Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 29, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 29, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

Altercation: Goodbye and Thanks

Eric Alterman, January 27, 2023 [The American Prospect]

The key question I want to leave people with is this: Given the lack of guardrails, how far are these people willing to go? Trump is as popular as he was before January 6th and has been invited back on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. His only credible alternative for the Republican nomination at this point, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is in many significant respects even worse than Trump. Kevin McCarthy is elevating lunatic insurrectionists who fear Jewish space lasers and children’s books about loving gay parents to positions with real power and rejecting people merely because they are competent and committed to the Constitution. Tucker Carlson, a paranoid, racist co-conspirator of the morally disgusting Alex Jones, has the highest ratings in cable news. Thanks in part to a great lineup at the New York Jewish Film Festival this month, I’ve just recently seen a whole bunch of films about the fate of fascism in Germany, Austria, France, Ukraine, and Poland—I’m considering Stalinism to be a form of fascism here—and another about Eichmann’s trial and death in Israel, and elsewhere in theaters about town, about fascism in Argentina, in Italy (which I wrote about here), and another one about Austria. They speak to this question, which has long been on my mind: How far are these people willing to go and what is to stop them?

War

What Russian elites are saying:

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 1-28-2023]

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Why is Egypt’s Navy commanding a NATO-led coalition in the Red Sea? 

[The Cradle, via Naked Capitalism 1-24-2023]

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 22, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 22, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

How Much Income Do You Need to Be Rich? 

[Of Dollars And Data, The Big Picture 1-19-2023]

Based on the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, what are the top 10%, top 5%, and top 1% of household incomes in the U.S.? We take a high level overview of how much income the highest earning households make so that you can determine for yourself what it means to be rich…

• Top 10% = $191,406
• Top 5% = $290,164
• Top 1% = $867,436

Thomas Frank On Why Democrats Suck

Katie Halper [YouTube, January 3, 2023]

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10:49 If you go back and look at the sociological literature in … the mid-1960s, it was triumphant … about … the middle class achievement; that the gap between rich and poor had shrunk; that we had solved the problem [of inequality]; that we were the “affluent society…” there's a a book that came out in 1966 … by an economic [with] a whole chapter establishing that white collar and blue collar people basically had the almost exactly the same standard of living….

..the richest man in the world in 1965 … was J Paul Getty, an … American Oil Baron he was living in London by that time and his net worth in 1965 was one billion dollars and this is the richest man in the world … he wrote an article for one of the popular magazines … complaining …  that it wasn't really awesome he was the richest man in the world a… because even the middleclass man could afford all the things that he had….

...look at what has happened to us since… billionaires shooting themselves sinto space … billionaires making billion dollars in a single year…

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 15, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 15, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

[TW: Dear readers: I was on the road much of this past week, so had limited time and access. If this wrap seems a bit short and abbreviated, it’s because it is. Should be back to normal this coming week.]

Life Lessons from 1,000 Years

[Curiosity Chronicle, via The Big Picture 1-13-2023]

I asked a number of 90-year-olds a simple question: “If you could speak to your 32-year-old self, what advice would you give?” In total, there was over 1,000 years of lived experience captured. The responses were…incredible. They range from fun, playful, and witty to deeply moving. I’d encourage you to read through them with your loved ones and reflect on those that hit you the hardest.

Global power shift

Why the CIA attempted a ‘Maidan uprising’ in Brazil 

[The Cradle, via Naked Capitalism 1-11-2023]

A former US intelligence official has confirmed that the shambolic Maidan remix staged in Brasilia on 8 January was a CIA operation, and linked it to the recent attempts at color revolution in Iran.

On Sunday, alleged supporters of former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court, and  presidential palace, bypassing flimsy security barricades, climbing on roofs, smashing windows, destroying public property including precious paintings, while calling for a military coup as part of a regime change scheme targeting elected President Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva.

According to the US source, the reason for staging the operation – which bears visible signs of hasty planning – now, is that Brazil is set to reassert itself in global geopolitics alongside fellow BRICS states Russia, India, and China.

That suggests CIA planners are avid readers of Credit Suisse strategist Zoltan Pozsar, formerly of the New York Fed. In his ground-breaking 27 December report titled War and Commodity Encumbrance….

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 8, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 8, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Why Petulant Oligarchs Rule Our World

Paul Krugman [New York Times, via The Big Picture 1-3-2023]

...the lesson I took from my moment of pettiness was that privilege corrupts, that it very easily breeds a sense of entitlement. And surely, to paraphrase Lord Acton, enormous privilege corrupts enormously, in part because the very privileged are normally surrounded by people who would never dare tell them that they’re behaving badly.

When an immensely rich man, accustomed not just to getting whatever he wants but also to being a much-admired icon, finds himself not just losing his aura but becoming a subject of widespread ridicule, of course he lashes out erratically, and in so doing makes his problems even worse.

The more interesting question is why we’re now ruled by such people. For we’re clearly living in the age of the petulant oligarch….

Musk still has many admirers in the technology world. They see him not as a whiny brat but as someone who understands how the world should be run — an ideology that writer John Ganz calls bossism, a belief that the big people shouldn’t have to answer to, or even face criticism from, the little people. And adherents of that ideology clearly have a lot of power, even if that power doesn’t yet extend to protecting the likes of Musk from getting booed in public….

[TW: Montesquieu wrote (see below)]  

“Though real equality be the very soul of a democracy, it is so difficult to establish, that an extreme exactness in this respect would not be always convenient. Sufficient is it to establish a census, which shall reduce or fix the differences to a certain point: it is afterwards the business of particular laws to level, as it were, the inequalities, by the duties laid upon the rich, and by the ease afforded to the poor. It is moderate riches alone that can give or suffer this sort of compensation; for as to men of overgrown estates, everything which does not contribute to advance their power and honor is considered by them as an injury....” [emphasis by TW]

SBF and the Injustice Democrats: How SBF, AIPAC and pro-Trump billionaires coordinated to crush the left 

Max Berger [via Naked Capitalism 1-4-2023]

When I looked into SBF’s political giving to write a follow up to last week’s piece, I thought I knew what I was looking for. It’s a subject I’ve written about before.

But, when I looked at the end-of-cycle FEC data, the results were truly shocking.

I found more evidence SBF was collaborating with AIPAC and Trump supporting billionaires to stop the growth of the squad and the electoral left.

Five billionaire funded PACs were coordinating closely on a strategy to defeat progressive candidates in Democratic primaries — a kind of Injustice Democrats.

Mark Mellman, a long-time operative and AIPAC ally, appears to be at the center of the effort and likely spearheaded the shared campaign. He was hired by four of the five groups this cycle, who collectively paid his firm $476,016.67… According to FEC data, over 75% of the money SBF contributed to Democrats in 2022 went to groups that spent nearly all their money on competitive primaries in the Democratic Party.

SBF personally contributed $29,250,000 to Protect Our Future and DMI PAC (which later contributed the money to Web3 Forward). Both of these groups spent the vast majority of their money on Democratic primaries. They also worked closely with two AIPAC affiliated SuperPACs called the United Democracy Project (UDP) and the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), and a group called Mainstream Democrats which aimed to defeat the “far-left.”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 1, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 1, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

The dark side

Dress Rehearsal: Trump’s attempt almost two years ago to undermine the 2020 election reads today like a blueprint drawn for a future autocrat.

Fintan O’Toole, January 19, 2023 issue [The New York Review]

To understand the attempted coup that culminated in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, it is useful to go back to Donald Trump’s immediate response to the election he actually won, in 2016. The head of his transition team, Chris Christie, then governor of New Jersey, presented Trump with a detailed plan for the transfer of power to his incoming administration. It was literally trashed. As Christie recalled in his self-pitying memoir, Let Me Finish, “All thirty binders were tossed in a Trump Tower dumpster, never to be seen again.”  Trump didn’t want an orderly transition to his own presidency, let alone to Joe Biden’s. To a raging narcissist a plan is an impertinence, a Lilliputian restraint on the inspired instincts of a giant….

A coup, in this context, does not mean tanks on the streets, helicopter gunships strafing public buildings, thousands of people rounded up by soldiers, and a junta of generals or colonels addressing the nation on TV. On the contrary, the story that needed to be told by the plotters of 2020–2021 was not the overthrow of democracy, but its defense. Trump, as his chief of staff and co-conspirator Mark Meadows put it in his book The Chief’s Chief, was merely seeking “to uphold the democratic process.”….

To understand what Trump could have done instead, it is necessary to revisit a long meeting at the White House on the evening and night of December 18, 2020. This episode is easy to dismiss because it was described by Hutchinson as “unhinged” and because the proposals aired at it were called “nuts” by one of the saner attendees, the former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann. These characterizations are accurate. Yet the meeting matters for two reasons. The first is that it immediately preceded Trump’s fateful decision to summon his followers to Washington on January 6. The other is that one of the ideas put forward at this meeting would be of great interest to any future conspirator.

In spite of all of this idiocy, however, Byrne did have one seriously interesting proposal to put to Trump at the meeting. It was that, having seized control of the voting machines through some kind of military task force, there would then be a live TV event in which all of the paper ballots in the six most contested states would be counted in front of the cameras: “If there are not big discrepancies, Trump concedes. But if there are big discrepancies, we would rerun the election in those six counties, or states, using that federal force.” This was actually quite an intelligent idea. By appearing to commit to conceding defeat if no discrepancies were found, Trump could pose, as he had to do if a coup were to succeed, as the defender of American democracy….

Most importantly, there would be a public drama, an elaborate spectacle of “democracy” in action. It is not hard to imagine how Trump’s enablers in the media would sell this show: Why are the Democrats afraid to see what the paper ballots say? The mechanics of this performance remain obscure. How were “discrepancies” to be created? What would the Supreme Court have done? To have a chance of success, the plan would surely have to have been put into effect much earlier—well before the Electoral College met on December 14 to confirm Biden’s victory. Yet Byrne had the germ of the right idea. The best way to steal a presidential election would indeed be through a staged display of democratic process backed by elaborate precooked “evidence” of foreign conspiracy and amplified by Fox News, social media campaigns, and other media. This is the upside-down shape of a successful American coup. Democracy is destroyed by the enactment of its protection. 

Strategic Political Economy

"The Contest on Corporate Purpose: Why Lynn Stout was Right and Milton Friedman was Wrong

Thomas Clarke [From the journal Accounting, Economics, and Law, via Avedon’s Sideshow 12-15-2022]

It is now 50 years since Milton Friedman set out his doctrine that 'The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.' This paper seeks to add fresh and compelling new evidence of why Lynn Stout was correct in her resolute critique of the thesis of shareholder primacy at the heart of the Friedman doctrine, and how this doctrine remains profoundly damaging to the corporations that continue to uphold this belief."

Global power shift

Preparing for the Final Collapse of the Soviet Union 

[Hudson Institute, via Naked Capitalism 12-25-2022] 

[TW: As Lambert Strether noted, this is a glimpse at what USA ruling elites really believe. ]

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 12-28-2022]

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