Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
I was recently invited to give a talk about "young people and the election" by the fraternity of business majors at Frostburg State University, Delta Sigma Pi and did so on Thursday evening, March 3rd. I was surprised by the invitation, which came about because some members live near me, are aware of what I write about at the Daily Kos as BillofRights, and were also kind enough to help shovel out my parking area after January's 34" snowfall.
The fraternity itself has an interesting history, founded at NYU in NY City in the early 20th century, by some recent immigrant students, who felt they were outsiders of a business "establishment." That surprised me. Here at www.deltasigmapi.org and en.wikipedia.org/...
Of course, I was a bit leery of the likely gap between my dissenting economic (and environmental views) and what these students were hearing and reading in their classrooms, and I was half expecting a faculty advisor or professor or two to attend to monitor "the heretic." So I spent a week thinking about what I would say, determined to keep the presentation informal, not a speech, and not a campaign endorsement, watching the students' eyes and expressions for boredom, incomprehension and more likely, ideas and terms which they had simply never encountered before. Fortunately, they were polite and attentive, and seemed interested in the alternative narrative, which began with an occupational bio and a description of the shattered economic world I had entered when I graduated from college in 1972, the years which ended the American "Golden Decades" and the Bretton Woods Agreement. Sorry Ted Cruz, we left the gold standard between 1971 and 1973, and were right to do so.
Because this election is turning upon voters' perceptions of the economy, and economic pain, I thought it wise to explain the differences between the two parties, the different factions within the parties, and the origins of the terms neoliberalism and austerity, the two words which best describe the reigning philosophy under which we all live.
I have often wondered to myself: when was the last time, either at FSU, or the Western Maryland region, that citizens had a chance to hear a serious debate about the American economy, between not just the Center and Right, but the forgotten left, the side of the spectrum that has no place at CNN (unless one wants to include Van Jones) nor, as best as I can judge, within the minds of the journalists from any network asking the candidates the questions. Nor do I remember any back during my nine years in Montgomery County, the liberal "Utopia." That's exactly what Sheldon Wolin meant in his book, listed below, Democracy Inc.
I won't bore you with all the details, but I did want to share a one pager I prepared to leave with the students, the books and essays which have shaped my thinking about economics: political economy. I did try to rank them in the order of importance and influence upon my thinking, and the list could easily be 35 instead of 25, and with some swapping in and out upon further reflection.
I might have added in the following, or pushed others out: Richard Smith, Green Capitalism: The God that Failed (2014); Van Jones, The Green Collar Economy (2008); L. Randall Wray's Modern Monetary Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems (2012); Daniel Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976); Michael Harrington's Socialism (1972); Donald Worster's Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (1977); James Gustave Speth's The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (2008); and a book I'm currently reading, borrowed from the FSU library because I can't afford to buy them new or used anymore, Kirstin Downey's The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience (2009).
And finally, and perhaps I should have added this magazine article to the student's list, William Greider's Why Was Paul Krugman So Wrong? From April 1, 2013 in The Nation magazine. Krugman launched a sustained personal and intellectual attack upon Greider's book about trade and Globalization, One World Ready or Not (2007) which I did list for the students, and Krugman did so in the same arrogant tone with which he just recently attacked economist Gerald Friedman's running the numbers on Bernie Sanders' policies. According to Krugman, Greider was a mere journalist, didn't have mathematical models to support his observations and conclusion, and shouldn't be listened too - despite the fact that he had written the book on the Federal Reserve, Secrets of the Temple (1987) and later, his predictions of economic troubles have come true, worldwide, since 1997, which hasn’t prompted any apology.
If you wonder why I dislike the Democratic establishment, their economic rationalizers, and their role in nearly destroying the American working class, and that includes both the Clinton's, but many more hands as well were involved since Jimmy Carter, then you can't do better than revisiting Greider's piece here www.thenation.com/... , or James Galbraith's letter to the Clintonistas here at...
big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/...
And someday, in our dreams I guess, the nation will have a serious discussion of how the two parties, Bill Clinton leading the way, doing the bidding of the "American" multinational corporations, eased the path for the rapid rise of China, and what that has cost our people in terms of jobs, and, most likely, our dominant role in the world economy. We'll get that about the same time as we get a "National Truth Commission" on what happened to the working class, white and black. And maybe some journalist will ask Mrs. Clinton why the nation never, after 8 years of Bill Clinton, and 8 more under our first black President, President Obama, the nation never saw fit to authorize a "Marshall Plan" for our urban ghettoes, the one Henry Richmond of One Thousand Friends of Oregon called for, and which I also called for when I had a chance to meet with Clinton's Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, who was visiting New Jersey at the invitation of Governor Jim Florio, and met with a few of us to hear about saving the NJ Highlands. That was in the late 1990's, during the "Roaring 1990's." Today, I would probably be attacked by the Congressional Black caucus for even suggesting such a thing, for calling attention to urban ghettoes, instead of talking about the rising black middle class. I didn't have much luck, either, when I suggested, in 2003 or 2004, that film-maker Ken Burns do his next documentary on the history of the black ghetto...when I approached him at Logan Airport in Boston, when I was serving as a Federal Security Screener. I think we got the history of jazz instead. Less controversial, but not much help in fighting the "Great Incarceration." And if you want to know how neoliberalism and austerity have affected poor people in places like Ferguson, Missouri, perhaps the most shocking thing I've read over the past year, then visit the very last article listed, "Policing and Profit." It flows directly out of Bill Clinton's philosophy that the "Era of Big Government was Over," and right into the hands of privatization and the Republican Right. Thanks Bill.
And now for the list:
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Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944).
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Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (2008).
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Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (2015)
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Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013).
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David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (2010).
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William Greider, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism (1997).
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John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capital (1998).
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Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (2014).
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Alyssa Battistoni, www.jacobinmag.com … (How to Change Everything)
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________________, www.jacobinmag.com … (Alive in the Sunshine).
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Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930’s (2004).
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Robert d. Leighninger Jr., Long-Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal (2007).
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Cass Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever (2004).
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James A. Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (2003).
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Gary Wills, Reagan’s America (1987).
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Russell Banks, Dreaming Up America (2008).
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Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991).
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Mark C. Taylor, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption (2004).
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Michael Lewis, Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street (1989)
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_____________, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (2010)
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James Galbraith, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008)
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_______________, The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth (2014)
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Yanis Varoufakis, www.nakedcapitalism.com (Can the Internet Democratize Capitalism?)
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_______________, www.nakedcapitalism.com … (Confessions of an Erratic Marxist….)
24. harvardlawreview.org/... (Policing and Profit)
Best,
BillofRights
Frostburg, MD