Yves here. While it might seem that Larry Summers has finally faded from public life, think again! Wikipedia reports that Summers joined the board of OpenAI in November 2023. And one can be sure he\u2019d want to influence the economic policies of a Harris Administration, if not though a formal role, then though op-ed and back channels. <\/p>\n
Keep in mind that Summers has one of the leaders of the hawkish view of our current inflation, which Americans have been dutifully told has been tamed, even if many are still suffering from higher prices. A snapshot of this views from 2022: History Shows No Example of Hiking US Rates Too Fast, Summers Says<\/a>.<\/p>\n In fact, as Dutch economist Servaas Storm showed over several papers, carefully parsing data, our inflation is due largely if not entirely to a reduction in supply: the impact of Covid on the workforce and supply chains and sanctions blowback<\/a>. Biden deficits may have come to play a role, but Summers\u2019 notion that too much demand caused the inflation meant his call for Fed interest rate hikes was administering the wrong medicine. <\/p>\n So Mark Ames\u2019 hardy perennial, which he wrote for our first fundraiser thirteen years ago, remains an important warning. <\/p>\n While this is our analogue to Christmas staples like The Grinch That Stole Christmas or It\u2019s a Wonderful Life. Ames\u2019 piece is the antithesis of sappy. Ames also explains one of the reasons the left is so bad at power: its adherents saw finance as grubby and thus not worth of study. <\/p>\n And in the spirit of Christmas coming early, we hope you\u2019ll leave something nice in our stocking, um, Tip Jar<\/a>! <\/p>\n By Mark Ames, author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan\u2019s Workplaces to Clinton\u2019s Columbine<\/a><\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n If you\u2019ve been reading Naked Capitalism for any period of time without giving back in donations\u2014and most of us have been hooked from the time we discovered Yves Smith\u2019s powerful, sharp voice and brilliant mind\u2014then you you\u2019ve been getting away with murder. Naked Capitalism is that rare blog that makes you smarter. Smarter about a lot of things, but primarily about Yves\u2019 area of expertise, finance.<\/p>\n By a quirk of historical bad luck, the American Left has gone two generations without understanding finance, or even caring to understand. It was the hippies who decided half a century ago that finance was beneath them, so they happily ceded the entire field\u2014finance, business, economics, money\u2014otherwise known as \u201cpolitical power\u201d\u2014to the other side. Walking away from the finance struggle was like that hitchhiker handing the gun back to the Manson Family. There\u2019s a great line from Charles Portis\u2019s anti-hippie novel, \u201cDog of the South\u201d that captures the Boomers\u2019 self-righteous disdain for \u201cfigures\u201d:<\/p>\n He would always say\u2014boast, the way those people do\u2014that he had no head for figures and couldn\u2019t do things with his hands, slyly suggesting the presence of finer qualities.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n That part about the hands\u2014that would refer to the hippies\u2019 other great failure, turning their backs on Labor, because Labor didn\u2019t groove with the Hippies\u2019 Culture War. So the Left finds itself, fifty years later, dealing with the consequences of all those years of ruinous neglect of finance and labor\u2014the consequences being powerlessness and political impotence.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why Yves Smith is so important to anyone who cares about politics and the bad direction this country is taking. In 2008, the Left suddenly discovered that although it could bray with the best of \u2018em about how bad foreign wars are, and how wrong racism and sexism an homophobia are, it was caught completely and shamefully by surprise by the financial collapse of 2008. The ignorance was paralyzing, politically and intellectually. Even the lexicon was alien. Unless of course you were one of the early followers of Yves Smith\u2019s blog.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t always this way.<\/p>\n Back in the 1930s, the Left was firmly grounded in economics, money and finance; back then, the Left and Labor were practically one. With a foundation in finance and economics, the Left understood labor and political power and ideology and organization much better than the Left today, which at best can parry back the idiotic malice-flak that the Right specializes in spraying us with. We\u2019re only just learning how politically stunted and ignorant we are, how much time and knowledge we\u2019ve lost, and how much catching up we have to do.<\/p>\n Which is why Yves Smith\u2019s Naked Capitalism is one of the 99%\u2019s most valuable asset in the long struggle ahead: She is both analyst and educator, with a rare literary talent (especially for finance). One thing that\u2019s protected the financial oligarchy is the turgid horrible prose that they camouflage their toxic ideas and concepts in. Yves is one of the rare few who can make reading finance as emotionally charged as it needs to be.<\/p>\n Naked Capitalism is our online university in finance and politics and ideology. Whereas other online universities are set up to turn millions of gullible youths into debt-shackled Wall Street feeding cows, Naked Capitalism is the opposite: Completely free, consistently brilliant, vital, and necessary, making us smarter, teaching us how we might one day overthrow the financial oligarchy. One other difference between Naked Capitalism and online university swindles: (Stanley Kaplan cough-cough!) Your donations won\u2019t end up paying Ezra Klein\u2019s salary.<\/p>\n Which brings me back to my whole \u201cShame on you!\u201d point I was trying to make earlier. When it comes to fundraising, nothing works like shaming. That\u2019s how those late-night commercials work: You\u2019re sitting there in your nice comfortable home, and then suddenly there\u2019s this three-legged dog hobbling into its cage, with big wet eyes, and then some bearded pedophile comes on and says, \u201cPoor Rusty has endured more abuse and pain than you can ever imagine, and tomorrow, he will be gassed to death in a slow, horrible poison death chamber. And you\u2014look at you, sitting there with your Chunky Monkey and your central heating, what kind of sick bastard are you? Get your goddamn Visa Mastercard out and send money to Rusty, or else his death is on your head. I hope you sleep well at night.\u201d<\/p>\n Now I know that this sort of appeal wouldn\u2019t work on the Naked Capitalism crowd\u2014too many economists here, and as everyone knows, you can\u2019t appeal to economists\u2019 hearts because, well, see under \u201cLarry Summers World Bank Memo\u201d\u2026 I can imagine Larry watching that late night commercial with the three-legged dog, powering a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke and devouring a bag of Kettle Salt & Vinegar potato chips, calculating the productive worth of the three-legged dog, unmoved by the sentimental appeal. Larry grabs a dictaphone: \u201cItem: How to end dog-gassings? Solution: Ship all three-legged stray dogs to sub-Saharan Africa. Africans won\u2019t even notice. Dogs saved. Private capital freed up. Problem solved.\u201d<\/p>\n So some of you have no hearts, and some of us have no shame. But we all do understand how vital Naked Capitalism has been in educating us. I\u2019m sure that the other side knows how dangerous a site like this is, because as we become more educated and more political, we become more and more of a threat.<\/p>\n The oligarchy has spent decades on a project to \u201cdefund the Left,\u201d and they\u2019ve succeeded in ways we\u2019re only just now grasping. \u201cDefunding the Left\u201d doesn\u2019t mean denying funds to the rotten Democratic Party; it means defunding everything that threatens the 1%\u2019s hold on wealth and power.<\/p>\n One of their greatest successes, whether by design or not, has been the gutting of journalism, shrinking it down to a manageable size where its integrity can be drowned in a bathtub. It\u2019s nearly impossible to make a living as a journalist these days; and with the economics of the journalism business still in free-fall like the Soviet refrigerator industry in the 1990s, media outlets are even less inclined to challenge power, journalists are less inclined to rock the boat than ever, and everyone is more inclined to corruption (see: Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly). A ProPublica study in May put it in numbers: In 1980, the ratio of PR flaks to journalists was roughly 1:3. In 2008, there were 3 PR flaks for every 1 journalist. And that was before the 2008 shit hit the journalism fan.<\/p>\n This is what an oligarchy looks like. I saw the exact same dynamic in Russia under Yeltsin: When he took power in 1991, Russia had the most fearless and most ideologically diverse journalism culture of any I\u2019ve ever seen, a lo-fi, hi-octane version of American journalism in the 1970s. But as soon as Yeltsin created a class of oligarchs to ensure his election victory in 1996, the oligarchs snapped up all the free media outlets, and forced out anyone who challenged power, one by one. By the time Putin came to power, all the great Russian journalists that I and Taibbi knew had abandoned the profession for PR or political whoring. It was the oligarchy that killed Russian journalism; Putin merely mopped up a few remaining pockets of resistance.<\/p>\n The only way to prevent that from happening to is to support the best of what we have left. Working for free sucks. It can\u2019t hold, and it won\u2019t.<\/p>\n There are multiple ways to give. The first is here on the blog, the Tip Jar<\/a>, which takes you to PayPal. There you can use a debit card, a credit card or a PayPal account (the charge will be in the name of Aurora Advisors).<\/p>\n You can also send a check (or multiple post dated checks) in the name of Aurora Advisors Incorporated to<\/p>\n Aurora Advisors Incorporated Please also send an e-mail to yves@nakedcapitalism.com with the headline \u201cCheck is in the mail\u201d (and just the $ en route in the message) to have your contribution included in the running tally of donations.<\/p>\n\n
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