It’s Eve. It may seem like Larry Summers has finally disappeared from public view, but think again. According to Wikipedia, Summers joined the OpenAI board in November 2023. Even if he doesn’t have an official role, there’s no doubt he wants to influence the economic policy of the Harris administration through editorials and back channels.
Keep in mind that Mr. Summers is one of the leaders of the current hawkish view on inflation. The American public has been dutifully told that inflation is under control, even as many people are still suffering from rising prices. Here is a snapshot of this view in 2022: Summers: U.S. interest rates have never been raised so quickly in history.
In fact, as Dutch economist Servaas Storm has shown in several papers after careful analysis of the data, Our inflation is largely due to reduced supply – the impact of Covid on labour and supply chains – and the backlash from sanctions.Biden’s budget deficit may be a factor, but Summers’ belief that excess demand has caused inflation means calling for the Fed to raise interest rates is the wrong response.
That’s why “Hardy Perennials,” written by Mark Ames for our first fundraiser 13 years ago, remains an important warning.
It’s a similarity to Christmas classics The Grinch and It’s a Wonderful Life, but Ames’ work is the opposite of sentimental. Ames also explains one of the reasons the left is so bad at taking power: its adherents see finance as dirty and therefore not worth studying.
I hope you’ll put something nice in your stockings to make you feel like Christmas is coming early. Tip Jar!
Author: Mark Ames The Postman’s Rage: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.
If you’ve been reading Naked Capitalism for any length of time and haven’t donated back (and most people are hooked, as they discovered Yves Smith’s powerful, incisive voice and brilliant mind), then you’re in for a treat. Naked Capitalism is that rare blog that makes you smarter — smarter about a lot of things, especially about finance, Yves’s area of expertise.
Due to historical misfortune, the American left has not understood finance, nor has it tried to understand it, for two generations. It was the hippies who decided half a century ago that finance was not their level, so they were happy to cede the whole field of finance, business, economics, money, i.e. “political power” to the other side. Running away from the financial fight was like a hitchhiker giving his gun back to the Manson Family. There is a wonderful line in Charles Portis’ anti-hippie novel, Southern Dogs, that captures the Baby Boomers’ smug disdain for “numbers.”
He was always, with the boasting of the people, saying that he was bad with numbers and could not do anything with his hands, and subtly implying that he had superior qualities.
The part about the hands refers to another great hippie mistake – turning their backs on the Labour Party, because Labour wouldn’t go along with their culture wars. So the left finds itself, 50 years later, having to deal with the consequences of years of disastrously ignoring finance and the Labour Party: powerlessness and political impotence.
That’s why Eve Smith is so important for anyone who cares about politics and the bad direction our country is heading. In 2008, the left suddenly found itself caught completely and humiliatingly off guard by the 2008 financial collapse, even though it could have shouted louder than anyone else about how bad foreign wars were and how wrong racism, sexism and homophobia were. Politically and intellectually, ignorance was paralyzing. Even vocabulary was foreign, unless, of course, you were one of the early followers of Eve Smith’s blog.
It wasn’t always this way.
In the 1930s, the Left was firmly rooted in economics, money, and finance. At that time, the Left and labor were practically one. The Left, based on finance and economics, understood labor and political power, ideology, and organization much better than the Left of today, who can at best deflect the stupid, vicious attacks that the Left throws at us. We are only just beginning to learn how politically immature and ignorant we are, how much time and knowledge we have lost, and how much we have to catch up on.
That’s why Eve Smith’s Naked Capitalism is one of the 99%’s most valuable assets in the long battle ahead. She is an analyst and educator with a rare literary talent (especially in finance). One of the things that has protected the financial oligarchy is the verbose, terrible prose they use to camouflage their harmful ideas and concepts. Eve is one of the few people who can make a book about finance an emotional read.
Naked Capitalism is an online university for studying finance, politics and ideology. While other online universities are set up to feed gullible young people to the debt-ridden Wall Street cattle, Naked Capitalism is the exact opposite: completely free, always excellent, essential, and indispensable, it will make us smarter and teach us how to one day overthrow the financial oligarchy. Another difference between Naked Capitalism and the online university scams (Stanley Kaplan, cough cough!) is that your donations will not be used to pay Ezra Klein’s salary.
So, back to the point I was trying to make earlier: “Shame on you!” When it comes to fundraising, nothing works more effectively than shaming. That’s what late-night commercials are like. You’re sitting in the comfort of your home and all of a sudden, a three-legged dog comes hobbling into his cage with big teary eyes, and a bearded pedophile appears and says: “Poor Rusty has endured more abuse and pain than you can ever imagine, and tomorrow he will be gassed to death in a slow, horrible poisoning chamber, and you, take a good look at yourself sitting there with your Chunky Monkey and your central heating, what a sick bastard you are? Get out your goddamn Visa Mastercard and send some money to Rusty, or his death will be your fault. I hope you sleep well at night.”
Now, I know this kind of appeal doesn’t work with the “naked capitalism” crowd. There are too many economists here, and as we all know, you can’t appeal to the economists’ hearts, because, well, see “Larry Summers’ World Bank Memo”…I can imagine Larry watching a late-night commercial with a three-legged dog, drinking two liters of Diet Coke, devouring a bag of Kettle Salt & Vinegar potato chips, and calculating the production value of the three-legged dog, unmoved by the sentimental appeal. Larry grabs the Dictaphone. “Problem: How to end gassing of dogs? Solution: Transport stray three-legged dogs to sub-Saharan Africa. Africans won’t notice. Dogs saved. Private capital freed. Problem solved.”
So some of you are heartless, some of us are shameless, but we all understand how important Naked Capitalism has been in educating us. The other side should also know how dangerous sites like this are, because as we become more educated and more political, we become more of a threat.
The oligarchy has spent decades on their “defund the left” project and has finally succeeded in a way that we can understand. “Defund the left” does not mean defunding the corrupt Democrat Party, it means defunding anything that threatens the continued wealth and power of the 1%.
One of their greatest successes, whether intentional or not, has been to eviscerate journalism, to reduce its integrity to a manageable scale that could be dunked in a bathtub. It’s nearly impossible to make a living as a journalist today, the journalism industry’s economics are still plummeting like the Soviet refrigerator industry in the 1990s, the media is even less inclined to challenge authority, journalists are less inclined to rock the boat than ever, and everyone is more inclined to corrupt (see Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly). A May ProPublica investigation put the numbers in: In 1980, the ratio of PR spokespeople to journalists was roughly 1:3. By 2008, there were three PR spokespeople for every journalist. And that was before the awful events of 2008 hit journalism fans.
This is what an oligarchy looks like. I saw the exact same dynamic in Russia under Yeltsin. When he came to power in 1991, Russia had the boldest, most ideologically diverse journalism culture I had ever seen. It was a lo-fi, high-octane version of 1970s American journalism. But once Yeltsin created an oligarchic hierarchy to ensure his victory in the 1996 election, the oligarchs bought up all the free media and one by one drove out anyone who challenged their power. By the time Putin came to power, all the good Russian journalists that I and Taibi knew had abandoned the profession for PR or political prostitution. It was the oligarchy that killed Russian journalism, and Putin simply wiped out the few remaining pockets of resistance.
The only way to stop that from happening is to support the best of what we have left. Working for free is the worst. It can’t and won’t be sustainable.
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Donate to Naked Capitalism nowIf you can’t afford much, give what you can. If you can afford more, give more. If you can give a lot, give a lot. Whether you give $5 or $5,000, every donation pays for itself. This is not just a donation, it’s a statement that you want a different discourse, a different society, a different culture.
Who knows, maybe we’ll win. Maybe we’ll even figure out how to lock Larry Summers in some kind of spaceship and launch him into deep space to circle Uranus forever. Eve? Can we get the funding?
