Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 29, 2024
By Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
A Newly Declassified Memo Sheds Light on America’s Post-Cold War Mistakes
[Slate, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-2024]
...The newly discovered memo, written in March 1994 by Wayne Merry, chief of the U.S. Embassy’s [in Moscow] internal politics division at the time, didn’t make the same impact as Kennan’s for two reasons. First, Merry did not go public. Second, unlike Kennan’s memo, Merry’s was at odds with U.S. policy and was ignored, then buried, and its author was blackballed, by the policymakers at the time. In fact, it was buried so deeply that it was declassified just last week as the result of a lawsuit filed under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, a private research firm at George Washington University.
Looking at it today, more than 30 years after the fact, it’s a remarkably prescient document that should prompt several lessons about how to run foreign policy.
Merry’s memo, titled “Whose Russia Is It Anyway: Toward a Policy of Benign Respect,” was written as Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s experiment with democracy and free-market economics was in heightened turmoil. The party of his prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, the architect of his economics policy, had recently lost an election—the result of popular discontent with the policy’s extreme inflation and displacement. Yeltsin mobilized tanks in downtown Moscow to put down an attempted putsch—launched for a variety of motives—in Russia’s Parliament. Yet, to the frustration of specialists in the U.S. Embassy, including Merry, many senior officials back in Washington saw Yeltsin as a still-strong figure and his “shock therapy” economics—which they had been pushing, along with a bevy of academic advisers, many of them from Harvard—as a success.
Merry stressed the urgent need for a course correction:
Democratic forces in Russia are in serious trouble. We are not helping with a misguided over-emphasis on market economics. There is no reason to believe the Russian economy is capable of rapid market reform. There is reason to fear that an intrusive Western effort to alter the economy against the wishes of the Russian people can exhaust the already-diminishing reservoir of goodwill toward America, assist anti-democratic forces, and help recreate an adversarial relationship between Russia and the West.
The West, Merry continued, should focus more on helping Russia develop “workable democratic institutions” and a “non-aggressive external policy.” U.S. interests “are directly tied to the fate of Russian democracy but not to the choices that democracy may make about the distribution of its own wealth” or “the organization of its means of production and finance.”….
Nick Corbishley, December 24, 2024 [Naked Capitalism]
...Mexico has lost the dispute settlement panel brought by the US and Canada over its attempt to ban imports of genetically modified corn for direct human consumption. On Friday (December 20), the arbitration panel ruled in favour of the United States, asserting that Mexico’s 2023 decree banning the use of genetically modified (GM) white corn for human consumption violated the terms of the trade agreement.
It wasn’t even a close run thing: the panel’s three judges agreed with the US on all seven counts in the case. The panel has given Mexico 45 days to realign its policies with the ruling. Failure to do so could result in stiff penalties, including sanctions.
As we’ve noted before, this case may be an important battle for Big Ag lobbies and biotech companies but it is an existential one for Mexico, for whom corn is the cornerstone not only of its cuisine and diet but also its culture….
Support for Luigi Mangione Reflects Working Class Weariness of Top-Down Violence
Megan Thiele Strong, December 28, 2024 [Common Dreams]
Some fear the positive regard of Mangione is indicative of a shift into a new era where violence is glorified and humanity is lost. As a sociology professor who teaches Poverty, Wealth, and Privilege, I disagree. This failure of subsets of the public to broadly denounce the actions of Mangione does not herald a cultural shift in appreciation of violence….
Second, the working classes are weary from surviving an unnecessarily violent and unjust society. We live amid staggering class, race, and gender-based stratification and life and death stakes everyday. The ruling class profits from our blood, sweat, and tears. And yet, when one of the elite passes, they want us to give them more. They ask us to give them our love. Yet, they remain calloused to our pain and ignore our pleas for fairness.
We all deserve the same sanctity of life given to wealthy insiders. However, when it comes to many of our social systems, such as healthcare, respect and care are not institutionalized; instead, harm is normalized. We see “out-sized returns” to private equity investors….
Our healthcare system is not pro-health. The World Health Organization (WHO) names universal healthcare as a worldwide goal. The United States has not complied. Most Americans are insured through private companies. Many Americans struggle to pay for healthcare, they postpone receiving care, and are in medical debt. The healthcare system has practices, such as using AI to deny a high number of healthcare claims, which put profits over people. There is something deeply inhumane and harmful about this disregard for health in a healthcare system. It may not be illegal, but it is savage.
The elite and their apologists ask, “How could they not be appalled by Thompson’s murder?” Instead we, as a community, might ask, how are the elite and their apologists not appalled by a harm-rich system that normalizes the idea that humans are only as valuable as their economic worth? Decades ago, Larry Summers, currently on the board of directors of OpenAI, famously wrote that people who produce less are more expendable. This classist ideology pervades our healthcare system….
Global power shift
The Plan To Carve Up the World Is Underway
[MindWar: The Psychological War on Democracy, December 23, 2024]
Dugin’s “multipolar” strategy plus the “Dark Enlightenment” equals the coup-de-grace for the post-WWII world order
Donald Trump has threatened to acquire or invade, by Truth Social post, in just the last few days:
Additionally, the PayPal Mafia and associates have made major moves into El Salvador by installing Bukele who has been trying to replace the currency with Bitcoin, although was forced to scale back once they figured out crypto is terrible as a currency and it’s really only a gambling-“investment” device.
But it doesn’t take a professional analyst to see what’s going on here. This is the attempted takeover of North America….
So what’s the Big Idea? Why? Trump is incapable of running a casino much less an entire continent. What’s he up to? Should we take this seriously? Yes, we must.
There are three major ideological strains involved in this plan, in my view:
Putin’s goal is to capture Europe and create a new Russian Empire with Moscow as the Third Rome that stretches across Asia and Europe. This is best expressed by Dugin’s “Eurasianism.”
The PayPal Mafia’s goal is to destroy liberal democracy and create a North American Empire ruled by a technocratic, eugenicist monarchy with Elon Musk as emperor. Curtis Yarvin and the “Dark Enlightenment” is the effective guru of this movement.
Anti-communists like Flynn and much of the real “deep state” in the government that prevented any accountability for J6, want to pull Putin away from Xi and create a theocracy to wage holy war on Islam and China. That’s why Catholic cults like Opus Dei and Knights of Malta are involved.
What we’re seeing is an increasingly explicit alliance between these groups to divide up the world into geopolitical “poles” per Dugin’s propaganda — which accuses “the West” of creating a New World Order of “totalitarian” liberal democracy which has formed a degenerate “unipolar world” — aka “globalism.”
The Case for Dismantling the Rules-Based International Order
Glen Diesen [Glenn’s Substack, via Naked Capitalism 12-24-2024]
China Stuns With Heavy Stealth Tactical Jet’s Sudden Appearance (Updated)
[The Warzone, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-2024]
Why sanctions against Russia have failed
Ian Proud [Strategic Culture, via Naked Capitalism 12-22-2024]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
The Big Happening [collapse of Assad in Syria]
[Big Serge, via Naked Capitalism 12-24-2024]
...The problem, not just for the Assad regime but for any would-be ruler of Syria, is that knitting these geographic regions together is a very difficult military-political task, but one that is essential to the economic and fiscal coherence of the country. Syria’s primary grain growing regions are in the east, particularly in the Euphrates basin. The Northeast in particular is Syria’s predominant source of both cereal staples like wheat and export crops like cotton. For more than a decade now, these growing regions have been lost to Damascus and are under pseudo-autonomous Kurdish control….
It is difficult to over-emphasize just how completely Iran’s geopolitical position has collapsed in the Levant and the Eastern Mediterranean….
Israel has, in effect, created a kinetic feedback loop which is eating away at Iran’s position in the region. Hezbollah is weakened by the 14 month war with the IDF, and its leadership and infrastructure are in disarray after a series of devastating Israeli strikes, including both the infamous exploding pager operation and an airstrike which killed Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah’s weakened state left them utterly unable to intervene to prevent the collapse of Assad’s regime, and now that same collapse means that Iran must contrive a way to rebuild Hezbollah’s operational capabilities without the vital ground-logistical link that it has long utilized….
...There is a growing sense that Israel can act with near-impunity, after conducting an impressive shooting spree against high value enemy personnel, fighting a grueling and devastating ground campaign in Gaza, and exchanging air strikes against Iran itself….
[Haaretz, via Naked Capitalism 12-23-2024]
Oligarchy
At What Point Does a Billionaire’s Greed Hurt the Rest of Us?
by Yves Smith, March 22, 2022
By Drummond Pike, Governing Board of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at Social Policy Magazine; cross posted from the Institute for New Economic Thinking Website
King David: Billionaires I have known’: The final installment
Rick Perlstein, December 24, 2024 [The American Prospect]
...Roughly speaking, the political history of the Euro-American world we live in has a plot: the steady but uneven expansion of the rights of people who are not kings to shape their own lives, and the struggles of kings and their vassals to keep us from being able to do so. The Magna Carta was a tiny but significant step in that direction. The charter established that even kings were subject to limits on their powers and their subjects were entitled to rights, even if the good guys in this particular story were barons. The Declaration of Independence asserted the rights of American colonials to sever ties with their king, appending something between a statement and an ideal about all men being created equal—even if the good guys in this story were only property-owning white men, with the Emancipation Proclamation repairing part of the oversight.
Waxing rights, waning tyranny: David Rubenstein pays tens of millions of dollars to pose for selfies with that saga’s heroes. Even as, in the present-day chapter, he and his are actually the story’s bad guys—at the cutting edge of stopping any future advances in human liberty, dignity, and equal rights, clawing back those that already exist.
Every time I read something that clearly explains how our lords of private equity play the game of “loading up a company with debt” as prelude to stripping what someone else has built for parts, I’m astonished anew. I can’t get over how a PE firm borrows money to buy a company, and that company, not Carlyle, has to pay it back—and that Carlyle gets paid to make them pay it back, in dividends and “management fees.” It’s hardly less surreal than the notion of the king personally possessing every whale and sturgeon in the kingdom for his own pleasure.
Matt Stoller describes private equity as a “political movement,” and I find that designation brilliant. Especially now, with Carlyle leading the industry into looting a basic human need, profiting from buying up vast tracts of apartment buildings that once had responsive landlords, and putting them under the control of faraway management firms that are not….
Ken Silverstein [via Naked Capitalism 12-26-2024]
UnitedHealthcare’s Decades-Long Fight to Block Reform
[Jacobin, via Naked Capitalism 12-26-2024]
Health Insurance Leaders Pressured DOJ To Charge Luigi Mangione
Dan Boguslaw (!), Deeper State, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-26-2024]
“According to reporting by Joe Marino, Ben Kochman and Matt Troutman last week, health insurance leaders pressured the DOJ to make an example of Luigi Mangione by bringing federal charges against him in a surprise announcement that caught his lawyers off guard. If tried in federal court, Mangione could be sentenced to death, silencing any further criticism of the American healthcare system he decried in his manifesto. According to the Post’s[1] report, ‘federal charges came amid pressure from health insurance industry leaders to make an example out of Mangione.’ The Post also writes that the decision to unveil federal charges ‘came from the top of the DOJ in Washington D.C.’ How and when healthcare industry leaders tried to strong-arm the department of justice remains unclear. But the top three DOJ officials under Attorney General Merrick Garland have all represented massive healthcare companies during their respective stints in private practice before joining the DOJ…. At O’Melveny & Myers, [Lisa Monaco, the Deputy U.S. Attorney General] represented Humana–the fifth largest U.S. health insurance company… Notably, O’Melveny & Myers also successfully defended United Health in a suit brought by United Health group insured patients earlier this year…. The number three at DOJ, Acting Associate AG Benjamin Mizer, also represented healthcare and pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis, among others firms…. The number three at DOJ, Acting Associate AG Benjamin Mizer, also represented healthcare and pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis, among others firms. Finally, #4 at DOJ, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prolegar, reported Lumos Pharma, Syneos Health, and Amgen, as former clients on her disclosure.”
The Kids Are Alright, But Not Reflexively Positive About American Capitalism
Trygve Hammer, December 24, 2024
Many younger Americans don’t buy that this economic dissatisfaction stems from inefficient government or unchecked immigration. They have grown up with a form of capitalism that cannot focus beyond the next quarterly earnings report, a “greed is good” system where the only stakeholders who matter are shareholders. Many of these younger Americans have applied for jobs and then been ‘ghosted’ at some point in the process. Others have found jobs but remain dissatisfied not because of their salary but because they don’t feel valued at work. They sense that they matter only to the point where regulation requires that they matter.
The weight of all the wealth redistributed upward over the last forty-plus years has been grinding over them like a tectonic plate, building heat and pressure. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that they are not brimming over with shock and empathy when a CEO is murdered by someone frustrated with corporate greed….
Relief is not on the horizon. There will be no reckoning or self-reflection among the moneyed elites, no injection of compassion into the system. There might be more investment in executive security. There will likely be more tax cuts for the wealthy, and we will definitely see two stooges riding in to rescue us from government inefficiency, because there’s nothing like inspection by a puerile billionaire and a multi-millionaire pharma scammer to make government less wasteful.
Musk and Ramaswamy are the problem, not the solution, but they can’t see it. They have all the self-awareness of an abusive boss puzzling over why there aren’t more employees at the office holiday party. No one who has lost faith in capitalism will look at those two men and return to worshiping at the altar of the Almighty Dollar. Young folks will remain unafraid to impugn capitalism on social media, and their refusal to be unequivocally positive about it means that folks on the right will continue to label anything they don’t like as Communism or Marxism….
Elon Musk and Peter Thiel: Two sides of one Magic Trick
Matthew Ehret, December 24, 2024
The parallel growth of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel as children of mysterious establishment families enmeshed in the elite corridors of Apartheid South Africa and earlier fascist movements before and during World War 2 is noteworthy, but not evidence that either man is a part of a broader conspiracy….
As both men ascended to the higher echelons of Silicon Valley culture in the 1990s, their lives continued to cross pollinate and advance the same transhumanist programs between 1998 through to the present day….
Before that, Thiel had begun to make a name for himself as an innovative Straussian in Stanford University, where he founded the libertarian Stanford Review in 1987, serving as its editor-in-chief until his 1992 graduation.[1]
The Stanford Review received patronage from non-other than former Trotskyite and early Straussian Irving Kristol who led in the formation of the neoconservative movement during the Cold War and that movement’s acquisition of political power in the USA in 2000. The era of the ‘New Crusaders’ that launched forever wars abroad after 9/11 and a vast surveillance dragnet within the USA were all Straussians.[2]
This fact will become extra important later in this chapter….
Despite being sentenced to five years in prison for his role overseeing Iran Contra, Poindexter’s career did not suffer terribly, as his sentence was commuted to several months, and the neocon spent the next two decades working as a defense contractor, DARPA analyst and architect of TIA.
Thiels’ biographer Max Chafkin explains[9] that just before Palantir was created, John Poindexter and then-CIA director George Tenet were introduced to both Thiel and fellow Palantir creator Alex Karp by none other than leading neoconservative strategist and leading Straussian, Richard Perle. Among Palantir’s military intelligence clients are found the CIA, FBI, NSA, CDC, Marine Corps, Air Force, Special Operations Command, and Westpoint[10]. But that’s not all….
To properly appreciate the nature of the machinery influencing both Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, it will be useful to briefly take the opportunity to explore Thiel’s devotion to Leo Strauss, and the broader Behaviorist-Straussian ideology that has been used to undermine the American founding principles since its earliest days.
We will now do this by evaluating a 2007 essay written by Peter Thiel dubbed ‘The Straussian Moment’ first published in the Standford Review. [12]
The purpose of this Thiel’s essay was to summarize his political theory into a comprehensive manifesto and his belief in a ‘secret teaching’ for the initiated few vs the ‘public teaching’ for the masses promoted. Whether or not this essay contributed to Thiel’s rise to the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group or his initiation into the Crusader Knights of Malta remains to be seen, but for now, we will merely review his own words….
This Year's DWT Christmas Day Post Links To Grimes And AOC Videos But Is All About Co-President Musk
Howie Klein, December 24, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
Yesterday, Theodore Schleifer, Ryan Mac, Lily Boyce, and Kirsten Grind took a look at the people who influence mentally deranged South African fascist Elon Musk, and those who stand to gain from their association with him now….
They began with Musk’s backers (investors):
Steve Jurvetson is a longtime Silicon Valley venture capitalist and was an early investor in SpaceX, where he is a board member. He is also a Musk superfan. On a podcast in 2020, he praised the billionaire for being “the greatest gift of the American dream living right now.”
Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist (heavy emphasis on “capitalist”) is one of Musk’s big financial supporters in Silicon Valley: His firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has backed SpaceX, Twitter and xAI (and the takeover of the GOP….
Peter Thiel and Musk are members of the so-called PayPal Mafia, a group of founders and early employees of the payments company. While Thiel helped oust Musk from the company decades ago, he has recently become a political ally and supporter. JD Vance once worked for Thiel’s venture capital firm, and Thiel, who bought Vance his Senate seat, introduced him to Señor T.
Roelof Botha, fellow South African, he was also a member of the PayPal Mafia. Now, as the managing partner of Sequoia Capital, he oversees the venture firm’s various investments into Musk’s companies, including Twitter and xAI.
Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle and the fourth richest man in America after Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg, is a self-described good friend of Musk’s and has taken part in some Trump transition meetings. When Mr. Musk bought Twitter in 2022, Ellison committed $1 billion to the deal.
The next category The Times covered were Musk’s “personal friends.”….
Michael Kives, a totally connected Hollywood agent, whose network stretches to everyone from Sam Bankman Fried, Nelson Peltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bruce Willis and Katy Perry, to Bill and Hillary Clinton and Larry Fink, has a home where Musk crashes when he’s in L.A…..
David Sacks, another South African fascist and PayPal Mafia associate, is a longtime friend who has grown closer to Musk after the acquisition of Twitter and his rightward political shift. Musk got Sacks the position of AI and crypto czar for Trump’s regime….
Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir with Thiel, he provided guidance to Musk’s right-wing America PAC and has helped advise him on the presidential transition.
Rupert Murdoch is close to Musk, as his his son, James Murdoch, a current Tesla board member and SpaceX investor. He and Musk have vacationed together….
Ari Emanuel, Rahm’s brother and a Hollywood mogul, has grown close to Musk….
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
U.S. Homelessness Spiked by Jaw-Dropping Amount in 2024
Malcolm Ferguson, December 27, 2024 [The New Republic]
Rogé Karma, December 24, 2024 [The Atlantic]
New research suggests that the company makes the communities it operates in poorer—even taking into account its famous low prices….
The two new working papers use novel methods to isolate Walmart’s economic impact—and what they find does not look like a progressive success story after all. The first, posted in September by the social scientists Lukas Lehner and Zachary Parolin and the economists Clemente Pignatti and Rafael Pintro Schmitt, draws on a uniquely detailed dataset that tracks a wide range of outcomes for more than 18,000 individuals across the U.S. going back to 1968. These rich data allowed Parolin and his co-authors to create the economics equivalent of a clinical trial for medicine: They matched up two demographically comparable groups of individuals within the dataset and observed what happened when one of those groups was exposed to the “treatment” (the opening of the Walmart) and the other was not.
Their conclusion: In the 10 years after a Walmart Supercenter opened in a given community, the average household in that community experienced a 6 percent decline in yearly income—equivalent to about $5,000 a year in 2024 dollars—compared with households that didn’t have a Walmart open near them. Low-income, young, and less-educated workers suffered the largest losses….
The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction
[Persuasion, via Naked Capitalism 12-25-2024]
Five Decades of Stagnant Wages
[Dollars & Sense, via Naked Capitalism 12-22-2024]
‘Never Too Much’
Trevor Jackson [New York Review, January 16, 2025 issue]
If globalization has allowed elites to remove themselves from democratic accountability and regulation, is there any path toward a just economy?
Reviewed:
The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
by Martin WolfPenguin Press, 474 pp., $30.00Something has gone terribly wrong. In his 2004 book Why Globalization Works, the economics journalist Martin Wolf wrote that “liberal democracy is the only political and economic system capable of generating sustained prosperity and political stability.” He was articulating the elite consensus of the time, a belief that liberal democratic capitalism was not only a coherent form of social organization but in fact the best one, as demonstrated by the West’s victory in the cold war. He went on to argue that critics who “complain that markets encourage immorality and have socially immoral consequences, not least gross inequality,” were “largely mistaken,” and he concluded that a market economy was the only means for “giving individual human beings the opportunity to seek what they desire in life.”….Martin Wolf is probably the most influential economics commentator in the English-speaking world. He has been chief editorial writer for the Financial Times since 1987 and their lead economics analyst since 1996. Before that he trained in economics at Oxford and worked at the World Bank starting in 1971, including three years as senior economist and a year spent working on the first World Development Report in 1978. This is his fifth book since moving to the Financial Times. The blurbs and acknowledgments are stuffed with central bankers, financiers, Nobel laureates, and celebrity academics. The bibliography contains ninety-six references to the author himself….Wolf’s true goal is moral exhortation. He has absolutely no interest in removing the current elites or replacing them with others, and certainly not in trying to create a society without elites, or with elites whose powers to do harm are systematically curtailed. Instead he hopes to encourage our profligate elites to more virtuous behavior. He would prefer that they follow the rule of law instead of exercising contempt toward regular people. He would like them to exhibit “a substantial degree of honesty, trustworthiness, self-restraint, truthfulness, and loyalty to shared political, legal, and other institutions.” He wants, in short, to awaken the conscience of the global bourgeoisie and to produce a virtuous class consciousness that will render it capable of solving the problems it has created for itself. He fears that it is unconsciously generating its own gravediggers, in the twin forms of resentful populist demagogues and a more efficient Chinese state capitalism….Our elites have not suddenly become morally abhorrent; the financial globalization that Wolf championed has allowed them to remove themselves from democratic accountability, state regulation, and communities of obligation. It has also decimated countervailing powers such as organized labor, working-class political parties, and capital controls. The market never was “permeated” by the values of duty, fairness, and decency: it was constrained by nonmarket forces. Wolf has spent his career arguing that reason and freedom demanded the removal of those constraints. And here we are….
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
How the Silicon Valley Robber Barons’ New Tech Bubble Won 2024
Matt Ford, December 27, 2024 [The New Republic]
The two major techbro obsessions—crypto and AI—have delivered mostly scams and hype. But this year, they managed to buy themselves a federal government….
In cryptocurrency, scams are so common that there is a special lingo surrounding them. Early adopters will create a coin, promote it, and then sell their supply at the top in what is known as a “rug-pull,” meaning that they pull the rug out from under the feet of their putative investors. Those left behind are known as “bag-holders.” ….
[TW: It’s worth pondering the new rich, such as Musk and the crypto bros, and how they entered the path to authoritarianism. The classic old adage, “power corrupts,” has an economic corollary that the partisans of liberal capitalism and especially neoliberalism much prefer to ignore: money also corrupts. The power of wealth to corrupt was well understood in the formative years of the American republic; indeed, there was a wide-spread suspicion and even hostility toward luxury and especially ostentatious displays of wealth. It is a socio-cultural attribute we desperately need to recover and reinforce. ]
Russia says it's using bitcoin to evade sanctions
[Axios, via December 26, 2024, via Mike Norman Economics]
Bankman Fried Failed But The Crypto Cartel Bought The US Government— Not Just Trump, Congress Too
Howie Klein, December 28, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
Restoring balance to the economy
Montana State Supreme Court Upholds Historic Climate Decision
Gabrielle Gurley, December 24, 2024 [The American Prospect]
Montana’s Republican lawmakers may not be swayed by the gravity of climate crisis, but six state Supreme Court justices did not need convincing. Last Wednesday, 16 young plaintiffs won a resounding victory as those jurists upheld a historic 2023 climate decision, with only one dissenting vote among the seven justices. With climate deniers poised to roll back energy and environmental policies in Washington next year, and the U.N. climate conference (COP29) failing to resolve major international challenges, the decision was a bright spot in an otherwise dismal year of climate policy developments.
The case tackled the state’s appeal of Held v. Montana (2023), which found a provision of the Montana Environmental Policy Act (MEPA) unconstitutional. This “MEPA limitation” prohibited environmental studies demonstrating how the state’s greenhouse gas emissions contribute to global climate change. The state Supreme Court agreed with a lower-court ruling that the provision is unconstitutional because it violated the right to “a clean and healthful environment.”….
Disrupting mainstream economics
Everything sucks because no one knows what they are doing
[Dougald Lamont’s Substack, via Naked Capitalism 12-22-2024]
I don’t know when in my life it’s been clearer that people have absolutely no idea what they are doing or talking about.
I often think of this classic sketch from Saturday Night Live, classic in both senses of the word. It’s called “Theodoric, Medieval Barber” where Steve Martin plays Theodoric, and no matter what people ask for, he always recommends more bleeding.
Haircut? Bleeding!
Crushed legs because you were run over by an oxcart? More bleeding!
I think of this sketch, because it perfectly sums up the answer to every economic problem, which is more bleeding.
If times are good, cut spending and cut taxes and shrink government.
If times are bad, cut spending and cut taxes and shrink government.
If there’s inflation, cut spending and cut taxes and shrink government.
If there’s deflation, cut spending and cut taxes and shrink government.
If there’s a surplus, cut spending and cut taxes and shrink government.
If there’s a deficit, cut spending and cut taxes and shrink government….
Why everything’s messed up: on the economy, no one with authority knows what they are talking about
In the mid 1970s, there was an intellectual revolution in economics. Because wages were stagnating while inflation was high for several years running - so-called “stagflation” Keynesian New Deal ideas were thrown out and replaced with Neoliberal / Neoclassical ideas.
These fundamentally libertarian ideas - which include assumptions and mathematical models of different parts of the economy, claim to describe how the mechanics of the economy work. They don’t.
The fundamental assumption that neoclassical / neoliberal economics gets wrong is related to the creation of new money in an economy….
A fundamental aspect of the neoliberal / neoclassical ideology is that government is to blame for everything, because the market left to itself will be perfect….
The Cost of Anticompetitive Pricing Algorithms in Rental Housing
[White House Council of Economic Advisers, via Naked Capitalism 12-23-2024]
Health care crisis
How Big Pharma Is Wrecking the Inflation Reduction Act
Charlotte Kilpatrick, December 26, 2024 [The New Republic]
Read the NYPD’s Mangione report the media won’t publish
Ken Klippenstein, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-2024]
Louisiana forbids public health workers from promoting COVID, flu and mpox shots
[NPR, via Naked Capitalism 12-22-2024]
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Forget Chrome—Google Starts Tracking All Your Devices In 8 Weeks
[Forbes, via Naked Capitalism 12-23-2024]
'Godfather of AI' Demands Strict Regulations to Stop Technology From Wiping Out Humanity
Julia Conley, December 28, 2024 [CommonDreams]
"The only thing that can force those big companies to do more research on safety is government regulation."
Climate and environmental crises
New York to charge fossil fuel companies for damage from climate change
[AP, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-2024]
A (successful) test of the state-by-state approach!
Bill McKibben [The Crucial Years, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-2024]
The great question for people who care about the climate is: what now? How do we proceed with the most important fight in the world, when the most important office in the world is about to be filled by a climate denier, and when there’s a Congress with no hope of advancing serious legislation.
One important answer is: we go state by state, and city by city, making gains everywhere we still can. That sounds like small beer—but it’s worth remembering just how big American states are. California is the world’s fifth largest economy, and the energy transition is fully advanced there. Texas is the eighth largest economy—larger than Russia. Things are ripping along there too.
And New York is the tenth largest economy (New York City by itself would be the twelfth). That’s bigger than Mexico or Australia or South Korea.
Which is why it’s very exciting news that earlier today the state’s governor, Kathy Hochul, announced that she would sign the so-called “polluter pays” climate superfund bill….
Creating new economic potential - science and technology
How We Got the Lithium-ion Battery
[Construction Physics, via The Big Picture 12-28-2024]
It took decades of research, performed around the world, before a practical lithium-ion battery was possible. And then, not unlike solar PV, it took many more years of marching down the learning curve before it could find its place in electric vehicles and large-scale energy storage. Since the early ‘90s, the cost of a lithium-ion battery has fallen by more than 97% per kilowatt-hour, which has finally allowed electric vehicles to approach cost-parity with gasoline-powered cars.
Democrats' political malpractice
Stand For Something: Biden has left the Democrats with no claim to morality.
Hamilton Nolan, December 28, 2024
It is natural to think about what happened in America over the past year in terms of the rise of Trumpism. But the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that the real political story of 2024 is the utter emptiness of the Democratic Party. It was the year when the party’s total lack of moral grounding let it shrivel up and blow away….
...The Democrats wholly and completely own every child amputee, every dead baby, every shattered civilian body, every destroyed family home, every death by starvation and disease, every life ruined by Israel’s inhuman bombardment of Gaza, which would not and could not have happened without the blessing of the Biden White House….
If I shot your child in the head, would you forgive me because I had good green energy policy? If I blew up your entire family as they slept, would you write it off because I was pro-union? If I assassinated your brother with a missile because he was a journalist, would you feel that was okay, as long as I supported slightly higher marginal tax rates than my political opponents? We all know the answers to these things….
...The Democrats, in the broadest sense, in the world of branding where political parties forge their reputations in the public mind, are supposed to be the humane party. “Callously doing bad things for selfish reasons”—why, that is what rich people do, who don’t pay their fair share. That is what runaway corporations do. That is what fossil fuel companies do. That is what all of the malignant forces that the Democratic Party brands itself as opposed to do….
The Future of the Democratic Party Lies Far From Washington
Eric Schmeltzer, December 27, 2024
To restore the party’s fortunes, organizers should look to down-ticket races to build pressure against Trump—and create a new generation of leaders….
Gottfried, who retired from the New York State Assembly in 2022, concurs: Focusing on local organizing can have an outsize influence on lower-level elected officials.
“City and state elected officials are, in most cases, more sensitive to what they hear locally, and what they see locally,” Gottfried says. “Twenty people in a city council district are a much bigger factor than 20 people in a congressional district or a whole state.”
Gottfried added that this is something Republicans have recognized for decades, but which Democrats and progressives too often ignore.
“Right-wing Republicans, as far back as around the 1960s, were focusing on local public offices and local party positions very quietly, taking over school boards and taking over local Republican Party committees,” he noted to me. “To this day, you see right-wing groups taking over school boards and library boards and getting people elected dogcatchers and gradually working their way up the chain to controlling state government, state courts, state political parties, and capturing control of the national political party. Progressives have not done much of that.”
Democrats Need to Grow Up and Move Beyond the Myth of the 'Ground Game'
Scott Goodstein, December 26, 2024 [Common Dreams]
...Public safety studies show neighborhoods are more responsive to community policing programs when public safety officers know the people they serve. Why would political campaigns be different?
Technology has also had a major impact on door knocking. It's now been a decade since the invention of video door camera technology. According to a 2024 Consumer Reports study, 30% of Americans use video door cameras. These changes in neighborhood dynamics and consumer behaviors are realities that must be faced….
Trump’s transactional regime
What if Trump Does Everything He’s Promised—and the People Don’t Care?
Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, December 26, 2024 [The New Republic]
The authors of the bestselling “How Democracies Die” talk with editor Michael Tomasky about what kind of mark four more years of Donald Trump might leave on this democracy….
DANIEL ZIBLATT: ... One point I would make at the outset is that the need to rewrite the Constitution, say à la Viktor Orbán, is probably not the thing that’s concerning at this moment, because our Constitution works pretty well for the party that’s in control of all branches of government, and really the more serious concern is the risk of those in power going after the democratic opposition in ways that undermine competition. So it’s not about changing the rules, but really attacking civil society, attacking the opposition. That’s something that we really didn’t spell out in that scenario back in 2018, but it’s something that is top of mind for me right now.
TOMASKY: Well, let’s spell it out here. Steven, what would that attack on the democratic opposition look like?
STEVEN LEVITSKY: …. we’re going to see really classic authoritarian behavior. Many of us tend to think that—particularly given that most of us haven’t experienced authoritarianism in the United States—we tend to think of authoritarianism as dissolving the Constitution, locking up opponents, and eliminating electoral competition. And that’s highly unlikely. It’s very, very unlikely that we see a move toward sort of Putin-style authoritarianism.
But what I think has gotten insufficient attention among Americans is the centrality of simply politicizing the state and deploying it in ways not only to punish rivals, but also to change the cost-benefit calculation of actors across the political spectrum and throughout civil society so that they have an incentive to sort of step to the sidelines. And so, you know, first and foremost, we’ve been told to expect that the Department of Justice will be wielded to punish those who have tried to hold the Trump administration accountable. I think we’ll see it wielded against some politicians. We’ll see it wielded against some businesspeople. We’ll see it wielded against some civil society leaders….
From Wall Street to Big Pharma: The Corporate Giants Bankrolling Trump's Inauguration
Jake Johnson, December 26, 2024 [CommonDreams]
Trumpism’s healthcare fracture-lines
Cory Doctorow [Pluralistic, via Naked Capitalism 12-26-2024]
Monopoly Round-Up: New Deal or Crime Spree?
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 12-23-2024]
Trump and Political Realignment: Twirling Toward Freedom?
albrt [via Naked Capitalism 12-26-2024]
...So my test hypothesis is that Trump and Vance might make relatively rational decisions on a multi-year time frame with the goal of delivering real benefits to working people. The bar for achieving this is set very low—if the Trump-Vance administration does a barely competent job of delivering material benefits for the working class, that would be better than what the two factions of the legacy uniparty have done for the past 30 years, including what Trump did during his first term.
Note that I’m talking about material benefits such as higher wages, better housing, price stability, or health care (as distinguished from “access” to health care through a corrupt intermediary a.k.a. insurance company). For purposes of this post it is important to distinguish material benefits (which the oligarchs want working people to have very little of) from culture war conflict and entertaining stunts that give supporters a dopamine rush (which we get plenty of precisely because the oligarchs do not care about these issues).
The test hypothesis seems at least somewhat plausible to me because Trump and Vance might be unusually motivated to create a scenario where Vance can win the 2028 election….
Will Trump Take On the Housing Cartels?
Conor Gallagher, December 27, 2024 [Naked Capitalism]
The DOJ case against RealPage for orchestrating a rental housing price-fixing cartel will tell us a lot about the economic direction of Trump 2.0.
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Social Collapse
‘Baby in a dumpster.’ A spate of abandoned newborns unsettles Texas.
[Washington Post 10-28-2024]
...Statewide, according to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, at least 18 babies have been abandoned this year. The latest occurred just before Christmas at a Whataburger in San Antonio. A decade ago, the number was seven.
Whether there’s a pattern or common link in these tragedies is not clear. But they’re happening in a state with one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion bans — with no exceptions for rape or incest — and one of the highest birth rates.
Critics argue that’s no coincidence. Texas is ranked next to last for women’s health and reproductive care, according to the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund, which supports independent research on such issues. And with legislators having repeatedly cut funding for that care, the percentage of women without health insurance is higher here than in any other state. This year, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) ordered Texas public hospitals to track the cost of treating immigrants who are in the country illegally, potentially deterring women from seeking care for fear of being turned over to authorities.
Civic republicanism
Timothy Noah, December 25, 2024 [The New Republic]
...2024 may be the first election in American history in which a majority of United States voters specifically chose oligarchy. This is terra incognita, but it turns out to be a problem to which our second president, John Adams, gave considerable thought.
None of the Founders fretted as much about oligarchy as Adams; he was writing about its dangers as early as 1766, and in 1785 he urged that the Pennsylvania Constitution permit sufficient payment to its legislators to allow ordinary people to serve, lest “an Aristocracy or oligarchy of the rich will be formed.” ….
In the 2016 book John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy, Luke Mayville, a Yale-trained historian and co-founder of the grassroots group Reclaim Idaho, takes this argument further. “In his letters, essays, and treatises,” Mayville writes, “Adams explored in subtle detail what might be called soft oligarchy—the disproportionate power that accrues to wealth on account of widespread sympathy for the rich.” Adams did not judge this attraction benign, but neither did he believe it could be wished away.
The Framers of the Constitution, Mayville argues, believed in checks and balances among various government institutions, but they did not consider any need to balance the power of government against the power of wealthy private citizens. Adams thought otherwise. “The rich, the well-born, and the able,” Adams wrote in A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787–8), “acquire an influence among the people that will soon be too much for simple honesty and plain sense, in a house of representatives.” Adams’s solution to this imbalance of power was to separate out “the most illustrious” among this elite and corral them into the Senate.
Jefferson and other Adams critics saw this as elevating the oligarchs. But Adams judged it “ostracism” because it removed the rich from the sphere of self-interest. A modern expression of this conceit would be that “it takes a thief to catch a thief.”….
Why do rich people exert so much influence? Money is the obvious answer, and Adams acknowledged its power. But in The Discourses on Davila (1790) he emphasized another, more psychological explanation. There is, Adams wrote, a universal desire “to be seen, heard, talked of, approved and respected, by the people about [us], and within [our] knowledge.” In short: We all live to show off. This is why Mills compared Adams to Veblen….
[Adams continued,] “Riches force the opinion on a man that he is the object of the congratulations of others, and he feels that they attract the complaisance of the public. His senses all inform him, that his neighbors have a natural disposition to harmonize with all those pleasing emotions and agreeable sensations which the elegant accommodations around him are supposed to excite.…”
The End of Democratic Delusions: The Trump Reaction and what comes next
George Packer, December 2, 2024 [The Atlantic]
...The triumph of the Trump Reaction should put an end to two progressive illusions that have considerably strengthened it. One is the notion that identity is political destiny. For a long time, the Democratic Party regarded demographic change in America, the coming “minority majority,” as a consoling promise during interim Republican victories: As the country turned less white, it would inevitably turn more blue….
The 2024 election exploded this illusion. Nearly half of Latinos and a quarter of Black men voted for Trump. In New York City he did better in Queens and the Bronx, which have majority nonwhite populations, than in Manhattan, with its plurality of wealthy white people. M. Gessen of The New York Times called it “not a good night for solidarity,” but the presumption of like-mindedness among immensely diverse groups of voters should be retired, along with the term people of color, which has lost any usefulness for political analysis.
Adjacent to the demographic illusion is a majoritarian one. By this theory, the Democratic Party is kept out of power by a white Republican minority that thwarts the popular will through voter suppression, gerrymandering, judicial legislating, the filibuster, the composition of the Senate, and the Electoral College. By this thinking, the ultimate obstacle to the American promise is the Constitution itself. The United States needs to become less republican and more democratic, with electoral reforms and perhaps a second constitutional convention to give more power to the people. ...
I spent the years after the financial crisis reporting in parts of the country that were being ravaged by the Great Recession and the long decline that had preceded it, and were growing hostile toward the country’s first Black president. Three things recurred everywhere I went: a conviction that the political and economic game was rigged for the benefit of distant elites; a sense that the middle class had disappeared; and the absence of any institutions that might have provided help, including the Democratic Party. It was hard to miss the broken landscape that lay open for Trump, but the establishments of both parties didn’t see it, and neither did most of the media, which had lost touch with the working class….
Protecting the Constitution the Washington Monthly Way
Garrett Epps, December 23, 2024 [Washington Monthly]
For the past 30 years, I have taught constitutional law, and I have come to realize that America’s best days are those when my phone doesn’t ring. In ordinary times, constitutional scholars are dull company—when we find ourselves in demand as speakers and party guests, the Republic is in trouble….
For better or worse, lawyers and law professors are oft invited party guests, and we at the Monthly have been throwing one hell of a party. To hold power accountable, we have published legal scholars and attorneys like Peter M. Shane, one of the nation’s top experts on executive power, on questions ranging from presidential immunity to the end of the “administrative state”; Gerard Magliocca on the ongoing battles over the Fourteenth Amendment’s Disqualification Clause; Joshua A. Douglas, an authority on voting rights law, to assess the prospects that the next administration will meddle with Americans’ free elections; Jonathan Alter, who offered unparalled coverage of Trump’s Manhattan fraud trial, James D. Zirin’s observations (backed up by his experience as a federal prosecutor) on topics ranging from federal criminal prosecutions to Joe Biden’s age (backed up by his own experience as an octogenarian) to Samuel Alito’s alarming spiral; Caroline Frederickson on the Supreme Court’s radical abortion-rights decision; Ciara Torres-Spelliscy on federal campaign-finance and corruption law; Ruben Garcia on plutocrats’ war against the labor movement and the National Labor Relations Board; and Jacob Charles on the Supreme Court’s wacky gun-rights jurisprudence….
[TW: I am staggered by how historically ignorant all discussions about Trump’s tariffs have been so far. We need to stop and ask why protectionism has such ill repute. But to answer would require some knowledge of how economics developed as a profession under the sponsorship of American and British ruling elites aka oligarchs. The simple historical fact is that protectionism was a key component of the policy mix that led USA and other countries outside the British empire to industrialize, including most recently South Korea. (See Michael Hudson, Americas Protectionist Takeoff 1815—1914, Islet, 2010. Not surprisingly, at this time, South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang offers a critique of free trade that is light years ahead of any other work I know of. (See Chang’s Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, Bloomsbury; 2008.)
[Greatly hampering the discussion is that USA’s history of protectionism and industrialization has been obscured and hidden by over a century of myths and lies. If you don’t know who Henry C. Carey was, then you are a victim of those myths and lies and simply don’t have the historical facts at hand (and in mind) to make any rational and effective judgement regarding tariffs and protectionism. Carey was the leading USA economist of the mid-19th century, and the world’s leading proponent of protectionism. And the proof is certainly in the pudding: the success of Carey’s ideas are amply proven by USA’s rise to global industrial leadership by the end of that century. If you plot steel production, railroad mileage built, and coal production, against the various tariff regimes in the 1800s to 1920s, the results are very stark: low tariffs are strongly correlated with downturns in real production, and high tariffs are strongly correlated with increases in real production.
[Tariffs and protectionism are only one of five critical policies needed for economic success. They all existed in 19th century America, supported and nurtured by the founding governing philosophy of civic republicanism. But all five have been driven to the edge of extinction by the rise of liberal capitalism. The problem with Trump’s proposed tariffs is that tariffs alone will not succeed in the current climate of a financialized and oligarchical political economy.
[Standard accounts of USA economic history grudgingly acknowledge the protectionist policies of the 19th century. These accounts usually present protectionism as one of a triad of economic policies that created the conditions for USA’s industrial development. The other two are “internal improvements” and “national banking.” It is important to note that all three policies were bitterly contested. It is no coincidence that the center of strong opposition to these three policies were the southern slave states.
[Internal improvements. This policy is simply major and massive infrastructure programs, almost always undertaken by the national government directly, or with massive support and promotion by the national government. Examples are the building of roads, bridges and canals. The standard reference is Carter Goodrich’s Government Promotion of American Canals and Railroads, 1800-1890, which was published in 1960, just before the rise of Milton Friedman’s and Alan Greenspan’s neoliberalism made it almost impossible to write approvingly of government “directing” the economy.
[John Lauritz Larson, in his book, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2001, available on InternetArchive), argued that
This chaotic political history has resulted in most Americans today believing that “free enterprise and government noninterference” are “compelling and self-evident” virtues, because the “advocates of private-sector liberty and laissez-faire policy triumphed so completely” by the end of the nineteenth century….
After mid-century, railroad developers and other innovative entrepreneurs, while they never strayed far from government subsidies and protection, trumpeted with rising conviction the superiority of strictly private enterprise over public works. In the process, such new Wall Street revolutionaries shifted American ideology onto new foundations: thereafter not the consent of the governed but the freedom or rights of private property became the central pillar of American republicanism. With property rights in the ascendant, markets moved in as more legitimate arbiters of conflict than democratic governments….
[Larson concludes, “The tragedy for Americans was not that they had failed to build a national system of roads and canals, or that they lots control of the railroads to the private sector. The tragedy lay in the subtle substitution, during the long struggle over internal improvements, of economic liberalism for political republicanism at the heart of the American experiment.”
[National banking is not as clearcut as Internal improvements, because of the self-serving myths created by Wall Street and the big banks over the past century. Also, because Alexander Hamilton’s plan of national finance was eclipsed by Andrew Jackson’s “War on the bank” (Second Bank of the United States) which resulted in three decades of wildcat state banking and a financial system so weak and disorganized that the national government almost lost the Civil War in the first year. Lincoln and the Republicans only pulled the nation out of danger when they discarded entirely Jackson’s nonsystem chaos and restored some Hamiltonian national purpose to banking and finance.
[Most people, when they see the phrase “national banking” think of some bureaucratic leviathan, such as the present Federal Reserve. This is misleading. What is important is putting in place the regulations and guard rails needed to squeeze out much of the speculation and useless trading, and ensure that banking and finance are confined to channels that will help the rest of the national economy. A key example in the context of tariffs is useful: if tariffs are imposed, you have to make sure that the people who want to actually rebuild domestic production capacity have access to ample and easy credit. They will be building manufacturing and processing facilities, hiring and training workers, and building linkages in the “supply chain.” Wall Street has shown, repeatedly over the past four decades, that it much prefers to “make money” in financial legerdemain and riding the latest investment craze, rather than invest in actual industries where the expected annual return is a “paltry” five or six percent.
[To give actual industrialists access to ample and easy credit today, will require that
- the “too big to fail” banks be broken up,
- private equity pretty much eliminated,
- futures trading once again restricted to actual users of the commodities,
- interest rates largely brought back under regulation, and
- short term stock trading repressed heavily.
[Obviously, with the financial system lording it over the rest of us politically, none of this is likely to happen. Trump is rapidly surrounding himself with dozens of denizens from finance and private equity who will do all in their power to preserve the banksters’ domination of the economy. So, it’s a certainty that just imposing tariffs is never going to succeed at doing anything but raising prices.
[Doctrine of high wages. This is one critical component of 19th century industrialization almost entirely overlooked by historians and economists, and when they do notice it, they spin it as “plentiful land and scarce labor.”
[But there really was a time when there was a strong cultural and normative bias in favor of paying workers well, and widely sharing the prosperity of the national economy. This is a key component of the political economy of civic republicanism. An excellent book on this is James L. Huston’s Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765–1900 (LSU Press, 1998). Huston writes:
An important economic corollary of republicanism established primarily by Englishman James Harrington (1611-77) during the Puritan Commonwealth was widely acknowledged by American revolutionaries: to endure, a republic had to possess an equal or nearly equal distribution of land wealth among its citizens….
...The interesting entanglement was the rise of a protectionist argument that as a republic depended on equality for its existence, the state had to ensure that wages (or remuneration generally) would be high enough to allow social mobility. This could not be accomplished when virtuous republican nations traded with aristocratic ones because aristocratic nations purposely depressed wages so as to win foreign
markets. To avoid an inegalitarian fate and the demise of free government,
republics had to avoid trading with lands that suppressed wage rates.
[A social requirement to do good is also generally overlooked by historians and economists, and, again, a key component of the political economy of civic republicanism. Any decent biography of Benjamin Franklin will reflect this—his entire life was emblematic of his stated belief that “‘Serving God is doing good to man, but praying is thought an easier service and therefore more generally chosen,” Franklin wrote.
In “The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Jan., 1967), pp. 3-43, Edmund S. Morgan wrote
“The Ethic conveyed the idea of each man’s and woman’s “calling” in life. “The emphasis of [work or labor] was on productivity for the benefit of society….
“The calling of a ruler, as the colonists and their Puritan forebearers saw it, was like any other calling: it must serve the common good; it must be useful, productive; and it must be assiduously pursued.”
“A principal means of corruption had been the multiplication of officeholders who served no useful purpose but fattened on the labors of those who did the country’s work. Even before the dispute over taxation began, few colonists who undertook trips to England failed to make unflattering comparisons between the simplicity, frugality, and industry that prevailed in the colonies and the extravagance, luxury, idleness, drunkenness, poverty, and crime that they saw in the mother country.” (103)
The Puritan Ethic whether enjoined by God, by history, or by philosophy, called for diligence in a productive calling, beneficial both to society and to the individual. It encouraged frugality and frowned on extravagance. It viewed the merchant with suspicion and speculation with horror.
Manufacturing was now freed of the restrictions formerly imposed by the British; if once firmly established in the United States, it would help protect the very virtues that fostered it. An industrious, frugal people would manufacture for themselves, and in turn “Manufactures will promote industry, and industry contributes to health, virtue, riches and population.”82
Although the riches thus gained might constitute a danger to the virtues that begot them, they would not be as great a danger as riches arising from trade or speculation: “the evils resulting from opulence in a nation whose inhabitants are habituated to industry from their childhood, will never be I so predominant as in those nations, Whose riches are spontaneously produced, without labour or care. . .
[Lawrence A., Peskin’s book, Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry (Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia), Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), examines the social and professional organizations established in USA’s first decades to promote improvements in agriculture and manufacturing. Peskin’s books brims with scores of direct quotes from members of these organizations expressing the general social consciousness examined by Morgan.
[Another good book on USA’s early cultural and social imperative to do good is David Walker Howe’s The Political Culture of the American Whigs (University of Chicago Press, 1979). See especially the material on the administration of John Quincy Adams.
[Or just read the last third or quarter if Adams’ First Annual Message to Congress (December 6, 1825):
The great object of the institution of civil government is the improvement of the condition of those who are parties to the social compact, and no government, in what ever form constituted, can accomplish the lawful ends of its institution but in proportion as it improves the condition of those over whom it is established. Roads and canals, by multiplying and facilitating the communications and intercourse between distant regions and multitudes of men, are among the most important means of improvement. But moral, political, intellectual improvement are duties assigned by the Author of Our Existence to social no less than to individual man.
For the fulfillment of those duties governments are invested with power, and to the attainment of the end—the progressive improvement of the condition of the governed—the exercise of delegated powers is a duty as sacred and indispensable as the usurpation of powers not granted is criminal and odious.
Among the first, perhaps the very first, instrument for the improvement of the condition of men is knowledge, and to the acquisition of much of the knowledge adapted to the wants, the comforts, and enjoyments of human life public institutions and seminaries of learning are essential.
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