Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 28, 2021

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 28, 2021

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Destroying Democracy Is Central to the Privatization of Public Goods 

[Jacobin, via Naked Capitalism 11-22-2021]

How Delaware Became the World’s Biggest Offshore Haven 

[Foreign Policy, via Naked Capitalism 11-21-2021]

The American Ruling Class Has Never Let Us Build Back Better 

[Jacobin, via The Daily Poster, November 21, 2021]

The defeat of Reconstruction was the nation’s first failure to build back better, and it set the stage for the failures that followed. American austerity politics found their first full expression during this period, pivoting on an ideological turn to classical liberalism within the Republican Party. The events of the 1870s created a pattern of missed opportunities and reactionary blowback that has since been repeated time and again.”

Fighting the Inflation Profiteers

David Dayen, November 24, 2021 [The American Prospect]

Companies are raising prices well above increases in their costs. The only antidote is to finally take action against corporate power….

“Executives are seizing a once in a generation opportunity to raise prices,” reads a Wall Street Journal storyexplaining that around two-thirds of the largest publicly traded companies are showing profit margins higher today than they did in 2019, before the pandemic. Over 100 companies show profit margins of 50 percent or more above those 2019 levels…. Corporate executives are not hiding their handiwork; instead, they’re boasting about it in financial disclosures and earnings calls. “We have not seen any material reaction from consumers,” said the chief financial officer of Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest consumer goods company, which has hiked prices three times in the past year. “What we are very good at is pricing,” said Colgate-Palmolive’s CEO. “We find that taking several small price increases is more effective than one large price jump,” added the CFO of Unilever. Dollar Tree, a discount store which has the word “dollar” in its name, has decided to permanently set its price point at $1.25, stating specifically that the move is “not a reaction to short-term or transitory market conditions.”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 21, 2021

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 21, 2021

by Tony Wikrent

Conservative / Libertarian Drive to Civil War

Notes on an Authoritarian Conspiracy: Inside the Claremont Institute’s “79 Days to Inauguration”

[The Bulwark, via The Big Picture 11-14-2021]

... report published in mid-October 2020 by the Claremont Institute and Texas Public Policy Foundation’s (TPPF) called “79 Days to Inauguration,” prepared by “Constitutional scholars, along with experts in election law, foreign affairs, law enforcement, and media . . . coordinated by a retired military officer experienced in running hundreds of wargames.”

Among these luminaries were figures such as John Eastman—lawyer for Donald Trump and author of a memo advising Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally block certification of Joe Biden’s win in order to buy time for GOP-controlled state legislatures to send competing slates of electors—and K.T. McFarland, who served as deputy national security advisor under Michael Flynn in the Trump White House.

Other participants include Kevin Roberts, then-executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (soon to be head of the Heritage Foundation), Jeff Giesea, “a [Peter] Thiel protégé and secret funder of alt-right causes,” and Charles Haywood, a fringe blogger who anxiously awaits an American “Caesar, authoritarian reconstructor of our institutions.”

….Practically, the report is an instruction manual for how Trump partisans at all levels of government—aided by citizen “posses” of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers—could, quite literally, round up opposition activists, kill their leaders, and install Donald Trump for a second term in office….

are via emailThere’s more irony in how the task force imagines right-wing gangs would operate during such a period: with quiet discipline and in cooperation with law enforcement…. In reading the report, it becomes clear that task force participants see law enforcement as a critical adjunct to the more traditional political actors and that they believe law enforcement could act with greater impunity and force, independent from—and at times in defiance of—elected leaders…. Earlier this year the Claremont Institute created a Sheriffs Fellowship program. Claremont claims that this program will offer “training of unparalleled depth and excellence in American political thought and institutions.” But then, this is the same group that produced a report hoping that “several sheriffs in conservative counties” would give groups like the Proud Boys actual legal authority.

According to ConservativeTransparency.org, the largest funders of the Claremont Institute are the Sarah Scaife Foundation ($300,000 to $400,000 a year for the past several years; the John M. Olin Foundation ($100,000 annually), and The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation ($100,000 annually). The Sarah Scaife Foundation is part of the late Richard Mellon Scaife network, whose wealth was inherited from the Mellon banking family.In a healthy republic, dedicated to promoting the General Welfare, the rich would not be allowed to pass massive wealth from from one generation to another, thus solving the two interrelated problems of wealth inequality, and the worsening sclerosis and maintenance deprivation of the national economy and physical infrastructure. The Wikipedia entry states that in April 2021, Claremont senior fellow Glenn Ellmers wrote an essay in Claremont's The American Mind,  “ “Conservatism” is no Longer Enough: All hands on deck as we enter the counter-revolutionary moment,” arguing that the United States had been destroyed by internal enemies and that

“Let’s be blunt. The United States has become two nations occupying the same country. When pressed, or in private, many would now agree. Fewer are willing to take the next step and accept that most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.... “They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.”

Menace Enters the Republican Mainstream

[New York Times, via The Big Picture 11-14-2021]

Threats of violence have become commonplace among a significant part of the party, as historians and those who study democracy warn of a dark shift in American politics. 

At a conservative rally in western Idaho last month, a young man stepped up to a microphone to ask when he could start killing Democrats.

“When do we get to use the guns?” he said as the audience applauded. “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” 

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 14, 2021

 Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 14, 2021

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

China files 2.5 times more patent applications than U.S. in 2020

[Xinhua, via Mike Norman Economics 11-8-2021]

China's intellectual property (IP) office led the world in 2020 by reporting 1.5 million patent applications, 2.5 times more than the United States, which ranked second, the World

Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) said on Monday....Industrial design is another area where China has taken the lead, followed by the EU, South Korea, the United States and Turkey.…

Civic republicanism and the looming civil war

“Madison Saw Something in the Constitution We Should Open Our Eyes To” 

[Jamelle Bouie, New York Times, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-12-2021] This is very good. The scene-setting:

Not content to simply count on the traditional midterm swing against the president’s party, Republicans are set to gerrymander their way to a House majority next year…. It is true that Democrats have pursued their own aggressive gerrymanders in Maryland and Illinois, but it is also true that the Democratic Party is committed, through its voting rights bills, to ending partisan gerrymandering altogether…. The larger context of the Republican Party’s attempt to gerrymander itself into a House majority is its successful effort to gerrymander itself into long-term control of state legislatures across the country. In Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and other states, Republicans have built legislative majorities sturdy enough to withstand all but the most crushing ‘blue wave.’ And in the age of Donald Trump, they are using their majorities to seize control of election administration in states all over the country, on the basis of an outlandish but still influential claim that the Constitution gives sovereign power over elections to state legislatures…. 

In Article IV, Section 4, the Constitution says, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.”

In this vision of the Guarantee Clause, the touchstone for “a republican form of government” is political equality, and when a state imposes political inequality beyond a certain point, Congress or the federal courts step in to restore the balance…. Still, a broad understanding of the Guarantee Clause might be a potent weapon for Congress if a Democratic majority ever worked up the will to go on the offensive against state legislatures that violated basic principles of political equality.

“An Open Letter in Defense of Democracy”

Todd Gitlin, Jeffrey C. Isaac, and William Kristol]

The Bulwark, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-12-2021]

“Liberal democracy depends on free and fair elections, respect for the rights of others, the rule of law, a commitment to truth and tolerance in our public discourse. All of these are now in serious danger. The primary source of this danger is one of our two major national parties, the Republican Party, which remains under the sway of Donald Trump and Trumpist authoritarianism. Unimpeded by Trump’s defeat in 2020 and unfazed by the January 6 insurrection, Trump and his supporters actively work to exploit anxieties and prejudices, to promote reckless hostility to the truth and to Americans who disagree with them, and to discredit the very practice of free and fair elections in which winners and losers respect the peaceful transfer of power.”

Lambert Strether: If you take Bouie’s article above seriously, this is not true. It takes a long time to take control of state legislatures, and it also takes time to seize control over election administration. Again, it’s not an issue of personality. It’s a party movement that began before Trump, and would continue if (say) Chris Christie ran and won in 2024.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 7, 2021

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 7, 2021

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Billionaires Are Not Morally Qualified To Shape Human Civilization 

Caitlin Johnstone [via Naked Capitalism 11-1-2021]

Human civilization is being engineered in myriad ways by an unfathomably wealthy class who are so emotionally and psychologically stunted that they refuse to end world hunger despite having the ability to easily do so.

The United Nations has estimated that world hunger could be ended for an additional expenditure of $30 billion a year, with other estimates considerably lower. The other day Elon Musk became the first person ever to attain a net worth of over $300 billion. A year ago his net worth was $115 billion. According to Inequality.org, America's billionaires have a combined net worth of $5.1 trillion, which is a 70 percent increase from their combined net worth of under $3 trillion at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

So we're talking about a class which could easily put a complete halt to human beings dying of starvation on this planet by simply putting some of their vast fortunes toward making sure everyone gets enough to eat. But they don't….

Billionaires should not exist. They should have their power and wealth taken from them, and the steering wheel of humanity should be given to the ordinary people who are infinitely more qualified to navigate us through the rough waters ahead for our species.

 

The Democracy Crisis That Is Never Discussed

David Sirota and Andrew Perez [The Daily Poster, November 2, 2021]

In 2014, Northwestern and Princeton researchers published a report statistically documenting how lawmakers do not listen or care about what most voters want, and instead mostly care about serving their big donors. Coupled with additional research documenting the discrepancy between donor and voter preferences, they bluntly concluded that the “preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically nonsignificant impact upon public policy.” ….New polling demonstrates the silencing effect that systemic corruption is having on voter preferences:

• 82 percent of registered voters support adding dental and vision benefits to Medicare — and this is voters’ “top priority” for Democrats’ social spending bill, according to survey data from Morning Consult. Conservative Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have pushed to keep these benefits out of the bill, following an aggressive lobbying campaign by health insurers who enjoy massive profits from the privatized Medicare Advantage program.
• Another top priority for voters is allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, with 72 percent saying they support the idea, according to Morning Consult. Sinema and a few House Democrats backed by the pharmaceutical industry managed to block the party’s original drug pricing measure from being put into the reconciliation bill….

This Is The Hostile Takeover

Taken together, this is the democracy crisis thrumming underneath all the media noise — the day-to-day erosion of democracy by corporations that use a system of legalized bribery to buy public policy, which then erodes Americans’ faith in their government and leads to all the down-ballot that unfolded on Tuesday night.

And yet this erosion does not get discussed in a media-directed democracy discourse that focuses almost exclusively on the January 6th insurrection or Republican efforts to deny election results and limit voting.

That dichotomy is an expression of corporate power. Corruption is omitted from most corporate media coverage because their corporate sponsors are the ones doing the vote-buying. By contrast, the insurrection and GOP assault on voting are safe topics for corporate media, because they do not threaten the power of the media’s corporate sponsors.

The US Coast Survey under Bache - excerpt from Dupree, Science in the Federal Government - HAWB

HAWB - How America Was Built

Though the US Constitution contains several explicit and implied benedictions on science, the history of national scientific institutions is one of struggle to exist on precarious and often miserly Congressional spending. Nonetheless, the national governments support and promotion of scientific inquiry and invention is the basis of the USA’s development as an industrial superpower. It is a history that flatly contradicts the conservative and libertarian myths of American economic development driven by hardy risk-taking entrepreneurs. No better examples exist than today’s computers and cell phones, which are comprised of scores of technologies, every single one of which began as one or another USA federal government research program.  

Another example is steam engine design and building, which was not put onto a scientific footing until the 1850s when Captain Benjamin Franklin Isherwood of the U.S. Navy began a careful and meticulous collection of the operating characteristics of every marine and naval steam engine he could find. Isherwood would go on to become the Admiral in charge of the Bureau of Steam Navigation during the Civil War, overseeing the expansion of the fleet from around 50 steam vessels to over 600 – a quarter with steam engines of his own design. After the war, Isherwood created a curriculum for the Naval Academy to teach officers how to properly command a steamship, which was copied around the world, and formed the foundation for a new avocation, that of mechanical engineer.  

Today, the idea of “progress” has been bowdlerized by corporate ad campaigns for “new and improved,” and a new awareness of the damage to the environment caused by modern industrial societies seeking the cheapest means to the greatest profit. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, the idea of progress was cherished and revered, for it meant quest to free humanity from the scarcity, toil, drudgery, and disease of humanity’s struggles against the forces of nature, at a time when life expectancy limited to 30s to 40s years. 

“The great object of the institution of civil government,” President John Quincy Adams declared in his first annual message to Congress, December 6, 1825,

“is the improvement of the condition of those who are parties to the social compact, and no government, in what ever form constituted, can accomplish the lawful ends of its institution but in proportion as it improves the condition of those over whom it is established…. moral, political, intellectual improvement are duties assigned by the Author of Our Existence to social no less than to individual man.”

In the Introduction to his landmark history, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities to 1940 (Harvard University Press, 1957), — sponsored by Sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences — A. Hunter Dupree wrote 

“…all the institutions of the country in which science exists have found the actions of the government in conducting research and and in contracting for it are factors of first importance…. Indeed, before the rise of the universities, private foundations, and industrial laboratories, the fate of science rested more exclusively with the government than it did later…. The idea that the federal government should become the patron of science was easily within the grasp of the framers of the Constitution. As educated men of the eighteenth century they knew that European governments had often supported science, and their set of fundamental values led them to hold all branches of philosophy in high regard.”