Socialism, American-Style

Mark Thoma comments on Socialism, American-Style, by Gar Alperovitz and Thomas M. Hanna, Commentary, NY Times.

Moreover, contrary to conventional opinion, studies of the comparative efficiency of modern public enterprise show rough equivalency to private firms in many cases. …

With skepticism about capitalism growing among minorities and young voters, will we see more such endeavors in the future? Pendulums have a way of swinging, sometimes very sharply, when big economic tsunamis hit. It is possible that in the next big crisis, both sides might see the wisdom and practical benefits of public ownership, and embrace Joseph Schumpeter’s point even more boldly than they do today.

I think this would benefit from separating natural monopolies — where it is not surprising in the least that costs/prices are lower with public ownership (or strict regulation of prices if privately owned) — from the other examples. When *significant* market failures justify it, I fully support public ownership. But in most cases I'd prefer private sector ownership with regulatory oversight.

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The propaganda machine of Capitalism would never publicly admit the inherent deficiencies of markets. However, failures are sometimes too great to cover over as in the case of the GFC.

Public ownership and regulatory oversight are tacit admissions that economic forces should be subject to the popular will not to private whims. Yet, these are still far from the actuality of worker-controlled and directed enterprises under Communism.

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How Wealthy Is Everyone Who Isn't Rich?

Barry Ritholtz ponders How Wealthy Is Everyone Who Isn't Rich?.

Consider the 71 percent of the world's population that falls into the poor and low-income categories. TThis group devotes a very large share of its income to food, medicine, clothing, housing, education and energy. It therefore represents a huge market for basic goods and consumer staples.

Think of it another way. More than fourth-fifths of world's population live on less than $20 a day. TIn other words, how well this vast swath of humanity is doing will have important implications for industry, from health care and finance to agriculture and energy.

Income growth in these groups in both the developing and developed world will alter the economic and political landscape. The U.S. National Intelligence Council has called it a global megatrend.

Not to be too optimistic, but the economic state of world is getting better. As more people move into the global middle class, they are able to buy more consumer goods, save and invest. That creates a long-term self-interest in political stability and, one can hope, democratic institutions.

How well we adapt to these changes will determine how successful we in the U.S. are as investors, and as a nation.

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Of course, the implied argument of this article is that Capitalism is making the world a better place.

The efforts of governments in China, Laos, Venezuela, Vietnam, Ecuador, Cuba, and elsewhere in devoting large resources to food security, housing, literacy, medical programs to the poor is undoubtably a major part in this trend towards a better world.

Yet, we have seen in recent years the callous disregard of Capitalism towards the poor through austerity programs in Europe (especially in Greece), the destruction of nations with successful social programs such as Iraq and Libya, and the brutal supression of refugees fleeing the terror of war and poverty.

Ritholtz is naieve to believe the rising middle class is blind to what Capitalism really means. The US's role in enforcing the brutality of Capitalism will not be easily forgotten.

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The Eurasian Big Bang

Tom Engelhardt posts Pepe Escobar's report on The Eurasian Big Bang in which China and Russia Are Running Rings Around Washington.

In the end, whatever Washington may do, it will certainly reflect a fear of the increasing strategic depth Russia and China are developing economically, a reality now becoming visible across Eurasia. At Ufa, Putin told Xi on the record: "Combining efforts, no doubt we [Russia and China] will overcome all the problems before us."

Read “efforts” as new Silk Roads, that Eurasian Economic Union, the growing BRICS block, the expanding Shanghai Cooperation Organization, those China-based banks, and all the rest of what adds up to the beginning of a new integration of significant parts of the Eurasian land mass. As for Washington, fly like an eagle? Try instead: scream like a banshee.

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Strangely enough, America's victory in the Cold War has allowed all of this to happen—the dismantling of Socialism in a Single State in the former USSR; and the rise of Deng in the PRC. Instead of mutual hostility through ideological conflict over Marxist-Leninism and Maosim, there is a mutual recognization of a common enemy in the USA and its naval hegemony.

It is this naval hegemony that forced Russia, China, India, and Iran to realize that it can be made irrelevant through development of land transportation routes through the Eurasian land-mass.

Since US-dominated institutions are reluctant to fund such infrastructure development, Russia and China have led the development of alternative financial institutions thereby lessening somewhat the political and financial leveraeg of the USA.

For Australia, this means we will probably keep putting the choice between following China or USA for as long as possible. For the USA, we remain a positive strategic asset in South-East Asia. For China, our value would only exist in the negative sense.

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What Is Wrong with the West’s Economies?

Mark Thoma is skeptical that … the answer to our inequality/job satisfaction problems lies in the prescription given in What Is Wrong with the West’s Economies?.

Of the concrete steps that would help to widen flourishing, a reform of education stands out. The problem here is not a perceived mismatch between skills taught and skills in demand. … The problem is that young people are not taught to see the economy as a place where participants may imagine new things, where entrepreneurs may want to build them and investors may venture to back some of them. It is essential to educate young people to this image of the economy.

It will also be essential that high schools and colleges expose students to the human values expressed in the masterpieces of Western literature, so that young people will want to seek economies offering imaginative and creative careers. Education systems must put students in touch with the humanities in order to fuel the human desire to conceive the new and perchance to achieve innovations. This reorientation of general education will have to be supported by a similar reorientation of economic education.

We will all have to turn from the classical fixation on wealth accumulation and efficiency to a modern economics that places imagination and creativity at the center of economic life.

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What heresy from a Capitalist economist! Wealth accumulation is not the point of Capitalism!

I suppose this is a tacit admission that Capitalism is not living up to its ideal as a panacea for all social ills. The system is not delivering benefits to the poor because people are using it the wrong way!

This is the major blind-spot of all Capitalist economists—this is how Capitalism works. It is all about wealth accumulation. Wealth accumulates to the most efficient, the most ruthless, the most politically connected.

Wealth means accumulation of even more wealth. The less efficient, the less ruthless, the less politically connected are impoverished in the process and eventually discarded from the system altogether.

Changing how people see the world means changing the social, economic, and political systems that form those views. You cannot change one without changing the others.

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Obama Administration Throws Workers an Overtime Crumb — We Want the Whole Cake

Stephanie McMillan writes that Obama Administration Throws Workers an Overtime Crumb — We Want the Whole Cake.

Why even settle for a crumb? What about all the wages they stole through unpaid overtime up to now? They should RETURN ALL OF IT. How much: a year’s worth? Five years? Fifty? The amount will be determined by our collective strength, because they’ll never voluntarily return even a penny.

We gain nothing unless we fight for it. If we’re going to be strong enough to win our rights, then we need to organize. If establishment unions hold us back or sell us out—which happens all too often—then we need to organize on our own, into a new labor movement that workers control. The capitalists returned a crumb of what they owe us. Let’s band together and prevent them from taking it away again. Then we can start thinking about the rest of the cake.

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Knife at its throat, Greece yields to Troika brutality

Dick Nichols writes that with Knife at its throat, Greece yields to Troika brutality.

In this situation it is important to keep present that the basic reason for the signing of the Eurosummit deal was the SYRIZA-led government’s isolation. The energies of the left outside Greece are therefore best devoted to doing everything we can to strengthen understanding of Greece’s predicament and solidarity with its struggles, and to exposing the complicity of conservative and social-democratic governments in the European establishment’s ongoing war on the Greek threat to “There Is No Alternative”.

Greece has lost a battle—most probably unavoidably—but its courageous struggle against capitalist austerity continues. It must not be left to fight alone.

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Without a revolutionary movement, the Greece people were destined to be crushed. There are very few options under Capitalism for survival. Greece was given none.

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Conservatism with a Heart? It’s Called Socialism

Ted Rall writes that Conservatism with a Heart? It’s Called Socialism.

Boiled down to its essentials, the argument of would-be conservative reformers like Brooks is that it sure would be swell if capitalism could be made fairer. But the thing about capitalism is that unfairness isn’t an unfortunate side effect of this particular economic system. It’s a core feature.

Capitalism without unfairness and built-in inequality isn’t capitalism; it’s socialism. You don’t have to be Karl Marx to have been able to personally observe the tendency of power and money to aggregate into fewer and fewer hands over time, what we call monopolization, and to leverage those advantages in order to gather an even greater share.

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Redistribution of income. And wealth. That’s the ticket to solving income inequality. When the time comes, however, I’m going to trust my local Communists — who have been pushing for and thinking about it forever — a hell of a lot more than the reform conservatives who think Ronald Reagan, who trashed the social safety net, was some kind of hero.

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Not strictly true. The difference between Capitalism and Socialism is about who owns and controls the means of production: Capitalists or workers. In this advanced stage of Capitalism, the struggle is between the bankers and the workers.

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Greece Bailout: Selling Out to Scummy International Bankers

Ted Rall writes about Greece Bailout: Selling Out to Scummy International Bankers.

What is the point, from the standpoint of Greek voters, of electoral democracy, if elected “representatives” are elected with clear messages, reinforced by clear mandates delivered via referenda, who then ignore those popular directives when they feel squeezed by the so-called “great powers” in distant, fancy conference rooms?

If a national desire as clear-cut as that delivered by the Greek public — No. More. Austerity! — can be shrugged off just like that, it becomes clear that there is only one route left to effect real change: violence, revolution, violent revolution (which are one and the same).

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Revolution without a revolutionary party to guide it is likely to fail.

SYRIZA is not a revolutionary party. It wants to work within the system as do the majority of the Greeks.

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Former US Democrat Presidential Candidate Calls for Internment Camps for "Disloyal Americans" Americans

Mike Shedlock writes that Former US Democrat Presidential Candidate Calls for Internment Camps for "Disloyal Americans" Americans.

Idiotic "thought police" attacks on the constitution come from the right and the left.

Wesley Clark, like countless Republican constitutional hypocrites has just thrown his hat into the ring for perpetual war.

Don't like it? Then you belong in an internment camp until you do.

Is Clark's position any different from what happened in Nazi Germany or Iraq? What about China, or for that matter ISIS?

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Are the elites so wrapped up in themselves that they cannot see it is their actions and attitudes that are radicalising people?

All we need is someone to say Let them eat cake.

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Greece is not just a tragedy, but a lie

John Pilger writes that Greece is not just a tragedy, but a lie.

An historic betrayal has consumed Greece. Having set aside the mandate of the Greek electorate, the Syriza government has willfully ignored last week's landslide "No" vote and secretly agreed a raft of repressive, impoverishing measures in return for a "bailout" that means sinister foreign control and a warning to the world.

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For a small country such as Greece, the euro is a colonial currency: a tether to a capitalist ideology so extreme that even the Pope pronounces it "intolerable" and "the dung of the devil". The euro is to Greece what the US dollar is to remote territories in the Pacific, whose poverty and servility is guaranteed by their dependency.

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The leaders of Syriza are revolutionaries of a kind — but their revolution is the perverse, familiar appropriation of social democratic and parliamentary movements by liberals groomed to comply with neo-liberal drivel and a social engineering whose authentic face is that of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany's finance minister, an imperial thug. Like the Labour Party in Britain and its equivalents among former social democratic parties such as the Labor Party in Australia, still describing themselves as "liberal" or even "left", Syriza is the product of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, "schooled in postmodernism", as Alex Lantier wrote.

For them, class is the unmentionable, let alone an enduring struggle, regardless of the reality of the lives of most human beings. Syriza's luminaries are well-groomed; they lead not the resistance that ordinary people crave, as the Greek electorate has so bravely demonstrated, but "better terms" of a venal status quo that corrals and punishes the poor. When merged with "identity politics" and its insidious distractions, the consequence is not resistance, but subservience. "Mainstream" political life in Britain exemplifies this.

This is not inevitable, a done deal, if we wake up from the long, postmodern coma and reject the myths and deceptions of those who claim to represent us, and fight.

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Betrayal — that is a harsh word.

We must smash the lie of There Is No Alternative. We must do this daily through experience, reflection, and action. Then repeat.

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