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When the conversation is approached from what is commonly considered to be "discrimination," as opposed to outcomes, the framing is totally different.

The term "racial capitalism" — which is essentially this fusion of racism and capitalism — is a more effective way for us to understand those dynamics, those forces of history. I think the term "conjoined twins" allows for the recognition of racism and capitalism essentially being so closely tied together, No. 1 and No. 2.

The history of capitalism cannot be properly understood without understanding the history of racism. Racism and capitalism emerged simultaneously, they have grown together, they have ravaged together — and one day they'll ultimately die together.

By comparison, when you have a lily-white classroom with a fixed number of seats and you have a policy that effectively bars or reduces the number of white people entering the room until you get to a more equitable and representative number of people in that room, to me that's antiracist. That is a policy that leads to equity.

what if we had a conversation that is rooted in inequities and then we assess policies based on those criteria? From that premise and framework, a reasonable person cannot look at affirmative action programs and say that they are racist because the goal of such programs is to reduce racial inequity.

We should actually rethink the term "discrimination" itself. Instead of using the term "racial discrimination" and saying that that is fundamentally bad, we should actually use the terms "racist" and "antiracist discrimination."

For example, let's say you have a lily-white classroom and the policies allowing that lily-white classroom to stay lily-white involves continuously barring black people at the door. We should call that policy and discriminatory action "racist."

 In terms of principles, antiracism is the recognition that there is nothing wrong or right with any racial group

I also hope that people who are antiracist will get into positions of power at a federal level, and also at the local level, and then put into place policies that allow democracy to exist and thrive.

And because there's nothing inferior or superior about any racial group, inequities in our society must be the result of racist policies that are being supported by racist power structures and institutions or racist policymakers.

What's absolutely critical is that we should stop using the phrase and broader language of "not racist." We should stop saying, "I'm not racist," because when you use that term as someone who is opposed to Trump, and as someone who is opposed to white supremacy, you are opening the door to allowing them to use that term.

Instead of using the language of "I'm not a racist" the framing should be about antiracism. None of these real racists are saying that they are antiracists. That is how they should be challenged.

when a well-intentioned white person asks a black person for guidance about fighting racism, how do you suggest we as black folks should respond?

One of the reasons why I wrote "How to Be an Antiracist" is so I can just refer them to the book or some other expert on the topic.

I specifically refer people to the work of people who are writing on these issues because there needs to be a recognition that there are such things as experts, that there are people where these questions about racism and politics and power are their primary areas of study.

That is not the expertise of every individual black person

Now, if a black person chooses to do that work based on their knowledge, I suggest that they focus on those white people who are open-minded, who are not going to cause us to have a very difficult experience when we're essentially trying to talk to them about these issues. These white folks should also not be resistant. They should also not be defensive. They should be open-minded. Once they start being defensive, resisting or being argumentative, that is the time for us to walk away

My hope is that the antiracist movement in this country will help Trump's people and others to see what is really happening which is how the public policies they support — and not nonwhite people — are actually causing them harm.

For example, consider affirmative action policies. Detractors begin with how admissions factors are "race neutral." Then affirmative action is depicted as somehow unfairly benefiting people of color. That formulation would lead many people to believe that affirmative action is discriminating against white people. Why? Because it is commonly thought that racial discrimination is a pejorative thing. It is bad. Essentially affirmative action is "reverse racism" or "discrimination," from that point of view.

"Reverse racism" is another nonsense term in post-civil rights-era America.

Lynn Forester de Rothschild, part-owner of the Economist magazine and a director of Estée Lauder, set up the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism after deciding in 2012 that she needed to bring together top executives to try to head off the threat.

The next 10 years could easily see the words of the past 10 years turned into action, both from governments becoming more interventionist and companies doing more to try to head off political involvement in their businesses. Shareholders should brace for change.

economic output must flow either to owners of capital, in the form of profits, dividends and rents, or to labour, as wages, salaries and perks. Economists refer to this as the “capital” or “labour” share of GDP. Who has the upper hand in the post-lockdown economy?

First we calculate a high-frequency measure of the capital-labour share across 30 mostly rich countries.

In 2020 the aggregate labour share across this group soared (see chart 1). This was largely because firms continued to pay people’s wages—helped, in large part, by government-stimulus programmes—even as GDP collapsed. Advantage, labour.

More recently, however, the battle seems to have shifted in favour of capital.

most economists anyway argue that labour’s share is not a perfect gauge of economic fairness, since it is so hard to measure.

In the first camp is Britain. There, underlying wage growth is in the region of 5% a year, unusually fast by rich-world standards.

But corporations seem not to have much pricing power, meaning that they are struggling to fully offset higher costs in the form of higher prices.

Labour seems to be winning out at the expense of capital.

The second group consists of most other rich countries outside America.

There, neither labour nor capital seems able to triumph. After correcting for pandemic-related distortions Japan’s pay growth appears to be slowing to below 1% a year

Pay settlements in Italy and Spain are treading water, while wage growth in Australia, France and Germany remains well below where it was before the pandemic. Workers in these places are not really joining in with the inflationary party.

In Europe pre-tax profit margins, as measured in the national accounts, have risen in recent months but remain below where they were just before the pandemic.

In Japan the “recurring” profits before tax of large and medium-sized firms recently returned to pre-pandemic levels. The profits of smaller firms remain well below, however.

A series of unusually large stimulus payments may mean that households are able to absorb the higher prices that companies impose.

Wages are rising, but nonetheless markups are responsible for more than 70% of inflation since late 2019,

In a recent report, analysts at Bank of America argue that greater pricing power helps explain why American equities have a higher price-earnings ratio than European ones.

Some economists wonder if workers will before long demand even higher wages to compensate for higher shop prices.

easy money. In an eye-opening new book, “What Went Wrong With Capitalism,” he makes a convincing case.

“When the price of borrowing money is zero,” Sharma told me this week, “the price of everything else goes bonkers.”

To take just one example: In 2010, as the era of ultralow and even negative interest rates was getting started, the median sale price for a house in the United States hovered around $220,000. By the start of this year, it was more than $420,000.

Nowhere has inflation (in the broad sense of the term) been more evident than in global financial markets. In 1980 they were worth a total of $12 trillion — equal to the size of the global economy at the time. After the pandemic, Sharma noted, those markets were worth $390 trillion, or around four times the world’s total gross domestic product.

But the worst hit is to capitalism itself: a pervasive and well-founded sense that the system is broken and rigged, particularly against the poor and the young. “A generation ago, it took the typical young family three years to save up to the down payment on a home,” Sharma observes in the book. “By 2019, thanks to no return on savings, it was taking 19 years.”

First, there was inflation in real and financial assets, followed by inflation in consumer prices, followed by higher financing costs as interest rates have risen to fight inflation

For wealthier Americans who own assets or had locked in low-interest mortgages, this hasn’t been a bad thing. But for Americans who rely heavily on credit, it’s been devastating.

Since investors “can’t make anything on government bonds when those yields are near zero,” he said, “they take bigger risks, buying assets that promise higher returns, from fine art to high-yield debt of zombie firms, which earn too little to make even interest payments and survive by taking on new debt.”

The hit to the overall economy comes in other forms, too: inefficient markets that no longer deploy money carefully to their most productive uses, large corporations swallowing smaller competitors and deploying lobbyists to bend government rules in their favor, the collapse of prudential economic practices.

“The most successful investment strategy of the 2010s,” Sharma writes, citing the podcaster Joshua Brown, “would have been to buy the most expensive tech stocks and then buy more as they rose in price and valuation.”

In theory, easy money should have broad benefits for regular people, from employees with 401(k)s to consumers taking out cheap mortgages. In practice, it has destroyed much of what used to make capitalism an engine of middle-class prosperity in favor of the old and very rich.

The social consequence of this is rage; the political consequence is populism.

“He promised to deconstruct the administrative state but ended up adding new rules at the same pace as his predecessor — 3,000 a year,” Sharma said of Trump. “His exercise of presidential authority to personal ends shattered historic precedents and did more to expand than restrict the scope of government. For all their policy differences, both leading U.S. candidates are committed and fearless statists, not friends of competitive capitalism.”

We are wandering in fog. And the precipice is closer than we think.

“My comparison is to speed limits,” Ms. Admati said in an interview near the Stanford campus. “Basically what we have here is the market has decided nobody else should be driving faster than 70 miles an hour and these are the biggest trucks with the most explosive cargo and they are driving at almost 100 miles an hour.”

“At one level, the story on capital and liquidity ratios is very simple: From the viewpoint of the stability of the financial system, more of each is better,” he said. But the United States, he said, was constrained by practicality. If other countries aren’t willing to impose stricter capital requirements on their own banks — and they don’t appear to be — then unilateral increases would hurt the American banking industry and the broader economy.

“If you lower the speed limit on one highway, you’ll have fewer accidents on that highway,” he said. “But the other road will just get more crowded.”

Ms. Admati compares this logic to letting American manufacturers pollute so that they can compete more effectively with companies in China.

banks continue to rely on debt financing far more than other kinds of corporations. Last year, the eight largest American banks together derived less than 5 percent of their funding from shareholders, according to Thomas M. Hoenig, vice chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The average equity financing for nonfinancial corporations was about 60 percent.

Banking is the only industry subject to systematic capital regulation. Borrowing by most companies is effectively regulated by the caution of lenders. But the largest lenders to banks are depositors, who generally have no reason to be cautious because federal deposit insurance guarantees repayment of up to $250,000 even if the bank fails. This means the government, which takes the risk, must also impose the discipline.

The industry’s more serious argument is that equity is more expensive than debt. If governments require banks to raise more equity, the industry warns, the results would be higher interest rates, less lending and slower economic growth.

an increase of 10 percentage points in capital requirements would raise interest rates by 0.25 to 0.45 percentage points.

This, in the view of Ms. Admati, is a small price to pay for fewer crises. She notes that debt is cheaper than equity largely because of government subsidies — not just deposit insurance but also tax deductions for interest payments on other kinds of debt — so more equity would basically transfer costs from taxpayers to banks

the economic impact may well be positive. A study last year by Benjamin H. Cohen, an economist at the Bank for International Settlements, found that banks with more capital tended to make more loans.

Ms. Admati says large banks should be required to raise at least 30 percent of their funding in the form of equity, about six times more than the current average for the largest American banks.

she says, banks should be required to suspend dividend payments, thus increasing their equity by retaining their profits, until they are sufficiently capitalized.

She freely concedes that there is no particular science behind her 30 percent equity figure. The point, she says, is that 5 percent is the wrong ballpark. The proper baseline, in her view, is what the market imposes on other kinds of companies.

“We have too much belief that we can be precise,” she said. “I don’t mean 20 percent. I don’t mean 30 percent. I mean add a digit. I mean a lot more.”

Other measures the new city council has enacted include divestment from fossil fuels and a commitment to halving the city's greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the decade.

"The time for climate action is now, and the new city government will address climate change both locally and globally," Berg told the International Business-Times. "The reduction in pollution will make the city even better to live in, and ensure that we take our global responsibility."

Profits have soared at the expense of worker pay. The wealth of the median family today is lower than two decades ago. Life expectancy has actually fallen in the last few years. Not since 2004 has a majority of Americans said they were satisfied with the country’s direction.

“Capitalism is a brilliant factory for prosperity. Brilliant,” Georgescu says. “And yet the version of capitalism we have created here works for only a minority of people.”

e talks about the signs of frustration, in both the United States and Europe. He has seen societies fall apart, and he thinks many people are underestimating the risks it could happen again. “We’re not that far off,” he told me.

Some other business leaders are also worried about rising inequality. Warren Buffett is. So are Martin Lipton, the dean of corporate lawyers, and Laurence Fink, who runs the investment firm BlackRock. “There’s class warfare, all right,” Buffett has said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning,”

That’s why the Union Army’s first offensive action of the Civil War was to cross the Potomac into Virginia in the early morning of May 24, 1861 and capture high ground in Alexandria and Arlington, including the family estate of Confederate General Robert E. Lee (which eventually became Arlington National Cemetery). The Union infantry quickly dug the first earthen forts, Fort Runyon and Fort Corcoran, to prevent the Confederates from installing cannons that could easily strike the capital.

The formidable task of fortifying Washington, D.C. fell to Major General John Barnard, a respected Army engineer. Winkle says Barnard quickly recognized that the greatest challenge was Washington, D.C.’s sprawling layout, the result of architect Pierre L’Enfant’s ambitious grid design

Over the winter of 1861 and 1862, Barnard directed a team of Army engineers, soldiers, formerly enslaved people and prisoners of war to build the first 37 earthen forts that created a 35-mile defensive perimeter around the capital.

“This is a very precarious position,” says Winkle, adding that Washington, D.C.’s other border was with Maryland, a slave state whose loyalty to the Union was shaky at best

In between the forts were 20 miles of earth-dug trenches known as rifle pits.

During the drawn-out conflict, the Confederate Army made several sorties in the direction of Washington, D.C.—Winkle says that both the Battles of Antietam and Gettysburg were primarily designed to threaten the Union capital—but the city only suffered one direct attack.

Lincoln wanted Washington, D.C. to be continuously defended by at least 30,000 regular infantry, but that wasn’t possible in the summer of 1864 when General Ulysses S. Grant desperately needed reinforcements in Virginia. By July, only 9,000 Union troops—mostly green new recruits and disabled reserves—were left to defend the capital and the Confederacy saw a golden opportunity.

Lieutenant General Jubal A. Early led 14,000 Confederate troops across the Potomac River into Maryland and then circled around to attack the Union capital from the north. On July 11, 1864, Early’s army arrived at Fort Stevens, where Lincoln himself stood with the shaky Union forces.

The dejected Confederate general concluded that “every appliance of science and unlimited means had been used to render the fortifications around Washington as strong as possible.”

after Mr. Trump won the election that year, the world seemed to blame tech companies for his victory. The resulting “techlash” against Facebook and others caused some industry leaders to reassess their political views, a trend that continued through the social and political turmoil of the pandemic.

The start-up industry has also been in a downturn since 2022, with higher interest rates sending capital fleeing from risky bets and a dismal market for initial public offerings crimping opportunities for investors to cash in on their valuable investments.

Some investors said they were frustrated that his pick for chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, has aggressively moved to block acquisitions, one of the main ways venture capitalists make money. They said they were also unhappy that Mr. Biden’s pick for head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, had been hostile to cryptocurrency companies.

Last month, Mr. Sacks, Mr. Thiel, Elon Musk and other prominent investors attended an “anti-Biden” dinner in Hollywood, where attendees discussed fund-raising and ways to oppose Democrats,

Some also said they disliked Mr. Biden’s proposal in March to raise taxes, including a 25 percent “billionaire tax” on certain holdings that could include start-up stock, as well as a higher tax rate on profits from successful investments.

“If you keep telling someone over and over that they’re evil, they’re eventually not going to like that,” he said. “I see that in venture capital.”

Some tech investors are also fuming over how Mr. Biden has handled foreign affairs and other issues.

Mr. Andreessen, a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a prominent Silicon Valley venture firm, said in a recent podcast that “there are real issues with the Biden administration.” Under Mr. Trump, he said, the S.E.C. and F.T.C. would be headed by “very different kinds of people.” But a Trump presidency would not necessarily be a “clean win” either, he added.

Mr. Sacks said at the tech conference last week that he thought such taxes could kill the start-up industry’s system of offering stock options to founders and employees. “It’s a good reason for Silicon Valley to think really hard about who it wants to vote for,” he said.

“Tech, venture capital and Silicon Valley are looking at the current state of affairs and saying, ‘I’m not happy with either of those options,’” he said. “‘I can no longer count on Democrats to support tech issues, and I can no longer count on Republicans to support business issues.’”

Ben Horowitz, a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, wrote in a blog post last year that the firm would back any politician who supported “an optimistic technology-enabled future” and oppose any who did not. Andreessen Horowitz has donated $22 million to Fairshake, a political action group focused on supporting crypto-friendly lawmakers.

Venture investors are also networking with lawmakers in Washington at events like the Hill & Valley conference in March, organized by Jacob Helberg, an adviser to Palantir, a tech company co-founded by Mr. Thiel. At that event, tech executives and investors lobbied lawmakers against A.I. regulations and asked for more government spending to support the technology’s development in the United States.

This month, Mr. Helberg, who is married to Mr. Rabois, donated $1 million to the Trump campaign

In his 2013 paper, Burkhauser and his two co-authors have completely upended the thrust of Figures 1 and 2.

Burkhauser’s 2011 methodology worked to make the pattern appear far less extreme, as illustrated by Figure 2:

First, take a look at Figure 1, a 2011 Congressional Budget Office chart showing significant inequality in the distribution of income gains from 1979 to 2007. Many on the left consider work done by the C.B.O. to be the gold standard of inequality measurement:

If — a virtually impossible if — the economic and policy-making community were to reach even a rough consensus in support of Burkhauser’s 2013 analysis, the victory for the right would be hard to overestimate.

If Burkhauser’s approach was accepted, it would render moot the basic political and philosophical tenets of the Obama presidency

Not only would Burkhauser lay waste to a core liberal argument — inequality is worsening — but his claim that a declining share of income is going to the wealthy could be used to justify further tax cuts for the affluent in order to foster top-down investment and growt

Burkhauser et al. achieve their reversal of past income distribution data by amending the definition of income developed in their 2012 paper — “post-tax, post-transfer, size-adjusted household income including the ex-ante value of in-kind health insurance benefits” — to incorporate another accounting tool: “yearly-accrued capital gains to measure yearly changes in wealth.”

it is a game changer.

Burkhauser attempts to measure the year-to-year increase in taxpayers’ assets — stocks and bonds, housing and privately held businesses – and to count those annual increases as income. Increases in the value of such assets do not show up in tax data because they are taxed by the federal government only when the asset in question is sold and the increased value is realized as taxable gains.

The Burkhauser approach does a number of things. First, it spreads and flattens income from capital gains over the duration of ownership. For a wealthy individual who makes a huge killing selling stock or a businesses, his or her income does not spike in the year of the sale, but emerges instead as a series of yearly incremental gains.

For assets that have been held for a long time, the Burkhauser system effectively backdates much of currently realized capital gains onto earlier years. This is especially significant in calculating income gains from the current sale of assets purchased in the 1980s and 1990s, since much of the added value was acquired in those earlier decades.

I raised the following question: Is it a fair measure of a person’s well-being to include unrealized capital gains? Their house or other assets may have increased in value, but their standard of living has not changed.

The unfairness of Burkhauser’s approach is clearly acute at the bottom and middle of income distribution. The most common large asset for those on the bottom rungs is a house. Burkhauser would increase the income of those below the median lucky enough to own a home by the annual appreciation in the value of the home through 2007. For many of these families, however, selling their home is not an option. In Burkhauser’s view, their income goes up even if their living conditions remain unchanged.

Burkhauser is respected by his peers; his critics, including some friends, do not accuse him of ideological bias. In addition to A.E.I, he has received support from such center-left institutions as the Pew Foundation, Brookings Institution and the Russell Sage Foundation.

the “problem is that in such things, especially when it is a difficult task based on lots of new data sources, the devil is in the details. It’s pretty hard to judge those details without doing a substantial amount of work.” Acemoglu’s conclusion: “Bottom line: conceptually there is a valid point here, and this is a serious paper. The rest is to be determined.”

“Rich Burkhauser’s work is really the state of the art — the most important research on inequality being done, in my view,” Scott Winship, of the Brookings Institution, e-mailed me. Winship voiced some concern over the reliability of the statistical data used by Burkhauser, but concluded:All that said, I think Rich’s paper is incredibly disruptive for many fields of research in labor economics and other social sciences, and potentially it could change our entire view about rising inequality over the past few decades.

Burtless continued:The problem with the authors’ estimates of accruing capital gains is that those numbers are wholly made up based on a prediction that everyone is equally successful in finding homes, stocks, bonds and other assets to invest in.  But they’re not:  Some people are wildly successful, and get into the 1%; others are horribly unsuccessful and become paupers (or receive foreclosure papers); and most earn mediocre returns that are — surprise! — a bit lower than the economy-wide average.

Burkhauser et al. measure the period from 1989 to 2007 because those are both peak years in the business cycle. This timing results in a failure to account for the consequences of the 2008-9 financial crisis and the subsequent struggle toward recovery accompanied by persistent high levels of unemployment.

During the post-crisis years 2009-11, according to the Pew Center, the wealthiest mean of the nation saw the value of their assets grow by 28 percent, to $3.17 million from $2.48 million, while the bottom 93 percent saw their net worth drop by 4 percent, to $133,816 from $139,896.

Wealth trends since the 2008 crash, shown in Figure 5, demonstrate an extraordinary growth in inequality, suggesting that Burkhauser’s findings — restricted to his carefully tailored definition of income — are fatally flawed as an instrument to assess the current real-world position of the poor and middle class compared with the very rich:

A key purpose in measuring both wealth and income is to determine what kind of standard of living is possible for those at the top, the middle and the bottom. Do individuals, families and households have enough to provide for themselves, perhaps most importantly for their children? Do they have the financial resources to enter the highly competitive global marketplace?On that score, Burkhauser’s use of “yearly accrued capital gains” fails the test of measuring what is most significant to know in policy making and in assessing the true quality of life in America.

Meanwhile, the current account surplus fell to $33 billion in 2013 from $72 billion.

Demand for foreign currencies plays a role as Russians travel abroad more and more each year, said Mr. Pantyushin. Higher payments for corporate loans obtained abroad also contributed to the capital flight.

Thatcher said something else that's particularly interesting in this discussion. She said there's no such thing as society. There are only individuals and families. And so what we begin to see is the emergence of a kind of ethic, a survival of the fittest ethic that legitimates the most incredible forms of cruelty, that seems to suggest that freedom in this discourse of getting rid of society, getting rid of the social-- that discourse is really only about self-interest, that possessive individualism is now the only virtue that matters. So freedom, which is essential to any notion of democracy, now becomes nothing more than a matter of pursuing your own self interests

I want to echo something that FDR once said, When he said that, you know, you not only have to have personal freedoms and political freedoms, the right to vote the right to speak, you have to have social freedom. You have to have the freedom from want, the freedom from poverty, the freedom from-- that comes with a lack of health care.

How do you get a discourse governing the country that seems to suggest that anything public, public health, public transportation, public values, you know, public engagement is a pathology?

Individualize the social, which means that all problems, if they exist, rest on the shoulders of individuals.

that the government-- the larger social order, the society has no responsibility whatsoever so that-- you often hear this, I mean, if there--I mean, if you have an economic crisis caused by the hedge fund crooks, you know and millions of people are put out of work and they're all lining up for unemployment, what do we hear in the national media? We hear that maybe they don't know how to fill out unemployment forms, maybe it's about character.

I think that what we haven't seen before is an attack on the social contract, Bill, that is so overwhelming, so dangerous in the way in which its being deconstructed and being disassembled that you now have as a classic example, you have a whole generation of young people who are now seen as disposable.

young people can't turn anywhere without in some way being told that the only obligation of citizenship is to shop, is to be a consumer. You can't walk on a college campus today and walk into the student union and not see everybody represented there from the local banks to Disneyland to local shops, all selling things.

Where are the public spaces for young people other learn a discourse that's not commodified, to be able to think about non-commodifiable values like trust, justice, honesty, integrity, caring for others, compassion. Those things, they're just simply absent, they're not part of those public spheres because those spheres have been commodified.

Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism.” Why that metaphor, zombie politics? HENRY GIROUX: Because it's a politics that's informed by the machinery of social and civil death.

It's a death machine. It's a death machine because in my estimation it does everything it can to kill any vestige of a robust democracy. It turns people into zombies, people who basically are so caught up with surviving that they have no-- they become like the walking dead, you know, they lose their sense of agency-

This casino capitalism as we talk about it, right, one of the things that it does that hasn't been done before, it doesn't just believe it can control the economy. It believes that it can govern all of social life. That's different. That means it has to have its tentacles into every aspect of everyday life. Everything from the way schools are run to the way prisons are outsourced to the way the financial services are run to the way in which people have access to health care, it's an all-encompassing, it seems to me, political, cultural, educational apparatus.

as the social state is crippled, as the social state is in some way robbed, hollowed out and robbed of its potential and its capacities, what takes its place? The punishing state takes its place. You get this notion of incarceration, this, what we call the governing through crime complex where governance now has been ceded to corporations who largely are basically about benefiting the rich, the ultra-rich, the big corporations and allowing the state to exercise its power in enormously destructive and limited ways.

we kill the imagination by suggesting that the only kind of rationality that matters, the only kind of learning that matters is utterly instrumental, pragmatist. So what we do is we collapse education into training, and we end up suggesting that not knowing much is somehow a virtue. And I'll and I think what's so disturbing about this is not only do you see it in the popular culture with the lowest common denominator now drives that culture, but you also see it coming from politicians who actually say things that suggest something about the policies they'd like to implement.

Rick Santorum is not-- is kind of a, you know, an obvious figure. But when he stands up in front of a body of Republicans and he says, the last thing we need in the Republican party are intellectuals. And I think it's kind of a template for the sort of idiocy that increasingly now dominates our culture.

I think intellectuals are-- there are two ways we can describe intellectuals. In the most general sense, we can say, "Intellectuals are people who take pride in ideas. They work with ideas." I mean, they believe that ideas matter. They believe that there's no such thing as common sense, good sense or bad sense, but reflective sense.

how we learn what we learn and what we do with the knowledge that we have is not just for ourselves. It's for the way in which we can expand and deepen the very processes of democracy in general, and address those problems and anti-democratic forces that work against it.

I think the real issue here is, you know, what would it mean to begin to do at least two things?

one is to develop cultural apparatuses that can offer a new vocabulary for people, where questions of freedom and justice and the problems that we're facing can be analyzed in ways that reach mass audiences in accessible language. We have to build a formative culture

Secondly, we've got to overcome the fractured nature of these movements. I mean the thing that plagues me about progressives in the left and liberals is they are all sort of ensconced in these fragmented movements

here's the contradiction I hear in what you're saying. That if you write about a turning toward despair and cynicism in politics. Can you get movements out of despair and cynicism? Can you get people who will take on the system when they have been told that the system is so powerful and so overwhelming that they've lost their, as you call it, moral and political agency?

to be different than it is now, rather than romanticizing hope and turning it into something Disney-like, right, it really has to involve the hard work of A) recognizing the structures of domination that we have to face, B) organizing collectively and somehow to change those, and C) believing it can be done, that it's worth the struggle.

I refuse to become complicitous. I refuse to say--I refuse to be alive and to watch institutions being handed over to right wing zealots. I refuse to be alive and watch the planet be destroyed. I mean, when you mentioned-- you talk about the collective imagination, you know, I mean that imagination emerges when people find strength in collective organizations, when they find strength in each other.

But not until the Spanish conquest of Peru was the conquest of the Aztecs matched in scope by the victory over the Inca empire in 1532.

A second (and permanent) settlement was established in 1580 by Juan de Garay, who arrived by sailing down the Paraná River from Asunción (now the capital of Paraguay). He dubbed the settlement "Santísima Trinidad" and its port became "Puerto de Santa María de los Buenos Aires." The city came to be the head of the Governorate of the Río de la Plata and in 1776 elevated to be the capital of the new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata.

Spain's administration of its colonies in the Americas was divided into the Viceroyalty of New Spain 1535 (capital, México City), and the Viceroyalty of Peru 1542 (capital, Lima). In the 18th century the additional Viceroyalty of New Granada 1717 (capital, Bogotá), and Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata 1776 (capital, Buenos Aires) were established from portions of the Viceroyalty of Peru.

The motivations for colonial expansion were trade and the spread of the Catholic faith through indigenous conversions.

The Libertadores (Spanish and Portuguese for "Liberators") were the principal leaders of the Spanish American wars of independence. They were predominantly criollos (Americas-born people of European ancestry, mostly Spanish or Portuguese), bourgeois and influenced by liberalism and in some cases with military training in the mother country.

These began a movement for colonial independence that spread to Spain's other colonies in the Americas. The ideas from the French and the American Revolution influenced the efforts. All of the colonies, except Cuba and Puerto Rico, attained independence by the 1820s

In 1898, the United States won victory in the Spanish–American War from Spain, ending the Spanish colonial era

It has been estimated that in the 16th century about 240,000 Spaniards emigrated to the Americas, and in the 17th century about 500,000, predominantly to Mexico and Peru.

The population of the Native Amerindian population in Mexico declined by an estimated 90% (reduced to 1–2.5 million people) by the early 17th century. In Peru the indigenous Amerindian pre-contact population of around 6.5 million declined to 1 million by the early 17th century.[citation needed] The overwhelming cause of decline in both Mexico and Peru was infectious diseases.

The Spaniards were committed, by Royal decree, to convert their New World indigenous subjects to Catholicism. However, often initial efforts were questionably successful, as the indigenous people added Catholicism into their longstanding traditional ceremonies and beliefs. The many native expressions, forms, practices, and items of art could be considered idolatry and prohibited or destroyed by Spanish missionaries, military and civilians. This included religious items, sculptures and jewelry made of gold or silver, which were melted down before shipment to Spain.

But regardless of industry, the families investing the most in presidential politics overwhelmingly lean right, contributing tens of millions of dollars to support Republican candidates who have pledged to pare regulations; cut taxes on income, capital gains and inheritances; and shrink entitlement programs.

In marshaling their financial resources chiefly behind Republican candidates, the donors are also serving as a kind of financial check on demographic forces that have been nudging the electorate toward support for the Democratic Party and its economic policies. Two-thirds of Americans support higher taxes on those earning $1 million or more a year, according to a June New York Times/CBS News poll, while six in 10 favor more government intervention to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly seven in 10 favor preserving Social Security and Medicare benefits as they are.

The donor families’ wealth reflects, in part, the vast growth of the financial-services sector and the boom in oil and gas, which have helped transform the American economy in recent decades. They are also the beneficiaries of political and economic forces that are driving widening inequality: As the share of national wealth and income going to the middle class has shrunk, these families are among those whose share has grown.

Most of the families are clustered around just nine cities. Many are neighbors, living near one another in neighborhoods like Bel Air and Brentwood in Los Angeles; River Oaks, a Houston community popular with energy executives; or Indian Creek Village, a private island near Miami that has a private security force and just 35 homes lining an 18-hole golf course.

More than 50 members of these families have made the Forbes 400 list of the country’s top billionaires, marking a scale of wealth against which even a million-dollar political contribution can seem relatively small. The Chicago hedge fund billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin, for example, earns about $68.5 million a month after taxes, according to court filings made by his wife in their divorce. He has given a total of $300,000 to groups backing Republican presidential candidates. That is a huge sum on its face, yet is the equivalent of only $21.17 for a typical American household, according to Congressional Budget Office data on after-tax income.

“The campaign finance system is now a countervailing force to the way the actual voters of the country are evolving and the policies they want,” said Ruy Teixeira, a political and demographic expert at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

The accumulation of wealth has been particularly rapid at the elite levels of Wall Street, where financiers who once managed other people’s capital now, increasingly, own it themselves. Since 1979, according to one study, the one-tenth of 1 percent of American taxpayers who work in finance have roughly quintupled their share of the country’s income. Sixty-four of the families made their wealth in finance, the largest single faction among the super-donors of 2016.

instead of working their way up to the executive suite at Goldman Sachs or Exxon, most of these donors set out on their own, establishing privately held firms controlled individually or with partners. In finance, they started hedge funds, or formed private equity and venture capital firms, benefiting from favorable tax treatment of debt and capital gains, and more recently from a rising stock market and low interest rates

In energy, some were latter-day wildcatters, early to capitalize on the new drilling technologies and high energy prices that made it economical to exploit shale formations in North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. Others made fortunes supplying those wildcatters with pipelines, trucks and equipment for “fracking.”

The families who give do so, to some extent, because of personal, regional and professional ties to the candidates. Jeb Bush’s father made money in the oil business, while Mr. Bush himself earned millions of dollars on Wall Street. Some of the candidates most popular among ultrawealthy donors have also served in elected office in Florida and Texas, two states that are home to many of the affluent families on the list.

the giving, more broadly, reflects the political stakes this year for the families and businesses that have moved most aggressively to take advantage of Citizens United, particularly in the energy and finance industries.

The Obama administration, Democrats in Congress and even Mr. Bush have argued for tax and regulatory shifts that could subject many venture capital and private equity firms to higher levels of corporate or investment taxation. Hedge funds, which historically were lightly regulated, are bound by new rules with the Dodd-Frank regulations, which several Republican candidates have pledged to roll back and which Mrs. Clinton has pledged to defend.

And while the shale boom has generated new fortunes, it has also produced a glut of oil that is now driving down prices. Most in the industry favor lifting the 40-year-old ban on exporting oi

Hisham Abed (not his real name, for security reasons) says he and his 1980s-era Mercedes truck used to take the circuitous route described above. It took him just about six or seven hours to make the journey to Raqqa, and he liked the road because it was paved and relatively safe.

Mosul merchant Hassan Thanon (again, a pseudonym) complains that he can no longer communicate with the drivers of trucks carrying his stocks.

The new route out of Mosul heads south rather than west. Truckers drive on real roads to Tal Abtah, then take a dirt road for nearly 40 miles until they get to the Qayrawan (also known as Balij) subdistrict southwest of Mosul. There’s a paved road here, not far from the Sinjar Mountains, and from there the trucks cross into Syria.

And there are other adaptations: One driver has outfitted his truck like a mobile mechanic’s workshop, carrying tools and spare wheels so he can make repairs if they break down in the desert. He’s charging his colleagues high prices for his services.

“My truck was one of the first to travel this new route,” Abed said proudly, soon after he arrived back in Mosul after another tiring journey.

Transport costs have also increased by about 25 percent, Thanon said. “But we were only able to increase the prices of our goods a little bit because people living in Mosul can barely afford to buy anything anyway.”

Abed says he saw the results of one airstrike. Planes had hit a convoy of trucks carrying vegetables from Raqqa to Mosul; three trucks on the Syrian side of the border were burned out.

However, as Abed notes, there are no guarantees that this road will continue to be drivable.

What Bregman said, put simply, was the Davos emperors have no clothes. They talk a lot about how something must be done about inequality and the need to address social unrest, but cavil at the idea they might be a big part of the problem.

He told his audience that people in Davos talked about participation, justice, equality and transparency, but “nobody raises the issue of tax avoidance and the rich not paying their share. It is like going to a firefighters’ conference and not talking about water.”

He said he is part of a generation not traumatised by the cold war and radicalised by the financial crisis of a decade ago. “When we say what’s needed are higher taxes and the response is ‘that’s communism’, we say ‘whatever’,” he said.

“I am part of a broad social movement. Ten years ago, it would have unimaginable for some random Dutch historian to go viral when talking about taxes. Yet here we are.”

As a historian, Bregman noted the most successful period for capitalism occurred in the years after the second world war, when the top rate of tax in the US was above 90%.

“This is about saving capitalism,” he said. “Most innovation has come about through government spending. During the golden age period [after the second world war], there were way higher taxes on wealth, property, inheritance and top incomes. That’s what we need today if we are going to tame this beast called capitalism.”

“I thought that we needed historians to take the stage and explain what’s going on. When I watched the crisis on TV, the only people being interviewed were economists, and these were the guys that didn’t see it coming. I thought that we needed some historians there, so I left academia,”

He spent a year working on a left-of-centre Dutch paper before joining a new journalism platform that paid him a basic income and provided the freedom to write about anything he chose. Utopia for Realists was the result.

Bregman bridles at being called an optimist. “I prefer the word possibilist,” he said. Optimists are the sort of chief executives found at Davos, who think globalisation is working, neoliberalism is a good idea and inequality is on the decline, he added.

Since income through employment will diminish and perhaps even largely disappear where tasks are routinized, more of people’s incomes in the decades ahead should be drawn from an ownership stake in the robots and systems that displace them.

All working-age citizens should hold an equity share in the growing wealth of companies where intelligent machines drive productivity gains. One way this can be done is through national savings accounts, in which all can participate, that are invested in mutual-fund type instruments mixed with diversified venture capital pools.

If the greatest social fracture is between those who own capital and those who have to live off labor alone, then the answer to inequality is augmenting the capital of those who have gotten the short end of the stick

the primary policy response to inequality in the future economy should be fostering “universal basic capital” instead of a relying mostly on transfer payments of redistributed wealth. Increasingly, a return on capital ought to supplant sole dependence on wages and salaries

Instead of paying exorbitant taxes to fund the income of others, everyone would, in effect, be paying themselves.

This is a far deeper response to the challenges ahead than “universal basic income,” an idea many on the left embrace. As a redistributive program, it only perpetuates the structure of inequality instead of breaking it down. And it is wildly expensive

there’s a piece missing. While Zuboff’s assessment of the costs that people incur under surveillance capitalism is exhaustive, she largely ignores the benefits people receive in return — convenience, customization, savings, entertainment, social connection, and so on

hat the industries of the future will seek to manufacture is the self.

Behavior modification is the thread that ties today’s search engines, social networks, and smartphone trackers to tomorrow’s facial-recognition systems, emotion-detection sensors, and artificial-intelligence bots.

All of Facebook’s information wrangling and algorithmic fine-tuning, she writes, “is aimed at solving one problem: how and when to intervene in the state of play that is your daily life in order to modify your behavior and thus sharply increase the predictability of your actions now, soon, and later.”

“The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale,” a top Silicon Valley data scientist told her in an interview. “We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable certain behaviors are for us.”

This goal, she suggests, is not limited to Facebook. It is coming to guide much of the economy, as financial and social power shifts to the surveillance capitalists

Combining rich information on individuals’ behavioral triggers with the ability to deliver precisely tailored and timed messages turns out to be a recipe for behavior modification on an unprecedented scale.

it was Facebook, with its incredibly detailed data on people’s social lives, that grasped digital media’s full potential for behavior modification. By using what it called its “social graph” to map the intentions, desires, and interactions of literally billions of individuals, it saw that it could turn its network into a worldwide Skinner box, employing psychological triggers and rewards to program not only what people see but how they react.

spying on the populace is not the end game. The real prize lies in figuring out ways to use the data to shape how people think and act. “The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” the computer scientist Alan Kay once observed. And the best way to predict behavior is to script it.

competition for personal data intensified. It was no longer enough to monitor people online; making better predictions required that surveillance be extended into homes, stores, schools, workplaces, and the public squares of cities and towns. Much of the recent innovation in the tech industry has entailed the creation of products and services designed to vacuum up data from every corner of our lives

“The typical complaint is that privacy is eroded, but that is misleading,” Zuboff writes. “In the larger societal pattern, privacy is not eroded but redistributed . . . . Instead of people having the rights to decide how and what they will disclose, these rights are concentrated within the domain of surveillance capitalism.” The transfer of decision rights is also a transfer of autonomy and agency, from the citizen to the corporation.

What we lose under this regime is something more fundamental than privacy. It’s the right to make our own decisions about privacy — to draw our own lines between those aspects of our lives we are comfortable sharing and those we are not

Other possible ways of organizing online markets, such as through paid subscriptions for apps and services, never even got a chance to be tested.

Online surveillance came to be viewed as normal and even necessary by politicians, government bureaucrats, and the general public

Google and other Silicon Valley companies benefited directly from the government’s new stress on digital surveillance. They earned millions through contracts to share their data collection and analysis techniques with the National Security Agenc

As much as the dot-com crash, the horrors of 9/11 set the stage for the rise of surveillance capitalism. Zuboff notes that, in 2000, members of the Federal Trade Commission, frustrated by internet companies’ lack of progress in adopting privacy protections, began formulating legislation to secure people’s control over their online information and severely restrict the companies’ ability to collect and store it. It seemed obvious to the regulators that ownership of personal data should by default lie in the hands of private citizens, not corporations.

The 9/11 attacks changed the calculus. The centralized collection and analysis of online data, on a vast scale, came to be seen as essential to national security. “The privacy provisions debated just months earlier vanished from the conversation more or less overnight,”

satisfy two centrists:

desire for higher tax revenues without higher tax rates has left Democrats scrambling to make deep changes to how some levies work

straightforward result of their fragile control of Congress and the idiosyncrasies of two of their senators

failed to bring in straightforward reforms that raise revenue by enlarging the tax base

Taxing capital gains at death, as Mr Biden first proposed, would raise more than $200bn over a decade—not far off the “several hundred billion” Democrats say the tax on investment portfolios would yield

lobbyists defeated the idea

lifting the cap on an exemption from federally taxable income of money used to pay state and local taxes. Doing that would benefit the wealthy, narrow the tax base and subsidise high-tax states.

Mr Biden ignored the example of Europe. Its social spending is funded using broad-based and efficient taxes, most notably value-added tax, a levy on consumption

unfriendly to economic growth to begin with. Narrowing the target further—the capital-gains reform would apply only to billionaires and those with more than $100m in annual income sustained over three years

The failure to agree on a tax plan carries echoes of doomed Republican attempts, under Donald Trump, to “repeal and replace” the Obamacare health-insurance system.

Democrats will have to confront the fact that permanently expanding the welfare state without damaging the economy means winning an argument for higher taxes, rather than always telling voters that some rich person will pay.

it is beautifully written and a magnificent read, whether or not one follows the author all the way to his final destination in this journey of the pilgrim soul in the capitalist wilderness.

McCarraher challenges more than 200 years of post-Enlightenment assumptions about the way we live and work. He rails against “the ensemble of falsehoods that comprise the foundation of economics”, which offer “a specious portrayal of human beings and a fictional account of their history”.

Homo economicus, driven by instrumental self-interest and controlled by the power of money, is condemned as a shabby and degrading construct that betrays the truth of human experience.

After capitalism has delivered what the author describes as “two centuries of Promethean technics and its irreparable ecological impact” there must be a return to an earlier, gentler, more sacramental vision of the world; one that has a greater sense of natural limits and a restored sense of wonder at creation.

McCarraher embarks on a kind of genealogy of neoliberal morals, barrelling his way through the tracts, studies, theories and literature that have constituted the “symbolic universe” of capitalism since the Renaissance.

From the English Puritans who made money for the greater glory of God, through the machine idolatry rampant in 1920s Fordism, to the cult of the ruthless entrepreneur

capitalism is best understood, he concludes, as a secular faith. It operates through myths and dogma, just as any religion does.

Modernity is not, as Max Weber maintained, the culmination of a process of intellectual “disenchantment”, in which societies lost their sense of the sacred and embraced the rational

Instead, a different enchantment took hold of our minds; the material culture of production and consumption. “Its moral and liturgical codes are contained in management theory and business journalism,” writes McCarraher. “Its iconography consists of advertising, marketing, public relations and product design.”

This brave new era produced a “predatory and misshapen love of the world

Spiritually diminished by the commodification of things and people, and the desire to consume, we have lost sight of what the Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins described as the “dearest freshness deep down things”.

On Avarice. This work, says McCarraher, signalled a transition: the growth of commerce and banking was beginning to loosen the grip of biblical disdain for “filthy lucre”

the Florentine then makes an argument that is precociously modern, suggesting that without it, there would be “no temples, no colonnades, no palaces…”

The 17th-century Puritans are presented as a capitalist “avant garde”, driven by notions of a divine calling to turn common land into private property and then turn a profit on it

Milton mourns this sellout of the English revolution, using Paradise Lost to portray Mammon as a fallen angel, driven to blasphemous self-aggrandisement on eart

by the 20th century such satanic cunning is the new common sense in business circles

McCarraher leaves the poetry of Milton to move, via the Industrial Revolution, to the outlandish business utopias dreamed up in early 20th-century America

In February 1928, Vanity Fair caught the mood, praising Henry Ford as “a divine master-mind”

the epilogue of this mammoth portrait of the religious longings at the heart of secular materialism carries a bleak message: 20th-century fantasies of the world as one global business have been realised. Capital’s empire now extends to all corners of the world. Globalisation has built a “paradise of capital”

But Mammon is delivering an unsustainable future dominated by wage stagnation, tech-led unemployment, deepening inequality and environmental peril. As disaster looms, distraction is being sought in “a tranquillising repertoire of digital devices and myriad forms of entertainment” along with “the analgesic pleasures of consumption”.

“get back to the garden”. A new Romantic left is needed to reinhabit a sacramental imagination, which values people and things in themselves rather than as factors of production, and places collaboration over competition

recalling John Ruskin’s principle of “amazement”, which teaches that the gifts of nature should be admired and nurtured, rather than ravished and depleted

where pessimism might take hold, the author’s Christian faith gives him a trump card. For McCarraher, it is simply the case that “the Earth is a sacramental place, mediating the presence and power of God”

however obscured the truth is by a destructive lust for power and accumulation. It is simply a question of seeing things as they truly are.