Marx would have said, it’s all determined by economic relations between classes, the wealthy, the middle class and the vast poor, who do all the work.
Krugman said, it’s not partisan, it’s ideological. (NYT 01/25/16)
It all depends on where you stand.
A billionaire at Davos said he was “mystified” as to why people are so angry. He doesn’t see anything wrong. After all, he’s doing fine!
Face it, Republicans like Governor Snyder, like Speaker Ryan, like Trump and Cruz are all bound by an ideological construct that denies government can ever do anything positive for its citizens; it can only get out of the way. Then, if business can profit from it, it will work.
Why is this a class issue? Flint is mostly poor and non-white, therefore ‘those people’ can’t afford good services; nonpayments prove it. If government is going to act at all (provide water services), it should provide terrible service, because you can’t waste money on something worthless like poor people’s water! Now, water for Grosse Point, that’s another issue: their citizens work hard (look at their average income), and they’ll be willing to pay for better service.
Republican “conservatives” (the label is misleading), are ever wary of spending public money, because they’re positively averse to raising taxes (even a tiny move, towards rates where they were in the booming Eisenhower years: 91% top rate, vs 39+% now.).
Why tax averse? Because the wealthy (who fund them) already think they pay too much: in fact, as a portion of their overall income they pay much less than everyone else.
So, all kinds of infrastructure, a public good, are not replaced, maintained, or upgraded. That’s why even China has better rail systems than we do. That’s why our bridges collapse, or are condemned, why children are taught in shabby, overcrowded schools.
Some even putatively liberal politicians appear to prefer private and “charter” schools to public ones, because you know what kinds of children are left in the public ones. And the charters and private schools are largely non-union. The charter movement has subtracted from the resources that public schools need to serve those who need it most: the poor.
Who loses when a public road becomes a private toll road? Easy, the people who can’t afford the extra money it will cost them: the poor.
As Elizabeth Warren has pointed out for several years, the system is rigged against the vast majority of people, so that large corporations, especially financial institutions, can siphon off the value created by everyone’s hard work: well over 90% of all new wealth created since the Great Recession in 2008 turns up in the accounts of the top 1%, and even more, the top 0.1% of income earners. No wonder, most peoples’ incomes are stagnant or declining in buying power.
No wonder people are angry.
How does this work?
Wages are kept low through monetary and fiscal policy: trillions to resuscitate the banks, while money for programs to help ordinary people are cut in the name of fiscal austerity.
Taxes: while Obama raised the marginal income tax slightly for top income earners (from 33% to 39+% for those with incomes over $ 411,000), Republican local and state governments have slashed taxes on the wealthy, and cut expenditures for everyone else. They propose to do the same at the Federal level in the name of austerity, even though budget deficits have been very low, and borrowing costs have been lower still.
So, government programs are not available to boost employment, and a large army of the long-term unemployed remains (Marx described this as a reserve army of the poor). The effect of this reserve army is to keep wages low. “Free” trade treaties maintain downward pressure on wages, as well, and encourage corporations to profit from expanding world markets, since American consumption lags with low incomes.
Anti-union policies add to the downward spiral of wages: workers lose their bargaining power to raise them and their political power to represent themselves.
With wages low, corporations can raise profits, and stockholders can “earn” higher dividends, while executives are paid ridiculously high salaries and bonuses. Ergo, inequality becomes more and more extreme.
It’s in this context that Bernie Sanders proposes free college, single payer health care, break-up of the big banks and financial institutions and higher taxes for the wealthy to pay for these programs.
Critics have pointed out, however, that these institutions: finance, pharmaceuticals, hospitals, doctors, large corporations, generally, will martial their huge resources to oppose any threat to their earning power. Obamacare was constructed to work with these institutional heavy-weights, which is why drug prices, insurance premiums and doctors’ salaries have risen as Obamacare is implemented.
This is also why Bernie’s proposals have no possibility of realization, unless there is a thorough-going political revolution (which he advocates). What would be needed, at minimum, would be large congressional majorities (a mandate) in favor of his programs, and a replication of these majorities in the states.
The GOP and the Supreme Court have conspired to make this kind of political revolution close to impossible: voting restrictions and partisan gerrymanders after 2010, have made it highly unlikely that any popular movement could overthrow the Republican majority in the House, or in the states.
Ironically, Clinton and now Obama, through their trade deals, have made it more likely that corporations will have virtual veto power against any radical change that will adversely impact their profits, or their CEO’s salaries.
But, there is enormous hunger out here (in the world, right now in the US) for the kind of Revolution Bernie talks about.
If it happens, we’ll be spared the bloody mess of a violent revolution. If radical reform doesn’t happen, an explosion will. Not now, but soon. Or, an alternative: a fascist totalitarianism to hold down the lid; it would make Stalin and Hitler look like pikers.
Showing posts with label Corporations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Corporations. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Feudalism Corporate-style
The US is leaving Afghanistan (too slowly), but just think of the profits big corporations can make on its most important export.
Really, there must be some way Pfizer, Novartis, etc, can profit on Afghan opium (Afghanistan produces 90% of the world's crop). Big corporations increasingly dominate world trade. They're pressing globally for patent rights even to basic food crops. Patents as monopoly grants, provide corporations monopoly profits.
Corporations promote war, any war: they can make obscene amounts on it. They have a near monopsony, as well: the US Defense Department; it buys more from defense corporations than all other buyers combined, close to a definition of the word, monopsony.
The US strides, giant-like, across the world--trampling, too. But it, and almost every other nation, is bowing to a multiplicity of fiefdoms called corporations.
When the Roman Empire was self-destructing in the late 300's to late 400's, it was ruled by a class that created the model for what came after: Roman Senators lorded it over huge latifundias, with estates from Gaul to North Africa, all manned by hundreds to thousands of serfs and slaves. Senators also provided the bureaucratic skills to run the Empire, usually to their personal advantage. Over time, the Senators' holdings grew as there became fewer of them (small families), but then shrank as the Empire withered: losing estates in North Africa, for example, when the Vandals took over there--due to incompetence and rivalry between Imperial services.
But what prevailed became the feudalism of the Medieval period, dominated by Germanic conquerors--rampaging hordes that settled down to enjoy their pillage in one place.
Something similar is happening today. Corporations are the new Senatorial latifundias, spreading their thirst for profits worldwide, but in their own niches. We have feudalism of food production by Monsanto, or of pharmaceuticals by Glaxo-Smith-Kline, or of oil and coal production by the Koch brothers.
Workers are treated increasingly as serfs, as unions are driven out, workers are laid off, wages are cut and the remaining employees work harder in fear for their jobs.
Now, with the secret negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the ascendancy of these corporations lurches forward. Only "stakeholders" (not the public or Congress) are permitted to know what the negotiations entail, but leaked accounts indicate that corporations will be able to sue to block environmental and labor laws, expand patent and copyright rights, and generally override sovereign nations' regulations, as long as they can claim their profitability/interest is threatened.
Corporate feudalism is like the Roman Senators, who held life and death power over their 'dependents.' But once the nation-state is pushed aside, will there just be rampaging corporations? No governments will be able to protect the people from the corporate hordes.
Really, there must be some way Pfizer, Novartis, etc, can profit on Afghan opium (Afghanistan produces 90% of the world's crop). Big corporations increasingly dominate world trade. They're pressing globally for patent rights even to basic food crops. Patents as monopoly grants, provide corporations monopoly profits.
Corporations promote war, any war: they can make obscene amounts on it. They have a near monopsony, as well: the US Defense Department; it buys more from defense corporations than all other buyers combined, close to a definition of the word, monopsony.
The US strides, giant-like, across the world--trampling, too. But it, and almost every other nation, is bowing to a multiplicity of fiefdoms called corporations.
When the Roman Empire was self-destructing in the late 300's to late 400's, it was ruled by a class that created the model for what came after: Roman Senators lorded it over huge latifundias, with estates from Gaul to North Africa, all manned by hundreds to thousands of serfs and slaves. Senators also provided the bureaucratic skills to run the Empire, usually to their personal advantage. Over time, the Senators' holdings grew as there became fewer of them (small families), but then shrank as the Empire withered: losing estates in North Africa, for example, when the Vandals took over there--due to incompetence and rivalry between Imperial services.
But what prevailed became the feudalism of the Medieval period, dominated by Germanic conquerors--rampaging hordes that settled down to enjoy their pillage in one place.
Something similar is happening today. Corporations are the new Senatorial latifundias, spreading their thirst for profits worldwide, but in their own niches. We have feudalism of food production by Monsanto, or of pharmaceuticals by Glaxo-Smith-Kline, or of oil and coal production by the Koch brothers.
Workers are treated increasingly as serfs, as unions are driven out, workers are laid off, wages are cut and the remaining employees work harder in fear for their jobs.
Now, with the secret negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the ascendancy of these corporations lurches forward. Only "stakeholders" (not the public or Congress) are permitted to know what the negotiations entail, but leaked accounts indicate that corporations will be able to sue to block environmental and labor laws, expand patent and copyright rights, and generally override sovereign nations' regulations, as long as they can claim their profitability/interest is threatened.
Corporate feudalism is like the Roman Senators, who held life and death power over their 'dependents.' But once the nation-state is pushed aside, will there just be rampaging corporations? No governments will be able to protect the people from the corporate hordes.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Lockouts: Capitalism 2012
Corporations, or rather, their CEO's, are feeling their oats. They're sitting on mountains of profits and can see, from their corner window offices, the endless reserve army of the desperate, just waiting to be asked: work, no matter how badly paid, is better than no work at all.
So, more and more corporations aren't tolerating their union workers any longer: they're locking them out, or threatening to do so. If unions attempt to negotiate for their members, corporations refuse to listen. Instead, they demand: lower wages and benefits; they don't budge. It doesn't matter that their corporations have high profits at current wage levels; they want to cut wages, cut benefits, and claim they'll go out of business, or relocate, or offshore, if they don't get their way, or simply will hire replacement workers. After they make their claim--unsubstantiated by their balance sheets--they lock the doors if unions don't cave. Seventeen have done so in 2011, but before this year, lockouts were rare.
It's the new face of management: take it or leave it: capitalism 2012 style.
What managements want is clear: higher and higher profits, huge salaries for themselves and higher dividends if that will enhance the value of their stock, and incomes. What is also clear: workers may do the work necessary to the corporation, but workers are now fungible, just like money. They can be traded in for cheaper models, just like retiring high interest loans for lower cost ones. There are just so many willing to work, and so few jobs available.
Manufacturing is supposedly reviving in the US. This may be one reason: highly skilled, educated, hard-working (willing to work way more than 40-hour weeks), American workers come cheap, now that unions have been beaten down to the point where they are weak, almost impotent. Strikes are no threat to many corporations: replacement workers, what unions call "scabs," are willing and ready to take the place of strikers, and the authorities will send in the police, armed, armored and dangerous to insure the safety of replacement workers and corporate property. Strikers are no match for them.
There are few political representatives, in this supposed democracy, to stand up for workers' rights. The Occupy movement represents the helplessness many feel in the face of corporate aggression and no countervailing force. What do we get instead? Obama will now take a more populist tone, will pledge to reinvigorate "the middle class," (no one speaks of "workers") and Romney, Gingrich, et al, clearly represent corporate interests and people like themselves with high incomes--Romney's unearned income came to over $20 million in each of the last two years!
This does look like the takeover of a class very like the fifth century's Roman Senators, with inequality growing, not receding. It's a prescription for stagnation and decline--just like the late Roman Empire.
So, more and more corporations aren't tolerating their union workers any longer: they're locking them out, or threatening to do so. If unions attempt to negotiate for their members, corporations refuse to listen. Instead, they demand: lower wages and benefits; they don't budge. It doesn't matter that their corporations have high profits at current wage levels; they want to cut wages, cut benefits, and claim they'll go out of business, or relocate, or offshore, if they don't get their way, or simply will hire replacement workers. After they make their claim--unsubstantiated by their balance sheets--they lock the doors if unions don't cave. Seventeen have done so in 2011, but before this year, lockouts were rare.
It's the new face of management: take it or leave it: capitalism 2012 style.
What managements want is clear: higher and higher profits, huge salaries for themselves and higher dividends if that will enhance the value of their stock, and incomes. What is also clear: workers may do the work necessary to the corporation, but workers are now fungible, just like money. They can be traded in for cheaper models, just like retiring high interest loans for lower cost ones. There are just so many willing to work, and so few jobs available.
Manufacturing is supposedly reviving in the US. This may be one reason: highly skilled, educated, hard-working (willing to work way more than 40-hour weeks), American workers come cheap, now that unions have been beaten down to the point where they are weak, almost impotent. Strikes are no threat to many corporations: replacement workers, what unions call "scabs," are willing and ready to take the place of strikers, and the authorities will send in the police, armed, armored and dangerous to insure the safety of replacement workers and corporate property. Strikers are no match for them.
There are few political representatives, in this supposed democracy, to stand up for workers' rights. The Occupy movement represents the helplessness many feel in the face of corporate aggression and no countervailing force. What do we get instead? Obama will now take a more populist tone, will pledge to reinvigorate "the middle class," (no one speaks of "workers") and Romney, Gingrich, et al, clearly represent corporate interests and people like themselves with high incomes--Romney's unearned income came to over $20 million in each of the last two years!
This does look like the takeover of a class very like the fifth century's Roman Senators, with inequality growing, not receding. It's a prescription for stagnation and decline--just like the late Roman Empire.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Anarchy Right and Left
I read a right-wing paean for anarchy in a libertarian newsletter; it was mirrored by a left-wing article expressing disgust--at corporate anarchy!
The pro-anarchist rhapsodizes about how 'mates' helped each other in the Australian floods, volunteering by the thousands--and then the government comes in, hunts for looters, restores law and order, and worst of all, collects taxes: end of paradise, the renewal of theft.
The leftist describes how the corporations are running Washington, and do the same thing--siphon off the people's wealth--with government collusion, bought and paid for.
So, is it the government, or is it corporations?
Conservative anarchists assume that all taxation is theft. Government service, to them, is an oxymoron. Nothing government does has any economic value. They assume that everything should be provided by 'business.' So, private roads and military would be more efficient? Would every road be a toll road?
What anarchists ignore, are the 300 pound gorillas on the loose, all over the world--the global corporations. Wouldn't they mind if corporations ruled everyone's lives without any government oversight, or intervention? Wouldn't they mind the toxic pharmaceuticals, dangerous toys, dangerous roads, dangerous cars, and above all, dangerous banks?
Why do conservatives, more generally, think that less government, or no government is preferable? These aren't the days of Daniel Boone. Now, there are huge, powerful private institutions--as well as a lot of crooks--predators: human and institutional. Will corporations protect you from other corporations? Their only rationale is greater profit. Ultimately, government's motive (in a democracy) is to please enough voters so that its elected leaders get reelected.
The profit motive does make private enterprise efficient, but there are examples of better government-provided outcomes: health care and utilities abroad and in municipalities are only two. But there are many functions that only a government should do: maintain order, maintain means of transportation, i.e. roads, airports, city streets, public health, ensure that the marketplace is not a shark-pit and then, there's also defense. Should we fire the Pentagon and hire Blackwater/Xe?
That I would go for: dismantle the Pentagon, then don't renew Xe's contract. But seriously, there are a lot of issues that the left and right see in tantalizingly parallel ways.
Doesn't everyone get impatient with bureaucracy? But it's both government and corporate, isn't it. The major difference is that government legalese is usually of legible size.
What we're really facing here is the takeover of corporate gangsters, who buy the government, or enough of its members so that they can continue siphoning off Americans' wealth, regardless of the hardship. Raise taxes on the middle class and poor (Sales taxes, real estate taxes) and cut income taxes on the rich, and on the corporations, from which they derive their wealth. License corporations to do everything, and profit handsomely.
I present to you the Selfish Class, the title of a book you'll find on the referenced site.
The pro-anarchist rhapsodizes about how 'mates' helped each other in the Australian floods, volunteering by the thousands--and then the government comes in, hunts for looters, restores law and order, and worst of all, collects taxes: end of paradise, the renewal of theft.
The leftist describes how the corporations are running Washington, and do the same thing--siphon off the people's wealth--with government collusion, bought and paid for.
So, is it the government, or is it corporations?
Conservative anarchists assume that all taxation is theft. Government service, to them, is an oxymoron. Nothing government does has any economic value. They assume that everything should be provided by 'business.' So, private roads and military would be more efficient? Would every road be a toll road?
What anarchists ignore, are the 300 pound gorillas on the loose, all over the world--the global corporations. Wouldn't they mind if corporations ruled everyone's lives without any government oversight, or intervention? Wouldn't they mind the toxic pharmaceuticals, dangerous toys, dangerous roads, dangerous cars, and above all, dangerous banks?
Why do conservatives, more generally, think that less government, or no government is preferable? These aren't the days of Daniel Boone. Now, there are huge, powerful private institutions--as well as a lot of crooks--predators: human and institutional. Will corporations protect you from other corporations? Their only rationale is greater profit. Ultimately, government's motive (in a democracy) is to please enough voters so that its elected leaders get reelected.
The profit motive does make private enterprise efficient, but there are examples of better government-provided outcomes: health care and utilities abroad and in municipalities are only two. But there are many functions that only a government should do: maintain order, maintain means of transportation, i.e. roads, airports, city streets, public health, ensure that the marketplace is not a shark-pit and then, there's also defense. Should we fire the Pentagon and hire Blackwater/Xe?
That I would go for: dismantle the Pentagon, then don't renew Xe's contract. But seriously, there are a lot of issues that the left and right see in tantalizingly parallel ways.
Doesn't everyone get impatient with bureaucracy? But it's both government and corporate, isn't it. The major difference is that government legalese is usually of legible size.
What we're really facing here is the takeover of corporate gangsters, who buy the government, or enough of its members so that they can continue siphoning off Americans' wealth, regardless of the hardship. Raise taxes on the middle class and poor (Sales taxes, real estate taxes) and cut income taxes on the rich, and on the corporations, from which they derive their wealth. License corporations to do everything, and profit handsomely.
I present to you the Selfish Class, the title of a book you'll find on the referenced site.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
The Long Counter-Revolution
I missed the signs, going back to the Rehnquist court. Like most people left of center, I railed against the pro-business bias of many court decisions by the US Supreme Court.
But even Rehnquist held that corporations were artificial entities, not corporate "persons" with the rights and privileges of citizens. With the Roberts' Court decision, Citizens United v FEC, that personhood has now been enshrined in the supreme law of the land, no matter how flawed, transparently political and shattering of all precedent that decision was. It was authored by "Justices" who had claimed in their confirmation hearings that they would be bound by precedent, and would not "legislate from the bench." In Citizen's United, that's exactly what they did, more brazenly, more outrageously than any liberal Justices (like Thurgood Marshall, Earl Warren and William O. Douglas), who were accused over the years of creating law not out of precedent, but out of their personal biases.
It was a judicial coup, and has the potential to wipe out any populist impulse or movement. It was possibly a direct response to Obama's apparently populist movement and electoral victory.
In "The Rise of The Corporate Court" by People For The American Way, the authors point out: resources available to corporations to influence elections are at a scale never before encountered by our already corrupted "democracy." Exxon collected about $1 million in its PAC for the 2008 election, abiding by campaign finance laws before the Citizen's United case. However, it amassed $85 billion in profits that year. With all limits on direct corporate spending thrown under the bus, it could now easily spend 10% of its profits--$8.5 billion--to elect the officeholders it wants. $8.5 billion is more than the 2008 campaign expenditures of Obama, McCain, plus all senate and congressional candidates and all state legislative candidates combined. Yet, Exxon is just one corporation!
Back in the 1890's, people joked about the Senator "from Standard Oil," or "JP Morgan." It won't be a joke!
What's worse, there are corporations like Goldman-Sachs, setting up some clients to fail so that Goldman--and other clients--can profit. They can use those profits to protect themselves politically! Three point three billion dollars profit just last quarter.
The real question is: how can ordinary citizens reclaim their democracy? There is a movement to ban corporate personhood by amending the Constitution, but the amendment process is much more difficult than passing healthcare in the Senate: required are two-thirds majorities in both House and Senate, and then passage by three-fourths of the states.
Citizens United is the culmination of a long-running counter-revolution. Corporations (and their principal owners) have become the Roman Senators, the honestiores, of our time. The rest of us are being reduced to humiliores.
Even before Rome's downfall, the humiliores had descended into serfdom.
But even Rehnquist held that corporations were artificial entities, not corporate "persons" with the rights and privileges of citizens. With the Roberts' Court decision, Citizens United v FEC, that personhood has now been enshrined in the supreme law of the land, no matter how flawed, transparently political and shattering of all precedent that decision was. It was authored by "Justices" who had claimed in their confirmation hearings that they would be bound by precedent, and would not "legislate from the bench." In Citizen's United, that's exactly what they did, more brazenly, more outrageously than any liberal Justices (like Thurgood Marshall, Earl Warren and William O. Douglas), who were accused over the years of creating law not out of precedent, but out of their personal biases.
It was a judicial coup, and has the potential to wipe out any populist impulse or movement. It was possibly a direct response to Obama's apparently populist movement and electoral victory.
In "The Rise of The Corporate Court" by People For The American Way, the authors point out: resources available to corporations to influence elections are at a scale never before encountered by our already corrupted "democracy." Exxon collected about $1 million in its PAC for the 2008 election, abiding by campaign finance laws before the Citizen's United case. However, it amassed $85 billion in profits that year. With all limits on direct corporate spending thrown under the bus, it could now easily spend 10% of its profits--$8.5 billion--to elect the officeholders it wants. $8.5 billion is more than the 2008 campaign expenditures of Obama, McCain, plus all senate and congressional candidates and all state legislative candidates combined. Yet, Exxon is just one corporation!
Back in the 1890's, people joked about the Senator "from Standard Oil," or "JP Morgan." It won't be a joke!
What's worse, there are corporations like Goldman-Sachs, setting up some clients to fail so that Goldman--and other clients--can profit. They can use those profits to protect themselves politically! Three point three billion dollars profit just last quarter.
The real question is: how can ordinary citizens reclaim their democracy? There is a movement to ban corporate personhood by amending the Constitution, but the amendment process is much more difficult than passing healthcare in the Senate: required are two-thirds majorities in both House and Senate, and then passage by three-fourths of the states.
Citizens United is the culmination of a long-running counter-revolution. Corporations (and their principal owners) have become the Roman Senators, the honestiores, of our time. The rest of us are being reduced to humiliores.
Even before Rome's downfall, the humiliores had descended into serfdom.
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