In Fiery Speeches, Francis Excoriates Global Capitalism

ASUNCIÓN, Paraguay — His speeches can blend biblical fury with apocalyptic doom. Pope Francis does not just criticize the excesses of global capitalism. He compares them to the “dung of the devil.” He does not simply argue that systemic “greed for money” is a bad thing. He calls it a “subtle dictatorship” that “condemns and enslaves men and women.”

Having returned to his native Latin America, Francis has renewed his left-leaning critiques on the inequalities of capitalism, describing it as an underlying cause of global injustice, and a prime cause of climate change. Francis escalated that line last week when he made a historic apology for the crimes of the Roman Catholic Church during the period of Spanish colonialism — even as he called for a global movement against a “new colonialism” rooted in an inequitable economic order.

The Argentine pope seemed to be asking for a social revolution.

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A Reflection on Modern China by an American ex-Patriot

...The question about capitalism is... tough to answer. In my mind, white-bread-American capitalism is a combination of a company trying to make money in the confines of a society that's sure as hell gonna know if it dumps metric tons of company waste in the nearest river while being watched over by a government that is reasonably free from graft and will freak out if that dumping happens while also operating in a society where everyone has the freedom to take pictures with their cell phones and put them up on Twitter if the rivers turn purple/blue/green, etc.

China is... different.  On one hand, Chinese (and, of course, Japanese) people work a thousand circles around a typical American. Capitalists could find this attractive, of course. A capitalist might be really thrilled by the idea that in China there really aren't weekends and the average worker gets one day off PER MONTH. Also, in China the workers sometimes come from other parts of the country and leave their children behind. This is because in China children tend to be raised by the grandparents, and this is because there are mandatory retirement ages (in the 50s for both men and women though the men are usually allowed to work a bit longer than women), so that there is really no such thing as older workers.

The family relationship in China is one where the husband and wife and child also have the husband's parents living with them in a tiny little apartment. The husband and wife both work, the grandparents were mandatorily retired years ago, and take care of the grandchild. The husband and wife might work where they live or one or both might work in another city altogether tons of miles away. They all might see each other once or twice a year. This is why "golden week" or other such vacation weeks are so incredibly important... it's when families see each other.

Sons are more valued than daughters not because one gender is more prized than another but because sons are usually an aging parent's only hope for a semi-comfortable retirement. When you grow old, you move in with your SON, not your daughter, for your daughter already married some guy and his parents already live with them and there ain't no room for you and even if there were, it's not what's done. If you have no son, you're pretty much screwed, unless you've amassed money, but that doesn't happen for the typical worker in China.

Sure, there is unbelievable wealth in China, but the typical worker doesn't have any of it. Business and moneymaking in China is wrapped in graft, rolled up in intellectual property theft, and includes generous amounts of corporate espionage.  One could argue that it's actually far more capitalistic than what you see in America! Businesses, free from that pesky EPA, can (and will) dump what they wish in the rivers.  Free from labor laws, they can (and will) have workers working 16 hour days with only one day off a month.  Free from any kind of court system that functions, they can (and will) steal intellectual property from any and all without shame or even self-consciousness.  There was an "Apple" store (the fake kind) just down the street from my apartment the whole entire time I lived in Chengdu. It looked and functioned EXACTLY like a real "Apple" store. They had the logo out front, the same shirts worn by the workers inside, the same displays/posters/advertising, the same everything. Anyone would have thought that it was a real Apple store, but it was total fraud from start to finish. And no one cared at all or did anything about it, because in China it was totally normal. 

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I think this may be one of the best short descriptions of modern China that I have read. The description of China's economy reminds me in many ways of our own during the so called "Gilded Age."

Why We Can't Be Sweden

Daron Acemoglu, an eminent economist at M.I.T., has ignited a firestorm by arguing that contemporary forces of globalization bar the United States from adopting the liberal social welfare policies of Scandinavian countries.

“We cannot all be like the Nordics,” Acemoglu declares, in a 2012 paper, “Choosing Your Own Capitalism in a Globalized World,” written with his colleagues James A. Robinson, a professor of government at Harvard, and Thierry Verdier, scientific director of the Paris School of Economics.

If the “cutthroat leader” – the United States — were to switch to “cuddly capitalism, this would reduce the growth rate of the entire world economy,” the authors argue, by slowing the pace of innovation.

Acemoglu, Robinson and Verdier put their argument technically, but there is no mistaking the implications:

A longish but interesting article. Read the rest here.

North Carolina May Ban Tesla Sales To Prevent “Unfair Competition”

No. I'm not making this up.

From the state that brought you the nation’s first ban on climate science comes another legislative gem: a bill that would prohibit automakers from selling their cars in the state.

The proposal, which the Raleigh News & Observer reports was unanimously approved by the state’s Senate Commerce Committee on Thursday, would apply to all car manufacturers, but the intended target is clear. It’s aimed at Tesla, the only U.S. automaker whose business model relies on selling cars directly to consumers, rather than through a network of third-party dealerships.

The bill is being pushed by the North Carolina Automobile Dealers Association, a trade group representing the state’s franchised dealerships. Its sponsor is state Sen. Tom Apodaca, a Republican from Henderson, who has said the goal is to prevent unfair competition between manufacturers and dealers. What makes it “unfair competition” as opposed to plain-old “competition”—something Republicans are typically inclined to favor—is not entirely clear. After all, North Carolina doesn’t seem to have a problem with Apple selling its computers online or via its own Apple Stores.

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Marcus Brauchli on David Stockman's New Book

...Now, he has cast his acid eye on the country’s entire economic edifice. What the former divinity student sees doesn’t merely dismay, it outrages him morally, page after page, chapter after chapter. Stockman’s new tract, “The Great Deformation,” is a kaleidoscopic rant against people, institutions and practices he knows well. He attacks, upends, eviscerates, mocks and denigrates them all, usually with some justification, always in the brutalist prose of a manifesto.

The New Deal was a “political gong show,” and Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard M. Nixon were “peas in a statist pod.” Morgan Stanley’s former chief executive, John Mack, is a “ruthless gambler and bully who never hesitated to exploit any avenue to make a buck.” Reagan’s defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, was “obdurate and imperious on everything within his brief.” Alan Greenspan and Milton Friedman get entire chapters dedicated to their free-market heresies.

But here’s the thing: Even as he indulges his spleen, Stockman produces a persuasive and deeply relevant indictment of a system dangerously akilter.

Over the past 40 years, the United States has become a strange fantasy land where many politicians think deficits don’t matter, regulators are closely entwined with their charges, and the Federal Reserve manages the economy through high-stakes, high-risk experimentation. The financial turmoil of the past few years is just a glimpse of what lies at the end of the road we’re on, Stockman warns.

In showing us where it leads, he takes the long way, ambling past the wreckage of fiscal and market calamities dating back a century, pausing to praise the gleaming fiscal conservatism of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, then arriving at the ever-more-dire failures of the last generation.

The country began veering badly off course, Stockman argues, in August 1971. That was when Nixon decided to scrap the international financial arrangement that anchored the dollar’s value to gold and thus other currencies in the decades after World War II. “In an act that cascaded down through the decades, Richard Nixon caused the United States to default on its . . . obligations . . . and thereby inaugurated an era of global trade imbalance, currency pegging and manipulation, massive debt creation, and financial speculation that had no historic antecedents,” Stockman writes. “It became the era of bubble finance.”

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The name of the book is ‘The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America’ by David Stockman.

Wall Street protests continue and spread

NEW YORK — Protesters speaking out against corporate greed and other issues showed no signs of giving up their campaign Monday, with organizers urging participants to dress up as what they called corporate zombies and to take part in a rally against police brutality.

The arrests of 700 people on Brooklyn Bridge over the weekend fueled the anger of the protesters camping in a Manhattan park and sparked support elsewhere in the country as the campaign entered its third week.

Occupy Wall Street started with fewer than a dozen college students spending days and nights in Zuccotti Park, a plaza near the city’s financial center. But a day after Saturday’s mass arrests, hundreds of protesters were resolute and like-minded groups in other cities had joined in.

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Spat over Boeing plant sparks political firestorm

It started as bad blood between aerospace giant Boeing Co. and its unionized production workers.

But now a feud over Boeing’s decision to assemble some of its 787 jetliners at a new, non-union facility in South Carolina has mushroomed into a very public and highly political fight over outsourcing, right-to-work states and the future of the National Labor Relations Board.

The clash's outcome could hinge on whether Boeing executives publicly said more than they should have about their motivation for opening the new plant in South Carolina.

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