by Oscar Silva-Valladares

The current ideological debate between the right (which normally defends private enterprise, market economies with minimal government interference, democratic forms of government and traditional family values) and the left (which supports social solidarity, government involvement in the economy, subordination of democratic forms to social priorities and defence of minority rights on social behaviour) is a struggle between opponents who are not necessarily true to themselves and therefore often do not seem to defend their interests. Therefore, it is worth asking whether there is still a genuine ideological dimension in this contest.

A key reason for this disorientation in the left versus right debate is unawareness of the current world geopolitical confrontation. This conflict is a struggle between an exclusivist vision of Western hegemonic dominance (based on its conviction that it offers a superior political, ethical and economic model because of its supposedly proven effectiveness in defeating antagonistic models and because it is the result of a millenary evolution of Western civilisation) and a multipolarity perception promoted by Russia and China, among other powers. The conflict between the West and the East (which certainly does not follow strict geographic boundaries) is not a recent phenomenon, but today it has new meaning because the division that existed between political, economic, and ideological economic systems from the time of the Russian Revolution of 1917 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 (in simple terms, capitalism versus communism) no longer exists.

The new geopolitical alignment (Western hegemonism versus multipolarity) has complex roots, but its most recent development is the fast consolidation of the BRICS group of countries as a consequence of the sanctions imposed by the West on Russia in the wake of the conflict in Ukraine. This new alignment does not respond to a division between opposing political or economic models of governance, but to a simple power struggle for the continuation of Western hegemonic primacy resisted by a growing majority of countries with diverse economic and political models.  On the one hand, Western hegemonic power transcends political formulas and ignores or dispenses with them as it sees fit, for example in its interest in forging alliances with Arabian Gulf countries that do not follow democracy. On the other hand, the BRICS countries followed diverse political and economic models but have in common a paramount inclination to preserve cultural and social autonomy; Russia and China, for instance, strive to strike a balance between their authoritarian political models and the need to maintain stability among their diverse multi-ethnic groups.

Historically, most right-wing positions have had a strong affinity with Western hegemonic groups. Beyond a traditional ideological accommodation with their democratic ways, their positions reflect a strong cultural familiarity as well as familial, social, and economic ties with the West. There is also great complacency and comfort with the US security umbrella and a conceptual difficulty in understanding that today’s Russia is not the Soviet Union, let alone Tsarist Russia. The left, for its part, pretends to have less affinity with the US-led status quo but in practice much of its leadership has a strong economic dependence on the West as employees of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), international organisations or academic institutions funded directly or indirectly by Western governments.

These historical gravitations of the left and the right have created relations of dependency which, in the face of the new geopolitics, have led to great ideological distortion and confusion.  A good example is the antagonistic positions in some Latin American countries regarding legislative proposals to limit NGOs interference, initiatives supported from the right and rejected from the left. Curiously, in the antipodean Republic of Georgia, an identical political contest has just ended with the approval of a law limiting NGOs foreign influence, a law that was fervently opposed by most Western governments and has led to sanctions against its proponents who are accused of being manipulated or directed by Russia. The opposition of official Western sectors to the Latin American initiatives have been less conspicuous but there is no doubt about their position, and in this debate the right, despite notable exceptions, mostly skirts the Western roots of this infiltration while the left ironically defends the Western establishment.

Another controversial issue with deeper dimensions is the discussion about transhumanism and its dangers. The right, while attacking transhumanism, claims that this phenomenon is part of a sinister agenda of international organisations promoting globalism, but it is ignored that transhumanism can be interpreted as a classic phenomenon inherent to the development of world capitalism in its quest for profit maximisation and whose primary forms (alienation, dehumanisation) were warned about many decades ago by Marx and his followers. The right, in seeking parallels between communist utopias and transhumanism, mistakenly sees globalism as a neo-Marxist, Gramscian cultural offensive and overlooks the leading role of Western power groups in this phenomenon. In the side discussion in defence of traditional family values, the right largely ignores the conservative character of the Russian government’s support for the nuclear family, which ironically has led a contemporary Russian philosopher to argue that Russia is the last bastion of the defence of traditional Western values.

The conflict in Ukraine is another strong example of this ideological distortion.  With the exception of minority groups (e.g. sectors of the left traditionally sympathetic to Russia), there is almost unanimous condemnation of Russia from opposing positions that have nothing in common but ignorance of the roots of this conflict.  The right criticises so called Russian authoritarianism and imperialism but ignores the growing anti- democratic manifestations in Ukraine through the persecution of religious groups aligned with the Russian Orthodox hierarchy, the absolute control of the Ukrainian press, and the suppression of presidential elections.  The left, for its part, passively supports the geopolitical positions of the US Democratic administration and the EU bureaucracy and his repeatedly ignore the strong pro-nazi roots in Ukrainian nationalism.

The lack of understanding of the current state of the world economy prevents both the left and the right from defining clear ideological options that would allow them to develop solid and consistent political messages. There is an ignorance of key economic facts that have worsened the current geopolitical confrontation, including the declining economic importance of the West vis-à-vis the rest of the world, the increase in US public debt and its unsustainable financing through monetary issuance, the de-dollarisation of the world economic system as protection by many countries against possible US sanctions, and the continued importance of traditional energy sources in world economic development that renders the Western ecological agenda doubtful. The right seems to ignore that traditional communist economic models have been discarded in Russia and China. The left, in its rigid defence of the migration phenomenon in the West, disregards the fact that such patronage is a fundamental part of the globalist agenda.

The right’s staunch defence of the capitalist economic model as the standard-bearer of free enterprise belittles the growing role of the state in the West as the promoter and client of the military-industrial complex. Some voices on the right have attempted to differentiate between the advantages of economic capitalism versus the pernicious character of cultural capitalism and question the current cultural message in the transformation and manipulation of the agents of economic capitalism.  However, let’s not forget that cultural capitalism as a consequence of economic capitalism was explained by Marx as an inevitable development, who also asserted that the progress of economic capitalism requires a continuous ideological adaptation of economic agents.  The preponderance of the cultural capitalist message has been accentuated in recent decades by capitalism’s turning away from its traditional activities of market expansion, production, and trade, and its increasing  concentration  on  lending  and  financial  speculation,  a  phenomenon historically indicative of economic decline.

Regardless of their roots and objectives in the context of the Cold War, and despite growing convergence with leftist sectors, globalism and progressivism are firmly embedded in the current political leadership of the West. Needless to say, NGOs, for example, are precisely the opposite of their name, as they are organisations that design, coordinate and execute government agendas in the geopolitical interests of the West. Globalism is a weapon and a manifestation of the Western hegemonic power struggle and will likely continue regardless of the results of the upcoming US presidential election.

The aggravation of the geopolitical confrontation will sooner or later lead to a larger widening of positions on both the left and the right. An interesting case will be Argentina, with a government that claims to have conservative roots in defending the traditional family but which will necessarily have to compromise that position by persisting in its unconditional geopolitical alignment with the West.

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/lost-in-the-labyrinth-left-and-right-in-geopolitics/

READ FROM TOP.

SEE ALSO: arrogant imperialism....

By Les Leopold
Common Dreams

There comes a time in the history of a nation when extreme inequality turns into pillage. If economic power is concentrated so is political power, and the wealthy are able to do whatever they damn well please. They can lie, cheat, and steal because they know they won’t be held to account.

Have the super-rich now taken control of America’s political and economic systems? Some current news makes me worry.

Let’s start with the food industry, the food cartel that includes General Mills, PepsiCo, and Tyson, which has been jacking up prices non-stop since 2020. Why are food prices up 25 percent since then?

These giants blame supply chains, the rising costs of labor, and the rising prices of other inputs required to produce and distribute their products. It’s not their fault, they say. But the real culprit, upon closer examination, is stock buybacks, another word for stock manipulation. These firms are fleecing shoppers by raising prices and then using the cash to buy back their own stocks, thereby increasing the market value of each share. 

Stock buybacks do not increase the value of a company, but they move money effortlessly to the largest Wall Street shareowners and to a company’s top executives, who receive most of their compensation via stock incentives.

As food prices shot up by 25 percent, “the ten largest grocery and restaurant brands have together returned or pledged to return more than $77 billion to shareholders,” reports Veronica Riccobene in her excellent article “Big Food, Big Profits, Big Lies.”

In related news, California fast-food giants have claimed that the state’s 2023 minimum wage law, which raised wages from $16 to $20 per hour, killed 10,000 jobs. A closer look, picked up by the Los Angeles Times, showed that the industry cooked the numbers by comparing employment in September with December. 

But every year, September is within the peak dining out season, and in December people dine out least. When adjusted for seasonal variation or compared with the employment levels exactly one year earlier (both standard ways of measuring employment levels) the number of jobs actually increased by 7,000 after the minimum wage law was enacted. 

Boeing recently crashed into the news again, when company CEO Dave Calhoun was roasted by a couple of congressional committees about its shoddy production processes. There were plenty of outraged performances, but none of the oh-so-self-righteous lawmakers had the cajónes to ask about the impact on safety of Boeing’s $61 billion in stock buybacks or about how Calhoun hauled in $30 million in stock incentives while Boeing lost $1.6 billion in 2023. 

Is it possible that maybe, just maybe, Boeing financed those buybacks by laying off workers, moving work to lower-wage sub-contractors, and cutting safety corners? Radio silence from Congress. (See “Did Stock Buybacks Knock the Bolts Out of Boeing?”)

Then there’s the way Wall Street squeezes out new home buyers by gobbling up houses and turning them into rentals. (See “Wall Street to Working-Class Homebuyers: Fuggeddaboutdit!”)

Let’s not forget that John Deere recently announced moving jobs from the U.S. to Mexico while feasting on government contracts and, of course, using job cuts to finance stock buybacks.

Do we have to even mention how Big Pharma is charging us more than it does Canadians, or how health insurance companies collude to fix prices, or how giant hospital chains over-charge us with impunity? 

They rip us off to feed their profits, which then gets shipped to the richest of the rich via stock buybacks. Of the $3 trillion in after tax U.S. corporate profits in 2022, about $1.31 trillion went to stock buybacks. In 1980 there were 13 U.S. billionaires. Now there are 748.

None of this is accidental. Stock buybacks were deregulated in 1982. That’s when Wall Street began its financial war on workers and got filthy rich. (See my new book for the gory details.)

Corporate Welfare

Just hearing that phrase makes me nauseous because it’s a stark reminder of how feeble we are. Progressives have been complaining about government giveaways to large corporations at least since the 1970s and the practice has only grown worse. 

I’ll bet you already know how bad it is. We taxpayers give the oil industry about $20 billion a year in subsidies while BP, Shell, Chevron, Exxon Mobile and TotalEnergies plow $104 billion in dividends and stock buybacks into the pockets of their shareholders (2022). 

Wall Street may be getting as much as $800 million a day via the Federal Reserve, according to one report. I have yet to find a credible source that adds it all up. I’m guessing it’s well over a trillion dollars a year in direct subsidies, tax breaks, and financial market supports. To rub it in, the richest corporations have successfully lobbied for so many tax loopholes that they pay little or nothing at all. (See here and here.)

“But wait,” they tell us, “Tax cuts and subsidies create jobs.” 

That’s the biggest and most painful lie of all. Since the deregulation of Wall Street, corporations have been on a job killing spree. Stock buybacks are financed with job cuts. More than 30 million of us have suffered through mass layoffs (defined as 50 or more workers let go at one time) since 1996. Kill the jobs, save some money, buy back your stocks, put the money in your pocket, rinse and repeat.

Working Class Revolt?

We’re nowhere near any kind of organized mass uprising. But American workers are not stupid. They may not be able to spell out in detail how they are getting ripped off, but they know it’s happening. Most importantly, they understand that the government works for the rich and not for them. 

That’s why so many are willing to support train-wrecking outsiders who attack the government, even when they are anti-worker billionaire buffoons. In 1964, 77 percent of Americans had trust in the federal government. Now it’s 16 percent. 

We’re living with the results of the collapse of countervailing working-class power. In 1955, 35 percent of the private sector workers were in labor unions. Today it’s only 6 percent. That means there is no organized mass of working-class folks with enough power to stop corporate looting. 

I hate to be alarmist, but we’re really in bad shape and it is likely to get worse. Power is so tilted towards the rich that more and more people are giving up on politics, leaving the field open to the modern-day robber barons. This corrupt environment is a petri dish for conspiracy theories and hate.

Somehow, somewhere, a new working-class movement has to emerge. I’ve been begging progressive labor leaders to start a new organization that would fight against mass layoffs and for workers who are not in unions. (How about Workers United for Justice?)

While labor unions must organize shop by shop, they should also acknowledge that labor law is so tilted against workers, that it will be very difficult to make major inroads into the 94 percent with no union protection. We need a new parallel path to connect with these workers that doesn’t involve years and years of costly combat within a rigged labor law system. 

Victims of mass layoffs are everywhere. They need a voice. They need an organization that will fight for them. If leaders like Shawn Fain of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and Sara Nelson from the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA) reached out to non-union workers who are getting crushed by Wall Street stock buybacks, those workers just might come running.

Until we rebuild large scale working-class power, it’s going to be a very rough ride. If we have learned anything at all since 1980, it’s that greed begets greed. The super-rich always want more and they’re not shy about grabbing it, even if democracy crumbles all around them — and us.

Les Leopold is the executive director of the Labor Institute and author of the new book, Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do About It. (2024). Read more of his work on his substack here.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/01/pillaging-by-the-super-rich/

READ FROM TOP.

After the US Supreme Court curtailed the powers of federal agencies in two cases last week, progressive critics predictably complained that the decisions favored “big business,” “corporate interests” and “the wealthy and powerful.”

That gloss overlooked the reality that people with little wealth or power frequently are forced to contend with overweening bureaucrats who invent their own authority and play by their own rules.

In the more consequential case, the court repudiated the Chevron doctrine, which required that judges defer to a federal agency’s “permissible” interpretation of an “ambiguous” statute.

The majority said that rule, which the court established in 1984, was unworkable (creating “an eternal fog of uncertainty” about what the law allows or requires) and fundamentally misguided (allowing the executive branch to usurp a judicial function).

Although People for the American Way perceived a win for “the corporate interests that have been itching to gut the power of federal agencies to protect our health and welfare,” the dispute at the center of the case complicates that picture.

Two family-owned fishing operations objected to onerous regulatory fees they said had never been authorized by Congress.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch noted other examples of vulnerable supplicants who suffer when agencies are free to rewrite the laws under which they operate.

He cited cases involving a veteran seeking disability benefits and an immigrant fighting to remain in the country.

Because of an arbitrary rule that the Department of Veterans Affairs invented for its own convenience, Thomas Buffington lost three years of disability benefits that the government owed him.

How the Supreme Court rescued my NJ fishing firm that bureaucrats almost sank 

Alfonzo De Niz Robles faced deportation and separation from his American wife and children after the Board of Immigration Appeals overturned a judicial precedent on which he and many other immigrants had relied for relief.

“Sophisticated entities and their lawyers may be able to keep pace with rule changes affecting their rights and responsibilities,” Gorsuch noted; they can lobby for “reasonable” agency interpretations and “even capture the agencies that issue them.”

By contrast, Gorsuch added, “ordinary people can do none of those things.”

They are “the ones who suffer the worst kind of regulatory whiplash” when the law changes according to bureaucratic whims.

In another case, the Court ruled that the Seventh Amendment requires jury trials for people accused of securities fraud.

The majority said the Securities and Exchange Commission had violated that right by imposing civil penalties via internal proceedings in which the agency itself served as investigator, prosecutor and judge, with only minimal independent review after the fact.

The petitioner in that case was a hedge-fund manager who was accused of lying to clients and inflating his fees.

The progressive outlet Common Dreams decried a “victory for the wealthy and powerful.”

But the SEC’s rigged process, in which the agency almost always prevailed, also affected people of modest means facing more dubious allegations.

Consider accountant Michelle Cochran, a single mother of two who was hit with a $22,500 fine and a five-year ban on practicing before the SEC after in-house proceedings in which she represented herself.

When the agency investigated her former employer, it concluded that she had “failed to complete auditing checklists,” leaving some sections blank,” although there was “no evidence” that the incomplete paperwork had caused “monetary harm to clients or investors.”

The SEC, Gorsuch noted, sought to “penalize citizens without a jury, without an independent judge, and under procedures foreign to our courts.”

That approach, he said, violated constitutional constraints that “ensure even the least popular among us has an independent judge and a jury of his peers resolve his case under procedures designed to ensure a fair trial in a fair forum.”

Defenders of the administrative state seem to assume that federal agencies inerrantly target greedy villains who bilk the unwary, undermine public safety, or threaten the environment.

But “while incursions on old rights may begin in cases against the unpopular,” Gorsuch observed, “they rarely end there.”

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine. Twitter: @jacobsullum

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/supreme-court-s-chevron-overturn-a-victory-for-the-little-guy-not-for-big-business/ar-BB1pqGuY?ocid=BingNewsSerp

....

....That is a major loss for the American national security state who wanted Assange either in a cell for the rest of his life or dead to punish him for embarrassing them and to dissuade other journalists from trying anything similar.

Instead, Assange was able to go home, kiss his wife for the first time in five years, and hold his seven—and five-year-old sons for the first time ever.

More good news came on Friday when the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron doctrine. The ruling was a major blow to the administrative state and a significant victory for liberty.

To understand what the administrative state is and how the Chevron doctrine helped build it into the monstrosity we have today, we have to go back to its beginning. In the early 1880s, after a deranged man—who thought he deserved a job in James A. Garfield’s new administration because of his work on the campaign—shot and killed the president, Congress passed the Pendleton Act.

Before the act passed, when voters chose a new president, the new administration would appoint much of the staff of the various administrative agencies and bureaucracies that comprise the executive branch. The Pendleton Act, however, made it unlawful to fire or demote most of the employees who made up these agencies. The result was the class of unelected, unappointed bureaucrats who make up the permanent government or “deep state” that stays in power, regardless of who voters send to the White House.

This special class of bureaucrats grew more powerful over the next century, but the most consequential expansion of its power came in 1984. That year, in the case of Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., the Supreme Court ruled that whenever a dispute arose between citizens and an executive agency because of ambiguous language in legislation relating to the agency’s function, the courts are to defer to the agency’s interpretation of the law.

Because politicians are more interested in passing legislation that sounds good to voters—like bills simply making the air clean or keeping Americans safe from terrorism—than in being precise, this Chevron doctrine essentially lets federal agencies interpret laws however they’d like. The courts have no choice but to accept the agency’s interpretation.

Under this Chevron precedent, the administrative state ballooned into what we have today. There are dozens of agencies staffed with over two million unelected bureaucrats who can almost never be fired by the president, intervening in all aspects of our lives—be that warping the economy to benefit themselves and their friends in industry, imposing draconian restrictions on our lives and bodies in the name of public health, or forcing us to fund overt and covert interventions abroad that often blow up in their faces and put Americans in danger—all with the legal equivalent of a blank check authorizing almost everything they want to do. But as of Friday, that blank check is no more.

Disputes over the authority of federal agencies must now be settled in court. In the short term, that could call into question the legality of much that the federal government currently does. In the longer term, this ruling will transfer power from unelected to elected government officials and force Congress to be very specific and transparent when drafting regulations. The reversal of the Chevron doctrine alone is not enough to roll back the entire administrative state and all the destruction it causes, which will continue as long as the millions of federal bureaucrats remain unfireable. Still, it is an uncharacteristically massive step in the right direction.

....

https://mises.org/mises-wire/julian-assange-chevron-doctrine-and-case-against-pessimism

READ FROM TOP.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zmvv0Om1AAw

The BRICS nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—are advocating for changes that reflect the economic realities of the 21st century. They argue that the current structures of the IMF and WTO favor developed countries and fail to represent the interests of the Global South. Key proposals include revising the IMF's quota system to give more weight to developing nations and restoring the full functionality of the WTO's dispute settlement mechanism.

In this video, we delve into the reasons behind the dissatisfaction with the IMF and WTO by examining instances where their policies have caused significant issues for borrowing countries. We also explore the solutions proposed by the Global South to address these challenges and create a fairer global economic system.

GUSNOTE: THE AI GENERATED SUBTITLES STINK...

READ FROM TOP.