Category: Politics

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Saving American Democracy Will Require Major Structural Reforms

The Blind Spot; How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracy, Jeffrey Winters, 2026

For oligarchs, voting is meaningless compared to how their wealth influences politics and society literally all the time…They fund candidates that protect the rich, fund think tanks to produce ideas justifying oligarchic agendas, and buy up the media that pump those ideas into society…And, as we will see, there is no area where this power is more impactful than in the epic fight over progressive taxation–the primary tool that democracies around the world use as they try to stem rising inequality. Heavy taxes on the ultra-rich, both individually and on the corporations they own, are the last chance we get to keep extreme inequality in check…Forbes reports that the US was home to about 900 billionaires in 2025, with $6.8 trillion in combined net worth. Most of that had never been taxed.

A small cushion of wealth provides an elevating safety net to fall back on; it allows for choices, buys precious time in difficult moments, and is fortifying psychologically. It must be viewed as absolutely necessary for all human beings. The problem is that most people in the world have no access to this most basic form of security; while a few are mindlessly hoarding everything they can and gearing up for an oligarchic transfer of tens of trillions of dollars tax-free to their immediate heirs.

The Gini index is reported on a scale between 0 and 100, where 0 means prefect economic equality across the population and 100 means perfect inequality — that is, everything has somehow been grabbed by a single person. (The wealth Gini for the world is 88; Sweden is 87, the USA is 83, Europe is 81.)

For the years 2014 to 2018, the 25 wealthiest American families paid a mere 3.4 percent. Warren Buffet paid 0.1 percent, Jeff Bezos paid 0.98, and Michael Bloomberg paid 1.3. Across half a century, these relentless oligarchic victories over taxation have fueled an epidemic of inequality in America and the related descent into open political warfare.

Alexander Hamilton James Madison

The converging crisis of the mid 1870s taught the (Constitutional) convention (1787) delegates two kinds of lessons reflecting two kinds of fear. One was that too much democracy and empowerment of the people could produce policies unacceptable to oligarchs. The other was that too little democracy could result in mass protests that could become volatile. What was especially worrying about all the debt relief and paper money legislation was that so many state senates had failed the test of protecting the rich…Randolph argued that, at the state level, senates were too close to the masses and too easily intimidated by unrest. Control had to shifted upward within a steep pyramid of power.

The result of 1787 was the Constitution (less all the amendments) we have today with a national senate, a president with veto power, and a high court that can override federal laws.

In 2006 Congress passed a whistleblower law for revealing tax fraud that offered a reward of up to 30 percent of the funds the IRS collects. In 2007, Bradley Birkenfeld, a UBS (Union Bank of Switzerland) employee, came forward with incrimination information. “Without Mr. Birkenfeld walking in the door of the Department of Justice in the summer of 2007,  I (Kevin Downing) doubt as of today this massive fraud scheme would have been discovered by the US government.”

Birkenfeld received $104 million but spent thirty months in prison for his efforts.

Charles P. Rettig, who was the IRS commissioner in 2023, said that the actual number was “about $1 trillion in unpaid taxes every year.”..For perspective, the tax gap in 1974 was only $40 billion…With Rettig’s estimated $1 trillion in taxes going unpaid every year, it means the very rich are constantly adding hundreds of billions to their wealth through non-compliance and defeating the tax system.

We’ve arrived at a paradox where oligarchs are more visible than they’ve been in 150 years while their wealth is more invisible than ever…As we’ve seen, three of the most important weapons in the oligarchic arsenal are complexity, secrecy, and infiltration. Complexity, created deliberately be the Wealth Defense Industry, is deployed as a squid deploys ink. The secrecy that hides wealth and financial dealing is a core concession to oligarchs by governments–most evident in their reluctance to demand an answer to the most basic political-economic question: who owns an asset? And infiltration is the placement of oligarchic foot soldiers in strategic government offices to ensure key regulations tilt strongly in favor of the rich.

With multi tiered (20 or more) partnerships with half a million partners or more and pass throughs replacing corporations, driven entirely by tax advantages for oligarchs, tax collection is virtually impossible. Two Congressional efforts to reign in this chaos The Enablers Act and the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) both failed. 

The ENABLERS Act (Establishing New Authorities for Businesses Laundering and Enabling Risks to Security Act) is proposed, bipartisan U.S. legislation designed to close major loopholes in the country’s anti-money laundering (AML) framework. While U.S. banks are required to investigate their clients’ wealth and block illicit funds, the ENABLERS Act aims to extend these same “know-your-customer” (KYC) rules to a broader group of professional “gatekeepers”. The Enablers Act was never enacted.

The CTA had a very simple goal — to document “beneficial ownership.” By now, it is apparent that, in the hall of mirrors that is the world of assets, income, and ownership, there are scores of entities that range from actual people to creations on paper that can, at least financially, do everything an actual person can do except have a heartbeat. All of these constructed substitutes for persons–companies, shell corporations, shelf corporations, trusts, foundations, and so on — ultimately represent, somewhere, buried under multiple layers and tiers of concealment, real breathing persons who are the owners, the beneficiaries, the controllers and deciders, beyond whom there is nothing else. Sometimes there are so many hidden intermediaries that there is a need to refer to the “true” beneficial owners.

The CTA was the US government’s attempt to find out who owned what, their names, and where they were. Having that information makes it far easier to confront threatening groups or actors, discover how trillions of dollars in illicit funds are hidden, moved, and laundered, and sometimes intercept dangerous peoples before they can do great harm. On this occasion (the 2021 Defense Authorization Act), oligarchs were late to the game, in part because wealth defense specialist hadn’t been paying attention…It was a costly oversight… The CTA became law on 1 Jan 2021 with strong bipartisan support.

It was in March 2025 that the bombshell hit…the executive branch was now under the control of a new administration with no interest in corporate transparency…”All entities created in the United States — including those previously known as ‘domestic reporting companies’–and their beneficial owners are now exempt from the requirement to report beneficial ownership information.“..By executive fiat, over 99 percent of all companies that had been required to register no longer had to do so….The law was still there, but it had been completely gutted.

The politics of preparation

The second level of our challenge to oligarchy (after progressive taxation) is deeper, focusing on changes that become possible only during the politics of crisis, when oligarchs are at their weakest. During ruptures, the decision-makers oligarchs rely on face pressure to focus their priorities on stabilizing the society. That certainly can included default responses that shore up oligarchy itself, but that is not necessarily the case. It is in the nature of crises that those in charge become far more willing to consider policies and solutions that would be unthinkable during the politics of the ordinary. They can do this because emergencies often require extreme actions and because they are less afraid of the ways oligarchs can punish. After all, oligarchs themselves are in disarray during these ruptures and also want restabilization, even if that means significant concessions they would ordinarily oppose bitterly…When a rupture happens. two things matter most; how well organized citizens are to pursue their interests, and what major changes are prepared to be implemented. A high state of readiness in such moments enables change that is transformative and lasting.

Wealth inequality arises at two sites. The first is the labor market, where inequality unfolds at our places of employment. Many impactful things can be done there to constrain oligarchs–enacting laws that facilitate rather than block unionization, raising minimum wages, having employees own significant shares of their workplaces, and indexing compensation of employees to compensation for the highest levels of management and ownership, just to start.

The other site is after the dust has settled on these income, compensation, and wealth gains. This is where we address inequality through redistribution. Confronting political structures that uphold oligarchy– like unrepresentative lower houses, senates, supreme courts, and presidential vetoes–is unusually hard. Enacting policies for the redistribution via the tax system has not only been a realm of great success but one where the victories has been so substantial that oligarchs were forced to retreat into tax evasion as they fought to reduce the tax rates. There are two large lessons to draw from this; the progressive tax victories of the past must be won again and stronger, and the maneuvers of the Wealth Defense Industry has devised to subvert redistribution must be answered. That means dismantling the mazes of complexity the industry has built, forcing an end to ownership secrecy, and closing the industry’s revolving door with government.

There is no greater threat to oligarchy than transparency…This extreme secrecy can be defeated. In the US, enacting policies like the Enablers Act and Corporate Transparency Act will deal a major blow. We must also turn the Wealth Defense Industry against its creators by forcing its many branches to monitor and report suspicious financial activity–with stiff penalties including imprisonment for failing to do so.

Although it’s a tough sell, democratic populations around the world must support dramatically stronger tax agencies. Larger budgets, more auditors, and more technology will only hurt oligarchs.

In 1922, American oligarchs faced fifty-six brackets. After the Second World War, the highest bracket was over 90 percent. By 2026, there were just seven brackets with the highest rate being 37 percent. Having two or three dozen tax brackets, with the highest being over 80 percent is an important goal.

The immediate goal must be to impose two kinds of taxes on oligarchs–a true income tax on annual gains in the value of oligarchic fortunes, and wealth tax on the total current value of those riches.

Oligarchs enjoy substantial annual increases on their assets, but this income is rarely taxed unless it is “realized” by selling the assets. This is a pure concession to the rich that fuels inequality and serves no positive social purpose.

As I’ve mentioned, this agenda is only a start–there are many more reforms that could be attempted. Still, while achieving them would be great progress, they are not enough to end participatory inequality. That requires deeper and harder changes of a constitutional or semi-structural kind. This moves us into the realm of the politics of preparation. These proposals are grand in scale and significantly more impactful in making political power more equally shared. They are conceivable only under conditions of severe crisis.

Three of these ideas are a direct reversal of oligarchic safeguards created by the Philadelphia (1787) delegates. Such antidemocratic features have been replicated in many countries since, especially in presidential systems. The first one requires little elaboration. The veto powers of the executive branch should not exist. A single person should not be able to cancel the will of the people expressed through the legislature’s deliberations and votes. The purpose of an executive branch is the execution of laws and policies from the legislature not the making or blocking of policies from that powerful office. If there is a need to check or slow certain sensitive decisions, it would be fine to grant limited powers to the executive branch to delay implementation to allow for further national debate or to send a law back to the legislature for a confirming simple majority vote.

The second proposal concerns constitutional courts, which are everywhere made up of just a few judges whose primary function is to constrain democracies composed of millions of voting citizens, represented by many hundreds of legislators (or thousands if state or provincial legislatures are included). In the US, it takes just five judges to block the will of the people, even a super majority. Supreme courts and the constitutions they interpret have served to sustain oligarchy in the face of democracy. The only compelling justification for concentrating so much power in so few hands is to protect the the weak from the powerful. It certainly is good to prevent a “tyranny of the majority” when this means mostly actions taken democratically against the vulnerable, especially when those actions trample important principles of fairness and justice.

The problem is that in democracies dominated by oligarchs high courts have spent most of their time doing the opposite–defending the powerful few against the vulnerable many. The justification for constitutional courts collapses once it is recognized that their main obsession has been to support oligarchy against democracy.

One solution is to have our constitutional courts be much larger and more representative of average citizens.

Beyond the size of the court, it is important to change how justices are chosen. The current American system of presidential nomination and Senate confirmation was created in Philadelphia (1787) to preserve oligarchy. We can democratize that process using sortition. Half of the justices on the enlarged bench should be appointed by lottery from a pool of citizens who have a law degree, having served as a judge for at least three years at any level, and have a clean criminal record. Congress should vote on the remaining judges, but neither the legislature nor the executive  should be involved in those appointed through random selection. Sortition will ensure that the overall panel of judges on the Supreme Court has a broader diversity of views and is more representative of the wider public. If this remedy fails, ending judicial review completely remains an option.

The third structural proposal to roll back oligarchic protections is the elimination of all upper legislative chambers. The primary purpose of senates and houses of lords is to dampen the power of more democratic bodies below them. Several countries have transitioned from a bicameral to unicameral system by elimination their upper chambers. New Zealand erased the Legislative Council in 1950. Denmark removed the Landsting in 1953. Several provinces in Canada abolished their upper houses. As senates are removed, societies should design alternative checks that ensure fairness, defend freedom, and protect truly vulnerable minorities.

Additional steps along these lines would include dramatically increasing the number of seats in the people’s legislature so that districts are smaller…Smaller districts bring representatives closer to their constituents, complicate legislative lobbying by special interests, and make it harder for oligarchs to dominate campaign financing across so many races.

sortition replaces voting

None of these major reforms goes far enough in addressing the ability of oligarchs to dominate electoral democracy with money.  A bold proposal to neutralize the power of oligarchs in elections is to choose representative by lottery rather than voting.

In the US, over 150 million voters get to choose, but they do not get to choose their choices. The slate of candidates, and the narrow agenda they pursue, is overwhelmingly influenced by oligarchs. Camila Vergara calls this distortion of democracy “systemic corruption”, and she joins a growing chorus of others — most notably (John) McCormick himself, Helene Landemore, Gordon Alrlen — who argue this will never be fixed by tinkering at the margins.

Their startling conclusion is that in the face of centuries of resilient oligarchy, the only way to strengthen democracy so that it functions horizontally and vertically is by ending voting for representatives. In its place they propose sortition — selection of leaders by random lottery…We are represented not because we voted but because those making decisions are like us.

The closest example today is how juries are selected for trials from a random group of fellow citizens.

Amy Kapczynski’s Proposed Constitutional Amendment

Congress shall have the plenary power and duty to legislate a democratic political economy, in order to provide genuine political equality for all natural persons. This shall include the power and duty to remedy structural discrimination, to empower workers, to provide for the care and health of the people, and to ensure a sustainable environment. The judiciary shall defer to Congress with respect to legislation that pursues these ends, notwithstanding any other provision in the Constitution.

These words display a subtle appreciation of the problems at the heart of participatory inequality. Unlike the vague expressions in constitutions around the globe of popular values and goals societies should strive for, this proposal requires that they be pursued. A democratic political economy leaves no room for oligarchy. “Genuine political equality” refers to power shared equally in all its forms and only by natural persons, not corporations. And the courts are explicitly stripped of their power to impede this progressive agenda.

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A History of the Jewish Bund from 1772 to 1948

Here Where We Live Is Our Country; The Story of the Jewish Bund, Molly Crabapple, 2026

The Jewish Labor Bund was a secular, socialist, and anti-Zionist movement founded in 1897 in the Tsarist Empire. Dedicated to doikayt (hereness), Bundists fought for multi-racial democratic socialism and cultural autonomy where they lived, rather than emigrating to establish an ethnostate in Palestine.

Large numbers of Jews migrated from Spain and other western European areas to escape the pogroms around the time of The First Crusade (1096–1099). Most settled in an area around present day Poland. There, they developed their own language, Yiddish, an amalgam of medieval high German, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic written in the Hebrew alphabet.

In 1791, Empress Catherine the Great formalized the Pale (of Settlement) after Russia acquired vast territories with large Jewish populations during the partitions of Poland. Jews were only allowed to settle in this Pale. At its peak, the territory spanned about 500,000 square miles (1.2 million square km), covering parts of modern-day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, and Moldova. It comprised roughly 20% of European Russia. The Pale was officially abolished following the February and October Revolutions (1917), which dismantled the Russian Empire and eliminated state-sanctioned restrictions on Jewish residency.

Now free of the Russian Empire, Poland immediately embarked on its own imperial wars of conquest, starting with the exquisite, formerly Hapsburg city of Lviv…The Lviv massacre was among the first of over a thousand pogroms that took place between November 1918 and March 1923, within the former Pale of Settlement. They were of a ferocity and sadism never before experience in eastern Europe. Almost everyone took part, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Russians, Poles, Cossacks, criminals, warlords, aristocrats, soldiers, deserters, Whites, Greens, monarchists, reactionaries, nationalists, people with no ideology whatsoever, and even units that were ostensibly communist…Everyone agreed they had it coming.

Over the next two decades, the Bund would show Jewish workers that they were a people as worthy as any other. Their methods remind me of those of the America’s Black Panther Party, another group of young radicals who carried guns and started free breakfast programs and asserted their people’s beauty in a country that wanted them dead. Like the Panthers, the Bund was a Marxist party built by and for oppressed and racialized others, who created a network of communal care and cultural uplift, of schools, clinics, mutual aid centers, and youth groups, backed with weapons and branded with militant chic…The Bund created a youth movement. Tsukunft (the Future), for teenagers who worked ten hours a day and lived five to a tenement room but still dreamed of a better and more beautiful world. Bundist teachers dominated the new, secular Yiddish school system, TSYSHO (Central Yiddish School System). These schools directly challenged the traditional cheders that my great-grandfather endured — that Bundists described as filthy holes where subliterate old men “filled [a child’s] small brain with nonsense,” using  a cat-o’-nine-tails to reinforce their points.

The Bund helped transform Yiddish, the language of the Jewish street, into a vehicle for transnational literary culture. When they fled disaster, Yiddish became a portable homeland that Bundists carried on their tongues. Secular Yiddish literature and the Bund grew together until Bundists became the literature’s greatest champions. Bundists devoted themselves to the perpetuation of Yiddish long after they had been forced to abandon everything else.

In April 1920, at the Bund’s Krakow convention, a majority of delegates voted to join the Comintern (Communist International).

From a 1928 Bund Warsaw resolution:

  • The most important condition for a peaceful life together for the population of Palestine, is a renunciation of the Zionist plan to rule the land against the will of the majority.
  • Zionists have built all their hopes on stripping away the political rights of Palestine’s existing Arab population, who constitute the oppressed majority…and on forcing them from all positions of power…[Zionists] have stood with every occupying power in Palestine–first Turkey, now England–and have used every means to make sure that Arabs are not granted their most minimal demands for political freedom and self-government.
  • The Arab hatred of the Jewish population is a direct result of Zionist politics. Zionism has poisoned the atmosphere and put the Jewish population of Palestine in danger.
  • The nationalist demonstrations that Zionists have organized exploit the victims of these tragic events and the understandable upset of the Jewish community…This meeting call on Jewish workers to fight the storm of nationalism and chauvinism that Zionists are unleashing on the Jewish Street. The answer to tragically, but pointlessly spilled blood cannot lie in more national hatred, which will inevitably lead to more communal clash, but in international solidarity and the growth of the socialist movement.

(Henryk) Erlich (Bundist leader) spelled out the fatal conflict at the heart of Zionism. The establishment of Israel would lead to perpetual war with its neighbors and the people it had dispossessed. “If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be; eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); and an untiring struggle for the extermination of the language and culture of the non-Hebraized Jews of Palestine…Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy and progress can grow?” Erlich asked. “Indeed, is it not the climate in which reaction and chauvinism ordinarily flourish?”

Bundists described how the Nazi Slaughter was an extrapolation of what Europe had inflicted on the world. “It is the Hitlerites’ attempt to invoke the colonial methods of extermination that the European imperialists adopted in the previous centuries…and apply them to weak and small peoples of Europe.”

By the end of WWII in 1945, “The Nazis  murdered 90 percent of Polish Jews — and one-third of the  Jews on earth.”

When, in 1948 Congress tried to pass a bill to accept 200,000 survivors, the bill passed banning 90% of Jewish survivors because they had taken wartime refuge in the Soviet Union.

In social justice circles, it’s said that an oppressed group can’t be racist because racism requires power. If a group is powerless, they can be as bigoted as they like. Jews have been powerless for most of our history. The rituals of our religion are those of a powerless people, and we have hated with a powerless hate. On Purim, we make noise to celebrate not just Haman’s death but the murder of our enemies, the people of Amelek, down to the last man, woman, and child. For a long time, this was just an expression of impotent emotion. Theater, in the Aristotelian sense. Catharsis. We weren’t going to do anything about it. It’s not like we had an army.

This is fine when a group is powerless, but power is a fluid thing. Jews now have an army, and those once-impotent fantasies about destroying Amalek have transformed into white phosphorus bombs dropped on Gaza, into torture camps and mass graves full of cancer patients, shot with their catheters still in.

In 1942, young Zionists in the Warsaw ghetto founded the Jewish Combat Organization. Exactly five years after the ghetto revolt, on the eve of Passover 1948, Zionist paramilitaries ethnically cleansed fifteen thousand Palestinians from Haifa.

Bundists (Bulletin June 1949) saw the Nakba for what is was, the foundational crime of the Zionist  endeavor. Born of another people’s violent dispossession, Israel had yoked itself into an ever worsening cycle of repression and resistance. Its own violence would poison it, and the cancer would metastasize, until there was nothing else left.

Sophia (Dubnova, widow of Henryk Erlich) died in 1986, at age 101, engaged and lucid to the last. Shortly before her death, she told her grandson Henry she had a confession to make. She was no longer a socialist, but an anarchist.

Today, a new generation of activists and scholars view the Bund as a historic model for global solidarity, democratic socialism, and the fight for human rights. To explore their extraordinary history in depth, you can read Molly Crabapple’s book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country.

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Leonard Leo, Opus Dei, John Roberts, and the Most Dangerous Supreme Court

Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and his Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights, Lisa Graves 2025

SUPREME COURT CORRUPTION AND PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY

Through action and inaction, Roberts has also allowed a culture of corruption to run rampant. For more than a decade, he has worked to stall congressional efforts to require an enforceable code of conduct for the Supreme Court, even though every other judge in the nation is subject to such rules…Roberts stood silent as Thomas sat on the case involving Donald Trump’s immunity claims in a criminal case about Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election, even though Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, actively sought to stop the count and even to secure fake electors. Roberts adopted the same do-nothing approach toward Samuel Alito, despite evidence that flags tied to the Jan 6 insurrection were flown over his homes. Why? Roberts needed their votes in order to accomplish his most reactionary agenda to date and to cement the most unprecedented edict of all: to effectively pardon Trump and pave the way for his return to power, emboldened by kinglike immunity from prosecution for any of his “official acts” as president…John Roberts unprecedented decree was that Trump had committed no crimes, and could have committed no crimes , as long as he was acting in his official capacity as president. The chief justice’s declaration that Trump’s speech and actions in connection to his so-called official acts could not be used as evidence also interfered with other indictments and potentially his conviction in one of the other cases… This was, essentially, a judicial coup.

This situation–where ethically compromised justices were making critical decisions about the election of the president–harkens back to Bush v. Gore. In 2000, Clarence Thomas refused to recuse himself from the Bush v. Gore case despite a very serious conflict of interest involving, once again, his spouse. Rather than recusing himself, Thomas proceeded to cast the decisive vote in the Court’s 5-4 decision to stop the recount in Florida, thereby making George W. Bush president. As part of her job at the Heritage Foundation, Ginni Thomas helped lead the screening and recruiting of appointees for a future Bush administration…After Clarence Thomas failed to recuse himself, the Heritage Foundation promoted Ginni to director of executive branch relations, working directly with the Bush administration..She received nearly $1 in compensation over the next seven years.

John Roberts is presiding over the most corrupt Supreme Court in American history, and he is doing it in order to use the judiciary to entrench Republican power and roll back legal precedents that secured rights that he dislikes. Despite his superficial geniality, Roberts may go down as the worst chief justice in US history, presiding over the destruction of the law and the decimation of the Constitution.

Citizens United v. FEC 

Devastatingly, Roberts has systematically altered the very structure of our democracy by sabotaging voting rights and permitting illegitimate and undemocratic electoral maps that all but eliminated incentives to seek compromise, fueling extremism and division. But Roberts masterstroke was alchemy: turning gold into speech by judicially rewriting the First Amendment to allow mountains of gold in the form of dark money to distort our elections. The result in that case, called Citizens United v. FEC (2010), was orchestrated by the Roberts Court, which ordered an out-of-season oral argument on new questions to clear the decks for a surge in secret cash for the 2010 midterms–just in time to try to rein in America’s first Black president, Barack Obama. That tsunami of cash has been deployed to distort the ensuing elections, epitomized by the actions of the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who spent $288 million to procure the presidency for Donald Trump (and an unelected copresidency for a while) in 2024.

OPUS DEI AND LEONARD LEO

A lot of the money used to rewrite the Constitution through the capture of the Court came from a small number of people–mostly white men–wielding their wealth to limit other people’s rights, especially women’s rights and voting rights, but not just those. To be clear, the Roberts Court does not stand alone in the endeavor to limit these rights: Its sits at the apex of a complex infrastructure of nonprofit groups and for-profit firms seeking to use the Court and protect it from critics. Leonard Leo’s role in building this infrastructure cannot be overestimated. It would not be unreasonable to assert that he is the individual most singularly responsible for reversing American’s reproductive freedoms and other rights through the Roberts Court. Of course, none of this would be possible without generous funding from billionaire zealots.

By 2001, Newsweek was reporting that Justices Scalia and Thomas were reputed to be part of Opus Dei, a secretive ultraconservative Catholic sect, although they could also have been  unofficial collaborators. That article also reported that Scalia’s wife, Maureen, had attended multiple Opus Dei “spiritual functions”…Opus Dei was created as a special prelature of the Catholic Church by Joes-maria Escriva, a priest with close ties to Spain’s Fascist dictator, Francisco Franco. Journalist Gareth Gore recently noted that most Opus Dei members in the United States live in or near Washington D.C., and no government since Franco’s has included as many Opus Dei members or collaborators as the first Trump administration. Two of Leo’s closest allies in the dark-money financial engine that has captured the court, Neil and Ann Corkery, have been part of Opus Dei. Leo also funds the Opus Dei headquarters in DC, the Catholic Information Center, and has received its highest award…by 2006, the Court had its first Catholic majority in US history: Alito plus Roberts, Thomas, Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy.

Attack Philanthropy: Right-Wing Billionaire Fueled Climate Denial & Conservative Judges, Schools

ProPublica reported that in September 2020 (Barre) Seid sold one of his companies and created a massive trust with Leo as Trustee. When the transaction details were settled, Leo stood at the helm of a $1.6 billion trust, one of the biggest gifts of its kind in US history.

No Supreme Court majority in American history has ever been constructed the way the Roberts Court has–with the help of big, dark secret money.

In 2024, Leo made public a letter he had sent to numerous right-wing groups explaining that his focus is on “funding to operationalize or weaponize the conservative vision,” to “crush liberal dominance at the choke points of influence and power in our society.” Leo wasn’t writing just as a person who controls a billion-dollar trust fund, which he has used to help orchestrate the reversal of Roe and more. This is the man who helped handpick the majority of justices on the US Supreme Court.

OVERTURNING 1973 ROE V. WADE

Since John Roberts became the chief justice of the US Supreme Court, American women have been losing their liberty. Starting with the Gonzales v. Carhart (2007) decision through the Dobbs v. Jackson (2021) ruling and its aftermath, the Roberts court has made it increasingly difficult for American women to get the medical care they need, to follow their doctor’s advice to protect their health when they are pregnant and confronted with a heart-wrenching diagnosis like cancer that needs treatment or where a severe fetal abnormality is detected. Women are literally dying because John Roberts agreed that states can restrict access to abortion well before a fetus is viable.

MARRIAGE EQUALITY

…when the question of marriage equality was taken up by his court, in Obergefell v. Hodges, Roberts cited as authority sources built on biblical claims…For example, Roberts cites a book published by an Opus Dei-tied publisher and edited by Robbie George, which asserts that the movement for same-sex marriage has created a “crisis,” for marriage. It also treats Christianity as authority on the relationship between “husbands and wives” and “man and woman” where “the family (headed by the husband) ruled itself.” That essay, by law professor David Forte, which Roberts cites in his opinion, also  asserts that the Founding Fathers relied on marriage as the foundation of a “free republic,” “national morality,”, and “public virtue,” based on one letter by John Adams asserting that marriage was necessary to rein in “private passions,” whatever that means. This is one of the flimsiest readings to hang a ruling on that I have ever encountered in more than thirty-five years of reading Supreme Court opinions.

Rich and powerful people have always tried to rig the rules in their favor. Now they are trying to take America backward and control who we can be, who we can love, and how we can care for our bodies, our families, and our world. They are putting the weight of their wealth on the scales of justice to diminish other people’s freedoms. The billionaires who helped capture the Supreme court have a guaranteed freedom to exercise their religion in America, just as all Americans have the freedom to worship or not, as they choose. But the billionaire-backed effort to use the US Supreme Court to impose those views as law on abortion and other social issues is profoundly at odds with our nation’s founding as a place of refuge from state-imposed religion.

VOTING RIGHTS

Roberts waited until three days after Obama was reelected in 2012 to accept another case on the constitutionality of the Voting Rights  Act, a case out of the Deep South known as Shelby County v. Holder. It was brought by Shelby County in Alabama, a state with a legacy of racial terror lynchings and a history of vote dilution efforts…That was the vehicle Roberts handpicked to destroy the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights act…Roberts reprised his theme that “things have changed in the South” in his judicial decree in Shelby County. Then he went about arrogantly disregarding congressional expertise and rejecting a mountain of factual findings in contradiction of this political agenda.

Supreme Court Justices, like all appellate judges, are expected to follow precedent and defer to the factual findings of the courts below them and to Congress. But in Shelby County Chief Justice Roberts did not behave like an appellate judge. Instead, he gave scant consideration to the detailed findings of Congress and to the arguments of the groups submitting amicus briefs in defense of the Voting Rights Act, including those that provided detailed evidence to support the extension of the law…Roberts produced the antidemocratic outcome he desired but that the majority of the people’s representatives overwhelmingly rejected. Roberts declared, despite congressional findings to the contrary, “The conditions that originally justified these measures…no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions.”

Voting restrictions started going into effect immediately, within minutes of John Roberts announcing his decimation of the preclearance protections under the Voting Rights Act.

Attacking The SEC administrative agency and administrative law Judges

In Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy (2025), Roberts chose to pen that decision, striking down decades of administrative law practice to declare suddenly that Congress cannot assign the administration of civil penalties for securities fraud to the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and that instead such cases must be tried in federal court. This dramatic change in the law will make it far more difficult and expensive for the SEC to enforce the rules on trading securities, rules that protect American investors.

Charles Koch and the Supreme Court attack on Unions and Environmental Protections

The Kochs appear throughout this book, particularly Charles Koch. (See Kochland) Charles is not religious but worked closely with Leonard Leo.

In the 2018 Janus v. AFSCME John Roberts assigned the opinion to Sam Alito, who asserted that the fair-share rule created a “windfall” for unions.  Alito’s opinion, which Roberts joined, allows workers like Janus to be free riders who get the benefits and wages negotiated by unions without paying any fees–that’s the real windfall…the Roberts Court’s majority were weaponizing the First Amendment to undo precedents that the new majority disliked; they were reversing the law in Abood (1977) based not on any material change in the law or circumstances but just because John Roberts had the majority to do it. The decision also gave Charles Koch and his family a major victory in their multigenerational attack on unions.
In Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, (2021) John Roberts delivered another blow to union organizing with his own words. Writing for the 6-3 Republican majority in that case, Roberts struck down a forty-six year old law that allowed union organizers a “right of access” to an agricultural employer’s property to protect agricultural workers’ right  to freedom of association in order to organize. Roberts asserted that the right  to organize in the farm fields constituted a “taking” under the Fifth Amendment.

In West Virginia v. EPA (2022), Roberts dealt a devastating blow to the power of the EPA. Roberts articulated the totally invented so-called major questions doctrine, which appears nowhere in the Constitution and had never appeared in any prior cases. The judicial invention asserts that federal agencies cannot use existing statutes to regulate on an issue the the Court deems to be a “major question” that Congress should first pass specific legislation to address. Under that “doctrine”, Roberts and his fellow Republican appointees declared that the EPA did not have the authority to regulate carbon by setting targets for utility companies to expand reliance on renewables, even though the EPA has authority under to statute to regulate carbon and other pollutants.

On its face Loper Bright (2024) is about sea captains opposing a regulation designed to protect wild fish in marine habitats from overfishing, but the  case was about much more than marine life. It was about advancing the destructive legal agenda of one of the the richest men in the world, whose enormous wealth comes from extractive industries. The case transcended Koch’s individual pecuniary interests, however, and was designed to make it easier for other billionaires and corporations to assail an array of federal regulations across countless industries. A close examination of the Loper Bright litigation reveals how it was orchestrated to secure a pro-Koch ruling by a Supreme Court with a newly constituted majority with judges Koch helped get confirmed. (Koch got) the reversal of the legal precedent set in Chevron v. NRDC (1984) …that required federal courts to defer to interpretations by federal agencies of statutory language when Congress did not specify the meaning of a particular word or term and the agency’s interpretation was a reasonable policy choice…Over the course of forty years the Chevron case was cited more than 15,000 times by the courts and provided some stability to the setting of federal rules…By 2024 federal judges no longer needed to defer to reasonable policy choices by experts at federal agencies in cases of broad statutory authorization. Now federal judges–which include more than 200 Trump appointees–can substitute their beliefs and slants for those of government scientists and other substantive experts employed by  the public. The Roberts Court has opened up a free-for-all for hostile federal judges to assert that they know more about air pollution than the experts at the EPA… or that they know better than the FDA about approving drugs like abortion medicine…This is a signature outcome long sought by Koch, Leo, and their comrades…It was about power.

For a look at how the Justice Department and FBI failed to bring Donald Trump to trial and justice for his many crimes and the role of the Federal courts in preventing these trials see Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department, by Carol Leonnig , Aaron C. Davis 2025

 

 

 

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Wealth and Income Inequality and the Great Recession

The Price of Inequality; How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future; Joseph E. Stiglitz, 2012

See Thomas Piketty On Redistribution of Wealth and Participatory Socialism

See these other accounts of the Subprime Mortgage banking disaster of 2008  that led to the Great Recession .

The most important role of government, however, is setting the basic rules of the game, through laws such as those that encourage or discourage unionization, corporate governance laws that determine the discretion of management, and competition laws that should limit the extent of monopoly rents. As we have already noted, almost every law has distributive consequences, with some groups benefiting, typically at the expense of others.

Indeed, even the IMF (the International Monetary Fund, the international agency responsible for ensuring global financial stability) has now recognized the dangers of unencumbered and excessive financial integration: a problem in one country can rapidly spread to another. In fact, fears of contagion have motivated bailouts of banks in the magnitude of tens and hundreds of billions of dollars. The response to contagious disease is “quarantine,” and finally in the spring of 2011, the IMF recognized the desirability of the analogous response in the financial markets. This takes the form of capital controls, or limiting the volatile movement of capital across borders, especially during a crisis.

Politics–and in particular how politics shapes the laws governing corporations–is a major determinant of the fraction of a corporation’s revenues that its top executives take for themselves. U.S. laws provide them considerable discretion. This meant that when social mores changed in ways that made large disparities in compensation more acceptable, executives in the United States could enrich themselves at the expense of workers or shareholders more easily than could executives in other countries.

(Japan in 2010) paid their chief executives an average of $580,000 in salary and other compensation…about 16 times more than the typical Japanese worker ($36,000). Average CEO pay at the 3,000 largest U.S. companies is $3.5 million, including stock options and bonuses…CEO pay of major U.S. corporations (is) some 263 times that of the income of the average worker ($13,300).

It used to be that when the economy went into recession, employers, wanting to maintain the loyalty of their workers and concerned about their well-being, would keep as many as they could on their payroll. The result was that labor productivity went down, and the share of wages went up. Profits bore the brunt of the downturn. Wage shares would then fall after the end of the recession. But in this (2008 and the previous 2001) recession, the pattern changed, the wage share declined in the recession, as well as in the ensuing years. Firms prided themselves on their ruthlessness–cutting out so many workers that productivity actually increased.

The irony is that just as markets started delivering more unequal outcomes, tax policy asked less of the top. The top marginal tax rate was lowered from 70 percent under Carter to 28 percent under Reagan; it went up to 39.6 percent under Clinton and down finally to 35 percent under George W Bush.

…One of the reasons that the top has done so well is rent seeking–which entails seizing a larger share of the the pie and, in doing so, making the size of the pie smaller than it otherwise would be…Widely unequal societies do not function efficiently, and their economies are neither stable nor sustainable in the long run. When one interest group holds too much power, it succeeds in getting policies that benefit itself, rather than policies that would benefit society as a whole. When the wealthiest use their political power to benefit excessively the corporations they control, much-needed revenues are diverted into the pockets of a few instead of benefiting society at large.

Since the time of the great British economist John Maynard Keynes, governments have understood that when there is a shortfall of demand–when unemployment is high–they need to take action to increase either public or private spending. The 1 percent has worked hard to restrain government spending…(Substituting large tax cuts for the wealthy didn’t work).

There is a second way that unbalanced politics driven by extremes of inequality leads to instability: deregulation. Deregulation has played a central part in the instability that we, and many other countries, have experienced. Giving corporations, and especially the financial sector, free rein was in the shortsighted interest of the wealthy; they used their political weight, and their power to shape ideas, to push deregulation, first in airlines and other areas of transportation, then in television, and finally, and most dangerously, in finance.

In the aftermath of the Great Depression, an event preceded by similar excesses, the country enacted strong financial regulations, including the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. These laws, effectively enforced, served the county well: in the decades following passage, the economy was spared the kind of financial crisis that had repeatedly plagued this country (and others). With the dismantling of these regulations in 1999 (Clinton), the excesses returned with even greater force: bankers quickly put to use advances in technology, finance, and economics. The innovations offered ways to increase leverage that circumvented the regulations that remained and that the regulators didn’t fully understand, new ways of engaging in predatory lending, and new ways to deceived unwary credit card users.

The losses from the under utilization of resources associated with the Great Recession and other economic downturns are enormous. Indeed, the sheer waste of resources brought on by this crisis caused by the private sector–a shortfall of trillions of dollars between what the economy could have produce and what it has produced–is greater than the waste of any democratic government ever.

For several decades America has suffered from under investment in infrastructure, basic research, and education at all levels. Further cutbacks in these areas lie ahead, given the commitment by both parties to bringing down the deficit and the refusal of the House of Representatives to raise taxes. The cuts come despite evidence that the boost these investments give to the economy far exceeds the average return in the private sector, and is certainly higher than the cost of funds to the government. Indeed, the boom years of the 1990s were buoyed by innovations made in previous decades that finally took their place in our economy. But the well from which the private sector can draw–for the next generation of transformational investments–is drying up. Applied innovations depend on basic research, and we simply haven’t been doing enough of it.

The financial sector succeeded in making student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, which meant that the lenders had little incentive to see to it that the schools for the which the students were borrowing money were actually providing them with an education that would enhance their income. Meanwhile, private for-profit schools with richly compensated executives have defeated attempts to impose high standards that would make schools that exploit the poor and ill informed-by taking their money and not providing them with an education that enables them to get jobs to repay the loans–ineligible for loans.

Rent seeking distorts our economy in many ways–not the least of which is the misallocation of the country’s most valuable resource: its talent. It used to be that bright young people were attracted to a variety of professions–some to serve others, as in medicine or teaching or public service; some to expanding the frontiers of knowledge.  Some always went into business, but in the years before the (Great Recession) crisis an increasingly large fraction of the country’s best minds chose finance. And with so many talented young people in finance, it’s not surprising that there would be innovation in that sector. But many of these “financial innovations” were designed to circumvent regulations, and actually lowered long-run economic performance. These financial innovations do not compare with real innovations like the transistor or the laser that increased our standard of living.

Someday, perhaps soon, we too will see how globalization as currently managed promotes neither global efficiency nor equity; even more importantly, its puts our democracy in peril. Another world is possible: there are alternative ways of managing globalization that are better for both our economy and our democracy; but they do not entail unfettered globalization. We have learned the lessons of unfettered markets for our economy and how to temper capitalism so that it serves the majority of citizens, not a tiny, powerful fraction. So too, we can temper globalization; indeed, we must if we want to preserve our democracy, prevent our rampant inequality from growing worse, and maintain our influence around the world.

 

 

 

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A just Transition from neoliberal capitalism to progressive capitalism

The Road to Freedom; Economics and the Good Society, Joseph E Stiglitz, 2024

From FDR’s “Four Freedoms Speech” 1941

The first is freedom of speech, and expression — everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world…freedom from want — which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings, which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world…freedom from fear — which translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit and act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.

From Reagan to Clinton, presidential administrations expanded the freedom of the banks. Financial deregulation and liberalization meant freeing the banks to do as they pleased…The very word “liberalization” connoted “freeing”. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, we discovered the cost. Many Americans lost their freedom from fear and want as the very real prospect grew that millions of workers and retirees would lose their jobs and homes. We as a society lost our freedom — we had no choice but to spend taxpayers’ money to bail out the banks.

John Maynard Keynes and FDR saw an alternative way forward from classical economics. Updated for the marked changes in the economy and our understanding of the past three-quarters of a century, their vision still stands as an alternative to the neoclassical and neoliberal economics that followed and to the new Right that is emerging. The Keynes and FDR approach was a tempered capitalism with government playing a key but limited role, ensuring stability, efficiency, and equity — or at least more than is provided by unfettered capitalism. They laid the groundwork for a twenty-first-century progressive capitalism that supports meaningful human freedom.

Adam Smith 1776 The Wealth of Nations :

The interest of [businessmen] is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public…The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order…ought never to be adopted, till having having been long and carefully examined. with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men…who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public.

If you are born into the wrong environment, those assets mean nothing. They yield the returns they do only because of the socioeconomic environment as to our own skills and effort. There is full justification, then, for imposing high taxes on high income even in a perfectly competitive economy in which wealth is garnered in ways that have full moral legitimacy.

Likewise, the moral claim against progressive taxes is slim if high incomes arise out of luck or inheritance–and even more so if they are made possible through exploitation or because the rules that generate or allow such income have been shaped by access to political power.

Donald Trump illustrates what happens when parents and teachers fail, and an individual does not become socialized. When norms, peer pressure, and tradition worked normally, we didn’t need strong laws to define what a president could ethically do. Almost every president acted within the constraints. But Trump, with his brazenness, may force us to define the presidential limits more precisely by putting them within laws and regulations.

In the centuries since the Enlightenment, we’ve developed institutions that do a remarkable job of assessing the truth–independent courts, research and educational institutions, and professional associations. There was a widespread consensus behind these institutions until the naysayers in the modern Republican Party and their counterparts around the world arrived on the scene. Unless we restore trust in our truth-ascertaining and verification institutions, it will be hard to have a sustained, well-functioning society or a productive economy.

Financial Times article in 2020 on Facebook;

In short, without full transparency, with a mechanism for holding participants to account, without equal ability to transmit and receive information, and with unrelenting intimidation, there is no free marketplace of ideas. One of the major insights of modern economics is that private and social incentives are often not well-aligned. If those who want to spread misinformation are willing to pay more than those who want to counter it, and if lack of transparency is more profitable than transparency [if we simply say] “so be it,” we won’t get a well-functioning marketplace of ideas.

Online platforms have not only exacerbated societal fragmentation; they have also increased the problem of the rapid, viral spread of mis- and disinformation. Virality means that information can spread quickly, more quickly than “antidotes” to the misinformation can be designed. The lack of transparency in who gets what messages have meant that the antidotes cannot be effectively developed and delivered in the relevant time span, if at all.

Social media companies have enabled the incitement of violence and the spread of hate speech and induced antisocial behavior. Their claim that they are neutral is obviously false.

Should we allow greenhouse gas emission to go unfettered? How should we manage a public health crisis like a pandemic? In that case, the transmission of scientifically false information — especially targeted mis- and disinformation that goes viral — can have dangerous and destructive consequences.

Feudalism was marked by a high concentration of power and wealth, low economic growth and slow social progress. Communism succeeded in generating greater security and more equality in material goods but failed on other counts, including low economic growth, an absence of freedom in all dimensions; a concentration of power, and a greater inequality of standards of living than Communist rulers would admit.

Milton Friedman Friedrich Hayek

Neoliberalism, the dominant economic system in the West over the past forty years, is increasingly viewed as an economic failure because it brought slower growth and more inequality than in earlier decades…It increased societal polarization; created selfish, materialistic, and often dishonest citizens, and contributed to a growing lack of trust.

It is intuitively clear to me that a society marked by greater equality (other things being equal) is better than one marked by huge disparities; that cooperation and tolerance is fundamentally better than greed, selfishness, and intolerance. The extreme versions of the latter that have appeared on the American scene in recent decades are truly loathsome.

Similarly, we now recognize the dangers of climate change, but if governments take action to restrict fossil fuels, under existing investment agreements, they might have to pay out as much as $340 billion to compensate the companies for not destroying the planet.

Our economic system has to be decentralized, with a multiplicity of economic units–many enterprises and other entities (of different kinds) making decisions about what to do and how to do it. The world is too complex to be centrally planned…Any well functioning economy or society requires a mix of types of institutions, not only public and private for profit, but also cooperatives, private not for profit, and so on. And the governmental institutions need to operate at multiple levels, including local, state or provincial, national and global. These institutions need to exert checks and balances on each other and the overall governance structure must limit power and its abuse. I want to emphasize that there must be large parts of the economy that are not and cannot be driven by profits. These include much of the health, education, and care sectors, in which the the narrow pursuit of profits often leads to perverse results. The private prison system has failed its core mission of rehabilitating prisoners.

…we are not born fully formed; we are shaped by our parents, our schools, and the environment surrounding us–including the economic, political, and social system in which we are embedded…cooperative institutions may spur more cooperative behavior. The neoliberal system that we’ve had for the past half century has failed on its own terms by not producing the shared prosperity it promised, but more disturbingly, it also bred more selfish and materialistic people who are less honest and trustworthy. What kind of a world is it in which individuals routinely make money by taking advantage of others and don’t even feel guilty?

Progressive capitalism’s deep aspiration is to construct a society in which there is more empathy, more caring, more creativity, and healthy striving, with individuals who are less selfish and more honest–and these attributes will lead to a better-functioning economy and society.

I believe a large part of the answer is related to two problems of neoliberalism that I’ve called attention to: the growing income and wealth divide that marks twentieth and twenty-first century neoliberal capitalism and the polarization caused by the media. Making matters worse is that current rules allow the rich and elites to have a disproportionate voice in shaping both the policies and societal narratives. All of which leads to an enhanced sense by those who are not wealthy that the system is rigged and unfair, which makes it all the more difficult to heal divisions.

As income inequalities grow, people wind up living in different worlds and don’t interact. There is a large body of evidence showing that economic segregation is growing and has consequences, for instance, on how each side thinks and feels about the other. The poorest members of society see the world as stacked against them and give up on their aspirations; the wealthiest develop a sense of entitlement, and their wealth helps to ensure that the system is rigged. But these individual opinions about the economic divide only increase the societal divide.

Not only are neoliberal economies inefficient, but neoliberalism as an economic system is not sustainable. There are many reasons to believe that a neoliberal market economy is prone to devour itself. A market economy runs on trust. Adam Smith emphasized the importance of trust, recognizing that society couldn’t survive if people brazenly followed their own self interest rather than good codes of conduct.

The regard to those general rules of conduct, is what is properly called a sense of duty, a principle of the greatest consequence to human life, and the only principle by which the bulk of mankind are capable of directing their actions… Upon the tolerable observance of these duties, depends the very existence of human society, which would crumble into nothing if mankind were not generally impressed with a reverence for those important rules of conduct.

A “businessman” like Donald Trump can flourish for years, even decades, taking advantage of others. If Trump were the norm rather than the exception, commerce and industry would grind to a halt.

 

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History of the Americas 1500 to present

America, América: A New History of the New World, Greg Grandin, 2025

As if to intentionally mock expectations and exacerbate resentment, President Harry Truman signed the Marshall Plan into law on Apr 3, (1948), shorty after talks in Columbia (the last Pan-American Conference held in Bogota, Columbia, in March and April 1948) had gotten under way. No funds were included for Latin American reconstruction. As the plan’s formal name made clear, it was exclusively a European Recovery Program. Earlier in the year, after the government of Brazil had asked Washington to fund a modest program of industrial development, the White House send down a commission headed by the economist John Abbink, chairman of McGraw-Hill, to study the request. The commissions response, try “self-help,” and “do it yourself.” Adding to such insults, Truman, when pressed on whether Latin America would receive a recovery plan, answered: “There has been a Latin American Marshall plan for the Western Hemisphere for a century and a half and known as the Monroe Doctrine.”

Marshall had little to give because Washington had, by this point, moved on from the region. The train of global of events hurtled forward, as fighting a Cold War against Moscow became official policy.

In mid-February 1948, George Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff produced a paper meant to “trace the lines of development of our foreign policy, and to project them into the future, so that we could see where we were going.” Sending the paper on to Marshall, Kennan apologized for not including Latin America.” Kennan said, But, he confessed, “I am not familiar with the problems of the area, and the Staff has not yet studied them.”

The irony: Good-Neighbor Pan-Americanism (FDR) was such a spectacular diplomatic and strategic success that, after Allied victory, not much diplomacy or strategy was needed to administer the region. Latin America fell back to being a place to make money and rehearse new strategies of global policing. By 1948, the White House and the State Department had largely ceded responsibility for Latin America to the Pentagon and the private sector.

In Western Europe (after WWII), access to public capital and cheap credit allowed liberalism to reestablish itself, to expand social welfare. In Latin American, the need to placate foreign capital allowed no such outcome. For instance, in Germany, the founding document of the Christian Democratic Union called for the the creation of a “socialist economic order.” When Christian Democrats in El Salvador and Guatemala said they wanted the same thing, they were executed.

The Catholic Church, Israel’s secret services, and the CIA joined forces to get the SS officer Walter Rauff, who during the war killed tens of thousands with his mobile gassing vans, first to Ecuador and then Chile. There, he started building a network of refugee Nazis that he put at the service of the region’s militaries and intelligence agencies. When Pinochet overthrew Allende in 1973, Rauff began working with Chile’s secret police, the DINA, Pinochet’s notorious gestapo. Rauff also helped the government construct a concentration camp on Dawson Island in remote Patagonia and had close ties to the cultish Colonia Dignidad in the low Andes, a guarded community of German immigrants that served Pinochet as a torture center.

United States investment soared during this decade of jackboot stability, with a “great surge” of capital flowing into Latin America. The State Department, now led by John Foster Dulles, turned away appeals for intercession on behalf of the “the political prisoners rotting in the dungeons of Perez Jimenez.” “We must concede,” wrote Kennan in 1950, “that harsh government measures of repression” are necessary to establish stability.

Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Ayala assasinated Apr 9, 1948 Bogota, Columbia

Kennan and Wisner went about weaponizing the kind of confusion, speculation, and conspiracy that swirled around Gaitan’s execution. The routine bewilderments of daily life, and the muddle that came with rapid social and technological change, were hypercharged whenever groups of men in the White House, at Langley, or at Foggy Bottom decided that there were things that needed doing.

Cuba didn’t become a state, as many had predicted it would. But with organized crime established on the island since at least the 1930s, Cuba was incorporated into the union in different kind of way, as a shadow state of offshore desire, for drugs, gambling, and sex…When the insurgent army led by Fidel Castro took power in Cuba on Jan. 1, 1959, the RAND Corporation calculated that the “book value” of United States investment in Cuba was greater than in any other Latin American country, apart from Venezuela…If Cuba’s (revolution) has occurred in the 1930s, say, it might have progressed at a pace of the Mexican Revolution, with cycles of reform, radicalization, reaction, and consolidation, and fights over property rights playing out over decades…”A chain reaction was occurring all over Latin America after Castro came to power. I (Jacob Esterline, CIA project director of the Bay of Pigs) saw — hell, anybody with eyes could see it– that a new and powerful force was at work in the hemisphere.” Esterline here is describing Castro the way Carcia Marquez did Gaitan, as a phenomenon whose moral energy radiated across the Americas.

In the wake of the Cuban Revolution, the United States backed a quick round of coups; El Salvador in 1961; the Dominican Republic, Guatemala (again), and Honduras in 1963; Brazil and British Guiana in 1964. All told, Washington had a hand in sixteen regime changes between 1961 and 1969.

By the end of World War II, Latin America had done the unthinkable: it had forced the great powers to recognize the sovereign equality of all nations, abrogated the doctrine of conquest, and provided a model for a world system organized around the presumption of mutual interests rather than inherit antagonisms. But a reform of diplomacy wasn’t enough to strike at the domestic sources of exploitation. Just as Eighteenth-century philosophers wrote against royal absolutism is all its stultifying effects, Latin Americans wrote and worked against all the various manifestations of dependency: economic, psychological, cultural, political, and moral.

The spread of liberation theology, dependency theory, and artistic critique went hand in hand. “Dependence and liberation are correlative terms,” Father Gutierrez wrote. “An analysis of dependence leads one to attempt to escape from it.”

The United States is now a two-tiered nation, where about 30 or so percent of the population benefits from globalization and the rest struggle to make their bills. Infant mortality is up. Life expectancy is down. And every year breaks a new record for suicides, which are significantly higher in rural areas.

Wilson imagined a world without war. FDR imagined a world without fear or want. Today’s political class imagines nothing. Its grand strategists do no better than offer perilous talk of a new cold war, of restarting nuclear testing, abrogations disarmament treaties, rearming Germany and Japan, expanding NATO, and garrisoning Africa. Wars are seen not as things to be ended but chances to leverage strategic tension to advantage, create new realms of influence.

The international institutions and rules that Latin America helped create or inspire after World War II, long enfeebled, are today nearly worthless. NATO, modeled on the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, is now a blunt instrument of United States power in Europe. The world’s many wars proceed as if there never was a thing called international law. Considering the growing dependence on private mercenaries, corporate intelligence firms, and the accelerating power of out-of-control technologies, the head of Amnesty International, Agnes Callamand, says that the world stands on the brink of a “descent into hell.” Private firms like Palantir Technologies and Israel’s Elbit Systems have teamed up to turn Ukraine, the U.S. Mexico borderlands, and Gaza into their testing grounds, integrating high-tech, AI-driven intelligence gathering into what the CEO of Palantir calls “digital kill chains.”

It feels like the 1930s all over again, as Latin America teeters between the dark and the light. Only this time its reformers are on their own in their fight against reaction — there’s no equivalent of (FDR’s) (Ernest)  Gruening, (Josephus) Daniels, or (Sumner) Wells to work with.

One would think that, with all the region has suffered, from the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition to the death squads and disappearances of the Cold War, Latin Americans would have given up on the idea that history is redeemable. Yet centuries of violence seemed to have seared into activists an irrepressible ability both to recognize the dialectic lurking behind the brutality and to answer every bloody body with ever more adamant affirmations of humanity.

Bartolomé de las Casas Bishop of Chiapas

Las Casas spent 50 years of his life actively fighting slavery and the colonial abuse of Indigenous peoples, especially by trying to convince the Spanish court to adopt a more humane policy of colonization.

One reason for the persistence of a humanist, social-democratic left, one absorbent enough to take in demands related to gender, race, and sexuality, has to do with, I think, the fact that Spanish colonialism’s moral crisis came early with the Conquest. The critique launched by dissenters was frontal and all encompassing, and when independence from Spain finally came, many of those who led that movement understood “emancipation” (even if they didn’t always act on that understanding) in its fullest sense, to include, potentially at least, all forms of oppression. This, I think, helps explain Latin America’s commitment to a panoramic conception of citizenship, on that includes social rights.

The Anglo experience was different. Evasion and denial were English settlement’s hallmarks. And remained so for centuries. No ethical dilemma accompanied the destruction of the continent’s indigenous people. When a moral crisis over chattel slavery did finally come, in the 1800’s, it abstracted Black-skin bondage as a singular, exceptional sin. This, as historian David Brion Davis wrote fifty years ago, had the “great virtue” of providing an “ideal” and “clear-cut” model of evil, which was useful for abolitionists when it came to fighting it but a hindrance to later historians and activists when they tried to relate it to the persistence of “other species of barbarity and oppression.” This, I think, helps explain why the United States’ inability to overcome a narrow conception of individual rights.

Latin American nations do not always agree on the best way forward to calm international problems, including, for example, Valenzuela’s 2024 electoral crisis. Yet despite their differences, most of their leaders all start with the founding premises of American International Law, persistent diplomacy, arbitration, de-escalation, respect of sovereignty, and as Sumner Wells put it when Vargas made his power grab, “patience.” Washington, be it led by Republicans or Democrats, has forgotten Well’s call for forbearance — for letting countries work out their own internal class struggles — and rampages through Valenzuela like that bulls in that china shop, making matters considerably worse.

Still, Latin America remains among the the most peaceful continents in the world, in terms of state-to-state relations. For many, nationalism is still a gateway not toward rivalry but universalism. Native Americans have entered into politics in countries like Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru,, Guatemala, and Mexico not under the banner of ethnonationalism or separation. Rather, indigenous-led social movements and political parties are often the primary carriers of the region’s social-democratic heritage.

…”Democracy has,” FDR said over the radio in 1938, “disappeared in several other great nations, not because people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness through lack of leadership,” Latin Americans know that the way to beat fascism now is the same as it was then: by welding liberalism to a forceful agenda of social rights, by promising to better the material conditions of people’s lives. Nearly every Latin American nation has the “right to health care” enshrined in their constitutions — a simple clear popular objective liberals and leftists in the United States should consider fighting for.

Getúlio Vargas        Lázaro Cárdenas Popular Front Salvador Allende

Its difficult to imagine any politician or coalition in the United States, from any party, rising above the country’s cresting anger or its vertiginous politics of fear to become a stable ally, the way the politicians of the New Deal were, to Cardenas’s Mexico, Vargas’s Brazil, or Popular Front Chile. One can hope.

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Time is running out to limit climate change from greenhouse gases

Here Comes the Sun; Bill McKibben, 2025

At 210 pages this short book is intended to paint an optimistic picture of our chances to limit global temperature rise to a livable maximum. The book is packed with decades long activist experience and remarkable solar power technical development. The reader can reach their own conclusions whether this picture warrants optimism. But the book is well worth reading.

Solar power generation technology that required breakthroughs in solar panels, storage batteries, and power generating wind turbines have, in only the past 15 years, succeeded in joining Moore’s law of  growth in digital computing power as the second exponentially advancing technology in human history.

Thanks to Chinese and other nation’s investments, the world is now in position to replace the burning of fossil fuels with greenhouse gas free energy to meet the total needs of the planet. Now the question becomes – will solar based infrastructure be deployed in time to limit temperature rise to livable levels. In McKibben’s view we may only have five  years to do so.

Solar power is now far and away the cheapest power source in human history and it continues to drop in price. On the positive side, China has made the most progress, reducing its dependence on coal burning generation more than any other country. China is also the leader in the development and production of EV cars, trucks, and buses.  Even the petrol-states of the middle east are converting to solar power generation. In America, California and Texas (surprise?) are leading the way in adopting solar power. Rolling blackouts in California are (almost) a thing of the past. Arizona’s SRP (home to valley of the sun) is slowing down deployment by charging $50 a month just to connect your home solar to their grid. They should be paying homeowners and businesses to connect.

The global south, most close to the equator stand most to gain and adoption is happening at the grass roots first with self installed Chinese panels being placed everywhere. Cheap power is central to reducing inequality and improving lives throughout the globe.

The cost of converting the globe as fast as possible could be expedited with surprisingly little investment but the returns on such investment would be much lower than other alternate investments for billionaires and wealthy retirement funds. In the investment world, saving the planet does not enter the calculations.

The risks (of coups or outright corruption) are greater as well. McKibben suggests that the World Bank and IMF should shoulder these risks but that seems unlikely.

So we have an unstoppable exponential growth source of clean energy that may not get deployed in time to save the planet.

McKibben ends talking about grass roots efforts in the U.S. where key decisions regarding building wind and solar farms are usually local decisions that may come down to the whims of one or two key participants.

He notes that the Covid pandemic demonstrated a widespread and fast public and political response but the threat of immediate personal risk was at the heart of this pandemic. Within a five year period only those directly affected by weather and fire events are likely to be motivated to take action.

And the billionaire class are busy investing in survival pods and space travel! Like Trump, only they matter – no empathy for anyone else.

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Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces

The Fort Bragg Cartel; Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, Seth Harp, 2025

(H.R.) Bush’s subsequent tenure in the Executive Building coincided with a transfer of power from the CIA to the military, which, thanks to the creation of JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command), now had operatives fully capable of carrying out the same skullduggery as civilian spies, but without the added baggage of congressional meddling.

Over the next eight years (1980s) , as Reagan and Bush waged off-the-books dirty wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and also intervened in Columbia, Haiti, and Grenada, the administration leaned heavily on Delta Force and other undercover soldiers. The militarization of covert action was tied up with the rapidly metastasizing “global war on drugs,” another brainchild of George H. W. Bush’s, and partially exposed by the hydra-headed Iran-Contra Affair, the essence of which was the use of illegal arms deals and the sale of other untraceable commodities to fund secret operations. A classified White House memorandum that Reagan signed in 1984 reads like a sketchy blueprint to the “global war on terror” that Bush’s son and political heir would institute at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Among other things, the memo authorized killing in “preemptive self-defense,” so long as the targets were defined as “terrorists.”

That same Orwellian year, The New York Times belatedly broke the news of JSOC’s existence. The article titled “U.S. Military Creates Secret Units for Use in Sensitive Tasks Abroad,” was sourced to members of Congress and intelligence committee staffers. “The worry,” concerned lawmakers told the Times, was that JSOC might become “a uniformed version of the Central Intelligence Agency,,” used by the executive branch “to circumvent Congressional restrictions and reporting requirements.”

Under U.S. occupation, Afghanistan had become the world’s leading narco-state, with an economy almost entirely dependent on the the drug trade. Within a year of the Taliban’s ouster, opium production had returned to record levels. “The significant increase,” the DEA reported “is attributable to the fall of the Taliban, and the Taliban poppy ban.” …By 2005, heroin production in Afghanistan had increased a mind-blowing 7,514 percent. The 2007, the country’s annual output of pure heroin approached a thousand metric tons. By comparison, in a far distant second place, produced just fifty tons that year.

The superabundance of highly potent product inundated Pakistan, Iran, China, Russia, all of Europe, Australia, and the whole world. In the United States, street prices went down, purity went up, and opioid addiction took hold in a population primed for it by a a decade of loose prescribing practices around pharmaceutical painkillers.

According to the DEA, virtually none of the heroin consumed in America during the surge in usage seen in the 2020s and 2010s came from Afghanistan. Less than 1 percent is the official figure.

In his second term in office, President Obama completely abandoned any remaining effort to counter narcotics in Afghanistan, and it became implicit U.S. policy to allow poppy to flourish unimpeded. The amount of land under poppy cultivation expanded to nearly a quarter million hectares. Major traffickers protected by the Karzai cartel, such al Lal Jan Ishaqzai, became untouchable.

Ever since World War II, illegal drugs have served as a common coin for the purposes of espionage, paramilitary operations, and covert actions, and the foreign entities that choose to work for the U.S. military and the CIA — the twin sentinels of global capitalism — often profit from this most capitalistic of all enterprises. Throughout its history, the CIA has worked to achieve American national security objectives in partnership with known drug traffickers, including the anticommunist Kuomintang, the founders of modern-day Taiwan; France’s Corsican mafia syndicates; Cuban exiles opposed to Fidel Castro; Hmong irregulars in Laos as well as the Royal Lao Army; and the contra rebels of Nicaragua. But American foreign policy elites’ complicity in the international drug trade was never so substantial, sustained, witting, and consequential as in Afghanistan…No person in any position of influence dared to suggest that the scourge of opiate addiction then afflicting the poor and working classes across the United States might have resulted from the wartime narcotics bonanza.

But over time, a sea change took place in the composition of the Special Forces. A good number of those who stayed in the Army for the second decade of the GWOT (Global War on Terror) were animated by baser character traits, including a sheer love of fighting, addiction to the gun-slinging lifestyle, and a mercenary attitude toward killing. Theft of government funds, seen as a victimless crime became commonplace… According to Special forces quartermaster James Dumas Sr.’s son “They’re bringing the drugs from overseas into Fort Bragg. They say a group of Special Forces are pushing and selling drugs. They fly it in, put it out on the street. Said they have been doing that for years.”

But the wars that won him (Admiral William McRaven 2014) and his privileged ilk so many encomiums were, for the rest of the nation, an era of cataclysmic abasement. The wars that made SOCOM a budgetary and bureaucratic juggernaut were not worth fighting, in the opinion of a majority of Americans, including supermajorities of combat veterans. In Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and now Ukraine, the United States failed to achieve its stated ex anti objectives and succeeded only in killing millions of people, displacing millions of people, displacing tens of millions, squandering trillions of dollars, and making America the great villain of the twenty-first century in the eyes of most of the world. Ten years after McRaven’s speech, the iconic archetype of the rugged special operator no longer occupied the same vaunted position in the cultural firmament. The prototype figure of the bearded commando had taken on a grittier, dirtier, darker cast in the popular imagination.

“You start to see behind the curtain,” said former Delta Force soldier and Army Ranger Tyler Grey to the podcast host Sean “Buck” Rogers, an ex-Green Beret, of his service alongside the CIA in Iraq and Syria. “Dude, this is not what I thought it was,” Grey realized. “We’re not who I thought we were. We’re not doing this for the reasons I thought.”

Over tine, the suspicion that the Americans might actually be the bad guys “just continues to grow,” Grey said, speaking in 2023. “To were now I see why veterans or wars, when they’re older, feel a certain way,” he said. “I’m starting to be that guy.”

Grey went on to say that if he could speak to a young person thinking of joining the military and pursuing a career in special operations, he’d be tempted to tell the kid, “Don’t do it. It’s a trap. Run, go live your life, man.” He added, “Don’t trust your recruiter. Don’t believe them.”

Between January 2017 and September 2022, a total of 15,293 active duty service members suffered drug overdoses, and 322 of those were fatal, according to statistics compiled by the Department of Defense. The data showed that Fort Bragg had far more overdoses than any other military base, in both absolute and per capita terms, and that Fort Bragg soldiers were significantly more likely to overdose and die than the average American.

There were at least twenty-four murders involving Fort Bragg soldiers between 2020 and 2024. Many remained unsolved years after the fact.

See also CIA Pioneer Alan Dulles  Legacy of Ashes  The Murder of Osama Bin Laden  President as Assassin

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How Dupont (Chemours) Saint-Gobain and 3M Poisoned the World

They Poisoned The World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals; Mariah Blake 2025

Manhattan Project: “The goal was to isolate a rare class of uranium atoms that were capable of producing nuclear chain reactions — the only process that could yield enough energy for an atom bomb…The most promising — gaseous diffusion — involved converting uranium into a gas called uranium hexafloride, or hex, and pumping it through a maze of porous barriers. Since the desired isotope, uranium-235, passed through the tiny pores, the rest of the atoms would gradually be filtered out, leaving only the prized nuclear fuel….If the project stood any chance of succeeding, the physicists needed materials that could stand up to both flourine and hex in some of the harshest conditions imaginable…As luck would have it, Dupont had already developed one that seemed to fit the bill: Teflon. The company hadn’t figured out how to make more than a few ounces at time, but it had a history of ramping up production fast…In the last two months of 1942 alone, the government contracted with Dupont to build two  factories to produce flourocarbon lubricants and sealants based on research from university scientists, and a third facility to manufacture a chemical critical to the production of both flourocarbons and hex — which were now a matter of national security….To avoid being seen as a war profiteer, the firm agreed  to limits its fee for the project to one dollar above costs and to turn all patents over to the US government. But it held on to its patent for Teflon, expecting the material would be key to the Columbia method for enriching uranium.”

Post War Products: “The push by companies like 3M to turn wartime innovations into peacetime profits would transform American Life. After the conflict, manufactures began marketing these materials for every imaginable purpose. Poison gases found new life as pesticides. Explosives like ammonium nitrate were repackaged as chemical fertilizer, revolutionizing entire food systems. And plastics once reserved for military use were transformed into a cornucopia of goods. Polyethylene, which had been used to coat radar cables, were turned into Tupperware, Hula Hoops, and grocery bags. Vinyl, or PVC, became shower curtains, flooring, medical equipment, and a popular new household item call Saran wrap. Nylon, which had been used to make parachutes, flak jackets, and aircraft fuel tanks, returned to store shelves in the form of previously scarce run proof stockings.”

Rob Bilott and Mark Ruffalo

The book first focuses on PFOA (Perfluorooctanoic Acid C8HF15O2) which has a chain of 8 carbon atoms and were the first identified forever chemicals that do not break down. The book gives detailed histories of the long legal battles around the Dupont plant near Parkersburg, West Virginia, and the Dupont plant near Hoosick Falls NY surrounding Dupont’s production of PFOA chemicals. Cincinnati attorney Robert Bilott was involved in both battles. The 2019 Todd Haynes movie Dark Waters dramatizes the Parkersburg legal battle with Mark Ruffalo playing Robert Bilott.

Bilott first filed a Federal case in West Virginia in 1999 on behalf the Tennants, farmers whose cattle were dying as a result of Dupont hazardous substances being dumped into Dry Run near his farm. The case evolved into a class action suit with 3500 plaintiffs. Dupont reneged on their medical agreement forcing Bilott to file cases one by one. When the first few cases awarded millions in damages, Dupont settled with all plaintiffs for $671 million in 2017.

The Hoosick Falls case was settled for $27 million in 2025.

Dupont spun off its forever chemical division to Chemours Company in 2015.

Chemical companies continued development of forever chemicals in a new class of PFOS (Perfluorooctanesulfonic acid C8F17SO3H or C8HF17O3S ). Other new inventions were chemicals with carbon chains from 1 to 7 atoms and are identified as PFAS and include PFOA and PFOS.  They all share the characteristic that they don’t break down so are forever chemicals. It has become next to impossible for governments or the EPA to regulate (like setting parts per billion limits in drinking water).

“It all began in the early 2020s, when a group of European researchers developed a technique to detect an elusive subset of forever chemicals that evaded other methods — specifically, those with three or fewer carbon atoms. After applying this technique for drinking water across Germany, they made a breakthrough discovery: All but 2 percent of PFAS detected were ultashort-chain substances, which up until that point had hardly registered on scientists’ radar.”

“One molecule turned out to be particularly abundant — triflouroacetic acid, or TFA, which is used to make pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and working fluids for heating and cooling systems. It is also a common breakdown product of other PFAS. The researchers found that this chemical alone accounted for 90 percent of forever chemicals detected in German tap water. Since then, TFA has been detected in alarming levels in beer, bottled water, tea, and baby food in a variety of countries. One survey found the TFA made up virtually all PFAS found in rivers and groundwater across Europe.”

“Similarly, when researches from Emory University measured the levels of various PFAS in tap water from homes in Indiana, they found that TFA accounted for 85 percent of the total. And the average concentration was orders of magnitude above the EPA’s safety limits for PFOA. Industry has long insisted that shorter chain chemicals are safer because they don’t build up in people’s bodies. But the Emory team found that the TFA levels in homeowner’s blood were even higher than the national average for PFOA at its peak. This wasn’t because the chemical had built up over time but because people were being exposed to such large qualities.”

“They (TFA) build up faster in crops, leading to enormous concentrations in the few foods that have been tested. And they’re virtually impossible to get out of drinking water. Not only do they pass right through the type of carbon filters used to remove legacy chemicals but they also foil newer treatment technologies that are meant to remove a broad range of PFAS.”

“So far, manufacturers like Dupont, Chemours, and 3M have been hit with roughly fifteen thousand legal claims, the lion’s share from municipalities, water districts, and residents of polluted communities, though more than thirty U.S.states have also brought cases. And the numbers are expected to rise sharply in the coming months and years.”

“While these (EPA) standards are a potentially important step, they do nothing to protect people from the thousands of other forever chemicals that are inundating their bodies. And there’s no telling whether they (EPA standards) will survive Donald Trump’s second presidency.”

“In the end, any federal action may prove less consequential than the aggressive measures cropping up in other places. In 2023, the European Commission introduced a wholesale ban on the production and sale of PFAS and products containing them, the most sweeping chemical regulation in the bloc’s history. Thanks to the tireless efforts of grassroots activists, many U.S. states are embracing similar measures.”

“Rob Bilott, the lawyer who brought these chemicals to the world’s attention, sees these developments as a testament to the power of ordinary citizens. “It shows just how much individual people and communities standing up and speaking out can do and the dramatic change they put in motion” he said. “It took us way too long get here, but its happening.””

 

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The Current American Oligarchic System

The System; Who rigged it, how we fix it; Robert B Reich, 2022

The typical American, as I have shown, has little wealth and has “near-zero, statistically non-significant” political power. Almost all wealth and power now reside in the oligarchy. Yet the oligarchy is not committed to the public good. It does not want to raise the wages of working Americans, reduce inequalities, guarantee all Americans access to good health care and a world class education, or stop climate change. The oligarchy’s allegiance is to corporate shareholders, and its major interest is enlarging their  and its own wealth. The easiest way to lift share values and enlarge the oligarchy’s wealth are to hold down wages, roll back regulations, find ever cheaper places to produce products and services, fight unions, and secure giant tax cuts that result in less money for education, health care, and everything else most Americans need.

In the 1980s and 1990s almost a quarter of all public corporations in the United States were at one time the target of an attempted hostile takeover, opposed by a firm’s management. Another quarter received takeover bids supported by management.

Corporate Raider Carl Icahn and Donald Trump

Few conditions change minds more profoundly than the imminent possibility of being sacked. Hence across America, CEOs who were now threatened by being replaced by CEOs who would maximize shareholder value began to view their responsibilities differently: they would maximize shareholder value even more. The corporate statesmen of previous decades became the corporate butchers of the 1980s and 1990s, whose nearly exclusive focus was — in the meat ax parlance that became fashionable — “to cut the fat,” “cut to the bone,” and make their companies “lean and mean.” By 1997, the Business Roundtable reversed the position it had taken in 1981. Now it declared the “job of business is in fact only to maximize shareholder wealth.”

Between 1981, when Jack Welch took the helm at GE, and 2001 when he retired, GE’s stock catapulted from $13 billion to $500 billion. Welch accomplished this largely by slashing American jobs and abandoning the communities GE had been rooted in. Before he became CEO, most GE employees had spent their entire careers with the company, usually at one of its facilities in upstate New York. But between 1981 and 1985, a quarter of them — 100,000 in all — were laid off, earning Welch the moniker of “neutron Jack,” along with the growing admiration of the business community. Between the mid-1980s and the late 1990s, GE slashed its American workforce by half again (to about 160,000) while nearly doubling its foreign workforce (to 130,000)…As GE opened facilities abroad, staffed by foreign workers costing a small fraction of what GE had paid its American employees, the corporation had all but abandoned upstate New York.

Giant corporations that dominate an industry also gain political power. They provide significant campaign contributions, have platoons of lobbyists and lawyers, and directly employ many voters. As a result, their CEO’s phone calls to members of congress are promptly returned. Items they want included in legislation are dutifully inserted; those they don’t want are scrapped. They get tax loopholes, subsidies, bailouts, regulatory exemptions, and loan guarantees they seek. They can stop laws in their tracks. Never underestimate the monetary value of such largess. The financial returns on political investments are among the highest in the whole system.

The three systemic changes I have outlined — from stakeholder to shareholder capitalism, from unionized workers to corporate monopolies, and from regulation of Wall Street to letting the street run wild — profoundly altered the American system. It created a jaw-dropping wealthy and powerful oligarchy. It shafted just about everyone else.

      

Jamie Dimon and Sandy Weill <> <> <> <> <> Koch Brothers

Dig under the surface of the system and you see individuals making deals that generate billions for themselves — such as Carl Icahn’s corporate raids, Jack Welch’s attacks on GE’s workers and unions, Warren Buffet’s investments in corporations with moats, and Sandy Weill’s and Jamie Dimon’s unfettered financial supermarkets and betting parlors.

Dig deeper and you see how these deals depended on seemingly small changes in laws and regulations, such as preventing companies defending themselves from raiders, neutering antitrust enforcement, imposing small fines for firing union organizers, refusing to regulate derivatives, and dismantling Glass-Steagall.

Bore still deeper and you see a vicious cycle in which, starting around 1980, wealth and power began concentrating around a relative small group at the top, giving them increasingly political clout to get changes in laws and regulations that concentrated their wealth and power even more.

The first three decades after WWII featured a growing middle class. a steadily more inclusive democracy, and a nation beginning to grapple with problems like poverty, inequality of opportunity, and environmental decay. African American and women slowly gained footholds in the system. Mass production begat mass consumption demanded steady jobs with good wages. This balance relied on strong unions, a government willing to regulate corporations, and large corporations rooted in their communities and responsible for the well being of their employees and neighbors as well are shareholders.

The  last forty years, the opposite has occurred. The middle class has shrunk, democracy is too often malfunctioning, and the nation has turned its back on climate change, poverty, widening inequality, and the evils of racism and xenophobia. As I’ve said, the economy doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game in which the winners do better only to the extent losers do worse. But power is necessarily a zero-sum game. Certain people possess it only to the extent other people don’t. Some people gain it only when others lose it. The connection between the economy and power is critical. As power has concentrated  in the hands of a few, those few have grabbed nearly all the economic gains for themselves.