ago:

The End of New Deal Liberalism
By William Greider
The Nation, January 5, 2011

(reposted by Physicians for a National Health Program)

We have reached a pivotal moment in government and politics, and it feels like the last, groaning spasms of New Deal liberalism. When the party of activist government, faced with an epic crisis, will not use government’s extensive powers to reverse the economic disorders and heal deepening social deterioration, then it must be the end of the line for the governing ideology inherited from Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson.

Political events of the past two years have delivered a more profound and devastating message: American democracy has been conclusively conquered by American capitalism. Government has been disabled or captured by the formidable powers of private enterprise and concentrated wealth. Self-governing rights that representative democracy conferred on citizens are now usurped by the overbearing demands of corporate and financial interests. Collectively, the corporate sector has its arms around both political parties, the financing of political careers, the production of the policy agendas and propaganda of influential think tanks, and control of most major media.

What the capitalist system wants is more—more wealth, more freedom to do whatever it wishes. This has always been its instinct, unless government intervened to stop it. The objective now is to destroy any remaining forms of government interference, except of course for business subsidies and protections….

Sanders Lays Out Plan to Fight Oligarchy as Wealth of Top Billionaires Passes $10 Trillion

Jake Johnson, December 31, 2024 [CommonDreams]

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I hope you had a good year and that next year is good for you. It’ll be a bad year for the world, but that doesn’t mean it has to be for individuals.

I’ll probably hold off on the promised “what can Europe do” post till next week.

Feel free to use as an open thread.

Hope you’re having a good one. If not, hope it isn’t too awful.

Use as an open thread for nice things if you wish.