Tag Archives: plutonomy

Should be neoliberalism is destroying the illusion of liberal democracy.EvonomicsNobel Economist Says Inequality is Destroying Democratic Capitalism Angus Deaton | Senior Scholar and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Economics Department at Princeton University

I don't think that this quite correct. John Bolton is the frontman in the administration for casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a rabid supporter of Zionism and a major contributor to Trump's political campaign. It is not an exaggeration to say that Trump owes his 2016 victory in large part to Adelson's legal bribery.OK, course, Trump gave no quid pro quo for the funding, so it is not bribery in the legal sense. However, anyone who thinks that political contributions, especially large ones,...

Wow. 16 million hits, and counting. Leave it to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC)  to show how to turn a campaign finance primer into a viral video.  Certainly the first time a congressional hearing on strengthening ethics rules for the executive branch  reached such a huge audience.  This is a must-watch clip. I hesitate to add much commentary, as anything I write will likely not add all that much, and might instead only distract from the original.Nonetheless, full speed...

We need a revolution to cast off monopolies and restore entrepreneurial freedom. First of two excerpts from “The Myth of Capitalism.” Bloomberg OpinionCompetition Is Dying, and Taking Capitalism With It Jonathan Tepper See also a short review of The Myth of Capitalism A lot of times, when you read reviews about books on the economy, you end up wondering what the reviewer’s ‘priors’ are as people like to say in economics. You read the review and wonder where the biases of the reviewer...

The Trump White House research team have issued a very strange report. It’s called “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism,”. It purports to prove that ‘socialism’ and ‘socialist’ policies would be damaging to Americans because the ‘opportunity costs’ of socialism compared to capitalism are so much higher. What is strange and rather amusing is that the White House advisers to Trump deem it necessary to explain to Americans the failures of ‘socialism’ in 2018. But when you delve into the...

The premise and promise of capitalism, going back to Adam Smith, have been that global wealth would increase and serve as a benefit to all of humanity.2 However, the experience of recent decades has challenged those claims: while global wealth has indeed grown, most of the increase has been captured by a small group at the top. This has continued into the“recovery” in the United States and globally. The result is that an obscenely unequal distribution of the world’s wealth has become even...

A Trump administration staffed by plutocrats – most of whom gained their wealth from rent-seeking activities, rather than from productive entrepreneurship – could be expected to reward themselves. But the Republicans’ proposed tax reform is a bigger gift to corporations and the ultra-rich than most had anticipated. Best line: "Trump assumed office promising to “drain the swamp” in Washington, DC. Instead, the swamp has grown wider and deeper. With the Republicans’ proposed tax reform, it...