Yves here. We are running this hardy fundraiser perennial, which is still timely. Even though Larry Summers is far less visible than he once was, having apparently gotten the message that he has become too toxic to win a senior economic post after having been rebuffed by Team Biden during the 2020 campaign, he is still influential. Summers joined the board of OpenAI in November 2023, and continues to rear his head on matters Harvard, such as criticizing the university for not being sufficiently tough on anti-genocide protests anti-Semitism and attempting to play a role in the Trump campaign against Harvard’s independence.
We must, however, clear our throats: we are still behind where we need to be in the fundraiser. At this point, we have always been working on our final goal, of funding more original reporting. We have a much bigger nut to cover this year due to readers having said enthusiastically that they want to continue our new Coffee Break/Sunday movie features. Those time slots in the past were covered by donations outside Naked Capitalism, to Lambert directly. So supporting these new offerings should be within the amounts donors were collectively providing over the years.
So please, if you have not donated yet, or forgot to top up for former Water Cooler contributions, please proceed directly to the Tip Jar and give generously!
Mark Ames’ hardy perennial, which he wrote for our first fundraiser fourteen years ago, remains an important warning about how neoliberalism became ascendant and why those who care about shoring up social safety nets and achieving more equitable income distribution need to focus on the nerdy operations of financial and economics. Ames explains one of the reasons the left is so bad at power: its adherents saw finance as grubby and thus not worth of study. For instance, someone in asset management is twice as likely to become a billionaire as someone in tech.
While this is our analogue to Christmas staples like The Grinch That Stole Christmas or It’s a Wonderful Life. Ames’ piece is the antithesis of sappy.
And in the spirit of Christmas coming early, we hope you’ll leave something nice in our stocking, um, Tip Jar!
By Mark Ames, author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.
If you’ve been reading Naked Capitalism for any period of time without giving back in donations—and most of us have been hooked from the time we discovered Yves Smith’s powerful, sharp voice and brilliant mind—then you you’ve been getting away with murder. Naked Capitalism is that rare blog that makes you smarter. Smarter about a lot of things, but primarily about Yves’ area of expertise, finance.
By a quirk of historical bad luck, the American Left has gone two generations without understanding finance, or even caring to understand. It was the hippies who decided half a century ago that finance was beneath them, so they happily ceded the entire field—finance, business, economics, money—otherwise known as “political power”—to the other side. Walking away from the finance struggle was like that hitchhiker handing the gun back to the Manson Family. There’s a great line from Charles Portis’s anti-hippie novel, “Dog of the South” that captures the Boomers’ self-righteous disdain for “figures”:
He would always say—boast, the way those people do—that he had no head for figures and couldn’t do things with his hands, slyly suggesting the presence of finer qualities.
That part about the hands—that would refer to the hippies’ other great failure, turning their backs on Labor, because Labor didn’t groove with the Hippies’ Culture War. So the Left finds itself, fifty years later, dealing with the consequences of all those years of ruinous neglect of finance and labor—the consequences being powerlessness and political impotence.
That’s why Yves Smith is so important to anyone who cares about politics and the bad direction this country is taking. In 2008, the Left suddenly discovered that although it could bray with the best of ‘em about how bad foreign wars are, and how wrong racism and sexism an homophobia are, it was caught completely and shamefully by surprise by the financial collapse of 2008. The ignorance was paralyzing, politically and intellectually. Even the lexicon was alien. Unless of course you were one of the early followers of Yves Smith’s blog.
It wasn’t always this way.
Back in the 1930s, the Left was firmly grounded in economics, money and finance; back then, the Left and Labor were practically one. With a foundation in finance and economics, the Left understood labor and political power and ideology and organization much better than the Left today, which at best can parry back the idiotic malice-flak that the Right specializes in spraying us with. We’re only just learning how politically stunted and ignorant we are, how much time and knowledge we’ve lost, and how much catching up we have to do.
Which is why Yves Smith’s Naked Capitalism is one of the 99%’s most valuable asset in the long struggle ahead: She is both analyst and educator, with a rare literary talent (especially for finance). One thing that’s protected the financial oligarchy is the turgid horrible prose that they camouflage their toxic ideas and concepts in. Yves is one of the rare few who can make reading finance as emotionally charged as it needs to be.
Naked Capitalism is our online university in finance and politics and ideology. Whereas other online universities are set up to turn millions of gullible youths into debt-shackled Wall Street feeding cows, Naked Capitalism is the opposite: Completely free, consistently brilliant, vital, and necessary, making us smarter, teaching us how we might one day overthrow the financial oligarchy. One other difference between Naked Capitalism and online university swindles: (Stanley Kaplan cough-cough!) Your donations won’t end up paying Ezra Klein’s salary.
Which brings me back to my whole “Shame on you!” point I was trying to make earlier. When it comes to fundraising, nothing works like shaming. That’s how those late-night commercials work: You’re sitting there in your nice comfortable home, and then suddenly there’s this three-legged dog hobbling into its cage, with big wet eyes, and then some bearded pedophile comes on 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 poison death chamber. And you—look at you, sitting there with your Chunky Monkey and your central heating, what kind of sick bastard are you? Get your goddamn Visa Mastercard out and send money to Rusty, or else his death is on your head. I hope you sleep well at night.”
Now I know that this sort of appeal wouldn’t work on the Naked Capitalism crowd—too many economists here, and as everyone knows, you can’t appeal to economists’ hearts because, well, see under “Larry Summers World Bank Memo”… I can imagine Larry watching that late night commercial with the three-legged dog, powering a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke and devouring a bag of Kettle Salt & Vinegar potato chips, calculating the productive worth of the three-legged dog, unmoved by the sentimental appeal. Larry grabs a dictaphone: “Item: How to end dog-gassings? Solution: Ship all three-legged stray dogs to sub-Saharan Africa. Africans won’t even notice. Dogs saved. Private capital freed up. Problem solved.”
So some of you have no hearts, and some of us have no shame. But we all do understand how vital Naked Capitalism has been in educating us. I’m sure that the other side knows how dangerous a site like this is, because as we become more educated and more political, we become more and more of a threat.
The oligarchy has spent decades on a project to “defund the Left,” and they’ve succeeded in ways we’re only just now grasping. “Defunding the Left” doesn’t mean denying funds to the rotten Democratic Party; it means defunding everything that threatens the 1%’s hold on wealth and power.
One of their greatest successes, whether by design or not, has been the gutting of journalism, shrinking it down to a manageable size where its integrity can be drowned in a bathtub. It’s nearly impossible to make a living as a journalist these days; and with the economics of the journalism business still in free-fall like the Soviet refrigerator industry in the 1990s, media outlets are even less inclined to challenge power, journalists are less inclined to rock the boat than ever, and everyone is more inclined to corruption (see: Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly). A ProPublica study in May put it in numbers: In 1980, the ratio of PR flaks to journalists was roughly 1:3. In 2008, there were 3 PR flaks for every 1 journalist. And that was before the 2008 shit hit the journalism fan.
This is what an oligarchy looks like. I saw the exact same dynamic in Russia under Yeltsin: When he took power in 1991, Russia had the most fearless and most ideologically diverse journalism culture of any I’ve ever seen, a lo-fi, hi-octane version of American journalism in the 1970s. But as soon as Yeltsin created a class of oligarchs to ensure his election victory in 1996, the oligarchs snapped up all the free media outlets, and forced out anyone who challenged power, one by one. By the time Putin came to power, all the great Russian journalists that I and Taibbi knew had abandoned the profession for PR or political whoring. It was the oligarchy that killed Russian journalism; Putin merely mopped up a few remaining pockets of resistance.
The only way to prevent that from happening to is to support the best of what we have left. Working for free sucks. It can’t hold, and it won’t.
There are multiple ways to give. The first is here on the blog, the Tip Jar, which takes you to PayPal. There you can use a debit card, a credit card or a PayPal account [and now Clover and Wise].
You can also send a check (or multiple post dated checks) in the name of Aurora Advisors Incorporated to
Aurora Advisors Incorporated
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Please also send an e-mail to yves@nakedcapitalism.com with the headline “Check is in the mail” (and just the $ en route in the message) to have your contribution included in the running tally of donations.
So donate now to Naked Capitalism. If 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 can contribute $5 or $5,000, it will pay for itself, I guarantee you. This isn’t just giving, it’s a statement that you are want a different debate, a different society, and a different culture.
Who knows, maybe we’ll win; maybe we’ll even figure out a way to seal Larry Summers in a kind of space barge, and fire him off into deep space, to orbit Uranus for eternity. Yves? Could it be financed?
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I was born on January 1, 1946, and quite early in the morning, so I must be among the first of the “self-righteous Boomers” Mr. Ames excoriates with so much energy and even more ignorance. He particularly has it in for “the hippies,” claiming that they decided “finance was beneath them” and “turned their backs on Labor.” This is nonsense. The hippies didn’t decide anything about “finance” and had no idea that “Labor” (in this sense) existed. They simply (yes, simply) grasped (intuited) that American society was unbearably opressive and rejected it, “dropped out,” at least in their private lives. I was never one of them. In the language of those days, I was a “politico.” I left university to work full time in an organization opposing the war in Vietnam, a memorable act of savagery Mr. Ames’ countrymen inflicted on the world. Indeed, my opposition to it landed me in jail (for the first time) in the year before Mr. Ames’ birth. Many Americans, baby-boomers all, opposed that war, too. And they certainly grounded themselves in “economics, money and finance,” at least in terms of the Left tradition that is associated with Karl Marx. What the New Left was doing, precisely, was to attempt to re-establish links with the Left of the 1930s, links that had been broken by the anti-communism of the McCarthy period. That anti-communism was inextricably bound up with a Russophobia, which, noting some of his comments about “Putin,” Mr. Ames may well share. But, of course, this is history and like many Americans history is a terra incognito for Mr. Ames. I do not mean the particular details, but the thing itself, the understanding that who we are now was formed by a past that must be understood, not caricatured. What makes Mr. Ames’ jejune remarks so regrettable is that he is making them in a good cause, and one I share. Naked Capitalism is a unique and invaluable resource. People who read it should support it. I have already done so. But in a spirit of solidarity that Mr. Ames rejects, I shall do so again.
Russophobia….then and now…in the annals of gop history…seems like the bet never left
I think a fair reading of history would show that those hippies, rather than abandoning finance, actually embraced it, surrendered to it, and achieved great wealth and power from it. They can be found today on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, and and in the establishment wing of the democratic party, which explains why the Democratic party is so hapless against the onslaught of the Nazis of the Republican party. Whatever they eventually do, they want to make sure they don’t kill the golden goose of finance in the process.
And yes, those hippies did abandon the working class. And 50 years later, they are in disbelief that much of the working class has finally abandoned them for a nasty demogogue who could tap into their anger after 50 years of betrayal.
Well, it depends on which hippies. I think this does not apply to Amfortas the Hippie, for example, and he can’t be the only one. Albert Bates is another one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Bates
There may still be other less known ones.
And part of the reason why so many “hippies’ abandoned the Working Class is that so much of the Bigly Unionized Working Class supported the Vietnam War. Some of them ( for example Nixon’s Hardhats) even made a special point of beating up protesters and marchers .
” The ‘Hard Hat Riot’ of 1970 Pitted Construction Workers Against Anti-War Protesters
The Kent State shootings further widened the chasm among a citizenry divided over the Vietnam War”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/hard-hat-riot-1970-pitted-construction-workers-against-anti-war-protestors-180974831/
Neoliberalism always finds a way to bastardize any organic social dynamic, be it lifestyle, fashion, music, ideology/politics via monetization and its incentives. In the case of hippies [not forgetting all that came before them] was a dynamic born out of WWII family formation. I mean the slogan down with The Man says it all, largely anti authoritarian – ” Turn on, tune in, drop out ” – Leary lol.
This was contra to the male dynamic that proceeded its post WWII identity – WE – won the war = vindication of superiority. Don’t forget the Hells angels being asked to knock down a few hippies. Not that 90+% of post WWII was just a huge corporate/financial foaming of the runway to tap all the wealth created during the war from citizans via endless income streams. Now going in hyper gear via fintech/subscription models and AI.
Back to the point – at 64 yrs old I have watched any social good, be it Sierra Club, kids sports clubs, et all all get the treatment. At the end of the day watched so many cool kids from wealthy family’s jump on the fun hippie wagon [see Grateful Dead] and after some drugs/sex/music got a bit older and jumped on the wealth wagon. Like Cocaine in the 80s L.A. those that transitioned well and made packet via networks would always joke about having that faze and then woke up to Reality[tm].
Hudson covers this well from an anthro optic – debt contracts perpetuity for a select few in society does not end well for it … the rest is just fluff …