The ugly, ghastly bill

 From Ben Jennings

14 years of Tory austerity

 A video summing up an in-depth article by The New Yorker about 14 years of Tory rule in the UK ---  the last toxic convulsion in the death-throes of neo-liberalism.    Yet, like communists in the 1950s, who, when it was pointed out to them that communist economies weren't working, answered that that was because they weren't communist enough, conservatives say that if only they were even more conservative, the economy would improve. 

Life expectancy in the US

 This very interesting article from Our World in Data:

Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries? 

(Study by Max Roser)

Why do Americans have a lower life expectancy than people in other rich countries, despite paying so much more for health care?

The short summary of what I will discuss below is that Americans suffer higher death rates from smoking, obesity, homicides, opioid overdoses, suicides, road accidents, and infant deaths. In addition to this, deeper poverty and less access to healthcare mean Americans at lower incomes die at a younger age than poor people in other rich countries.

The US clearly stands out as the chart shows: Americans spend far more on health than any other country in the world, yet the life expectancy of the American population is shorter than in other rich countries that spend far less.

The chart here doesn’t just show the latest data points, but how life expectancy and health spending have changed during the last five decades. The arrows start in 1970 and connect the annual data points for both metrics, showing the change over time.

In the 1970s the US didn’t stand out at all, it does so now because life expectancy increased much more slowly than in other countries. At the same time, health spending in the U.S. increased much more rapidly, particularly since the mid-1980s. The consequence of these two exceptional developments is that the US followed the much-flatter trajectory that the chart shows.

The unequal development over recent decades led to an inequality between the US and other rich countries. In the US health spending per capita is up to four times higher, yet life expectancy is lower than in all of these countries.

The US has achieved very substantial progress in health outcomes over the last 140 years: in 1880 the life expectancy of Americans was 39 years, since then it has doubled. But this extremely positive trend has come to an end. While life expectancy for people around the world continued to increase, the life expectancy of Americans has declined since 2014. With the pandemic of 2020 – which already caused more than 225,000 deaths due to COVID-19 and 300,000 excess deaths – it is unfortunately already certain that the decline of life expectancy in the US will continue this year.1

In a word:  the triumph of neo-liberalism.   

Truly, American Exceptionalism is correct.  Just in all the wrong ways.

Shit-life syndrome

Poverty is the 4th cause of death in the US

The great share buyback scam

Poverty is the 4th cause of death in the US

Source: Mirriam-Webster

From The Guardian

Can you name the top 10 causes of death in America? Without too much trouble, most Americans could likely come up with some of them: cancer, heart disease, stroke, accidents. But it would come as a surprise to many to know that poverty is right up there with these other dreaded scourges – much higher, in fact, than many ills that have inspired investigative committees, major policy investments and sustained attention from the public and private sectors in American life.

A recent study by one of our colleagues shows that cumulative poverty over many years is the fourth leading cause of death in this country. Current poverty – just being poor right now – is seventh on that list, and it alone causes 10 times as many deaths as homicide, close to five times as many deaths as gun violence, and 2.5 times as many deaths as drug overdoses. Cumulative poverty that lingers year after year is associated with approximately 60% more deaths than current poverty, putting only heart disease, cancer and smoking-related deaths ahead in the number of Americans it kills.

But if this is true, why do we hear so much about crime rates, opioids and gun violence in America, but so little from our elected leaders about the crisis of poverty? Why is there no “Surgeon General’s Warning” on low-wage jobs? The relationship of poverty to disease and death is a well-established fact detailed in reports by the World Health Organization, the World Bank and our own government. But we as a people have become numb to the unnecessary deaths that are normalized by the ways we often think and talk about the economy in public life.

Sadly, the United States is the leader in poverty among the rich countries of the world. As of 2019, the US had the worst poverty rate overall (17.8%) and in children specifically (20.9%) among the other 25 wealthy countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

In addition, poverty affects us all. Seventy-five per cent of all Americans between 20 and 75 years of age will be among the “current” poor or near poverty for at least one year of their lives. Contrary to popular belief, poverty is hardly just the province of the inner city: only 10% of poor Americans live in high-poverty census tracts – most are spread out across the country. They are our neighbors. And although the rates of poverty are highest among communities of color, by sheer volume most people living in poverty are white.

Finally, poverty is a drag on our economy. Child poverty alone in the US presents an $800bn to $1.1tn price tag, based on reductions in adult productivity, criminal justice costs and the costs of healthcare for children from poor families.

But what if we could end poverty in America, the misery and suffering it generates – the 500 deaths a day it causes in this country? Our colleague Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Princeton University, estimates that we could lift everyone within our borders above the poverty line for less than 1% of our national GDP – $177bn. Ending poverty is within our grasp. It is something we can accomplish together. So what’s stopping us?

As the economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson said in their 2012 book Why Nations Fail, “those who have power make choices that create poverty. They get it wrong not by mistake or ignorance but on purpose.” Matthew Desmond elaborates a similar theme in his recent book Poverty, By America: “Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by a mistake of history or personal conduct. Poverty persists because some wish and will it to.”

It is difficult to believe that some people are pro-poverty. The incentives for maintaining the status quo, for keeping many Americans poor, rest on the fact that some people find considerable financial benefit from presiding over the misery of others. This is what a young Friedrich Engels – observing the deaths of factory workers, the conditions of the slums and the exploitation of children in Manchester, England in the mid-19th century – called “social murder”. Many were dying, while a few made a killing from their suffering. It was true then, and it is true now.

But this is not our destiny. We can be the generation that abolishes poverty, the country that goes from the bottom of the heap among its peers – whether it’s about poverty, or life expectancy – to the top of it. We can rise to lead and “we the people” of the US can stand up to form a more perfect union, lifting this generation and the generations after it out of poverty, wiping away the deaths being poor causes in this nation.

But this means holding up a mirror to who we are as a country. Those who gain from keeping people in the chains of poverty, condemning them to early death, must be confronted with a movement that names poverty in the richest nation on Earth as a public health crisis, an economic dead weight, a moral abomination and a stain on the republic. When the poor and low-wealth people of this nation link arms to make the moral case for an economy that works for everyone, we have the power to change the conversation about what is possible in Washington and in our statehouses.

The US claims to be a beacon of democracy abroad and a nation committed to justice and general welfare at home. This cannot be true as long as poverty is the fourth leading cause of death in the richest nation in the history of the world. Poor and low-wealth people are fighting for their lives and for the life of our democracy through the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, which worked with members of the US House of Representatives last year to introduce a Third Reconstruction Resolution that outlines policy priorities that can guide legislation to end poverty.

In an echo of the Bible, this movement is saying, “Woe unto those who make unjust laws and rob the poor of their right.” But this prophetic challenge isn’t a condemnation. It is an invitation to life. Together, we can become the land of “liberty and justice for all” that has never yet been. Indeed, people who know that they do not have to accept the death sentence of poverty are leading the way.



[The Rev Dr William J Barber II is founding director of the Yale Center for Public Theology and Public Policy and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival

Gregg Gonsalves is associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health]

Over the last 40 years, real wages in the US haven't risen, while real GDP has.  All the increase has gone into the pockets of the top 10% and the top 1%.  Much the same has happened over the last 10 years in the UK and Australia.  Neo-liberalism has failed.   Worse: it is literally killing people.

See also  Shit life syndrome

Not a radical idea

 

A seismic shift in Australian politics

This piece from The Guardian is about how young people have turned to the left in Australia. But what's happening here is also happening in the USA, UK, and, to a lesser extent, Europe.

Millennials are not behaving as expected. But what else is new? This time it’s their voting patterns and it spells very bad news for the Coalition.

In Australia, the previous three generations – the silent generation, the baby boomers and generation X – all voted left when they were young, on average. Now the silent generation and the boomers, on average, vote right and gen X voting habits don’t appear to have changed much over their lifetime.

As they age, however, millennials appear to be going in entirely the opposite direction. Moving more to the left.

The trend where previous generations have moved right as they age, while millennials have moved left, is being seen across the English-speaking world. This is a big problem for the parties of the right as millennials make up an increasingly larger proportion of voters and it had an impact on the last federal election.

According to data from the Australian Electoral Commission there are now four electorates where those under 40 make up more than 45% of the voters in the seat: Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Griffith. Griffith is an inner-city seat in Brisbane. Both Brisbane and Griffith switched to the Greens, which means the Greens now hold three of the top four.

The Coalition lost 18 seats and government, with almost all the lost seats in the major cities. The one bright spot for the Coalition was that they lost no rural seats. Rural seats are older. The 10 electorates with the smallest proportion of people under 40 are all rural seats (with the National party holding five of them). These are the seats that will see the slowest impact from millennials.

But even here the demographics are against the Coalition. Cities are growing rapidly, which means the proportion of city electorates is increasing, while rural seats are dwindling.

As older generations die out, millennials will increasingly come to dominate a larger number of electorates. If they continue to vote left, this will be catastrophic for the Coalition.

But why are millennials continuing to vote left as they age? There are probably three main reasons, and they are all linked to their economic wellbeing.

Insecure work

The first is the rise of insecure work. Whether it’s casual jobs, sham contracting, or labour hire, the number of insecure jobs is rising and younger workers are those most impacted. Millennials took the advice of their parents. They studied hard, with record numbers of them getting university degrees. But the secure well-paid jobs that were promised for those who worked hard have not appeared. In 2021 one in four unemployed people had a university degree.

While unemployment might be at historic lows, if the jobs are not secure then people are not able to plan a future. Wages growth has also been almost non-existent for a decade. Real wages, your wages after adjusting for increasing prices, have gone backwards over the last 11 years.

The economic deal of secure, stable and well-paid employment that was offered to previous generations has not been offered to millennials.

The Coalition is openly hostile to any changes in industrial relations laws that would make work more secure and give more bargaining power to workers. It was completely opposed to the recent modest changes to IR laws put forward by the Labor party. Further changes to try to reduce insecure work are expected to be brought forward this year. Millennials will likely be the biggest winners from these changes.

Housing affordability

The second reason is housing. Housing gives families stability and security. Robert Menzies, Australia’s longest-serving prime minister and the founder of the Liberal party, understood this. His government had a specific policy of increasing home ownership rates. Menzies believed that people were more likely to settle down and support their community if they owned a part of it.

Modern Liberals have a completely different view of housing. They see it as an investment, a way for people to make money. They have opposed policies that would make housing more affordable. Policies like scrapping tax concessions to property investors or large expansions to public housing.

Perhaps the Coalition hopes that as the boomers die off, they will pass down their expanded property portfolios to millennials, giving them economic security and hopefully switching them to vote conservative. But with average life expectancy now in the 80s and continuing to rise, many millennials will be into their 60s or older before they inherit.

Climate change

For previous generations, the existential threat was from nuclear annihilation and the cold war. The Coalition was successful in convincing many people that it was the party best placed to provide protection from this.

Today’s existential threat is from climate change and the Coalition is either ambivalent or in some cases openly hostile to action to prevent it. The impacts of climate change are now clear, and they are only going to get worse. Younger people will disproportionately bear the costs of inaction on climate change, so it is not hard to see why they are reluctant to vote for parties that are unwilling to act.

These three issues – insecure work, housing affordability and climate change – mean that millennials are sharing in less of the benefits of the economy and are less secure than previous generations.

The Coalition doesn’t have to do anything about this. But parties that ignore the concerns of important cohorts of voters are usually rewarded with extended time in opposition.

But things are not necessarily all rosy for the Labor party. It is not enough to promise action that will improve the living standards of millennials. They must fix these problems. If millennials come to believe that neither major party will make any real difference, then they will start to look elsewhere.

The teals took advantage of this at the last election, running on stronger action on climate change than either of the major parties. Some of the teals, like Sophie Scamps in Mackellar, also ran on affordable housing. The Greens ran hard on all three in the inner-city Brisbane electorates they had such great success with.

The Labor party has made modest changes to IR laws and is likely to bring forward more changes this year. Its rhetoric on climate change has been good, but we are yet to see any real action. And its policies on housing affordability are ineffective and will make no real difference.

The rising importance of millennials as a voting bloc is bringing a seismic shift in Australian politics. Political parties will need to stop just promising better jobs, more affordable housing and action on climate change, and instead actually deliver. Those parties that fail to do so face becoming irrelevant.

Matt Grudnoff is a senior economist and director of the economics program at The Australia Institute

To these reasons, I'd add a fourth:  

Culture Wars.

Most people under 40 are used to gay and lesbian people,  They have gay and lesbian friends, and don't regard it as wrong or evil, as the Right does.  For this age group, the anti-gay, anti-trans rhetoric of the rabid right just makes the Right look nasty.  This generation vigorously rejects the Christianist guff that women ought to be subservient to men.   They are aware of racism and have friends who are black or Asian.  For them, Black lives really do matter. 

If you put all these together, it's kind of obvious why the youngest cohorts of our populations, at least in Anglo countries where the toxic doctrines of neo-liberalism have done the most damage, are irremediably hostile to the Right.

See also:

Why the Right likes individualism

The GOP's Abstract Professors

Conservatism has lost touch with reality

and plenty more.

The great share buyback scam

From The Hartmann Report

My radio/TV program and my daily Substack newsletter, Hartmann Report, together are a small business. The only way I can increase my income from that business is by increasing the advertising revenue to the show, getting more people signed up for the newsletter, or both.

Build the business, in other words. Do the hard work every day. Keep my “customers” informed and thus happy: add value through research and share what I learn along the way.

It used to be that way with big business as well — companies grew in value because of good management and continual reinvestment in people, facilities, and product — until Ronald Reagan adopted neoliberalism and rewrote the rules of business.

Southwest Airlines passengers, for example, are today lamenting lost time with loved ones, lost luggage, and lost money spent on hotels, airline reroutes, and rental cars.

They missed weddings and funerals, spending time with family, and some confronted life-threatening situations as luggage-packed medications went missing and dialysis appointments had to be skipped.

All, apparently, so senior executives at Southwest and their morbidly rich investor cronies could get billions richer.

Here’s how it works.

If you’re the CEO of Southwest Airlines, or most any publicly traded corporation, there are two main ways you can increase your own compensation. They are:

1. Build the company: Invest in workers and technology. Open new routes. Provide better service to passengers. Upgrade your planes so people will want to fly with you. Pay your people better to build employee retention.

2. Use company profits to buy back and retire Southwest stock.

According to corporate watchdog Accountable.US, most of the evidence suggests the immediate predecessor to Southwest’s new CEO chose door number two as often as possible.

But how and why does it happen that CEOs and senior executives make a pile of money when they direct their own corporation to buy back its stock out of the marketplace?

And how did this manipulation of stock prices ever get decriminalized after being illegal for a half-century?

Imagine you’re the CEO of Acme Airlines, a company valued at $10 billion. The company has issued a billion shares of stock that are currently trading at $10 a share ($10 x 1 billion shares = $10 billion).

As the CEO, you’re not only paid a salary, you also have the two typical forms of “stock incentives” modern corporations give their senior executives.

The first is “performance compensation,” meaning as the price of the stock goes up you get bonuses and/or an increase in your pay. The second is that you’re partly compensated with stock or stock options (the right to buy stock at a predetermined typically low price).

If you can increase the share price of Acme Airline’s stock, you not only get a big bonus for hitting your “performance” target, but the stock you hold or can buy at a fixed (lower) price also increases in value. You get rich(er)!

But let’s also say that you’re not interested in building Acme as a way of increasing the stock price: that’s a lot of work and takes years. You want big bucks fast.

So, you simply direct your company to go into the marketplace, to the stock exchange where Acme is traded, and buy up, say, a hundred million shares.

The company is still worth $10 billion, the value of all the planes, landing slots, goodwill, corporate buildings, and assets: none of that has changed.

You haven’t added a single customer or paid a single flight attendant, mechanic, gate agent, or pilot an extra penny. You haven’t improved service or widened the seats in the planes to get in new customers. All you’ve done is use $1 billion in company profits to buy a hundred million shares at $10 each and “retire” them.

But now that the company has bought and retired a hundred million shares, instead of there being a billion shares in circulation there are only 900 million, even though the company is still worth just $10 billion.

As a result of your directing Acme to do that “share buyback,” every share that still exists is worth roughly 10% more because there are 10% fewer of them.

Which means the piles of shares you’ve gotten in compensation are now worth 10% more, too. And because the stock price went up, you’ll be getting a nice “performance” bonus at the year’s end.

This used to be a crime called “stock price manipulation” and was one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s and Congress’ early targets when they went after the Wall Street crooks who brought us the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s.

Congress created the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 1934 and FDR put Joe Kennedy (JFK’s father) in charge of it; Kennedy ironically told my old friend the late Gloria Swanson that he was chosen because, she told me, FDR had wisecracked that, “It takes a crook to catch a crook.”

Kennedy, knowing how the game worked, outlawed stock buybacks as one of his first official acts.

But in 1982 President Reagan endorsed this very form of corporate corruption as part of his new neoliberal Reaganomics agenda, decriminalizing it for the first time in almost a half-century.

Lest you think it improbable that modern CEOs would do this, as it’s so obviously corrupt and harmful to the company itself, consider this headline from the corporate watchdog group Accountable.US:

“Southwest Cancellation Crisis Follows Execs’ Choice to Reward $5.6B to Shareholders Instead of Investing in Infrastructure”

As their press release lays out:

“Government watchdog Accountable.US called the airline’s cancellation crisis a problem of its own making after slashing its workforce by over 1,400 in 2021 and choosing to spend $5.6 billion on stock buybacks in the 3 years leading up to the pandemic rather than making investments in infrastructure to be better prepared for extreme weather events like this week…”

This Reaganomics neoliberalism scam has made America’s corporate CEOs and stock speculators among the wealthiest people in the world, while keeping down wages and benefits for everybody else. It’s hurt the competitiveness of American business.

It started with Reagan’s putting John Shad— the Vice Chairman of the monster investment house E.F. Hutton — in charge of the SEC, which regulates monster investment houses.

Shad wasted no time in deregulating stock buybacks, instituting in 1982 what’s now known as “Rule 10b-18” that made stock buybacks explicitly legal for the first time since 1934.

Since then, share buybacks have become the most personally profitable business scam CEOs and senior executives can run against their own employees, companies, and communities.

When Reagan and Shad made this change in 1982, the average compensation of CEOs was around 30 times that of their average employee. CEO’s often lived in the same communities as their workers, or in a just slightly more upscale part of town.

Today CEO compensation is between 254 and 1000 times the average employee, depending on the industry, and CEOs live in palatial estates with servants’ quarters, yachts, and private jets; much of that increase in their annual income is the result of their companies’ repeatedly executing stock buybacks over the past 40 years.

Corporate CEOs call this “maximizing shareholder value” and claim it’s how capitalism is supposed to work.

As more and more CEOs got in on the scam since Reagan legalized it in the 1980s, it’s come to account for much of the 40-year explosion in the price of publicly traded stocks.

Investors don’t complain because they’re making out well, too (and 84 percent of all stock in America is owned by the top 10 percent).

It’s also why so much of America’s corporate infrastructure is rotting, from leaking methane from oil rigs to toxic spills from chemical factories to industrial waste being discharged into our environment instead of being cleaned up.

After all, why spend money on improving the company — or even on routine maintenance and safety — when you can personally cash in just as effectively by simply using your company’s revenues to engineer a stock buyback scheme every year?

As William Lazonick wrote for The Hill in 2018:

“Most recently, from 2007 through 2016, stock repurchases by 461 companies listed on the S&P 500 totaled $4 trillion, equal to 54 percent of profits. ... Indeed, top corporate executives are often willing to incur debt, lay off employees, cut wages, sell assets, and eat into cash reserves to ‘maximize shareholder value.’”

You’d think that if a company’s stock was going up in value that would indicate it is doing well and could even pay its employees better.

In fact, the CEOs of companies need cash to do these buybacks, and to get that cash they often lay off workers and even cut back on their main business just to enrich themselves and their senior executives.

As Emily Stewart wrote that same year for Vox:

“The thing is, when companies are investing in stock buybacks and dividends, they’re spending money they could use on something else.

“The Roosevelt Institute in May released a report estimating that Walmart, for example, could boost hourly wages to more than $15 an hour with the $20 billion it was using for a buyback. A separate study from the Roosevelt Institute released in July found that companies spent nearly 60 percent of net profits on buybacks from 2015 to 2017.

“It estimated that with the money allocated to buybacks, companies such as Lowes, CVS, and Home Depot could give each of their workers a raise of at least $18,000 a year [on top of their current income!].

“Harley-Davidson in February announced a nearly $700 million stock buyback plan just days after saying it would close a plant in Kansas City. Wells Fargo is spending $25 billion on buybacks and is at the same time laying off workers in multiple states.”

Share buybacks have replaced growing a business as the main way CEOs jack up their compensation to buy a new mega-yacht or ski chalet in Switzerland. And its just as much of a scam today, and just as destructive to working people and our nation, as it was in 1929 when it helped crash the market.

Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been shouting about this from the rooftops for decades. Hillary Clinton brought it up in her 2016 campaign for president, something that no doubt cost her some CEO support.

At the time, Financial Times US National Editor Ed Luce wrote, in an article titled Hillary’s War on Quarterly Capitalism:

“The case for reforming shareholder capitalism is strong. The level of US investment [in actual business activity] is at its lowest since 1947. Last year, according to Goldman Sachs, S&P 500 companies spent more than $500bn on share buybacks. This year it is expected to hit $600bn.”

That was in 2015. Just so far this year:

Macys bought back 28.9% of their shares spending $2 billion they could have otherwise used to expand the business or raise workers’ pay.

Chesapeake Energy bought back 20.6% using $2 billion.

Diamondback Energy spent $4 billion to buy back 17.9 percent of their own shares.

For Morgan Stanley it was 14.8% of shares at a cost to the company of $20 billion.

The entire list — hundreds of billions in share buybacks just this year — is on this Marketbeat site.

When the biggest oil companies in America reported record profits this year, ripping off American drivers with sky-high gas prices, Reuters reported on April 29:

“Exxon earlier this year more than doubled its projected buyback program to $30 billion through 2022 and 2023. Shell said it would buy back $6 billion in shares in the current quarter, while Chevron boosted its annual buyback plans to a range of $10 billion to $15 billion, up from $5 billion to $10 billion.

“Exxon shares rose 4.6% to $96.93. Chevron shares rose almost 9%, closing at $163.78.”

CNBC reports:

“Apple started to pay quarterly dividends and repurchase its shares in March 2012. Since then and through last summer, Apple has spent over $467 billion on buybacks, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, which calls the iPhone maker the ‘poster child’ for share buybacks.”

Facebook, which apparently doesn’t have enough cash to hire people to keep Nazis off their platform, has made its top stockholder, Mark Zuckerberg, the richest millennial in America in part through share buybacks, announcing in their third quarter 2021 earnings report:

“We repurchased $14.37 billion of our Class A common stock in the third quarter and had $7.97 billion remaining on our prior share repurchase authorization as of September 30, 2021. We also announced today a $50 billion increase in our share repurchase authorization.”

Democratic politicians have been working for years to try to end this corrosive practice. Senator Tammy Baldwin wrote in a 2015 letter to the SEC’s chair:

“Stock buybacks use profits to purchase a company’s own stock instead of investing in the worker training, research, or innovation necessary to promote long-term growth. ... In the past, this money went to productive investments in the form of higher wages, research and development, training, or new equipment. Today, cash is being extracted from companies and placed on the sidelines. Buybacks are now undermining the stock market’s role in capital formation.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren noted:

“Buybacks create a sugar high for the corporations. It boosts prices in the short run, but the real way to boost the value of a corporation is to invest in the future, and they are not doing that.”

In 2019, Senators Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer co-authored an article for The New York Times in which they told America:

“Between 2008 and 2017, 466 of the S&P 500 companies spent around $4 trillion on stock buybacks, equal to 53 percent of profits. An additional 40 percent of corporate profits went to dividends. When more than 90 percent of corporate profits go to buybacks and dividends, there is reason to be concerned.

“First, stock buybacks don’t benefit the vast majority of Americans. That’s because large stockholders tend to be wealthier. Nearly 85 percent of all stocks owned by Americans belong to the wealthiest 10 percent of households. Of course, many corporate executives are compensated through stock-based pay. So when a company buys back its stock, boosting its value, the benefits go overwhelmingly to shareholders and executives, not workers.”

Pointing out that share buybacks inflate the wealth of the top 10% of Americans who own most of this nation’s stocks — increasing inequality — while generally screwing the people who work for those companies, they added:

“[W]hen corporations direct resources to buy back shares on this scale, they restrain their capacity to reinvest profits more meaningfully in the company in terms of R&D, equipment, higher wages, paid medical leave, retirement benefits and worker retraining.”

Small businesses like mine and millions of others across this nation can’t engage in this sort of manipulation to seemingly pull money out of thin air. Large businesses shouldn’t be able to, either.

It’s time to declare the 42-year Reagan Revolution’s neoliberal experiment a failure, and outlaw the share buybacks that are one of its most visible markers. Joe Kennedy knew what he was talking about when he criminalized them, even if he was a crook.

A first step toward restoring vitality to America’s business sector and providing much-needed funds to return America to our position as the world’s innovator — with the world’s most prosperous middle class, as we were before Reagan’s introduction of neoliberalism — is to once again outlaw stock buybacks.

Source: CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978

Why are people surprised that the young are turning away from capitalism to socialism?  Why the astonishment when politicians like Trump get elected, when Brexit gets voted for, when extreme Right politicians do so well?  If we want to save our democracies, we must rein in capitalism.

Neoliberalism fails everywhere it's been tried

 We've seen the collapse of neoliberalism in the UK, and the USA.  The Saturday Paper in Australia sums up why it's failed here too.  And the lessons apply everywhere.

The collapse of neo-liberalism in the USA & Russia

Drawing by Wolfgang Ammer, an Austrian cartoonist

From the Hartmann Report

There’s a reckoning coming. The kind of oligarchy that neoliberalism has brought to both America and Russia is so unstable it will not hold. Both nations are thus confronting dramatic transitions over the next few years.As Russia has suffered substantial defeats in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin may be looking at the end of his reign. There’s similar tough stuff facing Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and their GOP buddies.

As the world watches its 40-year-old experiment with neoliberalism collapse, Republicans in the US and Putin in Russia are facing a crisis they once thought would be an opportunity.

Neoliberalism was brought to America in 1981 by Ronald Reagan with his “Reagan Revolution,” and brought to Russia in the 90s by the IMF.

It’s an economic and political system where regulation of the economy of a nation is largely taken away from government and handed to the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful economic actors, be they billionaires, corporations, or both.

It accomplishes this by:

*Diminishing government’s role in protecting consumers, communities, and small business (deregulation);

*Gutting the power of labor (destroying union movements and letting corporations go anywhere in the world to find the cheapest labor available, aka “free trade”);

*Allowing virtually unlimited acquisition of wealth by the top 1% (massive tax cuts);

*Privatizing the essential functions of government, handing them off to private corporations (for example, fully half of Medicare is now privatized through George W. Bush’s Medicare Advantage scam, and half the electric systems of America have been privatized); and

*Promoting the formation of monopolies and oligopolies by refusing to enforce anti-trust and other anti-predation laws (as Reagan did in 1983).

Neoliberalism has now been tried, in a big way, in Chile, Russia, Iraq, and the United States, as I document in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.

In each case, the result was a total or near-total shift to oligarchy or rule by a small handful of the morbidly rich and their corporations.

The problem with oligarchy, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class, is that it’s an inherently unstable and essentially transitional form of government.

Rarely lasting more than a generation or two, oligarchies typically dissolve into either strongman fascism on the right or, are broken by popular democratic uprisings on the left. This is the essence of the reckoning facing both Russia and the United States.

In Chile, when Pinochet was deposed, the people reclaimed democracy, although the legacy of Pinochet and his neoliberal constitution have left political, social, and economic landmines in democrats’ path that are currently being hashed out in efforts to rewrite their constitution.

In Iraq, the oligarchy imposed by Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld dissolved into the current corrupt strongman neofascist government that today rules that country, particularly since Nouri al-Maliki has consolidated most of the nation’s political and economic power into his own hands and those of his close circle.

In the United States, Reagan imposed neoliberalism with the so-called Reagan Revolution in 1981. Since then, five Republicans on the Supreme Court forced on America the neoliberal theory that big money should control politics, legalizing political bribery with their corrupt Citizens United decision and its predecessors.

The result has been oligarchy here for the past 30 or so years, with great wealth determining most of our political decisions. Even programs that could get passed, like Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill and Inflation Reduction Act, had significant neoliberal elements (demanded by Joe Manchin) requiring virtually all of the money they distribute to run through the hands of generally for-profit corporations.

Since the Reagan Revolution, American oligarchs have demanded massive tax cuts for themselves, largely free access to the nation’s mineral and fossil fuel wealth, and an end to laws and rules protecting consumers, the environment, and small businesses.

For four decades, American government has largely complied, gutting the middle class and paralyzing the ability of Congress to pass meaningful legislation that might reverse our neoliberal experiment.

Thus, American oligarchy is now at a crisis stage, on the verge of flipping toward the fascist state envisioned by Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and the current leadership of the GOP, or returning to a pre-Reagan democratic state as promoted by President Biden and progressives within the Democratic Party.

Trump’s failure to gain re-election was a huge blow to his vision of a strongman fascist America, which is why he continues to claim he didn’t actually lose.

The fascist movement within the GOP, what President Biden identified as the “semi-fascist” “MAGA Republicans,” has shrunk the party (because of Trump’s loss) but radicalized the authoritarians in its base, leading to the possibility of increased domestic violence.

In Russia, when Gorbachev let communism collapse he envisioned the new Russia becoming a fully modern democratic socialist state modeled after, as Gorbachev himself said, Sweden and the other Nordic nations.

George HW Bush, Bill Clinton, and the IMF, however, had other ideas, and demanded neoliberal “shock therapy” in exchange for IMF loans. Gorbachev and Yeltsin complied, concentrating that nation’s wealth in the hands of a few hundred oligarchs and setting the stage for the rise of uber-oligarch Vladimir Putin.

Putin has tried to impose a Mussolini-style fascist regime on Russia, but for fascism to work the government and its leadership must be perceived by the people as, essentially, all-powerful. Fascism requires fear.

“Strength” and infallibility, or at least the appearance of same, are essential to fascism. Russia’s partial defeat this past week at the hands of Ukrainians has led to Russian politicians now doing the previously unthinkable: calling for Putin to step aside.

Fascist leaders never survive defeat, and only rarely do their systems survive, lacking a clear and coherent transition of power from one strongman to another. This is thus a moment of maximum danger for President Putin.

Whether he will do something terrible and dramatic like trying to start a nuclear war to hang onto power, or is arrested/deposed, or steps down with the promise of a golden parachute is still unknown.

The way he leaves may well determine whether a new strongman leader emerges who can flip Russia fully into fascism, or whether the people — particularly the Russian generation coming up now that’s wired into the world — will again try Gorbachev’s idea of democracy.

The fathers of neoliberalism, Mises, Hayek, and Friedman, have all passed on to that great marketplace in the sky; their legacy is a weakened and oligarchic America, an empowered China (which rejected neoliberalism and instead adopted Alexander Hamilton’s “American Plan”), and a badly destabilized Russia that could trigger World War III.

And now, there’s a reckoning coming.

The next few years, amidst worldwide crises of climate change and economic instability, will determine the future course of governance worldwide. And the failures of neoliberalism are hitting both Russia and the United States particularly hard.

It’s an extraordinary time to be alive, and a vital time to become an activist on behalf of democracy, wherever you may live.

Trickle down

 

Republicans: we tried your way, and it's failed

 From The Hartmann Report

The 1970s were a pivotal decade, and not just because it saw the end of the Vietnam War, the resignation of Nixon, and the death of both the psychedelic hippie movement and the very political (and sometimes violent) SDS.  Most consequentially, the 1970s were when the modern-day Republican Party was birthed.

Prior to that, the nation had hummed along for 40 years on a top income tax bracket of 91% and a corporate income tax that topped out around 50%. Business leaders ran their companies, which were growing faster than at any time in the history of America, and avoided participating in politics.

Democrat Franklin Roosevelt and Republican Dwight Eisenhower renewed America with modern, state-of-the-art public labs, schools, and public hospitals across the nation; nearly free college, trade school, and research support; healthy small and family businesses; unions protecting a third of America’s workers so two-thirds had a living wage and benefits; and an interstate highway system, rail system, and network of new airports that transformed the nation’s commerce.

When we handed America over to Ronald Reagan in 1981 it was a brand, gleaming new country with a prosperous and thriving middle class.

The seeds of today’s American crisis were planted just ten years earlier, in 1971, when Lewis Powell, then a lawyer for the tobacco industry, wrote his infamous “Powell Memo.” It became a blueprint for the morbidly rich and big corporations to take over the weakened remnants of Nixon’s Republican Party and then America.

They then moved on to infiltrate our universities, seize our media, pack our courts, integrate themselves into a large religious movement to add millions of votes, and turn upside down our tax, labor, and gun laws.

That effort burst onto the American scene with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.

By 1982 America was agog at the “new ideas” this newly-invented GOP was putting forward. They included radical tax cuts, pollution deregulation, destroying unions, and slashing the support services the New Deal and Great Society once offered people (because, Republicans said, feeding, educating, or providing healthcare to people made them dependent).

Their sales pitch was effective, and we’ve now had 42 years of the so-called Reagan Revolution.

It’s time to simply say out loud that it hasn’t worked:

Republicans told us if we just cut the top tax rate on the morbidly rich from the 74% it was at in 1980 down to 27% it would “trickle down” benefits to everybody else as, they said, the “job creators” would be unleashed on our economy.

Instead of a more general prosperity, we’ve now ended up with the greatest wealth and income inequality in the world, as over $50 trillion was transferred over 40 years from the bottom 90% to the top 1%, where it remains to this day. The middle class has gone from over 60% of us to fewer than half of us. It now takes 2 full-time wage earners to sustain the same lifestyle one could in 1980.

Republicans told us if we just deregulated guns and let anybody buy and carry as many as they wanted wherever they wanted it would clean up our crime problem and put the fear of God into our politicians.

“An armed society is a polite society” was the bumper sticker back during Reagan’s time, the NRA relentlessly promoting the lie that the Founders and Framers put the 2nd Amendment into the Constitution so “patriots” could kill politicians. Five Republicans on the Supreme Court even got into the act by twisting the law and lying about history to make guns more widely available.

Instead of a “polite” society or politicians who listened better to their constituents, we ended up with school shootings and a daily rate of gun carnage unmatched anywhere else in the developed world.

Republicans told us that if we just ended sex education in our schools and outlawed abortion, we’d return to “the good old days” when, they argued, every child was wanted and every marriage was happy.

Instead of helping young Americans, we’ve ended up with epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and — now that abortion is illegal in state after state — a return to deadly back-alley abortions.

Republicans told us that if we just killed off Civics and History classes in our schools, we’d “liberate” our young people to focus instead on science and math.

Instead, we’ve raised two generations of Americans that can’t even name the three branches of government, much less understand the meaning of the Constitution’s reference to the “General Welfare.”

Republicans told us that if we cut state and federal aid to higher education — which in 1980 paid for about 80% of a student’s tuition — so that students would have what they told us was “skin in the game,” we’d see students take their studies more seriously and produce a new generation of engineers and scientists to prepare us for the 21st century.

Instead of happy students, since we cut that 80% government support down to around 20% (with the 80% now covered by student’s tuition), our nation is groaning under a $2 trillion dollar student debt burden, preventing young people from buying homes, starting businesses, or beginning families. While students are underwater, banksters who donate to Republican politicians are making billions in profits every single week of the year from these bizarrely non-negotiable loans .

Republicans told us that if we just stopped enforcing the anti-monopoly and anti-trust laws that had protected small businesses for nearly 100 years, there would be an explosion of innovation and opportunity as companies got bigger and better.

Instead, we’ve seen every industry in America become so consolidated that competition is dead, price gouging and profiteering reign, and it’s impossible to start or find small family-owned businesses anymore in downtowns, malls, and the suburbs. It’s all giant chains, many now owed by hedge funds or private equity. Few family or local businesses can compete against such giants.

Republicans told us that if we just changed the laws to let corporations pay their senior executives with stock (in addition to cash) they’d be “more invested” in the fate and future of the company and business would generally become healthier.

Instead, nearly every time a corporation initiates a stock buyback program, millions and often billions of dollars flow directly into the pockets of the main shareholders and executives — while workers, the company, and society suffer the loss.

Republicans told us that if we just let a handful of individual companies and billionaires buy most of our media, a thousand flowers would grow and we’d have the most diverse media landscape in the world. At first, as the internet was opening in the 90s, they even giddily claimed it was happening.

Now a small group of often-rightwing companies own our major media/internet companies, radio and TV stations, as well as local newspapers across the country. In such a landscape, progressive voices, as you can imagine, are generally absent.

Republicans told us we should hand all our healthcare decisions not to our doctors but to bureaucratic insurance industry middlemen who would decide which of our doctor’s suggestions they’d approve and which they’d reject. They said this will “lower costs and increase choice.”

In all of the entire developed world — all the OECD countries on 4 continents — there are only 500,000 medical bankruptcies a year. Every single one of them is here in America.

Republicans told us if we just got rid of our unions, then our bosses and the companies that employ them would give us better pay, more benefits, and real job security.

As everybody can see, they lied. And are working as hard as they can to prevent America from returning to the levels of unionization we had before Reagan’s Great Republican Experiment.

Republicans told us if we went with the trade agreement the GHW Bush administration had negotiated — NAFTA — and then signed off on the WTO, that we’d see an explosion of jobs.

There was an explosion; lots of them, in fact, as over 60,000 American factories were torn down or left vacant because their products were moved to China or elsewhere. Over 10 million good-paying jobs went overseas along with those 60,000 factories.

Republicans told us global warming was a hoax: they’re *still* telling us that, in fact. And therefore, they say, we shouldn’t do anything to interfere with the profits of their friends in the American fossil fuel industry and the Middle East.

The hoax, it turns out, was the lie that there was no global warming — a lie that the industry spent hundreds of millions over decades to pull off. They succeeded in delaying action on global warming by at least three decades and maybe as many as five. That lie produced trillions in profits and brought us the climate crisis that is today killing millions and threatens all life on Earth.

And then, of course, there’s the biggest GOP lie of them all: “Money is the same thing as Free Speech.”

Five Republicans on the Supreme Court told us that if we threw out around 1000 anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws at both the state and federal level so politicians and political PACs could take unaccountable billions, even from foreign powers, it would “strengthen and diversify” the range of voices heard in America.

It’s diversified it, for sure. We’re now regularly hearing from racists and open Nazis, many of them elected Republican officials, who would have been driven out of decent society before the Reagan Revolution. American political discourse hasn’t been this filled with conflict and violence since the Civil War, and much of it can be traced straight back to the power and influence of dark money unleashed by five Republicans on the Supreme Court.

The bottom line is that we — as a nation, voluntarily or involuntarily — have now had the full Republican experience.

And now that we know what it is, we’re no longer listening to the Republican politicians who are continuing to try to sell us this bullshit.

We don’t want to hear Republicans sermonizing about deficits (that they themselves caused).

Or welfare (that they damaged and then exploited).

Or even whatever they’re calling “faith” these days, be it the death penalty, forcing raped women to give birth at the barrel of a gun, or burning books.

We’re over it, Republicans. A new America is being birthed from the ashes of the Reagan Revolution and you can’t stop it much longer.