Why Does No One Speak of America’s Oligarchs?

Yves Smith asks Why Does No One Speak of America’s Oligarchs?

The current narrative about Cyprus portrays the country as a tax-havern for the Russian oligarchs. Smith challenges this narrative.

Smith asks:

…But see another implicit part of the story: that Russia’s oligarchs and “dirty money” are a distinctive national creation. Do you ever hear Carlos Slim or Rupert Murdoch or the Koch Brothers described as oligarchs? To dial the clock back a bit, how about Harold Geneen of ITT, which was widely known to conduct assassinations in Latin America if it couldn’t get its way by less thuggish means? (This is not mere rumor, I’ve had it confirmed by a former ITT executive).

Smith makes the point that the oligarchs in the USA are called elites instead. She writes that Simon Johnson clearly described in his important 2009 Atlantic article, The Quiet Coup, that American was in the hands of oligarchs:

Now Johnson carefully laid the bread crumbs, but so as not to violate the rules of power player discourse, pointedly switched from the banana republic term “oligarch” to the more genteel and encompassing label “elites” when talking about the US (“elites” goes beyond the controlling interests themselves to include their operatives as well as any independent opinion influencers). Yet despite his depiction of extensive parallels between the role played by oligarchs in emerging economies and the overwhelming influence of the financial elite in the US, there’s been a peculiar sanctimonious reluctance to apply the word oligarch to the members of America’s ruling class. Some of that is that we Americans idolize our rich, and the richer the better. No one looks too hard at the fact many of our billionaires started out with a leg up, parlaying a moderate family fortune (for instance, in the case of Donald Trump) into a bigger one, or having one’s success depend on other forms of family help (Bill Gates’ mother having the connection to an IBM executive that enabled Gates to license MS-DOS to them).

Smith concludes:

Confucius said that the beginning of wisdom was learning to call things by their proper names. The time is long past to kid ourselves about the nature of the ruling class in America and start describing it accurately, as an oligarchy.

But the question remains: how does an oligarchy arise from Capitalism?

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What is "critical" about critical realism?

Dan Little asks What is "critical" about critical realism?

Little lists three (3) elements of "critical" philosophy:

1. Critical thinking as emancipatory: This meaning is reflected in Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. "The philosophers have sought to understand the world; the point, however, is to change it."
2. Critique as illusion-destroying: Another dimension of the idea of criticism in the Marxist tradition is the idea of "critique" -- focused intellectual effort to uncover the implicit (and misleading) assumptions of various schemes of thought and policy.
3. Critique as self-creation: This involves the feature of "reflexiveness" that obtains in the social world. We constitute the social world, for better or worse. And the forms of knowing that we gain through the social sciences also give rise to forms of creating of new social forms -- again, for better or worse.

The third point is really a really a realisation of the maxim that the subjective influences the objective, and the objective influences the subjective.

In essence, we are to use critical realism to uncover the reality behind the scenes and change that reality for the betterment of humankind.

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Inequality, Evolution, & Complexity

Mark Thoma excerpts from Chris Dillow's post about 'Inequality, Evolution, & Complexity'.

The key question is:

Why has mainstream neoclassical economics traditionally had little to say about the causes and effects of inequality?

The real answer is that you don't bite the hand that feeds you. As Lenin says:

The task of a bourgeois professor is not to lay bare the entire mechanism, or to expose all the machinations of the bank monopolists, but rather to present them in a favourable light.

Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism (p.52)

Anyway, the bourgeois professors think the problem is:

…that the blindness is inherent in the very structure of the discipline. If you think of representative agents maximizing utility in a competitive environment, inequality has nowhere to come from unless you impose it ad hoc…

Nice one, Capitalism! You have created a superstructure so effective that the wrong answers cannot be found as the question does not arise.

But no fast, the bourgeois professors think that by reverting to the original political use of the theory of evolution, they can come up with an answer:

…If we think of the economy as a complex (pdf) adaptive system…then inequality becomes a central feature. This is partly because such evolutionary processes inherently generate winners and losers, and partly because they ditch representative agents and so introduce lumpy granularity.

Emphasis Mine

So we are back where we were 150 years ago, the theory of evolution is being used to justify inequality.

But then, this leaves the Capitalists in a quandry: which system do they choose to build the superstructure on? Are they going with Creationism or with Evolution? Or are they going to reconcile the two?

I think reconciliation is out of the question because of the ongoing civil war within the Capitalist class for which the battle between Creationism and Evolution is a proxy.

Communists will have to side with Evolution because it is scientificly based, and leads to more progressive outcomes than does Creationism.

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Men Who Kick Down Doors: Tyrants at Home and Abroad

Ann Jones posts about Men Who Kick Down Doors: Tyrants at Home and Abroad.

Jones connects the dots between domestic violence and war-mongering:

It was John Stuart Mill, writing in the nineteenth century, who connected the dots between “domestic” and international violence. But he didn’t use our absurdly gender-neutral, pale gray term “domestic violence.” He called it “wife torture” or “atrocity,” and he recognized that torture and atrocity are much the same, no matter where they take place -- whether today in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Wardak Province, Afghanistan, or a bedroom or basement in Ohio. Arguing in 1869 against the subjection of women, Mill wrote that the Englishman’s habit of household tyranny and “wife torture” established the pattern and practice for his foreign policy. The tyrant at home becomes the tyrant at war. Home is the training ground for the big games played overseas.

The violence engender by the system is all-pervasise. You cannot eliminate the violence within the domestic sphere without eliminating the violence inherent in the system. The only way to eliminate inherent violence is to replace the system.

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John Pilger: The new propaganda is 'liberal'

John Pilger: The new propaganda is 'liberal'.

Of the world of blogging, tweeting, and social media, Pilger writes:

Edward Said described this wired state in Culture and Imperialism as taking imperialism where navies could never reach. It is the ultimate means of social control because it is voluntary, addictive and shrouded in illusions of personal freedom.

Today's “message” of grotesque inequality, social injustice and war is the propaganda of liberal democracies. By any measure of human behavior, this is extremism.

The conservatives are correct when they say that the mainstream media is liberal. But they misunderstand what the word 'liberal' means. They are led to believe that it means progressive and radical, whereas the meaning imparted by the capitalists is freedom for them to exploit others while hiding this exploitation.

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Us vs, us

Seth Gogin asks who wins in a game of Us vs. us.

For Communism to suceed, we need to raise our consciousness from the individualism that Capitalism that moulded us into, to a higher level:

When we steal or disrupt or game the system of a community we care about, we hurt everyone we say we're connected to, and thus hurt ourselves.

Communism requires a permanent revolutionary mindset:

Online communities are quick to form, but they're just as quick to fade, to become less open and to become less trusting because sometimes we have a cultural orientation toward taking, not giving. We forget to feed the network first, to take care of those we care about.

We have to throw away the profit motive for evaluating which choices to make:

Here's a possible standard: is it open, fair and good for others? If it's not, the community asks that you take your selfish antics somewhere else.

Godin concludes with:

Call me naive, but I think it's possible (and likely) that the digital tribes we're forming are going to actually change things for the better. But not until we embrace the fact that we are us.

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Mechanisms of racial disparities

Dan Little describes some Mechanisms of racial disparities.

Little's conclusion is:

In short, there seem to be a great number of mechanisms of racial differentiation that are at work in American society that don't generally presuppose explicit racial antagonism, but that work to channel black individuals into worse outcomes than their white counterparts. These are structural factors that the population faces, not personal factors; and they have pronounced effects when it comes to generating racial disparities in a number of crucial social dimensions.

These mechanisms include:

• The provision of essential social services, like education, health care, and public transport, by local government.
• The access to health care is also tied to employment.

• Actual racial prejudice in hiring practices

Since local governments are heavily depenendent on the local tax base in US society, the quality of public services varies greatly depending on the locale. Racial differentiation leads to economic differentiation which leads to differentiation in the provision of these public services.

The lack of public transport means people are trapped within their locale. Thus, they have limited chances of employment, and therefore access to health care.

Poor public services means poor education which, in turns, leads to reduced job oppportunities.

Even if they manage to overcome all of this, they still face discrimination during the hiring process.

So, racism has a structural basis in tying public services to local government and health care to jobs. But, there is still racial prejudice to stop anyone escaping those traps.

As Malcolm X said, "You cannot have Capitalism without Racism!"

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Communication is a path, not an event

Seth Godin says that Communication is a path, not an event.

Communication for revolutionaries occurs at many levels:

• Propaganda
• Slogans
• Agitation
• Mass rallies

Propaganda is what Godin would say is a waste of time if it is used wrongly. It is unidirectional communication, but the purpose should be:

Don't sell us anything but the burning desire to follow up. The point of his talk wasn't to get a new customer (impossible), nor was it to get through the talk and get it over with (silly and selfish). No, the point of the talk should have been to open the door to have a better, individual conversation soon.

This individual communication is what is known as agitation. It is the dialogue between the cadre and the public on at the personal level. It is at this level that recruitment into the party takes place.

The slogans are short, precise communications that allow the party to quickly get feedback about the public is prepared to mobilise around. The effect of these slogans is measured directly at the mass rallies.

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Remembering Rachel Corrie, 10 Years Later

Juan Cole Remembering Rachel Corrie, 10 Years Later.

Supporters of Greater Israel succeeded in having the performance of a play based on her life cancelled in New York, but it has gone on to play elsewhere, and she and her legacy have not been erased, as the extreme nationalists would have liked. In some ways the controversy over the play led to the founding of the influential blog Mondoweiss, which has done much to create spaces in which hard line Jewish nationalism can be critiqued.

Emphasis in original

To remember is to resist.

Meminisse resistere.

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Oz the Great and Powerful

The movie, "Oz the Great and Powerful", is a propaganda film that extols:

• The usual Disney myth of the correlation between beauty and goodness;
• The capitalist hero myth;

The younger sister, Theodora, prefers to keep her ugliness as a manifestation of the hate she feels inside.

The eldest sister, Evanora, does not have a political program to explain her rule. Why did she overthrow her father? Why did she think she was a better ruler of Oz than her father.

Her political program of control is profess the myth of a liberator, while portraying herself as the defender of Oz.

She has the caste of flying monkeys to terrorise the countryside. She has an official enemy to blame all of the acts of terror on. Thus, she would justify her rule as protector against the terror she creates in the chaos after the death of her father.

I would have to assume that she wanted power and wealth for herself. Terror is a means to an end.

The younger sister believes the propaganda. It is only when Oz betrays her that is converted to the dark side, as it were.

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Bankistan Vanquishes America

Barry Ritholtz watches as Bankistan Vanquishes America and issues a call to arms to liberate America. Wolverines!.

Ritholtz still has not caught with Lenin's idea that Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism. Of particular interest, chapter 3 "Finance Capital and Financial Oligarchy" has the quotes:

It is characteristic of capitalism in general that the ownership of capital is separated from the application of capital to production, that money capital is separated from industrial or productive capital, and that the rentier, who lives entirely on income obtained from money capital, is separated from the entrepreneur and from all who are directly concerned in the management of capital. Imperialism, or the domination of finance capital, is that highest stage of capitalism in which this separation reaches vast proportions.

(Kindle Location 929-932)

And, the big four (4) countries were, prior to the First World War, Great Britain, United States, France, and Germany.

Together, these four countries own 479,000,000,000 francs, that is, nearly 80 per cent of the world’s finance capital. Thus, in one way or another, nearly the whole world is more or less the debtor to and tributary of these four international banker countries, the four ‘pillars’ of world finance capital.

(Kindle Location 954-956)

One hundred years later, the only thing that has changed is the ordering at the top. Lenin wrote:

Thus, the beginning of the twentieth century marks the turning point from the old capitalism to the new, from the domination of capital in general to the domination of finance capital.

(Kindle Location 707-709)

Does Ritholtz really think that financial capitalism is a recent innovation? If he does, then the ideological state apparatus has been extraordinarially effective. Lenin writes that:

The task of a bourgeois professor is not to lay bare the entire mechanism, or to expose all the machinations of the bank monopolists, but rather to present them in a favourable light.

(p.52)

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"You've got ping, but they've got no pong"

Seth Godin ponders what to do when "You've got ping, but they've got no pong".

You can take a great deal of responsibility for creating this mutual enthusiasm, and you can put the effort into creating an environment and a story where it's likely to happen.

Connection requires energy and insight and enthusiasm from both sides, and if your partner isn't responding, look hard at why. Of course, if you can't bring your half, stay home.

This is an interesting problem for revolutionaries. New recruits have lots of enthusiasm and ideas, but the daily grind of facing apathy and hostility wears them down.

Enthusiasm is cheap, commitment is expensive. It is in the interest of the ruling elites to keep it so.

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2 Year Anniversary of Fukushima

Barry Ritholtz posts on the 2 Year Anniversary of Fukushima.

The list of articles presented is disturbing. Nuclear power is so bloody dangerous.

The article concludes:

We don’t mean to pick on Japan. After all, the American government is dictating nuclear policy in Japan. American reactors are even more dangerous than Fukushima. And a secret report confirms that Southern California Edison knew of major problems at the San Onofre nuclear plant… but let the slipshod expansion and remodeling project continue anyway.

As the article, United States: A Fukushima-style disaster is waiting to happen, notes:

The US is just as likely to see a devastating “perfect storm” as Japan.

Another claim is that US nuclear regulators are much more stringent than Japan. But that rings hollow in the face of the facts.

A 2010 study of nuclear plant safety by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) found US plants experienced at least 14 “near misses” last year. The report overview explained that “many of these significant events occurred because reactor owners, and often the NRC, tolerated known safety problems”.

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The four corporate industries that rule Australia

The four corporate industries that rule Australia are:

1. Mining
2. Banking
3. Superannuation
4. Gambling

These four (4) industries are able to direct government policy at all levels through campaign donations, media campaigns, and threats to withold investments.

The only really productive industry is the first: mining. Banking and superannuation are financial capitalists. While the last (gambling) is just a parasite—it adds no real value to the Australian economy.

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A Disgusting TV Ad in Favor of Gay Marriage

Ted Rall is against A Disgusting TV Ad in Favor of Gay Marriage.

Rall argues for the abolition of marriage as it …causes untold misery and reinforces outmoded systems of patriarchy, hierarchy and capitalism.

But more importantly, [o]ppressed peoples should support one another rather than rely on the oppressors to grant rights to one section of the oppressed.

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The Bolsheviks and the Soviets

Chapter 35 of History of the Russian Revolution by Leon Trotsky covers The Bolsheviks and the Soviets.

In this chapter, Trotsky explains the shifting focus on the slogan, All Power to the Soviets!.

Although the soviets of the soldiers and the workers were set up in 1905 and again in 1917 as the expressions of popular will, Trotsky contends they lagged behind the masses in the expression of the popular will. This was most clearly seen in the July Days when the soviets came out against the people's uprising.

Lenin's argument was to move the focus of Bolshevik political activity closer to the worker and the soldier. It was only on this basis that an insurrection could suceed.

The soviets had been captured by the Compromisers for the Capitalists, and so, had to be fought against.

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What became of Detroit?

Dan Little asks What became of Detroit?

Little thinks that White racism is the root cause:

If I had to single out a single fact out of this complicated story as the most important factor that led to these toxic changes, I would identify the mechanisms of racial residential segregation that Detroit has embodied for almost a century. For decades Eight Mile represented a key racial division in the city, and a plethora of mechanisms of exclusion conspired to maintain this division. If the city could have settled into a racially and economically mixed pattern of residence in the 1940s, much of this story would have been different. Population exit would not have reached crisis proportions; businesses would have been less likely to relocate out of the city; and a schooling system that was very successful in the 1950s could have maintained its effectiveness. This implies that Detroit is victim to the continuing tragedy of America's inability to heal its racial divisions and antagonisms.

Emphasis Mine

And yet, Little ignores the vital role racism plays in Capitalism. This role is that of control. Racism is control both blacks and whites in order to make them fearful of each other.

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De-escalation

Seth Godin promotes De-escalation .

There are revolutionaries who want the big finish of the General Strike, the barricades, the storming of the Winter Palace:

The goal then is to create tension, to escalate need, to amplify conflict until action is taken. Escalation causes us to commit to our original need, by reinforcing it.

The cultural norm is always to sharpen the conflict.

Godin proposes:

De-escalation creates connection, not commitment to previously made choices. It trades the short-term battle for the long-term relationship.

Taking our time and letting air in (and heat to escape) might be precisely the best way to build the relationships we need for the long run. It leads to better decisions, less shrapnel and work that truly matters, without regret.

An interesting idea of building Socialism quietly through relationships, instead of conflicts.

It is always tempting to avoid conflicts especially in light of the state's prepondernace of force and brutality. This would leave the workers defenceless against attacks.

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Hugo Chavez, undefeated! Why the rich and powerful hated Chavez

Hugo Chavez, undefeated! Why the rich and powerful hated Chavez.

The rich and powerful of the world did not hate Chavez because he was a dictator. Deep down the sentient among them know he wasn't.

They hated him because he was symbolic of a threat to the dictatorship of Capital, a figurehead of a continent alive with social movements and millions of people conscious of their political power.

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Hugo Chavez presente!

Hugo Chavez presente! Hugo Chavez is dead.

Time will tell how deeply Socialism has taken in Venezuela. I think Chavez has done a good job of bringing prosperity to the poor of his country. Literacy and health has improved dramatically.

The Capitalist press screams "Dictator!" when he won 63% of the vote.

The prolonged period of dual power in Venezuela is going to wear people down.

In Venezuela and the Middle East after Chavez, Juan Cole criticises Chavez for:

The foreign policy of late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez imagined that socialism and anti-imperialism are the same thing, and that he could lead a new sort of socialist international. These considerations shaped his Middle East policy in ways that were contradictory and hypocritical.

In Chavez's defence, it could be said that Venezuela was a country under imperialist attack, and Chavez sought allies wherever he could find them.

The BBC posits Hugo Chavez: A divided and divisive legacy?.

He gave a voice and identity to the poor, not just at home but also on the international stage.

He was a determined advocate of South-South dialogue, building close relations with ideologically like-minded presidents across Latin America.

He raised the profile of Venezuela into that of an international player, forming alliances with anyone who opposed the US (Iran, North Korea, Libya under Muammar Gaddafi).

"Within his administration he gave opportunities to people who would never have had them otherwise," said political analyst Carlos Romero.

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