Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 25, 2019
by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus
Strategic Political Economy
Give No Heed to the Walking Dead
[The Scholar’s Stage, via Naked Capitalism 8-18-19]
The People’s Republic of China is wealthier than any rival America has faced. Its leaders are convinced of the malignance of the United States. Their ambitions are global, their ideology hostile, and their military forces optimized to “fight and win wars” with America and the democratic nations that surround it. The challenge is daunting—and it exists because of us. The Sino-American relationship of 2019 is the acrid fruit of “engagement.”
Engagement is dead. Yet like dead growth lumped to living branch, the men and women who crafted the disaster linger with us. In twitter whispers and podcast chatterings their murmurs grow. Engagement did not fail, we hear. It never was about remaking China in the first place. We never thought the Chinese would come to share our systems, values, or priorities. Engagement was about something else entirely….
Here is Bill Clinton, explaining to the American voters why the People’s Republic deserves a seat at the W.T.O.:
By joining the W.T.O., China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products. It is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values, economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people — their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise. And when individuals have the power, not just to dream, but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say….The broader problem with the Haas formula (“shape what China does”) is that China’s political behavior cannot be divorced from the economic and political structures that produce it. As China’s newest white paper eagerly reminds us, demanding the PRC reform its SOEs is demanding that it transform the fundamentals of its government, of which those SOEs are a critical part. Asking them to dismantle mercantilist policies and halt IP theft is asking them to abandon the economic model (what Xi would call “the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics”) that their social system (in the Marxist tinged theory of the CPC, China’s social “superstructure”) is built upon. Dialing down the ambitions and capabilities of the PLA would have meant dismantling a keystone of Party ideology, identity, and organization.
The Population Bust: Demographic Decline and the End of Capitalism as We Know It
Foreign Affairs, via Naked Capitalism 8-18-19] Not paywalled.
Just as much of the world has come to see rapid population growth as normal and expected, the trends are shifting again, this time into reverse. Most parts of the world are witnessing sharp and sudden contractions in either birthrates or absolute population. The only thing preventing the population in many countries from shrinking more quickly is that death rates are also falling, because people everywhere are living longer.
The Failure of Establishment Neoliberal Economics
Corporate America & the Rules of Capitalism
Barry Ritholtz, August 20, 2019 [The Big Picture 8-20-19]
The CEOs of nearly two hundred companies say it’s not just about shareholders anymore, it’s about stakeholders. Risk Reversal Advisors Principal Dan Nathan, Chairman of Ritholtz Wealth Management, Barry Ritholtz, and “Kochland” author Christopher Leonard join Stephanie Ruhle to discuss how corporate America is trying to change the rules of capitalism and whether we can believe them.
In shocking reversal, Big Business puts the shareholder value myth in the grave
Alright, so Germany has now introduced a zero interest bond. That means, given inflation, people will get back less effective money than they started with. At this point, outside the US, the average interest rate is negative.
That means that capitalists and banks, including central banks, have failed. It is their function, in a Capitalist society, to allocate resources. Money represents resources: people, stuff and land.
Now if we lived in utopia, with no real problems, this would make sense, but we don’t. There are tons of real problems which need solving, lots of money floating around, and other capacity indicators show there are people and resources which are not being used, or which could be redeployed.
So capitalism is failing to do what it’s supposed to do, and so are capitalists….
The point is that if investors can’t find anything to invest in, government has failed to tweak profits correctly. You shouldn’t get rich in land speculation unless is building stuff that should be built. You should get rich in alternative energy, but mostly you don’t. You should get rich in making homes that are healthy and energy neutral, but instead we keep building unhealthy and environmentally degrading housing.
You should make money rebuilding infrastructure, or building high speed trains, or reducing carbon, or reforesting, or making fish and phytoplankton stocks recover. Yet you don’t, so these things which need to be done to, like, avoid a few billion deaths, don’t get done. That’s government failure.
Capitalism does not work without effective government control, if it is the dominant economic mode in a society.
So. We have lots of stuff that needs to be done. We have lots of resources and money which isn’t doing those things and indeed can’t find anything to do…
This endless printing of money to keep the useless rich afloat when they serve no useful productive function, and are actively stopping productive activity from happening.
Tax them. Stop propping them up and let incompetents die. Destroy utterly those members of the ruling class who are actively destructive, like Private Equity. Alter the rules so that productive activity is profitable, and while you’re doing all that, just have governments do the most important stuff themselves, with negative real interest rate loans.
Most people are terribly confused when it comes to understanding our leaders, whether corporate or political. They think that the sort of ethical or moral constraints which hold them back, hold back leaders.
But being a leader in our society is about “extracting value” from ordinary people.
Raising the price of insulin to $300, for example. Or launching a war against a country which is no threat to you. Or throwing people in jail for 20 years for minor drug offenses.
Our leaders don’t think the same way we do. Their function isn’t to make our lives better, their function is to make their lives better: and the lives of those people who can help them or the few people they care about.
Disrupting mainstream economics
Money as a Democratic Medium | The Color of Money: Banking and Racial Inequality (with Slides)
[Harvard Law Today, January 11, 2019]
According to [the] keynote talk by Mehrsa Baradaran of the University of Georgia Law School, the financial deck has been stacked against black people since the days of slavery. Drawing from her recent book “The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap,” Baradaran’s talk traced a history that has denied equal financial opportunity to blacks, offering self-help homilies in its place.\
“The rhetoric of free-market capitalism was used against them, and self-help was offered as a decoy,” she said. “The promise of free-market capitalism is that it does not discriminate, and yet history reveals that markets do discriminate. For most of our history, blacks have been excluded from schools and trades, and their finances have not been protected by law. The color of money, for much of U.S. history, was white.”
She traced that history back to the slavery-era economy—in which slaves were depicted on Confederate bills—and to the establishment of the Freedman’s Savings Bank afterward. The government encouraged newly-freed blacks to invest in the bank, not pointing out that it hadn’t been government insured; the bank’s white manager in fact lost much of the money on railroad bonds. “Instead of getting land, the freed slaves got a bank,” Baradaran said. “The notes and the building still had government insignia, but it was really a glorified piggy bank. By the time the Freedman’s Bank failed, the disenfranchisement of the black population was complete.” Indeed, she said, many Southern blacks still distrusted banks because of the Freedman episode as recently as her research in 2014.
The selling of black self-help rather than actual government assistance persisted well into the ‘60s and beyond. As the heyday of civil rights wound down, President Nixon championed black capitalism, but this largely amounted to lip service, said Baradaran. “To see how great a diversion this was, you have to look at the path not taken. George Romney pushed hard for integration; Nixon fought him every step of the way. There was a bipartisan bill for reparation through Treasury deposits, and he killed that. Instead he deposited millions of dollars into black banks with much fanfare; and he created the Office of Minority Business Enterprise, which cannibalized Johnson’s poverty program. Black capitalism was an anemic response to the needs of the black community, but it was an effective decoy.”
More recently, she said, subprime loans were disproportionately given to the black community, so it was hit especially hard in the 2007-08 financial crisis. Yet the rhetoric of black capitalism has endured; most recently with the Treasury naming a wing after the Freedman’s Bank. “There are stubborn, longstanding myths that small community banks are the remedy in marginalized communities. I blame Thomas Jefferson for starting this myth and George Bailey for perpetuating it,” she said, naming the hero of It’s a Wonderful Life. “I propose we all boycott the movie next year.”
The Great Land Robbery: How Federal Policies Dispossessed Black Americans of Millions of Acres
Land and the labor markets, from 1865 ’til today.
Economics in the real world
Outrageous rents would be less alarming if wages were increasing at a comparable rate. But the opposite is true. Nationwide, the hourly earnings of high-wage workers rose 41 percent between 1979 and 2013; those of middle-wage workers grew only 6 percent. The pay for low-wage workers, meanwhile, decreased by 5 percent. Contrast these figures to the 138 percent annual wage growth among the top 1 percent of earners. Factoring in the cost of housing only darkens the picture. Today, there is not a single county in the United States where someone making minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment. In Atlanta, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s annual Out of Reach report, the “housing wage” needed to pay for a modest two-bedroom unit is $21.27 an hour. (Georgia’s minimum wage is $5.15 an hour.) In Boston, a tenant earning minimum wage would have to log 141 hours a week to afford the same residence. In San Francisco, it’s 203 hours, or the equivalent of five full-time jobs.
Confronted with housing costs that devour the bulk of their monthly incomes, some choose to move away. But where do they go? Across the nation, the housing crisis now radiates far beyond major urban centers, pushing up prices in neighboring towns and cities—and, even if cheaper accommodations can be found, relocation may require searching for a new job, or enduring a long commute, which involves additional expenses. But staying put is often equally fraught. Many families are forced to cut back on basic necessities—health care, utilities, food, clothing—and rely on whatever help might be available from local food pantries and nonprofits. As for government support, whether in the form of public housing or Section 8 vouchers to use in the private rental market: It’s nonexistent for the vast majority of low-income tenants. Since the mid-1990s, 250,000 public housing units throughout the country have been lost (many through demolition) without being replaced, and the voucher program, though shown in numerous studies to be a crucial lifeline, is drastically underfunded. Today, only one in four households poor enough to qualify for rental assistance actually receives it. In a country where vital aid is treated as a lottery, families struggling to pay the rent are, with few exceptions, left to fend for themselves. …
Julie Dworkin, the director of policy at the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, has called attention to the profound consequences of this neglect. Not only are families denied housing assistance from HUD and its local partners, but, as the federal agency’s figures make their way into the media, the true scale and nature of the crisis is also obscured. In 2016, Dworkin and her colleagues began conducting their own survey of Chicago’s homeless population, expanding it beyond the HUD census to include families doubled up with others. Their total was twelve times that of the Point-in-Time count: 82,212 versus 6,786. “The idea that these families aren’t ‘actually’ homeless because they’re not in shelters is absurd,” Dworkin told me. “Oftentimes the shelters are full, or there simply are no family shelters—in which case, all these people are essentially abandoned by the system.” She noted the myth that families with children living in doubled-up arrangements are somehow less vulnerable than those in shelters, when these conditions can be just as detrimental to a child’s education, mental and physical health, and long-term development.
“There are people at the top of the American food chain who are stupid rich, for whom questions of making ends meet and financial security are laughably distant. People like that, they are easy to deal with. If it was “us” (whoever the fuck we are) versus only them, politics would be easy. We’d have taxed the billionaires to pay their fair share a long time ago. But most of the people towards the top of the American food chain are not stupid rich, but stupidly rich. They “make” sums of money that by any fair reckoning, obviously in a global context but even in an American context, are huge. But they plow that affluence into bidding wars on incredibly (if artificially) scarce social goods. Nobody “needs” to live in Arlington (or my own San Francisco). No one’s kid ‘has’ to go to private school (or for the more woke among us, notionally public schools rendered exclusive by the cost of nearby housing).…
….the people who are your predators financially are, in their turn, someone else’s prey. Part of why the legalized corruption that is the vast bulk of the (dollar-weighted) US economy is so immovable is that the people whose lobbyists have cornered markets to ensure they stay overpaid are desperately frightened of not being overpaid, because if they were not overpaid they would become unable to make all the absurd overpayments that are now required to live what people of my generation (and race, and class) understood to be an ordinary life. It’s turtles all the way down, each one collecting a toll and wondering how it’s gonna pay the next… The result is a strange precariot, objectively wealthy, educated and in a certain sense well-intended, who justify as a matter of defensive necessity participation in arrangements whose ugliness they cannot quite not see. In aggregate, they are predators, but individually they are also prey, and they feel embattled.”
David Koch begins his exploration of Dante’s Inferno
1974 Charles Koch Speech: “Anti-Capitalism and Big Business” and How the Powell Memo Did Not Go Far Enough
Koch Docs, via Naked Capitalism 8-18-19] A trove.
How Wavering Democrats Bought Into Kochs’ Free Trade Scheme
[Truthdig, via Naked Capitalism 8-24-19]
“Kochland” Examines the Koch Brothers’ Early, Crucial Role in Climate-Change Denial
[The New Yorker, via Naked Capitalism 8-18-19]
Climate and environmental crises
When the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona shuts down later this year, it will be one of the largest carbon emitters to ever close in American history. The giant coal plant on Arizona’s high desert emitted almost 135 million metric tons of carbon dioxide between 2010 and 2017, according to an E&E News review of federal figures.
Its average annual emissions over that period are roughly equivalent to what 3.3 million passenger cars would pump into the atmosphere in a single year. Of all the coal plants to be retired in the United States in recent years, none has emitted more.
The Navajo Generating Station isn’t alone. It’s among a new wave of super-polluters headed for the scrap heap. Bruce Mansfield, a massive coal plant in Pennsylvania, emitted nearly 123 million tons between 2010 and 2017. It, too, will be retired by year’s end (Energywire, Aug. 12).
And in western Kentucky, the Paradise plant emitted some 102 million tons of carbon over that period. The Tennessee Valley Authority closed two of Paradise’s three units in 2017. It will close the last one next year (Greenwire, Feb. 14).
‘The Devil We Know:’ How DuPont Poisoned the World with Teflon
America’s agriculture is 48 times more toxic than 25 years ago. Blame neonics
“For the first time in history, low water levels on the Colorado River have forced Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico to cut back the amount of water they use. It’s the latest example of climate change affecting daily life, but also an encouraging sign that people can handle a world with less: These orderly cutbacks are only happening because seven U.S. states and Mexico had agreed to abide by conservation rules when flows subside, rather than fight for the last drops….. A Bureau of Reclamation study of Colorado River levels, released Thursday, triggered the cutbacks. The Rocky Mountains finally turned white with heavy snow last winter, but despite a galloping spring runoff, drought persists and bathtub-ringed reservoirs in the Grand Canyon are low. In its study, the Bureau highlighted the unique circumstances: ‘This 20-year period is also one of the driest in the 1,200-year paleo record.’”
De-Industrialization Discontentment
[Matt Stoller, via Naked Capitalism 8-21-19]
The storm was the immediate cause of the blackout, of course, but the storm took advantage of an electrical infrastructure weakened by years of poor investment choices. We know this because a few months after the storm, the Utility Workers of America, the union negotiating with Con Edison, released a report on the company’s operational practices, alleging that “Con Edison appears to operate its electric distribution system based on a policy of“run it until it fails.’”
The details of Con Ed’s operations are ugly. The union noted a lack of redundancy in voltage equipment, smart meters paid for by the stimulus that were never turned on, and a lack of basic supplies. “Our members have worked on cable so old,” said the report, “that it has paper insulation, and on utility poles that were installed in the 1930s and remain in service today.”
The company used to have a policy of keeping a “safety stockpile” of basic supplies on hand in the event of an emergency. No longer. So when Sandy hit, Con Ed ran out of utility ladders and utility cable. It had to rush order parts that did not work on Con Ed systems, including “entire truckloads of utility transformers” which the utility could not return “because of their specialized nature.”
Restoring balance to the economy
“Bernie Sanders’s ambitious plan to double union membership, explained”
“Sanders’s plan calls for the end to “at-will” employment, aims to double union membership in his first term in office, and advocates for industry-wide collective bargaining. It also directly addresses criticism from those like former Vice President Joe Biden who argue Medicare-for-all, Sanders’s central health care policy, could be bad for unions…. ‘If there is going to be class warfare in this country, it is time that the working class of this country won that war,’ Sanders said at the AFL-CIO convention in Iowa Wednesday, where he unveiled the plan.”
Predatory Finance
“McKinsey and Company Is an Elitist Cult. Why Is Buttigieg Defending It?
In 1993, Fortune magazine put it this way: ‘These fellows from McKinsey sincerely do believe they are better than everybody else. Like several less purposeful organizations—Mensa, Bohemian Grove, Skull and Bones, the Banquet of the Golden Plate—McKinsey is elitist by design.’ […] […] ‘We are now living with the consequences of the world McKinsey created,’ writes a former McKinsey consultant in an expose´ for Current Affairs. ‘Market fundamentalism is the default mode for businesses and governments the world over.’ […] As McKinsey comes under heavier scrutiny for its role in the crimes of governments and powerful corporations, any ‘progressive’ who worked there and wants to be taken seriously should have a rather critical perspective. Buttigieg has shown no such reflection. Instead, he calls his time at McKinsey his most ‘intellectually informing experience’; he left only because it ‘could not furnish that deep level of purpose that I craved.’ Buttigieg has said he didn’t follow the story of McKinsey’s OxyContin push. On McKinsey’s Saudi and South African government ties, he said: ‘I think you have a lot of smart, well-intentioned people who sometimes view the world in a very innocent way. I wrote my thesis on Graham Greene, who said that innocence is like a dumb leper that has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.'”
….I’m going to explain what private equity is and why it is facing these attacks. I’ll also go into a bit of history, how private equity, which used to be called the leveraged buy-out industry (LBO), was started by a Nixon administration official who oversaw the both the bankruptcy of New York City and the intellectual attack on antitrust in the 1970s. Finally I’ll also discuss what it would mean to eliminate PE from our economy and politics….
So what is private equity? In one sense, it’s a simple question to answer. A private equity fund is a large unregulated pool of money run by financiers who use that money to invest in and/or buy companies and restructure them. They seek to recoup gains through dividend pay-outs or later sales of the companies to strategic acquirers or back to the public markets through initial public offerings. But that doesn’t capture the scale of the model. There are also private equity-like businesses who scour the landscape for companies, buy them, and then use extractive techniques such as price gouging or legalized forms of complex fraud to generate cash by moving debt and assets like real estate among shell companies. PE funds also lend money and act as brokers, and are morphing into investment bank-like institutions. Some of them are public companies. While the movement is couched in the language of business, using terms like strategy, business models returns of equity, innovation, and so forth, and proponents refer to it as an industry, private equity is not business. On a deeper level, private equity is the ultimate example of the collapse of the enlightenment concept of what ownership means. Ownership used to mean dominion over a resource, and responsibility for caretaking that resource. PE is a political movement whose goal is extend deep managerial controls from a small group of financiers over the producers in the economy. Private equity transforms corporations from institutions that house people and capital for the purpose of production into extractive institutions designed solely to shift cash to owners and leave the rest behind as trash. Like much of our political economy, the ideas behind it were developed in the 1970s and the actual implementation was operationalized during the Reagan era….
PE firms serve as transmitters of information across businesses, sort of disease vectors for price gouging and legal arbitrage. If a certain kind of price gouging strategy works in a pharmaceutical company, a private equity company can roll through the industry, buying up every possible candidate and quickly forcing the price gouging everywhere. In the defense sector, Transdigm serves this role, buying up aerospace spare parts makers with pricing power and jacking up prices, in effect spreading corrupt contracting arbitrage against the Pentagon much more rapidly than it would have spread otherwise.”
Disrupting mainstream economics – Modern Monetary Theory
The Economist Who Believes the Government Should Print More Money
[New Yorker, via Naked Capitalism 8-21-19]
Information Age Dystopia
Creating new economic potential – science and technology
Population growth and environmental catastrophe mean that the very future of humankind is threatened. In the Netherlands, a group of scientists is working on an urgent challenge: feeding the 11 billion….
The base for these global ambitions is the quiet university town of Wageningen. This is a modest place, seemingly at odds with its reputation as a world capital of innovation in food and agriculture, where the whole chain of research is usually covered in-house – by the locality’s more than 6,500 specialists and experts, from biochemical engineers to seaweed policy makers to tasting panellists who determine the deliciousness of experimental tomatoes.
Guided by AI, robotic platform automates molecule manufacture
[The Conversation (US), via American Wind Energy Association 8-24-19]
The US can source all of its power from renewables by building out wind, solar and other energy sources in locations where the right resources are available, writes David Timmons of the University of Massachusetts Boston. Policymakers and the public must embrace the transition as a solution for curbing carbon emissions, he writes.
NRDC unveils tool for comparing energy costs
[North American Windpower online, via American Wind Energy Association 8-24-19]
The Natural Resources Defense Council has released a state-specific tool that users can use to project the levelized cost of electricity from wind, solar, coal and other energy sources. “This tool will provide important additional data to help shape the planning process for meeting our energy needs on a local, state or regional level,” says Power Sector Director Sheryl Carter.
Sen. Sanders’ $16.3T, 10-year Green New Deal emphasizes renewables
[The Washington Post (tiered subscription model) (8/22), Reuters, via American Wind Energy Association 8-24-19]
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., unveiled a $16.3 trillion, 10-year Green New Deal on Thursday that would help the US decarbonize its grid by switching to 100% renewables by 2030. “We are going to invest massively in wind, solar and other sustainable energies,” he says.
Air Force Develops Steel Alloy for 3D Printing
[Machine Design Today 8-22-19]
A steel alloy developed at the Air Force Research Laboratory, called AF-9628, has the strength and toughness needed for aerospace parts.
10-Atom Thick Heat Shield Keeps Electronics Cool
[Machine Design Today 8-22-19]
Atomically thin materials developed by Stanford University researchers could create heat-shields for cell phones or laptops that would protect people and temperature-sensitive components.
Who’s Winning the Robot Race?
[Machine Design Today 8-20-19]
More than 2.5 million robots will be put to work this year. Which country is employing the most?
Teaching Robots to Build and Use Tools
[Machine Design Today 8-16-19]
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed robots that have the ability to reason about shape, function, and attachment of unrelated parts.
BNSF, Wabtec Advancing the Future of Railroad Motive Power
[Railway Age 8-20-19]
In a wide-ranging interview with Railway Age in December 2018, BNSF’s then-Executive Chairman Matt Rose had this to say about the future of locomotive propulsion technology, “We’ve got to look at alternative fuels for our locomotives. We tested LNG, and we don’t see the spread between diesel and natural gas wide enough to justify us making that investment, and it’s a significant investment. For us, it’s probably $8 billion to $10 billion. We don’t see the returns of doing that. So we’ll open the next chapter of our book—battery operated locomotives.”
Democratic Party leadership insists on suicide
“Majorities of the under-35 crowd simply look at politics in a completely different light than majorities of the over-35 crowd, as demonstrated by these two poll responses below. Biden’s support is grounded entirely in completely subjective and undefinable measures like “electability” and “personal characteristics,” while the majority of both Bernie and Warren’s support is rooted in their aggressive policy positions—which again, are the farthest to the left of standard Democratic politics than any primary contender in Gen Z’s, millennials’ or Gen X’s lifetimes. On a majority basis, young people simply outright reject the politics of Biden’s generation. There’s no other way to read this kind of polling.” And: “Leftists who want to evangelize the cause should be wary of using the famed ‘centrist’ slur against folks just trying to find someone new to like, as current polling proves that these are the people who will choose the Democratic nominee….”
“The Democratic Party May Finally Be Emerging From the Shadows of 1980
I occasionally talk about the most singularly dismal episode in my experience hanging around politicians and political events, and it is not the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, nor is it the events that occurred between the beginning of November, 2016 and the end January, 2017. It isn’t even Betsy DeVos’s confirmation hearing, although that’s a real contender. No, the episode in question occurred in 1982, when I was just a young alternative journo, and I attended something called the Democratic Midterm Issues Convention. It was at that event that you could see what was coming for the next 30 years or so, and what you saw wasn’t pretty….
….it was becoming clear that the real money in politics—from Wall Street and from the remaining industrial oligarchs — had sluiced over to the Republicans, especially the money from the extraction industries in the west and the textile manufacturers in the South. Being the party of the poor and disenfranchised never paid well, but now it wasn’t paying at all, and the powers of the party decided to re- establish the Roosevelt coalition by poaching new Republican ideas. Black voices, and women’s voices, and the less than bellicose foreign-policy voices left over from the antiwar movement, were mercilessly squashed at this three-day performance of political Pygmalion. The guy presiding over the event, a banker type named Charlie Manatt, actually stopped one renegade outburst by shushing loudly into his microphone, like a fourth-grade nun with a media buy….
For me, that was where it all began—the relentless drive of the Democratic Party to court people whose hearts it had altogether lost, and to suck up all the money from plutocrats who hated what the party stood for, but were rich enough to hedge their bets.
Biden: ‘There’s an awful lot of really good Republicans out there’
History will judge us harshly for this, and will look with particular venom at Trump’s political opponents in both parties, who over the years were unable to win popularity contests against a man most people would not leave alone with a decent wristwatch, let alone their children.
Trump’s original destiny was the destruction of the Republicans as a viable entity in modern American politics. Then he ran a general election like he was trying to lose, and won. Now his legacy is the spectacular end of America’s fragile racial consensus.
Memo to mainstream journalists: Can the phony outrage; Bernie is right about bias
[Salon, via Naked Capitalism 8-18-19]
I said above that there’s “almost never a memo or order from top management” to newsroom journalists. In normal times, the media system works smoothly without top-down directives. But in times of crisis, such as during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq — when I was a senior producer of MSNBC’s primetime Phil Donahue show — there may well be orders and memos.
As the invasion neared, top management at MSNBC/NBC News ordered us to bias our panel discussions. If we booked one guest who was antiwar on Iraq, we needed two who were pro-war. If we booked two guests on the left, we needed three on the right. When a producer proposed booking Michael Moore, she was told that three right-wingers would be required for balance. (I thought about proposing Noam Chomsky as a guest, but our stage couldn’t have accommodated the 28 right-wingers we might have needed for balance.)
….When the Donahue show was terminated three weeks before the Iraq invasion, internal memos that had circulated among top NBC News executives actually leaked. (God bless whistleblowers!) One memo said that Phil Donahue represented “a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. . . . He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The memo described a dreaded scenario in which the Donahue show would become “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”
The History of Neoliberalism
Every Penny a Vote (Review of Quinn Slobodian, The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism,
[London Review of Books, via Naked Capitalism 8-18-19]
Neoliberalism is often conceived as a system of self-regulating markets, shrunken states and crudely rational individuals. Early neoliberals, however, didn’t believe in markets’ self-correcting properties. Instead, as Quinn Slobodian argues in Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, they were concerned above all with establishing governments, laws and institutions in which markets could be embedded in order to make them work as they should – not only at a national but at a global level. This approach was a response to the fragmentation of empires that began after the First World War, and the popular demands for redistribution and self-determination that surged through the nation-states that took their place. When these demands impinged on the free trade order, neoliberals opposed them as a form of juridical trespass: imperium, the authority of territorial states, must not breach the rule of dominium, the boundless sway of private property. In tracing this dynamic, Slobodian draws an intellectual genealogy of the ‘neoliberal world economic imaginary’ from interwar Vienna to 1990s Geneva, and from the furious debates over economic planning that followed the fall of the Habsburg Empire to those that generated the EEC, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the WTO….
The Austrian School of economics, in which [Mises] and Hayek were trained, had supplied the monarchical state with royal tutors and finance ministers for three generations. Defeat in the First World War brought the empire crashing down, shorn of three-quarters of its territory and four-fifths of its population. The socialist government of the First Austrian Republic, which took office in February 1919, introduced unemployment insurance, the eight-hour working day and other social reforms. Such measures didn’t go much beyond the reforms brought in by the New Liberalism in Britain before the First World War, but for Mises they were ‘Bolshevism’, and would ‘lead Vienna to starvation and terror within a few days’. ‘Plundering hordes would take to the streets,’ he warned, ‘and a second bloodbath would destroy what was left of Viennese culture.’….
[Walter Lippmann’s 1938 colloquium in Paris] is the conciliatory moment at which histories of neoliberalism often begin. By starting earlier and in Vienna, Slobodian shows that the common periodisations don’t hold up: the notion that neoliberals were, by and large, moderate in tone and inclined to compromise, only to lose their way in the 1970s and 1980s, is chimerical. The foundational intellectual work was radical, and took place before the Second World War.
It should be stressed that this formative period of neoliberalism drew upon nakedly oligarchical principles of political and economic hierarchy. Accepting Lionel Robbin’s invitation to teach at the London School of Economics, the reviewer writes, “Hayek took to his new home, with its comforting social hierarchies and imperial responsibilities; it was ‘like stepping into a warm bath where the water is the same temperature as your body’.”
S Brennan
To:
Economics in the real world – The New American Homeless – [New Republic, via Naked Capitalism 8-22-19] “Outrageous rents would be less alarming if wages were increasing at a comparable rate. But the opposite is true.”
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Actually, with an ever increasing population [whether native born or…imported], rents should climb and wages should decline.
We have an ever increasing population, those people have to live near where the work is, it follows there is an ever increasing demand for that housing.
We have an ever increasing population, which means we have an ever increasing supply of job seekers, compensation should fall.
History has a multitude of examples of mass migration increasing the population and doing the above. History also has a multitude of examples of famine & disease decimating the population and doing the opposite, dramatically improving compensation while…rents declined.
Forget the economic “theory” rents and wages have to rise together and study a little history. When a theory has knowable exceptions, it is no longer a “theory” it’s bull$#!t.
nihil obstet
@Give No Heed to the Walking Dead
Expectations that China would abide by treaty agreements that would remake it into an imitation of America make you wonder, “Are these American negotiators idiots?” When another country has resources that we want, we have a long history of just fomenting coups, overthrowing governments, and if necessary invading. For example, we haven’t let Iran, Iraq, or Venezuela cut out American oil companies from the wealth of resource extraction. So would our leaders seriously expect China not to “steal” our “intellectual property”?
Meanwhile, we’re continuing to grant patents on living material from India and South America to our drug and agricultural companies. It’s not stealing if the American government says its yours, not theirs.
nihil obstet
@The Economist Who Believes the Government Should Print More Money
It sounds like MMT is an attempt to take the politics out of politics. Don’t tax the rich because they don’t spend their money, so that money is irrelevant. Where the MMTers are wrong here is that the rich do spend their money — they buy politicians. Money is how power is exercised in a capitalist society. For a just society, the money must be constrained to social welfare.
I’m not terribly trustful of a theory that was developed by a “tea party Democrat” who first pitched it to Mitt Romney and then joined hands with Laffer. The proselytizing of a theory that can be used for either oligarchic or democratic purposes does not strike me as a good use of time. Once the right wing seizes on it as a new Laffer curve, does anyone really think that the explanations about controlling inflation will be any more favorable to good policy than explanations about the deficit?
Hugh
Here we are already over the cliff, into the territory beyond the red lines of climate change and overpopulation, and so much of the thought in these links is permeated by a kind of willful fuzziness and disingenuousness, informed by beliefs in the permanency of a world which soon will not exist.
China wants to be a big dog, or possibly the top dog, in a world that is ceasing to exist. How forward thinking of them… We need to be rethinking our supply chains and our connections to China for a world where if you can’t make it at home, you probably aren’t going to have it.
CEOs are going to be socially responsible? That’s why they’ve cut their top compensation to $500,000/year,raised worker wages and benefits, slashed the prices on their products and services, improved their quality, and gone green. Oh yeah, wait, no they haven’t.
Wanna solve overpopulation? Give everybody a cell phone. And even if the world population is 9-11 billion in the coming years, call that a bust. We need more, younger workers … to work in all those automated factories, and lets just ignore things like climate change, environmental destruction, water resource loss, and pollution.
Don’t mean to beat up on Stoller, but it’s incredibly late to be asking if private equity should exist. The more straightforward formulation should have been: Private Equity should never have existed. It ranks up there with letting vampires run blood donor clinics, and then wondering why all the donors seem to have disappeared.
Re Buttigieg and McKinsey being “his most ‘intellectually informing experience’,” I remember years ago talking with a group of university profs and grad students and I made the offhand comment that universities were some of the least intellectual places I had ever seen. A few of the older profs got what I was saying. Most of the others, being academics and academics in training, did not. Academic types, like Buttigieg, like to think of themselves as intellectuals, but they are very nearly the opposite. They do usually have a good knowledge base, but their whole career depends upon working within orthodoxies in established ways and generally defending and perpetuating the status quo. They are often well-spoken but rather vacuous. Change for them is defined by them in terms of tweaks and nudges. They fundamentally lack any real intellectual insight, even in the areas of their expertise. What McKinsey gave Buttigieg was elite validation, that he was just as cool as they thought they were. BTW, descriptors like sincere and innocent with regard to groups like McKinsey are an obscenity. Killing off tens of thousands of Americans each year by drowning them in opioids and hundreds of equally evil and destructive crimes are bad, hoocoudanode? That’s what elite “intellectualism” is really about.
I think it is good that Sanders wants to double union membership, but it is important to remember that union membership in the private sector is down to 6.4% of workers in 2018. This is down from 16.8% in 1983 when the government began keeping figures. It was probably higher before this. For those with long memories, the union-breaking Patco strike took place two years before this in 1981 under Reagan. Also unions were a lot, I mean a lot, more powerful in the past. Now they are pretty wimpy.
https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpslutabs.htm
(Tables 3, you need to input fields)
also
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
DMC
I can’t help wondering why those electric locomotives aren’t just powered directly via a “3rd rail” or equivalent, with batteries strictly as a redundant backup system.
Good work on these weekend wrap-ups, Tony! Since Avedon has become somewhat sporadic, it’s nice to have a concise stroll over the significant developments of the week.
Z
Stoller has been having an interesting tweet exchange with Stephanie Kelton over MMT today. Worth reading.
When you really strip through all the self-deceptive bullshit, the only reason that McKinsey Mayor Pete is running for president is due to his compulsion to make it to the head of the class.
Z
Hugh
Z, as nihil obstet points out, the rich use their money to buy politicians. Until politicians are more afraid of their constituents than they are of the rich, we are not going to get higher (far higher) taxes on the rich (Stoller) or MMT type spending for the people (Kelton). Kelton doesn’t understand that even her MMT money ends up in the hands of the rich. Neither understands that all the money that has gone to the rich and would go to the rich doesn’t produce inflation because it goes into bubbles, and a small amount, a billion here, a billion there, into buying the politicians.
It’s a pity that neither Stoller nor Kelton would deign to come here to engage with some of us in a real debate on MMT. But it isn’t surprising for Kelton in particular. Some of us have had criticisms of MMT for years. They are significant and MMTers like Kelton haven’t bothered to address them. So I don’t see her or any of the MMT core doing so now. What interaction we have had is with their surrogates and has consisted in them mostly throwing tantrums that anyone would dare question its holy writ.
KT Chong
1. Here is a reminder: Hong Kong did NOT have democracy or general election when it was under British rule for 155 years. For 155 years, British did NOT allow Hong Kong people to have democracy or elect their own leader. The UK simply appointed undemocratic, unelected “Governors” to lord over Hong Kong, and the Governors filled all the top political positions in Hong Kong.
2. When Hong Kong people were under British rule, they DID want democracy and elections. Hong Kong people had protested and demanded democracy/elections/independence/self-rule numerous times under British rule, particularly during the 1960s. However, British ruthlessly cracked down and crushed the Hong Kong protests with bloodshed. So, British/the UK/the West/white people did not give “freedom” and “democracy” to Hong Kong when it was under their rule, but now they want freedom and democracy for Hong Kong when it is no longer under their rule.
3. Hong Kong people finally got the general election they had wanted… in 2004. A reminder of the timeline: Hong Kong was handed back from British to China in 1997, so Hong Kong was already under Chinese rule in 2004. So, British did NOT give democracy to Hong Kong. It was actually CHINA that allowed Hong Kong to have a general election for the very first time in 2004.
4. As for the current protests/riots/whatever in Hong Kong: it is difficult to understand why China still has not cracked down on the protests/riots. So Here is my conjecture. The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) has done the political calculus and decided, ultimately, the protests/riots in Hong Kong do NOT pose a threat to the stability of China and the power of the CCP .
5. For the protests/riots in Hong Kong to grow into a real threat to the CCP, the protests/riots will have to spread into China, and then cause massive uprisings all over the mainland. That means the Hong Kong protestors would have to gain some popular support from other Chinese people in the mainland. Otherwise, the protests will continue to be contained/localized inside Hong Kong, and they will not challenge or threaten the CCP in the mainland.
6. As for why the Hong Kong protestors have been unable to gain popular from other Chinese people: those protestors have already invited hatred and hostility from other Chinese, both inside and outside China, (with the exception of Taiwanese, maybe.) Here is the reason: The Hong Kong protesters keep saying, “we are not Chinese”, “we do not want to be Chinese,” and then they were waving American and British flags, singing US anthem. Other Chinese look at that as traitorous and treasonous, not just to the CCP – but to the Chinese culture, the Chinese identity, the Chinese nation, and the Chinese race.
7. So, the overwhelming majority of other Chinese already see those Hong Kong protestors as “race traitors” and “treasonous dogs” (i.e., “汉奸走狗” in Chinese, which is the worst.) That means Hong Kong protestors will NOT be getting any sympathy nor popular support from other Chinese in mainland, (or Chinese overseas for that matter.) So their efforts and protests will NOT grow or spread into China and the mainland. Which is why the CCP ultimately does not feel threatened by the Hong Kong protests. As long as the protests do not spread into the China mainland, the CCP can just wait until the protests fizzle out, or until the short-attention-span Western media move on to other things after six months or a year.
8. As for what the CCP can or should do to the protest: they do not have to do anything. China just has to NOT concede anything or give in to ANY of the demands of the Hong Kong people. China just has to stick to the strict parameters for what they will NOT give to Hong Kong: those kids can protest as much as they want; China simply will NOT give or move an inch. As long as the situation does not spread beyond Hong Kong and into the mainland, China can just “wait it out”. Unfortunately for those kids in Hong Kong, they basically have no leverage when they have already lost the popular support of other Chinese (who could have put pressure on the CCP,) so their protests will continued to be contained/localized inside Hong Kong with no possibility of spreading into other parts of China.
9. So how are the protests in Hong Kong different from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests? The 1989 protests were already INSIDE China mainland. The protests had some popular support inside China, and they could have spread from Beijing to another city, and then from one place to another, and get out of control. Which was why the CCP put it down.
10. The Hong Kong protests are not gonna spread to other Chinese when other Chinese already see those Hong Kong protestors as 汉奸 and 走狗, i.e., “race traitors” and “treasonous dogs”.
Spring Texan
Wow, awesome content, I’ve seen some of these but not others (and will have to follow up only selectively cuz of time, but these are focusing on really important stuff and thank you, Tony Wikrent!)
KT Chong
Definitions of the two Chinese cultural terms that I used in my last post:
汉奸: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanjian
走狗: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_dog
Z
Hugh,
Yep, Wall Street has purposely kept wages down … the market unquestionably rewards any corporate talk of getting lean and mean with the workforce with an immediate boost to the stock price … and funneled the vast majority of the money in the financial system into their wealth and power multiplier that is commonly referred to as the stock “market”. The concentration of stock ownership (the top 10% in wealth own 84% of the stock market) is so narrow and severe that they can’t spend all that money so it doesn’t cause inflation.
Now that the big Wall Street outfits have sold so much of their stock via the huge corporate U.S. stock buybacks, they can impose on us one of their tenets that keeps them in charge of the economic system: free trade is great and trade wars are bad. This is supported by their hustle that the stock market is tied to the general overall health of the economy, and not primarily their personal wealth, and is some sort of future tell for the economy. Meanwhile, the stock market has been predicting a booming economy for the past ten years that has never materialized.
I haven’t followed the MMT debate closely although I almost spit my coffee on my computer screen the morning I came across Randy Wray’s article that you often mention about not needing to raise taxes. I know it’s an overly simple representation of the article but it seems like they make these blunt, attention grabbing statements at times and then weave their positions into sophistry in order to defend them. The tax system should be used to incentivize economic behavior. That’s my take. Not taking wealth and power from the rich shouldn’t even be under discussion. It’s a necessary precursor.
It seems like everything they talk about can be accomplished by fiscal spending and taxes though I realize they look at that as an unnecessary restraint. I think I understand they see MMT as a way of taking a big single bite out of the power and proceeding from there. Do they plan on doing this in the middle of the night when all the wealthy are comfortably asleep? Wouldn’t our bought and paid for congress have a say in the matter? Doesn’t suddenly usurping the framework of our economic system also endanger the stability of it?
I’ve made some minor efforts to understand MMT, but I always end up getting bored and confused. When that happens, there’s usually something purposely being hidden beneath the sophistry. And then the defense becomes, “Why are you all so dense?”
From reading Stoller’s give and take with Kelton, it seems like argument often comes down to the non-believers pointing out that there is no way the rich will allow you to deploy MMT without getting at their power by decreasing their wealth and then the MMTers getting irritated and stating that they didn’t say that we shouldn’t tax the rich … they only said you could … and then wishing to hold the terms of the debate on that side point and not address the meat of how you ever going to deploy MMT without going after the rich’s power first. Often when these defensive tactics are deployed there are funding and personal interests at stake and they are trying to avoid exposing the weakest pillars in the framework of their theory.
Z
Z
The first signs of Biden’s deterioration is showing up in the polls: https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/26/politics/monmouth-august-democrats-biden-warren-sanders/index.html
Z
Z
Biden’s support from people under 50 is 6%.
Z
Z
Oh boy, parsing a NY Times headline and sub-headline, Warren is “Quietly Telling Democratic Insiders” via “calls, texts and handwritten notes to party officials, (she) is pushing to convey a desire for a revival, not a revolution.”
Thinking less and less of Warren as a potential nominee by the day …
Z
StewartM
S Brennan
Actually, with an ever increasing population [whether native born or…imported], rents should climb and wages should decline.
Malthus does not apply over the specified range. The US is *not*, repeat *not* ‘overcrowded’ by any standard compared to other peer countries:
https://steemitimages.com/p/8SzwQc8j2KJbFHDbZTe1BxNJ6aRUvF52hbS1j1NoZUNyfwa4w5ZEkqPfGZBCtGvLZrkexaNxf4dYxGibW7jKXWj64oaS3SjAUjPm37MRHbEd5yKPpr2?format=match&mode=fit&width=640
Prices for an equivalent home in, say, Vietnam is less than half the cost of one in the US. Yet look how much more crowded Vietnam is by comparison.
Nor is the cost of building a home in the US account for the rising cost of homes. Instead, it’s rather flat. Most of the articles about ‘housing crises’ approach this issue by comparing the housing *need* versus the homes *for sale* and come up with a 7.2 million home deficit, but I think–as Ian has posted–we actually have enough empty homes to house everyone or nearly everyone. The problem is that we’ve let our useless eater rich get so rich that they can buy up extra homes to either serve in lieu
of hotels or serve as AirBnb, homes which sit empty most of the year. If you want to solve the housing crises, that’s the first step that should be taken.
Mike Barry
&Z,
“Biden’s support from people under 50 is 6%.”
That’s good news if true. Do you have a link for that?
Meanwhile,
Phew!!! Guess we dodged a bullet, haw haw haw.
Hugh
Chinese hasbara, Ian should feel so honored that his blog is considered important enough to warrant it.
Under the British, Hong Kong was a colonial possession. It did not have democracy per se, but it did have rule of law. The executive was appointed by the British, much as is the de facto case now with only pro Mainland China executives, like Carrie Lam, being allowed by the Mainland government. With a Mainland takeover, Hong Kongers will lose not just any semblance of democracy at a local if not executive level but the rule of law they got from the British. What KT Chong doesn’t say is that Mainland Chinese are getting highly skewed reports of what is going on in Hong Kong because their access to unbiased reports of what is going on in Hong Kong is highly censored at all levels by the Chinese government. KT Chong inadvertently does bring up one aspect that gets misconstrued by a lot of us outside China, and that is the concept of nationalism as viewed by the Chinese themselves. Chinese people throughout their history have identified less with the states and governments which come and go and much more in racial/cultural terms of being Han. And of course Hong Kongers while being “Chinese” are not strictly speaking Han, which brings us round to the dubious assertion: British imperialism, bad; Chinese imperialism, good.
Xi-di has not gone into Hong Kong so far because the costs of doing so would be astronomically high. If the Mainland takes over, the days of Hong Kong being the banking hub of much of Asia, including Mainland China, would be over. The Chinese banking system is pretty precarious as it is, and does not need this kind of shock. More importantly, it would definitively take any reunification with Taiwan off the table. It would validate the US military pivot against China, and coincidentally Trump’s bumbling trade war. China’s neighbors also have long memories, and plenty of them involve Chinese imperialism. This would tend to drive them even further into the US camp.
Z, 6% among those under 50 for Biden pretty much says it all. Like you, I am becoming more skeptical of Warren by the day. She seems to be taking the Obama line of talking about change to us rubes while signaling to the powers that be that she has no intention of rocking their boat.
Z
“Biden has suffered an across the board decline in his support since June. He lost ground with white Democrats (from 32% to 18%) and voters of color (from 33% to 19%), among voters without a college degree (from 35% to 18%) and college graduates (from 28% to 20%), with both men (from 38% to 24%) and women (from 29% to 16%), and among voters under 50 years old (from 21% to 6%) as well as voters aged 50 and over (from 42% to 33%). Most of Biden’s lost support in these groups shifted almost equally toward Sanders and Warren.”
https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_US_082619/
Z
Z
Warren isn’t willing to piss off the people that passed her the salt and pepper shakers at the charming Ivy League socials she’s been a part of.
Z
Z
And why is Warren “quietly” reassuring the dem party establishment? Why the duplicity in tone between what she’s feeding the working class and what she’s telling her elitist pals?
Z
Z
There’s no way that Biden is going to finish first in the dem primary. He’s already fading and he’s got no second gear. There’s nothing about him or his campaign that’s going to fuel a rebound. Our rulers are also going to come to the realization that they can’t even credibly stand him up in a brokered convention.
One of the most concerning things in that Monmouth poll is that Biden’s support from people of color is crumbling. Sanders is the candidate that is most likely to get the biggest bite from that group.
Warren has little or no appeal to people of color, and that includes women of color because they are a hell of a lot less likely to vote for a woman just because she’s a woman than white women are. They’ve got bigger concerns than white professional women who may see it as a personal victory for a woman to become president. They don’t have that luxury of self-indulgence.
The ethnic vote is going to be a very crucial demographic in the dem race. So, how do our rulers intend to get Warren a healthy portion of the ethnic vote? It won’t come organically from Warren herself. She can’t pull it off herself. They’ll go the closer and bring out the Head PR Man for the One Percent between his $400K corporate speeches and playing slap ass with billionaires on their yachts to prop her up in hopes that she can inherit the support that Biden once had from that demographic.
If I was Bernie, I’d be wary of what I ingested, among other things. He’s a very viable and outspoken threat to the kleptocracy.
Z
bruce wilder
I think there was an element of “rock, paper, scissors” to the assembly of Democratic Presidential Primary candidates: in full array, it is Biden, Sanders, Warren, Harris, Buttigieg or Beto, but one-on-one, it is a round-robin: Biden beats Sanders (primarily because of conventional name-recognition — in other words Biden is there to prevent Sanders becoming “inevitable” too early); Sanders beats Warren; Warren beats Biden. Inject Harris to draw away early-name-recognition-elements of support from Biden before that support seeps to Sanders and Warren. Hasn’t worked out because Harris is terrible at being her own sockpuppet: Biden’s support is slipping away to Sanders and Warren.
I am not at all surprised that Warren is posing as the champion of “revival” against Sander’s “revolution”. She signaled her stalwart loyalty to the establishment by endorsing Clinton in 2016. And, I am certain that her “I have a plan for that” rhetoric focus-groups really well in contrast to Sanders class warfare rhetoric, at least among the professional classes and petit bourgeoisie.
I, personally, would like this country a good deal better, if I did not have reason to expect that lots of people will be repelled by calls to forgive student loans or raise the minimum wage. The credentialed have done well out of checking all the boxes and may not be wild about calling into question the value of a world where everyone has to check all the boxes just to survive.
A very large part of the Democratic donor base and a significant part of the electorate (the “likely voter” base in polling terms) is deeply afraid of change. The Party establishment has worked hard to expand that conservative base by trying to appeal to formerly Republican suburban voters. The 2018 House elections skewed the House caucus in a conservative direction by adding suburban districts won with candidates with a military/security/business background, AOC and friends notwithstanding.
The propaganda for 3 years now has been designed to drown out dissatisfaction with the policy status quo. The revulsion for Trump is fed by cable news with relentless narratives that avoid any leftish critiques of policy. Dean Baquet of the NY Times got caught re-directing journamalism from “Russia,Russia,Russia” to “racism!” “Racism” as discussed in the NY Times will always be a way to spike any kind effective attention to poverty and class; it will be a reason people do not want to improve public education or to institute medicare-for-all.
I think Sanders could convince a majority of the national electorate that the billionaires are the enemy, if he has enough time and his campaign organization has enough reach beyond the filter of the plutocrat-owned Media and Party establishments. It would mean expanding the electorate at the margin. It would mean exploiting the precarity of a large part of the so-called middle classes with a rhetoric that went beyond working class rebellion and attacked predatory corruption (not incidentially Warren’s strategy). Whether Warren could go from where she is, and make an effective appeal to the disaffected — those of us willing to fight class war across the board for the working classes and discarded — I have doubts.
Z
I see Sanders as having “juice” in that he and his supporters could change the landscape as far as bringing voters into the fray who wouldn’t normally vote because he is giving them plenty of reasons to vote for him and there is a lot of enthusiasm for his campaign, particularly among the young.
Warren doesn’t have that. Her supporters are not desperate for change for the most part. Her support may gain some of off Biden’s, should he drop out, but it’s not going to grow organically. There’s no movement to her campaign.
The Clinton-dominated media is going to back Warren though and they’ll use every manipulative trick they have to pump Warren. Obviously mysogonism will be one of the tools they’ll pull from their bag.
Z
S Brennan
StewartM, your argument is childish, it does not account for the fact that not all of the land in the US equal. by your “factual data[1]” the Sahara is prime real estate…sheesh, what bulls$#!t.
[1] https://steemitimages.com/p/8SzwQc8j2KJbFHDbZTe1BxNJ6aRUvF52hbS1j1NoZUNyfwa4w5ZEkqPfGZBCtGvLZrkexaNxf4dYxGibW7jKXWj64oaS3SjAUjPm37MRHbEd5yKPpr2?format=match&mode=fit&width=640
S Brennan
While Tulsi Gabbard Serves her country on Deployment, the DNC “thanks her for her service” by…rewriting the DNC debate rules to exclude it’s only Soldier. My Democratic friends can never figure out why people voted for Trump, well, for the few, for the brave, read & weep..it’s hard to vote for an organization ruled by hypocritical @$$h*!e$.
==========================
DNC’s Dubious Debate Criteria By Michael Tracey August 21, 2019:Gabbard Victimized by DNC’s Dubious Debate Criteria
———————————————-
“Tulsi Gabbard is on the verge of being excluded from the next Democratic presidential debate on the basis of criteria that appear increasingly absurd.
Take, for instance, her poll standing in New Hampshire, which currently places Gabbard at 3.3% support, according to the RealClearPolitics average as of Aug. 20. One might suspect that such a figure would merit inclusion in the upcoming debates — especially considering she’s ahead of several candidates who have already been granted entry, including Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, and Andrew Yang. But the Democratic National Committee has decreed that the polls constituting this average are not sufficiently “qualifying.”
What makes a poll “qualifying” in the eyes of the DNC? The answer is conspicuously inscrutable. Months ago, party chieftains issued a list of “approved sponsoring organizations/institutions” for polls that satisfy their criteria for debate admittance. Not appearing on that list is the Boston Globe, which sponsored a Suffolk University poll published Aug. 6 that placed Gabbard at 3%. The DNC had proclaimed that for admittance to the September and October debates, candidates must secure polling results of 2% or more in four separate “approved” polls — but a poll sponsored by the newspaper with the largest circulation in New Hampshire (the Globe recently surpassed the New Hampshire Union Leader there) does not count, per this cockamamie criteria. There has not been an officially qualifying poll in New Hampshire, Gabbard’s best state, in over a month.
The absurdity mounts. A South Carolina poll published Aug. 14 by the Post and Courier placed Gabbard at 2%. One might have again vainly assumed that the newspaper with the largest circulation in a critical early primary state would be an “approved” sponsor per the dictates of the DNC, but it is not. Curious.
To recap: Gabbard has polled at 2% or more in two polls sponsored by the two largest newspapers in two early primary states, but the DNC — through its mysteriously incoherent selection process — has determined that these surveys do not count toward her debate eligibility. Without these exclusions, Gabbard would have already qualified. She has polled at 2% or more in two polls officially deemed “qualifying,” and surpassed the 130,000 donor threshold on Aug. 2. While the latter metric would seem more indicative of “grassroots support” — a formerly obscure Hawaii congresswoman has managed to secure more than 160,000 individual contributions from all 50 states, according to the latest figures from her campaign — the DNC has declared that it will prioritize polling over donors. In polls with a sample size of just a few hundred people, this means excluding candidates based on what can literally amount to rounding errors: A poll that places a candidate at 1.4% could be considered non-qualifying, but a poll that places a candidate at 1.5% is considered qualifying. Pinning such massive decisions for the trajectory of a campaign on insignificant fractional differences seems wildly arbitrary.
Take also Gabbard’s performance in polls conducted by YouGov. One such poll published July 21, sponsored by CBS, placed Gabbard at 2% in New Hampshire and therefore counts toward her qualifying total. But Gabbard has polled at 2% or more in five additional YouGov polls — except those polls are sponsored by The Economist, not CBS. Needless to say, The Economist is not a “sponsoring organization,” per the whims of the DNC. It may be one of the most vaunted news organizations in the world, and YouGov may be a “qualified” polling firm in other contexts, but the DNC has chosen to exclude The Economist’s results for reasons that appear less and less defensible.
Then there’s the larger issue of how exactly the DNC is gauging grassroots enthusiasm, which was ostensibly supposed to be the principle governing the debate-qualifying process in the first place. Gabbard was the most Googled candidate twice in a row after each previous debate, which at a minimum should indicate that there is substantial interest in her campaign. It’s an imperfect metric — Google searches and other online criteria could be subject to manipulation — but then again, the other metrics are also noticeably imperfect. There is no reason why the DNC could not incorporate a range of factors in determining which candidates voters are entitled to hear from on a national stage. For what it’s worth, she also tends to generate anomalously large interest on YouTube and social media, having gained the second-most Twitter followers of any candidate after the most recent debate in July. Again, these are imperfect metrics, but the entire debate-qualifying process is based on imperfect metrics.
Gabbard has a unique foreign-policy-centric message that is distinct from every other candidate, and she has managed to convert a shoestring campaign operation into a sizable public profile. (She is currently in Indonesia on a two-week National Guard training mission, therefore missing a crucial juncture of the campaign.) Other candidates poised for exclusion might also have a reasonable claim to entry — Marianne Williamson passed the 130,000 donor threshold this week — but the most egregious case is clearly Gabbard. If only out of self-interest, the DNC might want to ponder whether alienating her supporters is a tactically wise move, considering how deeply suspicious many already are of the DNC’s behind-the-scenes role — memories of a “rigged” primary in 2016 are still fresh. In its December 2018 “framework” for the debates, the DNC declared: “Given the fluid nature of the presidential nominating process, the DNC will continuously assess the state of the race and make adjustments to this process as appropriate.” Now would likely be an “appropriate” time for such a reassessment.
Michael Tracey (@mtracey) is a journalist in Jersey City, N.J.
Mike Barry
Not buying the anti-Warren shade. Warren is a an ethics-first center-leftist and as such, perhaps more palatable to the voters than Sanders. The oligarchs aren’t absorbing her, they’re settling.
Hugh
Oligarchs don’t settle. They buy. Warren has signaled to them that she can be bought. She is after all “capitalist to my bones.” While some of us were fighting for Medicare for All/universal single payer back during the great healthcare debate under Obama in 2009, it took Warren until 2017 to come out for Medicare for All and only definitively so during the first Democratic debate. So yes, I have problems with someone who finally comes to a position two months ago I and others were fighting for ten years ago. It doesn’t help when I see how hard the Establishment media at MSNBC is pushing her.
Just to remind in pundit speak,
centrist = conservative
left = liberal
far left = progressive/democratic socialist
progressive = meaningless generic applied to any Democrat
The real question about Warren is how much of what she says she is for will she fight for and how much is “aspirational” vaporware.
bruce wilder
Oligarchs don’t settle. They buy. Warren has signaled to them that she can be bought. She is after all “capitalist to my bones.”
tru dat
my rational politics has become the politics of the guillotine, but i find I do not have the stomach for it.
if they can’t buy, i expect they will burn
sabotage and a capital strike — realities that MMT ought to be able to respond to, but is designed by its advocates to be unrealistic about
NRG
“She signaled her stalwart loyalty to the establishment by endorsing Clinton in 2016.” — Bruce Wilder
Who did Sanders endorse in 2016, again? And can we cast blame upon him equally?
Warren saw what happened to Sanders, when the DNC (and their allies) crippled his campaign in 2016. Ideological purity in the face of a terrifically unfair electoral system is an exercise in futility. Ask damn near every third party candidate in US history. If you think electoral politics matters, which I question, navigating between Scylla and Charybdis is necessary. It’s been tried the other way repeatedly. Ask Ralph Nader. Ask Bernie, for that matter. He lost to the most unpopular Democratic party nominee ever, because he refused to mollify the establishment that could prevent his obtaining power. And they did. So, hope beyond hope for Tulsi Gabbard, as many here do? Pretend away at someone like Jill Stein again? I am not sure that real change can be made via electoral politics, but it 100% cannot without operating within the current electoral system — a system that empowers parties and their elites. I truly wish it could. Way too much energy is spent on pretending it can.
NRG
If you want to vote ideology without regard to electability, I suggest as a possibility: https://socialistaction.org/2019/07/06/jeff-mackler-for-u-s-president-in-2020-socialist-action-campaigns-for-socialism/
If not. . . then why are you (the plural you) compromising by voting for someone who isn’t really a socialist at all? Is it that the possibility he could be elected is greater than that of Jeff Mackler? If so, why does that matter?
Mike Barry
“Oligarchs don’t settle” until they do. Remember FDR?