by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
The Right Believes It Has the Supreme Court Votes to Overturn Labor Law
[In These Times, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-22-2024]
“The foundational 1935 labor law protecting workers is unconstitutional, according to major corporations and right-wing zealots who believe they have enough votes on the Supreme Court to overturn it. In the latest sign that anti-union forces will doggedly press the matter, a federal judge for the Northern District of Texas enjoined the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) from processing any allegations of employer violations of workers’ rights. The National Review hailed the decision as ’A Welcome Blow to the NLRB.’ This is after Elon Musk’s SpaceX won a similar injunction against the NLRB before the Western District of Texas in July. Both cases will work their way up to the Fifth Circuit Court, which has served as an expressway to steer anti-regulatory legal appeals to the Supreme Court ever since Trump packed it with right-wing ideologues. ‘I don’t think a lot of labor folks are focused on this right now,’ says Stephen Lerner, a fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. … ‘This is the culmination of a 50-year anti-union agenda.’… But, in trying to repeal all the rights and protections workers gained during the New Deal, including the limited protections that workers currently enjoy for organizing and engaging in collective bargaining, killing the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner Act) would also mean the lifting of a host of restrictions on unions’ ability to carry out solidarity activism and effective economic sanctions. Are unions prepared for a return to ’the law of the jungle?’”
MASTER PLAN Bonus: How Democrats Lost The Courts
[The Lever, October 22, 2024]
In this exclusive Master Plan bonus episode, David Sirota interviews former Senate Leader Tom Daschle, who led Democrats’ fight against George W. Bush’s plan to pack the federal courts with conservative judges — and paid the ultimate political price.
Daschle’s success stalling Republicans’ judicial picks in the Senate made him a prime target of the master planners — so they had him ousted from Congress and filled his South Dakota Senate seat with their own corporate candidate.
Sirota and Daschle discuss the Federalist Society’s influence in transforming the judicial nomination process into an ideological purity test. They also weigh in on the last major campaign finance legislation — the McCain-Feingold Act of 2002 — and whether similar reforms could even be possible in post-Citizens United America.
MASTER PLAN Bonus: The Federalist Society’s “Pipeline For Power”
[The Lever, October 22, 2024]
DAVID SIROTA: …To understand the roots of the Federalist Society, we spoke with Lisa Graves. She worked in the Department of Justice and on the Senate Judiciary committee and is now the founder of True North Research, a dark money watchdog organization. We heard from Graves briefly in Episode 7, but wanted to share the extended interview she did with producer Laura Krantz. Their conversation began with an overview of the four men who have been integral to the success of the Federalist Society: Ed Meese, C. Boyden Gray, Jay Sekulow, and Leonard Leo.
LISA GRAVES: Ed Meese was there near the beginning of the Federalist Society when it was created in 1981 as I mentioned, and Meese had served as Attorney General under Ronald Reagan. And he is certainly considered one of the fathers, or, you know, godfathers, in essence, of The Federalist Society from that period, and has been active in it throughout this, you know, these past 40 years, in a variety of ways. C. Boyden Gray, the highest role that he had in government was as White House Counsel for George Herbert Walker Bush. He helped select Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court to replace the great civil rights leader, Thurgood Marshall — he was someone who had an active opposition to civil rights or, you know, core civil rights laws.
Thomas had served in the Reagan administration in the EEOC in a way that many people in civil rights community consider to be destructive, not supportive of that institution. And C. Boyden Gray had a had a key role in that as White House Counsel, but he also had a role in the selection of David Souter to go to the U.S. Supreme Court, and that is the nomination and confirmation of a judge who, you know, is considered to be a Republican or having Republican roots, but he was not sufficiently doctrinaire.
When George W. Bush became president, C. Boyden Gray was not White House Counsel during that period, but he was operating on the outside, and he was seemingly determined to help make sure that, you know, ideologues were put on the bench. And so from the outside of the administration, he launched a thing called the Committee for Justice, CFJ, which was an attack machine to attack the Democrats for opposing any of these Bush nominees who were at the circuit court level, largely drawn from the ranks of The Federalist Society….
… in many ways, this so-called movement that The Federalist Society has been at the helm of was in part in reaction to Brown v. Board of Education, and whether they were going to try to justify it or not, along with opposition to the Roe v. Wade decision, which was built on a really important case called Griswold v. Connecticut, which recognized a right to autonomy in reproductive decisions that states could not limit, for example, women from accessing contraception. And so there’s a whole host of decisions by the court in the 20th century, including decisions affirming major public policies like social security and programs to, you know, protect labor rights and more, and the Federalist Society and Leo and these men have you know worked for years to try to undo those precedents by, in part, by this appointment process of personnel being policy….
LISA GRAVES: The Powell Memo expressly targets the courts as a lever of power… Lewis Powell [was] a lawyer for the tobacco industry, he had been instrumental in trying to prevent the federal government from regulating tobacco, despite the fact that the tobacco industry knew full well that its products caused cancer… He also had been a lawyer advising the city of Richmond, as it was contending with Brown v. Board of Education. And though he wasn’t the most outspoken of the white segregationists at that time, he helped put forward policies to pave the way for white kids to attend, you know, private institutions in order to not be subject to racial integration.
And in Powell’s memo, of the things he wrote was that businesses needed to play a more active role in influencing Congress, in influencing universities and influencing the courts. And he singled out the courts as a particularly important lever of power. And then just 10 years later, The Federalist Society was created. A number of institutions or entities were created in the aftermath of the Powell Memo — the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council … there was a concerted effort over the next 10 years to implement the Powell Memo through creating these entities … and infusing them with cash from sort of proto-billionaires … to advance an alternate vision for our constitution….
… one of the things that happened was that Leonard Leo became actively involved in trying to destroy the role of the American Bar Association in evaluating potential judicial nominees for the federal bench….
…the Bush administration basically outsourced the pre-selection process to the Federalist Society to Leonard Leo, and they were involved. I know for a fact that they were involved in 2001 in contacting potential circuit court nominees and asking them how they voted. Did they vote for George W. Bush or not? As a precondition, for the Federalist Society recommending them for circuit judgeship….
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, March 15, 2021 [Wall Street on Parade]
Last Wednesday, March 10, a Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing of critical importance to every American on the growing tsunami of dark money that is corrupting the U.S court system, up to, and including, the U.S. Supreme Court. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who has written extensively on the corrupting influence of dark money on American democracy, chairs that Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action and Federal Rights….
Had a truly objective Editorial Board at the Wall Street Journal taken the time to read the full written testimony of Lisa Graves, President of the Center for Media and Democracy, that was presented at this hearing, there would be no doubt in their minds that the Federal court system in the United States has been obscenely corrupted by dark money, coming predominantly from fossil fuels billionaire Charles Koch and his dark money network….
Graves’ courageous testimony named names and backed up her charges with hard facts. Graves explained the campaign to seat Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court…. Graves writes that Leonard Leo, the Co-Chairman of the Koch-funded Federalist Society “sits at the hub of a secretive scheme to capture the courts and remake our laws, with a cadre of his confidantes and groups.” Graves says that “more than $400 million” was received by this dark money network between 2014 and 2018….
Graves explains the motive behind the involvement of the Federalist Society as follows:
“The Federalist Society is also stacked with corporate attorneys whose day jobs are to defend some of the biggest corporations in the world. Through its publications and events, the Federalist Society advances a pro-corporate agenda to limit the ability of Congress and federal agencies to regulate corporations and to thwart the mitigation of climate change under the guise of a merely neutral philosophy.”
Graves also provided written testimony on a memo that was sent by the Koch network to tout its success in getting the Trump administration to enact its agenda. Charles Koch’s late brother and long-time ally, David, had written in the memo: “Our efforts have been aligned with the Trump administration’s efforts to use Executive Orders to direct agencies and departments to dismantle regulatory overreach.”
Do protective tariffs boost growth?
[Policy Tensor, via Naked Capitalism 10-23-2024]
[TW: The poster looks only at 1943 to 2016, and ignores the 19th century, when USA, Germany, Russia, Japan and other countries industrialized despite the efforts of the British Empire to prevent them.
[So, this is an example of how Trump and the MAGAfied (anti)Republican Party have done much to destroy meaningful political discourse in USA. Though much blame must be placed on the liberals, “the left” and the Democratic Party for being so dangerously ignorant of the history of how USA was actually industrialized.
[Every country that ever successfully industrialized has used protectionism – i.e., protected its domestic producers and workers from foreign predation. The key point missing from this discussion is that protectionism must be complemented by four other important national policies. First, a program of building infrastructure and industry (in the 18th and 19th centuries, the term used as “internal improvements.”)
[Second, a national banking system that dampens speculative excess and helps ensure that credit and financing is directed only toward the building of new economic potential. As Alexander Hamilton pointedly asked in The Federalist No. 15, “Is private credit the friend and patron of industry?” Biden’s policies have included not just protective tariffs, but an “internal improvements” program that has resulted in the largest increase in industrial construction expenditures since Worl War Two.
[Third, there must be a focus on raising the pay of workers and employees. In the 18th and 19th centuries, this focus was largely a cultural affinity for what came to be called “The Doctrine of High Wages,” as part of the general philosophy of governing of civic republicanism (to differentiate the philosophy from the current “Republican” Party which is now quite hostile to the philosophy).
[Fourth, there must be a cultural affinity for “doing good works.” Again, in the 18th and 19th centuries, this was part of the general philosophy of civic republicanism. It is enshrined in the Preamble of the Constitution as “promoting the General Welfare.” Carefully note the general conservative position that the Preamble is only a rhetorical flourish devoid of any judicial and legal importance, and the Hayakian insistence that “promoting the General Welfare” is only a slippery slope to statist tyranny.
[Trump envisions tariffs only as a means of generating revenues that will allow him to offer a series of tax cuts that are obviously ploys to attract votes. Trump’s tariffs will be ruinous in their effects on prices.
[As Chalmers Johnson writes in his excellent book review of South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang’s book Bad Samaritans : The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
Alexander Hamilton, the first American secretary of the treasury and the man who coined the term “infant industry.” Although he did not live to see it, by 1820 Hamilton’s 40 percent tariff on manufactured imports into the United States was an established fact. Hamilton provided the blueprint for U.S. economic policy until the end of the Second World War. The 19th and early 20th century U.S. tariffs of 40 to 50 percent were then the highest of any country in the world. Throughout this same period, it was also the world’s fastest growing economy. Much like contemporary China, whose average tariff was over 30 percent right up to the 1990s, neither American nor Chinese protectionism inhibited foreign direct investment but rather seemed to stimulate it.
[In the early 1990s, I used the Bicentennial Statistical Abstract – Colonial and Historical Statistics, to plot out steel production, railroad mileage built, and coal production, against the various tariff regimes in the 1800s to 1920s. The results were very stark: low tariffs are strongly correlated with downturns in real production, and high tariffs are strongly correlated with increased in real production. Exactly like the leading American economist, Henry Carey, wrote in the mid-1800s.
[Trump’s assigned role as a provocateur misleading the populist revolt against the economic mismanagement by Western elites should be crystal clear here. There should be some discussion of how protectionism was used, in conjunction with other policies, to industrialize USA and other countries. But there isn’t, leaving citizens without an intelligent and fact-based rebuttal of the anti-tariff arguments. ]
[Stanford University, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-23-2024]
Interview with Stanford institute for Human-Centered AI Policy Fellow Marietje Schaake. “In what ways are private companies increasingly taking on functions normally assumed by states? In the digital realm, companies’ control of information, unfettered agency, and power to act have almost overtaken that of governments. For example, in the private intelligence sector, companies like NSO Group Technologies with its Pegasus spyware products are creating and selling the capability to hack into people’s devices. This means that anyone with the financial resources to purchase Pegasus spyware can access the capabilities of intelligence services and hack into the very private information of political opponents, judges, journalists, critical employees, competitors, and others. Another striking example is that of offensive cyber capabilities. In the name of defending their clients or their networks, companies are attacking hackers across borders, using ‘offense as defense.’ And notice that I’m talking not only about big tech companies but also small ones, because there’s de facto power that comes from the development of digital technologies.”
Who would run Kamala Harris’s economy?
[Financial Times, via Naked Capitalism 10-22-2024]
Wally Adeyemo, Yellen’s deputy, is considered a natural successor, according to people familiar with the discussions. He has forged close ties with Harris — including appearing at joint events around the country — and is well regarded by lawmakers from both parties on Capitol Hill, which could make him easier to confirm.Unlike Yellen, Adeyemo, 43, is not a macroeconomist but is known for his policy chops, having worked at BlackRock, the investment group, and led Barack Obama’s charitable foundation.
he received a bachelor of arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004 and a juris doctor degree from Yale Law School in 2009…. Prior to joining the Obama administration, Adeyemo worked as an editor at the Hamilton Project. Adeyemo then served as senior advisor and deputy chief of staff to Jack Lew in the United States Department of the Treasury.[10] Adeyemo later worked as a negotiator on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He also served as the first chief of staff of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Elizabeth Warren.Adeyemo worked at BlackRock for two years from 2017, serving as a senior advisor, having previously been interim chief of staff for the firm’s CEO, Laurence D. Fink.[15][16]
On August 1, 2019, Adeyemo was selected as the first president of the Obama Foundation.
On March 26, 2021, he was sworn into office by Secretary Janet Yellen.[23] Deputy Secretary Adeyemo has been heavily involved in sanctions enforcement in 2022, visiting[24] and speaking with[25] foreign regulators to encourage their cooperation. ]
Global power shift
BRICS 2024 Kazan Special Coverage
Simplicius [Simplicius the Thinker, via Naked Capitalism 10-25-2024]
Iran’s Bomb is Real — and It’s Here
Scott Ritter [Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 10-21-2024]
[Tom’s Hardware, via Naked Capitalism 10-25-2024]
Ukraine’s population has fallen by 10 million since Russia’s invasion, UN says
[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 10-23-2024]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
‘The Entire Population of North Gaza Is at Risk of Dying’: UN Relief Official
Olivia Rosane, October 26, 2024 [CommonDreams]
The Escalating Crisis in the Middle East (w/ John Mearsheimer) | The Chris Hedges Report
‘Hate and lust for vengeance are passed like poison from one generation to the next’
Thomas Neuburger [God’s Spies, 10-23-2024]
The noted journalist and writer Chris Hedges has published a long piece at Twitter, now called X. In it he makes a number of important points, but I want to emphasize one in particular: that there will be vengeance for Western complicity in the Israeli genocide.
“Our Job Is to Flatten Gaza. No One Will Stop Us.”
[Drop Site, via Naked Capitalism 10-23-2024]
As Gaza burns, Israeli settlers make ‘real estate’ plans
[Middle East Eye, via Naked Capitalism 10-23-2024]
‘This is our land, we deserve it’: Dozens of Israelis planning to cross border and settle in Gaza
[Sky News, via Naked Capitalism 10-24-2024]
‘This Is a War Crime’: IDF Kills 3 Journalists in Attack on Press Compound in Lebanon
Jake Johnson, October 25, 2024 [CommonDreams]
“These were just journalists that were sleeping in bed after long days of covering the conflict,” said one reporter who was present at the time of the Israeli attack.
How Does AIPAC Shape Washington? We Tracked Every Dollar.
Akela Lacy, October 24, 2024 [The Intercept]
For decades, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee had been an influential presence on Capitol Hill, working behind the scenes to lobby politicians and their staffers in support of Israel. But ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, AIPAC made a decision that would fundamentally alter its purpose and the contours of American politics.
After 60 years of issues-based lobbying, AIPAC for the first time opted to spend directly on campaigns. Flush with millions of dollars from loyal donors, among them Republican billionaires and megadonors to former President Donald Trump, AIPAC embraced a new strategy. It would use its vast funds to oust progressive members of Congress who have criticized human rights abuses by Israel and the country’s receipt of billions of U.S. dollars in military funding.
Just two years after it started pouring money into campaigns, AIPAC has become one of the largest outside spenders in congressional elections. The Intercept has chronicled AIPAC’s power through coverage of individual races, but never before has AIPAC’s massive outflow of money been analyzed in sum. This project uses records from the Federal Election Commission — submitted by the lobbying group’s federal political action committee, AIPAC PAC, and its super PAC, United Democracy Project — to map how much money has been spent on behalf of Israel, where these groups are doling out money, and what impact those funds are having on the balance of power in Congress.…
When it rolled out its new strategy in the 2022 election cycle, AIPAC found immediate success. The lobbying group and another pro-Israel group, Democratic Majority for Israel, defeated Reps. Andy Levin, D-Mich., and Marie Newman, D-Ill., who were outspoken in their criticism of unconditional U.S. military funding for Israel. The campaign to defeat Levin marked a significant push from AIPAC to repress criticism of Israel even from Jewish members of Congress….
Oligarchy
The Pro-Trump Oligarchs Driving Americans Into Homelessness
The principle cause of today’s crisis of homelessness and housing affordability has one, single, primary cause: billionaires treating housing as an investment commodity.America’s morbidly rich billionaires are at it again, this time screwing the average family’s ability to have decent, affordable housing in their never-ending quest for more, more, more. Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, and Denmark have had enough and done something about it: We should, too.A new report from Popular Democracy and the Institute for Policy Studies reveals how billionaire investors have become a major driver of the nationwide housing crisis. They summarize in their own words:…Wealthy investors are acquiring property and holding units vacant, so that in many communities the number of vacant units greatly exceeds the number of unhoused people. Nationwide there are 16 million vacant homes: that is, 28 vacant homes for every unhoused person…— Billionaire investors and corporate landlords are targeting communities of color and low-income residents, in particular, with rent increases, high rates of eviction, and unhealthy living conditions. What’s more, billionaire-owned private equity firms are investing in subsidized housing, enjoying tax breaks and public benefits, while raising rents and evicting low-income tenants from housing they are only required to keep affordable, temporarily….…according to research funded by the real estate listing company Zillow. When neighborhoods hit rent rates in excess of 32% of neighborhood income, homelessness explodes. And we’re seeing it play out right in front of us in cities across America because a handful of Wall Street billionaires are making a killing….…Ryan Dezember, in his book Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare….As that new study from Popular Democracy and the Institute for Policy Studies found:
[Billionaire Stephen Schwarzman’s] Blackstone is the largest corporate landlord in the world, with a vast and diversified real estate portfolio. It owns more than 300,000 residential units across the U.S., has $1 trillion in global assets, and nearly doubled its profits in 2021.
Blackstone owns 149,000 multi-family apartment units; 63,000 single-family homes; 70 mobile home parks with 13,000 lots through their subsidiary Treehouse Communities; and student housing, through American Campus Communities (144,300 beds in 205 properties as of 2022). Blackstone recently acquired 95,000 units of subsidized housing.
In 2018, corporations and the billionaires that own or run them bought 1 out of every 10 homes sold in America, according to Dezember…
…This all really took off around a decade ago following the Bush Crash, when Morgan Stanley published a 2011 report titled “The Rentership Society,” arguing that snapping up houses and renting them back to people who otherwise would have wanted to buy them could be the newest and hottest investment opportunity for Wall Street’s billionaires and their funds….
The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) joined Popular Democracy in compiling a 71-page report titledBillionaire Blowback on Housing, aiming to get to the bottom of growing concerns in recent years about how Wall Street, as Democratic vice presidential nominee and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said earlier this month, is “buying up housing and making them less affordable.”
The two groups found that a small number of wealthy individuals and their investment arms, who control “huge pools of wealth,” have spent some of their vast resources on “predatory investment and wealth-parking in luxury housing”—contributing significantly to the crises of unaffordable rents, out-of-reach homeownership, and homelessness.
Demonize the Rich — Fascists offer a fake enemy. We have to offer a real one.
Hamilton Nolan, October 24, 2024
Until the world is perfect, people will have rage. Who should they be mad at? Fascists will tell you to be mad at immigrants and brown people and gay people and poor people. It is not enough to just say, “don’t do that.” You have to tell people who they should be mad at instead: rich people.
Making America’s political atmosphere healthier depends on the task of getting people to stop despising scapegoats and to start despising rich people. Is “rich people” a precise enough term to describe the genuine villains at the heart of our nation’s problems? Perhaps not. But it’s close enough.
No political movement or party can hope to seize the public’s imagination and channel the public’s energy without being able to clearly tell the public who is to blame for their problems. Right wing zealots have never have a hard time understanding this. Who is to blame for the fact that the America that you live in does not match the America of your imagination? Immigrants are to blame! Black people are to blame! Dirty Muslims are to blame! Weird trans people are to blame! Mexicans speaking an inscrutable language are to blame! Criminals, inclusive of all the preceding groups, are to blame! Purge your beautiful nation of these rogues and the perfect America of your imagination will finally bloom—with you in the driver’s seat!
This message is a poisonous stew of lies. But that is not a political liability. It is a message that offers plain answers to hard questions. It is easy to understand. It soothes inflamed souls by pinning the crimes of modern capitalism on the perfect culprit: People different than you. Since you already didn’t care for those people too much, assuming that they are the root of all your woes is seductively plausible.
Clarity of lies should be countered by clarity of truth. Who is to blame for the fact that the America that you live in does not match the America promised to us all—the great land of hope and opportunity and equality and justice for all? Rich people are to blame. Why are rich people to blame? Because rich people, as a group, represent the beneficiaries and biggest defenders of the system of American capitalism that is ultimately responsible for producing the state of affairs that has robbed you of the ability to live a free and happy life. America is a wealthy nation. So why aren’t you wealthy? Because rich people take all the wealth for themselves. America has the resources to create a system that takes care of all of us. So why don’t we have such a system? Because rich people prefer a system that exploits most of us, in return for making rich people richer….
The class war is a reality. It is an ongoing process in the real world that constantly affects our lives. American capitalism is a system in which the forces of capital forever try to strengthen their own economic and political position, and the result of their success if that everyone else finds themselves in a diminished economic and political position. Politicians can either acknowledge this and take a position on it or they can try to deny it, but either way, the class war continues on….
The Three Factors That Will Decide the Election
George Packer, October 23, 2024 [The Atlantic]
Following Donald Trump’s victory that year, academics and journalists embarked on a search for an explanation. Progressives quickly lighted on racism as the sole answer. This conclusion was a costly mistake. Analytically, it ignored important causes that anticipated coming trends; politically, it alienated the unconverted and made discussion more difficult….
One afternoon earlier this month, I sat with five members of the United Steel Workers Local 53G in a McDonald’s near the Charleroi railroad tracks. They had spent most of the day negotiating the end of their livelihood with lawyers from Anchor Hocking—the glassware company, owned by a New York investment firm called Centre Lane Partners, that plans to close the Pyrex factory. Daniele Byrne, the local’s vice president, and her husband, Rob, an electrician, have worked at the Charleroi plant for a total of 71 years. Before Daniele, her grandfather put in 50 years and set his wall clock by the noon whistle. As severance, the company was offering two months’ health insurance, plus a day’s pay for every year of employment—about $8,000 for two-thirds of Daniele’s life.
She didn’t hide her disgust….
The workers’ hostility toward corporations and billionaires didn’t translate automatically into support for a candidate or party. Their alienation from politics and distrust of elites was too great. The word I kept hearing, in Charleroi and around western Pennsylvania, was care—as in, “They don’t care about us.” It conveyed a deep sense of abandonment….
The convergence of working-class decline, corporate greed, and nativist anger will shape next month’s election in places like Charleroi and throughout the Rust Belt. Northwest of town, Pennsylvania’s Seventeenth Congressional District is represented by Congressman Chris Deluzio. He’s a first-term Democrat, having narrowly won in 2022 in a competitive district of farmland, Pittsburgh suburbs, and mill towns along the Ohio River. Deluzio is a 40-year-old Navy veteran and attorney, neatly groomed, polite, and analytical in a way that doesn’t scream “populist.” But he’s running for reelection on the bet that his pro-labor, anti-corporate positions will prevail over the hostility toward immigrants that Trump and other Republicans are stirring up. (The campaign of Deluzio’s opponent, State Representative Rob Mercuri, didn’t respond to my request for an interview.)
“The Wall Street guys bankrolling Trump and my opponent are the guys who devastated these communities,” Deluzio told me as we drove between campaign events. “They tried to strip us for parts for decades. The mills didn’t just leave; they were taken away by an ideology and a set of policies that said cheaper and weaker labor rules and cheaper and weaker environmental rules is what they’re after. Your family’s hard work and sacrifice didn’t matter to these guys.”….
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
The Math Says It’s Getting Harder to Break Into the American Middle Class
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 10-26-2024]
[Phenomenal World, via Naked Capitalism 10-21-2024]
When he came to power in 2018, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) promised to contain unbridled neoliberalism and end political violence. This, he argued, could only be done by protecting and uplifting the poor, by “disjoining political from economic power,” by ending the military occupation of so many regions, and instead tackling the root social causes of violence…
Two key planks of Morena’s platform—curbing military power and raising taxes on Mexico’s wealthy—were abandoned before AMLO’s inauguration. A third—resisting the US’s inhumane treatment of migrants—was abandoned less than a year into his presidency.
The constitutional reforms that did reach the legislative floor were often of a completely different character: empowering and institutionalizing the power of the army, enabling punitive sentences for the incarcerated, and effecting an authoritarian power grab over the judiciary and the autonomous institutions in charge of organizing elections. To understand the government’s apparent shortcomings, we ought to situate its efforts in relation to three central features of Mexico’s political economy: the state, the elite, and the military. In its loyalty to the first, Morena ultimately yielded to the latter two
Predatory finance
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, October 22, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade]
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, October 21, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade]
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, October 24, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
How Corporate Vehicles Conceal Crime and Chicanery
John P. Ruehl [via Naked Capitalism 10-22-2024]
Front companies are commonly used by other companies as well. The Coca-Cola Company has employed front companies such as the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) and Global Energy Balance Network (GEBN) to lobby for its interests while minimizing the appearance of any connections. Pharmaceutical companies have similarly set up front companies to pressure health care providers and legislators to adopt their products.
In contrast to the more open nature of front companies, shell companies thrive on their subtlety. Typically registered in tax havens like the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, or U.S. states like Delaware, these entities lack any assets or operations and exist solely on paper to store wealth and facilitate financial transactions. They can be established in lawyers’ names, with figureheads serving in official positions to mask true ownership.
Shell companies are easy and inexpensive to create, and are useful tools for tax evasion, generating false invoices and consultancy fees, and money laundering. Non-publicly traded companies often serve as shell companies, but the introduction of limited liability companies (LLCs) in the U.S. in 1977 expanded their use by offering greater anonymity, limited liability, and fewer regulatory burdens. Similar entities exist in Europe, and according to 2024 data from Moody’s, the UK leads globally, with nearly 5 million “suspect companies.” Meanwhile, the EU accounts for 4 million, largely in France and Cyprus.
The role of shell companies has been increasingly exposed over the last decade through leaks and whistleblowers. The Panama Papers, released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in 2016, unveiled years of records from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, which created shell companies for various clients. Little attention was paid to who its clients were, which included Mexican drug cartels.
Restoring balance to the economy
Hands Off the Houses: Can We Stop Speculative Land Grabs?
[shelterforce.org, August 30, 2022, via Hartmann, above, CommonDreams]
According to a report by Americans for Financial Reform, 1.6 million housing units in the U.S. are now owned by private equity, including over 1 million apartment units, 275,000 manufactured home lots, and over 239,000 single-family rental homes.
The report lists 22 private equity-backed companies that hold the 1 million apartment units, which they estimate is 3.6 percent of all apartment units in the country, or about 1 out of every 26 apartment listings. And 12 private equity companies are listed as owners of the manufactured home sites….
Two laws specifically address auction sales of distressed properties, or properties that are risk of or have gone through foreclosure. California Senate Bill 1079, which was signed into law in September 2020, modifies the foreclosure auction process to give owner-occupants, tenants, local governments, and housing nonprofits the first right to purchase after a foreclosure sale….
Ohio State Sen. Bill Blessing in May introduced a bill that would give individual homebuyers first dibs on foreclosed homes. Under the bill, if an investor were to win a foreclosed home at auction, a 45-day freeze would be triggered on the sale and would jump-start a tiered system of potential buyers being given the opportunity to match the bid, beginning with the people who are renting the home, and then individual buyers and nonprofits….
Tax Policy
Some jurisdictions are using the tax system to rein in large real estate companies.
Efforts are underway in San Francisco to get a proposed vacancy tax on the ballot, which would tax property owners who leave their units vacant for more than six months, potentially generating “tens of millions annually for affordable housing and encourage some owners to rent out their empty units,” according to the San Francisco Examiner. Oakland, and Vancouver, British Columbia, have passed similar tax proposals.
Another bill, the California Housing Speculation Act, introduced last spring by California Assembly Member Chris Ward, would tack an additional income tax on profit gain from any property sales that occur within three years of the previous sale to curb investors from flipping properties….
Private Actors
Homeowners’ associations in North Carolina are setting their own rules to curb private equity’s market power. The Potters Glen Homeowners Association in Charlotte created a rule in 2019 requiring that new homebuyers wait two years before renting their homes out, according to reporting from The Washington Post.
Since the board adopted the rule in 2019, property records show the pace of investor purchases has dropped by more than half.
Similarly, the homeowner association in the Whitehall Village neighborhood in Walkertown, North Carolina, is working to require that new buyers live in a home or leave it vacant for six months before renting it out, according to The Wall Street Journal. ….
Implementation and enforcement of existing rules also matters, says Jenny Schuetz, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro and the author of Fixer Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems, who notes that building codes and tenant-landlord laws “are sometimes not uniformly enforced… Lots of places just haven’t put enough resources towards actually providing decent quality, renter experience and renter service,” she says….
Transparency
One obstacle to holding financial firms accountable is a lack of transparency—for tenants, municipalities, and organizations researching the issue—about who owns the country’s housing stock….
Lina Khan Is Just Getting Started (She Hopes)
[Businessweek, via The Big Picture 09-21-2024]
Biden’s FTC chair has toughened merger oversight, taken on noncompetes and made the donor class crazy. She hints that there’s a lot more to come, if she’s given the chance.
Michael Moore, October 12, 2024
….
1. Officially Declare the Equal Rights Amendment for Women (E.R.A.) as the 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
On January 27, 2020, the state of Virginia became the 38th state (of the required 38 states needed) to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Two hundred and forty four years after the Declaration of Independence declared that all men were created equal (but only if they were, in fact, men who were white and owned land), women’s Constitutional equality was finally recognized!Except it wasn’t.
The Trump administration’s Department of Justice refused to publish the fully ratified 28th Amendment to the Constitution, saying it “took too long” and now a few red states wanted to “de-ratify” it. But the Constitution grants no power to rescind a ratification…
2. Cancel All Student Debt Now.
You ran on the promise to cancel all student loan debts. Now is the time to do it! Break the law if you have to (remember — you have immunity!). You have made admirable efforts so far, but the Republican Supreme Court of Right Wing Catholics, along with the Republican Congress of Election Denying Traitors, keep trying to stop you. Now’s the time to go whole hog and just wipe away ALL student debt. And while you’re at it, take the advice of the American Federation of Teachers and fire MOHELA, the company currently under contract with the Department of Education that is one of the largest holders of student debt in the country. Better yet, don’t fire them, nationalize ‘em, and cancel all the debt they hold. You have immunity! …3. Cancel Medical Debt, too!
While you are at it, cancel medical debt, too! Americans owe $220 BILLION in medical debt to our corrupt, bloated, broken and exploitative health care system. Like student loan debt, these undue burdens that no other civilized country suffers from cripple our households and keep people living paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford rent, car payments and even groceries. You have some of the smartest minds in the legal world at your fingertips. What’s the wildest, most aggressive plan they’ve presented to you to cancel medical debt? Now’s your chance. Shortly before you ended your campaign, you pledged that ending medical debt would be a primary goal for your second term….4. Close Guantanamo Bay. ….8. Empty Federal Death Row. ….
10. Pardon Edward Snowden. ….
Disrupting mainstream economics
50 years of tax cuts for the rich failed to trickle down, economics study says
[CBS, via Naked Capitalism 10-26-2024]
Health care crisis
EviCore, the Company Helping U.S. Health Insurers Deny Coverage for Treatments
[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 10-26-2024]
[The Conversation, via Naked Capitalism 10-21-2024]
Climate and environmental crises
Thomas Neuburger, God’s Spies, October 18, 2024
From The Guardian we learn: “Trees and land absorbed almost no CO2 last year. Is nature’s carbon sink failing?The sudden collapse of carbon sinks was not factored into climate models – and could rapidly accelerate global heating.”
Democrats’ political malpractice
[X, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-21-2024]
Mark Cuban is splitting the Dems, attacking the Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders wing of the party right before an important election, calling for Lina Khan to be fired and bragging about sabotaging policy Harris committed to. Why is Harris campaigning with Cuban? This is… https://t.co/dUoQ4pQ6d9
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) October 21, 2024
Harold Meyerson October 24, 2024 [American Prospect]
The need to preserve our democracy is objectively urgent, but economic populism is the message that works.
The Campaign That Pushed Harris Into a Tie With Donald Trump
Stanley B. Greenberg, October 24, 2024 [American Prospect]
…In reports on ad testing by an independent firm called Blue Rose Research incubated by the super PAC Future Forward, The New York Times reports the most effective ads were the ones that educated viewers on her economic plans. Specifically, she said, “When I am elected president, I will make it a top priority to bring down costs. We should be doing everything we can to make it more affordable to buy a home and more than 100 million Americans will get a tax cut. I will help families; letting you keep more of your hard-earned money. As president, I will be laser focused on creating opportunities for the middle class that advance their economic security, stability and dignity.”
In other words, It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!, the title of my book co-authored with James Carville. And it’s also the cost of living, stupid!….
How Much More Conservative Does The Democratic Party Have To Become Before It’s The Pre-Trump GOP?
Howie Klein, October 22, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
These (former) Republican politicians, including Cheney, are not going to transform into progressive champions or suddenly adopt Democratic Party values. They may oppose Trump’s authoritarianism, but they still subscribe to a neoliberal, anti-Choice worldview that champions elitism, homophobia limited government, corporate tax cuts and pro-business policies. It’s the same worldview that once led Cheney to vote with Trump over 90% of the time. Now, aligning themselves with Kamala (or even the Democratic Party) against Trump, these figures will expect political rewards for their “sacrifices”— and those rewards worry me, given the trend in the party towards conservatism already.
What progressives should be deeply concerned about is that the Democratic Party— already pulled to the right by centrist factions going back to Clinton’s presidency— might further absorb these corporatist ideologies. Figures like Chris Matthews, Joe Scarborough and Cheney are not merely joining the Democratic coalition to defeat Trump— they are bringing their conservative baggage and right-of-center ideologies along with them. This conservative influence will undoubtably push the party to adopt positions on the border, inflation and corporate power that mirror Republican-lite policies, in the name of bipartisanship. It’s already happening….In the long run, this conservative resurgence within the Democratic Party— driven mostly by people who are only here because they have no place else to go— will ensure that corporate interests and right-wing ideology maintain their hold on the political agenda, even if Trump is defeated. Whatever is left of the idea that the Democratic Party being a vehicle for a transformational agenda— rather than just a vehicle for the careers of party officials— will disappear entirely.
Blue states should play “constitutional hardball”
Cory Doctorow [Pluralistic, via Naked Capitalism 10-20-2024]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Trump’s ‘Secretary of Retribution’ Unveils Plot to Nab North Carolina’s Electoral Votes
Tim Dickinson, October 22, 2024 [Rolling Stone, via downwithtyranny.com]
Donald Trump ally Ivan Raiklin is calling on state GOP leaders to disregard results if voters choose Kamala Harris…
Raiklin asserted that the impacts of Hurricane Helene could disproportionately impact GOP voters and affect the results of the 2024 election beyond the margin of a feared Democratic victory. So he called on attendees to exert pressure on the speaker of the North Carolina state House, Tim Moore, and the president of the North Carolina Senate, one scandal-beleaguered Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, to be willing to subvert any vote count that favors Kamala Harris, and to transform the state’s GOP legislative majorities into a rubber stamp, awarding North Carolina’s 16 Electoral College votes to Trump.
Raiklin’s plan hinges, he said, on the legislature leaping into action in early 2025, just before the Electoral College certification in Congress. But only if Trump loses. “If it’s legit, we don’t have to worry, right?” Raiklin told the crowd of the November contest. “But who thinks it’s going to be legit? You think they’re just going to give it to you? No, there’s going to be a fight!”
Leading Civil Rights Lawyer Shows 20 Ways Trump Is Copying Hitler’s Early Rhetoric and Policies
Steven Rosenfeld, August 09, 2019 [Common Dreams]
A new book by one of the nation’s foremost civil liberties lawyers powerfully describes how America’s constitutional checks and balances are being pushed to the brink by a president who is consciously following Adolf Hitler’s extremist propaganda and policy template from the early 1930s–when the Nazis took power in Germany.
In When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen’s Guide to Defending Our Republic, Burt Neuborne mostly focuses on how America’s constitutional foundation in 2019–an unrepresentative Congress, the Electoral College and a right-wing Supreme Court majority–is not positioned to withstand Trump’s extreme polarization and GOP power grabs. However, its second chapter, “Why the Sudden Concern About Fixing the Brakes?,” extensively details Trump’s mimicry of Hitler’s pre-war rhetoric and strategies….
A younger Trump, according to his first wife’s divorce filings, kept and studied a book translating and annotating Adolf Hitler’s pre-World War II speeches in a locked bedside cabinet, Neuborne noted. The English edition of My New Order, published in 1941, also had analyses of the speeches’ impact on his era’s press and politics. “Ugly and appalling as they are, those speeches are masterpieces of demagogic manipulation,” Neuborne says.
“Watching Trump work his crowds, though, I see a dangerously manipulative narcissist unleashing the demagogic spells that he learned from studying Hitler’s speeches–spells that he cannot control and that are capable of eroding the fabric of American democracy,” Neuborne says. “You see, we’ve seen what these rhetorical techniques can do. Much of Trump’s rhetoric–as a candidate and in office–mirrors the strategies, even the language, used by Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s to erode German democracy.”
His country trained him to fight. Then he turned against it. More like him are doing the same
[AP, via Naked Capitalism 10-23-2024]
Neocons Circling Trump Campaign
[Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 10-23-2024]
“Neocons maneuver through the shifting sands of power in Washington to make sure no matter who wins, they remain in charge, writes Daniel McAdams.”
Howie Klein, October 24, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
So… how about if a progressive response to the lure of fascism focuses on reframing the conversation— away from fear and towards courage— courage to adapt to changing times, to build a more inclusive society, and to reject easy authoritarian solutions? Something like: real men fight for progress, not against it.
Senate GOP’s Scheme To Let Trump Self-Police Ethics
Katya Schwenk, October 25, 2024 [The Lever]
Former President Donald Trump’s top ally in the Senate is working to block the appointment of the government’s top anti-corruption enforcer until after Inauguration Day — a tactic designed to give Trump the power to handpick his own ethics overseer if he wins the election.
In a move reminiscent of Republicans blocking President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee’s confirmation hearings until after the 2016 election, U.S. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) recently declared in a Senate speech that the confirmation of a new ethics chief should not move forward until the election was decided. Lee took the opposite position when Trump had a chance to fill a Supreme Court seat in late 2020, demanding the appointment be made before that year’s election.
Civic republicanism
This Is Why You Don’t Recognize Your State Government
[Bloomberg, via The Big Picture 10-26-2024]
…No matter who wins the presidency, the nation is going in two different directions. That’s because more states have fallen under one-party control — either Republican or Democrat — than at any time in modern US history. The shifting dynamic is suppressing competition in elections, discouraging voter engagement and, in too many places, enabling the party in power to ignore perspectives outside of their base. In short, political choice is vanishing….
The result is representative democracy’s steady erosion, in which geography determines destiny for 82% of the American population — 41% live under Democratic control in 17 states and 41% under Republicans in 23 states. This divide is clear in a trove of state-level data on elections and legislation that reveals a nation not only splitting along party lines but also over the importance of democratic representation itself.
The impact on policy has been asymmetrical. For the past quarter-century, the public has become more progressive on many social issues, according to Gallup. Blue trifecta states have moved with it, namely on abortion, gender identity, climate change, guns, immigration and voting rights. Red trifectas, meanwhile, have hewed to their base and to policies that receive majority support only half the time — rejecting Medicaid expansion, relaxing gun laws and cutting unemployment insurance. To many voters in the 23 Republican trifecta states, representative government is not representing them….
…If there were a tipping point toward one-party rule in America, it took place in the past 24 years, when gerrymandering entered an unprecedented level of intensity, Jake Grumbach explains in his book, Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics. A major part of the swing was due to Republicans rigging the political landscape one state at a time by creating favorable maps in the 2010 redistricting process. Their undeniable success expanded trifecta control from 10 to 22 states in just two years….
Red Hats, White Hoods, Swastikas, Yard Signs
John Pavlovitz, October 23, 2024 [via downwithtyranny.com 10-24-2024]
Things are getting easier now that shame has become obsolete in America. There is no mistaking who we are and how deep this sickness runs in us; how close and how prevalent and how emboldened the bigots are; how committed to a movement of grievance and privilege so many remain. The bullies now have a savior and their religious fervor is stratospheric and undying as they attempt to usher in his second coming.
… And this person didn’t create prejudice, he simply uncovered it, invited it out into the light and gave it permission to publicly celebrate itself. He’s encouraged it to plaster its enmity on campaign posters, to wear its contempt for its neighbor on its sleeve in partisan talk show monologues, to trumpet itself in verbal assaults on strangers, to pound its fist on vicious bully pulpits, to glory in its violence in midday Confederate flag/Nazi processions; to stick it in the ground in front of their homes, defining the hill they will allow their decency to die on.
We have white supremacists in Congress and running for GOP office— not covered in sheets, but willingly showing their faces and brandishing vitriol unapologetically, all because they have a former president’s seal of approval. And they are hoping he will be president again, to legislate their prejudices for all of us.
[TW: This legitimation of bigotry is the anthesis of the civic republican principle of doing good and promoting the General Welfare. It is particularly ironic that so many evangelical so-called “christians” support Trump and the legitimation of bigotry, given that the actual gospel of Jesus is to serve God, and love thy neighbor. ]
Can America Survive as a Multiracial Democracy?
David Masciotra, October 21, 2024 [Washington Monthly]
The late Ronald Tataki’s history of multicultural America roiled academic waters 30 years ago. It turned out to be prescient about the contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
The Medici’s Quiet Coup: How the Wealthy Bend Politics without Shifting Institutions
Marianna Belloc [VoxEU, via Naked Capitalism 10-22-2024]
The Medici family ruled Florence for nearly 300 years, patronising the arts and making Florence a cultural centre of Europe. But there was a dark side to Medici rule. This column studies the circumstances under which a relatively open political system can be corrupted by its confrontation with concentrated wealth. Without formally changing the constitutional architecture of the political system, the Medici machine manipulated its institutions and allowed political officials to appropriate public funds, transforming office holding from a civic duty to a source of individual wealth accumulation….
Our data also allow us to track how political participation correlated with changes in individual wealth over time. As depicted in Figure 3, before the Medici rose to power, the number of terms an individual spent in office (measured in the period 1393–1426) was not significantly associated with individual wealth accumulation (1427). By contrast, after the Medici took control of the political system, the correlation between office holding (1427–1456 and 1457–1480) and wealth (respectively, 1457 and 1480) increased substantially….
The Violent Exhaustion of Liberal Democracy
Wendy Brown, Francis Wade, October 21, 2024 [Boston Review]
A conversation with Wendy Brown on the U.S. presidential election, the exclusions liberal democracy is built on, and why we must aim at more than restoring its mythical former splendor….
…Second, Trump is symptom, not cause, of the “crisis of democracy.” Trump did not turn the nation in a hard-right direction, and if the liberal political establishment doesn’t ask what wind he caught in his sails, it will remain clueless about the wellsprings and fuel of contemporary antidemocratic thinking and practices. It will ignore the cratered prospects and anxiety of the working and middle classes wrought by neoliberalism and financialization….
…Because it’s easy to misunderstand, let me just say what reparative democracy is not. It is not about restoring liberal constitutional nation-state democracy to a mythical former splendor. That is, it is not about recuperating extant democracy as if it was once fine and only now is broken. Nor is it primarily concerned with reparations to peoples and places brutalized or exploited under past regimes. Rather, my argument is that the democratic ethos and practices we require today must be relentlessly and radically reparative in relation to past and present damaging modes of life, especially over the past two centuries. This orientation breaks sharply with the notions structuring liberal democracy, including progressivism, anthropocentrism, and individual interests and rights as the essence of political freedom.
Democratic Disenchantment: Can better decision-making procedures ever achieve real democracy?
Samuel Bagg, October 21, 2024 [Boston Review]
… Whenever powerful interests thwart popular progressive goals, it is tempting to blame the specific institutions that enabled them to do so—and to valorize whatever alternative procedures might have yielded different results in that case. Indeed, an emphasis on finding the right decision-making procedures follows naturally from the ideal of collective self-rule that has long defined our democratic aspirations. And in various ways, generations of liberals, progressives, and radicals have all chased an ever-receding mirage of genuinely collective self-rule—giving rise to a cycle of democratic innovation, reform, and disappointment.
To escape this cycle, we must reconsider that ideal itself. No matter how responsive, deliberative, or inclusive our decision-making processes may be, those with systematic advantages in background power will always find ways to shape outcomes to their advantage. Such power imbalances compromise any procedure for collective decision-making—even the most participatory, like those envisioned by the gilets jaunes. We must focus instead on addressing these imbalances directly….
But the legacy of such electoral reforms has been mixed; in some cases, they even made matters worse. In a fully proportional system with many parties—like that of Israel—the need to form majority coalitions can give enormous bargaining power to tiny extremist parties. Advocates hoped that popular majorities would use initiatives and referendums to override corrupt, elite-dominated legislatures, but in practice, such plebiscitary processes often have the opposite effect. Think of Proposition 22, which overruled the California legislature’s attempts to ensure that gig workers enjoyed standard labor protections—after tech giants spent over $200 million on misleading advertisements….
The ideal of “participatory inclusion” responds to the failures and deformities of modern mass politics by returning to the core intuition of early civic republicans: the idea that genuine self-government requires widespread participation by ordinary citizens in small-scale, face-to-face decision-making procedures. Conceding that modern states cannot be governed entirely in this manner, however, this vision sees local popular participation as an essential complement (rather than substitute) to larger-scale representative institutions.
This ideal is arguably the most practically significant contribution of twentieth-century political theory. It has inspired countless reforms and experiments across the globe, under a wide variety of headings—ranging from “negotiated rulemaking” and “collaborative governance” to “participatory budgeting,” “deliberative mini-publics,” and “citizens’ assemblies.” By now, the paradigm is so dominant that the very idea of “democratic innovation” is often understood as synonymous with direct, deliberative participation by ordinary people in processes of collective decision-making….
In order to escape this cycle of democratic innovation, reform, and disappointment, we must stop thinking of democracy primarily as a matter of procedures for collective decision-making. Most basically, modern electoral democracy is simply a way of forcing competition for power into peaceful channels—and incentivizing the winners not to ignore the needs of too many people at once. While this may not sound like much, it does limit the ability of any group to capture state power entirely for itself.
More importantly, this understanding of the democratic ideal—as principally a matter of resisting state capture—suggests a more fruitful agenda for action and reform, one focused squarely on power rather than process. (Indeed, this vision offers a more realistic account of what many familiar democratic practices already do.) If competitive elections with universal suffrage provide insurance against the most brazen and egregious forms of authoritarianism, kleptocracy, and apartheid, the unequal terms of competition for state power in all existing democracies ensure that many other forms of capture continue to thrive. Our overriding democratic priority must then be to address this failure directly, by pursuing a more egalitarian balance among social forces.
In place of the ideal of collective self-rule, we should think of democracy as a matter of resisting state capture.Practically speaking, this implies that aggressive redistribution of resources is among the central demands of democracy. For instance, sharply progressive taxation—on wealth as well as income—could limit the general advantages enjoyed by wealthy elites and other categorically privileged groups….
Who Counts Our Elections? Your state-by-state guide to how results are certified.
[boltsmag.org]
bruce wilder
In place of the ideal of collective self-rule, we should think of democracy as a matter of resisting state capture. Practically speaking, this implies that aggressive redistribution of resources is among the central demands of democracy.
. . . my argument is that the democratic ethos and practices we require today must be relentlessly and radically reparative in relation to past and present damaging modes of life, especially over the past two centuries. This orientation breaks sharply with the notions structuring liberal democracy, including progressivism, anthropocentrism, and individual interests and rights as the essence of political freedom.
So… how about if a progressive response to the lure of fascism focuses on reframing the conversation— away from fear and towards courage— courage to adapt to changing times, to build a more inclusive society, and to reject easy authoritarian solutions? Something like: real men fight for progress, not against it.
I am staring at the rhetoric of progressive aspiration — snippets of which I quoted above — and all I see is cluelessness of a deep and abiding kind. I am all in favor of thinking deeply and in a sophisticated way about institutions — institutions are how politics are structured — the “rules of the game” matter in many ways to the quality of political outcomes, to the quality of governance itself. But, mostly these arguments ignore institutions as political and social mechanisms governing cooperation. These are arguments about “right think” and the purity of motive that imparts a magical quality to political struggle, which isn’t struggle at all, but a kind of consciousness raising. It has all the attractive qualities and creative potential of masturbatory fantasies.
I think I understand the hopelessness that gives rise to these cringeworthy fantasies. Or — feeling hopeless myself in this political moment, that is all I can come up with to explain to myself why anyone would embarrass themselves by putting out such tripe.
“Our democracy” is a wholly-owned condominium complex, with ownership shared out among billionaires and giant multinational financial and business corporations. I get that. It is not really news, but I suppose the ongoing details matter as they continue to emerge.
But, when it comes to doing something to alter the situation and its momentum forward, or even as a stopgap, to identify a “lesser evil” to cheer on for maybe slowing the descent into heck-and-high-water, self-deception seems to be the preferred alternative to realistic appraisal and acknowledgement.
The entertainment value of red v blue — the political equivalent of “fantasy sports” — has worn through for me. The absence of integrity in messaging from the Democratic establishment and their journalistic helpers in the mainstream media tutors my feeling of helplessness. Integrity is so basic. I see no self-awareness from the blue team that their lack of integrity matters at all. And, they embrace enthusiastically the worst players deserting from the red team, people infamous for example for lying us into war in Iraq not that long ago that anyone should have forgotten.
The advocacy by Michael Moore in favor of Biden acting without integrity (because of the Supreme Court supposedly blessing official immunity) is another example. Moore is a gadfly, and has never let integrity stand in the way of a good “gotcha” or soundbyte, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. But, I find few counterexamples and that’s distressing. Even support for the sacrifices of, say, Julian Assange, seems tepid to me — how can the Guardian still be in business as a left-liberal platform?
Swamp Yankee
@Bruce Wilder. I agree re: Moore’s suggestions — these seem ill-considered at best to me, and I was surprised, though perhaps I shouldn’t be, to see him take them up. It’s one thing to play constitutional hardball; it’s another to embrace the radical new theory of Executive power that laid out in the majority decision _Trump v. United States_, especially while arguing — I think with some justice, though my sense is that not all here would agree — that they, the Dems, are the responsible party in terms of the constitutional order.
That dog won’t hunt.
And as for what has gotten me through the current age of despair — I’m heavily involved in local politics, which, in a New England Town with an Open Town Meeting form of government, are directly democratic and non-partisan. Partisan differences show up, but they aren’t 1:1 when you’re debating buying a fallow cranberry bog or rebuilding a seawall.
bruce wilder
The Trump “Keep Fighting” Bobblehead, “expected to ship in November” is my favorite piece of political propaganda.
Mark Level
I’ll agree, tangentially, with Swamp Yankee, specifically as to “That dog won’t hunt”. In that I can’t imagine in any timeline Biden doing actually progressive things like Moore suggests, such as approving the ERA (I’m sure he was opposed back in the day, likely still is if it even fires in his degraded synapses), canceling student debt (from the “Senator from Mastercard”?), emptying the prisons (he filled ’em, with poor black and brown people, his son Hunter’s open addiction is just a “misfortune”, can’t be judged must less incarcerated).
I laughed equally (both hard & bitterly) at the obvious, no-duh observation from a different source that Kamala’s “I’m saving you from fascism” Narrative is ineffective, & she could/would (again, not in the timeline we’re in) with barely a week do something economically “populist”.
That’s not her donors, not her dog, her dog’s chosen to pick choice morsels from the henhouse for the donor class, not to hunt the actual predators. I suppose it would & will hunt those of us who despise and upset the predators though. Steven Donziger would be an obvious case.