CapitalistImperialistPig

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland probably didn't restructure my world view quite so drastically as Guns, Germs, and Steel but it is another book packed with deep insights into the way today's world works. Freeland knows her subjects very well, and has spent a couple of decades observing them. It is by no means a "life-styles of the rich and infamous" book, though there is a sampling of that, but rather, a detailed economic history. It's pretty clear that she combines a certain admiration for their intelligence, diligence and entrepreneurial spirit with a well-justified suspicion of the risks their ascendancy poses for the rest of us. I have written extensively on her ideas in these previous reviews , but her final chapter deserves some additional commentary. It's theme is the natural human tendency of those who have scaled the heights to pull up the ladder after them, and the method is t...

ALONG THE PARIS STREETS the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrels carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind - Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities I can’t wait to see the tumbrels rumble up and down Wall Street picking up the heedless and greedy financial aristocracy that plundered and sundered free-market capitalism - Maureen Dowd in the NYT ...a private equity baron who divides ...

From a usually smart guy . Remember too that when you have a progressive tax system, especially when there are surcharges on people making seven-figure incomes, you also have a system where for any given level of national income, the greater the inequality, the greater the government’s tax revenues. And indeed federal revenues have been rising faster than median wages for decades now, thanks to the rich getting ever richer. Given the government’s insatiable appetite for cash, it’s only natural that it would prefer to tax plutocrats, spending some of that money on poorer Americans, rather than move to a world where poorer Americans earn more (but still don’t pay that much in taxes), and the plutocrats earn less, depriving the national fisc of untold billions in revenue. This idea is so dumb that it succumbs to the most casual applications of logic or history. Progressive taxes are not good for plutocrats, which is why they always fight them, and why they got poorer when we had them, an...

The quickest way to get rich is to occupy some valuable resource and collect a lot of rent for doing it. Wikipedia on Rent Seeking: In economics, rent-seeking is an attempt to obtain economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth. One example is spending money on political lobbying in order to be given a share of wealth that has already been created. A famous example of rent-seeking is the limiting of access to lucrative occupations, as by medieval guilds or modern state certifications and licensures. People accused of rent seeking typically argue that they are indeed creating new wealth (or preventing the reduction of old wealth) by improving quality controls, guaranteeing that charlatans do not prey on a gullible public, and preventing bubbles. Many current studies of rent-seeking focus on efforts to capture various monopoly privileges stemming from government regulation of a market. The term ...

The mostly off-stage hero of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is John Galt, purportedly an engineer, but actually an evil magician who plots the destruction of human civilization out of pique. His magical powers include conjuring electric power out of the air, creating invisibility shields, and a variety of other handy plot drivers. Today's Plutocrats can't do any of those magical things, though most of them are pretty handy with a spreadsheet. In their own minds, though, they are Galt and more. They are the job creators, the masters of technology. What they actually do, aside from bribing and hustling government officials, is allocate capital. That is a very important job, and a far from trivial one. It also has enormous rewards for those who chose, or guess, correctly. Given those immense rewards, and the resultant sycophantic bubbles they live in, it's pretty easy for them to convince themselves that they were indispensable. In reality, though, I suspect that there ...

G. K. Chesterton is a big fan of the medieval period and of the Catholic Church. He may not be an entirely reliable reporter, but has some interesting ideas. One of them is the notion that medieval times were an age of great human progress, perhaps especially in England. He credits the Church with the major influence in transforming a world of landholders and agricultural slaves into first serfs and later peasant proprietors. He also sees nascent democracy and egalitarianism in medieval institutions of guilds and charters. At the beginning of the Dark Ages the great pagan cosmopolitan society now grown Christian was as much a slave state as old South Carolina. By the fourteenth century it was almost as much a state of peasant proprietors as modern France. No laws had been passed against slavery; no dogmas even had condemned it by definition; no war had been waged against it, no new race or ruling caste had repudiated it; but it was gone. This startling and silent transformation ...

...that five or six mega-plutocrats see fit to print (or broadcast). Jeff Bezos's purchase of the Washington Post is another step in the complete control of all media by a few plutocrats. I don't have any idea whether Bezos is what I would call a good plutocrat or a bad (Koch) style one, but the trend is ominous.

Those familiar with my book reviewing style may recall that I prefer a sort of lengthy argument with an author - I can't wait until I've finished the book to start the review. So let it be with Chrystia Freeland's: Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. This book could have been another cheesey episode of "Lifestyles of the Really Really Rich" but it isn't, though there are tidbits for the incurable voyeur. Freeland is a veteran economics correspondent who has spent a couple of decades interviewing and hobnobbing with her subjects, but she - so far - is more interested in economics than personalities. After making it clear that she sees us in a new "Gilded Age" she takes a long historical look at the originals: the great industrialists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, AKA the "Robber Barrons." Andrew Carnegie was one of the princes of that crowd, and more than his fellows in...

Republican's have been quick to play the "class warfare" card, though to date they are the most successful practitioners, having steadily pumped cash to the very rich for nearly two generations now. Chrystia Freeland, in her book Plutocrats , has some hints that Obama's counterattack is aimed at the wrong target. Revolts elsewhere against the power of the super rich have originated mainly in the 1% that Obama targets (and belongs to). Although the 1% make about 15 times as much as the average of the bottom 90%, that pales compared to the factor of 125 multiple for the 0.1% and the much higher multiple for the Romneyesque 0.01%, not to mention the billionaires. The ordinary 1% no they are rich of course, but they are gnawed by envy of the really rich. They have enough money to be in contact with the big rich, but not to enjoy their unique perks. In India, Egypt, and Ukraine, rebellion of the 1% against the special treatment of the super rich oligarchs provided ...

After a long sojourn in the shadows, inequality has reared its head in the public discourse again, especially in the recent statements of Obama and the Pope. The exact sources of inequality in today's world are a bit hard to trace, but some threads are known. In the first place, greater inequality in the US is partly driven by outsourcing and the rapid economic progress of Asia and parts of the old Communist empire. In that sense, some of American inequality is driven by decreasing inequality between Chinese (say) and Americans. Almost everywhere, though, the disparity between the rich and the rest has increased dramatically. A lot of this can be traced to the triumph of neo-liberal economic thought - which is pretty much is called paleo-conservative economics in the US. The massive failures of socialist economics led to gigantic opportunities for those who could pick up failing government businesses for a song - usually with the help of political connections and gross skulldu...

Plutocrats Dictionary , Definition: Whine v., - that annoying sound the populace makes when we crush their balls. McCain economic guru Phil Gramm got into a bit of trouble when he said that the US was in a "mental recession," and that the country was "a nation of whiners." McCain stepped away from that, but just in case anybody had any doubt about how the Plutocracy feels, they were out in full force today to back up Gramm. George Will and Senator Jon Kyl, (R) AZ, were Sunday talking heads to back him up, and the Washington Post was quick to chime in with a Gramm flunky's editorial. They can't afford to be sympathetic, because things are working out just the way they planned, with the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and oil companies getting richest of all. It's important to remember that while the Bush economy has been a disaster for most Americans, it has been just dandy for rich people like McCain, crony capitalists like Gramm, and ...

It seems that the rich don't like being called on it - the word does rhyme with "bitch" after all. But investment banks do track them. One of the joys of Plutocrats is learning the vocabulary - the euphemisms of the day. A current segmentation is the HNWI (High Net Worth Individuals) and the UHNWI (Ultra High Net Worth Individuals). These respective worthies are defined by their investable funds or (sometimes, alternatively) annual incomes, with typical minima being,respectively, one million dollars and 50 million dollars. Collectively, they control a very large fraction of the World's total wealth. Credit Suisse counts about 30 million HNWI in the world and about 85,000 UHNWI as of 2011. All these people are rich of course, and the UHNWI are very rich, but you still need to increase your wealth by a factor 20 to make the billionaires club - the peak of the financial pyramid is very sharply pointed.

 THE ROMAN REPUBLIC: A Very Short Introduction by David M. Gwynn The history of the Roman Republic is a popular and relatively familiar subject, the setting of numerous movies and several Shakespeare plays.   That history made a deep impression on the Republics that arose in the Renaissance and on the founders of the United States.   A small and rather nondescript city in Italy somehow conquered the entire Mediterranean world over 700 years or so and then destroyed itself in an orgy of internal strife. Like the founders of our Republic, citizens of the world’s republics today should ponder the lessons of Rome’s successes and catastrophic collapse. David M. Gwynn’s brief history is much more interested in the internal dynamics of the Republic than in Rome’s battles and wars.   The armies of the Republic were initially citizen armies, led by the Senatorial classes and manned by small citizen farmers.   After Rome deposed its Kings, power was initially wiel...

 Popper thinks that Marx's theory of the state is a fatal flaw, and I certainly agree, but he argues that Marx came by it honestly: For Marx lived, especially in his younger years, in a period of the most shameless and cruel exploitation. And this shameless exploitation was cynically defended by hypocritical apologists who appealed to the principle of human freedom, to the right of man to determinate his own fate, and to enter freely into any contract he considers favourable to his interests. Popper, Karl R.. The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton Classics) . Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.  Of course our libertarian friends continue to say the same things, mostly, I think because they don't want the government interfering with their freedom to deny freedom to everyone else.  The fact that they largely cannot carry out their program in Europe is a big point against the Marxist theory of the state.  Of course the US is a somewhat different story, wher...

Ever since Ronald Reagan, running large deficits has been part of the the Republican strategy. So why should their plutocratic masters want large deficits? It has never been a secret. These guys hate Social Security and Medicare more than anything, except perhaps the thought that some non-rich person might breathe an untroubled breath. If the deficits become large enough, the strategy goes, they can target these hated "socialist" programs. That's why Reagan financed his star wars program with increases in Social Security taxes and debt. That's why W. financed his Iraq adventure with the biggest deficits ever, and why W's Mega Recession was as much a feature as a defect. HW got the boot for quailing at going along with the program. As I say, it's not like it's a secret - you can find it right wing think tank stuff from way back. Still, I was a bit surprised to see Mitch McConnell brazenly proclaim his plans *just before* the midterms. I thought th...

Sasha Abramsky, writing in El Haaretz : The United States, that most grand of human political experiments, is, in early 2017, hurtling toward a catastrophe. Trumpism is ascendant, and Trump, narcissist, bigot, totalitarian thug, stands triumphant, the entire American political and military apparatus at his disposal. It is, by any measure, a revolutionary moment. And, like all revolutions, it privileges extreme personalities over more mundane, middle-of-the-road, technocrats. In the year 2017, the American Republic – founded by Washington, Jefferson and other Enlightenment luminaries, saved by Lincoln, brought to its modern pre-eminence by Roosevelt – is being handed over to an unholy alliance-of-convenience made up of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Islamophobes, Russophiles, supporters of the ultranationalist wing of Israeli politics, billionaire plutocrats and conspiracists. They use social media to bully and to intimidate, and they threaten violence, with increasing frequency, ag...

Eric Lipton, writing in the New York Times , notes the hand of the brothers Koch in the attempt to crush the Wisconsin unions. Among the thousands of demonstrators who jammed the Wisconsin State Capitol grounds this weekend was a well-financed advocate from Washington who was there to voice praise for cutting state spending by slashing union benefits and bargaining rights. The visitor, Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity, told a large group of counterprotesters who had gathered Saturday at one edge of what otherwise was a mostly union crowd that the cuts were not only necessary, but they also represented the start of a much-needed nationwide move to slash public-sector union benefits. “We are going to bring fiscal sanity back to this great nation,” he said. What Mr. Phillips did not mention was that his Virginia-based nonprofit group, whose budget surged to $40 million in 2010 from $7 million three years ago, was created and financed in part by the secretive billion...

Thomas Piketty states his principal conclusions early in his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century: What are the major conclusions to which these novel historical sources have led me? The first is that one should be wary of any economic determinism in regard to inequalities of wealth and income. The history of the distribution of wealth has always been deeply political, and it cannot be reduced to purely economic mechanisms. In particular, the reduction of inequality that took place in most developed countries between 1910 and 1950 was above all a consequence of war and of policies adopted to cope with the shocks of war. Similarly, the resurgence of inequality after 1980 is due largely to the political shifts of the past several decades, especially in regard to taxation and finance. The history of inequality is shaped by the way economic, social, and political actors view what is just and what is not, as well as by the relative power of those actors and the collective choices tha...

Trump ran and won as a populist. Will he try to govern that way? Who knows, but he will be a plutocrat presiding over a party almost wholly owned by plutocrats, so the temptation will be to throw his supporters a few racist bones while handing out big tax cuts to himself and friends. Trump may well not be a billionaire today, but I expect he will get a lot richer fast. Another big question is how much energy he will expend on punishing and humiliating his enemies. Another thing I worry about is when Putin will decide the time is right to gobble up the Baltics.

The New York Times is widely considered a left wing paper. This is mostly because the American right wing, which has been driven increasingly to the right by it's plutocratic sponsors, keeps saying so. In fact, the NYT is yet another paper owned by plutocrats, operating in a mainly liberal town, and steering a rather middle of the road course. Many readers are outraged by the fact that its op-ed pages have added a racist, anti-feminist, climate denialist to its stable of right wing columnists, an op-ed page that includes zero comparably left wing columnists. Jim Naureckas, writing in the arguably left-wing FAIR, takes a look at, among other things, the history: To understand this anomaly—and the real reason that the New York Times would rather have a climate-denying bigot on its staff than a single-payer advocate—it helps to go back to the beginning of the Times dynasty, as Times veteran John L. Hess (Extra!, 1/00) did in his review of The Trust: The Powerful and Private Fami...