In 1601, Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex, asked Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, to stage the play Richard II at the Globe Theatre. This was done in the wake of an attempted coup against Queen Elizabeth. The intent was to stir anti-monarchical sentiment by depicting the overthrow of a weak king. The rebellion, however, did not succeed, and Devereux was executed.
House of Cards, the series starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, is a brilliant depiction of power-hungry politicians at the helm of the White House and their maneuvers to stay in power. Borgen, the Danish series, is a masterpiece of political intrigue and the backstage machinations of decision-making.
Political fiction is a powerful tool to evoke ideas—which is probably why it is often one of the first things to disappear when politicians begin to wield power beyond party politics. It’s difficult to imagine these series being produced today in China, Russia, or Turkey, for example. They show a side of politics that is too real—of course dramatized, but still a representation of the inner workings of politics that most people only glimpse through news coverage.
Russia has Roman Bolyaev, who produced The Last Minister but left the country when the war in Ukraine started. Türkiye produced the series Valley of the Wolves, which, although it makes references to Turkish politics and corruption, does so by blaming a powerful mafia that infiltrated the state—rather than the state itself.
Of course, that is not to say there are no Chinese, Russian, or Turkish political dramas—there might be—but to my knowledge, none depict the current political climate as a ruthless set of ambitious individuals willing to do almost anything to stay in power. Such portrayals would not reflect well on the current governments.
Let’s propose a few loglines for future productions:
An ex-KGB agent rises to power, promising to fight the mafia that has taken over the state, but ends up creating his own to maintain control.
A Communist Party leader takes over a developing economy and pushes it to become the world’s largest, while he becomes its de facto king.
An idealistic young politician rises to power and changes a country, but in the process, compromises the ideals he started with.
I think these loglines would make for pretty good series that will never be made—at least not in the countries where they are set.
The reason I believe they will not be made is not just because censorship exists in these countries and not in liberal democracies. Censorship exists everywhere, one way or another. The reason is that in these countries, politics—not party politics—matters far more than in Western liberal democracies. Governments hold more power than their liberal counterparts, and I believe this is because there is no true division of powers in these countries.
I am not speaking about the theoretical division of power into three branches—the judiciary, the legislative, and the executive—which constitutions establish. This division, though ideal on paper, is difficult to maintain in reality, and most authoritarian regimes claim to uphold it. I am speaking about the division between political power and financial power. If we leave ideology aside (with perhaps a few exceptions), this is the main difference between governments today. When financial and political power are unified, the state’s reach becomes far more extensive.
Trump knows this—or at least his team does—which is why he has been campaigning against Jerome Powell to try to remove him. The issue isn’t just that the Fed’s policies don’t align with his own—it’s about who controls financial power and economic policy.
Varoufakis describes it like this:
In the United States, there’s a war happening—not just a class war but also an intra-capitalist war between the cloud capital owners of Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Wall Street will never allow people like Zuckerberg, Musk, or Apple to steal their financial rents—they’d “nuke” them if necessary. That’s why there’s no app like WeChat in the West. It’s not because the West can’t develop a free payment system like WeChat, but because Wall Street wouldn’t allow it, and Wall Street controls the central bank. This isn’t the case in China.
What Varoufakis is pointing out is that in the US, Europe, England, Canada, and the West in general, banking and financial power are separate from political power. In China, this is different. The central bank is government-controlled, not independent. The country’s largest banks are state-owned. The state directly invests in private projects. There are private banks and financiers, but they don’t control the system.
In the US, the Federal Reserve resists political pressure, but its leadership seems to have been cognitively captured by the banking industry. In Europe and the UK, central banks operate independently of the government. The ECB, which rules over them, is, to all intents and purposes, an independent entity free from political control. The largest banks and investment funds (e.g., JPMorgan, BlackRock) are private. Financial power and financial policymaking are not in politicians’ hands. As Varoufakis continues:
Smart people in Washington DC realize China has a fantastic advantage because of this merger of cloud capital and finance—what I call “cloud finance,” which can’t happen in the US due to the war between financial and cloud capital. China’s political economy allows seamless integration.
“China’s political economy allows seamless integration” because politics and finance are already merged, unlike in the West. The mantra there is “laissez-faire,” which is very good—except when the one saying it holds the unique privilege of creating money out of nothing. And everyone wants that privilege. Then it can turn a bit sour.
The conflict Varoufakis mentions isn’t new either. It could be argued that it was among the key motives behind most revolutions, including France’s Revolution in 1789: when a new wealthy class becomes conscious of its power, it seeks to reshape the established order. That’s why Silicon Valley aligns with the Trump administration and why Trump is trying to influence Fed policy. Silicon Valley wants its seat at the table, and Trump’s administration wants control—at least a degree of it—over finance.
China’s real advantage over the US—and what others (like Russia, with more success than Turkey) try to imitate—is the merger of political and financial power. This gives the state unprecedented influence over its citizens, and when combined with technological advancements, it creates a Leviathan unlike anything we have seen before.
That’s why series like House of Cards or Borgen—which offer an uncanny look at politics—won’t be made in countries where financial and political power have merged. In those places, politics matters too much, and the reality of it surpasses fiction.
Politicians are addicts and nothing is more corrosive to the soul or more addictive than power.
Sorry, I have to disagree, and as an explanation, offer this paraphrase;
The real disadvantage the US has, when compared to China, is the fact that our government has been coopted, and rendered relatively powerless when faced with any choice that might conflict with the interests of our financial elites.
The neutering of our government’s ability to regulate finance has been under constant attack since at least the publishing of the Powell memo in 1971;
In reality, over the last 5 decades, corporate America, and finance has been allowed much too much influence in ‘the West’, and that is our disadvantage.
And China’s government has so far managed to avoid many of the problems we face as a nation because in China, corporations, and finance, of whatever flavor, have not been allowed to purchase control of the government.
Very interesting thesis, Curro. So are we changing from a system in the USA where finance and cloud compete to control the state to one where cloud and finance merge into the state? I’m not sure the state has that much power in the USA after working for finance all these years. It seems to me that American politicians have played the role of salesman for finance for so long that they’re incapable of thinking or speaking for themselves.
It’s undeniable, though, that the Chinese and Russian systems are working much better than what’s been installed in the EU and USA.
Here’s the missing link;
Powell memo info
I think this article makes a pretty good case for an independent central bank. If power is centralized, and concentrated, it becomes easier to corrupt. The US, like Germany, has a strong and well distributed regional banks, which serve as local power nodes in the banking system. (Although in both countries the State level regional banks are under attack from monopolists). The Canadian banking system is much more concentrated with less than ten big players, but it is competitive and there are solid cultural factors which make the central bank amenable to political influence to the benefit of citizens. The prospect of China-level centralization of power over all aspects of society I find scary. Although the Chinese have been running their show this way for three thousand years…..mostly successfully. I admit the concept of banking as a public utility has great appeal. How to govern it is the 64 trillion dollar question.
I think the exercise of power in all of the countries mentioned involves balancing competition among powerful factions. Putin and Xi both command the ship of their respective states, but I think it a mistake to think that either leader operates without answering to powerful groups.
So too here in the US.
My understanding of arguments presented in the Federalist Papers was the need for a system to maintain a balance among factions, largely regional in nature, to prevent any one interest from seizing control. The recipe for a successful oligarchy to prevent a monarchy.
The US had some experience with a national bank early in its history. It was not universally loved, as many believed that too much financial power was concentrating in the hands of an elite few. An early case of the 1% fearing the formation of the 0.01%?
China has modernized most recently, has a large population that was recently rural, and has not devoted much wealth to projecting power outside the country. They have a culture that emphasizes education and the lessons of Europe and US development to learn from. Their particular formula has raised the standard of living of hundreds of millions. Their future may be bright for years to come. But I do not think they have achieved the end of history.
Yes, USians are very proud of their constitution’s ‘balance of powers’ amongst the executive, the legislature, and the courts.
As readers of NC well know, they conveniently forgot the banks.
‘They’, the sacrosanct Founders.
Yes, but banks didn’t have the power that they have now and the threat of national banks or finance taking political power would not be evident for some decades. The Founders were concerned with more obvious problems that had been evident for centuries. Maybe they should have since the problems with bankers having too much influence had been noted or seen before.
Just a recognition that the founders saw challenges in their time to maintaining effective governance. What was enacted was a result of argument and compromise and done with the expectation that further work would be needed over time. There were also many arguments over the role of finance and the lessons of the failed first attempt of the articles of confederation.
China has found an approach that has worked well so far given where they began. Whether they will adjust effectively as circumstances change is an open question.
yeah, ahem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation
per Prof Hudson, that right there is the problem,lol.
allowing private banks to create money out of nothing.
freedumb, and all.
China will last longer than us because they kept money creation/destruction in-house.
the story i told my boys when they were little, but big enough to ask about where money comes from:
welp…you go into the bank, sit down in front of Thom(we all know Thom), present yer bidness plan, etc and he goes into the Inner Sanctum, and waves those documents in front of the stone idol of the Grasshopper God(a computer terminal)…if the Effigy makes the appropriate noises, you are Approved!…and money is soon created from nothing and deposited in your account.
when/if you pay it all back, plus interest(of course), that money vanishes from the world.
both of them…in their time, and to their credit…came back later, after ruminating…and said something to the effect of:”that sounds a whole lot like what the priest does in church with that cracker”.
and i considered the lesson complete, both times.
they are both Catholic…which i supported, throughout…but i was allowed my say on things, also throughout.
so, likely by my unintended influence/honesty when pressed….neither of them are on board with literal Transubstantiation….Cracker becomes dead god’s flesh for reals.
so i doubt that this method would work in more literal and serious christian familas.
Indeed, anyone can create money as it is merely an IOU. And as Minsky said, the problem you have is getting it universally accepted. However, private banks are licensees/franchisees of the state with a permit to create money in the currency of the state and not merely in their own unique monetary denomination.
So we have, in our western financialised capitalism, the private banks deciding where their credit advances are to be spent. Will that be for risky and difficult to assess productive activities that add to GDP or for asset purchases in the Ponzi marketplace of real estate, stocks and shares? Without any macroprudential regulations mandating where loans are to be made then gambling on assets is the easy short term win for loan managers compensated on loan book size. Structure determines behaviour.
“per Prof Hudson, that right there is the problem, lol.
allowing private banks to create money out of nothing.”
From a different perspective, allowing a multiplicity of small, local banks to create money might just be a pragmatic solution to economic growth provided the type of money locally lent/created is not for asset speculation. China moved from basically one bank to more than 5000 in a short period of time. Thus, the decision of how much money was going to be created and for what purposes was not left to a handful (say 5) bureaucrats at the central bank but, instead, an army of loan officers at the thousands of small local banks. If every bank has 30 branches and each branch employees 35 loan officers, then an army of more than 5 million on the ground experts would decide which company would obtain what amount of money and for what purpose (see writings of Richard A. Werner).
its my understanding that that’s pretty much what the New Deal banking regs did….but that no longer obtains, and the banks own the gooberment, now, anyways.
and if you were able to gather enough capital and set up a bank, (ie:if They’d let you)…if you started doing populist stuff like making rational loans, the big Banks would soon be upon you, first setting their Regulators on ya, then gobbling you up outright.
whole thing needs to burn to the ground…and lamp posts and even guillotines will hafta be used, ere these greedy bastids get the way of the world right.
This gives the Marxist state unprecedented
influence over its citizenscontrol over the capitalists it permits to exist and whose drive to accumulate it puts to use in selected areas of the productive economy…There, fixed it for you.
I think the most accurate portrayal of politics was Veep
There ya go. Of course both Veep and House of Cards had British DNA.
And Mafia might better describe what is going on in America right now than Putin whose nationalism seems genuine, even if he’s no boy scout. Personally I have my doubts about how serious a threat Silicon Valley is. That was a show too, on HBO.
My vote is for “The Candidate” and “Parallax View” for realism and the basis for liberalism.
Dollars are private money; yuan is a public money — that’s all there is to this.
Can you explain further?
There is a lot of confusion about this.
The US Congress, which is the representative of the American people (the public), can not issue dollars, it can obtain them through taxation (and the like) or borrow from the private individuals (including foreign).
The dollars are made by the private consortium that exists in itself and for itself and is independent from the Congress/President/public. Dollars are made when this consortium lends to outsiders and to itself (e.g., when the FED purchases paper from its member banks; this paper can be anything, including useless mortgage-backed securities). This consortium owns the right to issue dollars and can never go bankrupt in dollar terms — it can always ‘disappear’ bad debt and make new money. Musk and the like borrow money from the consortium (and other sources) like the US government and the rest of us and derives income from selling things (real like cars and not so much like carbon credits), while the Wall Street is part of the consortium and derives their income fully from money mechanics (i.e., interest on debt and probably just money creation disguised as financial engineering). Currently, FED pays interest on bank excess reserves, which is really pure money creation. The FED is not a central bank (as in public), it is the money consortium self-regulation body. The US does not have a central bank. Jerome Powell is the Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
From my understanding, China has a public central bank that issues yuan. The Chinese government direct the Central bank to fund the projects of interest and does not need to borrow yuan from private individuals (although it can). From what I understand, Jack Ma attempted to introduce private yuan creation and was shut down. The yuan system can not go bankrupt in yuan terms either. Currency mismanagement whether dollars or yuan will be manifested in low quality of life.
The private dollar and the public yuan systems do not mix well and their properties have huge effects on the corresponding economies, whether good or bad.
More on this: Public versus Private Sector Money Creation:
Society Enhancing Monetary Reform
Frank Dixon
Fellow, World Academy of Art and Science; Sustainability and System Change
Consultant, USA; Author, Global System Change series of books
Abstract
Nearly all money in the US, UK and many other countries is created by the private sector
through lending. Private sector money creation provides many benefits, but also imposes
large costs on society.
It’s been a long while, but is Victoria describing the private vs public moneys?
If you have time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx5Sc3vWefE
The US had public money during the New Deal. The last public bank that could issue money closed its doors under Eisenhower.
The New Deal had the Pecora Commission, while the 2008 had nothing of the sort.
Branco Milanovic recently argued that what is evolving in the U.S. is a new type of capitalism in which the traditional capitalist is being challenged by new households made up of both the labor rich as well as the capital-rich.
He argues that this growing cohort is an elite that is resistant to shocks in both labor and capital markets and thus able to maintain their respective positions. They are highly skilled individuals who have attended the best schools and probably feel that they deserve their superior positions. He maintains that many conveniently forget the capital part of their income and focus solely on the labor part for which they studied hard and worked hard.
He links three items–ownership of lots of capital, high level of education, and a highly paid job. Thus, instead of a class-based society of the old capitalism, we now have an elite-ruled society that seems to transcend the contradiction between capital and labor and this is the new type of elite in most advanced economies, that now sits at the very top. (His stats on this are amazing.)
uhm, labor is what cooks that elite’s food, does his laundry, pilots his private jet, hooks up that IV and nurses him when he’s sick, maybe even guides the robot that’s doing the surgery on his body. And oh yeah, stands guard with automatic weapons outside his house and his place of business. That elite schmuck ain’t laboring.
Your mum does the washing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS9Bc_GQBEs&list=RDPS9Bc_GQBEs&start_radio=1
‘They are highly skilled individuals who have attended the best schools and probably feel that they deserve their superior positions.’
Wasn’t there a report a few months ago of how the top corporations in America are veering away from hiring these very sort as being far too high-maintenance and lazy? And that they get better hires from cow colleges?
Milanovic also warns that the danger is that this new class in the US will attempt to cement its advantages and turn itself into a de facto hereditary aristocracy.
In his Capitalism Alone he points out that both China and the US face this same problem of preventing the emergence of hereditary aristocracy.
‘An ex-KGB agent rises to power, promising to fight the mafia that has taken over the state, but ends up creating his own to maintain control.’
I have a better and more accurate narrative-
‘An ex-KGB agent rises to power, sees that his country is being destroyed by within and without and will soon collapse and break up so decides to play the only way that he can – the Chicago Way.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjOPLTTjnwc (44 secs)
Perfect. And accurate.
“An ex-KGB agent rises to power, promising to fight the mafia that has taken over the state, but ends up creating his own to maintain control.”
I realise we’re speaking in the abstract, but I don’t remember the prototype promising any such thing. IIRC the story was more like “the mafia that has taken over the state gets its man in the FSB to become their new figurehead, only for him to actually take over and make them play by new rules”.
And I haven’t kept up with TV in ages so I may well have missed it but indeed I don’t think there was any show to this effect and it seems unlikely to appear soon. It did show up in fiction literature (Latynina, Pelevin, more obliquely Boris Strugatsky, surely others too), but that’s obviously much safer and less impactful now. I think we did have something like that Turkish show you describe, though. Corruption was and is a popular theme in our television (popular enough that even I would notice there’s a lot of it, I mean). It’s a staple of our numerous cop shows and some other genres too, but I believe it is shown as something that stops at least a little short of the top. Which in a sense is fair, as that is also true for most actual corruption, at least in Russia but probably elsehwere as well; it is a highly decentralised and multipolar world.
The power to mint money is and should be the sole prerogative of the sovereign. If it isn’t he and the land he rules over is not sovereign, it is a colony. In the case of US a self – colonized as they haven’t ever known anything else.
A Colony is a place where you can exploit the land and people to destruction and then move somewhere else for a new opportunity.
I had this revelation (it is rather trivial I agree) when I read Count Potocki’s Saragossa Manuscript a couple of years ago as a new translation had been published. There was a passage there that the Catholic King abolished slavery in The Crown but made an exception for colonies. That’s the origin story of US. An Exception.
Nota bene, Potocki had extensive ties to Russian Empire and was an official at the Imperial Court and an envoy to China but this fact is totally absent in Polish Wikipedia entry which I imagine is a recent modification.
It can’t be found in the English Wikipedia either, although it does at least mention that he died in the Russian Empire. The Russian Wikipedia does mention his Russian connections and diplomatic employment, though. He was far from alone among prominent Poles who had high standing in Russia, only for this to be downplayed by other Poles later. So it goes.
2D thinking. Geography is strategy.
China has more than 100 languages, ethnic minorities and cultures.
Truth? What is that? Who observes it? Reification destroys analysis.
Interesting that the author makes no mention of Zelensky, who actually was an actor/comedian playing the part of taking over the reins of power in Ukraine in a TV production to fight corruption etc. He then gets elected in real life by an electorate yearning for peace and an end to civil war and fighting Russia who somehow believe he genuinely is the TV character he played. Only once in power, Zelensk goes all in on corruptly enriching himself and his cronies, banning the Russian language and intensifying the civil war and leading to the utter destruction of Ukraine and its population, now either dead, maimed or having fled the country.
Given the alternative between the charade of “independent” central banks (which are, by design, aristocratic institutions inimical to labour) and a return to the consolidated treasury answerable directly to my elected representatives, I’ll take the latter, thanks.
I realize that this poses a new challenge — forcing our elected representatives to accept the mechanisms and consequences of democratic accountability. But I prefer that fight to the radical centrist neoliberal technocracy we’ve been enduring for far too long now …
The US operates under a liberal political philosophy and neoliberal economic philosophy, and China does not. Our liberal ideology values individual rights of the select few over the well being of society as a whole. Government has the role of protecting the individual rights of the select few, which means that government also needs to greatly limit the individual rights of everyone else at the same time. And the neoliberal ideology values the economic well being of those select few over the economic well being of society as a whole. Government has the role of creating the rules for the neoliberal economic system to make this possible.
Real political and economic power in the US, even though it resides in only about 0.01% of the US population, is still diffused to over 30,000 individuals, plus their surrogates. That adds up to a whole lot of potential disagreement and division, and that we have in abundance. China is not liberal or neoliberal and therefore is not burdened with the level of disagreement and division that the US has. China’s political system is much more centralized, and in those instances where centralized control and unity are important, they will outperform the US every time.
Liberalism has its limits, as it is impossible for everyone to have the superior set of inalienable individual rights that the elite want for themselves. Neoliberal economics has pushed the limits of liberalism far beyond where they have ever been, where the economic well being of 0.01% of the world’s population transcends the overall well being of the remaining 99.99%. That is utterly ridiculous.