Doug Henwood's Blog, page 40

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April 4, 2019 Jason Wilson on how cops are more interested in surveilling the left than the right (article here; Will Parrish article here) • Todd Chretien reflects on the 42-year history of the International Socialist Organization, which dissolved itself at the end of March

Hillary against incrementalism

With incrementalism all the rage among non-Bernie Dems—like Sorta Medicare for Some—it’s worth recalling this passage, about the only honest and interesting one amidst endless tedious self-exculpations, from Hillary Clinton’s What Happened, her story of her shameful loss to Trump:

Democrats should reevaluate a lot of our assumptions about which policies are politically viable. These trends make universal programs even more appealing than we previously thought. I mean programs like Social Security and Medicare, which benefit every American, as opposed to Medicaid, food stamps, and other initiatives targeted to the poor. Targeted programs may be more efficient and progressive, and that’s why during the primaries I criticized Bernie’s “ free college for all ” plan as providing wasteful taxpayer-funded giveaways to rich kids. But it’s precisely because they don’t benefit everyone that targeted programs are so easily stigmatized and demagogued…. Democrats should redouble our efforts to develop bold, creative ideas that offer broad-based benefits for the whole country.

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March 28, 2019 Jessie Sage, writer, podcaster, and sex worker, on sex work and myths around “trafficking” • Jenny Brown, author of Birth Strike, on efforts to control women’s reproductive powers

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March 21, 2019 Tony Smith, author of Russia Without Putin, on those topics

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March 14, 2019 Cinzia Arruzza and Tithi Bhattacharya, authors (along with Nancy Fraser) of Feminism for the 99%, on a truly transformative feminism • Sam Stein, author of Capital City, on bourgeois urban planning, with an emphasis on NYC

Making capital pay for the GND

Christian Parenti has an excellent piece up at Jacobin arguing that Corporate America could pay for a lot of the Green New Deal. They’re rolling in cash, and through a combination of regulation, taxation, coercion, and incentives, all that surplus capital could be steered into environmentally beneficial investment. I endorse this completely. I’m just here to underscore how much cash they have and show what they’re now doing with it.

According to the latest edition of the Federal Reserve’s financial accounts*, as of the end of 2018, nonfinancial corporations had $4.4 trillion in cash and other liquid assets (meaning they could quickly be turned into cash). And that doesn’t include unincorporated businesses, which have another $1.6 trillion on hand. (I’m leaving out financial firms, since a lot of what they hold is other people’s money.)

But that’s not all. Businesses are making far more in profits than they know what to do with. They do invest and hire, but they’ve also been shoveling vast pots of cash into the pockets of shareholders. They do this through several routes—traditional dividends, buying back their own stock to boost its price (which not only makes shareholders happy, it also makes top executives smile, since they typically own lots of stock in their employer), and taking each other over. (Stock buybacks were essentially illegal before 1982; they could be made illegal again.) Put all those together into something you could call transfers to shareholders, and you get some really staggering numbers. Between 2012 and 2018, firms paid their shareholders a total of almost $6 trillion dollars. Since 2000, the total is $14 trillion. Both totals are equal to about half what they spent on investment in real things like plant and equipment over those periods.

In other words, they’ve got plenty of money to spend on building a green infrastructure. Of course, they don’t want to, and even if forced, they’d do everything they could to avoid complying. But one thing they can’t do is plead poverty.

* The more familiar national income and product accounts (NIPAs), the source of GDP and related data, cover production of goods and services and incomes earned in production (like wages and profits). You might think of them as an accounting of the “real” economy, though there’s no shortage of unreality under the regime of capitalist production. The NIPAs do not cover purely financial things like assets and debts. That’s what the financial accounts, formerly known as the flow of funds, do. The figures in this post come mainly from tables B.103 (balance sheets of nonfinancial corporate business) and F.103 (flows of nonfinancial corporate business).

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March 7, 2019 Richard Walker, geographer and director of the Living New Deal project, on what the original can teach the Green one • Aziz Rana, author of this article, on the need for a left internationalism

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February 28, 2019 Melinda Cooper, author of Family Values, on the relationship between “free” market neoliberalism and family values conservatism

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February 21, 2019 Daniel Aldana Cohen, author of this article, on the role of housing in a Green New Deal • Joel Whitney, author of this article, on the CIA’s history as a purveyor of fake news

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February 14, 2019 Noah Kulwin, staff writer with Jewish Currents, on why Ilhan Omar’s AIPAC tweets aren’t anti-Semitic • Thea Riofrancos, one of editors of Jacobin‘s Green New Deal series, on the agenda’s scope and politics