The Perils of Nationalism in Global Finance [feedly]

The Perils of Nationalism in Global Finance
https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/29/05/2018/perils-nationalism-global-finance

_{Chiara Oldani describes the financial risks that could hit the G7 economies in the coming futures; most of them arise from nationalism in global financial regulation.}

 

_{Certain financial risks could hit the G7 economies in the coming futures, and most of them arise from reduced coordination in global regulation (i.e., nationalism).}

 

_{The 2017 G7 Leaders' meeting in Taormina (Italy) represented a turning point in global governance, since Leaders clearly confirmed their shift to nationalism with respect to relevant global issues, in particular climate change and financial regulation and coordination. The U.S. President took off his headphones during the Leaders' meeting, to physically stress his refusal to find an agreement on climate change, where America Comes First.}

 

_{The Finance Ministers meeting that took place in Bari in May 2017, a few days before the Leaders' summit in Taormina, focused on issues mainly in the domain of international economic coordination, in particular how to reduce the evanescence of taxation for IT companies, how to safeguard stability and enhance growth by means of coordinated public and fiscal policies. The necessity to better coordinate in the global financial regulatory system has not been felt by Finance Ministers and the G7 Leaders either, and positions are still way too far. The weakening of financial regulation and coordination in G7 countries, led by the US and the UK, does not facilitate the mission of globalisation. The June 2018 Canadian G7 summit in Charlevoix is very unlikely to reverse the nationalistic path of finance globalisation, since Leaders and their policies have not changed with respect to 2017, except (maybe) Italy.}

 

_{The evolution of financial technologies (FinTech) and the growth of cryptocurrencies (that are not money nor means of payments) attract increasing quantities of capital, because of the need to get rid of the banking system and its stringent rules that aim at safeguarding stability but inevitably reduce freedom and anonymity. Cash and deposits are rapidly moving out of the regulated banking system, going to wallets filled of Bitcoin (Fig.1) and Ethereum, increasing the need of capital for banks and then further diminishing their structural stability. Nationalism cannot win in a playing field dominated by the technological innovation that is changing deeply the inner structure of the economy, and in particular of the banking systems in the G7. The Chinese government, worried by frauds and capital flights, intervened in February 2018 to block any trading of cryptocurrencies by its inhabitants. However, in the absence of any coordinate intervention on innovative financial infrastructures, the Chinese decision will probably be ineffective.}

 

Fig.1 BITCOIN PRICE USD (2010-2018)

 

 

_{History repeats itself. In the very recent past deregulated financial phenomenon, like Over The Counter (OTC) derivatives, have been considered to be at the root of the financial meltdown, and a few markets' players have been found guilty and paid for their errors (e.g. Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Northern Rock, and Greece). The notional value of global OTC contracts reached its peak in 2013 with $710 trillion, and decreased to $532 trillion in 2017, according to the BIS; 80% of OTC contracts are on interest rates. The introduction of a centralized counterparty system in the OTC derivative markets after 2010 reduced the counterparty risk, but increased the market's concentration since 90% of contracts are cleared in one clearing house in the United States.}

 

_{The goal of stability collides with the America First policies implemented in the US, and in the UK (i.e., hard Brexit). American and the British Leaders push forward financial deregulation of the financial system for different reasons; the decisions to substantially reduce the size of the reforms undertaken with the Dodd Frank Wall Street Consumer Protection Act in the US, and to leave the European Union and get rid of the European financial pass-porting allow for regulatory arbitrage that does not enhance financial stability.}

 

_{The easing monetary policies implemented in most G7 economies (i.e. quantitative easing) will further sustain inflated assets' prices in G7 in 2018. The Chairman of the Board of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, in 1996 referred to irrational exuberance when describing the behaviour of investors in the US stock market; similarly, after many years of cheap money, present markets' expectations are still very high.}

_{The reduced regulatory coordination can increase the volatility of sovereign bonds yields, especially for heavily indebted countries, like Italy, France, the US and Japan with detrimental effects on public spending and the welfare state. Inflated assets' price and bonds' volatility are main ingredients of financial bubbles.}

 

_{In this complex institutional framework G7/G20 central banks and the Financial Stability Board (FSB) can act to smooth these explosive nationalistic forces, by persuading policy makers that financial regulation should coordinate, and by finding a reasonable framework for debt and wealth to stabilize; they can achieve their duty also by persuading the markets that inflation can rise, interest rates should normalize to positive values, and asset prices should reverse to more sustainable levels.}

 

 

 

 

Chiara Oldani (Lecturer of Economics, University of Viterbo "La Tuscia", Research Associate CAMA, Director of the G7 Research Group in Italy) coldani@unitus.it

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Italian President’s Loyalty to the Euro Creates Chaos

Italian President's Loyalty to the Euro Creates Chaos
President Sergio Mattarella of Italy enraged populists by rejecting a cabinet minister he feared would lead Italy out of the eurozone.CreditVincenzo Pinto/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Jason Horowitz

May 28, 2018

ROME — He's been called "gray," "invisible" and "gentle to the point of seeming fragile." Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister, once compared him to "a monk."

But on Monday, Italy's quiet, white-haired president, Sergio Mattarella, emerged as the most contentious figure in Italian and European politics. His refusal to confirm a euroskeptic economistas a government minister set off the collapse of a populist coalition hours before it was expected to take control of the European Union's fourth largest economy.

Mr. Mattarella's defenders hailed him as the courageous protector of Italy's democracy, institutions and financial health, while fuming populists sought to make the usually revered figure of the Italian head of state the country's public enemy No. 1. They called for his impeachment, saying he had overstepped his constitutional bounds with delusions of grandeur, blocked the will of the people and destroyed Italian democracy.

In response, Mr. Mattarella privately plugged along.

On Monday morning, as markets rose and fell with the whiplashing events in Italy, Mr. Mattarella gave a new mandate to form a government to Carlo Cottarelli, a respected economist, former International Monetary Fund official and Italian government appointee, who told reporters that he would form a caretaker government only with the goal of passing a budget and guiding Italy to new elections.



If Parliament votes in support of his caretaker government, elections would take place in early 2019. If it does not, which seems much more likely, he would quit "immediately" and elections would take place sometime after August.

Mr. Cottarelli's main goal in speaking on Monday seemed to be to assure nervous investors in Italy and abroad that the country was in good hands. He guaranteed, "in the most absolute way, that a government led by me would assure a cautious management of our national accounts," and that Italy's "continuous participation in the eurozone" was essential.

It was Mr. Mattarella's loyalty to the euro that prompted the 11th-hour collapse of the nascent government of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the anti-immigrant League.

He determined that the alliance's proposed economy minister, Paolo Savona, the co-author of a guide to leaving the eurozone, could lead Italy to abandon the euro without sufficient public debate, being that the parties maintained vague and shifting positions on the issue during the campaign leading up to the March 4 elections.

But in deliberately forcing a new election over the euro, which a majority of Italians say they support, the usually careful and measured Mr. Mattarella expressly put an explosive issue with the potential of transforming Europe front and center. And by using his constitutional powers to block the new government in order to protect Italian savings accounts from increasingly wary markets, he also handed the gifted and gleefully hostile populist parties the talking point of a lifetime before the elections.



The coming vote "will be a referendum on Europe, on the euro and on the Italian constitutional model," Francesco Verderami, a political analyst, wrote in Corriere della Sera on Monday. "Because it is equally clear that the presidency of the republic — which has been threatened with impeachment — during the electoral campaign is sure to be one of the targets of the populist and nationalist forces."


Carlo Cottarelli, a former International Monetary Fund official, said in Rome on Monday that he would form a caretaker government to pass a budget and guide Italy to new elections.CreditAlessandro Di Meo/ANSA, via Associated Press

It did not take long for that to come to pass.

Luigi Di Maio, Five Star's political leader, called on party members to demonstrate their opposition to Mr. Mattarella and "the darkest night of Italian democracy" by hanging Italian flags out their windows, marching in the streets and flooding the social networks where the party developed its support.

In a Facebook post, Mr. Di Maio said that Mr. Mattarella had prompted problems in the markets by creating uncertainty. "We don't want to leave the euro," he insisted, calling the party's well-documented ambivalence to the common currency "a lie created by the counselors of Mattarella."

He also said he would work to impeach Mr. Mattarella, and to ensure that "after the election there will not be the same president." His partner in the populist alliance, Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League, added that "The gravest fact is that the president of the republic chose the European markets ahead of the Italian people."

On Monday, several analysts and politicians accused Mr. Salvini, who rebuffed Mr. Mattarella's appeal to substitute the proposed economy minister with a top League official, of purposely blowing up the government in order to bank increased electoral support in new elections. He wants to be prime minister.

Leading members of the Five Star Movement proclaimed the new technical government dead on arrival and said they would introduce impeachment proceedings against Mr. Mattarella in Parliament.


But their efforts to intimidate Mr. Mattarella last week, saying he should not get in the way of Italian voters, failed. Some supporters argued that the potential blowback and risk in coming elections was worth keeping the populists, who have shown disregard for Italian institutions, away from power.

Mario Calabrese, the editor of the left-leaning daily La Repubblica, wrote in a front-page editorial, "If the president had given in, folding before the ultimatums and threats, and if he went back on his only objection, the state's checks and balances would have broken into pieces."

Mr. Berlusconi, the former prime minister and coalition partner of Mr. Salvini, also gave his support to Mr. Mattarella, saying the Five Star Movement was "irresponsible as always, talking about impeachment."

"Forza Italia waits for the determination of the head of state, but when necessary will be ready for the vote," he added, referring to his party.

That supportive language caused signs of a fracture with Mr. Salvini, who said Mr. Berlusconi's defense of Mr. Mattarella made him sound like Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. Mr. Salvini hinted that he was also open to running with the Five Star Movement in the coming election, saying that the policy agenda the two parties had hammered out was not "scrap paper," and that there was "a good base for working together."

Both he and the Five Star Movement unveiled campaign language in which they accused Italy of being held hostage by Germany, international markets, bankers and the overreaching president who did their bidding.


Matteo Salvini, center, the leader of the far-right League party, has been accused of purposefully blowing up the government in order to draw support in new elections.CreditLuca Bruno/Associated Press

Constitutional scholars debated on Monday whether Mr. Mattarella was within his rights. In Corriere della Sera, Italy's leading paper, Massimo Luciani, a professor of constitutional law at La Sapienza University in Rome, said Mr. Mattarella "exercised his constitutional rights" because he "believed that the choice of a certain minister for a key government position put the interests of our country at risk."



He added, "This is an institutional evaluation."

But Paolo Flores D'Arcais wrote in the political magazine MicroMega that while the president can object to the appointment of a minister if "he finds in the candidate's past behavior something that conflicts with honorability," Mr. Mattarella's problem with the economy minister was his position on the euro.

"It falls beyond the powers of the president of the republic to judge the candidates' political opinions in the single ministries," he wrote.

At first, markets seemed more appreciative of Mr. Mattarella's rejection of the populist government, but they then fell sharply, with stocks and bonds falling as investors digested the increased uncertainty.

"Developments in Italy are likely to keep the financial markets on tenterhooks," analysts at the German lender Commerzbank said in a note to clients Monday morning. Referring to polls that indicate that Italy's populist parties are likely to win any snap election called this year, they continued, "The entry into office of an Italian government that is on a confrontational course with the E.U. and disregards its rules is only postponed."

Italy's benchmark stock index, the FTSE MIB, was down more than 2 percent in afternoon trading in Europe, and the country's bonds took a beating. The yield on the main 10-year Italian government bond, which moves inversely to its price, rose to as much as 2.69 percent, its highest level since August 2014.

The "spread" between Italian government bonds and their German counterparts, in particular, has widened considerably since the start of the year, indicating investors see Italian debt as a riskier investment.



That "spread," a word often uttered with venom by Italian populists, was also the focus of Mr. Mattarella's remarks Sunday night, and Mr. Cottarelli's on Monday morning.

But it is the coming election, and the promised centrality of the euro in it, that makes many in Europe nervous. Mr. Mattarella, a 76-year-old Sicilian, has shown he is not easily shaken.

The son of a government minister, he decided to go into politics after his older brother, Piersanti, then the governor of Sicily, was shot and killed by the Mafia. Mr. Mattarella pulled his bloodied brother out of the car.

The first time he ran for office was in the 1970s, when he ran for a position in his university. He regretted it right away, his friend Vito Riggio once told La Repubblica, recalling that the quiet Sicilian had found himself surrounded by screaming, rabid student protesters.

"The more they screamed, the more he lowered his voice," Mr. Riggio was quoted as saying. "At a certain point, he said to the most enraged one, 'Excuse me, but why are you screaming? We are here to discuss. No?' "

--

John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV

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Neo-Marxism [feedly]

Is there a trend toward 'identity'  as opposed to 'class' politics? is it a step towards a broader coalition, or a more divided one?

Neo-Marxism
http://crookedtimber.org/2018/05/23/neo-marxism/

A couple of days ago, Andrew Sullivan delivered a blast against "neo-Marxism":

The idea that African-Americans have some responsibility for their own advancement, that absent fatherhood and a cultural association of studying with "acting white" are part of the problem — themes Obama touched upon throughout his presidency — is now almost a definition of racism itself. And the animating goal of progressive politics is unvarnished race and gender warfare. What matters before anything else is what race and gender you are, and therefore what side you are on. And in this neo-Marxist worldview, fully embraced by a hefty majority of the next generation, the very idea of America as a liberating experiment, dissolving tribal loyalties in a common journey toward individual opportunity, is anathema.

There is no arc of history here, just an eternal grinding of the racist and sexist wheel. What matters is that nonwhites fight and defeat white supremacy, that women unite and defeat oppressive masculinity, and that the trans supplant and redefine the cis. What matters is equality of outcome, and it cannot be delayed. All the ideas that might complicate this — meritocracy, for example, or a color-blind vision of justice, or equality of opportunity rather than outcome — are to be mocked until they are dismantled. And the political goal is not a post-racial fusion, a unity of the red and the blue, but the rallying of the victims against the victimizers, animated by the core belief that a non-"white" and non-male majority will at some point come, after which the new hierarchies can be imposed by fiat.

Matthew Yglesias rightly complains about Sullivan's suggestion that Marxism lurks behind the movements for gender and race recognition. Jonathan Chait has been making an even cruder version of this argument for a while, telling us that the "campus left" has borrowed its extremism from Marxism, and would likely drag us all off to the gulags if we ever got a chance. This theory marks a weird and unfortunate alignment that is taking place between a particular strain of center-to-center right opinionating and the "Intellectual Dark Web" crowd. Zack Beauchamp's description of how Jordan Peterson

elevates battles over political correctness and free speech into existential struggles over Western society. He is very literally arguing that if the "postmodernists" win, if people start using others' chosen pronouns, we're one step closer to modern gulags.

could be applied just as aptly to Chait, and likely, with modification, to Sullivan too, (the "hierarchies … imposed by fiat" bit sounds sinister but is notably weaker than gulag rhetoric; Sullivan is clearly angrier about race than he is about gender).

You could, I suppose, treat Sullivan's, Chait's and Peterson's arguments as serious claims to be taken seriously, pointing to the specific situations where campus leftists have indeed behaved like arseholes, and extrapolating this into a general trend of angry, intolerant and indeed totalitarian illiberalism on the march towards possible victory. Frankly, I think that that would be granting unwarranted respect to nonsense. These claims seem to me to instead be rhetorical attacks which illegitimately treat reasonable claims for recognition as if they were steps on a journey towards dictatorship. Contrary to their framing, they are fundamentally illiberal, in the small 'l' sense of liberalism, intended to justify existing power relations against people who would reasonably challenge them.

Where this becomes most clear is in Sullivan's previous post, which is particularly aimed at Ta-Nehisi Coates. Sullivan begins by praising Coates, sort of, before describing him as the exemplar of a "tribal" dynamic, where the "individual is always subordinate to the group," leading to the social exclusion of Bari Weiss's "Intellectual Dark Web," a group of "non-tribal thinkers who have certainly not been silenced, but have definitely been morally anathematized, in the precincts of elite opinion." Sullivan laments that something important has been lost:

But then I remember a different time — and it wasn't so long ago. A friend reminded me of this bloggy exchange Ta-Nehisi and I had in 2009, on the very subject of identity politics and its claims. We clearly disagreed, deeply. But there was a civility about it, an actual generosity of spirit, that transcended the boundaries of race and background. We both come from extremely different places, countries, life experiences, loyalties. But a conversation in the same pages was still possible, writer to writer, human to human, as part of the same American idea. It was a debate in which I think we both listened to each other, in which I changed my mind a bit, and where neither of us denied each other's good faith or human worth.

It's only a decade ago, but it feels like aeons now. The Atlantic was crammed with ideological opposites then, jostling together in the same office, and our engagement with each other and our readerships was a crackling and productive one. There was much more of that back then, before Twitter swallowed blogging, before identity politics became completely nonnegotiable, before we degenerated into these tribal swarms of snark and loathing. I think of it now as a distant island, appearing now and then, as the waves go up and down. The riptide of tribalism can capture us all in the end, until we drown in it.

I grew up outside America – which means that many aspects of the American argument about race don't come easily to me. I also don't know anything first hand, obviously, about the personal relationship between Coates and Sullivan, which I suspect colors their interactions too. So take these caveats as a health warning regarding what follows. Still, I think it's quite plain that Coates has a very different memory of his interactions with Sullivan than Sullivan's depiction. A week before Sullivan's piece, Huffington Post published a transcript of a conversation at the Atlantic about the hiring and rapid firing of Kevin Williamson. Coates says:

I got incredibly used to learning from people. And studying people. And feeling like certain people were even actually quite good at their craft, who I felt, and pardon my language, were fucking racist. And that was just the way the world was. I didn't really have the luxury of having teachers who I necessarily felt, you know, saw me completely as a human being.

This extends not just from my early days as a journalist, but if I'm being honest here, from my early days at The Atlantic. You can go into The Atlantic archives right now, and you can see me arguing with Andrew Sullivan about whether black people are genetically disposed to be dumber than white people. I actually had to take this seriously, you understand? I couldn't speak in a certain way to Andrew. I couldn't speak to Andrew on the blog the way I would speak to my wife about what Andrew said on the blog in the morning when it was just us…. I learned how to blog from Andrew. That was who I actually learned from. That was who actually helped me craft my voice. Even recognizing who he was and what he was, you know, I learned from him.

I don't have the privilege of being able to look into Sullivan's head, but it is hard to imagine that his piece about Coates and tribalism was not an angry and hurt response to Coates' claim that he, Sullivan, was a "fucking racist."

In juxtaposition, Sullivan's and Coates' pieces provide a miniature history of how a certain variety of self-congratulatory openness to inquiry is in actual fact a barbed thicket of power relations. What Sullivan depicts as a "different time" when "neither of us denied each other's good faith or human worth," is, in Coates' understanding, a time where he was required to "take seriously" the argument that "black people are genetically disposed to be dumber than white people" as a price of entry into the rarified heights of conversation at the Atlantic. The "civility" and "generosity of spirit" that supported "human to human" conversation is juxtaposed to Coates' "teachers" who didn't see him "completely as a human being." What was open and free spirited debate in Sullivan's depiction, was to Coates a loaded and poisonous dialogue where he could only participate if he shut up about what he actually believed.

Juxtaposing these two gives us a very different understanding of Sullivan's claim that "identity politics [have become] completely nonnegotiable," and we are all being pulled down by the "riptide of tribalism." The imagined paradise of liberal discussion from which we are being torn was only a paradise for some; others were there on sufferance, or not allowed in at all. Sullivan's hostility to "tribalism" reflects his unwillingness to confront the rather sordid politics of his own position, and his past and continuing history on race and intelligence.

Sullivan, Chait, and, I suspect many other soi-disant centrists and centrist liberals are now converging with Peterson and the whole sorry crew of white men on the Internet shouting out against the oppression of Social Justice Warriors. This allows them to delegitimize – and hence avoid having to seriously confront – hard criticisms of their own positions. If they want, it's perfectly reasonable for them to push back against what they believe to be excesses. Gender activists and race activists are human too, which means that they surely may be wrong, and may certainly behave stupidly, or badly. But claims that "neo-Marxists" and "campus leftists" are looking in general to build gulags, impose hierarchies by fiat and the like are themselves both bad and stupid rhetoric, which undermine rather than reinforce the commitment to open debate that they claim to hold so deeply.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Trump’s Corruption: Thanks to Koch Brothers, GOP Congress Is in on the Take [feedly]

Trump's Corruption: Thanks to Koch Brothers, GOP Congress Is in on the Take
http://prospect.org/article/trumps-corruption-thanks-koch-brothers-gop-congress-on-take

Poor Paul Ryan, caught between a rock and a hard place. His caucus divided between the belligerent and the merely unreasonable, Ryan's very tenure as speaker of the House is threatened. Even though he promised to step down in January, there are maneuverings among his colleagues to oust him before then.

Ryan's political career is largely the creation of Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers who have built the political infrastructure on which most Republicans in Congress now depend when seeking election. However, with the tax bill now passed and the deregulatory regime well under way in the executive branch, Ryan may have served out his usefulness to the Kochs.

Ever concerned about his reputation, Ryan—unlike Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—likes to occasionally serve up the pretense of judging a cause on its merits. So when the far-right Republican Freedom Caucus tanked a vote on the Farm Bill over the demand for a more draconian immigration policy, Ryan found that despite all the things he's done to please President Donald J. Trump, it wasn't enough for those far-right guardians of the patriarchy.

There's just so little appreciation for Ryan's unfailing support of Representative Devin Nunes's attempts to undermine the special counsel investigation of Russia's intervention in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and any contact the Trump campaign may have had with figures connected to Russia's meddling. Ryan even backed up Nunes, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, in Nunes's recent demand to know more about an FBI informant who was dispatched to talk with several campaign members in the bureau's attempt to understand possible contacts between campaign figures and Russian agents. Yesterday, this demand led Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to agree to disclosesuch information to Nunes and other House Republicans, despite Nunes's proven biasagainst the investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The kind of information demanded by Nunes is customarily withheld from members of Congress outside of a specially appointed body known as the "gang of eight," according to Adam Schiff the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee. But Nunes has threatened to impeach Rosenstein if he didn't get what he wanted.

Not to be outdone, the Freedom Caucus drew up a draft of articles of impeachment against Rosenstein. However far Ryan goes down Trump's authoritarian road, it's never quite enough for that crowd. And so, Ryan may be dumped in favor of Trump pal Kevin McCarthy, the House majority leader from California.

For Trump, the presidency is not only about power and "toughness" and respect (for him, of course). It's also part of his brand, sold to foreign diplomats and domestic suck-ups alike at the Trump International Hotel, to would-be investors in properties belonging to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to Chinese consumers of his daughter's fashion brands, the eponymous Ivanka Trump lines. And don't forget members of and visitors to his golf clubs. There's hush money and hacked emails and oligarch pals and all manner of stuff emitting noxious odors. The preceding list likely barely scratches the surface. But without the Koch brothers, who virtually own the majority in the House, Trump could not remain in power. Despite their confession of the libertarian faith, the Kochs have thrown in with a tainted authoritarian because it's working for them.

It's won them a tax bill that starves government and issues a windfall to the wealthy. It's won them the administration's policy of removing two regulations for every new one that's implemented. (The brothers' conglomerate, Koch Industries, is a famous polluter.) It's won them a promise to open up more, even sacred, public lands for mineral and fossil fuel extraction.

We'll probably never know the scope of the sprawl of the Koch network of interlocking nonprofit organizations, thanks to the unleashing of dark money in the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision—you know, the "money is speech" case that allows nonprofit groups to conceal the names of their donors. That dark money is pretty much paying for the perpetuation of Donald Trump's corruption of the presidency and the U.S. Constitution. Because if the Kochs wanted Trump gone, they could put a bug in a few congressional ears about articles of impeachment. Yet they don't. They may even feed their youthful ward, Paul Ryan, to the Trumpian beast that Congress has become.

During the presidential campaign, the Koch brothers made a big show of turning up their noses at the coarse, pussy-grabbing quisling from Queens, with David Koch even sitting out the 2016 Republican National Convention. (In 2012, he served as a Romney delegate.) But on election night 2016, Koch turned up at the victory party in Trump Tower.

In the end, it seems, there is no real division between the authoritarian and the neo-libertarians. Stronger than those differences is their mutual commitment to one unifying principle: greed.

It is unlikely that the United States can find its way back from the corruption epitomized by the Trump administration without addressing the corrosive effect of the dark money unleashed by the Supreme Court.

In the midterm congressional elections, Democrats would be wise to shine a light on the corruption represented by Trump and his congressional supporters. Should they win, it's time to revive legislation that would turn off the dark-money spigot.

The very life of the Constitution may depend on it.

VISIT

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Class at the Forefront: 2018 Working-Class Studies Association Awards [feedly]

Class at the Forefront: 2018 Working-Class Studies Association Awards
https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2018/05/28/class-at-the-forefront-2018-working-class-studies-association-awards/

Since the 2016 election, the working class has been repeatedly blamed in the news for electing Trump, though as many have argued, the issue of class is a far more complicated and often misunderstood category that defies such summary scapegoating.  But instead of ignoring the nuances that inherently define working-class experiences, scholars, journalists, activists, creative writers, and artists in the field of working-class studies have critically examined the subject of class and working-class life, placing it at the forefront of their work.  As past-president and this year's chair of the Working-Class Studies Association's Awards Committee, I had the pleasure of assembling works published in 2017 for our five awards.  More than a dozen scholars from nine disciplines reviewed the nearly 70 nominations. On behalf of the WCSA, I wish to extend our deep appreciation to these judges for their time and especially for their thoughtful responses.

The nominees for the Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism brought to light many issues that remain obscured from mainstream news: how contract-for-deed sales impact Chicago's communities of color, the activism of Oakland longshore workers to combat Trump's anti-labor agenda, the deceptive practices of guest-worker programs in recruiting foreign students majoring in STEM-master degree programs in the U.S., as well as  personal narratives detailing the demands placed on drivers in a rapidly-changing trucking industry and what it is like growing up as an Arab-American woman in the Rust Belt. In reports on a wide range of workers, from the Carrier furnace plant workers in Indianapolis to the housekeepers working at Harvard University, journalists have documented the ways in which working-class people remain exploited by exploring the intersections among race, gender, region, and class.  Judges agreed that Lizzie Presser's "Below Deck," published in The California Sunday Magazine, is a powerful example of investigative journalism detailing the exploitation of Filipino laborers on U.S.-based cruise lines like Carnival, exposing how "labor has been reconfigured and re-racialized in our contemporary global economy."  One judge wrote, "Presser's piece is a real feat of gorgeous writing combined with painstaking research, and sheds light on the dark side of an entire industry. I was especially impressed by the thoroughness of the reporting, as it was clear that she put in significant time in the Philippines searching out current and former workers, and her ability to sift through what must have been mountains of legal documents, complaints, etc., to emerge with an engaging narrative about a single man that includes so much more."

This year's nominations for the C.L.R. James Award for Published Book for Academic or General Audiences reveal the breadth of our interdisciplinary field with books exploring oral health and social mobility, the resurgence of craft and trade work in today's post-industrial labor market, the privatization of retirement pensions, U.S. working-class women's writing in the antebellum period, migrant farmworkers' work conditions, and how  race and masculinity shaped the early labor history of Cubans in New York. From trade unions and working-class inequality in Palestine during the 1920s and the evolving cultural history of coal mining in Yorkshire to chicken processing plants in North Carolina and the ongoing working-class movement in Turkey, these studies span the globe, bringing the fight for worker justice and equality sharply into focus. Scott Henkel won for his book, Direct Democracy: Collective Power, the Swarm, and the Literatures of the Americas, an examination of labor and racial resistance emerging out of the Haitian Revolution through the long nineteenth century. In their comments, judges praised Henkel for "outlining a new approach to the role and potential of collective action and the concept of power to analyze a variety of intersecting class struggles that have traditionally been viewed within distinct racial and gender boundaries," adding "his interdisciplinary approach combines literary and historical analysis in a way that brings alive the complexity and interconnectedness of a variety of struggles for basic human rights."  David Roediger's Class, Race, and Marxism, a collection of recent and new essays, also won in this category.  One judge wrote, "Roediger has spent a lifetime addressing the complexities between the constructs of class and race, and this book is a culmination of what he has discovered over those many years. The introductory essay, 'Thinking Through Race and Class in Hard Times,' should be required reading for anyone trying to understand the era of Trumpian politics. Roediger has a writing style that draws one in, even when talking about difficult subjects. This is an important book, with lessons that some may wish to ignore, but at their peril."

 

The John Russo & Sherry Linkon Award for Published Article or Essay for Academic or General Audiences also covered a wide range of material, including the lives of working-class academics, Puerto Rican farm labor migration, the role of Italian radicals in the Mexican Revolution of 1911, and gentrification to name a few. This year's award goes to Liza Sapir Flood for her essay, "Instrument in Tow: Bringing Musical Skills to the Field" published in Ethnomusicology.  Flood explores "ethnographic methodology in the context of a working-class amateur country music scene in eastern Tennessee."  As one judge noted, "she fruitfully explores the intersections of class and gender and brings them together in the theoretical framework she uses to analyze her experiences in the field."  Another offered this praise: "Flood's essay is an elegant and surprising analysis of a specific ethnographic situation, the nature of ethnography, and the assumptions researchers bring with them to the field. At the essay's start, a reader is led to expect a study that is relatively traditional in its methodology, but by the essay's end, Flood has delivered insights about the project's case study, about the role of a scholar, and about the ends of scholarship itself."

The winner of this year's Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing is David Joy, for his novel, The Weight of This World.  Set in rural Appalachia, the book, as one judge describes it, takes "a raw look at the lives people live when left with very little kindness or opportunity, and few options. It's a powerful, pointed narrative that's hard to read, but harder to turn away from."  Another commented, "The Weight of This World is a testimony to the power of love, friendship, and many hungers leftover from childhood.  Pain bubbles up and spills, entering our senses, not like ash, but like a terrible ache in the jaw-dropping world of these troubled characters.  A master storyteller, David Joy's on-the-fringe people become visible, so alive their deeds impale themselves into our hearts long after the final page.  It's a world we'd rather not see, ledgers about settling scores and carrying secrets. It's a compelling narrative driven by whispers and screams that show our deepest wounds in a night where no mother comes."

Two awards were given for this year's Constance Coiner Award for Best Dissertation for their significant contribution in advancing future directions in working-class studies.  The first goes to Steffan Blayney for "Health & Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work and the Working Body in Britain, c. 1870-1939."  One judge concluded, "Blayney has written a history of a commercial science and professionals' contribution to managing the worker as a body to be fragmented, controlled, and so optimized for the extraction of surplus value. . . .  this dissertation topic, in its capable, de rigeur execution, suggested exciting paths forward for scholarship." Simon Lee's "Working-Class Heroics: The Intersection of Class and Space in British Post-War Writing," the second winner in this category,  elicited the following praise: "In surveying British working-class 'Kitchen sink' literature, Lee finds that post-war British writing expresses a contingency of being in opposition to pre-war working-class solidarity. Paying contemporary theoretical respects to the structuring agency of the manufactured and owned material world, Lee submits a classic contribution to the great Atlantic tradition celebrating the restoration of a universalist cosmopolitan cultural viewpoint, highlighting the freedom and humanity in cultural distinctions."  

Congratulations to all the awardees and also to those whose work was nominated.  Together, they show how the multi-dimensional and complex field of working-class studies is not simply about the white working class in the U.S., but inclusive of the varied experiences of working-class life and culture both past and present.  Working-class studies draws strength from its intersectional, interdisciplinary, and international focus, and these works explicitly give voice to the working class in ways that are difficult to ignore. As the WCSA prepares to honor these awardees at its annual conference in June, I encourage you to consider adding these titles to your summer reading list.  

Michele Fazio

Michele Fazio is an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and is currently co-editing, with Christie Launius and Tim Strangleman, the Routledge International Handbook of Working-Class Studies.  Her research centers on the intersections among ethnicity, gender, and class with a particular focus on Italian American labor radicalism.

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Single-Payer Health Care in California: Here’s What It Would Take [feedly]

Single-Payer Health Care in California: Here's What It Would Take
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/25/business/economy/california-single-payer.html

Universal state health coverage has rallied Democrats in the governor's race. But even with the state's size and wealth, it would be hard to achieve.

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How Is a Functioning Republic Possible?: What James Madison Had to Say... [feedly]

How Is a Functioning Republic Possible?: What James Madison Had to Say...
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/05/james-madison-the-federalist-papers-no-9httpavalonlawyaleedu18th_centuryfed09asp-it-is-impossible-to-re.html

James Madison: The Federalist Papers No. 9: "It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the... state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy...

...From the disorders that disfigure the annals of those republics the advocates of despotism have drawn arguments, not only against the forms of republican government, but against the very principles of civil liberty.... It is not to be denied that the portraits they have sketched of republican government were too just copies of the originals.... If it had been found impracticable to have devised models of a more perfect structure, the enlightened friends to liberty would have been obliged to abandon the cause of that species of government as indefensible.

The science of politics, however, like most other sciences, has received great improvement. The efficacy of various principles is now well understood, which were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients. The regular distribution of power into distinct departments; the introduction of legislative balances and checks; the institution of courts composed of judges holding their offices during good behavior; the representation of the people in the legislature by deputies of their own election: these are wholly new discoveries, or have made their principal progress towards perfection in modern times. They are means, and powerful means, by which the excellences of republican government may be retained and its imperfections lessened or avoided. To this catalogue of circumstances that tend to the amelioration of popular systems of civil government, I shall venture, however novel it may appear to some, to add one more, on a principle which has been made the foundation of an objection to the new Constitution; I mean the ENLARGEMENT of the ORBIT within which such systems are to revolve....

Montesquieu... explicitly treats of a CONFEDERATE REPUBLIC as the expedient for extending the sphere of popular government, and reconciling the advantages of monarchy with those of republicanism.... "A CONFEDERATE REPUBLIC... by which several smaller STATES agree to become members of a larger ONE.... If a single member should attempt to usurp the supreme authority, he could not be supposed to have an equal authority and credit in all the confederate states. Were he to have too great influence over one, this would alarm the rest. Were he to subdue a part, that which would still remain free might oppose him with forces independent of those which he had usurped.... Should a popular insurrection happen in one of the confederate states the others are able to quell it.... As this government is composed of small republics, it enjoys the internal happiness of each; and with respect to its external situation, it is possessed, by means of the association, of all the advantages of large monarchies...

 

James Madision: The Federalist Papers No. 10: "A faction... citizens... united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community...

...As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves.... The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man.... So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property....

No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time; yet what are many of the most important acts of legislation, but so many judicial determinations, not indeed concerning the rights of single persons, but concerning the rights of large bodies of citizens? And what are the different classes of legislators but advocates and parties to the causes which they determine? Is a law proposed concerning private debts? It is a question to which the creditors are parties on one side and the debtors on the other. Justice ought to hold the balance between them. Yet the parties are, and must be, themselves the judges; and the most numerous party, or, in other words, the most powerful faction must be expected to prevail....

It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. Nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the rights of another or the good of the whole. The inference to which we are brought is, that the CAUSES of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its EFFECTS.

If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote.... [But] either the existence of the same passion or interest in a majority at the same time must be prevented, or the majority, having such coexistent passion or interest, must be rendered, by their number and local situation, unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of oppression.... A pure democracy... can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction.... Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

A republic... promises the cure for which we are seeking.... The delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country.... The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand, to refine and enlarge the public views.... The public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves.... As each representative will be chosen by a greater number of citizens in the large than in the small republic, it will be more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice with success the vicious arts.... The greater number of citizens and extent of territory which may be brought within the compass of republican than of democratic government.... Take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.... The same advantage which a republic has over a democracy, in controlling the effects of faction, is enjoyed by a large over a small republic....

In the extent and proper structure of the Union, therefore, we behold a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government. And according to the degree of pleasure and pride we feel in being republicans, ought to be our zeal in cherishing the spirit and supporting the character of Federalists...

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