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This Briahna Joy Gray interview of David Sirota discusses the fundamental problem of money in USA politics. Near the beginning, they discuss the likely danger that Harris will lay out positions that are progressive, but eventually abandon them and capitulate to the donor class, as she did on Medicare for All in 2019.
Beginning around 39:23, Sirota summarizes The Lever’s new work on Lewis Powell and the Powell Memo, and how Powell enabled corporations to corrupt the political system. There is some important information that was not publicly known before The Lever staff combed through nearly forgotten archives the past two years, including Powell’s friendship with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and the group of secret task forces established by the Chamber of Commerce to implement the Powel Memo.
They discuss what the Democratic Party might do when Trump is no longer on the scene. The Party just can’t be held together if it’s only progressives and big money donors in the Big Tent. Sirota talks about what he saw at the Demcoratic National Convention: the tensions under the surface between clean energy groups and corporate sponsors involved in fossil fuels. “You had anti-billionaire Senator Bernie Sanders… sharing the same stage with Illinois ultra-rich Democratic governor JB Pritzker.”
The last 20 minutes I found very tedious and a bit maddening. Gray asked whether or not Biden was a break from the right-ward drift of the Democratic Party since the 1970s. When Sirota said he thought that was the case, Gray refused to accept the answer and kept pressing for example of how Biden was “better.” Sirota would explain some policy change or program achievement, and Gray would just ignore it.
What a waste of the last 20 minutes! Why can’t Gray and other people on “the left” accept that, as Sirota said, “something changed” that made Biden much better on economics than Clinton and Obama? It would be so much more useful to try to identify what changed, what caused that change, and figure out if that cause and effect can be replicated again to continue driving the Democratic Party toward better economic policies.
And, glaring by its absence, was any discussion of how two of the most progressive member of Congress, Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman, were defeated in primaries earlier this year. They were buried by an avalanche of money from the Israeli front group, AIPAC. There was no mention of this at all.
Finally, also missing was any discussion of what people can do, either inside or outside the Democratic Party. Gray now believes that the two Sanders presidential campaigns, and the freezing out of AOC, Katie Porter, and The Squad, all show that the Democratic Party is useless as an instrument for achieving progress.
Ok, that’s understandable, but what are the alternatives? Remember, Gray and Sirota have both been “on the inside.” From 1999 to 2001, Sirota worked as press aide and spokesperson for then U.S. Representative Bernie Sanders, then served as a speechwriter and senior adviser for the Sanders 2020 presidential campaign. And Gray was National Press Secretary for the Sanders 2020 presidential campaign.
I should also note that in 2008, Sirota published The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington, giving ample warning of the populist surges we have seen under Sanders and Trump. So, an important topic for discussion should be: Why did reactionaries manage to take control of the (anti)Republican Party, but the progressives fails to take control of the Democratic Party?
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
John Kiriakou: The Slide Into Authoritarianism
John Kiriakou [Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 08-28-2024]
The Social Recession Is Accelerating
Charles Hugh Smith [via Naked Capitalism 08-25-2024]
A reader asked about the term social recession which he’d noted in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy. Here is the paragraph:
“Stagnation in opportunities to work and earn (i.e. a financial recession) leads to social recession, a loss of opportunities for adulthood: a rewarding career, family, and a home of one’s own. In a social recession, unemployed young people may be mired in adolescent narcissism, eschewing ambitions not just in work but in romance and marriage.”….In the purely financial / economic terms of growth of GDP, household income, corporate profits and the value of assets, the US has only been in an economic recession for a few months in 2008-09 and at the start of the pandemic lockdown. But when measured by the ability of just about anyone willing to work hard and practice basic frugality to buy a house and start a family, the US has been in a social recession since 2009. Demographics / economics analyst Chris H., who tweets as
CH @economica, recently posted charts which reflect this social recession, most strikingly in the collapse of the US birthrate that started in 2009. He asked: “The largest childbearing population in US history has gone on strike…maybe we should know why?”….
The social recession began as a direct result of policy responses to the Global Financial Meltdown in 2008-09, policies that favored capital and those who already owned assets, at the expense of everyone who did not inherit wealth/assets or was too young to buy assets such as houses when they were still affordable to average workers….
As I often note, average wages have stagnated for the past 45 years. This stagnation was tolerable as long as the cost of a house, childcare and healthcare insurance remained somewhat affordable to average workers, but once the engines of financialization transformed the US economy into a Bubble Economy of soaring real estate / stock valuations that then inevitably crash, triggering an even larger bailout / stimulus response that inflates an even greater bubble, the costs of home ownership, childcare and healthcare soared out of reach of all but the top 20%….
Did wages rise 10-fold to match the 10-fold rise in the cost of a modest house? No. That is social recession in a nutshell. When this fact is raised in conversation, those in the top 10% protest, but their protest rings hollow, for what they’re really saying is: since I’m doing great and all my friends are doing great, everyone’s doing great. There’s a word for this: denial. Denial cannot solve problems, it can only make them worse.
Heather Cox Richardson, August 28, 2024 [Letters from an American]
…on August 15, when Trump talked at reporters for more than an hour at his Bedminster property… he said …: “All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody that’s going to destroy our country.”
Trump uses “Marxist,” “communist,” and “socialist” interchangeably, and when he and his allies accuse Democrats of being one of those things, they are not talking about an economic system in which the people, represented by the government, take control of the means of production. They are using a peculiarly American adaptation of the term “socialist.”
….What Republicans mean by “socialism” in America is a product of the years immediately after the Civil War, when African American men first got the right to vote. Eager to join the economic system from which they had previously been excluded, these men voted for leaders who promised to rebuild the South, provide schools and hospitals (as well as prosthetics for veterans, a vital need in the post-war U.S.), and develop the economy with railroads to provide an equal opportunity for all men to rise to prosperity.
Former Confederates loathed the idea of Black men voting almost as much as they hated the idea of equal rights. They insisted that the public programs poorer voters wanted were simply a redistribution of wealth from prosperous white men to undeserving Black Americans who wanted a handout, although white people would also benefit from such programs. Improvements could be paid for only with tax levies, and white men were the only ones with property in the Reconstruction South. Thus, public investments in roads and schools and hospitals would redistribute wealth from propertied men to poor people, from white men to Black people. It was, opponents said, “socialism.” Poor black voters were instituting, one popular magazine wrote, “Socialism in South Carolina” and should be kept from the polls.
This idea that it was dangerous for working people to participate in government caught on in the North as immigrants moved into growing cities to work in the developing factories….
Any attempt to regulate business would impinge on a man’s liberty, wealthy men argued, and it would cost tax dollars to hire inspectors. Thus, they said, it was a redistribution of wealth. Long before the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia brought the fears of a workers’ government to life, Americans argued that their economy was under siege by socialists….
The powerful formula linking racism to the idea of an active government and arguing that a government that promotes infrastructure, provides a basic social safety net, and regulates business is socialism has shaped American history since Reconstruction. In the modern era the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954 enabled wealthy men to convince voters that their tax dollars were being taken from them to promote the interests of Black Americans. President Ronald Reagan made that formula central to the Republican Party, and it has lived there ever since, as Republicans call any policy designed to help ordinary Americans “socialism.”
Global power shift
Patrick Lawrence: “The End of Days”
[Scheerpost , via Naked Capitalism 08-27-2024]
…Three-quarters of the French stood with Chirac, whose refusal to enlist France in Operation Iraqi Freedom strained Franco–American relations for several years. Remember “freedom fries” and the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys?” This was the level to which Bush II brought American discourse as he manipulated public opinion prior to the invasion. Good guys, bad guys. Black hats, white hats.
There is one detail of the U.S.–French confrontation over Iraq that remains very little known. Just before the 20 March 2003 invasion, Bush II called Chirac in a late-hour attempt to persuade him to change his mind. The exchange was very heated. Bush II made a vigorous argument that with the events of 11 September the prophesied war of Gog and Magog had at last begun. I can only imagine what went through the worldly Chirac’s mind, or indeed the look on his face, as Bush II discoursed in this manner.
I know of only one account of this conversation. It is in The Irony of American Destiny: The Tragedy of American Foreign Policy (Walker & Co., 2010), a book William Pfaff published late in his life. The book sits at the end of Pfaff’s long and principled career as a sort of summation. It is rightly read as his causes-and-consequences critique of American exceptionalism. And it includes, inter alia, a description of the Bush–Chirac exchange. He got it, if I recall correctly what he told me later, from a high source in the French Foreign Ministry.
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UPDATE: I forgot to include a hilarious bit of business involving the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation vs. the Millersville (TN) Police Department. Have added it below:
Sean Paul’s post on the 2nd Amendment got me thinking about the prospects for civil war in the USA, in particular this spicy quote:
So, Sean Paul, what does this have to do with the Second Amendment Right to Bear Arms?
Everything to do with slavery, and nothing to do with holding our government accountable. Seriously, do you honestly think a couple thousand Texans with AR-15s could out fight an armored brigade? GTFOH.
It won’t be lard-ass militias that matter if there is a civil implosion in the US.
These things always come down to intra-elite splits and/or intra-military splits.
There seems to be a split between the Trump-supporting majority of American police forces, right-wing military personnel, some military officers & at least some FBI vs the Trump-hating “Deep State” CIA, NSA, Pentagon elite and the rest of the active duty military.
As NPR reported in 2021, some po-po’s were even willing to put their bodies on the line for whatever it was they were trying to do on Jan 6.
Nearly 30 sworn police officers from a dozen departments attended the pro-Trump rally at the U.S. Capitol last week, and several stormed the building with rioters and are facing federal criminal charges as well as possible expulsion or other discipline.
The officers are from departments large and small. There was veteran officer in Houston, the nation’s eighth-largest department; a sergeant in the small town of Rocky Mount, Va., and a group of Philadelphia transit officers.
Note that caveat in the headline about the vast majority of them being retired. Are we too “demographically advanced” ie old to get a war on?
Also check these nifty stats from Seton Hall’s “A Demographic and Legal Profile of January 6 Prosecutions”:
The government has won all but 12 cases brought to date (five died, four fled, one acquitted, two dismissed);
517 of 716 (72%) were charged as the result of tipsters and informants;
Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, and California are home to 43.9% of those charged;
Only states not represented among the 716 arrested were North Dakota, Nebraska and Vermont;
35.1% of defendants were identified as going to the Capitol alone;
25% were armed;
18.5 % had a background in law enforcement or the military;
Largest employment group identified is the Business Owner group, which accounts for 24.7%;
Only 35 of the 716 individuals were identified as unemployed;
22.2% had a criminal record.
Note that a disproportionate amount of the Jan 6ers came from just five states: Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, and California.
And two of those states are “solid blue” and even the red and purple states each feature very Democratic cities.
If there’s no geographic continuity to the two sides are we just going to have a nationwide running gun battle instead?
But wait, the case for imminent civil war has a couple more points to make.
TX Gov Greg Abbott turning the Texas National Guard against the US Border Patrol was a very ominous sign:
Most explosively, Texas Governor Greg Abbott in January deployed the state National Guard to block the U.S. Border Patrol from accessing a 2.5-mile-long section of the border in the city of Eagle Pass. The section includes Shelby Park, a 47-acre city park along the Rio Grande named for a Confederate general who fled to Mexico rather than surrender. Border Patrol officials had been using the park for processing encountered migrants. Now, they are effectively locked out of the park, and are mostly unable to access a heavily crossed border area to do their jobs.
Fl Gov Ron DeSantis’ creation of the Florida Guard outside federal control and his proposal to send them to the Texas border is another clown show that is also actually quite scary:
DeSantis established the Florida Guard on June 15, 2022, purportedly to enhance Florida’s capacity to deal with hurricanes. It was announced as a civilian force of approximately 400 volunteers to supplement the Florida National Guard, which balances both state and federal government control. The governor asked for $2 million.
Within a year, DeSantis and the super-majority Republican Legislature converted the small volunteer force into DeSantis’ expensive private army.
MORE BUDGET, MORE POLICE POWERS
House Bill 1285 skyrocketed the budget to $107.6 million, with half of the funds designated for “military” equipment. The number of “volunteers”— handpicked by the governor — increased from 400 to 1,500, and they were granted “police powers” to detain and arrest.
Although there is a titular head of the volunteers, the Guard may be “activated only by the governor and is at all times under the final command and control of the governor as the commander in chief of all military and guard forces of the state.”
And it is not under the state’s military control because the law further provides that: “The division [i.e. State Guard] shall not be subject to control, supervision or direction of the Department of Military Affairs in any manner…”
DeSantis moved quickly after that. He set up a military training center for millions of dollars and hired a combat-training company to recruit and train members of the Guard. The contractor was awarded a non-competitive $1.2 million contract and the company’s manual provides for hand-to-hand combat, busting down walls and interdiction in the sea.
These developments show an ominous willingness to escalate political fights into military conflict on the part of the two southern GOP governors.
But militarily this is pipsqueak stuff at this point. Were a war to erupt between the Feds and Abbot and DeSantis it would be over in a few savage minutes, as long as it takes for a pit bull to maul a baby.
And the yokel governors are not the pit bull in this scenario.
But things get very interesting, in the ancient Chinese curse sense, if Trump wins the presidential election and actually manages to place loyalists in key positions at the federal level.
But that’s a big if.
Politically Trump seems way off his game from 2016. Steve Bannon’s in jail and Trump has his head up his own ass. The rousing populism and ‘did he really say that?’ demagoguery are missing.
That makes it less likely that he could motivate supporters to truly crazy extremes.
Does Trump really seem to care enough to organize a civil war?
Also there’s the matter of social cohesion — oddly, it’s a critical ingredient for a civil war. Each side has to at least some internal unity to present a sufficient problem to the other side necessary for the brouhaha to go from “civic disturbance” or “riot” to CIVIL WAR.
Aurelian argues we don’t have enough social cohesion to get a war on.
For all the fashionable talk of “civil war,” a civil war requires organised parties competing for control of the future of the political system. We don’t have that, we just have individuals, and small groups without much cohesion, united only in their detestation for the system.
It may be the case that we can bumble our way into something really nasty without leadership on either side capable of catalyzing discontent into a coherent force.
If there’s a major economic collapse or a military disaster on a foreign front all bets are off.
But even in those scenarios, I’d anticipate more of a gradual disintegration into warlordism than an 1860 type thing.
UPDATE: I can’t believe I forgot to include the piece de resistance. This is a classic real-world example of a conflict between MAGA chuds in power locally vs. a state law enforcement agency:
In a perplexing pair of podcast interviews, the Millersville chief of police says the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has begun limiting his department’s access to certain sensitive law enforcement data.
It follows a scandal first dug up by NewsChannel 5 Investigates into the troubled police department for the community of 6,000 just north of Nashville.
“Once we start getting this bad publicity, our access starts getting cut off to financial reports, FinCen,” Chief Bryan Morris said in an interview with far-right podcaster Tom Renz. The interview was posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
“We can’t do investigations,” the chief continued. “We don’t have everything in this office that we need, you know.”
Renz chimed in, “You need the tools provided by federal law enforcement and other agencies, and state agencies.”
“And now we’re being denied that,” Morris insisted.
…
Morris — who also serves as interim city manager — claimed his department is now cut off from one of the most sensitive law enforcement data sources available.
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network — sometimes known as FinCen — is a program run by the U.S. Department of Treasury that can give police access to certain banking and other financial records of individuals when there is a legitimate law enforcement purpose.
Morris claimed that, because of NewsChannel 5’s investigations into his conspiracy-minded assistant police chief, Shawn Taylor, the TBI has now cut them off.
Renz asked, “Have they given you a good reason that they are denying you access?”
“No,” the chief answered. “I’ve actually called down there and talked to them, and what I’ve been told is we’re on hold because they are auditing us.”
As part of Taylor’s many bizarre conspiracy theories — including claims that some of the nation’s most powerful political figures are involved in child sex trafficking — Taylor has sometimes boasted about having access to sensitive data linked to some powerful people.
That includes the banking records for U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn’s campaign.
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
How Europe Could Reinvigorate Their Economy
Ian Wlesh, August 22, 2024
Force the US to reduce embassy staffs by 90% and remove all US NGOs and similar organizations.
Nicaragua shuts down 151 more NGOs, including US Chamber of Commerce affiliate
[Anadolu Agency, via Naked Capitalism 08-23-2024]
How the Pentagon built Silicon Valley
[Responsible Statescraft, via Naked Capitalism 08-21-2024]
[Yves Smith notes: This was documented years ago in Marianna Mazzucato’s book, The Entrepreneurial State.]
Global power shift
“How China acquires ‘the crown jewels’ of U.S. technology”
[Pekingnology, via Naked Capitalism 08-19-2024]
[Phenomenal World, via Naked Capitalism 08-19-2024]
‘On “How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare” by Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Vaez.’
Military Watch, August 21, 2024
Russia / Ukraine
Back to the Bloodlands: Operation Krepost
Big Serge [ via Naked Capitalism 08-21-2024]
[The Ukrainian attack into Russia]
Oligarchy
As RFK Jr. Backs Trump, Here’s the Secretive Billionaire Plutocrat Funding Them Both
Jake Johnson, August 24, 2024 [CommonDreams]
Timothy Mellon, the reclusive heir to a Gilded Age fortune, has poured over $165 million into the 2024 election so far, with tens of millions backing both Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Koch Invests in Massive Land Grab From West African Herders
[Exposed by CMD, via Naked Capitalism 08-22-2024]
Predatory finance
Crypto Took Down Another Federally-Insured Bank and Just Handed Its CEO a 24-Year Prison Sentence
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, August 23, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade]
Last year, the staff of a federally-insured bank in Kansas, Heartland Tri-State Bank, wired out more than one-third of the amount the bank held in deposits to a crypto scam. Why did they do that? Because the CEO of the bank, Shan Hanes, told them to do it. Hanes had become one more crypto sucker seduced by the allure of a get-rich-quick scheme. On Monday, Hanes was sentenced in a case brought by the U.S. Department of Justice to 24 years in prison for embezzling $47.1 million (via the wire transfers shown in the graph above) from the bank he was in charge of protecting. The bank failed last July with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) stepping in to make depositors whole while the investors in the bank (shareholders) were wiped out….
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by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
The world will lose $4.7 trillion of revenue in the next decade to tax havens. How did we get here?
[The Business Standard, via Naked Capitalism 08-16-2024]
American Pharmaceutical Companies Aren’t Paying Any Tax in the United States
Brad W. Setser and Michael Weilandt [CFR, via Naked Capitalism 08-16-2024]
It is an undisputed fact that American pharmaceutical prices are the highest in the world…. However, those high prices do not translate into high reported profits in the United States. Rather the contrary: large pharmaceutical companies generally report losing money in the U.S….
So high prices strangely seem to correlate with large losses. This, of course, is a clear sign that pharmaceutical companies live in a world marked by transfer pricing and tax arbitrage….
The average effective tax rate paid in the U.S. (so U.S. tax paid versus global profit) was only 3 percent from 2018 to 2022, well below the typical effective tax paid in the US before the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (see the work of Senator Wyden and his staff for more details).
A Very Good Sign: Kamala Harris Is Going Right at Corporate Greed
Nick Hanauer, August 16, 2024 [The New Republic]
… Greedy CEOs have milked the average American household for $12,000 since the pandemic. As a businessman, I can explain how they’re doing it. …if you compare corporate profits in 2019 to the last four years, you’ll find corporations have gouged their way to an almost unbelievable $1.5 trillion in excess profits since 2020—that’s in addition to their pre-pandemic profit rates.
That means the average American household has paid an eye-popping $12,000 in higher prices solely to pump up quarterly corporate profit margins. To put that figure into perspective, $12,000 could buy the average American household more than two years’ worth of groceries….
Over the last two years, CEOs learned they could get away with padding their profits by keeping prices high. We have really great evidence that this is what’s been happening, because CEOs admitted this is what’s been happening.
For example, Procter & Gamble chief financial officer Andre Schulten bragged during a 2023 earnings call that even though the company’s input costs to make diapers had decreased, they were still keeping consumer prices high….
This corporate embrace of price gouging is a new and troubling development in American capitalism. And this is an area I know something about.
I’ve founded, financed, and/or run 43 different companies, spanning a dozen different industries…. I’m deeply acquainted with all the tricks of the trade when it comes to corporate profit margins.
But I’ve never seen executives exult in raising prices like this….
The chasm between corporate costs and profits has never been greater in my lifetime:
- Combined wholesale and retail margins have increased by 25 percent from pre-pandemic times.
- Food and beverage retailers’ profit margins have risen by 29 percent from the pre-pandemic norm.
- And consumer prices have skyrocketed 3.4 times over producer costs over the past year.
Immediately before the pandemic, corporate profits were 9.7 percent of the total gross domestic product. From 2020 to 2023, they spiked to an average 11.2 percent of annual GDP. The disparity between those two numbers amounts to a jaw-dropping $1.5 trillion more of our economy that was transferred over to corporate profits in the last four years.
That money was picked directly from the pockets of American families, who each paid $12,000 more to plump the profit margins of corporations (and that’s not even counting the excess APR rates that have cost the average credit card user $946 over the same four-year period)….
Global power shift
[BNE Intellinews, via Naked Capitalism 08-15-2024]