Far more than any other conflict in American history, the global war on terror has been waged along free-market principles. In Iraq and Afghanistan, American soldiers actually on the payroll of the US Army were outnumbered by independent contractors working for private companies hired to provide services from meals to base security. From Pakistan to Yemen to Somalia, American counterterror operations have relied heavily on outside contractors to provide intelligence and logistics. As a result, the tenets of twenty-first-century American capitalism have become the bywords of twenty-first-century American combat. That includes the most infamous catch phrase of the global financial crisis — “too big to fail.”

When applied to banks, “too big to fail” referred to financial institutions that were so large and critical to the economy that they had to be bailed out by the government, no matter how execrable their past behavior or how badly they had been mismanaged. Letting them fail, refusing to bail them out, would only sink the American economy.

In the global war on terror as well, Washington has treated some of its biggest military and intelligence contractors as if they are too big to fail. The American enterprise in the Middle East has been so heavily outsourced, and the Pentagon, CIA, and other agencies have become so dependent on a handful of large corporations, that the government has been reluctant to ever hold those firms accountable for their actions.

—James Risen
Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

What we need is more demand and that goes to short run cyclical policy, more generally to how we operate macroeconomic policy, and the enormous importance of having tighter labor markets, so that firms have an incentive to reach for worker, rather than workers having to reach for firms…

I think that the broad empowerment of labor in a world where an increasing part of the economy is generating income that has a kind of rent aspect to it, the question of who’s going to share in it becomes very large. One of the puzzles of our economy today is that on the one hand, we have record low real interest rates that are expected to be record low for 30 years if you look at the index bond market. And on the other hand, we have record high profits. And you tend to think record high profits would mean record high returns to capital, would also mean really high interest rates. And what we actually have is really low real interest rates. The way to think about that is there’s a lot of rents in what we’re calling profits that don’t really represent a return to investment, but represent a rent.

The question then is who’s going to get those rents? Which goes to the minimum wage, goes to the power of union, goes through the presence of profit sharing, goes to the length of patents and a variety of other government policies that confer rents and then when those are received, goes to the question of how progressive the tax and transfer system is. That has got to be a very, very large part of the picture…

If we had the income distribution in the United States that we did in 1979, the top 1% would have $1 trillion less today, and the bottom 80% would have $1 trillion more. That works out to about $700,000 a family for the top 1%, and about $11,000 a year for a family in the bottom 80%.

That’s a trillion dollars. I don’t know what the number is, but my guess is that the total cost of the Earned Income Tax Credit is $50 billion. Nobody’s got on the policy agenda doubling the Earned Income Tax Credit. The big, aggressive agendas are probably to increase it by a third or a half. So, I’m all for it, but we are talking about 2.5% of the redistribution that has taken place. So, you have to be looking for things and there’s no one thing that is going to do it. My reading of the evidence, it’s a fairly general evidence, is that while there may be some elasticity, the elasticity around the current level of the minimum wage is very low.[1]

—Larry Summers
The One Where Larry Summers Demolished the Robots and Skills Arguments

[1] What this means is that raising (or lowering) the minimum wage will have very little effect on the demand for labor. Thus, contrary to what all conservatives “know,” raising the minimum wage is not going to cost jobs, and lowering (or eliminating) it is not going to create jobs.

Many of you have been in the room when the president has delivered speeches where he’s talked about his love for this country, or how the United States is a force for good in the world — in fact it’s the greatest force for good that the world has ever seen — and we can cite those examples and many of you have been in the room when he’s delivered remarks like that — both in this country and around the world.

More generally, I can tell you that it’s sad to see, when someone who’s attained a certain level of public stature and even admiration, tarnishes that legacy so thoroughly. And the truth is that I don’t take any joy or vindication or satisfaction from that. Really, I think the only thing that I feel is sorry for Rudy Giuliani today.

—Josh Earnest
Press Conference

There was a time where it was plausible to argue that more education and innovation were the primary solutions to our economic problems. But that time has passed. You cannot tell that, however, to the Wall Street Democrats and their Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution…

The new framing paper released by the Hamilton Project details how “advancing computer power and automation technology” creates a challenge for “how to educate more people for the jobs of the future, how to foster creation of high-paying jobs, and how to support those who struggle economically during the transition.” This is pretty much the same analysis we heard from the Clinton administration 20 years ago, when the discussion was of a “transition to the new information economy.” Let them eat education.

The education-only solution wasn’t appropriate when it was first put forward, and it is not even remotely plausible now given developments since the mid-1990s — and especially since 2000. Wages for the college-educated have been stagnant for the dozen years since 2000 (when the wage boom of the late 1990s receded). That stagnation has affected the bottom 70 percent of all college graduates both in the last recovery and throughout the Great Recession and the recovery from 2009 through 2014. Moreover, the college wage advantage has grown very little since the mid-1990s: This means that the continuously growing wage gap between high-wage and middle-wage workers since then has had very little to do with education wage gaps.

As documented by the New York Federal Reserve Board, we have seen accelerating underemployment of young college graduates. Recent cohorts of college graduates have been taking jobs at lower wages and with fewer benefits ever since 2000. Besides that, the observation that there are multitudes of college graduates working as free interns should tell us that there is no widespread shortage of college graduates. So the idea of education as cure-all is absurd…

[T]here is not much in this narrow agenda that provides any prospect that the vast majority will soon share in the economic growth they help to produce. Any real solution, after all, will need to challenge the current dominance of employers over wage growth.

—Lawrence Mishel
Failed Theory Posed by Wall Street Dems Puts Hillary Clinton in a Bind

About one conclusion we can feel especially confident: it will not happen within the framework of contemporary corporate capitalism — or any form of capitalism. To begin setting up domes on Mars, let alone to develop the means to figure out if there are alien civilizations to contact, we’re going to have to figure out a different economic system. Must the new system take the form of some massive new bureaucracy? Why do we assume it must? Only by breaking up existing bureaucratic structures can we begin. And if we’re going to invent robots that will do our laundry and tidy up the kitchen, then we’re going to have to make sure that whatever replaces capitalism is based on a far more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power — one that no longer contains either the super-rich or the desperately poor willing to do their housework. Only then will technology begin to be marshaled toward human needs. And this is the best reason to break free of the dead hand of the hedge fund managers and the CEOs — to free our fantasies from the screens in which such men have imprisoned them, to let our imaginations once again become a material force in human history.

—David Graeber
Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit

For neoliberals, it’s not the volume of state activity that is the concern, it’s the character of state activity. As long as the state is getting involved to support markets and the spread and development of markets — financial markets and in other ways too — as long as the state is opening up the public sector to private profit while bearing the costs, and as long as the state is using its coercive power to punish non-market transactions, the state has a very strong central role.

These things have effects. One of the things you can see throughout the 1980s that Mrs Thatcher did — she tried to launch so called popular capitalism. That wasn’t very effective at the time. It didn’t win the majority of people over. It won a minority of people who were the base of the Thatcherite insurgency. But New Labor, because the political forces of the left had been defeated — because the labor movement had been defeated so drastically — New Labor basically internalized the ideas and the dominant policies of neoliberalism, and governed on that basis, and because their base was a working class one, and because it was a left-wing one, they learned to communicate these goals — policy goals and aspirations — that working class and radical people could at least accept — at least acquiesce in. And that had an effect. It was under New Labor that attitudes shifted so much on issues to do with nationalization, welfare, redistribution — a whole series of indices.

—Richard Seymour
Against Austerity: How We Can Fix the Crisis They Made

I also declare myself opposed to almost the whole of your administration; for I know it to have been deceitful, if not perfidious, as I shall show in the course of this letter…

Monopolies of every kind marked your administration almost in the moment of its commencement. The lands obtained by the Revolution were lavished upon partisans; the interest of the disbanded soldier was sold to the speculator; injustice was acted under the pretense of faith; and the chief of the army became the patron of the fraud. From such a beginning what else could be expected than what has happened? A mean and servile submission to the insults of one nation; treachery and ingratitude to another.

Some vices make their approach with such a splendid appearance that we scarcely know to what class of moral distinctions they belong. They are rather virtues corrupted than vices, originally. But meanness and ingratitude have nothing equivocal in their character. There is not a trait in them that renders them doubtful. They are so originally vice that they are generated in the dung of other vices, and crawl into existence with the filth upon their back. The fugitives have found protection in you, and the levee-room is their place of rendezvous.

—Thomas Paine
Letter to George Washington

You should read the whole thing; it gets much better!

That the Republican Party has worked its way to a lonely and unpopular place is not news. The GOP’s congressional wing has been moving rightward since the 1980s, and in the five years of the present slump they have simply picked up the pace. Once they dealt in unpopular privatization schemes, but today they have graduated to extremely unpopular shutdowns and threats of default, and those among them who hesitate are thrown to the ravening mob. Red is the color of revolution, and today the GOP suffers under its own peculiar Reign of Terror, in which newly arisen extremists continuously outflank the extremists of yesterday — and public opinion be damned.

As sheer spectacle, this Tea Party Thermidor inspires a certain fascination and even amusement in the observer. But the larger question always returns: Why haven’t Democrats made the GOP pay for its widely despised views? Why aren’t they threatening to run up monster victories in even the safest red districts? What combination of incompetence and bad luck allowed the party of Roosevelt to fumble away the House of Representatives in the third year of an economic crisis — and then to keep on losing it even as its standard-bearing president was reelected by a substantial margin?

—Thomas Frank
Donkey Business

The New York Times‘ Jonathan Weisman reports that President Barack Obama’s chances of getting “fast track” authority to negotiate trade agreements are shrinking as “the political fringes expand on each end.” …

Toward the end of the article, Weisman writes that 150 out of 188 Democrats in Congress signed a letter opposing fast track. He notes that House Speaker John Boehner in the last Congress said he would need 50 Democratic votes to pass fast track, which would imply that there were about 72 anti-fast track Republicans. (Weisman suggests that that number may be bigger now.)

A hundred and fifty plus 72 is 222 congressmembers, or 51 percent of the House of Representatives. That’s a pretty big “fringe.”

—Jim Naureckas
Tell Us How You Really Feel About Fast Track Opponents, New York Times

In June, 2011, when Roy Moore was flirting with a run for president, he paid a visit to Heritage Community Church in Severn, Maryland. Moore was at the time best known having been removed from his position as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, a result of his refusal to comply with a federal court order to remove a 2.6 ton monument of the Ten Commandments from the Alabama Supreme Court. For this, at Heritage Community Church, Moore was a hero, and the assembled crowd relished his meandering, homespun disquisition on the sovereignty of God’s law over the laws created by men.

Moore is in the news again — and again, it’s over his defiance of the authority of federal courts to decide matters of constitutional law. His claim that a federal district court’s ruling striking down Alabama’s constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage is invalid, and his subsequent order to Alabama’s probate judges not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, stem from the same ideology that drove his Ten Commandments spectacle: that politicians, judges, and the “tyranny of men” are trying, unconstitutionally, to subvert God’s law…

That showdown between God and government is at the heart of Moore’s claims that he is on the side of righteousness and the federal courts on the side of an anti-God, unconstitutional “tyranny.” Moore believes there is a separation of church and state — but he believes it’s one that distinguishes America from royal monarchies. In other words, the government is separated from the church in that the government is barred from running the church, and it can’t tell the church what to do. Public schools, in his view, are “controlled by government,” and impose secularism; he favors tax credits for homeschooling because that’s “the right of the parent.” …

Moore, who graduated from West Point and served in Vietnam, is fond of reiterating the he has sworn to uphold the Constitution against enemies, both foreign and domestic. He readily agreed that America has been overtaken by enemies within. “Our government is infiltrated with communists, we’ve got Muslims coming in and taking over where we should be having the say about our principles.” And more: “I’m not so sure some in government don’t want to destroy our country.” …

Moore… favor[s] the election, rather than the appointment of judges, to guard against the judicial “tyranny” they claim is undermining the Constitution, and therefore, God’s law. A woman in the audience, who said that Obama was not qualified to be president, based on another IOTC-promoted claim that he was not a “natural-born citizen,” asked, “how do we prevent people who don’t worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob from holding political office in America?”

To his credit, Moore admitted there’s no way to stop that, because “it’s up to the people” to elect leaders. In Alabama, where judges are elected, that has meant the voters gave Moore another chance to turn their state into an embarrassment.

—Sarah Posner
Close Encounters With Roy Moore

There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first — the Orwellian — culture becomes a prison. In the second — the Huxleyan — culture becomes a burlesque.

No one needs to be reminded that our world is now marred by many prison-cultures whose structure Orwell described accurately in his parables. If one were to read both 1984 and Animal Farm, and then for good measure, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, one would have a fairly precise blueprint of the machinery of thought-control as it currently operates in scores of countries and on millions of people. Of course, Orwell was not the first to teach us about the spiritual devastations of tyranny. What is irreplaceable about his work is his insistence that it makes little difference if our wardens are inspired by right- or left-wing ideologies. The gates of the prison are equally impenetrable, surveillance equally rigorous, icon-worship equally pervasive.

What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeille act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

—Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death