Harold Meyerson: Late-stage American capitalism is the father of the fascist Chinese Party-State

Except Meyerson can't bring himself to use the word fascist, let alone Party-State.

"State capitalist power" is his polite euphemism for fascist power, which leftists who want to be taken seriously still must use apparently, ever since George Orwell said in 1944 that fascism had become a meaningless term, you know, like the words man and woman.

He stops short, too, of saying that there is something suicidal built into the West.

The conservative Oswald Spengler identified that something as Christian theology. He said it was the grandmother of Bolshevism, which is probably why Meyerson doesn't mention it! Don't wanna upset the fascists, the Christians, AND the true believers all at the same time.

But the fact remains that the heirs of Christianity in America have sold the rope to the Chicoms which they will use to hang our children after they are finished impoverishing them. 

Meanwhile Utopia still exists for Meyerson, in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, cold, wet, snowy, and dark NATO nations which rely on the American nuclear umbrella for their security.

   

Commies EVERYWHERE! 

... there is no such communist power [like the USSR] today.

There’s China, a Leninist-verging-on-tech-infused-Stalinist state capitalist power, but it boasts no virtually ideological adherents either in the States or abroad, and certainly not within the Democratic Socialists of America. It does have spies, and thugs who intimidate dissidents in the Chinese diaspora, but it lacks any support within the actual American left. To be sure, China’s rise to economic world power was fueled by offshoring American companies, but they went to China at the prompting of Wall Street as a way to boost their profit margins, Chinese labor then being dirt cheap. In other words, it was our leading capitalists, rather than any American socialists or communists, who sold out the industrial Midwest. ...

When Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama said You Didn't Build That, they were channeling that arch communist Benjamin Franklin

 

 

All Property, indeed, except the Savage’s temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention.

Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it.

All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of:

But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition.

He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages.

He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it. 

 

-- Benjamin Franklin to Robert Morris, quoted here 

Democrats have been trying to protect Joe Biden for years, and look how quickly they betray him: They're users

 

The Dems Must Dump Biden. Here's How

Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect

 

It's Up To Jill To Get Joe To Step Aside

Jill Filipovic, The Daily Beast

  

To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race

New York Times

  

Time To Go, Joe

Mark Leibovich, The Atlantic

 

Biden Is a Good Man & President. He Must Bow Out

Thomas Friedman, NY Times

 

 

Media Establishment Lays on the Horn: Joe Must Go...

 

Hollywood abandons...

 

Exclusive: Influential donors want to pressure Biden to drop out

 

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had signaled to political allies that he was open to options other than President Biden if his debate performance was disastrous

 

It's Time for Biden To Pass the Torch

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

 

 

Does anyone really know what is the level of stock buybacks?

The LA Times reported yesterday here that the level was $598 billion in 2013.

But The Washington Post reported last December here that is was $754 billion, not counting a big buyback announced by Boeing.

How do they know?

Harold Meyerson Thinks The Rich Got One Sweet Deal From The Democrats

Because the capital gains tax rate was raised only 33% from 15% to 20% instead of rising 164% to equalize it with the fiscal cliff deal's highest ordinary income tax rate of 39.6% on the richest Americans. Yikes! Can you imagine?

For The Washington Post, here:

"The tax deal Congress passed last week raised the top rate on wages and salaries from 35 percent to 39.6 percent. The rate on income from capital gains and dividends, however, was raised to only 20 percent from 15 percent. There has been no rending of garments nor gnashing of teeth from our super-rich compatriots; they got one sweet deal."

But it's a point conservatives should ponder more because Meyerson writes of common ground we share.

For one thing, there is love of country in Meyerson's article, a desire to see Americans benefit from investment domestically where it throws off all sorts of additional beneficial economic effects, instead of seeing those accrue to communities in foreign lands. American business long ago became unpatriotic in service to the almighty bottom line, which is why your job went to Mexico and then to China. This ushered in a process which has made the American worker more equal to the poverty of the foreign worker, instead of the other way around. But higher taxes on investment capital aren't going to reverse that. Only disincentivizing foreign investment and rewarding domestic investment will, which is a point which illuminates a conservative principle.

When it comes to economic inequality, conservatives should consider Meyerson's observation that the biggest gains overall in recent decades have come in investment income to wealthy investors, not in ordinary income to the rest of us. He doesn't say so, but it illustrates a conservative principle: When you want less of something, tax it. That is precisely what has produced the situation he decries. We have taxed ordinary income exorbitantly compared to investment income and consequently we have less of the ordinary income variety and more of the investment income variety. And we also actually reward foreign investment in the tax code, allowing unpatriated profits to escape taxation. To get more gains in ordinary income, we should equalize tax rates between ordinary and investment income . . . just not at progressive income tax rates. Conservatives should press for a world in which all money is treated the same in the tax code by taxing income of all kinds at one low uniform rate. Income inequality has to begin somewhere, and it begins in the tax code, not in the profits of Warren Buffett.

Similarly with supporting an aging population, it would be nice if there were a little liberal outrage, and a little conservative outrage for that matter, for the way the federal government conspires to suppress interest rates with a weak dollar policy. This punishes savers, but especially the old who expected and need return on capital to take care of themselves instead of depending on government. A strong stable dollar which has the same value when you are 80 as it had when you were 8 is what we need, but sadly our entire class of elites is committed to monetarism, which at its root means the dollar of 2013 could hardly be less equal to the dollar of 1913 than it is.

There is a theme here involving inequality, expressed in lower-wage foreign workers, ordinary income punished with higher relative taxes, and devalued savers' dollars, which could unite liberals and conservatives, and also the country, if only it had an effective advocate in a statesman who had the audacity to point out that big business and big government seem to be joined in common cause against the best interests of the American people. None dare call it fascism.