Ending White Minority Rule Across America

The Donald Trump-inspired political phenomenon across America that seems to refuse to die down is not an attempt to take America to an era of white minority rule. America has always had white minority rule. It is an attempt to retain white minority rule when the demographics of the country, the economic growth happening across the world, and all-around political consciousness ask America to take yet another stride towards becoming a more perfect union. Democracy is one person one vote, no ifs, no buts about it. All human beings are created equal, white or not, American citizen or not.

But sometimes hubris takes over, like in the case of Brexit. A people refusing to let go of old attitudes, habits of mind that supported unequal structures of power will not hesitate to rob the next generation of its future. A significant proportion of the population across America right now is trying too hard to go the way of a Brexit. A country of immigrants wants to stench the flow of immigration. You might as well cut the oxygen supply.

To be fair, America has always been a messy democracy. All democracies are messy. When you let everyone speak, when you let everyone vote, you will likely end up with a cacophony. The political spectrum houses every zany idea that ever existed somewhere along its length. As someone said, the past is not even past.

Every great crisis is an opportunity. But then every great crisis is also a potential disaster. The political will has to be mustered not to keep America as the sole global superpower - that was never an ideal situation to begin with - but so as to optimize the lifestyle and living standards and spiritual well-being of current and future generations, in America as well as the world. America is still the leading nation, and its signals are still picked up around the world. Ask Bolsonaro.

China is obvious competition and a potential threat. China might have picked up the market to an extent in response to the implosion of the Soviet Union, but it still retains one party’s political monopoly. The godlessness that is at the core of the Chinese political system is the reason for its immense cruelties: organ harvesting of the Falun Gong practitioners, social engineering to turn Uighurs into Han Chinese, killing the hen that laid the golden egg, namely Hong Kong, saber-rattling in the skies of Taiwan, border disputes with pretty much every bordering nation large and small, and round-the-clock surveillance of the entire population. Always being watched robs you of your basic humanity.

But white supremacist tendencies in America are hardly godly. The black population might as well be American Uighurs. Too many Uighurs are in detention camps, too many blacks are in prison. China erased poverty, America is not even working on it. Crass wealth inequality, left on its current trajectory, will bring America down. America will go the way of the Soviet Union. It will implode.

America today is not a democracy, never has been. It is not a one-person, one-vote arrangement. America is not a free-market economy. There are too many entrenched pockets of uncompetitive terrains segment after segment, architected by bribing politicians. Money has deformed the political process. The vast majority are voiceless as evidenced by policy after sensible policy that falls on deaf ears in the corridors of power.

Perhaps what America needs is a constitutional convention, ala Philadelphia. Elected representatives from across the country should gather again for the sole purpose of writing a new constitution that would expire automatically in 50 years. That might be the only way to make sure winners of the popular vote do not routinely lose the presidential election, the Senate is not a House of Lords, under the grip of less than 20% of the population, the people elect politicians and it is not the other way round. America needs to make an attempt at one person one vote democracy. America needs to try and become a democracy.

A constitution is just the playground, the football field if you will. The game is political action. Voters asserting their rights, and that of others, realizing their responsibilities, leaders challenging as well as responding to an awakening population, robustly borrowing from imaginative academics and thinkers, idea people, and all collectively seizing the future for an unprecedented Age of Abundance that is already knocking on the door: that is the clarion call of the day. There are major reasons for optimism if only the moment will be seized.

Perhaps the president should be directly elected. Open primaries might be the antidote to shameless gerrymandering. No taxation without representation was right for Boston. It is right for DC and Puerto Rico. Maybe every state should get a minimum of one Senator, but above that it should be proportional to the population for a total of 200 Senators. A state like California might as well end up with 20 Senatorial districts, or 10 even if the Senate’s number is capped at the current 100. Non-citizen white immigrants voted. All immigrants should similarly get the right to vote, regardless of what papers they carry. If you pay a phone bill, you vote. If you pay the utility bill, you vote.

You can not have one person one vote democracy at the local level but have something else at the state level, or something else at the national level. Why stop at the national borders? It is high time for a world government that adheres to the basic principle of democracy, that of one person one vote. The global economy asks for a genuine world government. The five veto-wielding powers at the UN are a relic of World War II. Nobody alive today remembers World War II. The UN is the ultimate white minority rule. Four of the five veto faces are white. And all five are male.

Ending White Minority Rule Across America https://t.co/i1g6C3Duoi #BetoForTexas #DonaldTrump #wealthtax @ewarren @AOC @KamalaHarris @VP @AndrewYang @RoKhanna @nick_rathod @PramilaJayapal @justicedems @sunrisemvmt @LiuNewYork @JenMetzgerNY @elonmusk @BernieSanders #UnitedStates

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) November 19, 2021

Democratic Capitalism

It is in America's political heritage that the word socialism is considered dirty. For a country that defeated the Soviet Union, it might be partly pride. 

There are more than 3,000 kinds of apples on the planet. I have a feeling socialism might be similarly varied. Countries in northern Europe practice a brand that I quite like. 

But the American political and economic systems have serious problems that I think can be better addressed by using the term Democratic Capitalism. If America is a democracy it is unraveling fast. One of the two parties is party to organized attacks on basic voting rights nationwide. Even before that the system was hardly democratic. My definition of democracy is one person, one vote. 

Campaign finance reform has to happen. Public funding of elections has to be considered. 

People should vote for the president directly. You get enough presidents who lost the popular vote and the person starts illegitimate on day one in office. The electoral college needs to be abolished. Every vote ought to count. 

Abolishing the filibuster would be a joke since, already, it is like 10% of the country rules over the other 90%, such is the structure of the US Senate. But, yes, the filibuster has to be abolished. It is a Jim Crow relic, except Donald Trump outdid Jim Crow. 

The Senate has to be restructured. The US needs to become a union of 100 states, one Senator each at the minimum, with the more populous states having more. 

Gerrymandering has to be outlawed. Democracy is people electing politicians, not the other way round. States may still carve out the districts, but they must obey federally passed guidelines as to how they may do so. Redistricting is not that different from voting rights. There are federal voting rights laws. 

The fundamental primary in America is fundamentally rigged. It is said a few tens of thousands of people in the country decide who the two major candidates will be in each election at every level through the money primary. Before China gobbled up Hong Kong, Beijing was offering something similar to the massive movement in the city. You say you want direct elections. You can have it. As long as we decide who the two candidates will be. That was a sham offer. But that is what the money primary in America is. 

No taxation without representation. Legalize everybody who is in America. 

Allow voting on mobile phones. Take voting to 90% or more. 

The US Supreme Court needs two more judges. 

Capitalism has three components: human capital, physical capital, and financial capital. Human capital is the most important of the three. But America does not act like it. No wonder it is losing its edge. In this knowledge economy, ignoring investments in human capital is hardly a choice. Education offerings need to be delinked from property taxes. 

Capitalism is free markets. The American economy is not a free-market economy. Pretty much all sectors have minor and major pockets of monopolies. Tech is basically four or five companies. Freedom has to be introduced into the markets so there is fair competition. Without that there will not be the needed innovation. 

Capitalism is secure property rights. The data collected around an individual is the property of that individual. That fact needs to be established nationally and globally and, in the 5G era and the era of tens of thousands of satellites beaming down the internet, that just might pay for a Universal Basic Income. Every individual sits on an oil well when data is oil. But companies steal that data. There can be an arrangement that up to a billion-dollar valuation, companies may monetize and need not pay, but beyond that it is 70% to the individual and 30% to the company. 

Democratic Capitalism https://t.co/hE38ktd9Od #unitedstates #KamalaHarris #Biden @AOC @RepAOC @BernieSanders @RoKhanna @paragkhanna @AndrewYang @drckraut @binay_panjiyar @upendrayadavjee @brb1954 @HisilaPost

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) July 29, 2021

"Extreme Inequality Is Like Economic Pollution"

What could the US afford if it raised billionaires' taxes? We do the math “Every billionaire is a policy failure.” So says a key adviser to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ocasio-Cortez herself says that it’s wrong to have a “system that allows billionaires to exist” alongside poverty. And the New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo recently called for us to “abolish billionaires”. ...... Today, the top 1% of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 90% combined. ....... But what does it really mean? Is it setting a cap on the amount of wealth one household can own? Or does it entail something a little more structural: unrigging the system that gave us billionaires and instead creating an economy in which everyday people get the benefits from the growth that they have created. ........ The richest 1% own nearly 40% of all the wealth, but pay only 20% of all the taxes. ............

Inequality makes bubbles more likely, it undermines the foundations for innovation and productivity, and it weakens and destabilizes consumer demand.

........ taxing the super-rich would generate revenue that could be put to better uses than letting that money sit in a Bahamian bank account of a billionaire. .......

Over the next 10 years, the richest 1% of American households will take home about another $22tn, after federal taxes. Their average annual post-tax income will be about $1.7m.

........ Three trillion dollars in new revenue is enough to make college free at all public universities, make a massive new investment in infrastructure along the lines of what Senate Democrats have proposed, and triple the budget for the National Institutes of Health. Needless to say, all of these investments would pay enormous economic dividends. .......... Doing that would generate about $8tn in revenue, which is enough to send every household in the bottom 75% a check for nearly $8,500 every year for 10 years........ As of 2016, the wealthiest 1% of American households owned about $27tn in total, an average of about $23m per household. ........ A tax that took about 1% of that wealth each year would yield about $4tn over the next decade. To put that amount in perspective, $4tn is more than the federal government will spend over the next decade on foster care, school lunch, school breakfast, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, food stamps, unemployment compensation, supplemental security income for the elderly, blind people and those with disabilities, and all the tax credits for working families combined........ Rich people are neither the source of economic prosperity, nor will they decide to go off and form their own society in Antarctica or 10 miles off the coast of San Diego...... If we disincentivize hoarding at the top, money will more easily flow to the workers and families who really drive economic growth. ........ And before long, instead of a few hundred billionaires taking ever more, we could instead have a thriving middle class, widespread economic security, and real opportunities to give the next generation a better life.

US Economy: Competitive? (No Market Economy In America)

Why the US economy isn’t as competitive or free as you think “Why on earth are US cell phone plans so expensive?” ...... Over the past two decades, competition and competition policy have atrophied, with dire consequences ....... America is no longer the home of the free-market economy, competition is not more fierce there than in Europe, its regulators are not more proactive and its new crop of superstar companies not radically different from their predecessors......... an inclination not to take free-market platitudes for granted ......... each step in his argument is based on meticulous analysis of the data. ......... “First, US markets have become less competitive: concentration is high in many industries, leaders are entrenched, and their profit rates are excessive. Second, this lack of competition has hurt US consumers and workers: it has led to higher prices, lower investment and lower productivity growth. Third, and contrary to common wisdom, the main explanation is political, not technological: I have traced the decrease in competition to increasing barriers to entry and weak antitrust enforcement, sustained by heavy lobbying and campaign contributions.” ........ Those prices of broadband access in the US are, for example, roughly double what they are in comparable countries. Profits per passenger for airlines are also far higher in the US than in the EU.......... across industries, more concentration leads to higher profits. Overall, the effect is large: the post-tax profit share in US gross domestic product has almost doubled since the 1990s........ This malignant form of increased concentration reflects significantly diminished entry of new businesses and greater tolerance of merger activity. In other words, the US economy has seen a significant reduction in competition and a corresponding rise in monopoly and oligopoly.............. From 1999 to 2017 real GDP per head rose by 21 per cent in the US, 25 per cent in the EU and 19 per cent even in the eurozone, despite the damage done by its ineptly handled financial crisis. Levels of inequality and trends in income distribution are also less adverse in the EU, so increases in incomes have been more evenly shared........ destroys the hypothesis that technology is the main driver of the downward shift in the share of labour incomes ....... “The US has better universities and a stronger ecosystem for innovation, from venture capital to technological expertise.” ....... the EU has established more independent regulators than either its individual members or the US would do (or have done). ....... Lobbying, both against deregulation and for favourable regul­ation, is much fiercer in the US. ........ this lobbying, which is inevitably dominated by big companies, works. Why else would people pay for it? ........

Members of Congress spend about 30 hours a week raising money.

The Supreme Court’s perverse 2010 “Citizens United” decision held that companies are persons and money is speech. That has proved a big step on the journey of the US towards becoming a plutocracy............ Corporate lobbying is two to three times bigger in the US than the EU.

Campaign contributions are 50 times larger in America than in the EU.

........... the cost of intermediation — how much bankers and brokers charge for taking in savings and transferring them to end users — has remained around two percentage points for a century. All those computers have made no difference. This then is a rent-extraction machine. That really has to change.........

There are two things about America that most outsiders will never understand: its gun laws and its healthcare system.

The US spends far more on healthcare (not much below a fifth of GDP) and yet has far worse health outcomes than any other high-income country......... the system creates rent-extracting monopolies from top to bottom: doctors, hospitals, insurance companies and pharmaceutical businesses all feed at this overflowing trough. ........ the “GAFAMs” (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft) ....... preventing dominant comp­anies from acquisitions or forcing them to divest; limiting their ability to exploit dominant positions by imposing interoperability with other networks and data portability; and breaking them up........ the rise of monopsony — the monopoly power of buyers — in labour markets, via restrict­ive contracts, occupational licensing and restrictions on entry. Deregulation needs to focus on such barriers.........

business on its own will pursue restraints on competition, and with great enthusiasm.

The outcome is rentier capitalism, which is both inefficient and politically illegitimate........... The answers, suggests Philippon, are: free entry; regulators prepared to make mistakes when acting against monopoly; and protection of transparency, privacy and data ownership by customers. The great obstacle to action in the US is the pervasive role of money in politics. The results are the twin evils of oligopoly and oligarchy......... Donald Trump is in so many ways a product of the defective capitalism described in The Great Reversal. What the US needs, instead, is another Teddy Roosevelt and his energetic trust-busting.