How Low Can You Go?

This is not a prediction. Only an observation. From 1952 to 1996, U.S. nominal net worth of households and non-profits tracked nominal GDP pretty closely. Net worth remained pretty close to 15 times GDP. That consistent relationship ended after 1997. In the third quarter of 2007, net worth was nearly 20 times GDP but by the second quarter of 2009 it had reverted to just 17 times GDP. One might argue that it was roughly 15 times what trend GDP would have been at that time.

In the second quarter of 2019, net worth was 21 times GDP  or about 28% above the historical norm from 1952 to 1996. To revert to that historical norm would entail a loss of asset valuation of around $32 trillion.

 

Why International Womens' Day Barely Celebrated In US Despite Starting In US

Today, March 8, is International Womens' Day, recognized as such by the United Nations since 1975.  But probably a majority of American women have never even heard of it, much less celebrate it.  There have been marches on it (or around it) here in Harrisonburg, VA for the last four years, but these have been small and led by women born outside the US, with most of the native born participants highly educated and very progressive politically, the latter very much the case for most native born American women who celebrate it, although it is gradually getting more celebrated here.  But it started here.  What happened?

The first International Womens' Day celebration happened on February 28, 1909 in New York City, organized by the Socialist Party of the US at the behest of Teresa Malkiel.  The following year, Clara Zetkin from the US got the Second Socialist International to adopt it as a day to be celebrated, although without a specific date set.  It was in 1914 in Germany that it began to be celebrated on March 8, which spred from there to be the day, with the US Socialist Party slow to move to that date, and it never really spreading beyond its original leftist circles in the US.

What really reinfoced that is that it became a major holiday within the international communist movement.  This came about after Russian women in then Petrograd (later Leningrad and still later back to its original name, St. Petersburg) demonstrated against the tsarist government's keeping Russia in WW I.  Famously they were banging on pots and pans as they marched in the streets.  Tsar Nicholas II called on troops to suppress them, but the troops ended up siding with the women, and four days later the tsarist government fell, replaced by a socialist regime eventually led by Alexander Kerensky.  While it was March 8 outside Russia, it was February 24 in Russia, still on the Julian calendar.  Hence tis was known as the February Revolution.

On November 7, still in October on the Julian calendar, the Bolsheviks under Lenin overthrew the Kerensky government, an event officially known as The Great October Socialist Revolution.  But as its precursor, the Bolsheviks would officially celebrate March 8 after they switched calendars as International Womens' Day, with it becoming a full holiday in 1965.  After that it would spread into other Communist Parties, with the Chinese one celebrating it from 1922 onwaed.  Needless to say, along with its origins in the Socialist Party, led to it not ever becoming a general holiday or celebration in the US, and knowledge of it being actively suppressed as time went on.  It was only after 1967 that  it began to get somewhat recognized in the US, but still remains not widely known.

Anyway, happy International Womens' Day, everybody!

Barkley Rosser

Ranking Health Care Systems By Country

As promised earlier, I am going to provide several lists of rankings of nations by the supposed quality of their health care systems. For only one of these do I have a breakdown for specific aspects.  Given that the US generally does not do well on any of these, I do note that studies have shown the US is especcially good for certain cancers, especially colon, wiith France and Japan its main rivals on that one. We are also tops for various unusual elective surgeries that are expensive.

Also for this list I note that pretty much all of the nations appearing have universal coverage except the US.  UK has full-blown socialized mediicine with health care workers central government employees.  Canada and Taiwan are supposedly single payer, with South Korea having close to such a system.  Several Nordic nations have single payer for service, but not a full system.  But then Canada does not have a full system with all the private supplemental insurance there.  The rest are all some public/private mixe, with several major nations having it about three to one public to private.

The most widely cited ranking, and the most complete, is that of the World Health Organization.  But it is also now 20 years old. Anyway, here are its top ten, with Canada coming in 21st, Denmark 34the, US 35th, and Cuba, 36th:

1. France
2. Italy
3. San Marino (yes, this is a thorough list)
4. Andorra
5. Malta
6. Singapore (this one is actually 3 to 1 private to public, but has universal coverage)
7. Spain
8. Oman
9. Austria
10. Japan (which has the world's longest life expectancy)

Then we have a list from International.Insurance.co, with only 11 nations listed:

1. UK
2. Australia
3. Netherlands
4. New Zealand and Norway
6. Sweden and Switzerland
8. Germany
9. Canada
10. France
11. US

World Population Review lists the following nations as having good systems, but does not say that this llist's order indicates anything, and the following discussion starts with Switzerland first and then moves to Finland, which is not on the list, so unclear what is what, although this one does have Canada at the front of the list whose meaning is unclear. Anyway, no numbers, but here is the list in order, for what that is worth, which does not include the US:

Canada
Qatar
France
Norway
New Zealand
Germnay
Hong Kong
Netherlands
Switzerland
Singapore
Luxembourg
Japan
Sweden

Here is a list from Numbeo, clearly ranked, a  long list that I shall only show the top 10 for, with Canada at #24 and the US not even on the list.  This one is more Asia-centric:

1. Taiwan (which has handled the coronovirus especially well by many reports)
2. South Korea
3. Japan
4. Denmark
5. France
6. Spain
7. Austria
8. Thailand
9. Australia
10. Finland

Here is a list of the top 10 from the Cigna insurnce company (again, no US):

1. Denmark
2. Sweden
3. Canada
4. UK
5. Germany
6. Netherlands
7. Australia
8. France
9. Austria
10. New Zealand

Finally I show one from soething calling itself Health Care Tracking, which shows top 10 for both ovwrall as well as some specific cattegories.  I show the overall and then mention thr tops and bottome for a few categories:

Overall
1. Netherlands
2. Australia
3. Sweden
4. Japan
5. Austria
6. Comparable Countries
7. Germany
8. France
9. UK
10. US (only list where US beats Canada apparently, although maybe it is in #7)

For lab delays, The US is the worst and Canada is third worst.  Best three are Germany, France, and Netherlands.

For quick access to a physician (which many in the US thinik we are great at), Canada is the worst (10th), followed by Sweden, and then the US (8th worst out of 10).  The best Netherlands and Australia.

Finally we have amount of use of emergency rooms. On that Canada is tops followed by the US. Least use is Germany, Australia, and the Netherlands.

So, hard to come to any conclusoins on this.  Again, the US does pretty badly on many things. Canada easily ahead of it except for curiously these last two items and generally a pretty good performer (possibly #1 foro World Populaton Review and definitely #3 according to Cigna), but there are also some systems that are usually ahead of it, easily figured out from looking at these lists.

Taiwan may be evidence of serious success with single payer (I do not know details of system there), and the socialized medicine of UK gets wildly different rankings, tops on two lists but then substantially lower on others.  I suspect those where it is tops are looking at expenses for patients where those are especially low in UK.  Costs are ovrall lower there, with lower health care worker pay.  In UK health care spending is only 8% of GDP while it ranges between 10-12% for most of the European nations on these lists as well as Canada, while the US is way ahead of the others at our ridiculous 17%. 

What we clearly need is universality and lower costs, with it unclear that either the Bernie or Biden plans bring us both of those, although both improve on our current system, which is also better than the pre-Obama system, which it seems Trump is trying to take us back to with the GOP-states lawsuit against ACA backed by the Trump DOJ now sitting at the SCOTUS.

Barklley Rosser

A "Wild and Dangerous" Scheme, Part Two: What's "fixed" got to do with it? Do with it?

“…we have seen a calculation… which shows that the fixed charges, for machinery and the general management of a mill, are as nearly as possible equal to the cost of wages in the process.”

In my earlier post on the "Wild and Dangerous Scheme" I teased the "egregious accounting error" committed by the author of the 1844 article in the Economist. In plain terms the error was double counting -- the author deducts 16.5% from wages to compensate for a decrease in output and then attributes a second loss of 16.5% to the decrease in output resulting from it's effect on "fixed charges."

That double-counting error seems self-evident to me but there is also a semantic smoke screen at play that obscures it for some readers. The term "fixed charges" seems to refer to an immutable absolute quantity of costs and -- implicitly perhaps? -- an unalterable production process. It doesn't. It refers to accounting entries, as the term "charges" indicates.

Let’s Talk About Biden’s Tax Plan

Barkley Rosser elevates the political debate by trying to find common ground regarding health care reform. I posted a link to an interesting tax proposal, which I want to mention briefly after acknowledging this comment:

As to Biden's fiscal plan, I'm assuming this is really Jared Bernstein's plan. Biden has a lot of virtues, but he's never been known for being the smartest guy in the room. And with age he's definitely lost a step. Sometimes I listen to him and wonder if he hasn't had a few mini-strokes. But whatever his faults, he does seem to have a knack for surrounding himself with smart folks, and Jared Bernstein is clearly one of the smart guys...a trained sociologist who is also an accomplished economist.

OK I get the Twitter and Facebook is lit up with pathetic attacks on Biden’s mental health. I hope this is not coming from the “Bernie Brothers” as this is the kind of garbage we expect from MAGA wearing hat stooges and those people in Moscow who are hoping to re-elect President Stooge. But 2slugbaits raises a good point about who one’s economic advisers. After all, Trump selects people like Lawrence Kudlow as his chief economic advisor so President Stooge can pretend to be the smartest person in the room. For a recovering Republican, Greg Mankiw elevated our political debate:

Most noteworthy is the huge increase in taxes on high-income households. The top one percent would see a 40 percent increase in federal taxes (all federal taxes combined). Their average federal tax rate would rise from 29.7 to 41.7 percent. If enacted, this plan would give us the most redistributionist tax code in many years. For comparison, in 1979, as the Reagan tax revolution was starting to pick up steam as a political movement, the tax rate for the top one percent was 35.1 percent--a rate that has never been reached since. By contrast, the middle quintile under the Biden plan would pay a federal tax rate of 13.5 percent, which is about the same as it has paid in recent years and much lower than the 19.1 percent rate it paid in 1979.

The Tax Policy Center notes:

In this brief, we estimate the revenue and distributional effects of former vice president Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign tax proposals. Biden’s spending proposals would also have important distributional and economic effects, but we have not estimated the distributional effects of those initiatives. Our modeling assumptions are based on information released by the Biden campaign and conversations with its staff; we detail these assumptions in appendix B. We analyze Biden’s proposals as of February 23, 2020. Biden would increase income and payroll taxes on high-income individuals and increase income taxes on corporations. He would increase federal revenues by $4.0 trillion over the next decade. Under his plan, the highest-income households would see substantially larger tax increases than households in other income groups, both in dollar amounts and as share of their incomes.

The political debate should focus on Biden’s fiscal proposals in contrast to Sander’s fiscal proposals. And following up on what 2slugbaits suggested, I would like to see who Biden is using as his economic advisers as well as who Sanders is using as his economic advisers.

A Compromise Health Care Proposal Between Bernie and Biden

Bernie supports a singly  payer system resembling that of Canada's. Biden supports an extension of ACA(Obamacare) tp add a public option such that anybody can buy into currently existing US Medicare, but not guaranteeing uinversal coverage.

So, my proposal intermediate between theiir proposals undoes the two biggest political economic problems with each sides.  Bernie's problem is that eliminating private insurance he alienates 2/3 US voters who like their employer-supplied insurance. Biden's problem is that he has not offered universal coverage, which every other high income nation has.

So, here is my proposal. Let there be "Medicare for All," but make it what most people think that means, not just what Biden proposes of letting people buy into Medicare, but simply making any uninsured person on Medicare as it is.  It is not all that good, so most will buy supplemental private insurance like nearly all actually existing Medicare recipients. So we shall achiieve the universal coverage that all other high income nations have,  But this will avoid the politically disastrous proposal of Bernie to simply end  all private insurance.

Barkley Rosser

A "Wild and Dangerous" Scheme!

"...a scheme at once wild and dangerous."
"...a trick, too, of the clumsiest description..."

I was hunting for the exact location of "Prince's Tavern" in Manchester in 1833 when I stumbled upon an Economist article from March 30, 1844 addressing the "practical consequences" of  reducing the length of the factory working day from 12 hours to 10. I am always fascinating by the profound and enduring hostility of a faction of employers -- amplified by their mouthpieces in academia and the press -- to the reduction of working time. I'm amazed how often their bile and zeal leads them to compound the error of biased, unfounded assumptions with boneheaded accounting mistakes. There is nothing so edifying as the sharp-eyed calculation of a businessman who has naught but the most important boon (far beyond any amount of benevolent sympathy or charity!) to the moral and physical independence of the operative at heart!

I'm going to leave this snippet here and invite commentators to identify the egregious accounting error the author commits. Later, I will demonstrate another instance of the exact same error, performed some 27 years later by an employer. These people weren't merely wrong, they were systematically and consistently mathematically illiterate and intellectually bereft. Frederic Harrison was on the mark when he called the purported "economic science" of his day "this magazine of untruth."

An Unsolicited Speech for Sanders

Friends, there are two parts to what I have to say to you today.  The first is humanitarian, the second is political—but also humanitarian.  It’s about the coronavirus silently making its way through our communities and the obligation of government to step up and protect public health.

Health professionals agree on the most important measures that need to be taken.  We need a *lot* more testing, and the testing should be free for everyone, period.  Treatment should also be free, not only for reasons of fairness, but also because it’s not in anyone’s interest to have people with symptoms avoiding or even just delaying seeing a doctor about them.  We need a big increase in government’s commitment to researching potential vaccines and therapies.  The federal government should make sure that testing kits are effective and produced and distributed as rapidly as possible.  And finally, in a country where so many of us live precariously paycheck to paycheck, we need a guarantee that no one who is laid up or quarantined has to forego the income they depend on.  In other words, we need paid leave for the coronavirus.

I appeal to President Trump, to the health officials within his administration, and to the nation’s governors to use all the powers our system of government gives them to take these steps immediately.

Now, the second part of this talk is political.  Consider again what is absolutely necessary in the face of the coronavirus: free testing, free treatment, public responsibility for comprehensive and affordable health care.  And paid leave so no one has to choose between getting care and paying the bills.  This is Medicare for All, and it’s also about ensuring that all workers in this country have their basic rights recognized and respected.  This virus has cast a piercing light on America’s fragmented, inefficient and grossly unequal health system, and what we have learned from it should set us on the path to real solutions—not just for this epidemic, but for the next, and the one after, and for all the health care needs we face as a society.  So: begin today to implement a sensible and inclusive program to meet the coronavirus challenge, and see it as the start of a new era in American life, the first pieces in Medicare for All and government support for essential worker rights.

Yes, I am making a political appeal here.  I want you to support the movement to finally deal with the health care mess, the mistreatment of workers, rampant economic injustice and the other failures that have been allowed to fester unattended in this country, decade after decade.  I’m asking for your vote, and beyond that, for your personal participation in this movement.  But, as the coronavirus reminds us, fighting for these things is also a struggle for humanitarian values.  The health of our people and the health of our economy depend not only on containing this virus and the damage it does, but also on addressing all the other preventable illnesses, the scourge of opioids, and the dental, vision and hearing problems that constitute their own epidemic among the un- and underinsured.  They also depend on providing care and support for the health needs none of us can avoid: maternity care and care for newborns, elder care, and the injuries and diseases that come with just living one’s life.  For a healthier society we also need a fairer economy, one where diagnosing and treating an illness is not a financial catastrophe for any worker.

The coronavirus is a dangerous threat, but it’s also an opportunity to see clearly what this country needs so all of us can live healthier, happier and more productive lives.

Medicare for All.  Workers rights.  Economic fairness.  Thank you.

Some Instant Thoughts on Super Tuesday

1. Biden benefitted from a wave of (orchestrated) last minute endorsements.  One effect of this wave was to divert attention from Biden the candidate to the endorsers and their combined bandwagon effect.  Particular endorsements helped in specific states: O’Rourke in Texas, Klobuchar in Minnesota.  But Biden has flamed out in all his previous runs for president because he is a weak campaigner, not very bright and prone to own goals.  He would be mincemeat for Trump.  Sanders, however, has vowed to make an issue only of political differences, not personal qualities.  We’ll see if that’s enough of an umbrella for Biden to get through to the nomination.

2. There must be immense pressure on Warren to remain in the race.  By any logic, she should drop out now and not soak up any more scarce resources, whether money, staff or her own time and energy.  If you look at the non-southern state results yesterday, however, her vote share had a big impact on the outcome.  If her support would break, say, two-thirds for Sanders and one-third for Biden, this would be enough to put Bernie over the top in close races.  I have no doubt the preferred lineup for the Democratic Party, donors and staff, is Biden-Warren-Sanders.  It will be interesting to see if she keeps playing the game.

3. I’m not surprised that the party apparatus is so determined to defeat Bernie, even at the cost of re-electing Trump.  Sanders has never been a Democrat.  He caucuses with them in the Senate, but, aside from the inevitable vote-rustling in congress, he has never coordinated with them politically.  His donor base minimally overlaps with theirs.  His staff consists of political professionals who were either outliers in the Party or outside it altogether.  If he were elected the result would be a hostile takeover of the national apparatus, and almost everyone who is a part of it today would have to find another line of work come January.  It’s existential for them.  The same probably holds in many or most state parties.

4. To recap #1, the Democrats have decided to place their full bet with Biden.  It may well work for them, but based on the man’s history, it’s a risky move.  If Biden self-destructs again their only fallback is to put forward a third party spoiler in the general election.

Protecting Healthcare Workers from Infected Patients, United States vs South Korea

Seattle:

Korea:

Those bedsheets will do a great job preventing the virus from spreading.

psst... the fundamentals are strong

Who Wins Prairie du Chien Wins the White House

That would be Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, whose French name means "prairie dog," and which is located where the Wisconsin River empties into the Mississippi River, third oldest town in the state founded by Europeans (the French) after Green Bay (originallly Fort Nicolet) and Portage, also located at crucial spots long used by the Native Indians for river transport.  It is also the county seat for Crawford County, with Grant County just across the Wisconsin River.

Many argue that Wisconsin is the ultimate swing state, based on that if all the states go as they did in 2016, Trump would stilll win if he loses PA and MI, but wins in WI.  It might be that Bernie in particular could swing AZ because of his strong support among non-Floridian Latinos, but even with that, Wisconsin is clearly about as crucial and swingy as any state in the Union.  How it goes is likely to align with the ultimate outcome in the electoral collage, at least as things stand now.

So why is Prairie du Chien so crucial?  Well, aside from several industrial cities, notably Erie, PA and Yongstown, OH, the parts of the nation that did the largest amount of chanigng their votes between 2012 and 2016, with then at least partly moving back towards Dems happen to be southwestern Wisconsin and northeastern Iowa across the Miisissippi from SW WI.  While much of WI is now pretty rigidly partisanly fixed, not so true in the past, this area is up for grabs and swinging back and forth at lot.  What matters in the rest of the state has more to do with base turnout issues, such as African Americans in Milwaukee and some other cities turning out a lot more in 2012 than in 2016.  But as of now, it looks like what goes on in SW WI looks to indicate how the state will go and thus how the ntional outome will go.

This is an area I think that continues to reflect a continuation of the "good government" tradition od the state examplified by the late senator, squeaky-clean William Proxmire (D-WI).  It seems to the part of the state that suddenly turned against Clinton in 2016 after James Comey came out with his report that she was again under FBI investigaation 11 days before the 2016 election. Maybe the lower black turnout would have done her in, but it looks to me that the sudden change in SW WI really sealed the deal.

I am looking at four counties in the Southwest in particular, moving from SE to NW: Lafayette, Grant (in the actual SW corner  of the state), Crawford, and larger La Crosse.  All four went for Obama more strongly than the state as a whole in 2012 but more strongly for Trump in 2016 than the state average.  Then three of the four went for Dem governor winner, Tony Evers, in 2018, who won by  hair over Scott Walker, 49.5% to 49.4%.  Of these four, Lafayettw went for Walker, while LaCrosse went way stgonly for Evers.  The two sticking more closely to the state outcomes, but showing large swinging weere the other tow Crawford and Grant, with Praiirie du Chien on their border, hence its significance.

I show the state totals for Dems for the three elections and the outcones for those two counties below.

Statewide

2012 Dems 52.83%

2016 Dems 46,45%

2018 Dems 49.5%

Crawford County

2012 Dems 59.22%

2016 Dems 44,24%

2018 Dems 51.83%

Grant

2012 Dems 56.04%

2016 Dems 41.25%

2018 Dems 50.19%

Heck, Grant in ths SW conrner may track it slightly more closely than Crawford, but county seat Lancaster not as cool sounding as Prairie du Chien, and that small city is just across the river from Grant. So more generally, as those two counties go, so probably will the state and the nation.

Addendum:

Dems might want to put serious money into ads in Dubuque, Iowa.  It is right across the Mississippi from Grant County, WI and covers much of this swingy paert of Wisconsin.  Also, northeastern Iowa is also almost as swingy as that part of Wisconsin, with Dubuque County going for Dems in 2021 56.5% to 41.8% GOP but  then in 2016 going for GOP 47.2%  to Dems 47.2%.  Most Dems are writing off IA but it is a former swing state, and the senate race there may be crucial to taking the senate.  I see with Bernie as candidate Dems taking ME, CO, and AZ while losing AL for senate, meaning they need one more beyond that, with best bets being either NC or IA. Anyway, putting a lot of ad effort into Dubuque, as well as LaCrosse, may well be critical in the end for both the White House and the Senate.

Barkley Rosser

What Is "Democratic Socialism"?

Probably the best answer is whatever Bernie Sanders says it is as he is by far the most famous person ever to adopt this term as a label for his beliefs.  There is a group  in the US baring that name, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which has been in existence since 1983.  But while its membership ha since then generally fluctuated between 4,000 and a bit over 6,000 through 2016, its membership had surged to over 45,000 by 2019, clearly responding to Bernie's identification with the term, even though as near as I can tell, he has not been a member of the DSA.

If one goes to the Wikipedia entry  on "democratic socialism," one finds claims that it originated with the utopian socialists and chartists in the early and mid-1800s.  Certainly many of these groups supported democracy and also some sort of socialism.  For that matter, Karl Marx also in many writings supported democracy and socialism, although in other places Marx sneered at what he called "bourgeois democracy," and we know many regimes claiming to be inspired by Marx have not been democratic, unless one wants to call Leninist "democratic centralism" to be democratic, something most of us would not go along with, and current DSA types would not go along with.

The Wikipedia entry also includes the British Labour Party from its origins and also various social democratic parties, although many "democratic socialists" like to argue that "democratic socialism" is not the same thing as "social democracy," even though many self-identified democratic socialists, including Bernie, point to social democratic nations like Denmark as role models when asked what they are talking about.  Of course self-identified "social democracy" has been around since the late 1800s in Germany with the still-existing German Social Democratic Party, although its ideology has changed over time.  It officially linked itself to Marx as recently 1959, even though the Wikipedia entry on democratic socialism includes the "revisionism" of Eduard Bernstein around 1900 in the German Social Democratic Party as another example of democratic socialism.

A more recent example according to Wikipedia is the UK Labour government under Clement Atlee in the late 1940s when nationalized several major corporations and established still-existing socialized medicine, even as Margaret Thatcher re-privatized most of those companies Atlee nationalized.   However, the Atlee Labour Party never used this term to describe itself, and neither did any of these other earlier groups or individuals mentioned in the Wikipedia entry, although it looks that Jeremy Corbyn  has adopted the term and connected his views with those of Atlee.

So when did the term actually first appear?  As near as I can tell it would seem to be shortly after 1970, and it would seem that is when Bernie Sanders took it on as his view.  Wikipedia identifies Michael Harrington as its main developer, especially in 1973 when he was the main organizer of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) as a section of the Socialist Party of America (its earlier leaders such as Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas also show up in Wikipedia entry, although they never used the term, as near as I can tell).  When the modern DSA formed 10 years later, it came out of a union between Harrington's DSOC with about 1000 people out of the New American Movement, with Harrington being the most prominent person involved with this.

However it looks like the term appeared slightly earlier, in 1971. This was with the formation of the Liberty Union Party of Vermont, which also still exists. It has described itself as being "democratic socialist" from the beginning, and Bernie joined it back then and ran as its candidate for several office, including governor in Vermont in the 1970s, even though he left the party in 1977.  But it would seem that he has identified himself with this term since then, which may make him even more of a founder of it than the late Michael Harrington, who died in 1989.

So, with all this history this still brings us back to "what is it" besides whatever Bernie Sanders says it is?  The DSA website offers a variety of possible meanings, although all of them involve political democracy, although some also call for "workplace democracy."

Clearly the murky part is the "socialist" part.  Again, some are fine identifying it with social democracy, which does not call for nationalizing means of production, the classic definition of "socialism" from Marx and Engels, nor any imposition of planning or commands, but rather a large welfare state, along with liberal views on social issues. But the core part of the DSA website calls for "social ownership" of the means of production.  But this apparently can mean either public ownership as in classical socialism or workers ownership and management as with cooperatives, or even possibly ownership by consumers.  There is also a call for "decentralized planning" with this to be done democratically, but ultimately probably operating within a largely market economy.

If the Green New Deal is an example, there is less emphasis on nationalizing means of production, but more use of command elements in the economy, along with a large expansion of the social safety net.  The use of command elements are linked to the environment and climate change, with invocations of how the US economy was run during WW II, which was indeed a temporary command capitalist economy.  Ironically, although it is not widely recognized, large parts of current US environmental policy actually do follow command policies, especially in the form of strict quantity controls on pollution emissions rather than taxes or cap and trade.

Anyway, while the term is now very popular, it is really quite recent in usage and also pretty broad in what it actually means, a concept still in development.

Barkley Rosser

Who "Got" Iraqi Oil?

Not the US.

Dick Cheney collaborated with US major oil companies in a plot to at least take over operating the oil production in Iraq, OPEC's second largest producer and exporter, if not get to own the oil itself outright (which has not happened as oil in the ground was and remains owned by the Iraqi government, which is they way it is in pretty much all OPEC members).  Of all people, Juan Cole and many other progressives agreed that the war was all about controlling Iraq's oil.  So the US overthrew Saddam Hussein, but then what followed was civil war and discombobulation, and oil production was seriously disrupted for a long time, with those US oil companies not getting any business for a long time.

Of course, Donald Trump has repeatedly argued that the worst thing about the Iraq war was that "we did not get thee oil."  Of course, the only reason he has left any troops in northeastern Syria is that somwbody told him there is oil there and he should leave troops there to keep terrorists from getting at the oil.  So there we have US troops occupying some of these wells, although there is basically no way they will ever be operated by US companies, much less owned by them.  Trump is deluded if he thinks "we have got" that oil.

So what about now?  According to the Iraqi Oil Ministry, there are 23 foreign corporations operating in the Iraqi oil sector.  Four of these are Chinese, three are Russian, and one is American: Exxon Mobil.  Last year Exxon Mobil reduced its workforce in Iraq due to security issues.

But now Russian interests are increasing their presence.  Yesterday Simon Watkins reported that the Russian Oil Ministry has announced that several Russian oil companies are planning to spend US$20 billion in Iraq.  That this is happening reflects a shift in attitudes in Iraq as well.  Watkins reports that the Iraqi leadership is upset by two things coming out of the US.  One is Trump's sudden abandonment of the Kurds in northeastern Syria.  The other, of course is Trump's attack without justification that killed both Iran's General Soleimani as well as Iraqi General al-Muhandis. 

Trump may want Iraqi oil and think that this is the most important reason for US being involved there.  But his own actions have led to US companies being shut out in favor of Russian ones.

Barkley Rosser

The Debate within Unions over Health Care is about the Nature of Unionism Itself

Casual observers of the political scene got an insight into union politics when a small storm erupted over a flyer distributed by Nevada’s Culinary Union attacking Bernie Sanders and his Medicare for All proposal.

Politico has a piece surveying similar disputes in other states and nationwide.  Some unions, like the building trades and the Teamsters, want to keep the insurance plans they’ve negotiated for their members; most others want universal public insurance.

Aside from the specifics of each individual bargaining agreement and its health care provisions, this issue reveals the fundamental difference between two forms of unionism.

Business unionism is based on the idea that union members, drawing on their own resources, can create the best conditions for their work.  From this point of view, the greater the difference between how well off union members are compared to the nonunion workers around them, the more attractive the union will be, the more members it will have, and the more benefits they can win at the bargaining table.

Social unionism also wants to promote the interests of its members, but it believes that what can be achieved society-wide, through coalition-building and political action, is far greater than what any single union can achieve on its own.  Instead of increasing the gap between union and nonunion workers, social unionists want everyone to move up together as far as possible.

Labor officials attached to business unionism hate Medicare for All: it will put all workers on the same footing whether they belong to a union or not.  In their view, this takes away one of the reasons workers might join in the first place.  They think they their bargaining power will continue to assure them the health benefits they currently have without any tradeoffs on wages or other elements of their compensation.

The social union perspective is exactly the opposite.  It welcomes Medicare for All, believing the collective action of workers in all occupations, union and nonunion, can win better and more durable benefits than the efforts of a few.  From their point of view, making these alliances and promoting a politics of inclusion is exactly what unions should be about.

It’s a perfect litmus test.