A lot of money.
And a lot more than money. Think about it. Unless you’re already among the top of the fabled 1 percent, an extra $125,000 of annual income—much less the combined $250,000 if you’re married—would mean a different life experience, especially for the 80 percent of Americans whose net worth has declined by 40 percent since 2007. If your income expanded by such a large increment, you would have no need to study the footnotes to protect yourself from being totally ruined by politicians.
A 75,900 Percent Rate of Return at Your Expense
Meanwhile, in a different, but equally revealing exercise, the Sunlight Foundation undertook an extensive research project to quantify the rate of return on money invested in lobbying and spending to buy political favors. This brings parasitism into clearer focus.
According to the Sunlight Foundation’s analysis, between 2007 and 2012, 200 of America’s most politically active firms dished out a combined total of $5.8 billion to buy laws and spending in their favor. What did they get back? Some $4.4 trillion, or two-thirds of the $6.5 trillion that individual taxpayers paid into the Treasury during that period. Note that those were tax receipts they caged, not outlays, as the government spent trillions from an empty pocket.
On average, for every dollar spent to buy political influence, the special interests got back about $760 from the government. As the figure was rounded up slightly, that translates to a 75,900 percent rate of return. Compare that to the 0.25 percent Grandmother gets on her CDs.
Airlines Seek to Reduce Competition
The 75,900 percent rate of return is only an average calculated from the results actually achieved by the 200 most politically active corporations. Twenty-nine of them received one thousand times, or more, what they invested in politics from the federal government—a 100,000 percent return or more. If Grandmother only had the option of buying an annuity indexed to the payoffs from political plunder, she could be flying first class to Dubai on Emirates for her holiday rather than watching reruns of I Love Lucy.
But of course, it can’t work that way. The stupendous rates of return pocketed by big investors in politics are leveraged to closing markets and denying Grandmother the choice of flying Emirates—even if she could afford it. In March 2015, John Gapper reported in the Financial Times that US airlines were attempting to curtail competition from upstart, nonunionized Gulf Airlines, sounding similar to those airlines that provided mediocre service in the past and complained about energetic rivals. That is just exactly what it is. As one who has flown on Emirates on occasion, I can report that the service and amenities are incomparably superior to anything you could encounter on American Airlines, Delta, or United. At the risk of sounding like a wine snob, the wine list on Emirates rivals what you would find in a Michelin starred restaurant. This strikes me as a particular measure of quality because I was once an investor in a beverage company that sold wine to United Airlines. From that vantage, I can confirm the impression you are liable to have informed as a consumer. They buy only the cheapest possible plonk for their passengers. Emirates wines would cost a magnitude more than United’s. Equally important, the seats on Emirates are extralarge and recline into comfy lie-flat beds. You literally have a choice of thousands of in-flight movies and entertainment options. Grandmother could probably watch her reruns of I Love Lucy on-board. And you might note that the grandmothers on board are all passengers. None of the Emirates flight attendants is older than thirty. Many could be mistaken for supermodels. And if watching them makes you all sweaty, there are showers in first class.
Electric Utilities Seek to Ban Rooftop Solar
The effort by US carriers to ban competition from the superlative Gulf Airlines is only one of dozens of similar antimarket efforts being conducted in the shadows every day. Indeed, where the crony capitalists are concerned, sunlight is the enemy.
Consider the campaign being orchestrated by electric utility monopolies. As detailed by investigative reporter Joby Warrick in a March 2015 Washington Post article, utilities are working to end a “home-solar insurgency.”6 Warrick reports that regulated electric monopolies are lobbying public utility commissions to impose monthly surcharges on customers who install solar panels. Such surcharges have been approved in Arizona and Wisconsin and are pending in New Mexico.
What can you make of these pick-pocketing maneuvers? Of one thing you can be certain: if US carriers don’t want to compete against Emirates, that is probably the most authoritative recommendation you could have to book on Emirates if you are going anywhere they fly. Equally, if regulated electric monopolies want to penalize you for installing solar panels, that’s probably a strong hint that it would make sense to do so.
The conclusions from the Journal of Economic Growth show the devastating cumulative effect of regulations, most of which were never more than footnotes at the time they were promulgated. If you remember the 1960s and ’70s, I am sure that you have no recollection of Walter Cronkite or his contemporary, David Brinkley, leading the nightly news broadcast on CBS or NBC with details about how you and other Americans were being ripped off by hundreds or even thousands of new regulations. With few exceptions, the details would’ve been mind-numbing. Indeed, that was part of the magic that enabled those who conspired against the public to get away with it. As the huge street demonstrations in Brazil attest, rip-offs that are too easily understood tend to infuriate their victims. Unless you assume that Americans are more complacent and easily fleeced than the Brazilians, you would expect to see millions of demonstrators on the streets of big American cities if Obama and his minions let the gag get as far out into the open as it has in Brazil.
You could shout, “Thieves! Bring back our money!” But good luck with that. There is practically no way of stopping the political plunder from getting worse as it is an inherent feature of the governing system, not an incidental distortion. It is a feature so large and essential to the corrupt corporatist system that it is paradoxically more or less invisible.
How could that be?
Think of DNA that informs biology: it is of paramount importance, but you can only see its consequences, not the DNA itself. Look at a dog. Its DNA is invisible. Yet because of the DNA, you can see it is a dog and not a porcupine.
Fiat Money as the Ultimate in Political Plunder
Equally, funny money is a crucial part of the DNA of the predatory modern state. Money is also the lifeblood of the economy. When the politicians can bring money under their absolute control, they will predictably use it to concentrate wealth in the hands of a small sliver of the population. This is certainly what happened in the United States. The introduction of pure fiat money by Richard Nixon was perhaps the single most telling step toward the impoverishment of the middle class in the history of the United States. Obama’s policy of pushing wealth inequality to an extreme since 2009 was only the culmination of the political pillage set in motion by Richard Nixon when he repudiated the last link of the dollar to gold in 1971.
In this sense, it is no coincidence that between 1930 and 1970 it was only the bottom 90 percent who saw their incomes rise, as NPR’s “Planet Money” report on February 11, 2015, so convincingly documented. Nixon’s move to fiat money halted the gains by the bottom 90 percent in the early 1970s and reignited the concentration of income gains among the top 1 percent of earners, reaching an extreme under Obama.
Of course, Obama would prefer that you forget that he initially sought the White House as the candidate of big banks. As reported by CNN, referencing Federal Election Commission figures, Goldman Sachs executives and PACs associated with Goldman Sachs were the largest corporate contributors to Obama’s 2008 campaign for the White House.
In a related development, the Sunlight Foundation reported that President Obama has received more money from Bank of America than any other candidate dating back to 1991. The banks got their money’s worth. Obama continued the Bush policy of bailing out the big banks, both explicitly and implicitly. By supporting quantitative easin
g (QE), he sent trillions of dollars into bank coffers. As of January 2015, 72 percent of money created through QE was sitting idle as excess reserves of private banks. They got this essentially free money, with which they are minting profits, as the Federal Reserve pays them 0.25 percent interest on the excess reserves.
Frederick Soddy, Nobel Prize winner (in chemistry), was a bitter opponent of the modern banking system that gives banks the privilege of creating money. He wrote in The Role of Money:
The Banker as Ruler—from that invention dates the modern era of the banker as ruler. The whole world after that was his for the taking. By the work of pure scientist the laws of conservation of matter and energy were established, and the new ways of life created which depended upon the contemptuous denial of primitive and puerile aspirations as perpetual motion and the ability ever really to get something for nothing. The whole marvelous civilization that has sprung from that physical basis has been handed over, lock, stock, and barrel, to those who could not give and have not given the world as much as a bun without first robbing somebody else of it . . . The skilled creators of wealth [in industry and agriculture] are now become hewers of wood and drawers of water to the creators of debt, who have been doing in secret what they have condemned in public as unsound and immoral finance and have always refused to allow Governments and nations to do openly and above aboard. This without exaggeration is the most gargantuan farce that history has ever staged.7
I do not embrace every facet of Soddy’s embittered indictment of modern banking. Still, he has a point.
Quantitative easing was evidently designed to enrich the few at the expense of the many. In the first instance, it was a financial death sentence for Grandmother, slashing the annual interest paid on her savings to 0.25 percent. To see this more clearly, assume that Grandmother had $400,000 in savings. Today, her annual interest income is just $1,000. Compare this to the 4 percent (or $16,000) a year she could have earned in bank CDs a year before the 2008 crisis unleashed financial repression.
And it is no better for Grandfather. In 2011, the Wall Street Journal profiled Forrest Yeager, a ninety-one-year-old resident of Fort Charlotte, Florida. With remaining savings of only $45,000, Yeager must supplement his monthly Social Security income of $1,500 and his small pension by digging deeper into his principal. According to the Journal, Yeager reported that he found himself “betting on dying before his money runs out.”8 For Yeager and others like him, QE really was a death sentence.
While money was pulled out of the pockets of millions of savers, elite bankers were handed trillions that they proceeded to use to drive up stock prices and scoop up foreclosed homes that they turned around and rented to dispossessed homeowners, and they made risk-free money by idling their excess reserves at the Fed. Obviously, it is the big borrowers and speculators who are the big beneficiaries of the Fed’s monetary policies.
Of course, I do not pretend for a moment that Richard Nixon, much less Barack Obama, was smart enough to fully understand the extent to which fiat money would concentrate wealth in the hands of a few. Far from it. But one needn’t suppose that successful politicians set out with the conscious intention of pauperizing their constituents to see they are cunning enough to recognize where their own best interests lie.
Strangely enough, where politicians depend on majority vote, they are probably more, rather than less, likely to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few, whom they reward with crony capitalist favors at the expense of the many.
Why?
Think about it. Would-be demagogues need needy constituents. (If the consequence of proliferating regulations and reducing the efficiency of the free market is to impoverish the majority, so much the better.) That makes the majority a ready audience for the schemes and nostrums of the politicians. If the average American enjoyed an additional $125,000 year, Barack Obama could not even draw a crowd as a community organizer. He would not have seen inside the White House, except as a tourist.
Equally, highly concentrated income complements political imperatives in another way. In addition to ensuring that many constituents are needy, it enables politicians to concentrate the cost of income redistribution on a relatively small sliver of the population. Hence fiat money fulfills multiple political purposes. In addition to impoverishing voters, thus making them politically receptive, and enhancing the appearance that the recipients of redistributed income get “something for nothing,” it rewards bankers—among the largest and most frequent political contributors.
I did my graduate research at Oxford on the thesis that the structure of decision making in the modern democratic state broadly determines how politics evolves. The result to be expected is ever-greater expansion of the antimarket sector. In my view, the only thing that could stop this is complete economic collapse.
Political Plunder Returns 2,600 Times Greater than Productive Investments
Meanwhile, the process feeds on itself. Do you wonder why? Analysis of the financial results of public companies, reported by David Benoit in a March 2015 column for Money Beat, shows that capital investment in the material expansion of the economy seemed recently to yield an average return of 29.2 percent.9 Compare that with the return of 75,900 percent (much less 100,000 percent) from investments in politics. If the normal assumptions of economists are correct, there will be less capital investment in things like property, plants, and equipment, for an average return of 29.2 percent, and more investment in lobbying and fundraisers for politicians, with the return of 75,900 percent. Indeed, the returns on political plunder could plunge by three magnitudes and still be attractive as compared to productive investment. If plunder only earned a return of 75 percent, it would still attract profit-maximizing businesses to hire lobbyists and subscribe $500-a-plate dinners to fund politicians.
Look at it from a distance, and the results go far toward explaining the artificial economies-to-scale that account for the growing predominance of established firms over start-ups. The legacy firms basically bribe politicians to rig the system in their favor. Hence my view that the immiseration of the middle class is caused more by the political economy of plunder and expansion of the antimarket than by capitalist production, per se, as postulated by Marx.
Marx is not “the next big thinker.” That thinking still needs to be done.
Notes
1 Cassidy, John, “The Return of Karl Marx,” The New Yorker, October 20 and 27, 1997, 248.
2 Smith, David, “Angola’s Jose Eduardo Dos Santos: Africa’s Least-Known Autocrat,” The Guardian, August 30, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/aug/30/angola-jose-eduardo-dos-santos.
3 Oliveira, Ricardo Soares de, Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola since the Civil War (London: Hurst, 2015), 65.
4 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4468042.stm.
5 http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2009/10/politicans-are-not-prostitutes-they-are.html.
6 Warrick, Joby, “Utilities Wage Campaign against Rooftop Solar,” Washington Post, March 7, 2015.
7 Soddy, Frederick, The Role of Money: What It Should Be, Contrasted with What It Has Become (London: Routledge, 1934), 51.
8 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703410604576216830941163492.
9 Benoit, David, “Capex or Capital Returns: The Data behind the Debate on Activism,” Money Beat, March 11, 2015.
Chapter Four
Would Marx Be a Socialist Today?
Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history . . . that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.
—Friedrich Engels’s eulogy for Karl Marx,
Highgate Cemetery, London, March 17, 1883
Notwithstanding the abject failure of socialist systems in practice, as well as the striking failure of the working class to express its “revolutionary potential” as ardently predicted by Marx, Marx is back in vogue. Remember the conclusion of the Communist Manifesto, the second best-selling book of all time, where Marx and Engels proclaimed, “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”1
Here you see the confusion between prescription and description that muddled Marx’s thought. Marx was much better at historic analysis than as the architect of a better world.
Call it a contradiction, if you will, but this becomes ironic because Marx’s deeper and more interesting insights now point to a completely opposite conclusion to his prescriptions that continue to resonate with the so-called proletariat. He offered a valid framework for understanding the dynamics of social change (i.e., “creative destruction”) in The Poverty of Philosophy, describing how people will change their mode of production when they acquire new productive forces, leading to a change in how they earn a living and in their social relations.
Take that seriously, combine it with new productive forces then unknown to Marx, and you get an entirely new set of revolutionary possibilities remote from those of which Marx himself was a partisan.
“Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railroads”
As I explore in the balance of this chapter, the new technology of the information economy has far-reaching implications for changing the way people earn their living and, indeed, changing all their social relations. I try to think about the shifting technological underpinnings of the economy in the same spirit expressed in William Wordsworth’s “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railroads,” in which he embraced the changes of his time, hoping to gain “that prophetic sense of future change, that point of vision” that illuminates “motions and means.”2 I have no qualms about rummaging in the dusty attic of intellectual history to scavenge whatever insights I can, even from poets, hence my somewhat mischievous willingness to deconstruct Marx’s nineteenth-century insights to illuminate the coming transition crisis.
The Breaking Point Page 6