Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 22 2024
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
What is the deep state? (YouTube video)
(Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, YouTube, via Thomas Neuburger, God's Spies, 06-20-2024]
This video segment is taken from a symposium at which Sach and Mearsheimer offered their views on U.S. foreign policy. The whole thing is worth a listen, but I’ve cued this to start at the point where the question, “What is the deep state?” is asked and answered.
Note: The answer relates to foreign policy only, not the broader question of “Does the Establishment State try to influence domestic politics?”
“Sachs: My experience ... is that there's a deeply entrained foreign policy. It has been in place in my interpretation for many decades. But arguably a variant of it has been in place since 1992. I got to watch some of it early on because I was an adviser to Gorbachev and I was an adviser to Yeltsin, and so I saw early makings of this though I didn't fully understand it except in retrospect.
“But that policy has been mostly in place pretty consistently for 30 years, and it didn't really matter whether it was Bush Senior, whether it was Clinton, whether it was Bush Jr., whether it was Obama, whether it was Trump.
“After all, who did Trump hire? He hired John Bolton. Well, duh, pretty deep state. That was the end of ... they told, you know, he [Bolton] explained this is the way it is. And by the way, Bolton explained also in his memoirs, when Trump didn't agree we figured out ways to trick him basically.”
….
“MEARSHEIMER: When we talk about the ‘Deep State,’ we’re really talking about the Administrative State. It is very important to understand that starting in the late 19th and early 20th century, given developments in the American economy, it was imperative that we develop — and this is true of all Western countries — a very powerful central state that could ‘run the country.’ And over time, that state has grown in power.
“Since World War Two, the United States has been involved in every nook and cranny of the world, fighting wars here, there, and everywhere. And to do that, you need a very powerful administrative state that can help manage that foreign policy. But in the process, what happens is you get all of these high-level, middle-level, and low-level bureaucrats who become established in positions in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence community — you name it. And they end up having a vested interest in pursuing a particular foreign policy.
“That particular foreign policy that they like to pursue is the one the Democrats and the Republicans are pushing. That’s why we talk about tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum with regard to the two parties. You could throw in the deep state as being on the same page as those other two institutions….”
[TW: This is an important glimpse into the thinking of USA ruling elites. But just as important was what was said, is what was not said. There was no discussion of cooperation between nations on solving global problems, in line with what I have identified as a core principle of civic republicanism: one major role of government is to encourage people to do good by increasing humanity’s power over nature. There was no mention whatsoever of climate change, which absolutely will require global cooperation, probably on an unprecedented level. How about an international effort to help Mexico build a second Panama Canal? Or a crossing of the straits of Gibraltar, now considered an insurmountable engineering challenge. Wouldn’t it be much better to focus energies and resources on such projects?
[Increasing humanity’s power over nature: that’s what sewer systems and water distribution systems did — projects which are probably the single largest factor in tripling the average human life expectancy in the past three centuries. Sewer systems and water distribution systems are primary examples of increasing humanity’s power over nature. Not just power over flows of water, but power over the spread of bacteria and viruses.
[The “realism” discussed by Sachs and Mearsheimer emphasizes competition — just like neoliberal “free market” economics. The real way to avoid nuclear war is to emphasize the cooperation of the human family in solving the problems we call face. The old paradigms of thought must be banished and replaced. For example, the idea that economics is about how “society allocates scarce resources” (taught in all “classical economics” texts and courses in the West), must be replaced by the understanding of civic republican political economy that the foremost economic task of any society is to overcome scarcity and provide abundance by increasing the power of humanity to understand and prudently control natural resources, then to distribute that abundance equitably to all of humanity. One major international cooperative project that cries out for attention and support is to build sewer systems and water distribution systems throughout the entire world, most especially areas in Africa and South American which do not now have them. There should not be any people anywhere on the globe who are forced to spend large parts of their day filling the basic need of securing enough clean water to drink, bathe, and cook.
[Eight years ago, China proposed an international $50 trillion project to build an electric power grid to bring solar and wind generated electricity from the polar and equatorial regions of the world, to the more populated regions that use the electricity. It is a great strategic mistake to ignore such proposals. ]
Global power shift
China leads world in 57 of 64 critical technologies; up from 3 just 20 years ago
[Hacker News, via Naked Capitalism 09-21-2024]
ASPI’s two-decade Critical Technology Tracker
[ASPI, via Naked Capitalism 09-21-2024]
The Great China Car Blitzkrieg
[Michael Dunne, via Naked Capitalism 09-21-2024]
China will export a stunning 6 million cars to more than one hundred countries this year, cementing its position as the world’s No. 1 exporter.
The average price of those made-in-China cars: $19,000. That’s less than half the average price of a new car in America and Europe.
Consumers in every time zone are leaving their Chevys, VWs and Hondas in favor of new models from Chery, MG, Changan and BYD….
While Chinese automakers steal chunks of market share, Japanese, European and American competitor appear to have no response. They are confused and overwhelmed by the speed and strength of the Chinese offensive.
The prices of the Chinese exports in particular shock them. Who can compete with $19,000?
China’s frightening car prices are a product of a powerful national arsenal that may be impossible to duplicate.
China has unmatched scale, speed, supply chains and every variety of subsidies. Ships, too. BYD and SAIC have their own Roll-on/Roll-off vessels to transport cars across oceans….
If China can jump from 1 million exports in 2020 to 6 million in 2024, what is to stop China from shipping 12 million annually by 2028?
And what is to stop China’s mighty car blitzkrieg from shattering 100 years of Western car dominance?
Collapsing world order
[Madras Courier, via Naked Capitalism 09-19-2024]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Israel’s siege now blocks 83% of food aid reaching Gaza, new data reveals
[Norwegian Refugee Council, via Naked Capitalism 09-17-2024]
Data analysis by organisations working in Gaza has found that as a consequence of the Israeli government's obstruction of aid:
- 83% of required food aid does not make it into Gaza, up from 34% in 2023.This reduction means people in Gaza have gone from having an average of two meals a day to just one meal every other day. An estimated 50,000 children aged between 6-59 months urgently require treatment for malnutrition by the end of the year.
- 65% of the insulin required and half of the required blood supply are not available in Gaza.
- Availability of hygiene items has dropped to 15% of the amount available in September 2023. One million women are now going without the hygiene supplies they need.
- Only around 1,500 hospital beds in Gaza remain operational, compared to around 3,500 beds in 2023 which was already well below sufficient to meet the needs of a population of more than 2 million people. By comparison, cities of similar size, such as Chicago and Paris average 5 to 8 times more beds than in Gaza.
- 1.87 million people are in need of shelter with at least 60% of homes destroyed or damaged (January 2024). Yet tents for around just 25,000 people have entered Gaza since May 2024.
Netanyahu’s popularity surges as Gaza genocide nears one year mark: Poll
[The Cradle, via Naked Capitalism 09-16-2024]
'An Extremely Dark Place in History': UN Panel Says Israel Violated Child Rights Treaty
Jessica Corbett, September 19, 2024 [CommonDreams]
"I don't think we have seen before, a violation that is so massive, as we are seeing in Gaza now," said one committee leader.
A United Nations committee on Thursday called out Israel for "serious violations" of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in the occupied Palestinian territories, particularly with its nearly yearlong assault on the Gaza Strip.
"The outrageous death of children is almost historically unique. This is an extremely dark place in history," said Bragi Guðbrandsson, vice chair of the U.N. Child Rights Committee, which also released its findings on five other parties to the global treaty—Argentina, Armenia, Bahrain, Mexico, and Turkmenistan.
Oligarchy
Here Are the Members of Congress Invested in War
[Sludge, via Naked Capitalism 09-15-2024]
A Brief History of American Eugenics
Jessica Wildfire [Sentinel Intelligence, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 09-17-2024]
“The idea itself originated with Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, who invented the term in 1883. He argued that governments should play a more direct role in “improving” the human race through a range of policies. By the early 20th century, eugenics had become a widely accepted idea in western culture, endorsed by everyone from Winston Churchill to Woodrow Wilson and taught in hundreds of universities from Northwestern to Harvard. British eugenicists ultimately rejected the American spin on the idea, finding it completely horrifying…. Darwin’s cousin created the word, but it only gave Americans a term to articulate ideas that were circulating for decades, all rooted in a national obsession with racial and spiritual purity. The history matters because eugenics has returned stronger than ever in American culture, resting on the tip of every complacent tongue as Americans ignore genocide abroad while committing social murder at home, casually mocking anyone who still wears a mask and framing anyone in favor of public health as fringe, anxious, or just plain weird. What you see in America’s history is a desire to rid society of the ‘undesirable’ going back to the late 19th century and leading to the peak of the eugenics movement in the 1930s.”
YouTube discussion of “Higher immorality’ of US ruling class: Criminality of capitalist elites”
based on the analysis of C. Wright Mills. They discuss former House Speaker Dennis Hastert and suggest pedophilia is almost a requirement to be admitted to the elite at this point.
10:23
Dennis Hastert was able to become the third most powerful politician in the United States at least in terms of the succession for the presidency uh not in spite of being a pedophile but like that that was presumably uh one of his main assets to help him succeed uh in this place because it was he was such a corrupted individual uh that he was firmly under control of these very dark forces that are are pretty much personify or uh encapsulate the higher immorality okay that this is I I can’t think of a better example than this uh and this story the Hastert thing is like it it came and went and it should have been a huge story that we talked about and it should have led to bigger discussions on how something like this was possible and then that could have led to uh you know an exploration of the role of sexual blackmail in our political economy and it never did uh and that’s because it goes against the myths of uh of American democracy.
The Sexual Abuse Scandal That’s Engulfed the Evangelical Movement
Elle Hardy, September 20, 2024 [The New Republic]
...Sexual abuse in churches has long been thought of as a “Catholic disease,” but as recent events have shown, it is unchecked power and authority, not celibacy, that is the root of the problem. It is also very much a crisis of the evangelical movement’s own making; in this milieu, commercial incentives have produced a culture where the more charismatic and authoritarian the leader, the more successful the church. The widespread culture of abuse, cover-up, and denial has been exacerbated by the kind of corruption that arises when friends appoint friends to positions of authority, tamping down any incentives toward transparency and accountability….
[TW: Again, the tenets of civic republicanism: “power corrupts...” ]
The Higher Immorality, excerpts from The Power Elite, by C. Wright Mills (Oxford Press, 1956)
The men of the higher circles are not representative men; their high position is not a result of moral virtue; their fabulous success is not firmly connected with meritorious ability. Those who sit in the seats of the high and the mighty are selected and formed by the means of power, the sources of wealth, the mechanics of celebrity, which prevail in their society. They are not men selected and formed by a civil service that is linked with the world of knowledge and sensibility. They are not men shaped by nationally responsible parties that debate openly and clearly the issues this nation now so unintelligently confronts. They are not men held in responsible check by a plurality of voluntary associations which connect debating publics with the pinnacles of decision. Commanders of power unequaled in human history, they have succeeded within the American system of organized irresponsibility.
CEO Pay Has Risen 1,085% Since 1978, But for Workers? Just 24%
Jessica Corbett, Sep 19, 2024 [CommonDreams]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
States’ Endless Pursuit of Gambling Revenue Is Bad for Everyone
[Boondoggle, via Naked Capitalism 09-20-2024]
Dairy farmer profits sink as industry continues to consolidate
[ Investigate Midwest, via Naked Capitalism 09-20-2024]
Up to a Quarter of Rental Inflation Is Due to Price-Fixing
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 09-20-2024]
Late last month, the Department of Justice filed a complaint against a software and consulting firm called RealPage, alleging a broad conspiracy among corporate landlords to increase rents to millions nationwide. RealPage sold software and services to large real estate management firms, which in aggregate control rents for 16 million units nationwide, which is a not small fraction (36%) of the 44 million renting households in America.
This alleged conspiracy matters for a lot of reasons, but the most important one being that housing costs are a crisis in America. Last week, the government released statistics showing that rent went up by 5% over the past twelve months, and that the cost of shelter accounts for 70% of all inflation for the last twelve months….
Predatory finance
Everything this Book Predicted on Wall Street Megabanks Ruling their Regulators Is Now Unfolding
Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 16, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade]
It is rare for a book to be so comprehensive and insightful that it provides a roadmap for the future – especially when its cast of characters are the lawyered-up megabanks on Wall Street and their legions of lobbyists and public relations flacks. We’re referring to Taming the Megabanks: Why We Need a New Glass-Steagall Act by Arthur E. Wilmarth, Professor Emeritus of Law at George Washington University.
Last Tuesday, the Federal Reserve completely capitulated to the demands of the Wall Street megabanks on its plan to dramatically raise capital levels at the megabanks — the so-called Basel III Endgame. The Fed, via its Vice Chair for Supervision, Michael Barr, announced it was cutting the required capital it had formally proposed in July of 2023 by more than half and will continue to allow the megabanks to use their own dodgy internal models to assess market risk.
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, September 17, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade]
Restoring balance to the economy
Lina Khan Doesn’t Need to Be Confirmed Again
David Dayen, September 11, 2024 [The American Prospect]
...The state of the race right now suggests that it will be unlikely for Kamala Harris to have the wherewithal to completely overhaul the current executive team. She will have to decide where to spend political capital to get her personnel in place. And some fights are going to be deemed not worth having with a hostile Senate. Out of necessity, the Harris administration, at least to start, could look a lot like the Biden administration….
Many Biden nominees won the thinnest possible majority to get confirmed. (Some did earn broad bipartisan support, like … Lina Khan, who was confirmed 69-28 in 2021.) Julie Su barely got confirmed as deputy secretary, but did not have the votes to step into the secretary of labor position when Marty Walsh left. So the Biden administration did something unusual: They kept her in place as acting secretary for close to two years.
That is perfectly legal. The Labor Department’s statute clearly states that the deputy secretary can “perform the duties of the secretary” indefinitely in the event of a resignation.
There’s similar statutory authority for Lina Khan. Technically speaking, her formal term of office ends next Wednesday, September 25. But the FTC statute states explicitly that a commissioner “shall continue to serve until his [or her] successor shall have been appointed.” In other words, Lina Khan does not need to face a Senate confirmation again to continue serving; that’s just the factual reality.
The same is true of every member of Biden’s Cabinet. Robert Gates, for example, continued on as Barack Obama’s defense secretary as a holdover from the Bush administration from 2009 to 2011. He did not need to be reconfirmed. Even if all Cabinet members offered their resignation to Harris, they could offer to remain in office until a replacement was selected….
Let Our Tax-the-Rich Battle Begin!
Sam Pizzigati, September 21, 2024 [CommonDreams]
... In 2025, we have a real shot at taking the rich people-friendly magic out of our current federal tax code.
What makes 2025 so special? By the year’s end, most of the tax giveaways to the rich that Donald Trump signed into law in 2017 will expire. That reality will have rich people-friendly lawmakers entering next year absolutely desperate to renew those giveaways before that expiration takes place.
If Donald Trump wins election this November and arrives back in office with congressional majorities willing to follow his lead, our richest will gain that renewal. In 2026, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy calculates, that renewal would save our richest 1 percent — taxpayers with incomes over $914,900 — 46 times more than average taxpayers making between $55,100 and $94,100.
Arguments Against Taxing Unrealized Capital Gains of Very Wealthy Fall Flat
Chuck Marr and Samantha Jacoby, September 11, 2024 [Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, via Pizzigati, CommonDreams]
A proposal in the Biden-Harris Administration’s 2025 budget[1] would require households with more than $100 million in wealth to pay income taxes of at least 25 percent of their annual income, including their unrealized capital gains — gains in the value of assets that they have not yet sold. Critics argue that unrealized capital gains, which are a primary source of income for many extremely wealthy households, are mere “paper” gains that do not constitute real income (though they meet a textbook definition of income).[2] But unrealized gains make asset owners better off in very real ways. Claiming that unrealized gains are not “real” is akin to claiming that individuals such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are not rich unless they sell their companies’ stock.
Critics also claim the proposal would mark a radical departure from current tax practices, but this too is incorrect. Two of the main types of assets that middle-income households own — their homes and defined-contribution retirement accounts like 401(k)s — are already taxed in ways that resemble proposals to tax the unrealized capital gains of the very wealthy. A family’s property taxes typically rise as the value of their home rises, and middle-class people pay the tax year after year in amounts reflecting those gains without selling their homes. Retirement account holders are required to begin realizing their deferred gains in those accounts and pay the associated tax when they reach a certain age, and their heirs then pay tax on any remaining gains….
How Biden’s NLRB has Boosted Bottom-Up Unionism (& Why this Matters)
[Labor Politics, via Naked Capitalism 09-20-2024]
High insulin prices spur a federal lawsuit against three pharmacy benefit managers
[Associated Press, via Naked Capitalism 09-21-2024]
AOC Goes All In With Her Brilliant New Housing Plan To Get Right At The Meat Of the Problem
jellis,September 20, 2024 [DailyKos]
Disrupting mainstream economics
Monopoly Round-Up: Antitrust Chief Says Economics Has Its Big Tobacco Corruption Moment
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 09-16-2024]
...I want to spend a bit of time on a shocking speech at Fordham University given this week by the Antitrust chief at the Department of Justice, Jonathan Kanter, on the “crisis of expertise” in antitrust, aka the corruption of economists. After a career in the corporate bar, Kanter became the top official on antitrust in the executive branch. The top antitrust enforcer role has been until recently occupied by a someone with a sense of community among corporate practitioners. Kanter has changed the game, with aggressive monopolization suits against Google, Ticketmaster, and Apple.
And this week, Kanter decided it was time to tell some hard truths to fellow antitrust experts. With “gasps in the room,” he laid into academics, particularly economists, for taking money from large corporations and then offering their supposedly expert disinterested opinion. It’s a well-known problem, but one that goes unmentioned in polite circles. Until now.
Kanter noted a series of stories, like tricking an international enforcer into attending a training event he thought was associated with the U.S. government, but was in fact paid for by large corporations encouraging lax antitrust, or academics taking money from big tech and then advocating against action against big tech, all without disclosure. He cited, without naming names, a disgraced academic named Josh Wright authoring papers promoting Qualcomm’s posture on antitrust, papers later cited by a Court of Appeals ruling for the company. Wright was paid by Qualcomm, but hadn’t disclosed that.
Kanter then brought up how pervasive and routine this corruption has become, that it has infected major economics journals, and that it’s similar to how big tobacco operated in the 1950s and 1960s to hide the link between cancer and cigarettes. Universities, economics journals, and the practice of economics are being fundamentally corrupted….
Every state trying to do something on privacy or antitrust has to deal with this crud clogging up our public discourse. But corruption is also in our academic centers, shaping our views in ways we have trouble imagining. Historian Richard John, for instance, responded to Kanter’s speech by publishing a piece showing how much more deeply rooted the problem truly is. He revealed how the very practice of history at Harvard in the 1960s onward was structured by pro-monopoly AT&T lobbyists, who wanted Harvard historians to move away from studying political economy and towards social history with a cultural lens. That’s in part why the anti-monopoly tradition died, the historians stopped writing about it, at the behest of AT&T….
Health care crisis
For-Profit US Healthcare System—Once Again—Ranks Dead Last Among Its Peers
Jake Johnson, September 19, 2024 [CommonDreams]
The new analysis from the Commonwealth Fund is the latest indictment of a corporate-dominated system that leaves tens of millions of people uninsured or underinsured and unable to afford life-saving medications without rationing doses or going into debt.
"Despite spending a lot on healthcare, the United States is not meeting one of the principal obligations of a nation: to protect the health and welfare of its residents," the report states. "Most of the countries we compared are providing this protection, even though each can learn a good deal from its peers. The U.S., in failing this ultimate test of a successful nation, remains an outlier."
People in the U.S., which spends roughly twice as much per capita on healthcare as other rich nations, "live the shortest lives and have the most avoidable deaths," Commonwealth noted, pointing to frequent "denials of services by insurance companies" and other systematic defects of the American system, including massive administrative costs.
Meanwhile, insurance giants and pharmaceutical companies are raking in huge profits, benefiting in particular from the growing privatization of Medicare. More than half of the Medicare-eligible population in the U.S. is currently on a privately run Medicare Advantage plan.
[Science-Based Medicine, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 09-18-2024]
“The Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) was published on October 4th, 2020. It was written under the watchful eye of a pro-tobacco, child-labor advocate, and it claimed we could rid ourselves of the virus by spreading the virus. The GBD claimed we could end the pandemic by April 2021 at the latest, but only if everyone worked in perfect unison…. In the GBD’s vision, the entire country would be informed of their Declaration, and after this, everyone would unite to abruptly and radically shift their entire approach to the pandemic. Citizens would voluntarily and appropriately sort themselves ‘vulnerable’ or ‘not vulnerable’ categories, and everyone would play their assigned role. 230 million or so unvaccinated, ‘not vulnerable’ Americans, most of whom had been diligently trying to avoid the virus thus far, would instantly reverse course and embrace ‘natural infection’. That some of them would get really sick and die would not be a reason for anyone to abandon the project.”
Cigna sues FTC over ‘defamatory’ PBM report
[Becker’s Hospital Review, via Naked Capitalism 09-20-2024]
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
THEY PROTESTED A MILITARY BASE EXPANSION. SO THE FBI INVESTIGATED THEM AS TERRORISM SUSPECTS.
[The Intercept, via Naked Capitalism 09-16-2024]
African Stream: Russia’s Latest Covert Influence Pipeline Targeting Africa and the U.S.
[Stanford Cyber Policy Center. Commentary, via Naked Capitalism 09-20-2024]
Taibbi & Kaminsky: Why are we targets of the State Department?
[Unherd, YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 09-21-2024]
Project Analyzing Human Language Usage Shuts Down Because ‘Generative AI Has Polluted the Data’
[404 Media, via Naked Capitalism 09-20-2024]
Collapse of independent news media
Major outlets change standards for hacked emails, protect Trump
[Popular Information, via The Big Picture 09-15-2024]
For weeks, major American media organizations — including The Washington Post, Politico, and the New York Times — have possessed internal Trump campaign documents. What do these documents say? We don’t know because all three outlets have declined to publish the documents — or excerpt a single sentence. This is a much different approach than the Washington Post took after hackers connected to the Russian government leaked internal emails from Clinton campaign officials and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The Washington Post published dozens of stories based on these leaked emails. The steady drumbeat of mostly unflattering articles was a major part of the election narrative in the days and weeks before election day.
Climate and environmental crises
In Honduras, Libertarians and Legal Claims Threaten to Bankrupt a Nation
[Inside Climate News, via Naked Capitalism 09-17-2024]
AI ‘accelerating’ climate crisis, uses 30 times more energy than search engine: analyst
[South China Morning Post, via Naked Capitalism 09-17-2024]
Data center emissions probably 662% higher than big tech claims. Can it keep up the ruse?
[The Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 09-16-2024]
Democrats' political malpractice
Harris’ Turn To The Dark (Money) Side
Helen Santoro, September 18, 2024 [The Lever]
Despite a history of decrying dark money, Harris is now reaping the rewards of big, secret political donations.
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
The approach other countries take -- and that's embedded in the ACA -- is to increase the cross-subsidy between healthy and sick and (ideally) get to one giant insurance pool. Conservatives want to push in the other direction, with different insurance for pools with different levels of risk i.e., reverting to something more like the old, pre-ACA system
The Political Economy of Trad Dad Populism
[Law and Political Economy Project, via Naked Capitalism 09-20-2024]
What is Trad Dad Populism?
Since hitting upon a winning formula in the 1980 presidential election, the Republican Party has counted on an electoral fusion of social conservatives, market fundamentalists, and foreign policy hawks. Trump changed all of that, most visibly by unleashing elements of the fringe right into positions of prominence and power. Social conservatives who had never felt like equal partners stacked the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, succeeding where much more anti-abortion Republican Presidents had failed. Now they are defining themselves against laissez-faire by openly promoting active government.
In the race to lead a changed party, politicians like Hawley have borrowed leftwing critiques of the rightwing status quo, telling the audience at this year’s National Conservatism conference that the Right has failed because “[i]n this moment of crisis, they’re busy tending the dying embers of neoliberalism. They’re reading their copies of John Stuart Mill and Ayn Rand. They’re still talking about fusionism and its three-legged stool. . . .In the name of ‘the market,’ these Republicans cheerleaded for corporate tax cuts and low barriers for corporate trade, then watched these same corporations ship American jobs overseas and use the profits to hire DEI experts.” Although it rhymes with leftwing populism’s juxtaposition between capital and labor, Hawley’s Trad Dad Populism orients itself against perceived cultural elitism and decadence.
The Trad Dad Populist believes that the heterosexual nuclear family is the essential building block of a healthy American political economy. He emphasizes the lost past of the family wage, when a man’s work could support his housewife and children in a life of church, community, and middle-class consumption. The ideology revolves around a theory of social life derived from one reading of Christian morality, in which gender hierarchy is the backbone of social order, combined with nostalgia for a working class composed of white men in blue collar jobs—a portrait that is inaccurate for huge swaths of American history, including the height of mid-century growth (to say nothing of today’s working class, which looks entirely different). On this account, the most important deficit is not in the national balance of trade, but in American manhood, which doubles as the title of Hawley’s recent book. (I highly recommend this review of the book by Strict Scrutiny co-hosts Leah Litman, Melissa Murray, and Kate Shaw.) It follows that the prime targets of the Trad Dad Populists are feminists, queer & trans people, and immigrants….
The Cultural Foundations of Political Economy
... what’s important to see is how this social vision forms the foundation for a (much shakier) economic plan. Social values are not “merely cultural,” but constitute the broader agenda. Trad Dad Populists have a very clear sense of social order and are attempting to build an alternative conservative political economy around it. Seeing through this lens helps us make sense of recent events that seem to scramble our political assumptions, like watching Teamsters President Sean O’Brien in a primetime appearance at the Republican National Convention, or hearing Hawley bemoan the loss of good jobs for the working class.
Suzanne Schneider, September 22, 2024 [The New York Review]
The Heritage Foundation has reinvented itself to include a new generation of conservatives at odds with their elders. Project 2025 lays bare the contradictions.
On July 8 Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, took the stage at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C. He was there to deliver a special message to the old Republican coalition—the libertarians, neocons, and establishment types who remain skeptical of Donald Trump’s GOP. Conservatives, he told them, face a left that is “totalitarian in its mission…expansionist, imperialistic, and practically jihadist in its theocratic fanaticism.” Against that threat, Roberts argued, they have no choice but to ally with national conservativism, an emergent right-wing movement that combines militant cultural reaction, unilateralism on the world stage, and populist economics….
It was uncanny to watch Roberts rail against a Republican establishment that Heritage, perhaps more than any other institution, helped create. Founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, Edwin Feulner, and Joseph Coors, Heritage surged to national prominence in 1980, when it published Mandate for Leadership—a policy handbook for what would become known as the Reagan revolution. According to the historian and former Heritage fellow Lee Edwards, Reagan implemented or initiated approximately 60 percent of its two thousand proposals, including dramatic tax cuts, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and creating “enterprise zones” meant to spur redevelopment in blighted urban neighborhoods.…
...under Roberts the foundation has moved—albeit ambivalently—to embrace quite a different cohort. In recent years a group of “New Right” intellectuals and political movements has emerged, borrowing (as I have detailed elsewhere) from left-wing critiques of capitalism in the service of a reactionary cultural project. They include Catholic post-liberals like Patrick Deneen and Sohrab Ahmari; Oren Cass, the founder of a think tank called American Compass; Josh Hawley, the senior Missouri senator; and the Ohio senator and vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance. The New Right has propelled economic populism into the conservative mainstream, arguing that government, far from threatening traditional family values, needs to actively intervene in the marketplace and the home to reshape the nation’s moral habits….
...Roberts is doing his best to bridge the divide. As his outreach to the old guard at NatCon suggests, he is moving to position Heritage as a kind of big tent, capitalizing on New Right energy without alienating the moneyed establishment. It is the culture war that binds these competing economic factions together. There might be newfound space on the right to debate the free market, but nearly everyone agrees about using state power to enforce a radical agenda on a fallen citizenry, including by banning trans medicine for youth and imposing draconian abortion restrictions. They differ over whether cultivating a moral society must entail improving working people’s material conditions—whether, in other words, to combine economic carrots and legal sticks or rely on sticks alone….
PHOTO: A Trump / Vance sign outside an early voting site in Virginia a few days ago, reads:
NO TAX ON TIPS
NO TAX ON SOCIAL SECURITY
NO TAX ON OVERTIME PAY
NO OPEN BORDERS
Vote Republican!
What do you have to lose?
Trump’s Tax Cut-A-Rama Total So Far: $9.75 Trillion
David Dayen, September 11, 2024 [The American Prospect]
Liberals and the left fail to notice - and celebrate - the intellectual death of conservatism
Tony Wikrent, March 2, 2019 [RealEconomics]
Faced with Trump's populist seizure of the Republican Party, establishment conservatives and libertarians are trying to redefine classic republicanism (referring to the ideas on which the USA was established as a republic, not to the Republican Party) to exclude anything other than market capitalism….
...capitalism and the importance it places on selfishness and self-interest is a fundamental rejection of republicanism….
Economic injustice creates oligarchy which destroy republics from within
But it gets worse, much worse, for conservatives and modern libertarians. Unless Lindsey and other doctrinaire propagandists succeed in redefining it on their terms, republicanism demands that the problems of wealth injustices and income inequalities be solved in ways they are going to hate….
Hamilton: An active role of government in the economy is required
Moreover, in an explicit repudiation of the laissez faire ideas of Adam Smith and the British, Hamilton emphasized the importance of having active government interests and investment in new and important economic enterprise. In his December 1791 Report to Congress on the Subject of Manufactures, Hamilton wrote:"Experience teaches, that men are often so much governed by what they are accustomed to see and practice, that the simplest and most obvious improvements, in the [most] ordinary occupations, are adopted with hesitation, reluctance and by slow gradations … To produce the desirable changes, as early as may be expedient, may therefore require the incitement and patronage of government… The apprehension of failing in new attempts is perhaps a more serious impediment…it is of importance that the confidence of cautious sagacious capitalists…should be excited… it is essential, that they should be made to see in any project, which is new, and for that reason alone, if, for no other, precarious, the prospect of such a degree of countenance and support from government, as may be capable of overcoming the obstacles, inseparable from first experiments."The left usually misses this crucial point of what Hamilton designed. Rather than the Marxist model of the means of production determining the political superstructure, what actually happens under Hamilton's system is government support for new science and technology creates new means of production….
How Trump’s Tariffs Would Radically Redistribute Wealth Upward
David Cay Johnston, September 20, 2024 [The New Republic]
You’ve surely read that tariffs would just tax regular Americans. You may not have read how they’d work to make the rich richer.
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Alarm as Trump Judge Sides With Company Claiming NLRB Is Unconstitutional
Julia Conley, September 17, 2024 [CommonDreams]
...In the Northern District of Texas, U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman ruledin favor of Findhelp's claim that administrative law judges at the NLRB have unconstitutional protections from being dismissed by the White House.
The argument has been used by other large companies including billionaire Elon Musk's aerospace firm SpaceX and a subsidiary of the fossil fuel giant Energy Transfer, which have both also obtained preliminary injunctions from Trump appointees in Texas, shielding them from labor rights cases.
Trump Judge Strikes Blow Against NLRB in Troubling Sign of What’s Next
Hafiz Rashid, September 17, 2024 [The New Republic]
The preliminary injunction cites the recent Supreme Court decision in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, which weakened federal regulatory agencies. Findhelp argued that the NLRB’s judge system, which hears cases, violates the separation of powers, and Pittman agreed in granting the injunction. This does not bode well for the NLRB, and signals a long legal fight between big business and unions, divided along ideological lines between conservatives and liberals. The case could go all the way to the Supreme Court, where it would meet a pro-business majority handpicked by Donald Trump himself.
Conservatives and their corporate allies have been attacking the NLRB for quite some time, with Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s all mounting legal cases against the agency in an attempt to destroy it. Trump’s time as president was four years of pro-business practices, appointing corporate-aligned attorneys to the Department of Labor and weakening laws that would have expanded worker pay and strengthened unions.
New Revelations Show Just How Corrupt the Supreme Court Really Is
Michael Waldman, September 18, 2024 [CommonDreams]
The Secret Plot To Buy American Democracy (podcast)
[The Lever, September 20, 2024]
In 1971, Lewis Powell, a tobacco industry lawyer and future Supreme Court justice, penned a memo calling on conservatives and business interests to make the nation’s legal system far more friendly to corporate power. A few years later, a lawyer named Michael Horowitz penned a follow-up memo calling for conservatives to indoctrinate generations of lawyers as the right’s foot soldiers on the ground.
Today on Lever Time, senior podcast producer Arjun Singh talks to David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher about their deep-dive investigation into this 50-year plan in the hit new Lever podcast Master Plan. Then, Arjun sits down with journalist David Daley to discuss his latest book, Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right's 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections.
Daley’s book centers on Chief Justice John Roberts, whose ascent to the high court — and the conservative rulings he’s handed down — were the culmination of decades of work that began with Powell and Horowitz’s memos.
To read an unedited transcript of this episode, click here.
Behind The Scenes Of MASTER PLAN
David Sirota, September 21, 2024 [The Lever]
David Sirota and the team behind the hit podcast detail their two-year reporting process and ponder the future of campaign finance reform.
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