Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 4 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

US Urged to Condemn Israel’s ‘Summary Execution’ of Two Journalists

Edward Carver, August 02, 2024 [CommonDreams]

A Palestinian journalist on Thursday pressed a U.S. State Department spokesperson to characterize the killings of two Al Jazeera journalists by Israeli forces as summary execution.

The heated press briefing followed an airstrike on Wednesday that killedAl Jazeera reporter Ismail al-Ghoul and cameraman Rami al-Rifee, and sparked global outrage. Israel’s military acknowledged targeting al-Ghoul, saying he was “eliminated” because he was a Hamas “terrorist,” an allegation the Qatar-based network said was “baseless.”

The death toll of Palestinian journalists and media workers now stands at least 108, including several intentionally targeted by Israel forces, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 07-31-2024]

Etan Nechin

@Etanetan23

It’s telling Israel (allegedly) can conduct pinpoint operations thousands of kilometers away to a capture target with precision, yet just two kilometers from home, they use 5-ton bombs on families to eliminate minor threats.

Oligarchy

Private Equity Giants Invest More Than $200M in Federal Races to Protect Their Lucrative Tax Loophole 

[Exposed by CMD, via Naked Capitalism 08-02-2024]

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

Uber, Lyft and Others Win California Ruling to Treat Drivers as Contractors 

[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism 07-28-2024]

Big Law Confronts Tail Risk Threat to Private Equity Bankruptcy 

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 07-29-2024]

Big Law partners are looking at a ruling that sent shock waves through the bankruptcy world as a lesson rather than a serious threat to their model of representing both private equity sponsors and their distressed portfolio companies.

The fallout comes in the wake of a decision this month in the Eastern District of Virginia. The court declared Vinson & Elkins could not represent wood-pellet maker Enviva Inc. in its bankruptcy case due to the law firm’s longstanding relationship with Riverstone Investment Group LLC, a private equity firm that held 43% of Enviva’s publicly traded shares.

Low-Income Homes Drop Internet Service After Congress Kills Discount Program 

[arstechnica, via Naked Capitalism 07-30-2024]

The hidden role of public pensions in raising rents in California

[Los Angeles Times, via Naked Capitalism 08-03-2024]

They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals

The Domination Tour 

Maureen Tkacik, August 01, 2024 [The American Prospect]

Four decades of intensifying corporate concentration turned the music industry into a wasteland of institutionalized control and abuse. Are antitrust enforcers ready to reckon with that?

….both Jennifer Lopez and the Black Keys were forced to cancel tours in which they had invested considerable sums of their own cash, due to lukewarm demand for tickets that had been priced too aggressively. The prolific hit machine Bebe Rexha unleashed a torrent of social media posts about how “hopeless” she felt working in an industry she claimed had repeatedly conspired to “undermine” her. And Spotify, as if on cue, announced it was tweaking its “mechanical royalties” compensation formula; songwriters could expect to receive $150 million less in 2025 than they had in 2024. The Guardian convinced 12 musical acts, including two with recent album releases that had charted in the top ten, to share their balance sheets from their most recent concert tours. Just one had turned a profit, of only about $7,000 for 29 performances.

These problems are more connected than they might seem, because power and resources in the music industry are so unbelievably concentrated. Since the demise of recorded music sales in the early 2000s, pop music in America has increasingly become a single-payer system, in which virtually every working musician relies for the majority of his or her earnings on a concert promotions cabal, anchored by Live Nation/Ticketmaster and its former CEO, the diminutive mogul Irving Azoff. Collectively, they own or control nearly 500 of the nation’s most important concert venues, sell more than 80 percent of the nation’s concert tickets, and perversely also solely or jointly manage the careers, brands, and business affairs of hundreds of artists, from U2 and Dua Lipa to Drake and The Weeknd….

But to truly grasp the terrifying insidiousness of the concert cartel’s control over the music industry and the artists who are its lifeblood—and why even a successful antitrust case may not change much of anything—one must peruse the work of the leading scholar of the #FreeBritney movement, namely a Northern Virginia anti-monopoly activist named Melanie Carlson, whose deeply researched Substack explores the corporate and para-political relationships behind celebrity drama.…

For most of Taylor’s clients, a “spiritual” connection is one of the selling points: She and her pastor husband Rob have controlled many churches, to which most of her clients seem to tithe a large portion of their paychecks. (Jamie Spears contributed hundreds of thousands of the dollars he made as his daughter’s conservator to Rob Taylor’s Cavalry church.) The Kardashians and Biebers were reported to be tithing 10 percent of their income to a megachurch called Churchome on whose board Taylor served; rumors have since swirled that P. Diddy, now hit with nine separate lawsuits for alleged sex trafficking, tithed large portions of his income to churches Taylor controlled. Diddy has denied all of the allegations.

Earlier this year, Taylor’s right-hand woman Robin Greenhill, who for ten years personally intercepted every message Britney sent or received on her phone and gave every man who asked her out on a date a comprehensive debriefing on her sexual and medical history, was also named as the accountant who facilitated wire transfers and cash payments from Diddy’s various music and promotional companies. (Greenhill could not be reached for comment.)….

Donald Trump Backs ‘Strategic Bitcoin Stockpile’ in Speech to Crypto Faithful 

[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 07-30-2024]

How the crypto industry is buying political support with 202 million U.S. dollars

Judd Legum [Popular Information, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 07-30-2024]

“15 years after Bitcoin was created, there are still few legitimate use cases. Today, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are primarily used for financial speculation and to facilitate organized crime. The broader crypto industry, meanwhile, has been rocked by scandals, including the spectacular implosion of FTX and criminal charges against Binance. But crypto lobbyists still have one ace up their sleeves: lots of money. The industry’s primary Super PAC, Fairshake, has raised over $202 million in the 2024 election cycle. Most of this money was collected in the form of 8-figure contributions. …. Coinbase alone has donated $70 million so far, and crypto investors like Ben Horowitz, Marc Andreessen, and the Winklevoss twins have written multi-million dollar checks. The largest individual donors are also supporting Trump’s candidacy. This money dwarfs the spending by Sam Bankman-Fried in the 2022 election cycle. Of the approximately $45 million Fairshake and its subsidiaries have expended thus far, two-thirds was used to attack Democrats or support Republicans. The cash stockpile positions the industry to be one of the most powerful forces in politics over the next 100 days.”

The Marriage Of Convenience Between Trump And The Crypto-Criminals Was Always 100% Inevitable

Howie Klein, August 4, 2024  [downwithtyranny.com]

Restoring balance to the economy

Federal regulator says Amazon can be held responsible for faulty goods sold on its marketplace

[CNBC, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 07-30-2024]

“In a landmark order, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said the agency unanimously agreed Amazon ‘fits squarely’ within the definition of a distributor of goods and bears responsibility for the recall of faulty products. The decision addresses a thorny issue faced by Amazon for years, with the company arguing it’s merely a conduit between third-party sellers and shoppers. A judge said Amazon’s fulfillment program for sellers give it “far-reaching control” over the products sold on its platform.”

Los Angeles gave families $1,000 a month in the biggest basic income pilot in the country. Now the results are in. 

[Business Insider, via Naked Capitalism 08-02-2024]

Participants in the Los Angeles-based program reported that they had better employment outcomes, felt safer at home, enrolled their kids in more extracurriculars, and were more likely to leave domestically abusive situations, according to the pilot study’s results.

The Basic Income Guaranteed: Los Angeles Economic Assistance Pilot, or BIG:LEAP, gave over 3,200 households $1,000 in monthly no-strings-attached cash payments for 12 months starting in January 2022. Participants had to have or be expecting a dependent child and fall below the federal poverty threshold, with average household incomes of slightly above $14,000 a year.

Build No Small Things: A sampling of innovative projects made possible by the Biden legislative wins

Noah Rawlings, July 29, 2024 [The New Republic]

Eyepopping Factory Construction Boom in the US Reaches New Highs Amid Big Corporate & Strategic Rethink

Wolf Richter [Wolf Street, via Naked Capitalism, August 2, 2024]

Companies invested a record $19.7 billion in June in the construction of manufacturing facilities, up by 18.6% from the already surging levels in June 2023, up by nearly 100% from June 2022, and up by 209% from June 2019, according to the Census Bureau today.

The investment totals here only cover the actual construction costs of the facilities, not the costs of the manufacturing equipment and installation that can dwarf the construction costs of the building. The total cost of a big chip plant might reach $20 billion, but the construction costs are the smallest part of it. So the total amounts invested in manufacturing plants, including the equipment and installation, are much higher….

The explosion in factory construction that started in the second half of 2021 was one of the changes that came out of the pandemic when America’s scary dependence on China became apparent in massive shortages of all kinds of goods, including semiconductor shortages, and unbelievable supply-chain and transportation chaos, that caused corporate America and policy makers to rethink the strategy of endless globalization.

The CHIPS Act, signed into law in August 2022, was part of the movement….

How the Democrats Finally Took on Big Pharma 

Timothy Noah, August 1, 2024 [The New Republic]

Millions of jobs? Rising wages? Those are great, but the unsung economic achievement has come in making health care much more affordable. The victories, starting with insulin prices, are remarkable….

…Insulin’s discoverers were two Canadian scientists: Frederick G. Banting and Charles H. Best. A third Canadian, James B. Collip, purified canine insulin sufficiently that it could be used to treat humans, prompting the granting of an American patent to all three in 1923. To make insulin available as widely as possible, they sold the patent for $3 to the University of Toronto. Anticipating Jonas Salk’s later and more famous declaration about patenting his polio vaccine (“could you patent the sun?”), Banting said: “Insulin does not belong to me. It belongs to the world.”

From the 1920s through the 1970s, animal insulin (derived from cows and pigs) really did belong to the world. Even with various critical improvements, it remained inexpensive. But starting in the 1980s, insulin prices began rising. Initially that was because genetic engineering made human-derived insulin possible for the first time. Human-derived insulin was presumed to be better, so it drove cheaper, pig-and-cow-derived insulin out of the U.S. market—even though the human variety’s clinical advantage was slight. The introduction of synthetic analogs in the late 1990s sped up how quickly an insulin injection takes effect. That’s a huge advantage for patients with Type 1 diabetes, the more severe variety. But Type 1 accounts for only about 5 percent of all cases. Nearly all the remaining 90 to 95 percent are Type 2, where it doesn’t typically matter how fast insulin takes effect. Even so, analogs largely displaced human-derived prescriptions for both Type 1 and Type 2 patients, boosting insulin’s price further….

Disrupting mainstream economics

Governments don’t borrow from financial markets 

[Funding the Future, via Naked Capitalism 08-02-2024]

Health care crisis

Structural Determinants of Health: Hospitals’ Unequal Capital Investments Drive Health Inequities 

[Center for Economic and Policy Research, via Naked Capitalism 07-28-2024]

‘Easy to Pay for Something That Costs Less’: New Study Shows Medicare for All Would Save US $5.1 Trillion Over Ten Years

Jake Johnson, November 30, 2018 [CommonDreams]

BURLINGTON, VT – Confronting the question most commonly asked of the growing number of Americans who support replacing America’s uniquely inefficient and immoral for-profit healthcare system with Medicare for All–“How do we pay for it?”–a new paper released Friday by researchers at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) shows that financing a single-payer system would actually be quite simple, given that it would cost significantly less than the status quo….

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

Copyright Office tells Congress: ‘Urgent need’ to outlaw AI-powered impersonation 

[TechCrunch, via Naked Capitalism 08-01-2024]

Democrats’ political malpractice

Kamala Harris campaign seeks ‘reset’ with crypto companies  

[Financial Times, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 07-29-2024] more in X

“Kamala Harris’s advisers have approached top crypto companies to “reset” relations between her Democratic party and a sector that has come out as an important backer of Donald Trump, her rival for the US presidency.” And: “People advising the Harris campaign on business matters said the decision to reconnect with the crypto industry had little to do with attracting new electoral contributions. They said the objective was instead to build a constructive relationship that would ultimately set a smart regulatory framework that would help the growth of the entire asset class.” BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA! Totes, a party needs to retain its self-respect. More: “One person said her campaign was using the change of leadership on the Democratic ticket as an opportunity to reset relations with the tech industry, which had felt targeted by the Biden administration, particularly on antitrust matters.” So, measuring Lina Khan for the drop? More: “The underlying message Harris wants to strike is that the Democrats are ‘pro-business, responsible business’, said one person close to her campaign. Harris is aiming to win back those in the tech community, many of them in her home state of California, who have turned away from the party in protest at the threat of new taxes or regulation of their industry.” • So backing crypto billionaires is the way to signal “responsible business.” If Kamala does pick Raimondo, that will be wonderfully clarifying

How Kamala Harris took control of the Democratic Party

[Washington Post, via The Big Picture 08-03-2024]

Why Harris Is Backpedaling on Fracking

Heather Souvaine Horn, August 2, 2024 [The New Republic]

Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War

The 4 Words That Will Decide The Presidency In 2024: Election Protection, Grassroots Organizing

Harvey Wasserman, August 2, 2024  [downwithtyranny.com]

In 2020, our national election was saved by hand-marked, hand-counted, digitally scanned paper ballots… by a fierce nationwide battle to save voter registration rolls… and by a massive grassroots organizing campaign that inspired citizens to vote in record numbers, with those votes reliably protected once cast. Amidst the Covid Pandemic, that movement ultimately rode an unprecedented wave of tens of millions of paper ballots that were mailed out and mailed back in through the US Postal Service.

Without the successes of these nascent national election protection and grassroots organizing campaigns, Donald Trump would be in the White House….

In Florida 2000, Ohio 2004, and Wisconsin-Michigan-Pennsylvania 2016,  massive “irregularities” plagued the computerized vote counts in a wide range of electronic balloting devices.

As reported by Bev Harris, wild fluctuations on computerized machines in Volusia County and elsewhere threw around more than enough votes to swing the 2000 vote count. As documented by Robert Fitrakis, similar malfunctions in scores of machines repeated the problem in Ohio 2004. The 2016 irregularities in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania may again have been enough to decide the election.

But in the wake of Ohio 2004, a national grassroots movement erupted to demand hand-marked paper ballots that would be digitally scanned to facilitate a speedy, verifiable vote count. Amidst the 2020 Covid epidemic, more than 80% of the nation’s ballots were cast on paper, backed up with digitized scanning devices.

The (anti)Federalist Society Infestation of the Courts

Allies Vow to Fight Off Big Oil Lawsuit Aimed at Ending ‘Existence’ of Greenpeace

Olivia Rosane, August 02, 2024 [CommonDreams]

Nearly 300 organizations and tens of thousands of individuals have signed an open letter supporting Greenpeace USA against a $300 million lawsuit brought against the environmental group by Energy Transfer—a company with a majority stake in the Dakota Access pipeline.

The corporation is falsely accusing Greenpeace of being the driving force behind Indigenous-led protests against the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) in 2016 and 2017….

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

‘Unacceptable’: Court Blocks Net Neutrality Rules During Legal Battle

Jessica Corbett, August 01,  2024 [CommonDreams]

Net neutrality advocates on Thursday sharply condemned a U.S. appellate court decision blocking implementation of the Biden administration’s broadband policy while a legal challenge launched by the telecommunications industry moves forward.

Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel joined with Commissioners Anna Gomez and Geoffrey Starks in April to reclassify broadband as a public service under Title II of the Communications Act—undoing damage done during the Trump administration.

Internet service providers (ISPs) are fighting to stop the FCC’s order. After temporarily delaying the rules last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit just granted a stay. Oral arguments aren’t expected until October or November.

The Common Political Foundations of Originalism and Cost-benefit Analysis (PDF)

Jonathan S. Masur and Eric A. Posner [SSRN, via Naked Capitalism 08-02-2024]

Abstract

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and originalism are rarely discussed together, and seem to belong to different worlds of legal scholarship. The two methods are used by different institutions in different spheres of law for different purposes; what could they have in common? Nothing, or so it would seem. Yet closer inspection reveals surprising commonalities-both in terms of structure and function, on the one hand, and in historical pedigree and political economy, on the other. CBA and originalism are what we will call midlevel legal methods. Midlevel legal methods are neither normative commitments nor legal doctrines, but recurrently used methodologies that are applied to multiple substantive areas of law. What is peculiar and interesting about these two particular midlevel methods is that, despite the fact that they cover such divergent domains, they have developed similar structures to fill similar roles.

How did these two methods with such similar structural and functional characteristics arise? We argue that the answer lies with their shared political history. Both methods have been propelled forward by significant financial support from an overlapping web of business groups and intellectual support from interlinked academic supporters associated with pro-market trends in intellectual and political circles in the 1970s and 1980s. Accordingly, both methods were originally backed largely by conservatives and associated with the conservative legal movement. But even that has shifted over time, and roughly contemporaneously. Yet the story of originalism and CBA is one of dynamic instability. New political forces and new populist trends pose threats to the continued preeminence of both methods.

Civic republicanism

Matt Stoller: Lobbying Used to Be a Crime: A Review of Zephyr Teachout’s New Book on the Secret History of Corruption in America

Matt Stoller, November 18, 2014 by Yves Smith

[Teachout answered questions about her book the week before this posting in Book Salon at Firedoglake.]

…the modern Supreme Court has engaged in a revolutionary reinterpretation of corruption and therefore in American political life. This outlook, written by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in the famous Citizens United case, understands and celebrates America as a brutal and Hobbesian competitive struggle among self-interested actors attempting to use money to gain personal benefits in the public sphere…. Liberals tend to think that questions about electoral and political corruption started in the 1970s, in the Watergate era. What Teachout shows is that these questions were foundational in the American Revolution itself, and every epoch since. They are in fact questions fundamental to the design of democracy.

Teachout starts her book by telling the story of a set of debates that took place even before the Constitution was ratified — whether American officials could take gifts from foreign kings. The French King, as a matter of diplomatic process, routinely gave diamond-encrusted snuff boxes to foreign ambassadors. Americans, adopting a radical Dutch provision banning such gifts, wrestled with the question of temptation to individual public servants versus international diplomatic norms. The gifts ban, she argues, was evidence of a particular demanding notion of corruption at the heart of American legal history. These rules, ‘bright-line’ rules versus ‘corrupt-intent’ rules, govern temptation and structure. They cover innocent and illicit activity, as opposed to bribery rules which are organized solely around quid pro quo corruption.

The Constitution is full of such bright-line rules. For instance, the residency requirement was intended to protect against ‘adventurers’ and the takings clause protects private property and has an anti-monopoly interpretive framework. The census, rules on representation of House members, the regular electoral cycle of two year terms, age requirements (to prevent dynasties), requirements for legislative journals, salary payments for legislators, and prohibitions on holding legislative and other offices are all anti-corruption provisions. The founders, Teachout argues, were obsessed with corruption. They had seen their beloved British system fall into the trap of corruption, with ‘place men’ (members of parliament dependent on the king) and rotten boroughs, and sought to prevent a recurrence in America.

Teachout points out something fairly obvious, but not recognized today — the theoretical underpinning of the American revolution was that a corrupt government had no legitimacy to govern. This is something the founders well recognized. The debates they had — Madison, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Washington, Hamilton, and people in the culture at large — reflected a divide between political philosophers Thomas Hobbes versus Baron de Montesquieu. Hobbes’s vision, echoed today among the Chicago school’s law and economics scholars, was that corruption as a concept made no sense. Life was a brutal competition among selfish actors. In such a paradigm, a revolution would simply be a question of raw power, rather than any set of principles.

The founders roundly repudiated this view, adopting Montesquieu’s arguments that there is such a thing as a public interest and that people could orient themselves around it given sufficient personal virtue and adequate structural incentives to do so. Montesquieu is best-known for his promotion of the concept of different branches of government, but that concept came from his moral view of human nature. Teachout shows that questions of bribery were fairly insignificant in the dialogue over the structure of the new republic, whereas anti-corruption as a Montesquieu-influenced deliberative design principle was the key animator of the shaping of the country….

The book’s final chapters are a discussion of Citizens United, the Supreme Court’s makeup, and a legal proscription of how to restore the more appropriate conception of corruption in our national life.

According to Teachout, Citizens United was a decision in which the Supreme Court ignored the historic record to narrow the definition of corruption to mean a simple quid pro quo transaction. It found that the First Amendment protects “political speech regardless of the identity of the speaker,” and that the Court found no sufficient “government interest in limiting corporate political advertising.” It equated favoratism and influence with ‘democratic responsiveness’. This was, as Teachout shows earlier, what Benjamin Franklin saw to be a dystopian view of how the American republic would be organized.

Teachout shows how the court itself has undergone transformations that turn it into a deeply elitist and anti-political body….

Kamala Harris’s Big-Business Choice 

Zephyr Teachout May 20, 2024 [The New York Review]

…Biden, alongside his trade representative, Katherine Tai, publicly rejected the dogma that has dominated US economic thinking since NAFTA: the neoliberal consensus around corporate privatization and the liberalization of finance and trade. Instead he embraced domestic manufacturing, particularly in the semiconductor and green energy industries, which received major subsidies through, respectively, the CHIPS Act and the Industrial Recovery Act. He announced this reversal in a 2021 speech condemning the cult of efficiency. “We’re now forty years into the experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power,” he said:

And what have we gotten from it? Less growth, weakened investment, fewer small businesses. Too many Americans who feel left behind. Too many people who are poorer than their parents. I believe the experiment failed.

By arguing that concentration was a problem for workers and democracy, Biden rejected the Chicago School’s “experiment”….

…But Harris has a different legacy as well. During her campaigns for California attorney general, she received significant support from big-tech figures, including Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, Jony Ive of Apple, Marc Benioff of Salesforce​, and John Doerr, an early investor in Google. As Zach Carter detailed in the Huffington Post last week, she cultivated these relationships. During her tenure as attorney general she had tough words for big banks after the financial crisis, but her bark was stronger than her bite, and she treated tech companies like Facebook and Google with kid gloves. As president, she could continue to do so. This week the Financial Times reported that her advisors were reaching out to crypto companies, including the exchange platform Coinbase, trying to “reset” relations with a lawless and exploitative industry.

Some of Harris’s crucial advisors have strong ties to big business. Her husband, Doug Emhoff, is a lawyer whose clients at the firm DLA Piper included Walmart and Merck. Karen Dunn, Google’s lead trial counsel as the Justice Department sues the company for violating antitrust laws, heads her debate prep team. And Tony West, Uber’s general counsel, is her brother-in-law. That relationship might not have mattered politically, but West has taken a temporary leave of absence from his corporate job to volunteer on Harris’s campaign. In his work at Uber, he oversaw many of the company’s nefarious legal campaigns: for Prop-22, a California bill that permitted the company to treat drivers as independent contractors rather than employees, against federal labor regulators pushing to allow drivers to unionize, and, during the Covid-19 pandemic, against the New York state attorney general, who was trying to regulate its price-gouging. West is not Harris’s only advisor with close ties to the company. On Friday she gave a prominent campaign role to David Plouffe, who managed Obama’s first presidential campaign. Labor and antitrust advocates, however, know him best for his stint as senior vice president at Uber, where he lobbied vigorously on its behalf with public officials around the world.

By my lights, the strongest test of Harris’s priorities will be whether she retains Khan as the chair of the FTC. Wall Street loathes Khan. Two billionaire donors to Harris—Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn, and IAC chairman Barry Diller—have even called on the candidate, if elected, to drop her….

Choosing the People Over the Billionaires

Max Moran, August 2, 2024 [The American Prospect]

Kamala Harris has made some gestures in the direction of rejecting big-money entreaties. That’s the right move, but there’s more to be done….

But if the president is not ideological on economics, then their economic advisers and appointees are that much more important. If you don’t have a strongly-held mental model of the economy, then the mental models of whoever surrounds you—no matter how accurate, and no matter what values they reflect—effectively become yours. In the words of Joan Robinson, “The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.”

Historically, high-dollar fundraisers like Karp’s are where politicians get taken in by those deceptions. They’re where a wealthy and generous host can introduce a candidate to the intelligent, well-spoken, numerically literate young person from Big Tech, BigLaw, or Wall Street who just so happens to be interested in a policy job.

Like Biden, Harris doesn’t appear to have personal qualms with making friendly with ultra-rich donors. But the public definitely wants candidates who aren’t bought and paid for: 80 percent of Democratic-leaning voters say large donors have too much influence in politics, and 76 percent say there should be hard limits on political spending. Republican-leaning voters poll about the same. Opposition to big money is perhaps the last bipartisan issue in U.S. politics….

The Corporate Wishcasting Attack on Lina Khan

David Dayen, July 26, 2024 [The American Prospect]

…A successful government actually depends on people who know how to work the levers of power to serve the public interest. You can’t get a whole lot done on what Joe Biden and Harris profess to be their agenda without people like Khan and her colleagues managing to govern.

We know this because when Harris needs to find something in the administration’s record to tout, she inevitably turns to the populist left policymaking faction. When Harris spoke at Zeta Beta Phi Sorority’s annual conference in Indianapolis on Wednesday, she touted: “We are finally making it so that medical debt can no longer be used against your credit score.” That was an initiative of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, led by Rohit Chopra, who brought Khan into the FTC as a legal fellow when he was a commissioner.

Just yesterday, Chopra’s CFPB released a stunning report on how K-12 public school students are relentlessly gouged by junk fees in electronic payments for class supplies and even school lunches. We’re talking about corporate thieves literally taking away up to $100 million a year in kids’ lunch money, by charging transaction fees (in violation of federal law) when money is added to cafeteria accounts. Every dollar of school lunch payments can incur as much as 60 cents in fees for those on reduced-price lunch, which is completely ridiculous. You’ll be utterly surprised to know that this market for school lunch e-payments is dominated by three companies (MySchoolBucks, SchoolCafé, and LINQ Connect)….

Also this week, a judge in Pennsylvania upheld the FTC’s noncompete ban, saying that the agency plainly has the authority to write rules prohibiting unfair methods of competition. Reid Hoffman should be up-front about whether he thinks workers should be locked into jobs and have their wages suppressed as a result. And then Harris can decide if this pillar of the Biden-Harris agenda should be something she throws overboard.

Khan’s FTC has sought to block the Kroger-Albertsons merger that would further consolidate the grocery market, one of the biggest areas cited by consumers concerned about inflation….

[TW: One of the principles of political economy in civic republicanism — the mistrust of, and hostility to, concentrations wealth and economic power — has yet to be made foundational. All the world’s great religions warn about how the rich and powerful develop psychological pathologies that do great harm to societies and the mass of ordinary people. The “free market” ideas of Reagan and the conservative / libertarian “Koch” movements have done immense damage. Biden’s conclusion that “the experiment hasn’t worked” is simply the beginning of repairing this damage. Simply stated, there should be very few, if any, corporate mergers and acquisitions. This must become normalized as an expectation of the political culture.

[17th century English republican theorist James Harrington wrote:

“Equality of estates causeth equality of power, and equality of power is the liberty not only of the commonwealth, but of every man… Where there is inequality of estates there is inequality of power, and where there is inequality of power, there can be no commonwealth.”

[This was in The Commonwealth of Oceana, published in 1656, seven years after the execution of Charles I, as an exposition of an ideal constitution for a republic. Scholars of the political thought of the American Revolution and early republic, such as Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood, have shown that Harrington’s ideas were much more important than John Locke’s at the beginning of the American experiment. Locke’s idea became dominant as the ideologues of capitalism sought to erode the moral constraints of republicanism, pushing a preeminent regard for private property over any concern for the General Welfare. ]

The Real Reason People Aren’t Having Kids

Christine Emba, August 1, 2024 [The Atlantic]

…South Korea has spent more than $200 billion over the past 16 years on policies meant to boost fertility, including monthly stipends for parents, expanded parental leave, and subsidized prenatal care—yet its total fertility rate fell by 25 percent in that time. France spends a higher percentage of its GDP on family than any other OECD member country, but last year saw its lowest number of births since World War II. Even the Nordic countries, with their long-established welfare states, child-care guarantees, and policies of extended parental leave, are experiencing sharp fertility declines.

Policy shifts that make life easier and less expensive for parents are worthwhile in their own right. But so far, such improvements haven’t changed most countries’ low-fertility rates. This suggests the existence of another, under-discussed reason people aren’t having kids—one that, I have come to believe, has little to do with policy and everything to do with a deep but unquantifiable human need.

That need is for meaning. In trying to solve the fertility puzzle, thinkers have cited people’s concerns over finances, climate change, political instability, or even potential war. But in listening closely to people’s stories, I’ve detected a broader thread of uncertainty—about the value of life and a reason for being. Many in the current generation of young adults don’t seem totally convinced of their own purpose or the purpose of humanity at large, let alone that of a child….

What was the American Civil War Really About? with Allen Guelzo

Question at 55:31: …  would you not say that this battle for …  liberal democracy is not generational, and we have to … meet and fight in every generation.

Guelzo: Let me tell you why, and in the most fundamental way.  Lincoln said, at Gettysburg, that this was a nation dedicated to a proposition, that all men are created equal.  I want you to reflect for a moment on how utterly novel that idea was, even in Lincoln’s day:  the idea that you could create a nation dedicated to “tracks of ink on paper.” That was how one European reactionary scoffed at the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. European reactionaries like Joseph de Maistre sneered at the American experiment. The idea that you could build a nation around propositions, sentences, reason! No! said de Maistre, nations are built historically; they are built upon race and tribe and clan and ethnicity and language and religion and soil. That’s what makes a nation.

They thought it was ridiculous, that Americans thought they could confect a nation out of assent to
propositions. “You mean any Tom, Dick and Harry that gets off the boat and reads the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and says, “yes,” can be part of the American experiment?”

To which the American experiment replies, “Yeah. Yeah.”

It takes 1500 years to make a Frenchman — you got a lot of wine that has to be consumed, you know — it takes 1500 years to make a Frenchman. But you can become an American in 20 minutes. You read those propositions, and you say, “Yeah, I sign on to that.” Brother, you’re in!

The idea that you could make a nation out of people like that just seemed preposterous to people in the 19th century. To other people outside the US, they thought it was bound to collapse in on itself. And they took the Civil War as a case in point: “See, it is collapsing … !”

Which is why Lincoln thought it was so important to defend it.

That was why Lincoln could look out at those semicircular rows of graves in the Soldiers National Cemetery at Gettysburg, and say, “From these honored dead we draw increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.

Lincoln looked at those graves, he looked at the dead who were buried there, he didn’t see in them the armies of Europe, armies of debased peasants who had to be flogged into obedience to their officers.  These were ordinary people, these were clerks, these were farmers, these were lawyers, these were businessmen, these were shop owners. And they’re buried there, in that cemetery because they saw something in this thing called democracy that was worth making the ultimate sacrifice for.

That, Lincoln said, that is what refutes the people who scoff at the propositions.

But the weakness is this: they are, after all, only propositions. We cannot simply say, well I’m an American because 16 generations of my family have been Americans. We cannot say I’m an American because my ancestor came over on the Mayflower. My ancestor didn’t. I had no ancestor on the Mayflower. I had no ancestor in the American Revolution. I had no ancestor in the Civil War. They all came afterwards.

My great-grandfather from Sweden, came in the 1880s. He couldn’t wait to abjure the king of Sweden. He wanted to be an American. He copied out in pencil the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address. They were his because he assented to them.

Because they are propositions, every generation has to repeat that assent. Every generation has to dedicate itself, over, and over. We can’t fall back on who we are descended from. We can’t fall back even on language, or culture. We have only those propositions. Every generation has to dedicate itself to those propositions for democracy in America to live.

It has its weakness, yes, it has its great weakness. But it has great strength because it means that anybody – anybody, my great-grandfather, your great-grandfather – can be part of this thing. There’s nothing that stops them from being part of the American experiment…

[TW: I think Guelzo’s answer is a useful and important contrast to the conservative (anti)Republican  ideas of “make America great again” by, among other things, basically eliminating immigration, including mass imprisonment and deportation of millions of people, and even denying “birth-right” citizenship to migrant children born in the United States. ]