Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 01, 2024
By Tony Wikrent
Jonathan Larson: A Life of Learning, Service, and Curiosity (July 17, 1949 - November 2024)
It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of Jonathan Larson, the founder of the Real Economics blog. Jonathan's insatiable curiosity, dedication to public service, determination to improve the human condition, and deep intellect left an indelible mark on all who knew him….
He authored Elegant Technology: Economic Prosperity from an Environmental Blueprint, a book that showcased his commitment to sustainable development and his vision for a greener future. Published in Scandinavia, the book demonstrated his global perspective and ability to inspire change across borders.
He also authored a paper on heterodox economist and scholar Thorstein Veblen, and supported and closely followed the restoration of the Veblen homestead. Jonathan began this blog, Real Economics, to do as Veblen had -- challenge and seek to supplant the failing orthodoxy of mainstream neoliberal and conservative economics….
Jonathan's passing leaves behind a legacy of intellectual brilliance, moral courage, and unyielding dedication to the betterment of society. His life serves as a reminder that curiosity, compassion, and hard work can create a better world. Those who knew him who will forever cherish his memory.
Strategic Political Economy
Trump tariffs a "10 year project" to make China consume more and manufacture less.
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 11-27-2024]
[TW: The Trump regime’s goal of forcing China to “manufacture less” should be understood in the context of Thorstein Veblen’s explanation of the conflict between business and industry. Business managers and financiers dislike the uncertainty and unpredictability created by technological innovation. Rather than creating wealth through increased and less imperfect production (here, think of the Japanese concept of kaizen), business managers and financiers instead seek to acquire wealth “by a shrewd restriction of output,” causing privation and unemployment. This actually establishes and perpetuates a process of financial sabotage of industry, as Veblen explained in the first chapter of his 1921 book, The Engineers and the Price System.
[By contrast, a foreign policy based on principles of civic republicanism would seek to collaboration and cooperation with other nations to solve the most pressing problems facing humanity, such as transitioning off of fossil fuels, and ensuring universal supplies of clean water, medical care, transportation, and so on.]
Sanders Says There Is No Choice: 'We Must Defeat the Oligarchs'
Jon Queally, November 30, 2024 [CommonDreams]
… Sen. Bernie Sanders issued a statement Saturday clarifying his belief that confronting the ruling oligarchy over the "coming months and years" will be the key battle for anyone who wants to build an economy and political system that puts the interests of everyday working people ahead of those of super-wealthy elites….
Enough Wealth to Warp the Universe
Hamilton Nolan, November 25, 2024
Last week, in the wake of favorable election results and a boom in the price of Tesla stock, Elon Musk’s net worth hit $348 billion. Numbers this large tend to fade into meaninglessness, so far outside of normal human experience that people have no real way to grasp their size. How can we think of a single person worth $348 billion?….
The JPMorgan Chase bank is worth $332 billion. Elon Musk could buy it out of pocket. He could buy the entire Coca-Cola corporation, give it away, and still be one of the 20 richest people in America. He could buy all of Goldman Sachs, give it away, and still be one of the five richest people in America….
The median sales price of a home in the US is $420,000. Elon Musk could personally buy 829,000 median-priced homes. For context, that is 100,000 more housing units than there are in Philadelphia.
The average new car in America costs $48,400. Elon Musk could buy 7.2 million new cars. New York City residents own a total of about two million cars….
What I’m saying is that Elon Musk does not just have a lot of money. Elon Musk has too much money… The total cost of all federal elections this year amounts to less than 5% of Musk’s net worth… Elon Musk [is capable of] buying every national election in America—or, assuming he donated only to Republicans, doubling the campaign budgets of every Republican candidate for federal office....
It is natural to be worried about what Elon Musk has already bought himself with his donations to Trump’s campaign. He is now in a position to shut down federal investigations into his companies, to put a thumb on the scale to award himself lucrative federal contracts, and to use his connections to escape enforcement of federal labor, environmental, and other regulations. All of these possibilities are the straightforward wages of buying political influence, and they are all very bad….
This, then, is the situation that America finds itself in: A strongman president who demands utter loyalty who is backed by the nation’s richest man, who is willing to use his wealth to destroy anyone who opposes the president, and who is able to do so because of our nation’s awful campaign finance laws. I realize that none of this is news, but I am not sure that everyone has fully digested just how dangerous this situation is to democracy itself. Trump, a completely unscrupulous president who values only loyalty and cares nothing about corruption, will happily give Elon Musk anything he wants in exchange for Musk being the mightiest bank account in all of American politics, willing to overwhelm all political opposition with money that no other donors are capable of matching. These two men, by themselves, are in a position to dictate the course of federal elections and federal government policy for years to come. All it will take is for Elon Musk to remain willing to spend on elections at the level he is capable of—a level he has not even begun to approach yet….
...if everyone on the left half of the political spectrum spent all of our time for the next four years raising money, it would still be a trivial act for Elon Musk to spend five seconds writing a check for more than the amount that we would raise....
This is why billionaires should not exist. Not only because many of them are rat bastards. Not only because nobody needs that much money and it could be put to much better uses. But also because the accumulation of so much wealth in the hands of a single person makes that person so ridiculously powerful that an entire nation of hundreds of millions of people cannot outweigh the influence of one.
If we want a democracy, we will confiscate their wealth. We are not going to be in the position to do it any time soon. But when Democrats regain control of the government, they need to take this seriously. If the only response to billionaires on one side is for the other side to desperately try to cultivate their own billionaires, all the rest of us get left on the side of the road, disempowered observers of the dumbest soap opera that has ever existed.
Is A Democratic Billionaire Better Than A Republican Billionaire?
Howie Klein, November 28, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
...For the past decade or so, Bernie has been talking about the billionaire class, not the Republican billionaire class or the Democratic billionaire class— just the billionaire class. There’s no place in a Democracy for billionaires.A progressive tax structure should have taken care of that. As Bernie noted in a new interview with John Nichols. “The Democratic Party is, increasingly, a party dominated by billionaires, run by well-paid consultants whose ideology is to tinker around the edges of a grossly unjust and unfair oligarchic system. If we are ever going to bring about real change in this country, we have got to significantly grow class consciousness in America. The questions that have to be asked [by activists who are serious about developing a powerful alterative to the Republicans] are: ‘Why in the wealthiest country in the history of the world are 60 percent of our people living paycheck to paycheck? Why do 60,000 people a year die because they don’t get to a doctor on time? Why can’t young people afford higher education?’ Those are the issues that have got to be talked about, that have got to be carried into the political sphere. And the Democratic Party— with few exceptions— is by and large not interested in doing that… There was a time in history— under FDR, even [under] Harry Truman, all the way up to Kennedy— where the Democratic Party was the party of the working class. I don’t think very many people believe that is the case today. In fact, what this last campaign was about was the Democrats doing much better among upper-income people, while the Republicans did much better in working-class communities….
Naming the Perp: Very Few People Cause All of the World's Worst Problems
Thomas Neuburger, November 27, 2024
To break this down, let’s look at American wealth in tiers:
The 17 richest people own $2.2 trillion (Forbes). Just 17 people.
The 400 richest own about $5.4 trillion (Forbes).
The 800 richest (includes all billionaires) own $6.2 trillion (source), twice the GDP of France.
The top 0.1% of Americans, about 131,000 households, own $21 trillion (Fed).
The top 1% of Americans, about 1.3 million households, own 30% of the wealth, or $46 trillion (Fed).
Everyone else splits the rest, about $100 trillion (Fed), divided among 130 million households, or 330 million souls. Those in the bottom 20% average about $14,000….
According to a new book, Titans of Capital by Peter Phillips, here’s what the global rich do with most of their wealth (emphasis mine):
The global richest .05 percent represents some 40 million people, including more than 36 million millionaires and 2,600 billionaires, who turn over their excess capital to investment management firms like BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase. The top ten of these firms together controlled close to $50 trillion in 2023. These firms are managed by the 117 people identified below. The top ten capital investment companies extensively cross-invest in each other. Cross-investments between the top ten firms amounted to $320.52 billion in 2022. Cross-investment practices imply a close monitoring of each other’s policies and a commonality of mutual interests in market maintenance and growth.
The 117 Titans decide how and where global capital will be invested.
[TW: Two considerations: first, there is likely to be a new, massive push for privatization of government services under Trump’s and Musk’s determination to dismantle the national government. Second, a possible way to derail Musk’s DOGE cutting of the national government budget may be to insist on a hard look at if governments have actually “saved money” with the privatizations of the past half century. The cases of British passenger rail and water supply are already notorious, if seldom mentioned in the mainstream media. I strongly suspect that the Pentagon’s budget could easily be cut by tens of billions of dollars by simply ending many privatization contracts and letting the actual military services do things like feed themselves, instead of outside contractors. Note that the US Air Force has reportedly already fielded a sixth-generation fighter by developing it in-house instead of relying on the parasitical defense contractors.]
Why Privatization Is Worse Than You Know
[publicseminar.org, January 7, 2022]
...activist and organizer Donald Cohen sat down with journalist Allen Mikaelian to write The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back (New Press, 2021),
Procurement Cost Analyses and the Decision to Contract
[inthepublicinterest.org, September 26, 2024]
As we recently announced and explored in a Q&A with Jobs to Move America (JMA), new updates to the Office of Management and Budget’s Uniform Guidance allow localities and states greater flexibility in incorporating pro-worker and pro-equity standards and tools in their contracting involving federal grant dollars. JMA leads the Local Opportunities Coalition, which fought for and won many of the new updates (In the Public Interest is a member of the coalition). As JMA explains in our Q&A, “The updates to the Uniform Guidance are critical as billions in federal funds flow to cities and states from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), CHIPS & Science Act, and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). Local and state governments will now be able to attach policies to this funding to maximize benefits for communities, workers, and small businesses.” Local Opportunities Coalition put together a memo highlighting some of the most important updates to the guidance.
One such critical new requirement is that localities and states using federal dollars for contracting must perform a “cost-benefit or price analysis.”
At minimum, a cost analysis should compare the full costs associated with delivering a public good or service publicly versus privately. While this is necessary to comply with the new federal rules for federal pass-through funds, it’s also vital that localities and states have a robust cost analysis process for all their contracting, regardless of whether federal dollars are involved, to save public money, to ensure high-quality service delivery, and to determine, in the first place, whether contracting is the best option.
Given the importance of this type of analysis and the new requirement, ITPI has written an issue brief designed to provide frameworks for localities and states to create or improve their procurement cost analysis process. It will also provide advocates with an understanding of what these types of analyses should look like so they can intervene in proposed contracts to ensure procurement decisions meet the needs of their communities.
By Matthew D. Bunker and Charles N. Davis
Global power shift
Patrick Lawrence [Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 11-27-2024]
...We have just witnessed a week’s worth of shocking provocations as the U.S. and Britain escalate their proxy war against Russia under the pretense of defending Ukraine in a war that is already lost.
Washington and London — the latter with the former’s assent — have now authorized the grossly irresponsible regime in Kiev to fire American– and British-made missiles into Russian territory.
The Ukrainians wasted no time doing so. The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) launched a volley of U.S.–made ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) missiles at Russian targets last Tuesday. A day later the AFU fired a similar barrage of British-made Storm Shadow missiles into Russian territory.
The degree of planning and coordination behind these attacks seems to me self-evident. Nobody in Washington, London, or Kiev is commenting on the targets hit, but these, too, were without question chosen after careful consultation.
Moscow has responded just as it said it would weeks ago. It now considers itself at war with the Western powers and, last Thursday, attacked a Ukrainian target with a new-generation hypersonic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead….
Questions & answers on China as a major creditor power
[CADTM, via Naked Capitalism 11-30-2024]
Commentary: US car industry is passing the baton to China with barely a fight
[Channel News Asia, via Naked Capitalism 11-25-2024]
Collapsing Empire: RIP Royal Navy
Kit Klarenberg [Global Delinquents]
...British ministers and military chiefs are, per The Times, “under immense pressure to make billions of pounds’ worth of savings,” with major “casualties” certain. Resultantly, senior Ministry of Defence and Treasury officials are considering scrapping at least one of the carriers, if not both. The reason is simple - “in most war games, the carriers get sunk,” and are “particularly vulnerable to missiles.” As such, the pair are now widely perceived as the “Royal Navy’s weak link.”
Matthew Savill of British state-tied Royal United Services Institute told The Times that missile technology is developing “at such a pace”, carriers are rapidly becoming easy for Britain’s adversaries to “locate and track”, then neutralise. “In particular,” he cautioned, China is increasing the range of its ballistic and supersonic anti-ship missiles. Meanwhile, Beijing’s “hypersonic glide vehicle”, the DF-17, “can evade existing missile defence systems,” its “range, speed and manoeuvrability” making it a “formidable weapon” neither Britain nor the US can adequately counter….
Are they planning a false flag event in London?
Alex Krainer, November 29, 2024
Yesterday, as I was finalizing my new report on Great Britain, an update to my August 26 article "The Coming Collapse of Britain," YouTube randomly suggested to me a short video by one Craig Houston titled, "Why are ALL LONDON webcams offline...?"
I was nearly floored: Mr. Houston looked through hundreds of Webcams across London and could not find a single one that was live. See for yourself here and here! That's extremely odd: clearly, someone made the decision to switch them all off - they couldn't all have failed randomly….
I think it's the only explanation that makes any sense to my mind: they are planning a false-flag terror attack on London which they'll blame on Russia, so that they can trigger an all-out, whole-of-society mobilization by all of the Western powers against Russia. Now, if this seems far-fetched, there are now several important elements that fit coherently with this scenario, starting with the general geopolitical state of things.
Western empire and the UK in particular, bet heavily on Ukraine and lost. By now the situation has become as undeniable as it is hopeless….
I believe that this is the reason why Western powers are encouraging Ukraine to strike into Russia with their missiles, even though there is almost nothing to be gained. Such escalation only makes them directly involved as belligerents in the conflict. This is why incredibly, the U.S. is suddenly discussing providing Ukraine with nuclear Weapons….
[TW: It would also be like the British oligarchy to use a false-flag event to force a change in Trump’s stated opposition to continuing the war in Ukraine, and lock Trump into a military response to Russia.]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
If The Gaza Ceasefire Holds, Israel Has Won
Ian Welsh, November 27, 2024
Oligarchy
We Tracked Every Visitor to Epstein Island
[WIRED, via Naked Capitalism 11-27-2024].
“Many of the visitors were likely wealthy, as indicated by coordinates pointing to gated communities in Michigan, as well as homes in Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket in Massachusetts.”
John R. MacArthur [Harper’s, via Naked Capitalism 11-27-2024]
...Today, France and the United States are best described in terms of this classic financial-business-political oligarchy. The current French government makes a mockery of the people’s will. After dissolving parliament in June, President Emmanuel Macron brushed aside the results of the legislative elections—which favored the left—and installed a right-wing government. In so doing, he imitated former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who, most notably, circumvented a 2005 national referendum rejecting the European Constitution without consulting the French people.
Only a sophisticated oligarchy can invalidate democracy that easily. I’ve never seen it play out as clearly as in Le Monde on September 24, in an article on the inner workings of a tight-knit political circle almost invisible to the general public. According to the paper, on March 6, a year after Macron’s government barely survived a vote of no confidence, Macron summoned his predecessor, former president François Hollande, a socialist, to talk about the war in Ukraine. At that meeting, the “troubled head of state” told Hollande that he was “desperately trying to expand his relative majority in Parliament.”
Hollande, a supposed leftist, reportedly responded that “You’re conducting right-wing politics. You have to make an alliance with the right.” Macron responded by saying, “I didn’t do all this to end up there.” But apparently he did. On September 21, with the support of enough deputies (and the key backing of far-right Marine Le Pen), he appointed “a government of thirty-nine ministers mixing a young Macronist guard with a dozen elected officials from the conservative right.”
Bossware is unfair (in the legal sense, too)
[Cory Doctorow [Pluralistic, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-26-2024]
“You can get into a lot of trouble by assuming that rich people know what they’re doing. For example, might assume that ad-tech works – bypassing peoples’ critical faculties, reaching inside their minds and brainwashing them with Big Data insights, because if that’s not what’s happening, then why would rich people pour billions into those ads? You might assume that private equity looters make their investors rich, because otherwise, why would rich people hand over trillions for them to play with? The truth is, rich people are suckers like the rest of us. If anything, succeeding once or twice makes you an even bigger mark, with a sense of your own infallibility that inflates to fill the bubble your yes-men seal you inside of. But though rich people can fall for scams the same way you and I do, the way those scams play out is very different when the marks are wealthy. As Keynes had it, “The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” When the marks are rich (or worse, super-rich), they can be played for much longer before they go bust, creating the appearance of solidity.”
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Monopoly Round-Up: Economic Termites Preparing to Feast?
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 11-25-2024]
Predatory finance
The Crypto Plot Against America’s Gold Reserves
by Ryan Cooper November 26, 2024 [The American Prospect]
So now that crypto has bought great political influence, it’s time to cash in. How might this happen? The basic idea is to turn the American government into the biggest crypto bag-holder of all time. If the plan goes through, hundreds of billions of dollars of public assets will be spent or leveraged to buy a million Bitcoins, allowing the tiny minority of Bitcoin moguls to finally cash out their holdings into real money. It would be one of the biggest upward transfers of wealth in world history….
But the biggest part of the program is to revalue America’s gold reserves. The U.S. government maintains a stockpile of about 261 million troy ounces of gold—or about 8,133 metric tons—in Fort Knox and other facilities. This is valued by statute at $42.22 per ounce, or $11 billion in total. But the market price of gold at time of writing is $2,631 per ounce. That’s more than 55 times as much, or a total of $688 billion.
Lummis proposes the Treasury issue new gold certificates based on the market price, and use the resulting cash—$677 billion at current prices—to buy up Bitcoins. In total, her bill would require the government to buy up 200,000 Bitcoins a year for five years, until a “strategic reserve” of a million would be accumulated….
As Wall Street freezes Floridians out of home ownership, talk of reform ripples through Tallahassee
[Seeking Rents, via Naked Capitalism 11-25-2024]
[TW: Even Republican legislators are becoming alarmed at the results of allowing private equity to speculate and profiteer on housing at the expense of everyone else.]
Restoring balance to the economy
How Dems Can Take Advantage of Trump’s Tariffs to Reverse the Reagan Revolution
Thom Hartmann, November 28, 2024 [Common Dreams]
As he shatters the neoliberal tariff consensus, Democrats should rise to the occasion and argue for rational, targeted, and gradual tariffs, taking the party back to its pre-1980s positions on trade.
[The Lever 11-28-2024]
...While President Biden is still in office, he has the power to nominate hundreds of appointees to government positions. According to the nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office, there are currently almost 700 vacancies across a wide swath of agencies.
Along with filling these vacancies, Biden can renominate a number of agency heads whose terms are set to expire during Trump’s second administration. Presidents can renominate or propose a replacement for presidential appointments during their time in office, even if the president’s term ends by the time the appointee steps in. After they’re nominated, these appointees must be confirmed by a simple majority. Democrats have a 51-seat majority in the Senate until Jan. 3.
The Proposal to Break Up Google Is Finally Here
Matt Stoller [Big Tech on Trial, via Naked Capitalism 11-24-2024]
Disrupting mainstream economics
[Mike Norman Economics, November 28, 2024]
Health care crisis
Why the U.S. Healthcare System Is So Much Worse Than Its Peers
[Harvard Business Review, via The Big Picture 11-24-2024]
The United States has the worst-performing health system among all high-income countries. Even the best-performing U.S. states lag international comparators like France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Australia. To move the United States from laggard to leader will require significant — but doable — changes in its healthcare system, including closing remaining gaps in insurance coverage, limiting debilitating out-of-pocket-expenditures, and reviving its failing primary care capabilities.
Democrats' political malpractice
Everyone is taking their skim’: How Democratic consultants cashed in on Harris’ losing campaign”
[Salon, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-26-2024]
...Faiz Shakir, a senior advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., told Salon that the Harris campaign’s spending profile is indicative of a structural issue with how the Democratic Party approaches paid media and political strategy. According to Shakir, Democratic strategists often see cutting a new 30-second ad as a sort of cure-all to a campaign’s problems and a way for campaigns to address a weakness without re-evaluating the message or stances they’ve taken. “There’s no room you walk into in which saying we should run an ad sounds like bad advice,” he said…. ‘
“The 30-second ad being pushed by media consultants is often seen as the easiest way to solve a problem, even if it won’t solve that problem,” Shakir told Salon. “The bigger problem to me is when there is a flaw or problem in the campaign it often wrongly becomes understood that there is a 30-second ad that can cure it. If we have a problem with Latino men, or young people or working-class people in Pennsylvania, how about another 30-second ad for that?”
The opportunity to make money off of the firm that has created 30-second ads and the person who has placed the ads is ripe for abuse because there are hundreds of millions of dollars going into it and everyone is taking their skim,’ Shakir said. ‘There’s a huge escalation every step of the way because of a skim at every level.'” Of the rentiers, by the rentiers, for the rentiers. More: “ In some cases, Shakir said, even senior campaign staff will get a cut of ad spending.” Oh. More: “Reviewing the ad spending from the Harris campaign, it’s clear that the bulk of the money was funneled through firms run or owned by Democratic Party insiders…. Many of the FEC filings documenting payments from the Harris campaign to Media Buying and Analytics lump together media production and buying, meaning it’s impossible to distinguish how much the firm is being paid to create media for the campaign versus how much it is spending on air time and what sort of commission the firm is making on those ad buys.” And: “The core issue, as Shakir puts it, is that the party political operations are a closed loop with well-off consultants, politicians and donors all taking advice from each other with little outside input. ‘We have a working-class problem in the Democratic Party and when you have wealthy consultants talking to wealthy donors who are all living in an elite bubble, it can become detached from what messages will resonate with people who aren’t in the elite bubble.'”
Liberals Are Finally Admitting Bernie Is Right
David Moscrop [Jacobin, via downwithtyranny.com 11-30-24]
...Liberal disdain has long manifested in skepticism of student loan forgiveness, hostility toward Medicare for All, and contempt for warnings that offshoring and dismantling manufacturing would create problems that no pair of $3 boxer shorts from Walmart could offset. It’s hard not to look askance at those whose moral principles and studied certainty bend only in the face of electoral vagaries — particularly when democratic socialists, among them Bernie Sanders, have been saying the same thing for decades….
[The Baffler, via Naked Capitalism 11-30-2024]
As presently constructed, the Democratic Party is ill-equipped to offer much else. That’s because the “party” is little more than a vision-starved blob made up of candidates, nonprofits, billionaire donors, and super PACS—all connected by data-addled consultants. Look at the Harris campaign, which was in effect directed by the super PAC Future Forward. According to the New York Times, Future Forward was founded by “a close-knit network of PhDs who have ascended in the party by displaying encyclopedic knowledge of randomized-controlled trials and political science literature more than working the Washington cocktail circuit,” and it raised over $950 million through the efforts of tech billionaires Denis Muskovitz, Reid Hoffman, and Eric Schmidt. Obama campaign alumni praised the group as “the most analytics and evidence-driven PAC”: in 2024 alone, it individually surveyed over ten million voters to road test thousands of messages and television and social media advertisements to ensure that the Democrats’ messages resonated with target electoral groups.
Future Forward provided a real test for the popularism thesis advocated by David Shor and Matthew Yglesias. It is the latest brainwave in data-driven political strategy that essentially boils down to only talking about what is popular, as determined by polling, and ignoring everything else. As Shor told Ezra Klein in 2022, “Traditional diversity and inclusion is super important, but polling is one of the only tools we have to step outside of ourselves and see what the median voter actually thinks.” The firm where Shor serves as the head of data science, Blue Rose Research, was, incidentally, “incubated” by Future Forward….
Leaked memos reveal that Future Forward was frustrated by the Harris campaign’s decision not to air highly rated ads talking about the economy. But this does not offer the absolution Future Forward may seek. Talking only about what’s popular ultimately compounds the party’s disconnect with working-class Americans. The crux of the problem is that the Democrats use data to reflect the mirage of public opinion. The American public is cognizant that it is being treated with disdain when, without offering a cogent explanation, the Democrats shift messaging and develop policies in response to the vaunted “median voter.” Of course, these shifts tend to occur on policy issues that don’t run counter to the party’s donors. So if public opinion opposes sending weapons to Gaza, or supports worker representation on corporate boards, it tends to be ignored. The lack of consistency only suggests that the party is not saying what it really thinks, and meekly chasing the latest poll does little to generate confidence that the Democrats actually understand or care why the working class is fleeing to the Republican Party in droves….
A campaign framed around democracy should have argued that democratic institutions need to change so that they can allow “ordinary Americans” to exercise a degree of control over the social and economic conditions that shape working-class life. To make such a case, the Democrats would have to consistently demonstrate that they believe that working-class people deserve such agency, that they possess valuable wisdom that the party itself could learn from. Given their fetish for data-driven analytics, and Barack Obama’s paternal lecturing of Black men and Muslim voters, there is vanishingly little evidence that this is how the Democrats think about the electorate. Instead, pollsters and consultants perceive voters as a passive audience in need of the right messaging….
In an ideal world, the Democrats would transform their organizational structure from the grassroots up. Instead of spending all that donor money on a Beyoncé appearance in the blood-red state of Texas, or entertaining for another second Jon Fetterman’s Carhartt cosplay, they would invest in long-term civic infrastructure, shifting decision-making power from the consultants to the public. Such a transformation could not be measured by a randomized control trial. So why would the DNC-contracted consultant put themselves out of work by advising such a shift in strategy?
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-26-2024]
Glenn Greenwald
@ggreenwald
If you have 90 minutes and want to learn about the DC swamp scumbags who run campaigns, watch this PodSave interview with the top 4 Kamala consultants.All self-congratulatory. Not one admission of error. Endless excuses for their $1 billion failure:
.
Ever Think About What Saving The Democratic Party From Careerist Greed Would Actually Entail?
Howie Klein, November 24, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
Charlie Dulik [via Naked Capitalism 11-30-2024]
Three weeks since the election, this already familiar narrative of class and party dealignment seems clear enough. Yet a major connecting thread between these groups remains underacknowledged: All are more likely than not to rent their homes, and therefore to suffer under the all-time-high rent burdens, rising precarity, and deteriorating conditions that afflict the nation’s rental housing stock. Indeed, the counties that saw the largest vote shift toward Trump were those with the toughest housing markets—where inventory is constricted and home prices have far outpaced average incomes. The working-class dealignment could just as aptly be called a tenant dealignment.
Democrats should stop mocking Trump’s ground game and start learning from it
Astra Taylor, Guardian, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-26-2024]
...When Democrats insist that Trump had no ground game, they ignore the right wing’s investment and presence in spaces that are not purely electoral and that engage people year-round, including groups like Libre, along with the evangelical churches and student groups that increasingly function as social clubs recruiting people to the Maga cause. As Tiffany Dena Loftin details in the new issue of the Black leftist magazine Hammer & Hope, the right wing has spent decades systematically attacking and defunding progressive student unions and networks and building up their conservative counterparts.” And: “The Trump campaign built on this model, providing its base with community and purpose and organizing them, in turn, to mobilize others to turn out and vote. Before joining Trump’s team as campaign co-chair, Susie Wiles spent years working to lock down Florida for Republicans (she’s since been named Trump’s incoming chief of staff). Her tactics make people feel like an essential part of a group with a clear goal. Wiles piloted the ’10 for Trump’ Iowa caucus program, which gave a subset of 2,000 volunteers the title of ‘captain’, a limited-edition gold-embroidered hat, and the goal of motivating 10 people in their precincts to turn out.”
David Kaiser [History Unfolding, via Naked Capitalism 11-27-2024]
...Given that I studied the structure of the Nazi government in graduate school and that it figured in my first book, Economic Diplomacy and the Origins of the Second World War, I am inevitably pondering the similarities and differences between what Trump is trying to do and what Hitler and the Nazis did after seizing power 91 years ago. I have a superb book by an excellent German historian, Der Staat Hitlers by Martin Broszat, to help me, and after reviewing some key chapters I am sharing some observations here.
Leaving aside for the moment their very real differences in style, background, and objectives, Trump and Hitler have played similar political roles. They are two political outsiders who each took advantage of a collapse in popular confidence in established leaders and institutions to defeat established political leaders in democratic elections….
Of all Trump's goals, the only one that can be compared to Hitler's is the desire to deport millions of illegal immigrants. He wants to weaken the state while Hitler wanted to strengthen it, and he does not want to fight a great war, or, apparently, any war. War to his right-wing allies has become just another excuse to expand the power of the deep state. Trump seems to want to create a state based entirely on personal allegiance to himself while removing all governmental obstacles to maximum profit and economic disruption. This is nearly the opposite of Hitler, who wanted to marshal all of Germany's resources to fight a great war and create a new empire, and who imposed severe sacrifices on the German people even before the war started in 1939. All over the world--even in Communist countries--corporate power has grown at the expense of state power now for more than forty years. Trump will continue that trend by turning Washington politics into a circus once again.
As I have said here many times, it is the gradual collapse of our democracy and of the habits that allowed it to function over the last 60 years--not racism or sexism or homophobia--that has made this possible. Exit polls showed that the increasing divide between college-educated people and the rest of the population is perhaps the real secret to Trump's success. Our educated class needs to re-educate itself and establish a new bond between itself and the rest of the population. I have no idea where this will end.
'Jeffries would be the next speaker': How one state’s GOP gerrymander 'changed the nation'
Carl Gibson, November 28, 2024 [Alternet]
While Democrats lost control of the White House and the Senate in the 2024 election, they may have flipped control of the House of Representatives were it not for a controversial move by Republican lawmakers in one battleground state.
In a Wednesday tweet, Rep. Wiley Nickel (D-N.C.) claimed that "North Carolina's gerrymandered maps changed the nation." The freshman congressman — who announced in 2023 that he would not seek a second term — further argued: "The three seats stolen from Democrats (mine included) cost Democrats control of the U.S. House of Representatives."….
The gerrymander went through last fall, when North Carolina Republicans ignored court-drawn maps in 2022 to propose new redistricting maps that effectively turned four previously Democratic districts into districts that heavily favored Republicans. Even though Democratic Governor Roy Cooper vetoed the maps, the GOP supermajority overrode him, making the maps official for the 2024 election.
Trump’s transactional regime
An Outside View of the US 2024 Presidential Election
[MR Online, via Naked Capitalism 11-29-2024]
Trump’s Economy: Brute Force and Favor-Trading
David Dayen, November 27, 2024 [The American Prospect]
...BUT THERE’S A SECOND PIECE TO TRUMP’S TARIFF STRATEGY, involving not countries but the importers and exporters. This is going to be one of the biggest locations of corruption and cronyism in Trump’s second term; it already was, actually, in the first. I’m talking about tariff waivers….
The China tariffs, administered under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, had a secret waiver process, with no oversight from Congress or ability to appeal. It was a perfect conduit for Trump’s preferred way of doing business: taking tribute from supplicants and rewarding them. Other tariffs in the Trump era, like on steel and aluminum, were conducted with outside oversight and did not show this pattern.
One company made 40,000 waiver requests. Bibles were given protection from tariffs, on the theory that Bibles simply couldn’t be produced in the United States, somehow ignoring the existence of the printing press since Gutenberg. Bigger businesses with more ability to engage in the pay-to-play process got better treatment. Your tariff exemption depended on the quality of your lobbyists and the value of your donations to Republicans above anything else.
There has already been a flurry of activity from companies wanting to position themselves for new waivers. Businesses donated $425 million to Republicans in the past election cycle, preparing for exactly this moment. More tariffs, as Paul Krugman notes, equals more opportunity for tariff waivers, and therefore more opportunity to buy the king’s love. When Ken Griffin, of all people, expresses publicly that tariffs can lead to crony capitalism, I think it’s clear what’s coming.
Trump Team Is Having a Terrifying Debate on How to Invade Mexico
Hafiz Rashid, November 27, 2024 [The New Republic]
“How much should we invade Mexico?” said one Trump adviser. “That is the question.”
Slashing $2 Trillion from “The Swamp”–Three Things
Charles Hugh Smith [Of Two Minds, via Naked Capitalism 11-28-2024]
...If we follow the money, we find the vast majority of the $6.75 trillion that flows through federal coffers goes to private sector businesses, institutions such as universities and individual Americans. A small slice funds the federal bureaucracy which is "The Swamp" in the popular imagination….
Myth #1: America spends too much on foreign aid: Opinion polls consistently report that Americans believe foreign aid is in the range of 25 percent of the federal budget. When asked how much it should be, they say about 10 percent. In fact, at $39.2 billion for fiscal year 2019, foreign assistance is less than 1 percent of the federal budget.
Then there's the $700 hammers in the defense budget. That fat is just waiting to be slashed. Alas, things are more complicated than we would like. Thanks to decades of relentless consolidation / centralization of industrial production, banking, etc.--the entire core of the U.S. economy--there are only a few corporations that can fulfill Pentagon orders. Yes, there are hopeful signs of startups competing for drones and other small-scale military weaponry, but when it comes to aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and renovating the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile, there are not many private-sector options--in many cases, there's only one….Is it mere coincidence that the top 1%'s net worth has risen in lockstep with federal debt, or are these two statistics correlated, that is, federal spending increases the wealth of the top 1% far more than it benefits the bottom 50%. Recall that most of the federal spending flows through to individuals and private-sector companies, the majority of which are owned by the top 1%, who constitute a very influential center of influence.
Cut off the gravy train of the top 1% and they'll respond in kind. Hell hath no fury like a billionaire scorned….
3. There is no way to cut federal spending without reconfiguring the economy from the ground up, starting with healthcare, the relentless consolidation of companies and the distortions created by the immense concentration of wealth and influence in the hands of the top 0.1%.
Elon Musk Sets His Sight on Helping Foment Massive Bank Fraud
Malcolm Ferguson, November 27, 2024 [The New Republic]
The richest man on earth wants to eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Scammers Are Stealing Billions From Americans’ Bank Accounts. Here’s What You Need to Know.
[Consumer Reports, via Naked Capitalism 11-26-2024]
[TW: But, yeah, let’s get rid of CFPB to save enough to give billionaires more tax cuts.]
How Trump Plans to Seize the Power of the Purse From Congress
[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 11-27-2024]
A New MAGA Plot To Kill Anti-Corruption Laws
[The Lever, November 27, 2024
THE NEW MASTER PLAN TO EXPAND CITIZENS UNITED: A Trump appointee at the Federal Election Commission is now pressing to move the agency out of expensive Washington, D.C., and to Odessa, Texas, all in the name of “address[ing] taxpayer waste while improving the agency’s efficiency.” Sounds reasonable and apolitical… until you realize what journalist Michael Beckel points out: that would move one of the last remaining anti-corruption watchdogs under the jurisdiction of the notorious Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
That’s the Trump-packed, corruption-drenched circuit that the conservative movement and Elon Musk use as their preferred abattoir for policies they want killed. The circuit includes Trump-appointed James Ho, who has been an outspoken opponent of campaign finance laws….
