Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 21 2024
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
David Sirota, July 18, 2024 [The Lever]
In 2008, I published a book with a straightforward premise: the upcoming era of American politics would be defined by a competition between the left and right to harness the working class’s intensifying rage in a society being pillaged by corporate interests.
It was the twilight of the Bush era, and the country was beginning its nose-dive into recession and turmoil, but hope and change seemed just over the horizon. I predicted that with elements of both political parties in a warrior stance, simmering conflicts over deindustrialization, financialization, and neoliberalism would soon explode and realign politics, birthing some American version of either social democracy or authoritarianism.
The 16 years since The Uprising was released have delivered much of the tumult I imagined. It has been a period of unrest, chaos, and flip-flopping control of government — and yet, amid all that volatility, the decline persisted. Whether medical bankruptcies, foreclosures, lower life spans, spikes in prices, mountains of paperwork, or endless junk fees attached to everything — life in America just kept getting more difficult, annoying, inhumane, painful, and seemingly impossible.
In the political arena, there was a sensation of change, but in real life, there was more of the same.
Donald Trump’s 2016 win was a reaction to the dissonance — a pressure cooker that finally exploded — but still possibly just a weird anomaly. For shellshocked liberals, the end of his first term felt like the conclusion of a roller-coaster ride, a reversion to a mean, and proof that the competition to harness the discontent had finally been won on the center left.
But as Trump surges and Democrats teeter in this blazing summer of discontent, it’s the 2020 election that seems more like the anomaly — a last rest stop on a wild Natural Born Killers-style jaunt. 2024 feels like the final destination in a journey bookended by two iconic roadside billboards: the “HOPE” poster featuring Barack Obama’s cool gaze, and now the photograph of a bloodied Donald Trump defiantly calling his armies to battle….
Can J.D. Vance’s Populist Crusade Succeed?
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 07-19-2024]
On Monday, Donald Trump unveiled his choice for Vice President, and picked a young Senator from Ohio, best-selling author and populist J.D. Vance. Last night, Vance spoke to the Republican National Convention, attacking Wall Street barons, the war in Iraq, multi-national corporations, and trade deals like NAFTA. What he said was shocking for a Republican. "We're done catering to Wall Street,” he said. “We'll commit to the working man."
But what he *didn’t* say was equally shocking. There was no talk of tax cuts, deregulation, or attacks on government, and while he levied plenty of fire at Democrats over immigration, environmentalism and overall weakness, he did not go after the substantially populist pro-labor and competition focused elements of the Biden administration. Vance’s fight is not just with Democrats, it’s within the Republican Party.
It’s hard to overstate the earthquake this pick has fostered in the citadels of power. CNBC, libertarians, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page are in mourning. “Wall Street will be begging for the return of Lina Khan after two months of the Trump-Vance administration," said one New York dealmaker to the Financial Times. CNBC is replaying clips of the Vance speech, with Jim Cramer analogizing it to William Jennings Bryan’s famous 1896 Cross of Gold oration….
At first, Vance bought into standard libertarian ideas, consistent with Thiel’s thinking. Thiel was a co-founder of PayPal with Elon Musk, and the alums from PayPal, the so-called “PayPal mafia,” are hugely influential in Silicon Valley today, though they are not entirely aligned with big tech. Thiel, for instance, hates Google, and this group is one of Vance’s core influences….
So what does Vance think? He is in agreement with the views of a rising set of younger conservatives, populists like Sohrab Ahmari and Oren Cass, who assert that libertarianism is a cover for private rule, most explicitly in Ahmari’s book Tyranny, Inc. It is flourishing of the family that animates this new group, not worship of the market. At Remedy Fest, Vance was explicit in his agreement with this notion, saying “I don't really care if the entity that is most threatening to that vision is a private entity or a public entity, we have to be worried about it.”….
Musk, Andreessen, and the crypto world are aligned in their own ways with Vance, though the extent of the alignment isn’t wholly clear. The arguments of these venture capitalists and crypto purveyors deserve to be taken seriously. Fortunately, Andreessen and Horowitz laid them out in a recent 90 minute podcast describing why they are supporting Donald Trump with vast financial resources. It comes down to the basic thesis that they believe that Joe Biden, far from a do-nothing President, is an existential threat to the status quo….
Andreessen and Horowitz have a view of America in which our might, and thus the world’s peace and prosperity, rests on three pillars: a strong economy, world-leading technology, and a powerful military. American culture is, as they put it, “depraved” and full of drug addiction, but our strength is that talented people can build things. We are not, as they put it, Argentina, or the Soviet Union. In World War II, America won because we invented better technology - not the government - but the private sector, the ‘Little tech’ guys like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, whose legacy Andreessen and Horowitz see themselves as upholding….
[TW: Stoller writes ” In World War II, America won because we invented better technology – not the government – but the private sector, the ‘Little tech’ guys like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, whose legacy Andreessen and Horowitz see themselves as upholding.”
[This is just completely wrong. After the dismal performance of US businesses during World War One (for example, US designed combat aircraft were markedly inferior, and shunned by pilots) Army CoS George Marshall created the Army Industrial College in 1924. Almost all the senior commanders of WW2 rotated through the AIC. They and the AIC staff conducted and compiled a nation-wide survey of every manufacturing facility in the US. Everything was entered on notecards: name, products, capacity, owners, managers, machine tools and other production equipment, even shop foremen in some cases. As events in Europe and China made it ever more clear that another total war was looming, it was Marshall and his cadre of Army officers educated at the AIC who had the most profound understanding of USA manufacturing capacity and how to mobilize it.
[Actual planning for the “Arsenal of Democracy” began in June 1940, when Edsel Ford, Ford Motor Co. production chief Charlie Sorenson, and GM president William Knudsen were summoned to Washington DC and agreed to build 9,000 Rolls Royce Merlin aircraft engines in their Detroit factories.
[Contrary to the myth believed — and peddled — by Stoller, Andreessen and Horowitz, Henry Ford was a hardline isolationist, and flatly refused to cooperate with anything having to do with building weapons or war material for European powers. Henry remained an obstacle even after the US entered the war; Ford Motor Co.’s war contributions, including the massive Willow Run bomber plant, were entirely the work of son Edsel and Sorenson.
[Edsel basically worked himself to death (though it was cancer that killed him), and when he died in May 1943 at only 49 years of age, Roosevelt, Marshall, Knudsen and others in Washington were horrified at the prospect of Henry Ford reassuming control of Ford Motor Co. Henry was 79, clearly past his prime, increasingly cantankerous, moody, and suspicious to the edge of paranoia, and no longer had the support of the company's directors. Edsel's son, Henry Ford II, then age 36, was an officer in the Navy when Edsel died. Henry II had accompanied his father and Sorenson to San Diego to begin the assumption of B-24 production from Consolidated Aircraft, had been involved in the preparatory planning for Willow Run, and had been tutored by Ford designer and Sorenson ally Laurence Sheldrick. Henry II was basically ordered to leave the Navy. and return to Dearborn to take control of the company from his grandfather.
[Henry was not the only corporate leader who refused to cooperate. Montgomery Ward CEO Sewell Avery resisted government price and rationing decrees, and was forcibly carried out of his office by military police in April 1944, when Avery refused to obey an order of the National War Labor Board.
[To overcome resistance in both the military and the business community, Knudsen was commissioned a lieutenant general in the Army — the one and only civilian given flag rank during the war — and given great power and leeway to enforce compliance with the flood of edicts and directive issued by a large but nimble government bureaucracy created for the express purpose of overseeing war mobilization and weapons production.
[In July 1940, an act of Congress placed production and exports of machine tools place under the review by Machine Tool Committee of the Army-Navy Munitions Board. This was superseded in January 1941 by Office of Production Management, headed by Knudsen. OPM in turn was replaced by the the War Production Board in January 1942, headed by Donald Nelson, executive vice president of Sears Roebuck. Wikipedia entry notes:
The WPB directed conversion of companies engaged in activities relevant to war from peacetime work to war needs, allocated scarce materials, established priorities in the distribution of materials and services, and prohibited nonessential production.[3] It rationed such commodities as gasoline, heating oil, metals, rubber, paper, and plastics… In 1942–1945, WPB supervised the production of $183 billion (equivalent to $2.46 trillion in 2023 ) worth of weapons and supplies, about 40 percent of the world output of munitions.
[The mythologizing by Andreessen and Horowitz is particularly ironic, because is the creation and development of computers was entirely directed and funded by the federal government during the war — and afterwards. The lead agencies in this effort were the Army's Bureau of Ordnance and the Navy’s Office of Naval Research. It was not private industry. It was entirely government research programs that created the technologies of early computers. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers histories of the development of computers cover all this in full. Moreover, it was the decision, by ABO and ONR, to deliberate disseminate into the civilian economy the technological knowledge and progress in electronic computation achieved by World War 2 defense research programs at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, in July-August, 1946.
[In fact, almost every technological development that created modern industrial society had government promotion and encouragement behind it. The machine tools and machining techniques developed at the Springfield Armory after the War of 1812, became the basis for the manufacture of interchangeable parts, laying the foundation for industrial mass production. In 1843, Congress directly funded Samuel B. Morris's development of the telegraph. Just before and during the Civil War, it was Navy research that introduced the science of thermodynamics to steam engine design. In the 1930s, the Bonneville Power Authority and the Tennessee Valley Authority promoted rural electrification. Computers come entirely out of the USA government research during World War Two to create calculating machines for artillery and naval gunfire ballistics, cryptography and code breaking, flight simulation, the physics calculations of the Manhattan Project, and more. All the underlying technologies of today's cell phone and smart phones were originally developed in government research programs. The three major developments in aerodynamics of the post war-period -- the area rule, supercritical wings, and winglets -- were developed by a government scientist named Richard Whitcomb using the wind tunnels at the NASA Langley Research Center. USA became the breadbasket of the world thanks to efforts and foresight of the bureaucrats and scientists in the Department of Agriculture. When the frozen food industry was near collapse in the 1920s because its products were so unpalatable, it was USDA research and programs that revived it.
[As first Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton had foreseen, the natural human reluctance to adopt new ways of doing things over tried and true methods would requires such a role by the national government. This is a key point of political economy in civic republicanism, and the mythologizing of “entrepreneurs” only serves to hide it and make it easier for economic predators to preserve their chiocanery. In his 1973 book, The Foundations of American Economic Freedom: Government and Enterprise in the Age of Washington (University of Minnesota Press, 1973), E. A. J. Johnson writes:
...in the Hamiltonian program, government played a central role; as a consequence, Hamilton's basic doctrines were much more closely related to those of Malachy Postlethwayt and Sir James Steuart than the atomistic theory of Adam Smith. Like Postlethwayt, Hamilton was convinced that national economic vitality demanded planning on the part of businessmen, and like Steuart, he felt certain that such planning could not be systematic and truly purposeful unless it was coordinated by statesmen.
The problem, of course. is what happens when you don't have statesmen, but only people who know cost-benefit analysis , how to fund raise, and pose for a camera. ]
Why Donald Trump Picked J. D. Vance for Vice-President
[The New Yorker, via The Big Picture 07-20-2024]
...Vance’s rise has also depended on his populism. Like some other Republican senators of his generation (Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Josh Hawley of Missouri, and Marco Rubio of Florida, among them), Vance often stressed the need for Republicans to break from the free-market absolutism of the past. “There is no path . . . to a durable governing majority for the conservative movement that doesn’t run through a rethinking of nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties economic dogma,” he said in 2023, at an event hosted by the think tank American Compass. He has backed tariffs and urged Republicans to try to win more union votes. “My grandma’s politics [was] a sort of hybrid between left-wing social democracy and right-wing personal uplift, and there is virtue to both of these world-views,” Vance told the New Statesman’s Sohrab Ahmari in February, though this kind of alliance has so far existed mostly at the level of rhetoric; as Ahmari put it, archly, “The mainstream labour movement has yet to find in Vance a partner on its legislative priorities.” ….
[TW: this sounds great. I fear the Democrats will fail to see how popular such economic populism is. But note that Vance, Cotton, Hawley, Rubio and other (anti)Republicans never attack oligarchy in general, or the vast income and wealth inequalities at the foundation of oligarchy. Note, for example, they never attack elites for being elites: for corrupting and undermining systems of representative self-government. Vance explicitly wants “a healthy ruling class,” which he defines as heterosexual: “we should support more people who actually have kids, because those are the people who ultimately have more of a direct stake in the future of this country.” These (anti)Republicans have no proposals, or intent to propose, raising the minimum wage, or imposing higher taxes on companies with higher pay gaps between executives and workers, or beginning serious and punitive legal actions against wage theft (now estimated at over $50 billion annually). No (anti)Republican ever mentions the fact that the past four decades of “free market” policies have transferred over $50 trillion from to bottom to the top of the income scale. They attack Wall Street because the destruction wrought by predatory finance is now just too much to deny. The pile of corpses and shattered lives is too high to hide. They attack Disney and other corporations that oppose them on specific issues, usually as a matter of culture wars. ]
'A Corporate CEO's Dream': Labor Unions Blast Trump-Vance Ticket
Jake Johnson, July 16, 2024 [CommonDreams]
"This ticket isn't pro-worker or pro-union. It's the billionaire ticket through and through," said one labor leader.
Leading U.S. unions warned voters on Monday not to be fooled by the pro-worker facade constructed by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, a Republican senator from Ohio who has opposed congressional efforts to strengthen organizing rights, allowed corporate lobbyists to influence his legislating, and raked in donations from the elites he claims to despise….
The Republican platform contains an ostensibly pro-worker pledge to exempt tips from taxation, a vow that—according to one critic—"appears to be a way for Republicans to change the subject if anyone questions their opposition to raising the minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 for the past two decades."
New AFL-CIO Guide Shows How Trump Agenda Would Be 'Catastrophic' for Workers
Brett Wilkins, Jul 19, 2024 [CommonDreams]
"A second Trump term would put everything we've fought for—good jobs, fair wages, healthcare, retirement security, worker safety—on the chopping block," said AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler….
The AFL-CIO guide highlights how Project 2025 would "be catastrophic for working people," including by:
- Banning unions for public service workers (page 82);
- Firing civil service workers and replacing them with Trump anti-union loyalists (page 80);
- Letting bosses eliminate unions mid-contract (page 603);
- Letting companies stop paying overtime (page 592) and allowing states to opt out of federal overtime and minimum wage laws (page 605);
- Eliminating child labor protections (page 595); and
- Urging Congress to pass Sen. JD Vance's bill to let employers create their own sham company-run unions (page 599).
"In his first term as president, Donald Trump was a disaster for workers and our unions, governing exclusively for the wealthy and well-connected," AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler said in a statement Thursday.
"The Trump Project 2025 Agenda lays out his plan to turbocharge his anti-worker policies, eliminate or control unions, and eviscerate labor laws and workers' contracts," she continued. "A second Trump term would put everything we've fought for—good jobs, fair wages, healthcare, retirement security, worker safety—on the chopping block.
"This new online tool is an essential part of our massive voter education campaign to reach every union household with critical information about the stakes of this election," Shuler added….
Nelson Lichtenstein, July 17, 2024 [The American Prospect]
...when it comes to actual worker welfare issues, the new GOP platform emphasizes, overwhelmingly, immigration restriction, often in the most racist fashion, as well as raising obstacles to trade with China. There is very little else that bears directly on worker status. The platform does call for “merit-based immigration” in contrast to what the GOP labels “chain migration,” allowing spouses or children of those new workers into the country. That probably opens the door to the kind of temporary employees demanded by both Silicon Valley and American agribusiness, but, please, no family members!
The platform favors ending the transition to electric vehicles, an industrial policy championed by both President Biden and a newly powerful UAW, whose 2023 strike ensured that higher wages and union jobs would spread to many new battery plants and EV factories. Trump and the GOP are wagering that EVs will still fail, and in their place their platform offers a bet on crypto and artificial intelligence. One of the very few places where the platform-writers put forward a specific work-related proposal comes with a call to eliminate the tax on the tips that restaurant and hospitality workers earn, a substitute perhaps for raising the minimum wage, otherwise unmentioned in the 2024 GOP platform.
[On Project 2025:] Chapter 18, “Department of Labor and Related Agencies,” covers a wide range of hot-button regulatory policies and legislation that a new GOP government would be eager to reconfigure. It was written by Jonathan Berry, a 40-something managing partner at Boyden Gray….
n his 36-page chapter, Berry frames a slew of policy proposals using the kind of workerist rhetoric projected by Sens. J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley: American workers must once again have “rewarding, well-paying, and self-driven careers,” with a “family-supporting job as the centerpiece of the American economy.” “The Judeo-Christian tradition,” writes Berry, “has always recognized fruitful work as integral to human dignity, as service to God, neighbor, and family.” A restoration of this virtuous world will ultimately arise out of a transformation of a debased American culture—and here Berry mainly zeroes in on government-mandated diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policy—however, Berry concedes that state agencies can also play an important role in protecting workers, creating healthy labor markets, and encouraging wages that can support a family.
But this prologue hardly structures the chapter. As we will see, there are a few initiatives that Berry puts forward in the MAGA vein: tougher overtime rules for “Sabbath work”; a bit of worker voice on corporate boards; and a sharp reduction in H-2A and H-2B immigration work permits, covering farmworkers and seasonal hospitality and service work. But the real substance of the chapter arises out of corporate America’s long-standing effort to limit the reach and potency of labor and employment law, a contest reaching back to the era of Ronald Reagan and before….
Politicians For Sale... Government For Sale: Billionaire Should Not Exist In Democracies
Howie Klein, July 16, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
You’ve probably read by now that South African fascist and government-funded billionaire Elon Musk said he’ll commit $45 million/month to a freshly-minted SuperPAC created to get Trump back into the White House, the anodyne-sounding “America PAC.” Until yesterday, it was primarily funded by crypto-currency criminals and anti-Climate extremists. Musk’s unprecedented spending— beginning this month— reminded me of the robber barons who bought the White House for William McKinley in 1896.
A couple of months ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump and Musk have discussed an important role for Musk….The substantial financial contributions from the ultra-wealthy, whether in the era of robber barons like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller or modern robber barons like Musk, represent a profound and troubling distortion of democracy and is why we’ll always emphasizing that billionaires— incompatible with democracy— just should be taxed out of existence.. Their immense political contributions serve to amplify the voices and interests of a small, elite segment of society at the expense of the broader public. The vast sums of money poured into political campaigns by billionaires skew the democratic process, allowing the wealthy to exert disproportionate and incalculable influence over elections and policy decisions, totally undermining the principle of equal representation and turning elections into contests dominated by financial power rather than public interest.
Chris Hedges, July 14, 2024 [scheerpost.com]The efforts by the Democratic Party and much of the press, including CNN and The New York Times, to discredit Trump, as if our problems are embodied in him, are futile. The smug, self-righteousness of this crusade against Trump only contributes to the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. This crusade attempts to reduce a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It is accompanied by a refusal to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy.
Global power shift
No, the US Doesn't Back Israel Because of AIPAC
Joseph Massad, July 21, 2024 [CommonDreams]
...the U.S. government has never supported national liberation in the Third World. The U.S. record is one of being the implacable enemy of all national liberation groups, including European ones, from Greece to Latin America to Africa and Asia…. Why the U.S. would then support Palestinian national liberation absent the Israel lobby is something this argument fails to address….
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Israeli Knesset overwhelmingly votes against Palestinian state
[defenddemocracy.press, July 18, 2024]
Israeli lawmakers have rejected the establishment of a Palestinian state under any circumstances.… Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in the Knesset, “The Palestinian State cannot be established because there is no such thing as a Palestinian people.”
….Earlier in February, the Knesset passed a resolution rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state, however, the motion specifically addressed a unilateral establishment of such a state without “Israel’s” approval.
This time around, the measure holds more drastic content, as it outright rejects any establishment of a Palestinian state, rejecting Palestinians’ right to statehood….
Attacks on Red Sea shipping bankrupt Israeli port
[Seatrade Maritime, via Naked Capitalism 07-15-2024]
Maersk says Red Sea shipping disruption having global effects
[Hellenic Shipping News, via Naked Capitalism 07-18-2024]
Oligarchy
Why Bernie Sanders Is Thanking Elon Musk
Jake Johnson, July 17, 2024 [CommonDreams]
In the wake of reports indicating that Musk plans to inject $45 million per month into a new super PAC supporting former President Donald Trump's bid for another four years in the White House, Sanders (I-Vt.) thanked Musk for doing "an exceptional job of demonstrating a point that we have made for years—and that is the fact we live in an oligarchic society in which billionaires dominate not only our economic life and the information we consume, but our politics as well."
"And let me be clear. While the size of Musk's financial contribution is particularly egregious, he is not alone in attempting to buy this election to further his own needs," Sanders continued. "Other billionaires are also playing a significant role—in both political parties. Oh, I know... here goes Bernie Sanders again about Citizens United and the role of money in politics. I have no shortage of critics who accuse me of being boring and of hammering away at the same themes year after year after year."
"They're probably right. I am repetitious, but that’s because the problems we care about are only getting worse," he added. "Let's be clear. It has never made sense to me, then or now, that a tiny clique of people should have incredible wealth and power while most people have none."
Trump Will Make “Us” Wealthy? Depends on Who the “Us” Is.
Thom Hartmann, July 17, 2024 [The New Republic]
If Trump-Vance wins, we’ll have a billionaire president and multimillionaire vice president, backed by other billionaires. And that’s who “us” is….
It’s the second-most-ancient form of governance humanity knows (behind democracy), described in detail in works both modern and ancient, dating all the way back to ancient Sumeria, China, Mesoamerica, and Europe; some countries incorporate it into their official name to this day.
It’s called “kingdom.” Most people, when they think of a kingdom, think of a king: a ruler with absolute power over his subjects. Absolute immunity for all official acts. A monarch accountable to nobody except his own whims.
And, of course, six Republicans on the Supreme Court just this month granted that very sort of power to the American presidency, an abomination completely at odds with the form of government our Founders and Framers created….
But kingdoms are also economic systems. In many regards, in fact, the economics of a kingdom are more essential to understanding how power is acquired, wielded, and held over time by the sovereign and their class—in defiance of the majority of the people—than any other single factor….
For example, when Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, he introduced us to two of those three economic classes…. ...few Americans ever realize how dedicated Dickens was to describing life in a kingdom where the ability to rise into the middle class was narrowly circumscribed and the working class was virtually 100 percent “the working poor.”
Public schools as we understand them were nonexistent; only the tiny middle class and very wealthy could send their children to attend quality private schools or university….
Not only was there no minimum wage in the United Kingdom in Dickens’s 1840s; there were maximum wage laws designed specifically to prevent working poor people from rising up through the economic ranks into the middle class….
Forty years of Reaganomics have taken our middle class from almost two-thirds of us in 1980 to fewer than half of us today; Republicans want to further impoverish working-class people by gutting unions, crushing small entrepreneurial businesses through blocking enforcement of anti-trust laws, and eliminating minimum-wage laws altogether.
They’re so dedicated to keeping working-class people poor and locked into their social strata they even went all the way to the Supreme Court to prevent President Biden from lessening the burden of student debt, a problem that literally does not exist in any other developed nation in the world.
America’s Billionaires Are Teaching Your Kids To Cheat Taxes
Katya Schwenk, July 18, 2024 [The Lever]
Corporations and arch-conservatives are using a public school curriculum to teach children about the dangers of taxing the wealthy.
When students head back to school in the fall, some will get an unusual crash course in taxes and personal finance. In class lessons and explainer videos, they’ll be taught that workers are the ones “who bear the burden” of corporate income taxes, and that when big companies dodge taxes, it helps “protect employment and job creation.”
Through a new curriculum project called TaxEDU, corporations are pushing these pro-business messages in hundreds of high school and college classrooms across the country. The effort is being led by The Tax Foundation, a right-wing tax policy nonprofit that also helped shape Project 2025, the 900-page plan for a second Trump presidency to dismantle the federal government….
The Newest Must-Have Home Amenity for the Rich: Purified Air
[Kanebridge News, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 07-15-2024]
“Luxury homeowners are known to splurge on sleek kitchens, custom decor and art, but they are increasingly turning their attention to something less visible. Forest-fire smoke, the pandemic and increased awareness of sensitivities to mould and other irritants are making their interior environment a priority. Many are investing in complex systems and flexible designs that promise healthier indoor air but still include spaces, such as glass-enclosed rooms, that make being indoors feel natural. Listings are increasingly touting pollution-fighting amenities to lure home buyers. In Santa Rosa, Calif., a 13-acre estate for sale at $15 million has a whole-home air purifier. This spring, the Dovecote building, under construction in Manhattan’s Harlem neighbourhood, will offer six, three-bedroom condos built to strict green and clean-air standards, starting at $1.5 million. Malin, founder of Troon Pacific, a San Francisco-based developer of $15 million to $45 million properties that he calls healthy homes, said he focuses on the smallest details that can affect air quality. New tools allow for more-precise measurement of various particulate matter and carbon dioxide levels, he added. ‘Covid changed people’s perspective on connecting air quality to health, and the [wildfires] only enhanced that.'
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) as ideological fortress for monetary technocrats
Vadym Syrota [Monetary Policy Institute Blog #146, via Mike Norman Economics, July 16, 2024]
...In this context, it seems rational to follow the arguments of well-known public supporters of Keynesian ideas, such as Robert Skidelsky. In a recent piece in Project Syndicate, Skidelsky fiercely criticizes the neoliberal dogmas dominating the economic mainstream, including the principle of the central bank’s independence and the argument that fiscal and monetary policy should be kept separate. His critique is mainly based on the conclusions from the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee’s inquiry into the Bank of England’s failure to predict the worst inflation in 40 years. In this report, as Skidelsky notes “the Committee criticized the BOE’s internal culture and forecasting models, casting doubt on its ability to get inflation back to the 2% target by 2025 and raised valid concerns about central bankers’ ‘unelected power’”. Some other scholars have also criticized the document; for example, Professor Malcolm Sawyer claimed in a Monetary Policy Institute blog that:
“The Committee appears concerned over a lack of diversity of thought and perspective but without challenging the dominance of a mainstream economics paradigm and the dominance of monetary and financial interests in the operation of monetary policy.”
Nonetheless, this report serves as a harbinger of radical changes in the way in which political elites think about economics and monetary policy in the near future.…
Predatory finance
Wall Street Senses the Barbarians Are Finally at the Gates
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 07-18-2024]
[TW: Unfortunately, it’s not that the greedy bastards on Wall Street are in fear of a populist revolt. The title refers to the classic 1989 book entitled, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, written by Wall Street Journal reporters Bryan Burrough and John Helyar. The book details what was the largest leveraged buyout up to that time, the $25 billion takeover of RJR Nabisco, by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. Notably, Burrough and John Helyar glossed over the many connections of KKR to organized crime. The RJR Nabisco LBO opened the gates to the past four decades of financial piracy and predation. The damage done to industry and working families by this financial predation one of the important causes of the rise of political polarization and extremism today.]
...Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are confident that their most important clients are about to get active after a long spell on the sidelines and help goose the long-awaited revival in investment banking fees.
The private equity deal machine has been mostly jammed up for the past two years, leaving many investment bankers twiddling their thumbs while their bosses talked up green shoots that failed to flourish.They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 17, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade]
We can’t remember a time when the Chairman and CEO of the largest, most complex and scandal-ridden bank in the United States, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, was too busy to squeeze in an appearance at the company’s heavily-scrutinized quarterly earnings call with analysts. That happened last Friday.
When something happens for the first time at a bank that has racked up five felony counts, has been doled out non-prosecution and deferred-prosecution agreements by the U.S. Department of Justice in a steady drumbeat since 2014, and spent most of last year in the headlines for a decade of sluicing tens of thousands of dollars per month in hard cash to the international sex trafficker of children, Jeffrey Epstein, it pays to sit up and pay attention….
Restoring balance to the economy
Investments in Hospital Infrastructure Reduced Mortality in the US South
Alex Hollingsworth, Associate Professor at The Ohio State University, Krzysztof Karbownik, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics at Emory University, Melissa A. Thomasson, Professor of Economics at Miami University, and Anthony Wray, and Associate Professor at University Of Southern Denmark [Originally published at VoxEU, via Naked Capitalism 07-12-2024]The cost-effective investments in healthcare infrastructure disproportionately benefited historically marginalised groups, had long-run benefits, and complemented, rather than substituted, medical innovation….In a new paper (Hollingsworth et al. 2024), we study how funding for healthcare infrastructure affects healthcare capacity and mortality outcomes, with a particular focus on racial inequality. Our work is based on a unique quasi-experiment: a large-scale hospital modernisation programme supported by the Duke Endowment in North Carolina during the first half of the 20th century. The charity assisted hospitals in expanding and improving existing facilities, obtaining state-of-the-art medical technology, and elevating their management practices. In select communities, it also helped to build new hospitals or to convert existing facilities to non-profits. Although the funding only started in 1927, by the end of 1942 the Endowment had appropriated over $53 million (in 2017 dollars) to the state.The funding increased the number of not-for-profit hospitals per 1,000 births that were eligible for funding, while causing a decline in ineligible for-profit hospitals (Figure 1). This substitution effect was mirrored in hospital beds: not-for-profit beds increased by 70.1% while for-profit beds declined by 61.4%. This led to overall increases in both institutions and beds. Furthermore, supported communities saw a 60.2% increase in high-quality physicians per 1,000 births and a 5.5% decrease in poorly trained physicians, advancing the average state of medical knowledge in Endowment supported locations (Figure 1). These effects persisted for more than 30 years, suggesting a lasting increase in capacity.
Puerto Rico Files $1 Billion Suit Against Fossil Fuel Companies
[The Verge, via Naked Capitalism 07-17-2024]
Puerto Rico filed suit against fossil fuel companies this week, alleging that the oil and gas giants have misled the public about climate change and delayed a transition to clean energy. The suit seeks $1 billion in damages to help Puerto Rico defend itself against climate disasters.
In a complaint filed in San Juan yesterday, Puerto Rico’s Department of Justice says that the companies violated trade law by promoting fossil fuels without adequately warning about the dangers. The defendants include ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Shell, ConocoPhillips, and other energy companies.
It’s the latest in a slew of lawsuits attempting to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the consequences of climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels are supercharging storms and other extreme weather events while rising seas eat away at island shorelines. Fossil fuel companies knew for decades that their products would cause global warming and went about business as usual anyway, several studies and investigations have found….
Complaint here.
Health care crisis
Insurers Pocketed $50 Billion From Medicare for Diseases No Doctor Treated
[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture 07-14-2024]
The Hidden Fee Costing Doctors Millions Every Year
[ProPublica, via The Big Picture 07-14-2024]
A powerful lobbyist convinced a federal agency that doctors can be forced to pay fees on money that health insurers owe them. Big companies rake in profits while doctors are saddled with yet another cost in a burdensome health care system.
Inside the Mafia of Pharma Pricing
Matt Stoller [via Naked Capitalism 07-17-2024]
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Facebook and Instagram’s algorithmic favoritism towards extremist parties revealed in new study
[PsyPost, via Naked Capitalism 07-20-2024]
Crooks Steal Phone, SMS Records for Nearly All AT&T Customers
[Krebs and Security, via Naked Capitalism 07-14-2024]
Cloudflare Reports Almost 7% of Internet Traffic Is Malicious
[ZDNet, via Naked Capitalism 07-17-2024]
Collapse of independent news media
The political media’s fantasy of an “unified” America defies reality
Dan Froomkin [Press Watch, via Naked Capitalism 07-19-2024]
Climate and environmental crises
The World’s Power Grids Are Failing as the Planet Warms
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 07-15-2024]
California Grid Breezes Through Heat Wave due to Renewables, Batteries
[This Is Not Cool, via Naked Capitalism 07-19-2024]
Cutting-Edge Technology Could Massively Reduce the Amount of Energy Used For Air Conditioning
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 07-17-2024]
China installing the wind / solar equivalent of 5 nuclear power stations a week
[ABC.net.au, via Naked Capitalism 07-17-2024]
[CNBC, via Naked Capitalism 07-15-2024]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Isn’t this what 2nd Amendment guys want?
[Carl Beijer, via Naked Capitalism 07-15-2024]
I cannot understand how one can say that political violence has no place in America and also believe that we have a sacred right to political violence that is supposedly enshrined in our Constitution. If you believe that then you can argue, perhaps, that Trump is not a tyrant — but that is a very different thing from taking the stance a lot of conservatives are taking right now, one which pleads that political violence is inherently illegitimate.
Ironically, the main effect of the Second Amendment in this case has been to make it more difficult to resist tyranny. Whether or not Donald Trump qualifies as a tyrant is a fundamentally political question, one that people should be allowed to debate and disagree about. But since the Second Amendment supposedly gives Americans a license to shoot tyrants, and since conservatives don’t want to give up the Second Amendment, they have been backed into having to argue that only they get to decide who the tyrants are. Thus we get the emerging consensus on the right that calling Trump a tyrant is not just incorrect, but dangerous and even unlawful: ….
Why Do Republicans Encourage Political Violence, While Democrats Never Do?
Howie Klein, July 16, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
...Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) posted on X that Democrats were ‘the party of pedophiles, murdering the innocent unborn, violence, and bloody, meaningless, endless wars.’ Although the shooter was a registered Republican, Greene said that the ‘Democrat party is flat out evil, and yesterday they tried to murder President Trump.’ A 2021 CNN investigation found that Greene ‘repeatedly indicated support for executing prominent Democratic politicians in 2018 and 2019 before being elected to Congress.’ In one instance, Greene liked a comment calling for the execution of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) with ‘a bullet to the head.’ Greene later claimed that staff members ran her account. But in 2019, Greene ‘created a White House petition’ to impeach Pelosi for ‘crimes of treason,’ for supporting immigration policies that Greene opposed. ‘[I]t’s a crime punishable by death is what treason is,’ Greene said. ‘Nancy Pelosi is guilty of treason.’”
[TW: Klein provides a useful list of the many instances of (anti)Republican leaders calling for exactly what they are accusing Democrats of.”]
[X-Twitter, via downwithtyranny.com, 07-15-2024 ]
1) Thread.If you're planning your next op/ed and you intend to scold both sides for violent rhetoric, think again and watch the following seven videos. Republicans have been producing violent ads targeting both legislation and actual Democrats for years. Let's review.
[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 07-14-2024]
Report Shows How Lawmakers in GOP-Dominated South Harm Workers
Jessica Corbett, Jul 18, 2024 [CommonDreams]
"For at least the last 40 years, pay and job quality for workers across the South has been inferior compared to other regions—thanks to the racist and anti-worker Southern economic development model."
That's according to a Thursday report by Chandra Childers, a senior policy and economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). The new publication is part of her "Rooted in Racism and Economic Exploitation" series.
Previous documents in the series have discussed how "Southern politicians claim that 'business-friendly' policies lead to an abundance of jobs and economic prosperity" but in reality, their failed model is designed "to extract the labor of Black and brown Southerners as cheaply as possible" and has resulted in "economic underperformance."….
The EPI report highlights that "Southern states have lower median wages than other regions," "low-wage workers make up a larger share of the workforce across the South," and "every state that lacks a state minimum wage" is in the region.
The publication also points out the decline of coverage from employer-provided health insurance and pensions in the South, as well as how workers there "have less access to paid leave than their peers in other regions" and "Southern state lawmakers have also disempowered local communities."….
[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 07-18-2024]
In 2022, Arizona pioneered the largest school voucher program in the history of education. Under a new law, any parent in the state, no matter how affluent, could get a taxpayer-funded voucher worth up to tens of thousands of dollars to spend on private school tuition, extracurricular programs or homeschooling supplies….
Arizona’s voucher experiment has since precipitated a budget meltdown. The state this year faced a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, much of which was a result of the new voucher spending, according to the Grand Canyon Institute, a local nonpartisan fiscal and economic policy think tank. Last fiscal year alone, the price tag of universal vouchers in Arizona skyrocketed from an original official estimate of just under $65 million to roughly $332 million, the Grand Canyon analysis found; another $429 million in costs is expected this year….
Among the funding slashed: $333 million for water infrastructure projects, in a state where water scarcity will shape the future, and tens of millions of dollars for highway expansions and repairs in congested areas of one of the nation’s fastest-growing metropolises — Phoenix and its suburbs. Also nixed were improvements to the air conditioning in state prisons, where temperatures can soar above 100 degrees. Arizona’s community colleges, too, are seeing their budgets cut by $54 million….
Advocates for Arizona’s universal voucher initiative had originally said that it wouldn’t cost the public — and might even save taxpayers money. The Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank that helped craft the state’s 2022 voucher bill, claimed in its promotional materials at the time that the vouchers would “save taxpayers thousands per student, millions statewide.” Families that received the new cash, the institute said, would be educating their kids “for less than it would cost taxpayers if they were in the public school system.”
But as it turns out, the parents most likely to apply for these vouchers are the ones who were already sending their kids to private school or homeschooling. They use the dollars to subsidize what they were already paying for.
Inside the Trump Plan for 2025
Jonathan Blitzer, July 15, 2024 [The New Yorker, via Naked Capitalism 07-19-2024]
…The Heritage Foundation was founded in the nineteen-seventies by Edwin Feulner, a Republican operative with a doctorate in political science. Under his direction, the think tank became the country’s leading bastion of conservative policy, with an annual budget exceeding eighty million dollars. When DeMint took over, in 2013, traditionalists on the organization’s board were concerned that his rebellious style would diminish the group’s reputation for serious research. He confirmed their suspicions by hiring several of his Senate aides. The former Heritage staffer said, “There were cultural differences between existing leadership and the DeMint team.”
But DeMint’s arrival reflected changes already under way at the organization. In 2010, as the Tea Party emerged as a force in conservative politics, the think tank launched an advocacy arm called Heritage Action, which issued scorecards evaluating legislators’ conservatism and deputized a network of local activists as “sentinels” to enforce a populist agenda. Vought, who’d previously worked as a staffer in House leadership, helped lead the operation. Under DeMint, the group became merciless in its attacks on rank-and-file Republican lawmakers. “Heritage Action was created to lobby the Hill, but they took it one step further,” James Wallner, a lecturer in political science at Clemson University, who worked with DeMint in the Senate and at Heritage, told me. “They had a grassroots army. They used tens of thousands of activists to target people.”
After the meeting with Trump, in 2016, some of DeMint’s staff objected to the task of drawing up a list of potential judges, arguing that Heritage was overcommitting itself. This was typically the domain of the Federalist Society, which was putting forth its own list of judicial nominees. But DeMint, sensing an opportunity to maximize his clout with Trump, dismissed the concerns. That August, after Trump became the Party’s nominee, Heritage was enlisted to participate in the Presidential transition in the event of a Trump victory. Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey at the time, was overseeing the effort and put Feulner, who was then the chair of Heritage’s board of trustees, in charge of domestic policy. Feulner later told the Times that Heritage saw a greater opportunity to influence policy under Trump than it had under Reagan. “No. 1, he did clearly want to make very significant changes,” Feulner said of Trump. “No. 2, his views on so many things were not particularly well formed.” He added, “If he somehow pulled the election off, we thought, wow, we could really make a difference.”
Why Some Americans Really Do Want an Authoritarian in Charge
Susan Milligan, July 18, 2024 [The New Republic]
The prospect that the nation might knowingly put back in power a man who cozies up to authoritarian leaders, tried to overturn the results of a free and fair election, and promises to be a dictator himself (if only, he says, for a day) has not only alarmed but baffled Democrats. How could voters in the United States, a country that styles itself as a paragon of democracy, let this happen?
…. A big chunk of the public actually wants an authoritarian leader. This is true worldwide, according to research, and no less so in what many Americans like to describe as the world’s greatest democracy. According to a February study by the Pew Research Center, 32 percent of Americans believe a military regime or authoritarian leader (described as a strong leader who can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts) would be a good way of governing the country. A PRRI study last October found that 38 percent of Americans (and 48 percent of Republicans, 38 percent of independents, and 29 percent of Democrats) think the country needs a leader who will “break some rules if that’s what it takes to set things right.” Democratic operative Steve Schale, in a 2022 poll, found that 56 percent of voters surveyed agreed that Washington is “broken” and that “for America to remain a world power, we need stronger presidents who will use their power to make change and get things done.” Meanwhile, [only] 44 percent backed the American tradition of competing branches of government as a model, if sometimes “frustrating,” system….
“For those of us who value representative democracy, the fact that some of our fellow citizens might prefer authoritarianism can be surprising or even unfathomable,” Joe Pierre, health sciences clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco’s Weill Institute for Neurosciences, told me. But, he said, when people feel threatened—either by a lack of order or a challenge by people who think differently—a controlling leader looks like a savior.
“Authoritarianism and a ‘strongman’ leader who’s willing to trample over civil rights can sound like a very appealing solution,” Pierre said. “In turn, democracy—which tells us that our ideological opposites deserve to be heard or should be given equal voice—can sound like the root of the problem.” People who favor an authoritarian regime, notably, don’t think it will be used against them, he noted, but “to subjugate others and have their freedoms taken away.”
America Missed Out So, So Bad By Not Electing Bernie President
Howie Klein, July 20, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
PICTURE posted by Sen. Sanders: "Want to better understand why we have a federal deficit? In 1952, the corporate income tax accounted for 33 percent of all federal tax revenue. Today, despite record-breaking profits, corporate taxes bring in less than 9 percent. It’s time for real tax reform." ….
“Republicans,” wrote Erica Payne of Patriotic Millionaires the other day, have done a lot of damage to the American tax code over the years by giving massive and harmful cuts to the wealthy and corporations. But if they win back the White House and get the chance to implement Project 2025, that damage will be supercharged to another level.” She noted that Project 2025 would “institute massive changes to the tax code. While this part of the Heritage-led manifesto is receiving far less media attention than others, it’s no less alarming. Below are just a few of the major tax changes that Project 2025 would usher in:
- Create two brackets with lower rates for ordinary income taxes— There are currently seven brackets for taxes on ordinary income, with a top marginal rate of 37%. There already aren’t enough brackets, with the 37% rate covering all income over $731,000, but Project 2025 would make a bad situation worse by reducing the number of brackets to just two— with a 15% tax on taxable income below $168,000 and a 30% tax on taxable income above that level. According to estimates from Brendan Duke, the Senior Director for Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress, under this policy, a family of four with $100,000 in annual income would pay $2,600 in additional income tax, while a family of the same size making $5 million a year would receive a $325,000 tax cut.
- Reduce the corporate income tax rate to 18%— The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) permanently reduced the corporate income tax rate from 35% to 21%, and in so doing, gave wealthy shareholders and executives a windfall. Project 2025 would further reduce this rate to 18% and give an even greater bonanza to the rich.
- Reduce the tax on capital gains and dividends to 15% — Currently, there are two tax brackets for capital gains and dividends: 15% and 20%. Project 2025 would do away with the 20% bracket entirely and tax capital gains and dividends at 15%. Taxing capital gains over $1 million at such a low rate is already an absurd giveaway to the wealthy that values wealth more than work, but considering how few Americans even own stock, and considering the vast majority of the publicly traded stock in this country is concentrated in the hands of the wealthy, this is just a further gift to the rich with no benefit for the average American.
- Repeal all tax changes made by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act— Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act took important steps in making the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share in taxes. Among other things, it created a 15% corporate minimum tax and a 1% excise tax on stock buybacks. Project 2025 would do away with all of it.
- Reduce the estate and gift tax to 20% and make permanent the TCJA’s exemption amount increase—The top marginal rate on the estate and gift tax is currently 40%. The TCJA temporarily increased the threshold at which estate and gift taxes kick in: in the 2024 filing season, this threshold was $27.22 million for a married couple. As if letting that much wealth pass from generation to generation tax-free wasn’t absurd enough, Project 2025 would reduce the top rate on estate and gift taxes to 20% and also make permanent the TCJA’s exemption threshold hike.
- Freeze IRS funding and replace top officials with appointees— Project 2025 calls for the budget of the IRS to be held constant in real terms, which essentially means that it would rescind the funding allocated to the agency by the Inflation Reduction Act. This money has already been used to recoup over $1 billion in unpaid taxes by the very wealthy and significantly improve taxpayer services. It would also replace many of the top positions at the IRS with presidential appointees, ensuring institutional policy and process knowledge would not be retained from administration to administration.
The Trump Administration’s Plan to Seize Control of Spending
Daniel Schuman, July 19, 2024 [The American Prospect]
Trump and his advisers want to bring back impoundment, enabling them to cancel spending appropriated by Congress.
Needles in Project 2025’s Haystack
Rick Perlstein, July 24, 2024 [The American Prospect]
SOME READERS OF MY FIRST INSTALLMENT in this series got lost in my nuances. This time, I’ll supply less nuance. This will just be the stuff you should be shit-scared about. First off, a few more needles in the haystack—the hypodermic kind, oozing unregulated poison….
Dark Money Just Got Darker: Wall Street Helped Fund Project 2025
[The Lever, July 17, 2024]
Financial giants are helping wealthy donors funnel cash to Project 2025 and other extremist causes with zero transparency or tax repercussions.
Robert Kuttner, July 15, 2024 [The American Prospect]
If Trump is shrewd, he will name J.D. Vance.
[TW: Have to give Kuttner plaudits for his foresight. And take to heart his warnings of who Vances really is.]
How a Network of Tech Billionaires Helped J.D. Vance Leap Into Power
[New York Times, via The Big Picture 07-21-2024]
Mr. Vance spent less than five years in Silicon Valley’s tech industry, but the connections he made with Peter Thiel and others became crucial to his political ascent.
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
It’s Impossible to Overstate the Damage Done by the Supreme Court in This Term
[The Nation, via The Big Picture 07-14-2024]
The effects of the high court’s rulings will be enduring and almost impossible to overturn without a serious reckoning by Democratic lawmakers.
Tierney Sneed, July 18, 2024 [CNN, via Talking Points Memo]
...But several veteran attorneys who practice in that circuit told CNN that the appeals court would be unlikely to grant such a request, even though Cannon’s justification for throwing out the prosecution was widely panned by legal scholars….
“There really just is no record supporting her removal from the case. They just don’t have any malfeasance to point to,” said CNN legal analyst Michael Moore, who served as an Obama-appointed US attorney in Georgia, another state covered by the 11th Circuit. “She’s been careful to not blindly issue rulings … and that has kept the record really shallow when looking for a removal rationale.”
[Society for the Rule of Law, via The Big Picture 07-14-2024]
On its face, the judicial method employed by Trump v. United States resembles Roe v. Wade in the ways that matter. Like Roe, the Trump majority explicitly relies on its views of wise policy. For example, the Trump majority invents immunities “to enable the President to carry out his constitutional duties without undue caution.” The Roe test eventually became “undue burden.” Both decisions support their policy pronouncements with one-sided snippets from prior cases that are readily distinguishable both factually and contextually.
What employers can expect following the end of Chevron deference
[Construction Dive, via Naked Capitalism 07-19-2024]
Matt Taibbi, July 16, 2024 [via Naked Capitalism 07-17-2024]
In the wake of a fatal shooting and attempted assassination of Donald Trump, a series of reversals may mark the beginning of a new political era
Jeffrey Toobin [The New York Review, March 7, 2024 issue]
Judges on the Fifth Circuit, many of them Trump appointees, are attempting to transform the law and challenge the very structure of American government.
