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From all the press coverage over the weekend, you would think that Paul Ryan was at the top of the Republican ticket. For those of us who have been having an intellectual battle with Libertarians for the past few years, it seems like this election might really be a referendum on the Koch Brothers Anarcho-Capitalist philosophy. Certainly Ryan is their favorite politician and water carrier as the Times points out this morning.

Less well-known are Mr. Ryan’s close ties to the donors and activists who have channeled Tea Party anger into a $400 million political machine, financed by a network of conservative and libertarian donors that now rivals, and occasionally challenges, the Republican establishment behind Mr. Romney.

Mr. Ryan is one of a very few elected officials who have attended the Kochs’ biannual conferences, where wealthy donors sit in on seminars on runaway government spending and the myths of climate change.

But it would be a mistake to focus on just Ryan’s efforts to bring an Ayn Randian philosophy to government where the Vice President would lecture the welfare “looters and moochers” in the language of John Galt, “We have no demands to present you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.” Ryan’s view of America as the continuing unpaid policeman of the world is pure Neocon, as the Wall Street Journal points out with pride this morning in a piece called “Paul Ryan’s Neocon Manifesto”.

Also, that he believes in free trade, a strong defense, engagement with our allies—and expectations of them. Also, that he wants America to stay and win in Afghanistan. Furthermore, that he supports the “arduous task of building free societies,” even as he harbored early doubts the Arab Spring was the vehicle for building free societies.

It tells us also that Mr. Ryan has an astute understanding of the fundamental challenge of China. “The key question for American policy makers,” he said, “is whether we are competing with China for leadership of the international system or against them over the fundamental nature of that system.”

But as Ronald Reagan’s Budget Director David Stockman points out this morning, the Ryan-Romney continuation of Neocon vision is a one way trip to nowhere.

Mr. Ryan professes to be a defense hawk, though the true conservatives of modern times — Calvin Coolidge, Herbert C. Hoover, Robert A. Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, even Gerald R. Ford — would have had no use for the neoconconservative imperialism that the G.O.P. cobbled from policy salons run by Irving Kristol’s ex-Trotskyites three decades ago. These doctrines now saddle our bankrupt nation with a roughly $775 billion “defense” budget in a world where we have no advanced industrial state enemies and have been fired (appropriately) as the global policeman.

Indeed, adjusted for inflation, today’s national security budget is nearly double Eisenhower’s when he left office in 1961 (about $400 billion in today’s dollars) — a level Ike deemed sufficient to contain the very real Soviet nuclear threat in the era just after Sputnik. By contrast, the Romney-Ryan version of shrinking Big Government is to increase our already outlandish warfare-state budget and risk even more spending by saber-rattling at a benighted but irrelevant Iran.

Ryan may be put forth as the soul of midwestern Catholic probity, but even in this pose, questions are being raised.

Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential running mate, sold stock in US banks on the same day he attended a confidential meeting where top level officials disclosed the sector was heading for a deep crisis.

The congressman on Monday denied profiting from information gleaned from the meeting on 18 September 2008 when Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, then treasury secretary Hank Paulson and others outlined their fears for the banking sector. His office said he had no control over the trades.

Public records show that on the same day as the meeting, Ryan sold stock in troubled banks including Wachovia and Citigroup and bought shares in Goldman Sachs, Paulson’s old employer and a bank that had been disclosed to be stronger than many of its rivals.

If Ryan’s excuse that this was not insider trading was that the trades were executed by his representative, can he swear that he had no communication with that representative after the meeting with Bernanke and Paulson? Ryan has boasted that he is an active investor and trader. Why all of a sudden does he act like his assets are in a blind trust? He will need to answer these questions.

As I said at the top, I welcome the addition of Ryan to the ticket. Romney was a total mushburger on policy, hoping to coast to the Presidency on Obama animosity. He realized that strategy was not working and has now thrown his fate to the ideas and pocketbook of the Koch Brothers. The election will decide whether we live in a democracy or an oligarchy;in a 21st Century world or a 19th Century fantasy.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the anomie that enveloped me when I attended the Aspen Ideas Festival. The sense that what was taking place in our economy and society was the effect of forces outside our control. The term used for this notion is globalization. So yesterday the New York Times put out a long piece about how through a combination of carrots and sticks we had gotten the Japanese auto manufacturers to put plants in America and hire American workers. The article asked this question.

For years, high-tech executives have argued that the United States cannot compete in making the most popular electronic devices. Companies like Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard, which rely on huge Asian factories, assert that many types of manufacturing would be too costly and inefficient in America. Only overseas, they have said, can they find an abundance of educated midlevel engineers, low-wage workers and at-the-ready suppliers.

But the migration of Japanese auto manufacturing to the United States over the last 30 years offers a case study in how the unlikeliest of transformations can unfold. Despite the decline of American car companies, the United States today remains one of the top auto manufacturers and employers in the world. Japanese and other foreign companies account for more than 40 percent of cars built in the United States, employing about 95,000 people directly and hundreds of thousands more among parts suppliers.

I posted the article on my Facebook page and got this rant back from John Papola.

Why should the corrupt crony thugs in DC prevent Americans from trading with other people just because of some stupid line on a map. The “globalization gospel” is called “freedom” and “free exchange” and its the roots of western civilization. Are you seriously proposing mercantilism? The 17th century called. It wants it’s defunct doctrines back.

But my response to John is that his vision of freedom in America is a mirage. In the U.S. those with power use it to insulate themselves from competitive forces by winning favorable tax treatment and other forms of what economists call “rent seeking.” I reject the notion that all of these changes that make it so hard to find jobs for people without college educations, are just the inevitable forces of technological change. Globalization was a choice on the part of capital to weaken the bargaining power of workers by using outsourcing. As the auto “insourcing” model proves, there is no inherent reason why U.S. workers can’t be just as productive as Asian workers. Because the Reagan administration (and every one to follow) made it easy for companies to close down factories and move jobs offshore, the rent seekers triumphed.

The irony of course is that I know John Papola hates rent seeking crony capitalism as much as I do. For a liberal like myself, it is anguishing that both Clinton and Obama have been just as obsequious to the wishes of Wall Street as Reagan, Bush 1 and 2. What we need is a new reform politics that will combine elements of market choice (such as our discussion on school vouchers) with a simple set of regulations that bring the extraordinary power of capital to heel. We will still need a smart government to build the roads, run the police and fire departments and provide a social safety net. My guess is that the Democrats are less in the bag to the 1% than the Republicans and so they are better positioned to be the messengers of reform. As I have said before, cashiering Tim Geithner and hiring Joe Stiglitz would be a good start for Obama’s second term.

I don’t often do book reviews, but having just finished Luigi Zingales’ book, A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity, I think it is worth writing about. For the last four years I have suggested that there might be common ground between liberals and libertarians. But every time I have tried to advance the notion, either the liberals have savaged the idea or the libertarians have complained of half steps and put forth their “anarcho-capitalist” solution, which is just plain stupid. Zingales offers a middle ground.

Zingales is a free market Professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and his main fear is that Crony Capitalism is destroying the competitive nature of America’s economic system. He believes that government has an important role to play in society, but that as corporations become more dominant in financing politics, they “capture” the regulators who are supposed to control them. Similarly, the corporations lobby the congress to put through special subsidies for their industry, thus distorting competition. Zingales sees the cronyism on both sides of the political aisle, such as when Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin lobbied hard to get the Glass-Stegall Act repealed, in order to help Citigroup, which had already violated the law.

Rubin left the Treasury in July 1999, the day after the House passed its version of the bill by a bipartisan vote of 343 to 86. Three months later, on October 18, 1999, Rubin was hired at Citigroup at a salary of $15 million a year, without any operating responsibility. It is hard not to see the connection between these two events.

Zingales’ prescriptions for fixing this mess are pretty straight forward. Cut all government subsidies and special tax breaks to corporations. Eliminate all tax deductions for individuals, which “would reduce the marginal tax rate for all taxpayers by at least five percentage points, except for taxpayers making more than $500,000, who would see their marginal tax rate unchanged. Use Pigouvian taxes to correct distorted incentives and negative externalities. Examples of this are a progressive tax on payments to lobbyists by corporations; a tax on short term debt held by financial institutions (which he believed caused the 2008 crisis) and a tax on pollution flowing from industry.

It is on various social policies that liberals will find Zingales pushing them into uncomfortable areas. On K-12 education he advocates a progressive voucher system. All schools would have to compete for all children with schools getting paid more to take on under privileged kids. If schools hired bad teachers, they would face the possibility of going out of business. I for one think this idea is worth trying. The K-12 system is so screwed up in this country, we really need to shake it up and perhaps vouchers is the way. But it is in the area of healthcare that I find Zingales ignoring the obvious because of his attachment to the free market. He says that the reason American per capita healthcare costs are so out of control is that “healthcare, unlike most goods and services, is not purchased in a free market.” What this ignores is that the per capita healthcare costs that are so much lower in every other developed nation are directly accountable to their adoption of a single payer system that has the muscle to negotiate with doctors, hospitals and drug companies.

Ultimately taking on Crony Capitalism should be the main task of the next era of reform. Both political parties are so beholden to the corporation that this seems like an almost impossible task. Perhaps we have to start with getting the money out of politics as proposed by Larry Lessig’s Rootstrikers campaign. I know the Republicans are too in the bag to big business to take this on, but if Obama gets a second term, his first act should be to fire Tim Geithner and hire someone like Joe Stieglitz. That would send an unmistakeable message.

When a religious fundamentalist suffers a “crisis of faith” it is a mournful incident to witness. Such was the occasion when Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve appeared before Congress in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008. The man who had singlehandedly carried the faith of “the rational market” confessed that, “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in their firms.”

The revelations around the fraudulent LIBOR fix that are beginning to come forth have been greeted with half the outrage heaped on Bernard Madoff two years ago. Some would suggest that the reason Madoff seems to be the only corrupt financier behind bars is that he stole from the 1%, while the fixers at Barclays and the other banks that manipulated the $360 Trillion derivatives market got away with a mere dismissal and most of their bonuses intact. Eduardo Porter suggests the real reason for our non-chalance.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Libor scandal is how familiar it seems. Sure, for some of the world’s leading banks to try to manipulate one of the most important interest rates in contemporary finance is clearly egregious. But is that worse than packaging billions of dollars worth of dubious mortgages into a bond and having it stamped with a Triple-A rating to sell to some dupe down the road while betting against it? Or how about forging documents on an industrial scale to foreclose fraudulently on countless homeowners?

What is so shocking is that most of what purports to be mainstream economic theory today is based on this notion of rational choice theory. The whole Potemkin Village of Libertarian Free Market theory is based on a concept that takes no account of the tendency of “rational actors” to cheat if they think they can get away with it. Porter again.

Company executives are paid to maximize profits, not to behave ethically. Evidence suggests that they behave as corruptly as they can, within whatever constraints are imposed by law and reputation. In 1977, the United States Congress passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, to stop the rampant practice of bribing foreign officials. Business by American multinationals in the most corrupt countries dropped. But they didn’t stop bribing. And American companies have been lobbying against the law ever since.

Extrapolating from frauds that were uncovered during and after the dot-com bubble, the economists Luigi Zingales and Adair Morse of the University of Chicago and Alexander Dyck of the University of Toronto estimated conservatively that in any given year a fraud was being committed by 11 to 13 percent of the large companies in the country.

This is the basic flaw in the Republican argument that we need less regulation of the financial markets. As Simon Johnson wrote this morning, The Market Has Spoken and It is Rigged. This is the torch the Democrats must carry from now until the election. Mitt Romney is the poster child for Savage Capitalism. His election would signal the end of democracy and the beginning of Oligarchy.

When my flight from Los Angeles touched down in Aspen, Colorado I counted 80 private jets parked at the airport. I had come for the annual Aspen Ideas Festival and what follows is a critique written with some affection for the institution but with the full knowledge that I may never be invited to speak there.

Aspen aspires to be an American Davos–a meeting in the mountains of top government policy makers, important pundits, authors and academics; all interacting with the corporate elite. Thus the enormous private jet fleet. It seemed to this first time attendee that the whole program was built on three suppositions.

1. That the economics of globalization are as inevitable as water flowing downhill on Frying Pan River.
2. That technological innovation is the salvation of society.
3. That American politics are so polarized that nothing can be accomplished at a national level.

These assumptions lead to a kind of philosophy of inevitability. Leadership is reduced to management and so problems really can’t be solved, they can just be managed. The pundits, politicians and managers on the stages of Aspen are there to tell us they know how to manage through crisis. This leaves the audience feeling as if there are no choices left other than the personal choice between eating steak or fish, wearing khakis or Levis, buying a Gulfstream or a Bombardier corporate jet. The notion of the political choice of fundamentally changing our society seems to be in the realm of the Higgs Particle. Does such a choice really exist and if so, how would we know?

On the stage the pundit interviewers were obsequiously polite with the politicians. Gillian Tett of the Financial Times never bothered to ask Larry Summers if he regretted eliminating Glass-Steagel at the behest of Citibank’s Sandy Weill. Charlie Rose sat mute as Mitch Daniels poured forth Romney talking points about how government regulation inevitably inhibits growth and how Obamacare was a tax on all Americans. The Atlantic’s David Bradley never challenged Pervez Musharraf’s assertion that military Coups were necessary to save Pakistan’s fragile and corrupt democracy. Tom Friedman allowed Ehud Barak to ramble on for minutes on why Iran’s joining the nuclear club would be different than any other previous nuclear aspirant, despite convincing evidence to the contrary by Kenneth Waltz in this month’s Foreign Affairs. Read more…

I have to say this was a good day for the President. Not only was his health care plan declared constitutional, but also some signs of a true long lasting economic recovery are beginning to fall into place.

First to the Affordable Care Act. I think Roberts’ vote was the true mark of a great Chief Justice. He saw that his court was deeply in danger of becoming totally politicized and a tool of the Republican Party. I think he truly believe Congress has the power to tax and since Obama had made that as a back up argument to the Commerce Clause, he seized on it. Beyond that, I think it secures Obama’s place in history besides FDR (Social Security) and LBJ (Medicare).

Beyond healthcare I was struck by two articles in this morning’s paper. The first was on housing.

But roughly six years after the housing market began its longest and deepest slide since the Great Depression, a growing number of experts and people who actually put money into housing believe the end has come.The trend is clear in the data. The widely respected S.&P./Case-Shiller index reported earlier this week that sales prices for existing homes rose in April for the first time this year. Several other measures, including a seasonally adjusted version of the index, show that price increases began in February. The pace of housing construction has increased. And the National Association of Realtorssaid Wednesday that pending home sales climbed to the highest level since the end of a federal tax credit for first-time buyers in September 2010.

It may be anecdotal, but you certainly feel in LA that the market has turned around. This would be a critical part of a sustained recovery. Read more…

Adelson and Milken

As I wrote a couple of months ago, I suspect that the shadow figure of Mike Milken, the convicted felon banker of the late 80′s is working hard with his minions to get his former client Mitt Romney elected. Yesterday, the Boston Globe surfaced the story in the MSM.

Romney, meanwhile, once referred to the deal as emanating from “the glorious days of Drexel Burnham,” saying, “it was fun while it lasted,” in a little-noticed interview with American Banker magazine.

The “glorious” part, for Romney at least, was that he used junk-bond financing to turn a $10 million investment into a $175 million profit for himself, his partners, and his investors. It marked a turning point for Romney, according to Marc Wolpow, a former Drexel employee who was involved in the deal and later was hired by Romney to work at Bain Capital.

“Mitt, I think, spent his life balanced between fear and greed,” Wolpow said. “He knew that he had to make a lot of money to launch his political career. It’s very hard to make a lot of money without taking some kind of reputational risk along the way. It’s just hard to do. It doesn’t mean you have to do anything illegal or immoral, but you often have to take reputational risk to make money.”

But there is a far darker tale to be told of the influence of the former Junk Bond King on our current Presidential race. If I was to tell you that the current Republican Presidential nominee and the four largest contributors to Republican Super Pacs are all intimately tied to one convicted felon banker, would you not think it some sort of Oliver Stone conspiracy movie?

But it is true. Mike Milken is responsible for the billion dollar fortunes of Sheldon Adelson, Harold Simmons and Ken Griffin, the top three Super Pac donors. In addition both Rupert Murdoch and David Koch were clients of Milken and Koch serves as Chairmen of the Board of Milken’s Prostate Cancer charity.

I have no idea what Milken’s mission is other than his belief that banking and environmental regulations are “harmful to capital formation” and his steadfast support of Likud party politics in Israel. I know he has tried with both Clinton and Bush to get a pardon without success.

Is the fact that Milken was responsible for the fortunes of both the candidate and his main corporate sponsors mere coincidence or something more sinister?

I wrote this In June when Koch was first starting to push his boy Paul Ryan towards Romney
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On a week when President Obama is being accused of being out of touch, its probably important to understand just how radically “out of touch” the Republican Kingmaker Charles Koch really is. It is Koch who has wanted Obama gone from Inauguration Day and unless you understand the nature of the opposition, you will never understand the fight ahead of us.

In the summer of 1974 Koch established the Charles Koch Foundation with the help of Murray Rothbard, a Professor of economics at the New York University campus in Brooklyn. At the time, Koch was Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, the second largest privately held firm in the United States. At Rothbard’s suggestion they changed the name of the foundation to The Cato Institute in July of 1976. Rothbard was an early associate of Ayn Rand, hailing her book Atlas Shrugged, as “not merely the greatest novel ever written, it is one of the very greatest books ever written, fiction or nonfiction.” It is in Rand’s hero John Galt that we find the roots of the libertarian belief that a great society is ruled by a class of Nietzschian supermen (the givers), and that most of the society (the takers) free rides on their work. “We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but have only now understood it,” Galt lectures the “looters” and “moochers” who make up the populace. “We have no demands to present you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.”

Rand’s novel, cited by Charles Koch and many other libertarians as the book that changed their lives, was the basis for a new philosophy, Objectivism, that shunned both religion and the Lockean liberal politics of the Founders for a new view that man’s sole purpose is to pursue his own self-interest. But by 1958, long before he was hired by Koch, Rothbard had begun to go beyond Objectivism into a philosophy that he named “anarcho-capitalism”. Rothbard considered that government was the greatest danger to liberty and the state “was nothing but a gang of thieves writ large.” The solution was to get rid of the state: anarchism. Rothbard wrote, “Capitalism is the fullest expression of anarchism, and anarchism is the fullest expression of capitalism.” He argued that taxation represents coercive theft on a grand scale, and “a compulsory monopoly of force” prohibiting the more efficient voluntary procurement of defense and judicial services from competing suppliers. For Charles Koch this was a philosophy that fit perfectly with his view that the government was the one force impeding the growth of his businesses, many of which were “plagued” by the Environmental Protection Agency for polluting the water and air. As to how the society would enforce order without a government the anarcho-capitalists had a solution as well. Competing insurance companies would have private security forces that would protect the property of their customers. Rothbard argued this would lower prices for police services because of private market competition. Just how two competing “Insurance Militias” might resolve a property dispute was never specified.

Read more…

I’ve been thinking about this fiscal cliff all the pundits are warning us against. Since the election of Ronald Reagan the country has made two profoundly damaging mistakes. It has continually raised the Defense Budget, thereby robbing our education system and basic infrastructure (roads, bridges, broadband, etc) of the needed funding and dragging us down to second world status in those areas. The second mistake was to cut taxes on the top five percent. As Nick Hanauer’s astonishing Ted Talk (which was censored by TED until the outrage grew too loud) shows, this move to cut taxes on the 1% by both Reagan and Bush II was destructive beyond belief to our country.

So now if Congress DOES NOTHING in the next six months, both those disastrous mistakes will be fixed in ONE DAY, January 1, 2013. On that day the Bush Tax Cuts will disappear for good, and the Sequester (along with previously agreed upon cuts) will take at least $1 trillion out of the Defense Budget in the next ten years.

Why are Progressives and Libertarians not cheering for this to happen? It would quickly solve the deficit problem as Ezra Klein points out in this chart. Letting the Tax cuts expire and the Sequester go through is called the Extended Baseline Scenario in this Chart.

The Chart on the lower right, is what Mitt Romney and the Republican’s want. Now I am aware that the Keynesian effect of taking a lot of government spending (on planes and missiles) out of the economy might cause a recession and that’s probably why Bill Clinton said the stupid thing about the tax cuts this week. Quite honestly, a couple of quarters of flat growth to address the two biggest mistakes of the Conservative era and put our fiscal house in order, would be worth it.

It has been my contention since 2007 that global capitalism was entering a period of stagnation that could not be cured by the temporary fix of lowering interest rates. Yesterday’s grim unemployment report in the U.S. only compounded the problems in the rest of the world.

The report on American jobs added to the global pall that has deepened with Europe’s debt crisis and slowing growth in China and India. Global financial markets, weak in early trading on Friday, sank further on the report. The Dow Jones industrial average lost 2.22 percent, or 274.88 points, wiping out its gains for the year, and the main index of the German stock market closed down 3.4 percent.

The American economy since Ronald Reagan first started to push Supply Side economics (sometimes know as trickle-down economics) has increasingly skewed gains to the top 1% and flattened middle and lower class wages. In such an atmosphere the engine of consumer spending could only be fueled by easy consumer credit mixed with aggressive marketing efforts—the classic “keeping up with the Jones’s” routine. Fiscal stimulus depended mostly on aggressive military spending which seemed to grow even in the face of the collapse of the Soviet empire. The financial sector, which was once restricted to aiding the manufacturing economy, gradually became the driving force in the economy. Speculative finance became so important to keeping the dogs of depression at bay, that the Lender of Last resort–The Fed–essentially ended up becoming the backstop to the most egregious kind of derivative trading, pouring hundreds of billions into Wall Street investment banks. Read more…