"Trump has sewn himself into a sack with Elon Musk, a few billion dollars, a cat and a snake, and had the sack tossed into the Tiber. That’s the story here. And it will go on for a while."
Showing posts with label corporate rule. Show all posts
Showing posts with label corporate rule. Show all posts
Deregulation Hysteria Is Building Inside the Beltway
Some republican legislator excited about Grump's support for deregulating the economy:
“There may be more bang for the buck in terms of growing our economy…making regulatory changes, get the impediments out of the way, let those job creators and entrepreneurs really be able to go to work.”
Letters from an American Historian
I liked Gary Gerstle's book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022), especially the history stuff about the fall of the New Deal (1932-1979) period and the rise of Neoliberal period (1980 to when remains a question), but the "fall" of the neoliberal order in his book title still seemed a tad presumptuous even after finishing his argument.
The recent election, for instance, was driven by revenge of the neoliberal order as much as it was culture war stupidity. Deregulatory hype like the above quote is Neolib reaction, pure and simple. They're back and never went away really.
And how many times have we heard this one: if only we'd get taxes and regulations off the backs of our enterprising captains of industry they'd create all the jobs and wealth and prosperity America could ever possibly need. Free market or halcyon deregulated business conditions are hyped as this romantic Shangri-La fantasy forever frustrated by government meddling. But, we already know what big businesses, corporations, will in fact do when unfettered by government regulations. We have nearly two centuries of evidence of what they do, actually.
We know what the free marketeers do when unregulated: 1) Big business interests will peddle products that are dangerous, poisonous, and addictive if not regulated. 2) Big employers will squeeze labor to the last drop, enslave workers if possible, and work children and adults for less than living wages, and then have the gall to construct an ideology out of these practices that contends that their business success and productive "efficiencies" depend on disciplining labor like this, most of whom would fall into lazy waste without the order their jobs provide. And 3) As much as they can get away with, large corporations have always "externalized" the expenses of doing business, their costs of production, pushing carbon emissions and other pollutants onto the community or public commons openly or if need be they will take extraordinary measures to dump their wastes into the environment to avoid the expense of disposing of them safely. Again, unless regulated this is what many so-called free market businesses will do and have been doing for 150 years routinely.
The free market dogma has gotten so bad of late that the billionaires and oligarchy are opposing green energy innovations and obstructing economic reforms with that old saw about how saving the planet is bad for the economy. One imagines making the planet uninhabitable won't be very good for the economy either.
Anyway, we do know what big corporations and private equity firms do when deregulated: they lowball and chisel labor, breaking unions, off-shoring labor, whatever they have to do, understaff and overstretch their frontline workers, externalize all the costs they can, and then skim off as much as they can in profits for as long as they can, and then sell off their remaining assets for parts. And just like they've never seen a tax or regulation they like, the profit margins from this process, their take, is never enough, of course. This go-go yuppie sales hustle hype is always in pursuit of the next bull market bubble and will most likely fizzle with a bunch of stock buybacks or another crypto bubble meltdown.
It's in the government's interest to increase commercial activity but not to leave the foxes guarding the henhouse. From a macro economic standpoint it's evident at this point that the neoliberal order isn't so much pro economic growth as it is class war redistribution and pro-billionaire wealth hoarding. If the richies had a pound of sense they'd be leaning hard into economic development in a green energy transition and pay living wages. But they don't.
And if nothing else, maybe this assassination of a healthcare CEO, I read today they found a backpack, presumably owned by the gunman, full of Monopoly money (not kidding), might give some sobering pause to the austerity Hawks lining up to turn the screws on health care and other essential services crucial to big super-majorities of the population.
Stay tuned.
Surveying the Media Landscape After Reactionary Bigot Takeover
"Have you heard that Comcast is planning to sell MSNBC? Is Rupert Murdoch planning to buy it? Will America’s media landscape soon resemble those of Hungary and Russia?"
So much for the liberal bias in the media. How about the billionaire bigot bias in the media? That somehow Biden has gotten blamed, essentially, for Covid and Grump who jeopardized hundreds of thousands of lives with his anti-public health idiocy is back only four years later epitomizes the peril. One trick going forward for the opposition will be exposing republican violence and their worst human rights abuses without obstructing their agenda, and allowing them to hang themselves with their own rope. It's that adage about how some people need to experience what they want before they understand what it means. Republicans, apparently, need to fully experience the consequences of Grump's Project 2025 before they can understand how they have been played by the promise of bigot violence against their sworn enemies, "illegals," immigrants, POC, Trans, homosexuals, liberals, civil servants, journalists, etc. And the resistance, de-platformed, will have to try to get the word out about the bigot violence and hold the line in Blue jurisdictions while evading the collateral damage of the coming illiberal assault. I'm adapting the adage "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" to keep an eye on your enemies and keep your "woke," human rights respecting and social justice loving, friends closer. Peace.
Fox and Tech Bros Turn Right-Wing Media Into Kingmaker
Michael Tomasky @ The New Republic
One personal humiliation here right off the bat is how the legacy media that people like me fret ab all the time, NYTimes/WaPo, are actually already marginal to the real big influencers with these online audiences that dwarf the old media: Fox, Musk's X, Joe Rogan, Tik Tok, Rush Limbaugh's ghost, honestly, I don't know this stuff and I'm not sure I want to know, but point taken.
And I'm not entirely unsympathetic to Grump being their champion. So he obviously lies about everything, cheats every which way he can in every election, that's what politicians do they reason, he is fighting for us. He isn't but you get the idea. They like the story that everyone is against him and he's a fighter. They feel like everyone (liberal establishment) is against them too and admire what they perceive as his heroic response to such terrible liberal left antifa protester opposition. This brings up that old saw about how some people need to get what they want before they can understand what that means, even if what it means is fascist violence and purges and pogroms, apparently.
None of this is good, very very bad, but I understand it or find it legible, anyway. I'm a much less clear, or maybe I should say alarmed or worried about how this dominance of conservative media in the cell phone era effectively gets an electoral majority to overlook or dismiss as unimportant that Grump tried to overthrow the 2020 election with an armed mob, or refused to relinquish a bunch of top secret national security documents, or is obviously compromised by his relationship to Putin, who has now attacked our last three national elections and divides us from our biggest friends and allies in the world. Or even how this conservative media juggernaut gets a winning majority to forget that this guy botched badly a global public health crisis that we have barely gotten out of but, apparently, everyone wants to pretend now never happened. Yolo, etc.
I feel like I'm saying more or less the same thing over and over, which I guess is what people do when they get my age, but it isn't just the inhumanity and injustice, the cruel and intolerant hierarchy in this popular election, which stands for over 200 years of conservative boilerplate at this point, but the who cares obliviousness to the direct assaults on our national independence and extreme, isolating, and self-destructive tendencies in this retreat from real world problems and the future that is most ominous, to say the least.
Let's put is this way: This electoral victory isn't a model of A.I. as Techno-optimist liberation but A.I. as a tool of surveillance and corporate manipulation of the media. Doomy and repressive. And America said, yup, that's what we want: 'Grump knows how to deal with the illegals and he's easier on the pocket-book.' Okay, if you say so, we'll have to see how that works out but I have grave doubts.
And Why Dems Are Losing the Culture War
Horatio Hornblower @ The Atlantic And then, yeah, more about conservatives dominating online media in the run-up to the election and Dems punking out and not even showing up for the "fight" in these spaces. Where, I might remind the author and readers, fascist monopolists and "libertarian" super corporations run the algorithms. Bless Pete Buttigieg for going on Fox. And bless Josh Marshall and journalists still putting up the good fight on X. But it isn't hard to see that these online media forums for "free speech absolutism" and troll wars are no-win situations packaged by corporate rule; pitting social media mob tendencies against ethical journalism. I was at Twitter for the Musk takeover and watched him nullify the Blue Wave there. What we need are corporate media untainted by the ideology of corporate rule and the patronage of power. But this isn't a viable business model, we are told.
Anyway, conservative right-wing media domination is emerging as a big factor in the election. Hard to say what can be done about it but the level of dysfunction (obscuring the national security threat posed by Grump, for instance) it has imposed on our civic life is concerning, to say the least.
Josh Marshall @ TPM's post-mortems on the election:
They seemed to have struck a nerve, as I gather TPM has received a boost in subs since the election. Reading through them was so hard-hitting for me I couldn't get through them in one go but it might be useful to think of them as reactions to Josh's following post-mortem summary take:
"I continue to be of the opinion that the big story of this election is that people experienced a lot of hardship coming out of the pandemic and they have basically blamed it on and punished the incumbent party in power."
Like other countries all around the world, where over the last few years voters have been kicking out incumbents over grocery prices and the perceived threat of immigrants in a difficult post-pandemic economy. Kitchen table, bread & butter, fundamental cost of living economic issues, driving electorates and elections.
Okay. But why in France when the extreme right pounced on these circumstances did a liberal left coalition rally in only a couple weeks to thwart it? Or, more critically, how in the world after just suffering four years of Trump's malevolent incompetence and non-stop corrupt self-dealing could Americans, men or women, city or rural, white or black, possibly think Trump would help reduce the cost of living for them even if he knew how?!
Harris's platform, constantly criticized for being vague, in fact included several specific plans to assist workers, plans to reduce price gouging, reduce health care expenses, add childcare tax credits, boost home acquisition, and increase taxes on the rich to fund crumbling public infrastructure. By contrast, Trump's economic plans were shock doctrine junk economics so extreme economists, even former Nobel prize winners, denounced it as incredibly inflationary (what was already supposed to be driving the electorate away from incumbents in Josh's fundamentals theory) and potentially catastrophic.
There's an old line from Ben Franklin about how democracies require an informed electorate. I get people's kitchen table budgetary stresses and reaction; I know many of the same stresses. Reaction against inflation is natural but imagining Trump as representing a viable economic solution is a dis-informed electorate of staggering proportions.
My own crude first take would be that this is less about the economics and still a culture war response to everything, as if mass deportations and crackdowns on "the enemy within," immigrants, Trans people, liberals, anybody who didn't vote for Trump or gets in the way of their agenda, and his thin 51% majority believe this scapegoating will take care of all their problems.
They won't but the winning electorate won't get this until the violent catastrophe they are provoking engulfs them. This is part of the violent fascist allure, reducing our collective complex problems to a few easy to identify scapegoats. So looks like, unfortunately, we're all going to go through some things. Rest up and get ready. And my apologies to all the innocent people who will become targets of this fascist violence.
Some highlights of what other readers were calling out:
The emphasis here is on the terrible neglect of Trump's Covid public health record absent in the Harris campaign and how the emphasis in the campaign was too exclusively on Trump as a "bad man" as opposed to the ample record of Trump as a "bad president." "Because Trump is both a bad man and a bad president, I think the next several years will be rocky."
"Trump can do whatever he wants, but the rest of us are just chumps." Yeah, WTF is up w/ that?!
Reader Reaction #3
The task now is building a middle up and sideways out class resistance to the coming tyranny. I gather this means building out from the cities and states in strongest legal constitutional positions to resist his plans to violently scapegoat "the enemy within," which will focus on undocumented immigrants and civil servants to start but really means all of us, the 49% who didn't vote for him.
Reader Reaction #6
It's mostly fundamentals, the "felt economy"--people didn't like big jump in groceries prices and out of reach housing costs and impossible interest rates for buying a car, that covers 67% of consumers in the economy. Okay but, again, seems like only a massive disinformation campaign and a very stupid electorate could imagine Trump could or even would if he could remedy expensive groceries and interest rates.
I sincerely hope Grump/Vance, and especially Musk, who I can especially imagine being triggered this way, take it all as their "fix it" challenge to reduce the cost of living for working people, they are wildly successful business people, they know how to produce share value, etc, but I'm fairly certain they won't be able to reduce the cost of living for the working classes by deporting millions of workers or imposing unprecedentedly high tariffs on imports or purging civil servants or cutting Obamacare or attacking Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid. No way.
"Sometimes people need to actually get what they want before they realize what that means," wins my quarter for incisive insightful line of this mix of reactions. "And I think we’re there, and to a certain extent, progressives need to be more selective about where we step in for the next decade or so." I hear you.
"He is basically the personification of the American id – the guy who says and does whatever he wants and gets away with it. Obviously, for us who believe in integrity, accountability, and decency, in playing by the rules, this is a huge turnoff. Sadly, we seem to be slipping into the minority. And that, more than anything else, terrifies me." Me too.
My first reflex, frankly, is flight, how do we get out of the way of this terrible scourge and evade its worst predations? And I'm sure I'm not alone in this.
You could say they're counting on this withdrawal and intimidation to reinforce their rules like bullies on the playground and we need to fight back, fight fire with fire, etc. I do think in our own blue jurisdictions their worst humanitarian abuses should be resisted, and we should expect and call for and continue to vote for a strong effort to resist the worst of this by our leaders. But for now a lot of this feels like it is about getting out of the way of their blundering violent idiocy and letting them hang themselves with their own rope.
If Josh is right that this devastating loss is conventional, simply reflecting bread & butter fundamentals, people voting against grocery prices and high housing and car loans costs, it is very unlikely Trump improves any of these cost of living issues and if he really goes through with his tariff and mass deportation plans it will be nigh impossible. So the same reaction against the rising costs of living and the incumbency should operate against Trump and the Republicans in 2026 and 2028.
But this also gives them four more years in power to rig the media and courts, meaning any democratic swing away from them will have to be significant and beyond their manipulations.
And if the bigger story is the galvanizing alliance between the Billionaires and bigots, our corporate rulers trying to hold onto an increasingly unsustainable neoliberal order and the culture war bigots wanting sadistic retribution against other groups, immigrants, people of color, gay and trans people, and liberals, who they think threaten their fortunes, then shaking this fascist fever, I'm afraid, will take something bigger than more or less status quo downturn economic conditions.
It'll take a bigger catastrophe, a bigger war, another colossal natural disaster, or economic collapse, like the pandemic, like 2008, something that brings the corporate order to its knees. That Trump and his admin will botch the response to any crisis horrifically, sadly, is likely and almost inevitable sooner or later. Unfortunately, again, such crises in the past just as often provoked more anti-democratic strongman reactions as they do liberal democratic reforms that protect workers and the environment from corporate rules worst predations. But I'm afraid this is where we are.
That abortion protections won in several states, even ones where Trump won, is a good sign for the potential of resistance against the worst of what Trump and the Trumpsters try to do. But clearly women's rights, and female rule, and what these things mean, has become The Rubicon upon which the country is not ready to cross. Still in 2024!
Strongly encourage you to read and support TPM.
Billionaires and Bigots Overwhelm Democracy with Disinformation
"But my own conclusion is that both of those things [post-pandemic inflation and sexism/racism] were amplified by the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now.
In the U.S., pervasive right-wing media, from the Fox News Channel through right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels run by influencers, have permitted Grump and right-wing influencers to portray the booming economy as “failing” and to run away from the hugely unpopular Project 2025. They allowed MAGA Republicans to portray a dramatically falling crime rate as a crime wave and immigration as an invasion. They also shielded its audience from the many statements of Grump’s former staff that he is unfit for office, and even that his chief of staff General John Kelly considers him a fascist and noted that he admires German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
As actor Walter Masterson posted: “I tried to educate people about tariffs, I tried to explain that undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes and are the foundation of this country. I explained Project 2025, I interviewed to show that they supported it. I can not compete against the propaganda machines of Twitter, Fox News, [Joe Rogan Experience], and NY Post. These spaces will continue to create reality unless we create a more effective way of reaching people.”
Letters from an American Historian
And I'd even have to add the example of the liberal prestige press, NY Times/WaPo and NPR, regularly reporting consumer frustrations with inflation, higher prices, horse race style, with very little if any basic context. For instance, that the whole world experienced inflation generated by supply-chain disruptions after the pandemic. Or that no other developed nation brought down the inflation as fast or as well as Biden and the US economy. Or successfully avoided a recession that most expected as inevitable after the Fed's spike in interest rates. Or even reports that much, nearly half, of the inflation was actually caused by corporate price gouging. They cultivated the opinion, instead, that Biden was to blame for the inflation and rising housing costs, and as if Trump's economics could bring back the prices of 2017. This is disinformation too.
Indeed, by contrast and as a matter of fact, nearly every credible economist tells us Grump's own plans for 20% tariffs on foreign imports and the forced deportation of immigrant labor in the tens of millions would be crazy inflationary.
At this point, the mainstream and right-wing media are propaganda arms for "free market" corporate rule. Their disinformation might make Billionaires freer but it makes workers less free, little more than wage slaves. And, sadly, these oligarchic market arrangements are usually impervious to reform until they mess up so bad they crash the economy like in 2008.
Let the post-mortem begin, Ryan Grim and Krystal Ball @ Drop Site:
"But the real problems for the Democrats go much deeper and require a dramatic course correction of a sort that, I suspect, Democrats are unlikely to embark upon. The bottom line is this: Democrats are still trying to run a neoliberal campaign in a post-neoliberal era. In other words, 2016 Bernie was right."
I agree and disagree with this take. I agree with the general political-economic history and agree with the contention that Bernie's populist left movement was smothered and slandered by the DNC and the media oligarchy in 2016 and 2020. But Biden, after winning the nomination in 2020, took a surprising turn, without a lot of fanfare he embraced the progressive wing of the party in a way HRC and Obama never did. He actually was the first POTUS to champion a "post-neoliberal era," condemned supply-side economics' central conceit, "Trickle-down theory," supported labor like no POTUS before him, and activated antitrust and industrial policy against the worst predations of corporate rule. I was afraid, actually, Harris would cave on these populist economic policies to Billionaire donor class pressures but, to her credit, she didn't. But as a consequence 8 out of 10 of the largest mega donors gave to Grump's republicans to the tune of over two billion dollars; and the richest guy in the world took over Grump's ground game in the last three months of the election and dumped hundreds of millions of dollars more into his campaign. Basically, foremost, doing all this political spending to stop Bidenomics from ushering in a "post-neoliberal era." Neoliberal Dems counseled that Harris should compromise with Wall Street, fire Lina Khan, or put some crypto creep in the cabinet, but I no more think that would have appeased the Tech Bros than militarizing the border, with a bipartisan plan, would have appeased the bigots. Maybe Bernie, white man, could have reached more of the bigots with his message of economic populism than Harris, but he would have faced the same denigrating hazing and obfuscation by the Billionaires and major media oligarchy. Instead of trying a full-frontal assault on the corporate order, like Bernie, a losing David and Goliath contest if there ever was one, Harris and Biden were trying to coax the corporate order into a "post-neoliberal era," a green new deal, as it were, a pragmatic alternative to Trump's violent fascism and chaotic lawlessness. What this election exposes more than anything else, in this regard, economics, political economy, is the ongoing intransigence of corporate rule and, with the crucial help of the mainstream media oligarchy, a popular electorate that has no better understanding of this dichotomy, or any understanding of who really supports their economic interests, than that the prices of groceries and housing were cheaper when Trump was in the Whitehouse.
Jeff Bezos and WaPo Teach About Billionaires
"What makes this moment important isn’t that it swung any votes, but that normal Democrats must finally reckon with the political danger of concentrations of wealth and power.
"Amazon,” wrote pundit Matt Yglesias [corporate rule apologist], “as far as I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers.” Bezos liked that line so much he quoted it in an investor letter.
From Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, to Hollywood’s refusal to distribute a pro-union documentary, to Google’s censorship of negative information about Republicans, Democrats are going through the same process Republicans did over the 2010s when they realized that the cultural power centers of America are hostile to their political vision. Democrats are realizing that market power is political power."
Matt Stoller @ (Too Damn ) BIG!
I'm just a poor retired school teacher, on the sidelines, fringy margins, out of it, but seems like the Dems have known this or should have known this since the 1980s, at least, when the political establishment, of both parties, more or less capitulated to corporate rule.
What's changed now is the Dems have assumed their own inclusive, civil rights expanding, globalizing values aligned it with corporate growth and expansion goals in a way the GOP's exclusionary culture war bigotry never could. Corporations, Dems could reason, want bigger markets, want to reach more consumers, not smaller markets or fewer consumers, excluding those consumers the GOP doesn't like.
But what the Dems did not anticipate, apparently, is that when it came to facing serious democratic pressures for more taxes and regulations on the rich and on the wealthy, an increasingly likely outcome of democratic majorities in government since 2020, corporations and their Billionaire donor class leadership would align with Grump/MAGA's violent bigotry and Handmaid's Tale morality over whatever "woke" Green New Deal and worker prosperity plans the Dems come up with.
What's most surprising or even galling to me is the Lucy and the football routine familiarity of all this and how something like it has been incrementalizing towards the current crisis for decades. Every time environmental reforms or worker protections or health care affordability reforms have been squelched because of their so-called "anti-growth" implications over the past thirty or forty years has been a political surrender to market power and the austerity economics TSEBC is calling for now again, should Trump be elected and he take an official role in the government.
We know the economic model Grump stands for, TSEBC continues to promote, and Yglesias defends, generates Billionaires, what we haven't fully come to grips with yet is the corrosive and obstructive effects unfettered market power has on public infrastructure, sustainable technological innovations, and the environmental crisis pushing the earth's life support systems to the brink.
Or, perhaps most galling of all, we haven't even come to grips with the fact this "free market" fundamentalist model isn't even the most pro economic growth; for that, see the New Deal order, 1930-1980, much higher taxes on rich corporations, better growth rates, and more widely shared prosperity. Corporate rule doesn't promote widespread economic prosperity but instead monopolizing, wealth hoarding, Billionaires.
How the Superrich Have Funded a New Class of Intellectuals
“Only 35 percent of wealthy Americans support spending what is necessary to ensure good public schools,” Daniel W. Drezner notes [from The Ideas Industry], “a sharp contrast to 87-percent support from the general public.” The wealthy also support cuts to government spending and social programs much more strongly than the rest of the public—which fits with their compulsion to spend millions on trying to buy academic legitimacy for unregulated capitalism."
See The New Republic story for more:
The Rise of the Thought Leader, by David Sessions.
The Thought Leader replaces the Public Intellectual. The TL has a big platform on a major media outlet, social media, a popular substack page, etc, and, the point, is sponsored at least in part by plutocratic money that wants to propagate the ideas and values of unfettered capitalism. The Public Intellectual, in the past, was more independent, protected by academic freedoms in a university or educational settings, and/or by popular free press platforms more viable before the rise of Google and social media. Sessions might be overstating the relative independence of former PI's but the plutocratic tilt (spending supports) for ideas that protect private equity/corporate profit seeking interests and refute, or more often obfuscate, criticism of these economic arrangements is obvious and troubling.
The NY Times Abridged Version of Recent Inflation
As usual NY Times does a story about recent inflation without mentioning that it was global, or comparing the US inflation ride with the rest of the world's experience, and not a word about the many stories of corporations using the cover of post-pandemic supply-shock inflation (to be expected after any big disruption in global economic operations) to engage in price gouging and record making profiteering. Again, we're counting on the electorate being able to see through the fascist turn in corporate rule and the major media are NOT helping. Beware.
Inflation's Wild Ride, NY Times
Secretive court system has awarded over 100bn of public money to private corporations
"The modern ISDS [Investor-State Dispute Settlement] system is widely viewed as an outcrop of efforts to prevent former colonies in the global south from appropriating or nationalising industrial concerns after independence. The Office of the US Trade Representative even lauds ISDS as a peaceful alternative to the gunboat diplomacy of the 19th century. But it has largely evolved to constrain national pushes for social and environmental regulation that could adversely affect investor ambitions.
Fabian Flues, of the PowerShift NGO, which co-compiled the analysis, said: “The injustice is glaringly obvious: countries in the global south are the main victims of ISDS, while corporations from Europe and North America benefit. It transfers public money into the hands of a few corporations and their shareholders. This has to stop. It is high time for countries everywhere to leave the treaties that include ISDS so that they can build a fair and sustainable future.”
We can't afford to be climate doomers, by Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian
If the scientists say we can overcome climate change then why are so many people doomy about it, asks the always very smart and hopeful-without-being-sappy Rebecca Solnit?
(BTW, her book, A Paradise Built In Hell, is an excellent history and another, Wanderlust, a sort of literary history of walking, one of my favorite books ever.)
Anyway, my hot take on why so many people might trend doomy on climate change:
B/c, for one big reason, the forces against climate change reform are the richest and most powerful corporate interests in the world. Big Oil and Wall Street. And everyone or nearly everyone depends on their economy; for jobs, housing, food, savings, etc.
Big Oil and the Billionaires, the people who run the economy, tell us environmental reforms threaten economic growth and security. And what threatens the Captains of Industry threatens Us, we naturally fear.
We don't want to cook the planet but we need jobs. Ack!
Now I don't believe this Chamber of Commerce bs for a minute but I certainly recognize the fear in the question: is whatever X factor good or bad for the economy? It matters. Many live with a fear that they're a few paychecks away from homeless destitution or other untold hardships. What if big biz people take their toys (jobs!) and go home, go full-hoarder austerity and wait out the "mob anarchy" (people asking for living wages, basically) in their island fortress redoubts? Too Big To Fail, etc.
It's scary.
But my contention is that the historical evidence is mounting that strategic government regulation of the economy, higher taxes on wealth, more spending on community infrastructure, and Democratic administrations since Roosevelt are more pro-economic growth, pro-jobs, and pro-prosperity than the monopolizing free market corporate rule of the Repuglicans, and this is on top of the fact the latter are also horrible bigots and the last people on earth that ought to be telling anyone else how to live their lives.
My point: With the Dems there is hope, even if it is being strained, in adapting to climate change while minimizing the humanitarian catastrophes coming and, really, already here. But there is no such hope-- all climate doomers or climate deniers, same diff-- w/ Trump and the MAGA Repugs. The problem isn't climate doomers so much as a climate dooming political party.
Vote Blue No Matter Who! Please and thank you.
The Conservative Crusade to Burn, Baby, Burn
Bankrolled by mysterious donors, a little-known group named Consumers’ Research has emerged as a key player in the conservative crusade to prevent Wall Street from factoring climate change into its investment decisions.
The Gospel of Wealth and Fascist Corporate Rule
Some good history on Gilded Age precedents for corporate rule today and another stark testament to the clear choice in November:
"Republicans want to extend the Trump tax cuts after their scheduled end in 2025, a plan that would cost $4 trillion over a decade even without the deeper cuts to the corporate tax rate Trump has called for if he is reelected. [And gallingly complain about deficits!] Biden has called for preserving the 2017 tax cuts only for those who make less than $400,000 a year and permitting the rest to expire. He has also called for higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, which would generate more than $2 trillion."
Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, March 1, 2024
NY governor seeks to quell business owners fears....
"In an interview on the New York radio show the Cats Roundtable with the supermarket billionaire John Catsimatidis, Kathy Hochul [Gov. of NY] sought to quell fears in some quarters that the penalties handed to Trump for engaging in fraudulent business practices could chill the state’s commercial climate."- Edward Helmore in NY/The Guardian
Meaning, for one thing, the fraud and tax evasion Dump was fined for is widespread, or so some business people (like supermarket billionaires) think; and they oughta know, right?
How about, if it is common place, considering how these practices rob public infrastructure spending, inflate government deficits, and squeeze lower income business enterprises? They are not "victimless" crimes.
Whopping 62% of jobs don't support middle-class life after accounting for cost of living
Third Way study from 2018--
30% of jobs are "hardship jobs," not allowing a single adult to make ends meet,
32% are "living wage jobs," making enough to get by but not enough to take vacations, save for retirement, or own a home,
23% are "middle class jobs," allowing for some dining out, taking vacations, sending your kids to college, and saving for retirement,
15% are "professional jobs," paving the way for more eating out, bigger vacations, and a more expensive home (or homes).
The ratio of CEO to average worker pay, in double digits as recently as the 1980s, is over 300 to 1 last I heard. In the European Union they have the ratio capped at 20 to 1 or something like that by law.
Why not forbidding even 2 to 1 before every employee is paid at least a living wage? A millionaire or billionaire CEO paying less than a living wage is a grotesque example of predatory capitalist excess.
But then what if "living wages" don't cover health care or education, etc? The gov will have to tax wealth enough to pay for the public infrastructure the rich depend on in building their personal fortunes but are always trying to get out of paying for, because you know they earned every penny on their own and don't need the gov or anybody else. (Or until they need to be bailed out of financial trouble, anyhow.)
Captains of Industry! Too Big to Fail!
And then if you want more middle class jobs the gov has to encourage or even require labor union representation in all medium to large scale industry. We know this: more union jobs = more middle class jobs.
But Big Biz will have none of it and will do anything they can to defeat any such reforms. And, besides, it's less likely any of their economic tyranny catches up with them before their environmental destruction takes us all down.
The Dems get at least some of this; some Dems anyway, Biden better than any potus since maybe LBJ. But the MAGA Repugs would like to take us back to the old plantation economy and whipped labor. Sure I'm exaggerating but not by much.
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