Steve's Politics Blog

YouTube has the video On Contact: Agenda of Hate with Ajamu Baraka.

On this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges examines the rise of white, right-wing hate groups with Ajamu Baraka, Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and the Green Party’s nominee for Vice President in the 2016 election. RT Correspondent Anya Parampil looks at the profusion of white supremacist groups in America.

This episode is not only about negative aspects of what is happening. Finding out about Jackson, Mississippi was encouraging. Jackson is something I’ll want to learn more about.

The Guardian has the article Should the rich be taxed more? A new paper shows unequivocally yes.

Measuring tax paid against share of income earned and wealth owned reveals the US tax system has become less progressive – and in Britain it is a similar picture

I have said for a long time that the factoid “The top 1% of earners in the UK accounts for 27% of income tax receipts” is meaningless. Tell me what percentage of the income the 1% earn before we judge the fairness of paying 27% of the tax.

Finally, this article alludes to that number even if it doesn’t present it in a simple fashion.

eoi online has the article ‘X’ Marks the Spot Where Inequality Took Root: Dig Here.

The spot so marked is shown in the following figure from the article.

The analysis is interesting, but I think the author left out a very important factor.

We came out of WWII relatively unscathed compared to Europe and other theaters of the war. Our workers and our corporations enjoyed an advantage over the rest of the world that could not last forever. As the Asian economies growth really started to gather full steam, some adjustment had to happen. We did not see the need to manage that adjustment, so we did not handle it well. All the burden of adjustment was put on the backs of the workers, while the wealthy were able to bend the rules to protect themselves – well at least temporarily.

One of the ways we went wrong was on the insistence of maintaining a strong dollar. This was good for maintaining the value of the wealth of the rich people. It was not good for spreading the pain of the inevitable adjustment over the entire population of the USA as our WWII advantage started to wane. I think this attempt to refuse to face up to the adjustment led to some of the desperate efforts to maintain the wealth of the wealthy in the face of forces we refused to recognize.

The New York Times has the article Chastised by E.U., a Resentful Greece Embraces China’s Cash and Interests.

While Europe was busy squeezing Greece, the Chinese swooped in with bucket-loads of investments that have begun to pay off, not only economically but also by apparently giving China a political foothold in Greece, and by extension, in Europe.

The NYT failed to point out that China understands the economic principles that the west has forgotten. The way to boost a struggling economy is not through austerity, but through government backed investments to stimulate the economy. Are we now going to blame China for our stupidity?

We no longer have to ask whether a Progressive economic policy would get the economy going again. China proves the Progressive economics works all over the world. We can refuse to learn anything from the evidence, or we could just give in and try economic policy that works.

I know people are going to twist my words into an endorsement of Chinese politics, but I said no such thing. We used to understand and apply progressive economics in our Democracy, but since we have switched our government to an oligarchy, we cannot seem to get out of our own way on economics.

Maybe fear of China will put a human face back on our capitalism. The threat of communism from the USSR is what used to prevent our system from diving into its current depths of depravity.

Medium has the article How To Keep Your Head In A Sea Of Propaganda. There are some very good ideas in this article. I found that I have recently developed an appreciation one of these ideas due to a book I have been reading. Here is an excerpt from the article that introduces the idea of “inner work”

Propaganda works by constructing narratives that are favorable to the institution promulgating it, and it does so by appealing to people’s baser impulses like fear and tribalism in order to create sympathy for their stories. Inner work which creates some space from mental narrative and identification is a great way to inoculate oneself against such manipulations. Meditation, self-inquiry, mantra repetition and mindfulness practices can all be useful toward this end, as can right-brained activities like drawing and painting since they involve a movement away from the language center.

I never put much stock in the value of meditation until I read the book “Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism” by Rajiv Malhotra. Here is an excerpt from the description of the book that I found on Amazon.

India is more than a nation state. It is also a unique civilization with philosophies and cosmologies that are markedly distinct from the dominant culture of our times – the West. India’s spiritual traditions spring from dharma which has no exact equivalent in Western frameworks. Unfortunately, in the rush to celebrate the growing popularity of India on the world stage, its civilizational matrix is being co-opted into Western universalism, thereby diluting its distinctiveness and potential.

“Being Different” explained the value of “inner work” as a tool that can be used in addition to western style logic to give you insights that you won’t get from western style logic alone. I still have not taken up meditation, but I now see the point of it.

KPFA has the podcast Ajamu Baraka on American Exceptionalism & The Failure of The Left.

Today on Flashpoints, we feature a discussion with Ajamu Baraka about American Exceptionalism and the failure of the Left to challenge US foreign policy.

The interview with Ajamu Baraka takes up the first 20 minutes of this podcast. Even though I agree with Baraka, I noticed I had a little resistance at first to the implications of what he was saying. That didn’t last long, as I realized that he was right about those implications, and I just had to deal with it.

Naked Capitalism has the article “How to Run a Cheap Foreign Labor Economic Model”.

The editor, Yves Smith, gives the following introduction to the article:

Yves here. In a bit of “cart before the horse,” I’m featuring this post on an approach to labor arbitrage that despite having a certain internal logic, serves to illustrate how far out of whack the debate over unregulated international trade has become.

With that proviso in mind, here is a teaser from the article itself. It follows the description of how to do it “right”.

This can be contrasted with what we’re actually doing, which is importing cheap foreign labor into our formerly high wages services economy.

When you do that what happens is wages get systemically undermined. Profits for those businesses that are exposed to the rising volume of demand and the falling wages enjoy a margin boost. These will include property developers, banks and some retailers (though certainly not all). That’s because the wider economy gets bogged down as wages growth stalls and falls.

This is the type of thing we need to understand if we are ever to get a handle on the falling living standards of most people in this country. We also need to understand the oligarch’s trick of making workers around the world compete for the ever lower wages of the jobs that are available. This competitive spiral downward is what needs to be broken by giving workers more rights around the world. We can do it by legislation in this country and by diplomatic negotiations with other countries to encourage them to do the same.

Upworthy has the article A short comic gives the simplest, most perfect explanation of privilege I’ve ever seen.

Privilege means that some of us have advantages over others for any number of reasons we don’t control — like who we are, where we come from, the color of our skin, or certain things that have happened in our lives.

Here are the first few panels of the cartoon. You have to go to the article to see all of it.

This explains what I came to realize after doing research for an essay in sophomore year in college. Before coming to understand this, I was a fan of Ayn Rand’s. After I came to understand this, I realized that she was just like Richard.

Huffington Post has the article The Confederate General Who Was Erased.

By now, Americans interested in the Confederate monument removal project have had it drilled into them that the monuments were erected decades after the end of the Civil War as testimonies to white supremacy in all its various manifestations: segregation, disenfranchisement, lynching, peonage, and second-class citizenship across the board. But the monuments were not merely commemorative. They were designed to conceal a past that their designers wanted to suppress. That past was the period after Reconstruction and before Jim Crow, years in which African Americans in the former Confederacy exercised political power, ran for public office, published newspapers, marched as militias, ran businesses, organized voluntary associations, built schools and churches: a time, in other words, when they participated as full members of society.

This description of history jibes with my readings of that history. I have read about the progress toward equality that was made after the Civil War and how it was turned back in the early 20^th century. This is the history we must remember when having arguments over statues that glorify the Confederate cause.

Current Affairs has the definitive article Thinking Strategically About Free Speech And Violence.

There are many great ideas in the article. There is one that I would like to give special emphasis to by quoting it below.

The battle is not for the hearts and minds of white supremacists, but for the hearts and minds of the general public.

I always keep this in mind for postings on this blog and any discussions I get into on the internet. I never assume that I can change the mind of the opponent in a discussion. I am just hoping that I can present a reasonable argument that the silent readers of the discussion can think about. I don’t want the readers to think that there is no rebuttal to the argument my opponent uses.