Author Archive for: Rupture.Capital
The Federal Reserve should raise interest rates more aggressively than it did in 2017-2018 to stamp out soaring U.S. inflation, the president of the Cleveland Federal Reserve said Thursday.
Peter Thiel, the free press–hating, alleged young-blood enthusiast who also happens to be one of the richest people alive, has emerged as the Republican Party’s latest kingmaker. Thiel is, per OpenSecrets data, the co-leader among GOP donors this cycle, funding an array of pro-crypto, anti-China candidates, spending tens of millions on congressional candidates during an election year in which Republicans are expected to triumph without his involvement. A longtime donor, Thiel nevertheless will almost certainly see his cachet among conservatives grow exponentially: Having stepped down from Facebook’s board earlier this year, Thiel is positioned to gain an enormous level of influence within right-wing politics practically overnight.
For most of the last six years, many on the right have attempted to intellectually backfill Trumpism, turning Donald Trump’s sketched-out ideology (when it was coherent at all) into some discernible set of political beliefs. In office, Trump reverted into a rather pro-forma type of Republican. But Thiel is bringing vast resources to an effort to conjure what might have been, pushing a distilled version of the former president’s antagonistic foreign policy and authoritarianism. Republican donors have long seen the popular will as an obstacle to overcome but have stopped short of catastrophizing democracy itself—the Koch brothers, for example, generally used their money and influence to shape popular opinion along their preferred anti-tax and anti-regulatory lines. But Thiel is more explicitly anti-democratic. In 2009, he published a piece arguing that he had come to “no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Seven years later, he secretly used his considerable resources to bankrupt Gawker as revenge, after one of its blogs had outed him years earlier.
The candidates Thiel is backing tell a clear story of where he hopes to lead the Republican Party. At a fundraiser for Wyoming Republican Harriet Hagerman, who is challenging Liz Cheney in Wyoming’s upcoming primary election, Thiel made it clear that his ultimate goal was to unseat all of the “traitorous 10” Republicans who had voted to impeach Donald Trump for incitement of a riot after his supporters breached the Capitol to try to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power on January 6 of last year. All told, Thiel has spent more than $20 million backing 16 House and Senate candidates who back the “big lie” that Donald Trump was the real winner of the 2020 election. Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters has said, “It’s really hard to know” if Biden was the real winner of the election, while in Ohio the flailing J.D. Vance—who was against Trump before he was for him—has insisted that Thiel’s Facebook buddy Mark Zuckerberg was behind a massive voter fraud effort.
The candidates Thiel is backing tell a clear story of where he hopes to lead the Republican Party.
But Thiel isn’t just selecting candidates based on their stance on voter fraud. Thiel has ripped into tech companies for being too cozy with China—even, in 2019, going as far as to suggest that the FBI should investigate whether spies from that nation had infiltrated Google—and is now spending millions in support of belligerent China critics and their cause. These include Missouri’s Eric Schmitt, who sued China over Covid-19 as the state’s attorney general, as well as North Carolina representative Ted Budd, who published a piece arguing that China is “not a force for good.” As New York’s Choire Sicha noted in a piece earlier this week, “If you’re a Republican candidate striving for financial support from this particular billionaire, attacking China is probably a good way to get [Thiel’s] attention.”
Part of Thiel’s focus on China also reflects his obsession with cryptocurrency. Thiel has called crypto a “Chinese financial weapon” aimed at undercutting the U.S. dollar’s status as the global reserve currency. “Even though I’m a pro-crypto, pro-Bitcoin maximalist person, I do wonder whether, at this point, Bitcoin should also be thought of in part as a Chinese financial weapon against the U.S…. It threatens fiat money, but it especially threatens the dollar,” Thiel said during a roundtable discussion at the Nixon Foundation last year. Nearly all of the candidates Thiel is backing are crypto enthusiasts, with many explicitly making the case that the United States use cryptocurrency as a means of countering the Chinese—Masters, for instance has suggested that the U.S. build a reserve of crypto.
Thiel’s opposition to China is about global influence and economics—not democracy, however. This is a significant break with the ways the U.S. has previously confronted China, with an eye toward broadening the appeal of democracy as a means to combat the perils of autocracy. Thiel would rather meet Chinese autocracy with an American version, rooted in the darker ideological strains that Silicon Valley has fostered in recent years. True to form, the candidates and ideas that he’s supported with his considerable wealth all flirt with a U.S. that’s less democratic and more unequal. The future he wants is one arguably even bleaker than the one being pushed by Donald Trump: one in which confronting the Chinese abroad and suppressing democracy at home are intertwined—one vertically integrated authoritarianism to rule them all.
With several interest rate rises expected soon, best to wait before trying to bottom fish
The 10 richest people in the world have more than doubled their wealth since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, while over 160 million people have been driven into poverty. Inequality is killing one person every four seconds, and the poor are four times more likely to die of COVID-19 than the rich. This is all according to Oxfam’s 2022 report Inequality Kills.
From lack of access to healthcare, to extreme hunger, to the impact of climate change, more and more people are suffering easily preventable deaths. Meanwhile, the super-rich are shooting themselves into space, lounging on luxury yachts and ruthlessly profiteering from the pandemic.
Much like Omicron, the ‘billionaire variant’ is out of control, and poses an existential threat to humanity unless this sick capitalist system is uprooted entirely.
Marx wrote that: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole”. Over 150 years later, Oxfam’s report has shown these words are more relevant than ever.
The report demonstrates that inequality has resulted in 21,000 excess deaths every day since the start of the pandemic. While a significant proportion of these deaths are due to lack of access to healthcare, at least a quarter are from hunger, and an increasing number of deaths are being caused by the adverse effects of climate change on poor communities.
Worst impacted are people from so-called ‘developing’ countries, women, minority groups and all those who are already the most vulnerable under capitalism. The report states that, thanks to economic inequality, the pandemic has “been actively made deadlier, more prolonged, and more damaging to livelihoods”.
Oppression and imperialism
The report states that there were 13 million fewer women in employment in 2021 compared to the previous year. 20 million girls are expected never to return to school due to the strain that coronavirus has put on poorer households.
Violence against women has also dramatically worsened since the start of the pandemic. As the report explains:
“That people in poverty, women and girls, and racialized groups are so often disproportionately killed or harmed, more than those who are rich and privileged, is not an accidental error in today’s dominant form of capitalism, but a core part of it.”
While it is certainly no accident when the poor and oppressed suffer disproportionately, it is not any particular ‘form’ of capitalism that is responsible.
It is the very nature of capitalism to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands, and in its period of senile decay plunge the vast majority of humanity to ever-deeper barbarism, starting with the most vulnerable.
A major contributor to the higher number of deaths in poor countries is a lack of access to vaccines, due to hoarding by the imperialist countries. The richest nations raced one another to gobble up the global vaccine supply, immunise their populations, and reopen their economies to get profits flowing as quickly as possible at the expense of the rest of the world.
This was aided and abetted by profiteering big pharma companies, eager to maximise their windfalls by prioritising the highest bidders for doses. The tragic impact of the disparity between rich and poor on COVID-19 patients is starkly reflected in the Oxfam report:
“Inequality of income is a stronger indicator of whether you will die from COVID-19 than age. Millions of people would still be alive today if they had had a vaccine — but they are dead, denied a chance while big pharmaceutical corporations continue to hold monopoly control of these technologies”.
The report describes the “strategic racism” of the ruling class, having “weaponised [racism] as a tool to advance free market fundamentalism, to gain support for an economic system that siphoned power from the public and transferred it into private hands”.
The report claims that this weaponisation of racism has been used to maintain control of vaccine production in developed capitalist nations like the USA and Britain, despite there being many viable vaccine manufacturing facilities in Africa and Asia.
The disgusting behaviour of the imperialist leaders certainly exposes their callous attitude towards oppressed nations. It is also clear that reactionary politicians in Europe and America exploited racism as part of a ‘culture war’ agenda, for example, Donald Trump spreading lies about the ‘China virus’.
But the reason Africa and Asia were prevented from developing cheaper vaccines locally had little to do with the racist views of western politicians, and far more to do with brute capitalist interests.
Countries like the USA and Britain lobbied on behalf of their big pharma capitalists to protect their intellectual property rights on the COVID-19 vaccines, to ensure they could be exploited for the greatest possible profit.
This is why pleas in 2020, by representatives from India and South Africa at the World Trade Organisation, to waive these IP protections were ignored – with disastrous consequences for the entire world, as we saw in the rise of the latest Omicron variant.
On top of that, waiving IP protection on the vaccines would have undermined the very institution of private property, and thus threatened the whole edifice of capitalism itself.
Meanwhile, attempts to alleviate the economic impact of the pandemic have widened the already yawning gulf between the richest and poorest nations widened during the pandemic, Oxfam reveals.
During the pandemic, the International Monetary Fund gave out 107 loans to some of the world’s poorest countries, all of which come with strings attached in the form of ‘structural adjustments’ (i.e. cuts) in order to service the resultant debt.
As well as further crippling these already underdeveloped economies, Oxfam suggests that austerity demanded by the IMF to pay off these loans will cause a severe worsening of “every type of inequality” within at least 73 countries. And thus, imperialism will continue to hold these countries in an artificial state of backwardness.
Billionaires ‘had a terrific pandemic’
This picture of poverty and despair for millions of people worldwide could not be further removed from the daily lives of the world’s super-rich. While income fell for 99 percent of people since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, Oxfam reports that billionaires “had a terrific pandemic”, with a new billionaire being created every 26 hours.
The combined wealth of the 10 richest men in the world has more than doubled, growing by roughly $700 billion over the last two years — an increase of $1.2 billion every day. The wealth increase of the world’s billionaires between March 2020 and November 2021 was larger than the previous 14 years of growth combined. This is a rate of wealth hoarding that is unprecedented in all of human history.
The wasted potential here is unimaginable. The profits made during the pandemic by the 10 richest individuals alone would be more than enough to fund a global vaccine rollout, as well as free, universal healthcare and social protection for the world’s entire population.
Jeff Bezos alone could afford to vaccinate everyone on earth with the profits he has made since the coronavirus outbreak.
Yet this is not how these parasites have chosen to spend their precious time and money. Rather than ‘wasting’ their money helping save millions of lives, the mega-rich have spent the pandemic enjoying greater luxuries than ever before. The last 12 months have seen huge increases in the demand for expensive goods such as caviar, super-yachts, private jets, champagne and fancy watches.
Luxury car manufacturer Rolls-Royce has reported that 2021 was the most successful period in the company’s 117-year history. In a shameful insult to the victims of the pandemic, Rolls-Royce CEO Torsten Muller-Otvos said: “Quite a lot of people witnessed people in their community dying from COVID. That makes them think life can be short, and you’d better live now.”
To the working class, the idea of spending millions on a luxury car after seeing the harrowing deaths of your close friends or family would be absurd — but this is precisely the mindset of the mega-rich, who have spent their whole lives profiting from the suffering of others.
A similarly out-of-touch statement was made by Carla Sora from Agriottica Lombarda, the biggest caviar farm in Italy, who recently said: “People in lockdown wanted to enjoy themselves, and everybody decided to spend money on caviar”.
This romantic vision of ‘everybody’ tucked away in their homes enjoying caviar and peacefully waiting out a lockdown would be touching, if it were not a shameful insult to those who lost their jobs, suffered domestic abuse or other myriad hardships during the pandemic. There can be no better manifesto for expropriating the parasitic, wealthy few than their own words!
No solution under capitalism
While Oxfam’s report is an astonishing review of the impact of global inequality, it is still unable to provide a solution that tackles the fundamental problem. Abigail Disney, grand niece of infamous exploiter Walt Disney and author of a foreword for the report, claims that, “the answer to these complicated problems is ironically simple: taxes”.
The report comes to similar conclusions, namely a “one-off solidarity tax” combined with “progressive spending and taxation”. US Senator Bernie Sanders also tweeted, in response to the report, that governments should “tax the rich” and “invest in the working class”.
Ultimately, however, the idea that capitalist governments should simply tax their way out of inequality is naive. Inequality is baked into the capitalist system and is a fundamental part of the exploitative process of profit generation that allows the super-rich and the ruling class to maintain control.
Asking the capitalist class to reform away their economic and social privileges is to ask a leopard to change its spots.
The only way to stop the millions of needless deaths from inequality is to expropriate the billionaires and use their ill-gotten gains to plan the economy according to the needs of society. It is the task of the working class, not bourgeois governments or billionaire elite, to kick out this rotten system and the poverty and inequality it creates.
In the Gulf of Mexico, still recovering from an estimated 134 million gallons of oil spilled by BP in 2010, the Biden administration has leased record-breaking off-shore drilling rights to 33 gas and oil companies including Exxon-Mobil, BP, Shell, and Chevron.
The 2020 presidential election saw the clash between two broad fronts: advocates of a white republic hell-bent on impeding democracy versus an array of constituencies and organizations that recognized Trump as a threat to democracy and racial justice, as they understood both. The latter was energized by both Trump’s attacks against people of color in the U.S. and across the globe…
Arizona state Rep. Wendy Rogers released a new campaign ad Tuesday in which she declared that her embrace of right-wing conspiracy theories such as the “Big Lie,” which baselessly claims that rampant voter fraud stole the 2020 presidential election from former President Donald, is part of an ongoing effort to change the narrative and move “the Overton Window.”
The Overton Window is a theoretical framework for conveying which opinions or policy positions on a given subject are politically acceptable at any given time. An effort to move the Overton Window generally involves introducing seemingly radical ideas into the mainstream political or cultural narrative repeatedly in order to desensitize the population, thus making once radical ideas more mainstream and thereby broadening or shifting the range of acceptable opinions or policy options.
In just one term in office, Rogers, a 67-year-old grandmother, has catapulted onto the national stage and raked in record donations thanks not only to her embrace of Trump, who has endorsed her bid for reelection, but also the far-right extremes of the white nationalist America First movement.
Rogers’ new ad is predictably heavy on Big Lie rhetoric and demands to see “arrests” and “perp walks” of those allegedly responsible for supposedly stealing the election.
“If you told me two years ago that, ‘Wendy Rogers, you’re going to be in the limelight on election integrity issues, election corruption for the nation,’ I never would have imagined it,” Rogers said. “We’ve collected all this data to arguably show widespread corruption in our voting system. … I want to see arrests. I want to see perp walks. I want to see everything out in the open. Elections have consequences. Stolen elections have far worse consequences.”
“We’re on defense all the time as state legislators fighting against the vaccine mandates, fighting against the mask mandates, fighting against medical tyranny,” she continued. “This is a long, protracted battle, and as much as the left gets away with changing the narrative, there is what’s called ‘the Overton Window of political acceptability’ and we have to move it inch by inch, day by day, and call out the fraud, call out the communist influence that is infiltrating this country.”
“We have to wake up and take charge,” Rogers declared. “We are the plan.”
The post Wendy Rogers Is Pushing Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories to Move ‘The Overton Window’ appeared first on Right Wing Watch.
Fed funds futures traders now see some likelihood that policy makers could deliver their first back-to-back, 50 basis point hikes in almost 30 years.
Once again, pundits have begun beating the drums for a presidential ticket split between a Democrat and a Republican in 2024. It’s a return to the elitist thinking that was still dominant in 2016 — and a recipe for disaster in the fight against the Right.
An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last month pitched 2024 as the year for “change candidate” Hillary Rodham Clinton to mount her history-making big comeback. (Gage Skidmore / Flickr)
Last month, a surreally bizarre trifecta of articles attempted to make the case for various alt-presidential tickets ahead of the 2024 election. On the face of it, none are particularly worthy of note except as objects of bemused derision: each advancing a highly improbable and transparently click-chasing future hypothetical. Tom Friedman’s self-parodying screed, for example, makes the case for a Joe Biden/Liz Cheney partnership, taking its inspiration from Israeli coalition politics. By way of response, Damon Linker suggests Biden should team up with Maryland Republican governor Larry Hogan to “marginally” improve Democratic electoral fortunes. (Linker, to be fair, does acknowledge that such a scenario is far-fetched.) Charging into the fray Leeroy Jenkins–style, one op-ed in the Wall Street Journal even pitched 2024 as the year for “change candidate” Hillary Rodham Clinton to mount her history-making big comeback.
Articles like these are roughly the punditry equivalent of a fantasy football draft: a vaguely amusing pastime with zero stakes, enjoyed mainly by people permanently OD’d on the news.
It’s probably no accident, however, that the genre has started to make a resurgence a year into an ossified administration that was effusively sold to liberal voters as an activist presidency in the making. As Biden’s approval ratings continue to tank, his legislative agenda stalls, and Democrats stare down the prospect of catastrophic defeat in next November’s midterms, the usual goldfish-brained chorus of pundits has grown increasingly vocal about the idea that blame lies with a White House too captured by progressive excess and removed from the reasonable “center” of mainstream opinion.
Fearing a second act of Trumpism and still reeling from the two surprisingly strong challenges made by Bernie Sanders, it follows that we’d see the return of a type of elite fusionist thinking that was all the rage back in 2016. Drawing on a kind of militant centrism, the core idea was that mindless anger — whether from gun-toting MAGA chuds or activists championing universal health care and free college — threatened the sanctity of liberal institutions, necessitating a new alliance of the technocratic center right and center left in order to save them. In this crisis of democracy, it was said, democracy itself was the culprit, and the people were a feral mob in desperate need of rescue from themselves. (If this sounds like hyperbole, I invite you to peruse this June 2016 essay by James Traub, quite literally titled “It’s Time for the Elites to Rise up Against the Ignorant Masses,” which was a superlative entry into the genre).
The slew of recent op-eds positing absurd scenarios for 2024 might be insipid discourse fodder, but it’s also symptomatic of a genuine strand of elite opinion that sees the salvation of America’s sclerotic political order at some Archimedean point between Joe Biden and Mitt Romney. In its current incarnation, this “fever dream of reactionary centrism” seeks to bring about a consolidation of the pre-populist status quo: forging a permanent coalition between the traditional establishments of both major parties under the transparently fraudulent aegis of “defending democracy.”
It’s the kind of bipartisan bilge with virtually no buy-in outside expensive corporate fundraisers and newspaper op-ed sections. But it’s the sort of thing that still finds oxygen in a political environment so inane some liberals can be found lionizing the likes of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush because they count among a handful of Republicans willing to criticize Donald Trump (Cheney, who took office after his ticket quite literally stole the 2000 election, having been warmly received at the Democrats’ January 6 commemorative event last month). Though unlikely to attract genuine popular support, quixotic speculation about the prospect of an alt-fusionist ticket will probably grow as the Democrats face a difficult midterm election and the GOP maintains its thoroughly Trumpified course with or without an actual Trump candidacy in 2024.
Here, the recent past offers plenty of precedent. Hillary Clinton, after all, more or less openly ran as the bipartisan standard-bearer for establishment America, boastfully rolling out Republican endorsements in the absurdly out-of-touch belief they would be political kryptonite. The 2020 Democratic National Convention, meanwhile, somehow included a “virtual prayer circle” for the late John McCain, while the party’s brightest young voices were asked to make way for the likes of Colin Powell, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, and union-busting former GOP governor John Kasich.
Spurred by the events of January 6, 2021, and an already atrophying Democratic administration, there’s every reason to expect that 2024 will see a reversion to something like the same formula as anxious elites call, yet again, for a popular front in the face of the post-Trumpian right. Such thinking proved disastrous in 2016 and continues to represent a political road to nowhere. Having nothing to say about political corruption, democratic stagnation, destructive trade deals, the noxious influence of organized money, or any of the other root causes of the current political crisis, America’s elite fusionists seek not to overhaul defective institutions but instead to restore their legitimacy. Though partisans for this project have seized on the rhetoric of heterodoxy and public-spiritedness, their objectives remain fundamentally conservative.
Perhaps more importantly, they are also self-defeating. Repairing the reputation of a rotten system is no substitute for transforming it, and a coalition of elites who have been on the wrong side of every major issue and policy decision for the past quarter-century is incapable of achieving either. What America’s atrophied and increasingly precarious political order demands is not bipartisan insularity and anti-populism but genuine democratic revolt — not just against the sinister forces of Trumpism but also the elites whose behavior has allowed it to fester and flourish.