ALB
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Looked up see who he is. He’s the official Democratic Party candidate for a New York district in the US House of Representatives. Perhaps someone thought that this was going too far for that party of capitalism.
Anybody know anything else about him?
I don’t see how an increase in the US government’s debt is a “transfer of wealth (and power) from the working class to the corporate class” if only because the working class never had such wealth and power to transfer. It would better be described as a transfer of wealth within the corporate class, from one section of it to another.
In any event, there is no chance of the US government going bankrupt, ie being unable to repay what it has borrowed or the interest in it. If those capitalists who lend money to it had the slightest hint that this might happen they would be reluctant to buy US government bonds and interest rates on them would soar as, to attract buyers ( ie capitalists to lend to it), the government would have to offer a higher interest rate on them. But this is not happening. I think we can trust capitalists who lend to governments to know which way the wind is blowing and they show no signs that they think that the US government won’t be able to repay what they lent to it.
Incidentally of course it would be the government and not “ the country” that would go bankrupt. To describe the US government as “ the country” is to let go unchallenged the myth that the US government represents the interests of all the people living in the US (most of whom are workers) whereas in fact it represents the interests of the US capitalist class.
I wouldn’t either, not even for one hour. But who are the people that are so determined to vote? Are they Trump or anti-Trump voters? Are there any figures on this? Have the Republicans been encouraging and organising their supporters to vote by post?
That last paragraph is not your view I hope ! We know from the Corbyn experiment here that you don’t win elections — and that’s the primary if not the only aim of capitalist political parties— if you have a candidate considered extreme. If Sanders had been the Democrat’s candidate Trump would probably walk it.
Capitalist political machines know how to win elections. Generally speaking they know what they are doing. It’s the leftwing progressives and reformists who don’t. And even if they sometimes win we know that the operation of capitalism is going to impose its priorities in the end and their government will fail to deliver on its promises and programme.
We should leave capitalist politicians do their dirty vote-catching work without trying to second guess them. It’s not our concern anyway. Capitalist politics is a side show that can sometimes provide us with some amusement perhaps but nothing else.
Sorry, LBN, I think “do-gooder” is a perfectly acceptable derogatory term. It refers to liberals and others who want to do good to or for others rather than want the group they have taken pity on to act for themselves. Socialists are not do-gooders. We are do-it-for-yourselves-ers !
No section of the working class is privileged. The only people in society who are are those who own and control the means of life as this enables them to draw a non-work income and lead a privileged lifestyle,
The suggestion that some workers may be privileged arises from the use of the word “underprivileged” to refer to some groups of workers. This implies that other workers are therefore “privileged”; in fact it implies that the group designated “underprivileged” is itself privileged but just doesn’t have enough of it.
I don’t know who invented the word — probably some do-gooder reformist— but it’s a word that should not be part of the socialist vocabulary.
Thanks. You’ve convinced me. He is that bad. Just a common or garden left wing poseur who came up with a dodgy theory of language and wrote boring books on US foreign policy. Ok, he did write one decent book about manufacturing consent.
Did Chomsky really say that that’s what should happen — vote Biden and then put pressure on him to adopt “progressive” policies? I didn’t think he was that bad or politically ignorant.
In his reply to your article in the Lesser Awful he said that voting Biden was just a costless gesture. The test would have been whether he would be prepared to stand in a queue for an hour or so to do it. He probably doesn’t need to as presumably he lives in Massachusetts where there is no chance of the members of Electoral College from there being delegated to vote for Trump. He just wants voters in swing states to do that.
That’s a bit of a coincidence. John Oswald drew our attention to this here on 11 April. Did you get this from him?
And of course there is Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophical theory, expressed in his The Essence of Christianity which “George Eliot” translated into English, that “God” was humanity’s distorted reflection of their own powers which they had yet to realise that they had. God as one big Fetish, from which his contemporary, Marx, would have got his idea of the “fetishism of commodities”.
I wouldn’t deny that our “rites” as a group of socialists, eg big public meetings, rallies, don’t have the same opiate effect as religious ones. As humans are social animals you would expect humans to enjoy feeling part of a larger community.
Marx wasn’t of course religious but his criticism of religion was not that of those atheists who see it as a con for religious leaders to get a good living at the expense of their gullible followers. It was that capitalist conditions were so bad that they gave rise to the need for consolation— religion as “the heart of a heartless world” as he put it. And his answer to the pure and simple atheists was that their justifiable criticism of religion should give rise to a criticism of the social conditions that gave rise to the need for it as a consolation.
I was going to quote that sane passage from Mattick too as it explains well enough why and how “quantitative easing” raises stock market prices. However, his explanatoion as to why it has not caused general inflation is still based on the assumption that businesses have the ability to raise – or not raise — prices at will.
His argument is that, because businesses are making capital gains from the stock exchange boom QE generates, they don’t need to raise prices
“Basically, none of this costs business anything, while the rise in stock prices disproportionately benefits the small super-wealthy minority who disproportionately own stocks, so there is no motivation to raise prices—especially under the deflationary conditions of a global business slowdown—producing an inflation-free expansion”.
So, he is saying that businesses are choosing not to raise prices even though they could do. But why would they not do so if they could since that would enable them to make more profit, which after all is their primary “motivation”?
The fact is that businesses don’t have a choice in the matter. They sell at a price that the market can bear and in a recession the market will not bear an increa. Mattick in fact undermines his whole argument by adding “especially under the deflationary conditions of a global business slowdown.” Precisely. In other words, they don’t raise prices even with QE because they can’t. It’s not that they choose not to since they are already making enough money from capital gains on the stock market, but because they can’t.
The reason why QE hasn’t led to general inflation is that the extra money is injected only into the financial system but not into the general economy. So it inflates only the price of shares not prices generally, as explained in this article:
It is government policy to inflate the general price level by about 2 percent a year. This they do by increasing the supply of “basic money” (M0) in the usual way of allowing banks to withdraw money from their accounts with the Bank of England in the form of bank notes.
It seems it is beginning to happen — renewal energies becoming cheaper than fossil fuels— which is the only thing that is going to make capitalism switchover to them. So, it might not all be doom and gloom. However, to make full use of them there’s going to be a need for a larger and more efficient grid for distributing electricity which will be quite costly.
