The Golden Rule Is Capitalism's Intrinsic Incompatibility With Democracy

alternet |  The capitalist economic system has always had a big problem with politics in societies with universal suffrage. Anticipating that, most capitalists opposed and long resisted extending suffrage beyond the rich who possessed capital. Only mass pressures from below forced repeated extensions of voting rights until universal suffrage was achieved—at least legally. To this day, capitalists develop and apply all sorts of legal and illegal mechanisms to limit and constrain suffrage. Among those committed to conserving capitalism, fear of universal suffrage runs deep. Trump and his Republicans exemplify and act on that fear as the 2020 election looms.

The problem arises from capitalism’s basic nature. The capitalists who own and operate business enterprises—employers as a group—comprise a small social minority. In contrast, employees and their families are the social majority. The employer minority clearly dominates the micro-economy inside each enterprise. In capitalist corporations, the major shareholders and the board of directors they select make all the key decisions including distribution of the enterprise’s net revenues.

Their decisions allocate large portions of those net revenues to themselves as shareholders’ dividends and top managers’ executive pay packages. Their incomes and wealth thus accumulate faster than the social averages. In privately held capitalist enterprises their owners and top managers behave similarly and enjoy a similar set of privileges. Unequally distributed income and wealth in modern societies flow chiefly from the internal organization of capitalist enterprises. The owners and their top managers then use their disproportionate wealth to shape and control the macro-economy and the politics interwoven with it.

However, universal suffrage makes it possible for employees to undo capitalism’s underlying economic inequalities by political means when, for example, majorities win elections. Employees can elect politicians whose legislative, executive, and judicial decisions effectively reverse capitalism’s economic results. Tax, minimum wage, and government spending laws can redistribute income and wealth in many different ways. If redistribution is not how majorities choose to end unacceptable levels of inequality, they can take other steps. Majorities might, for example, vote to transition enterprises’ internal organizations from capitalist hierarchies to democratic cooperatives. Enterprises’ net revenues would then be distributed not by the minorities atop capitalist hierarchies but instead by democratic decisions of all employees, each with one vote. The multiple levels of inequality typical of capitalism would disappear.

Capitalism’s ongoing political problem has been how best to prevent employees from forming just such political majorities. During its recurring times of special difficulty (periodic crashes, wars, conflicts between monopolized and competitive industries, pandemics), capitalism’s political problem intensifies and broadens. It becomes how best to prevent employees’ political majorities from ending capitalism altogether and moving society to an alternative economic system.

To solve capitalism’s political problem, capitalists as a small social minority must craft alliances with other social groups. Those alliances must be strong enough to defuse, deter, or destroy any and all emerging employee majorities that might threaten capitalists’ interests or their systems’ survival. The smaller or weaker the capitalist minorities are, the more the key alliance they form and rely upon is with the military. In many parts of the world, capitalism is secured by a military dictatorship that targets and destroys emerging movements for anti-capitalist change among employees or among non-capitalist sectors. Even where capitalists are a relatively large, well-established minority, if their social dominance is threatened, say by a large anti-capitalist movement from below, alliance with a military dictatorship may be a last resort survival mechanism. When such alliances culminate in mergers of capitalists and the state apparatus, fascism has arrived.

During capitalism’s non-extreme moments, when not threatened by imminent social explosions, its basic political problem remains. Capitalists must block employee majorities from undoing the workings and results of the capitalist economic system and especially its characteristic distributions of income, wealth, power, and culture. To that end capitalists seek portions of the employee class to ally with, to disconnect from other, fellow employees. They usually work with and use political parties to form and sustain such alliances.

In the words of the great Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, the capitalists use their allied political party to form a “political bloc” with portions of the employee class and possible others outside the capitalist economy. That bloc must be strong enough to thwart the anti-capitalist goals of movements among the employee class. Ideally, for capitalists, their bloc should rule the society—be the hegemonic power—by controlling mass media, winning elections, producing parliamentary majorities, and disseminating an ideology in schools and beyond that justifies capitalism. Capitalist hegemony would then keep anti-capitalist impulses disorganized or unable to build a social movement into a counter-hegemonic bloc strong enough to challenge capitalism’s hegemony.

Population-Consumption-Climate-Control - The .00001%'s No Lives Matter Movement

realworldeconomicsreview |  Ten years ago, the rich and powerful Rockefeller Foundation played through and favorably described a scenario in which a pandemic would lead to autocratic forms of government with total surveillance and control of citizens. Now it has published a pandemic plan to make this scenario a reality.

According to the preamble by the President of the Foundation, it took two weeks to set up and edit this plan, implicating a large number of “experts and decision-makers from academia, business, politics and government – across industries and political ideologies” and publish it in glossy on April 21, 2020, under the title “National Covid-19 Testing Action Plan: Pragmatic steps to reopen our workplaces and our communities”.

I became aware of this plan through a German translation of an article by Dux Morales in the Italian newspaper il manifesto about it. As I read through this my breath stood still. 

Two weeks seems a very short time for such a comprehensive work with allegedly many contributors and about 25 signers. However, the Foundation had ten years to prepare for this moment. So it wasn’t a hollow phrase in the 2010 publication, which already included the “Lock-Step” pandemic response scenario, telling decision-makers in foundations: ” Scenarios are designed to stretch our thinking about both the opportunities and obstacles that the future might hold; they explore, through narrative, events and dynamics that might alter, inhibit, or enhance current trends, often in surprising ways.”.

In the current brochure, the Rockefeller Foundation proposes, along with other recommendations, to form a Pandemic Testing Board, modelled on the War Production Board, which was an agency of the US to supervise and plan war production during World War II. This new powerful technocratic council is designed to consist of nine representatives from business, government, acadimia, universities and labor, and the order seems not to be random. Microsoft and Google are probably at the top of the list of candidates for this council.

The name of one of the four authors of the proposal caught my eye immediately: E. Glen Weyl, techno-libertarian market radical, Microsoft research manager and long-time campaigner for the legalisation and reintroduction of debt bondage, precisely for migrants.

Another author is Ganesh Sitaraman, professor of law at Vanderbilt University and former researcher at the “Counterinsurgency Training Centre” in Afghanistan. The third is Julius Krein, former hedge fund manager and head of the right-wing nationalist journal American Affairs, which emerged from the Journal of American Greatness. The renowned ethics professor Danielle Allen is allowed to dilute a bit this toxic cocktail of authors.

In wartime, anything goes

As in wartime, the Pandemic Board should have the power to confiscate and order the production of whatever is needed to achieve testing capacity in a short time, a capacity to test so many people a day that the majority of Americans, and possibly the entire world population, can be tested for Covid-19 on a weekly basis. This, it is said, is necessary to get the economy back on track.

Congruously, the state should guarantee test providers a fair price, “e.g. $100” per test. Where companies invest, governments are to relieve them from any risk for their great profit prospect by a guarantee to order tests.

A pandemic corps of 300,000 testers and contact tracers will have to perform police-like tasks towards a reluctant population – even if the latter is not stated explicitly in the brochure -, because “the infection status must be known for people to participate in many societal functions “. In other words: Those who cannot prove that they are corona-free will not be allowed to go to work and even less to participate in social life.

In order to “enable more complete contact tracing”, apps and tracking software should be used as extensively as possible, recording and reporting who is close to whom.

The foundation innocently writes that laws must be passed to prevent dismissal due to infection. As if that had even the slightest chance of happening in a country where in many states you can be dismissed for any reason with two weeks’ notice, including when you are being called up for jury duty.

The global unique ID under a new name

The brochure also promotes the plan to introduce a globally unique identification number for everyone, which the Rockefeller Foundation has already been busy pushing forward with the ID2020 total surveillance project, but now under the name “unique patient identification number”. Everyone is declared a patient here.

This unique “patient” number will provide information on the viral status, antibody status and finally the vaccination status of each citizen. But not only that. The database is to be a hyper database that will be linked to pretty much any other database with personal information, from attendance lists in schools, passenger lists of any kind of transport, or ticket sales at events. Of course, privacy is to be preserved. What else?

In order to identify populations at risk and to achieve performant contact tracing and decision support, powerful analytical tools must operate across any such platform of data. Existing obstacles in accessing and collating data by such analysis instruments (i.e. artificial intelligence) need urgently be removed. Recent progress towards this goal through new regulation is praised.

Indianapolis Slave-Catchers Caught Grabbing Titties And Whooping Ass

caitlinjohnstone |  Wherever these videos emerge online you will inevitably see a deluge of cop apologia (which I decided just now I’ll be calling copologia) saying the footage is fake or the victim deserved it and the cop’s just trying to get home to his family blah blah blah. There is not enough gold in the earth’s crust to make the number of olympic medals these people deserve for all the mental gymnastics they are performing to excuse unprovoked, completely unnecessary acts of violence from public employees whose job isn’t even statistically all that dangerous.

Most of these copologists do not even know why they are falling all over themselves to try and justify police brutality. It’s a conditioned response, like turning your head when someone calls your name. They don’t think about it, it’s just something they’ve been conditioned to do by decades of media and cultural indoctrination into an empire whose survival depends on the existence of a violent and militarized police force. They hear Pavlov’s bell and start salivating, just as they’ve been programmed to.

The thing is, their creative energy is being spent entirely in vain. Police and their apologists have already lost the argument.

A police force which cannot respond to protests about police brutality without the internet being flooded with a steady stream of police brutality footage is a police force in sore need of drastic overhaul. It has already been proven that that is in fact the case. There’s no taking it back. There’s no fixing it. It’s done. The debate is officially over. Huge, sweeping changes must immediately be made, and there’s no valid reason for the protests to stop until that has occurred.

These videos have made it clear that the institution of policing in America is completely sick from coast to coast, right down to its very culture. The most obvious example I can point to is that watching just a few minutes of the footage of police brutality at these protests makes it undeniably apparent that a belief pervades police culture that it is okay to physically assault someone who has made you feel emotionally upset. Over and over and over again we see police accosting civilians for saying impolite words to them or making rude gestures, or not demonstrating an adequate level of subservience. Over and over and over again we see an attack on a cop’s ego treated as an attack on the cop himself.

This is absolutely ridiculous. These are public servants. Imagine if teachers, mail carriers or DMV employees were routinely assaulting anyone who spoke impolitely to them.

America Cannot Solve Its Pain and Misery With Addictive Distortions

unz |  All over America, I’ve seen posters warning against drug addictions. In Cheyenne, it’s “METHAMPHETAMINE / Don’t live this tragic story.” A few blocks away, I stepped over used needles on the sidewalk. In Buffalo, it’s an image of a beer bottle and a pill bottle, with “HEROIN addiction starts here…” Appended to it was a homemade sign, “SHOOT YOUR LOCAL HEROIN DEALER.” Also in Buffalo, it’s a photo of a seemingly dead man on the floor, with “Learn how to recognize OPIOID OVERDOSE and SAVE A LIFE.” In Cleveland, it’s a tagged toe in a morgue, with “DEATH BY HEROIN OVERDOSE IN CUYAHOGA COUNTY HAS QUADRUPLED,” and this was in 2014, before the prevalence of fentanyl.

 

In 2016, Philly had 277 murders and 907 fatal drug overdoses. For 2017, murders are up 21% and drug deaths, 33%. What’s your town’s drug toll?

A 33-year-old friend admits to popping street-bought Xanax every now and then to help her sleep. I suspect she’s on various pills, if not heroin, for she’s always broke and borrowing money. She has a spotty memory, sporadic hygiene and pinpoint pupils.

At Friendly, I sat next to my buddy Jeff, who’s in his late 40’s and HIV positive. Each day, Jeff pops a dozen pills, including Klonopin, a benzodiazepine that can trigger paranoid or suicidal thoughts, as well as degrade your memory, judgment and coordination. Mixed with other substances, particularly alcohol, it can slow your breathing or even kill you. Jeff is always drinking.

“Jeff, man, you’re always so outgoing, so gregarious, I can’t imagine you having anxieties!”

“That’s because of the Klonopin, dude. Without it, I’d be a mess. Without it, I’d be up all night pissed off, you know, about some stupid argument I had 15 years ago, some fight with a hot dog vendor who gave me ketchup instead of mustard!”

“That’s serious.”

“Here’s what it looks like,” Jeff showed me some innocent white pills in a yellow bottle. “You want one?”

“No, thanks.”

Jeff took one out anyway and gave it to the bartender, 42-years-old Lisa. She stashed it away for later.

meanwhile, on the non-BLM, no-mandingo side of the occupy 2.0 protest movement...,

LATimes |  Nearly three years ago, a group of about 200 workers at McDonald's, Taco Bell and other New York City fast-food restaurants walked off the job and rallied for higher wages.

It was widely described as the largest series of demonstrations ever in the fast-food industry.

Fast-forward to Tuesday, and the so-called Fight for $15 movement seeking better pay for fast-food and other low-wage workers has spread to what organizers say are 270 cities across the U.S. All three Democratic presidential candidates weighed in with support on Twitter after rallies began. The governor of New York and the mayor of Pittsburgh issued orders Tuesday that will lead to a $15 minimum wage for all government workers.

How the once-fledgling campaign has captivated national political discourse is a testament to the uneasiness still felt by many Americans left out of the recovery from the Great Recession. Although jobs have continued to grow since the depths of the downturn, earnings for lower- and middle-income workers have not.

By galvanizing efforts around fast-food workers — people who many interact with on a daily basis — the movement's organizers, backed in part by the nation's second-largest labor union, have worked to change the public perception of low-wage work.

"For many of us, these are workers who we see every day, yet they're invisible," said Harley Shaiken, a UC Berkeley labor expert. "What the Fight for 15 has done is give faces, names and personal stories that many, perhaps most, working Americans can identify with."

The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour has been the same since 2009, and efforts have stalled in Congress to increase wages. But at the state and local level, there has been an unprecedented wave of action to boost wages since the movement began in 2012.

imf austerity hunger has spaniards foraging in the dumpsters for food...,

NYTimes | On a recent evening, a hip-looking young woman was sorting through a stack of crates outside a fruit and vegetable store here in the working-class neighborhood of Vallecas as it shut down for the night.

At first glance, she looked as if she might be a store employee. But no. The young woman was looking through the day’s trash for her next meal. Already, she had found a dozen aging potatoes she deemed edible and loaded them onto a luggage cart parked nearby. 

“When you don’t have enough money,” she said, declining to give her name, “this is what there is.”

The woman, 33, said that she had once worked at the post office but that her unemployment benefits had run out and she was living now on 400 euros a month, about $520. She was squatting with some friends in a building that still had water and electricity, while collecting “a little of everything” from the garbage after stores closed and the streets were dark and quiet. 

Such survival tactics are becoming increasingly commonplace here, with an unemployment rate over 50 percent among young people and more and more households having adults without jobs. So pervasive is the problem of scavenging that one Spanish city has resorted to installing locks on supermarket trash bins as a public health precaution. 

A report this year by a Catholic charity, Caritas, said that it had fed nearly one million hungry Spaniards in 2010, more than twice as many as in 2007. That number rose again in 2011 by 65,000.

As Spain tries desperately to meet its budget targets, it has been forced to embark on the same path as Greece, introducing one austerity measure after another, cutting jobs, salaries, pensions and benefits, even as the economy continues to shrink. 

Most recently, the government raised the value-added tax three percentage points, to 21 percent, on most goods, and two percentage points on many food items, making life just that much harder for those on the edge. Little relief is in sight as the country’s regional governments, facing their own budget crisis, are chipping away at a range of previously free services, including school lunches for low-income families.

For a growing number, the food in garbage bins helps make ends meet.

imf's call for more cuts irks greece

NYTimes | As Greece enters a pivotal week in its economic crisis, tensions between the Greek government and the country’s international lenders have reached a boiling point. The government is resisting a push by the International Monetary Fund to impose additional austerity measures that Greek leaders fear could destabilize the shaky coalition government.

Although those talks are expected to resume later this week, they have been suspended since an angry exchange last week between the Greek finance minister and the I.M.F.’s top negotiator for Greece.

The impasse has elevated tensions here as Greece braces for a nationwide general strike planned on Wednesday that threatens to bring public services to a halt. The Greek people are increasingly angry over the prospect that public salaries and pensions will be cut again in a last-ditch bid to secure a new loan installment of 31.5 billion euros, or $40.7 billion, from Greece’s creditors. 

The Greek prime minister, Antonis Samaras, plans to address the nation this week to bolster support for the austerity package. He has already publicly warned his center-right party, New Democracy, that he will oust lawmakers of the party failing to back the package once it comes up for a vote, probably in early October.

Various European leaders have gone out of their way in recent weeks to voice support for the Greek government, which came to power in June. And they have praised the Samaras government’s renewed commitment to taking difficult steps to revamp the economy despite concern that Greece could be a ward of its euro zone partners for years to come. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has joined France in declaring that Greece must stay in the euro union to avoid even the perception that the union would be vulnerable to a wider breakup. 

In this political calculus, Ms. Merkel and others see Mr. Samaras as the last best hope for Greece. They worry that if the government teeters, new elections might be called in which his party could lose power to the increasingly popular leftist party Syriza, led by the political maverick Alexis Tsipras. Mr. Tsipras advocates tearing up the loan agreement with Greece’s international creditors. That would raise the risk of default and an eventual exit from the euro. 

The situation is also being monitored by Chinese officials, who would be reluctant to see a Greek exit from the euro destabilize the European Union, China’s largest trading partner. 

“We want the euro zone to stay intact,” Du Quiwen, the Chinese ambassador to Greece, said in an interview on Monday. “If something in Europe goes seriously wrong, if there’s a major mishap in the euro zone, it would put pressure on the world economy and it would not be in the interest of the world community or China.”

ABC "shaping" the occupy movement story...,

ABCNews | A protest in New York City's financial district is planned for Monday to mark the 1-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, a movement against corporate greed that spawned tent cities of protesters around the globe and became a rallying point for the "99 percent".

Twenty-five people were arrested for disorderly conduct on Saturday at the beginning of three days of festivities planned to re-energize the movement, which fell into disarray after countless arrests, in-fighting and an eviction from Zuccotti Park last November.

"This weekend we will mark the occasion of our anniversary by once again showing the powers that be that we see what they are doing, and that soon enough the whole world will again as well," said a message on the Occupy website.

The scene was celebratory today as members enjoyed a concert in Foley Square and attended workshops on civil disobedience in preparation for Monday's march.

At 7:30 a.m. on Monday, one year to the day the movement began, protesters plan to create "a swirl of mobile occupations of corporate lobbies and intersections" in the city's Financial District, which is home to the country's largest banks and the New York Stock Exchange.