Gillibrand and Lewinsky

Gillibrand Says Bill Clinton Should Have Resigned Over Lewinsky Affair

Stiglitz: Bernie would have won.

Joseph Stiglitz: 'Trump has fascist tendencies'

prediction Alabama race

Jones beats Moore. Ellison replaces Franken?

Beating the Populist Right with the Neoliberal Center Isn't Sustainable At All

Beating the Populist Right with the Neoliberal Center Isn't Sustainable At All by Jamie Peck

Bill Clinton was a horrible President

Bill Clinton Was A Horrible President by Atrios

How to fix the Democratic Party

How to Fix the Democratic Party by Bernie Sanders

Spielberg on 2016 primary

There’s a Reason People Think the Democratic Primary Was Unfair and Undemocratic: It Was by Ben Spielberg

Brazile

In a September 2015 email obtained by The Washington Post, a lawyer from Perkins Coie, a law firm representing both the DNC and the Clinton campaign, wrote the Sanders campaign with a copy of what was presented as a “standard joint fundraising agreement.”

Democrats express outrage over allegations of early party control for Clinton in 2016

Donna Brazile’s Bombshell Isn’t That Hillary Clinton Rigged the Race, But That the Democratic Party Blew It by Joy-Ann Reid

Donna Brazile's bombshell tell-all could inspire DNC reforms

Donna Brazile: I considered replacing Clinton with Biden as 2016 Democratic nominee

On Safari in Trump's America by Molly Ball

On Safari in Trump's America by Molly Ball

Politics, though, was not the focus of the Third Way interviewers, who believed there was more to be gained by asking neutral, open-ended questions. In accordance with Third Way’s ideology, they believed that political partisanship was not most people’s primary concern. But sometimes the Wisconsinites brought up politics anyway. 

At the Labor Temple Lounge in Eau Claire, nine gruff, tough-looking union men sat around a table. One had the acronym of his guild, the Laborers International Union of North America, tattooed on a bulging bicep. The men pinned the blame for most of their problems squarely on Republicans, from Trump to Governor Scott Walker. School funding, the minimum wage, college debt, income inequality, gerrymandering, health care, union rights: It was all, in their view, the GOP’s fault. A member of the bricklayers’ union lamented Walker’s cuts to public services: “If we can’t help each other,” he said, “what are we, a pack of wolves—we eat the weakest one? It’s shameful.” 

But their negativity toward Republicans didn’t translate to rosy feelings for the Democrats, who, they said, too frequently ignored working-class people. And some of the blame, they said, fell on their fellow workers, many of whom supported Republicans against their own interests. “The membership”—the union rank-and-file—“voted for these Republicans because of them damn guns,” a Laborers Union official said. “You cannot push it out of their head. A lot of ‘em loved it when Walker kicked our ass.”

(h/t Chapo Trap House)

Finance, Techology, and Power by Chris Dillow with Mason quote

FINANCE, TECHNOLOGY & POWER by Chris Dillow

Donna Brazile

Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC by Donna Brazile

Fed on potential GDP

The Fed Chair Should Be a ‘Principled Populist’ By STEPHANIE KELTON and PAUL MCCULLEY

McCulley: I think it should be a collaborative venture between the Fed and Congress. Yes, I used the word “collaborative,” which I think applies in a more general way to the relationship between Congress and the Fed.

The Fed’s operational independence is grounded in the thesis that the legislature cannot be trusted with monetary policy, as the electoral process is inherently biased to inflation, of overstimulating the economy with too much spending relative to taxation, running inflationary budget deficits.

That simply has not been the case for a long, long time. Yes, we’ve had large deficits, but inflation has been too low, not too high. Thus, I’m not convinced by the argument that strict Fed independence is always and everywhere needed to discipline the fiscal authorities’ inflationary bias.

Kelton: What about policy today?

McCulley: If President Trump wants to try to boost real growth from 2 percent to 3 percent, there is no reason that the Fed should actively push back. That doesn’t mean that the Fed shouldn’t or wouldn’t respond if such an acceleration in growth were to finally drive unemployment low enough to generate a loud wage and inflationary response.

My point is that there is no reason for the Fed to prevent the “experiment,” if Mr. Trump and the Republican Congress want to run it.

Money creation in a post-crisis world by Frances Coppola

Money creation in a post-crisis world by Frances Coppola

The Prodigy Vs Public Enemy Vs Manfred Mann - Shut ‘Em Up

Michigan governors race

Don’t call this man the “next Obama”

Mike the Mad Biologist

You Can’t Be Intersectional Without An Economic Plan

Matt Levine on Marxist indexing

Bitcoin Dividends and Marxist Indexing by Matt Levine

Should index funds be illegal / Are index funds Marxist?

Here is a Jacobin interview with leftist economist J.W. Mason about "finance's role in capitalist society" that is fascinating throughout. Mason endorses a "functional view of finance, as the enforcement arm of the capitalist class as a whole":

There are people and institutions whose job it is to ensure that corporations remain within capitalist logic, that they remain oriented towards production for sale and for profit. On some level, this is the fundamental role of shareholders and their advocates, and of institutions like private equity.

I think that a lot of quite mainstream financial people would agree that one thing that shareholders do is ensure that the corporations they own "remain within capitalist logic," sure. But Mason also points to the rise of index funds as undercutting capitalist logic: If all the companies are owned by the same handful of big diversified investing institutions, and if those institutions have no interest in competition between the companies they own, then what is the point of capitalism?

If you take competition out of the mix, it’s unclear what function private ownership is supposed to accomplish. If the evolution of finance gets you to a situation where you have a single set of institutions — or in the long run, maybe a single institution — that owns all of these firms, then pressure from shareholders is going to be against competition. They don’t want to see these firms trying to gain market share or anything else at each other’s expense.

Seth Ackerman, the Jacobin interviewer, responds:

It’s hard to listen to what you just said without thinking of the debates that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where many people — arguably including Marx — predicted either that firms would be consolidated into the hand of a very small number of controllers or that the underlying wealth would be concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer people. And in either case, it would undermine the basic logic that made capitalism an economically and politically successful system in the first place.

Virtually no one that I talk to in or around the financial industry really believes the "common ownership of companies by mutual funds undercuts competition" theory. It just seems too attenuated: Sure, it might be in BlackRock's and Vanguard's interests if the companies they own don't slash prices to compete with each other, but it's not (usually) like they call up executives to tell them that. Plus "competition" is usually a more nebulous concept than price-cutting: It might be in shareholders' interests to keep prices high, but it is also in shareholders' interests to see more innovation and more competition on quality. If you own the entire economic pie, your interest is in growing that pie, not in keeping each company's slices the same. And the way the pie grows is through the normal capitalist processes of innovation and competition and creative destruction and so forth.

Still I am so desperately fond of this theory. What I love -- what is made so clear in Jacobin's discussion -- is how it wraps capitalism all the way around to socialism. Index funds are in many ways a perfection of financial capitalism: Not only are they the result of scientific finance (modern portfolio theory, the efficient markets hypothesis, etc.) replacing earlier and less rigorous forms of investing, but they also concentrate and align shareholders with each other, and corporate managers with shareholders, in a way that seems like it would be well suited to "ensure that corporations remain within capitalist logic." And the result is something that both Marxists and also financial analysts think is quasi-communist, that "undermines the basic logic that made capitalism an economically and politically successful system in the first place." What if Marx was right that capitalism would ultimately destroy itself, but the way that it does so is through index funds? 

Anyway, happy 100th anniversary of Red October, I guess.

Elsewhere: "David Einhorn Is Wondering If Value Investing Even Works Anymore." And here is an excerpt from his letter to Greenlight Capital investors:

What if equity value has nothing to do with current or future profits and instead is derived from a company’s ability to be disruptive, to provide social change, or to advance new beneficial technologies, even when doing so results in current and future economic loss? It’s clear that a number of companies provide products and services to customers that come with a subsidy from equity holders. And yet, on a mark-to-market basis, the equity holders are doing just fine.

That is an alternative perfection of capitalism, I guess, if the capitalist class is subsidizing consumers without actually losing any money. 

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Emphasized: Mason disagrees with the "but" in that sentence. Marx was right all along.

Cowen on NGDP targeting; Mason on financialization

The Only Fed Rule Is That There Are No Fed Rules by Tyler Cowen

Interview with J.W. Mason by Seth Ackerman

Jimmy Carter voted for Sanders

Jimmy Carter Lusts for a Trump Posting by Maureen Dowd

Centrist Democrats are now the great defenders of social justice? Please. by Ryan Cooper

Centrist Democrats are now the great defenders of social justice? Please. by Ryan Cooper