Hope is given for the sake of the hopeless
8.21.2020 Leave a comment
Not long ago Frank Snowden wrote:
The hypothesis [of his book] is that epidemics are not an esoteric subfield for the interested specialist but instead are a major part of the ‘big picture’ of historical change and development. Infectious diseases, in other words, are as important to understanding societal development as economic crises, wars, revolutions and demographic change (Snowden, 2020, 2).
Indeed.
8.11.2020 Leave a comment
Cédric Durand wrote:
The return of the political is thus paradoxical. The hegemony of finance — the most fetishized form of wealth — is only maintained through the public authorities’ unconditional support. Left to itself, fictitious capital would collapse; and yet that would also pull down the whole of economies in its wake. In truth, finance is a master blackmailer. Financial hegemony dresses up in the liberal trappings of the market, yet captures the old sovereignty of the state all the better to squeeze the social body to feed its own profits [emphasis added].
Durand wrote his book in response to the Crash of 2008-9. We are unfortunate that the crisis before us might prove to be far worse, especially since the next collapse will reflect the workings of the plague on the economy. In both instances, the crisis reflected and will reflect the political character of the neoliberal project. That character included the use of state power to impose laissez faire market norms on the labor market, of decoupling welfare and well-being from the state. Despite their rhetoric, neoliberals never offered the anti-statist, anti-political program its promoters claimed for it. The neoliberal state was active. It defended the prerogatives of capital and those capitalists who captured part of the state. Neoliberals was, in fact, a form of authoritarian liberalism. The extremism it practiced (Goldwater) produced a viciously narrow form of individualism. The rich and powerful take whatever they can, the weak and poor suffer whatever comes their way.
8.2.2020 Leave a comment
The New York Times reports:
The United States recorded more than 1.9 million new infections in July, nearly 42 percent of the more than 4.5 million cases reported nationwide since the pandemic began and more than double the number documented in any other month, according to data compiled by The New York Times. The previous monthly high came in April, when more than 880,000 new cases were recorded.
Dr. Birx believes the plague has entered a new phase of development:
As the plague goes, so goes GDP.
7.30.2020 Leave a comment
The New York Times reports:
The economic collapse in the second quarter was unrivaled in its speed and breathtaking in its severity. The decline was more than twice as large as in the Great Recession a decade ago, but occurred in a fraction of the time. The only possible comparisons in modern American history came during the Great Depression and the demobilization after World War II, both of which predated modern economic statistics.
To be fair to Trump, a thought that makes me choke, the problems expressed by the recent economic catastrophe were the product of the neoliberal project that has dominated the American political economy since the late 1970s. Financialization, globalization, deregulation, stagnate wages, militarization — these produced a relatively resourceless society and political economy. The United States can annihilate life on the planet, but it cannot solve problems other countries can address with difficulty, but successfully. Washington did manage to transfer trillions of dollars to the corporations and oligarchs who fund the two cartel parties.
5.2.2013 Leave a comment
Serge Halimi, editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, wrote:
Some revelations come as little surprise. It’s not really news that some politicians love money and like to spend time with those who have lots of it. Or that they sometimes behave like a caste that is above the law. Or that the tax system favours the affluent, and that the free circulation of capital enables them to stash their cash in tax havens.
The disclosure of individual transgressions should lead to scrutiny of the system that created them. But in recent decades, the world has been changing at such a pace that it has outstripped our analytical capacity. With each new event — the fall of the Berlin Wall, the emergence of the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), technological advances, financial crises, Arab revolutions, European decline — experts have fallen over themselves to announce the end of history or the birth of a new world order.
Beyond these premature birth and death notices, three main, more or less universal, tendencies have emerged which warrant initial exploration: the marked rise in social inequality, the disintegration of political democracy and the decline of national sovereignty. Every new scandal is like a pustule on a sickly body: it allows us to see each element of this trio re-emerge separately and operate together. The overall situation could be summed up thus: governments allow their political systems to drift towards oligarchy because they are so dependent on the mediation of an affluent minority (who invest, speculate, hire, fire and lend). If governments balk at this abandonment of the popular mandate, international pressure from concerted financial interest ensures they topple.
Oligarchy, Halimi suggests, is scarcely incompatible with a modern democracy. Both can coexist within a social system. This point, the uncomplicated compatibility of oligarchy and democracy, has slowly moved to the forefront since December, 1991, the moment at which Bush the Elder’s New World Order emerged in its purest form. Our modern oligarchs rule indirectly, by capturing a political elite which, although elected by the demos, depends on the former for resources and guidance. The oligarchs thus rule because of the political power generated by their enormous wealth.
The United States, of course, provides a special case of this general condition. Today it is the only global empire, an unmatched military colossus and a country which sits beyond the rule of law, according to its self-understanding. It also remains exceptionally wealthy and provides the world with its commonly used reserve currency. Sheldon Wolin depicted it as having an inverted totalitarian system, that is, as an ‘as if’ democracy embedded within an empire and a stagnant economy. Democracy in America today produces results that mostly affirm oligarchic demands, a system of markets strongly distorted by finance capital and the prerogative powers of the security-surveillance apparatus. A political commitment to economic austerity and massive wealth inequality, to the imprisonment of the poor as a means of social control and to imperial domination at home and abroad makes the United States a leader among the many countries committed to this kind of democracy. Democratic elections remain in effect. They are, however, ineffective mechanisms for holding the powerful accountable. They are, instead, noisy spectacles which generate a weak kind of political legitimacy for the governed and a politically effective legitimacy for the social system as a whole. This system legitimating originates in the common realization that little to nothing can be done to successfully resist the irresistible force which is society.
Americans ought to consider these points before they vote, whenever they listen to their political leaders and when they wonder how they can make it through the year.
8.15.2012 Leave a comment
You don’t, do you. Well, you should because corn is a component of ethanol and meat production. People eat it too. Corn prices have risen a bit over the last month because the drought of 2012 has punished America’s corn producing states. Thus:
A wise person will adjust her personal spending habits to account for this problem.
7.26.2012 Leave a comment
The phrase just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it! One even expects it to make sense. What, then, is the London Disease? Well,
Which brings us to an issue that is fast troubling global financial regulators: the so-called ‘London disease’. It has not gone unnoticed that many of the financial scandals in recent years have a Square Mile connection. Never mind Libor, it was the London offices of AIG, Lehman Brothers and Bernie Madoff that helped destroy them. The JP Morgan and UBS rogue traders who lost billions were both London based.
The UK is also arguably the centre of the offshore world. It is one of the biggest private bank centres and Britain’s non-domicile tax rules allow the global super-rich to legally avoid taxes on their overseas income while residing here. In addition, many of the UK’s overseas territories and crown dependencies such as Jersey, Isle of Man, the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands are major offshore centres. This perhaps explains why the British government, for all its rhetoric, has failed to clamp down on the shadow financial system.
What is the “offshore world”? It is a place that mostly lacks legal and political accountability, where the oligarchy parks its money, where loyalty can be bought. The London Disease exists because casino capitalism exists, because The City is a place where the world’s oligarchs like to do business and because the British political system is intrinsically corrupt. The London Disease thus refers to a place where the morbidity of contemporary capitalism manifests itself with clarity. Wall Street is also such a place. Both have more in common with the “offshore world” than they do with Great Britain and the United States. Their autonomy is a political catastrophe without an identifiable conclusion.
4.24.2012 2 Comments
Accretive Health has a position for you. The New York Times reports:
Hospital patients waiting in the emergency room or convalescing after surgery could find themselves confronted by an unexpected visitor: a debt collector at bedside.
Mary A. Tolan, Accretive Health CEO
One of the nation’s largest medical debt-collection companies is under fire in Minnesota for having placed its employees in emergency rooms and other departments at two hospitals and demanding that patients pay before receiving treatment, according to documents released Tuesday by the Minnesota attorney general. The documents say the company also used patient health records to wrangle for more money on overdue bills.
The company, Accretive Health, has contracts not only with the two hospitals cited in Minnesota but also with some of the largest hospital systems in the country, including Henry Ford Health System in Michigan and Intermountain Healthcare in Utah. Since January, it has faced a civil lawsuit filed by Attorney General Lori Swanson of Minnesota alleging that it violated state and federal debt-collection laws and patient privacy protections.
Shocking — that is, I find it shocking that Accretive’s morally dubious practices violate debt collection laws and privacy protections. These violations are contrary to the spirit of the times! I am sure that ALEC, with its deep and strong concern for protecting the rights of health care consumers to directly pay for their health care, will want to get these laws fixed as soon as possible.
All Tied Up and Nowhere to Go by Stephen Zielinski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
All Tied Up and Nowhere to Go 
When Washington embraces one purpose
7.31.2020 Leave a comment
For a moment, the plague brought together our supposed representatives, who typically are befuddled by gridlock and acrimony. Robert Brenner wrote:
For Congressional Democrats, being gutless has its costs. Brenner continued:
What we saw in March was political theatre meant to serve as a legitimation device for what amounts to the removal of trillions of dollars by the already wealthy and some well-connected corporations. The plague that is killing thousands provided a pretext for this remorseless wealth-taking without pride. The commoners, on the other hand, were provided with a one-time payment of $1,200, a meager month of minimum wage income; expanded unemployment insurance, set to expire soon; and a limited rent holiday. Each of these provided only a starting point for supporting the well-being of most Americans. What was needed was debt forgiveness, jobs, income maintenance, health insurance, etc. What was provided was hardly sufficient to fend off the disaster. Unemployment remains high while the GDP has plummeted and remains negative, according to Shadow Stats. The money used to fund this orgy showed that the federal government has always had the capacity to generate the money needed to pay for programs, services and items most Americans need. Single-payer health care anyone? Jobs for all?
Most Americans will pay the costs incurred on their behalf by their representatives. Deficit hawks The wealthy and influential, on the other hand, were protected from the consequences of this event.
Filed under Commentary, Essay, News Tagged with CARES Act, Cartel Party System, Democratic Party, Economic Crisis, Party Duopoly, Republican Party