real economics: February 2024

Sunday, February 25, 2024

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 25, 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

Opinion: I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza. What I saw wasn’t war — it was annihilation

[Los Angeles Times, via Naked Capitalism 02-22-2024]

Global power shift

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 02-19-2024]

SCOTT RITTER: Mike Turner’s Folly

[Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 02-18-2024]

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

You paid more in income taxes last year than a corporation with billions in profits

[Popular Information, via The Big Picture 02-18-2024]

On February 2, for example, General Electric (GE) reported about $7 billion in profits for 2023. GE CEO and Chairman H. Lawrence Culp Jr. was effusive. "In 2023, our teams delivered an excellent year, more than tripling earnings and generating almost 70 percent more free cash flow," Culp said in a statement. Culp noted the company was able to fatten the pockets of its shareholders by spending $7 billion on "dividends, buybacks, and retiring our preferred equity."
You might expect that, with such a profitable year, GE sent a giant check to the federal government. Instead, GE received a refund of $423 million.
Data from Americans for Tax Fairness shows that GE is not an anomaly. Earlier this month, T-Mobile reported over $10.9 billion in profits in 2023 but paid just $42 million in federal income taxes, an effective tax rate of just 0.4%. Meanwhile, Tesla recorded $3.2 billion in domestic profits in 2023 but paid just $48 million in federal income taxes, an effective tax rate of 1.5%.
The 2023 annual reports of public companies will be filed throughout the year. But in 2020, "55 of the largest corporations in America paid no federal corporate income taxes… despite enjoying substantial pretax profits in the United States," according to a report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP). Those 55 companies collectively brought in over $40 billion in pre-tax domestic profit. But instead of paying federal income taxes, they received $3.5 billion in rebates from the federal government.
Another ITEP report found that 39 profitable companies paid no taxes over the three-year period from 2018 to 2020. This group included FedEx, Salesforce, Penske, and Advanced Micro Devices. And T-Mobile paid no taxes over that three-year period despite collecting $11.5 billion in profits. Another 79 profitable corporations paid less than half of the statutory rate of 21% between 2018 and 2020.
Companies are able to pay little or no taxes in part due to "long-standing tax breaks preserved or expanded by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act," the signature tax policy of former President Trump. Companies can continue to take advantage of tax loopholes, including huge write-offs for giving executives stock options, shifting profits off-shore, and accelerated depreciation of equipment purchases. But the statutory tax rate was also reduced from 35% to 21%. So, companies are taking these deductions off of a much smaller base.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was supposed to "broaden the base" by eliminating loopholes and lowering the rate. It ended up just lowering the rate and keeping most of the loopholes. As a result, many companies are paying little to nothing.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 18, 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Who will guard the guardians?

U.S. Government Is Hiding Documents That Incriminate Intelligence Community For Illegal Spying And Election Interference, Say Sources

Public, via Naked Capitalism 02-15-2024]

“Former CIA Director Gina Haspel blocked the release of ‘binder’ with evidence that may identify her role in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.”

CIA Had Foreign Allies Spy On Trump Team, Triggering Russia Collusion Hoax, Sources Say

Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag [via Naked Capitalism 02-14-2024]

[TW: I want to put forward the observation that given Trump’s close association with Roy Cohn, and business dealings with the Russian mafia, it would have been malpractice for USA intelligence agencies NOT to make such requests. The real problem with this is that there is no longer any reason to believe the the CIA, FBI, NSA and other intelligence agencies actually serve the General Welfare of the citizens of USA.

Or to put it another way, how would we want an intelligence agency to have dealt with Aaron Burr when Burr was running for president? Or how about dealing with Secretary of War Jefferson Davis in the 1850s as the sectional crisis worsened? What do we want an intelligence agency to do when one such appears headed for the highest office in the land? Or actually wins it?

There are many people who have a knee jerk reaction against intelligence agencies. Are we to abolish any and all intelligence agencies? I have no doubt that there are many people who immediately answer with an emphatic “yes!” I would ask them to take the time to read James Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo/ It is Cooper’s “novel” of how the secret service of Venice blackmails a poor man into being an assassin. At the very least, read Cooper’s Introduction; there is nothing fictional there at all. Cooper explains that he wrote the novel to explore the process of cultivating evil in the dark recesses of government power, and how that contrasts to the process of acculturation in civic values that is supposed to occur in a real republic.

In the case of Trump, we know that his behavior and character was molded in profoundly evil ways because Trump was tutored in Cohn’s methods and philosophy of government. But, again, what are we to do about this when we no longer have government institutions steeped in the civic values of republicanism? Recall that Jeffrey Epstein’s first troubles with law enforcement were dissipated by the intervention of intelligence agencies with the district attorney in Florida who wanted to bring charges.

Lambert Strether applauds (anti)Republicans for opposing the campaign of the intelligence agencies against Trump, but I do not think these (anti)Republicans are acting from any moral commitment to the good. Rather, their position is part of their partisan warfare against the Democrats, calculated to gain a political advantage. The excesses and coups of the CIA, let us remember were committed as much, if not more, under Republicans as Democrats. The names Dulles, Helms, Colby and Casey come to mind. And then there is George Bush Sr., who was both CIA director and POTUS. And I think it is a mistake to assume that only the Democrats thought they would benefit from the RussiaGate operation. Trump is as much a danger to the Republican establishment as he is to the Democratic Party. Nobody yet has been much interested in looking for a RussiaGate connection to the Bush family apparatus yet, but I suspect there are some important stories there waiting to be uncovered.

It is useful to look at the history of intelligence activities before the formal establishment of intelligence agencies — and especially the creation of the national security state — beginning with Franklin’s and Washington’s espionage operations during the Revolutionary War. Why were there no scandals arising from those operations? Or from the Union Army and Pinkerton operations during the Civil War? I contend that a large part of the reason was that the guardrails of public duty as defined by civic republicanism were still in place and quite robust.

In the final analysis, the only real way to “guard the guardians” is to make sure that the doctrines and values of civic republicanism a suffused throughout the nation. But capitalism, and its single-minded emphasis on self-interest, is a strong and dangerous corrosive element that must be reckoned with. — TW]

Death of Aleksei Navalny: the Brits did it!

Gilbert Doctorow [via Naked Capitalism 02-17-2024]

...In all of the false flag operations that have been directed by the West against Russia over the past decade or more, I have argued that the old Roman investigative principle of cui bono militated against the Kremlin having been involved in any way. So it is today: why would Putin want to murder Navalny, when the man is now largely forgotten within Russia. Navalny is yesterday’s news and his ‘anti-corruption’ campaign is irrelevant to Russians in the midst of an existential struggle with the Collective West that is being fought on the territory of Ukraine? However, the murder of Navalny clearly serves the interests of that same Collective West.…
Let us go beyond the cui bono argumentation to circumstantial evidence that is damning for the Brits. As the Americans like to say, there are ‘fingerprints’ of the Brits all over this death of Navalny.
A fair number of the poisonings and other assorted deaths of people who could be said were ‘inconvenient’ to the Kremlin happened in the U.K., after all. That is where Boris Berezovsky, the exiled oligarch who opposed Putin tooth and nail, was ‘suicided’ and it occurred in 2013 at his London estate when it was widely rumored he was looking for forgiveness for his treachery and was preparing to return to Mother Russia with a trove of documents. Earlier still, the U.K. is where the Berezovsky employee Alexander Litvinenko met his death in 2006 from polonium poisoning in a very British cuppa tea.
However, more recently there were incidents in the U.K. which bear directly on the fate of Navalny, and their timing is very relevant. I am thinking about the Novichok poisoning of former Russian spy Alexander Skripal in Salisbury at the start of March 2018, ahead of the 18 March presidential elections in Russia that year, when Putin was making his return to power following the interregnum when Dmitry Medvedev was president….

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 11, 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

Israel’s Relentless Bombing Erases Gaza’s Heritage Sites

[Wide Walls, via Naked Capitalism 02-09-2024]

The war in Gaza is wiping out Palestine’s education and knowledge systems

[The Conversation, via Naked Capitalism 02-09-2024]

In the past four months, all or parts of Gaza’s 12 universities have been bombed and mostly destroyed.
Approximately 378 schools have been destroyed or damaged. The Palestinian Ministry of Education has reported the deaths of over 4,327 students, 231 teachers and 94 professors.
Numerous cultural heritage sites, including libraries, archives and museums, have also been destroyed, damaged and plundered.

Oligarchs' war on the experiment of republican self-government

The Republican Party and Their Billionaire Backers’ Plot Against America

Thom Hartmann, February 8, 2024 [Common Dreams]

...The most appealing thing about a dictator is that he can “get things done.”
Dictators don’t have to worry about bureaucracies hindering them, or pesky laws and regulations. They don’t care about local opposition to their projects, or their impact on the environment.
From making the trains run on time to building an autobahn and a car company to go with it, dictators famously “get things done.”
The corollary to that old nostrum is that when things are going well, when things are working smoothly, when the people are getting what they want from their government, there is little interest in putting a dictator into office.
You have to break government pretty badly before people are willing to trade in a normal democracy for a dictatorship, but it’s sure happened before.
Germany wouldn’t have embraced Hitler if it weren’t for the depression the country had slid into because they lost World War I and were hit with fierce sanctions in the Treaty of Versailles.…
One of the most successful ways the forces of autocracy and authoritarianism have risen to power throughout history is by creating or stepping into a crisis and promising to be the “strongman” who will fix things and fix them now.
Which, of course, is why right-wing billionaires and the Republicans they own have been working so hard in the decades since the Reagan Revolution to break our government.
They want a series of terrible crises. And if they don’t happen organically, right wingers are more than happy to create them, as we saw this week when Republicans in the House of Representatives refused to do anything about our southern border or to fund aid to Ukraine and the Palestinians….