Trump lost a gargantuan $1.17 billion over that period. Avoiding paying any taxes for 8 of the ten years! He would call himself the 'debt king' because of things like that. He knew he could make money by borrowing money and then not paying it back.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/05/trump-new-york-state-tax-returns
Trump Admits he lost that money:
Trump thinks that making a billion dollars by unloading debts and losses onto marks is just good business.
But where it gets dicey is that, despite our country setting itself up as a responsible. It is not. Trump is typical in this.
I started this post nearly 3 years ago, to answer the question via thought experiment. I am exploring broader questions than whether Trump is a crook. It just happens that his criminality illustrates some points I've been making about our Piratical Privateering traditions in commerce and colonialization.
Who has the power? “Creditors” or “Debtors?”
Nothing illustrates this question like our corrupt President. Trump has built his business by bankrupting clients, customers, contractors, workers and those who trusted him. He is called “the debt king” for a reason. Like a King he has managed to avoid paying debts he owed, converted debt to his own hands, and built a reputation based on borrowed money. He illustrates a principle that used to apply to Kings during the pre-modern period.
Trump is adept at making others pay for his mistakes. Like a Medieval King Trump can punish those he owes as easily as he punishes those who owe him.
Countries have power over their coinage, debt. The sovereign power regulates markets in countries that are sovereign over their own affairs. Feudal Societies operated an exchange of promises between lords and their vassals, creating a hierarchy of mutual obligations of service. Modern societies exchange promises in the form of contracts. At one time money was coined gold or silver, copper or bronze. Societies with sovereign power could fix the value of coins in terms of the commodities they bought or sold. But sovereign or not, the issue in most countries is not treasure, loot or coins, but debt. Debt is the original sin of a banker based system. Capitalism professes to be about actual capital, but it is actually about debt and ownership.
Thus where economics get dicey is that, what drives the business cycle is borrowing. What really drives recessions and depressions is whether people can borrow or attract investment without losing their property. In a sovereign country, if debt got to be so onerous that wealth was being concentrated and the people enslaved, the government would declare a Jubilee and cancel or zero out all debts. This like modern bankruptcy, would free up debt based businesses to borrow again. A society based on debt creates a lot of virtual wealth. When that wealth falls into few hands, so does the power of that country. People think that Republics exist to protect everyone from abuses of power, but aristocratic people want republics to protect the wealthy from being held to account.
despite our country setting itself up as a responsible. It is not. Our US Treasury is technically sovereign over money. But thanks to the influence of Alexander Hamilton and J. P. Morgan we privatized our banking system and put the pirates in charge of it.“The UK government took banker debt and made it our debt while letting bankers off. Then told us: You're living beyond your means.” ― Fuad Alakbarov https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/debt?page=3
“If you or I owe, say 100,000$, the people we owe own us. ”
But economics is testable theory.
Those claiming it is untestable, like Von Mises and his praxeology crowd (see Faulty Assumptions Post), turn economics into a side show at best, or a collection of faulty dogma's at worse. The current "tax reform" will lead to disaster, will have to be reformed, and is not reform.
But it does represent an exercise in power by our wealthiest incipient Oligarchs. Our side-show discussion, never made it into the national debate, but they gave me grist to analyze our system. I wish the money discussions were national. Because I learned something. And that was:
Money is not the property of "the money men". They've had that conceit off and on through history. The "Capitalist" era, wasn't really solely a time when investment in factories and actual capital made the world prosperous, it was also a time when the concept of property was enforced by armies and police worldwide, through piracy and privateering, expressed in colonialism, neocolonialism, dictatorships and even in socialism. But the place of the money men has always been fragile. Their origins as pirates meant that they could be robbed as easily as they robbed others. Their dependence on debt and interest.
Was reading today about the but had it done so, might have helped allay the anxiety people have about the costs of governing in the public interest. That subject is our money Power. The debate we had then continued among economists I know and in my own thought experiments.
The importance of sovereignty over the money supply is illustrated by the lessons of colonialism and neo-colonialism. Most people don't understand the subject. Most wealthy people have a different view of even what money should be from the rest of us.
Almost all money that can be exchanged in modern societies takes the form of "promises to pay", notes, tokens or accounting entries. The result is that those who are owed a lot can lend even more. Those who owe a lot have trouble borrowing.
The wealthy claim to prefer that money either be coins with intrinsic value. But when that happens, Gresham's law operates and the coins with intrinsic value are withdrawn from circulation. Only the desperate or the acquisitive spend their intrinsically valuable coin. They prefer to hoard it for difficult times. The wealthy create a kind of currency in order to put at least some of their money to loose. They loan it or invest it as capital.
There is never enough currency to fuel an economy, so it is really in the best interest of the wealthy that token, note and accounting money be available. Their gold and silver is lost when they have to spend it or when desperate people break into their treasure vaults. When the official money is gold or silver, the wealthy wind up creating accounting money anyway. When the wealthy back their notes with gold, they have a tradition of absconding with the gold and leaving note holders holding worthless paper.
The reason the monied prefer tokens with intrinsic value is that they need "treasure." They need valuables that are portable, valuable and can be sold in an emergency. Hence they prefer gold, jewels, valuables both as a display of wealth, prowess, virility and as a substitute for money while travelling or running from the law. Many of the wealthy, especially nouveau wealth, but also old money, never have enough wealth. They know people won't always be able to pay back their debts in a timely fashion, so treasure is also kept as something to either back their own borrowing or barter efforts.
Indeed, treasure is what usually backs "private money", at least nominally.
Thus the difference between a pirate and a nobleman, is that a pirate has to use violence to acquire loot. Nobility own property that they can extract rents from, borrow against and lend at interest, or invest with an expectation of earning income from. The wealthy can acquire loot either through charging economic rent on the use of property they control, or by taking property that borrowers pledge as surety when they can't pay. The wealthy earn unearned income during good times, and acquire property and treasure from desperate people in hard times.
The United States has had paper currency for most of it's history. Much of it printed by private banks and unreliable. Promises to pay are only as good as their promises. Token money, accounting money & notes can be rendered worthless with the stroke of a pen or the fall of a government.
But that doesn't mean that modern privateers don't know that The writer/economist John T. Harvey, in an article, "Can America Afford Bernie Sanders' Agenda?" talks about Sovereign Money:
From Hamilton to the present, who controls the money power has been vital to the survival and union of our country. To the extent it has operated in the common interest and funded communications and commerce it has been beneficial. To the extent it is operated for the benefit of the few it has created large fortunes, while dispossessing and enslaving masses. The Money power has been a source of both liberty and tyranny. It's been a key fight from before the constitution and was one of the fights that wracked the administration of our first President; George Washington, as one faction of our founders reacted suspiciously to Alexander Hamilton's proposed policies, another decided to take them over and use them for corrupt purposes, and a third faction went to war with the very idea of a central bank.
The surface issue then was whether the Federal Government should possess the money power fully or in tandem with the states. But the real issue was which private cabal -- one dominated by money men in the Northeast of the Country (Boston and Manhattan) -- or one dominated by diverse private banks dispersed around the country would control the money supply. And both factions, operated under the illusion that "hard money" (gold or Silver Commodity money) was real money and despised and abused paper money. Banks would print paper money and issue it with debt, establishing a win/win situation for themselves as long as no one caught on to their conversion of the reserves backing the paper. If the customer couldn't pay they'd take the property of the customer. If the customer paid back the debt they'd get interest from the customer. As my friend John Turmel pointed out, that interest constitutes a rent on money that leads to the bank acquiring much of the value of the economic activity leant money creates. Accounting money disappears when the debt is paid. It also disappears when the bubble created by its use, collapses.
He who has the money power winds up with unearned wealth and rental income.
British privateers, operating through their Tory and Whig agents in Parliament first made the States subject to external money power by forbidding them to coin currency or issue their own credit money (paper money). Benjamin Franklin defended the States power to produce its own money. They ignored him, and that is one reason for the Rebellion.
“This is so because, unlike in Greece, every single penny of it is denominated in our currency. We don’t need to raise dollars from taxation, exports, or bake sales–we make them.” Harvey
“Don’t take my word for it. Here are just a few folks from across the political spectrum and in different walks of life saying the exact same thing:” Harvey
“In the case of United States, default is absolutely impossible. All U.S. government debt is denominated in U.S. dollar assets.” Peter Zeihan, Vice President of Analysis for STRATFOR” Harvey
“In the case of governments boasting monetary sovereignty and debt denominated in its own currency, like the United States (but also Japan and the UK), it is technically impossible to fall into debt default.” Erwan Mahe, European asset allocation and options strategies adviser” Harvey
“There is never a risk of default for a sovereign nation that issues its own free-floating currency and where its debts are denominated in that currency.” Mike Norman, Chief Economist for John Thomas Financial” Harvey
“Central banks can issue currency, a non-interest-bearing claim on the government, effectively without limit.” Alan Greenspan, Chair of the Federal Reserve (1987-2006)” Harvey
“There is no inherent limit on federal expenses and therefore on federal spending…When the U.S. government decides to spend fiat money, it adds to its banking reserve system and when it taxes or borrows (issues Treasury securities) it drains reserves from its banking system. These reserve operations are done solely to maintain the target Federal Funds rate.” Monty Agarwal , managing partner and chief investment officer of MA Managed Futures Fund” Harvey
“As the sole manufacturer of dollars, whose debt is denominated in dollars, the U.S. government can never become insolvent, i.e., unable to pay its bills. In this sense, the government is not dependent on credit markets to remain operational.” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis” Harvey
“The necessity for a government to tax in order to maintain both its independence and its solvency is true for state and local governments, but it is not true for a national government.” Beardsley Ruml, Chair Federal Reserve Bank of New York (1937-1947)” Harvey
“I am not worried about the deficit. It is big enough to take care of itself.” Ronald Reagan, President of the United States (1981-1989)” Harvey
“Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.” Dick Cheney, Vice President of the United States (2001-2009)” Harvey
“A sovereign government can always make payments as they come due by crediting bank accounts — something recognized by Chairman Ben Bernanke when he said the Fed spends by marking up the size of the reserve accounts of banks.” L. Randall Wray, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute, and Co- Editor of the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics” Harvey
“Mind you, that doesn’t mean there cannot be other consequences. Inflation, for example, is a possibility. Also from Dr. Wray:” Harvey
“Government needs to be concerned about pressures on inflation and the exchange rate should its spending become excessive. However, with high unemployment and idle plant and equipment, no one can reasonably argue that these dangers are imminent.” Harvey
“In other words, if all of our resources are fully employed–which is our real budget constraint, not dollars–then this can cause the demand for goods and services to outstrip supply and thereby drive up prices. This was precisely the situation during World War Two. Of course, that period was hardly one of economic malaise because that kind of inflation is a problem in the same way that having six people ask you for a date on Saturday night is a problem–you are so popular you can’t keep up with demand. Things could be worse.” Harvey
“That’s not our problem today, however, when the standard measure of unemployment is 5.1% and the broad one is 10.3% (the latter includes discouraged workers and those who have taken part-time employment but wanted full-time). And this is why we have seen neither hide nor hair of even moderately high inflation during the current run up of the debt.” Harvey
“But returning to the main point, anyone who says the federal government doesn’t have the budget to manage Sanders’ (or anyone else’s) programs doesn’t understand how modern macroeconomies work. The federal government’s budget is not analogous to your own and it cannot run out of money (for a longer explanation of this, see The Big Danger In Cutting The Deficit). If they want to say instead that his agenda (Bernie Sanders: Agenda for America) will push us to the point that our resources will be fully employed, that’s possible.” Harvey
When we think of pirates we picture them with eye patches, bandanas and at sea. We often see them as having no connection to anything in our own times or outside the world's oceans. But there is a direct connection between:
Offshoots of Piracy | |
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And on a more humorous note:
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It is easy to get confused about the founders. They worked together to create the constitution, but North and South never really understood each other well. Philadelphia, Boston, and New York formed one axis. But the other axis stretched from Georgia to Virginia. They joined to fight the British. Without Unity, there would have been no United States and the States of the North would have gone from Colonies to neo-colonies and never escaped oppression. That unity was formed around economic, cultural and familial ties. But it also was formed around a willingness to embrace the concepts of Federalism, Democratic Republicanism, commonwealth and Democracy.
Some of those principles came from history and philosophers. But some of the sources were more intimate. Formal influences came from experience with the Dutch, the Swiss, Italian City States & Ancient Greece. They also came from enlightenment writers. But additional experience was informed by our own maritime history with piracy and privateering, conscription and militias. And our experience with neighbors like our own Indigineous.
The Indigenous practiced forms of Democracy and Federation, that may have influenced the formation of our country. Politifact quotes Jon W. Parmenter's The Edge of The Woods: Iroquoia, 1534-1701:
“It is highly probable that Anglo-Americans during the revolutionary era looked to Haudenosaunee governance as a model of a successful collective polity, and borrowed elements of Haudenosaunee practice in developing revolutionary American constitutional governments,”
Politifact also cites a speech given in 1744, by Canassatego, an Onondaga chief, to representatives from Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia at a treaty conference in Lancaster, Pa.:
“We heartily recommend Union and a good Agreement between you our Brethren,...Never disagree, but preserve a strict Friendship for one another, and thereby you, as well as we, will become the stronger. Our wise Forefathers established Union and Amity between the Five Nations; this has made us formidable; this has given us great Weight and Authority with our neighbouring Nations. We are a powerful Confederacy; and, by your observing the same Methods our wise Forefathers have taken, you will acquire fresh Strength and Power; therefore whatever befalls you, never fall out one with another.”
However, it wasn't Democracy that made the Iroquois so powerful it was the concepts of Federation. The viral meme about the Iroquois conflates Democratic, Republican and Federation principles. The “E Pluribus Unum” concept is what the Iroquois were talking about and what Benjamin Franklin and others was referencing with his famous and somewhat brutal quote that if the Iroquois:
“capable of forming a Scheme for such a Union," then the new nation of European origin should be able to as well.”
So the idea of Democracy was not central to the indigineous influence on our founders. They were worried about what happens when States start out in disunity; they go to war. Federation is about avoiding and mitigating conflict.
“The concept [of Federation is] based on peace and consensus rather than fighting."
I've found compelling evidence that Robert and Governeuer Morris were pirates. And Hamilton was not perfect either. But I've also found evidence they were nationalists, just as patriotic as the Southerners, abolitionists and wanted a unified nation not a confederacy. His work with Madison and Jefferson gave us a Strong nation that still survives.
Had we been a loose confederacy, the Civil war would have started sooner and never ended. Fractured states are subject to external predation, colonialism and neo-colonialism.
Hamilton wanted direct election of the President. He was able to stop the Congress from making the selection of the President by the State Governors or Congress, but the Electoral College was a compromise with Southern Politicians who did not want popular sovereignty.
He also gave us a strong independent judiciary, which has saved us, even when it has been somewhat corrupt at times. As we can see right now, a Judiciary subject to executive and legislature, in the hands of a corrupt factional legislation and executive, would be the death knell of our Republic.
The General Welfare clause has allowed our country to serve its people instead of its oligarchs.
And Morris was the loudest, and pretty much the solo, voice against slavery at the Convention. Had he been listened to we might have avoided the Civil War.
So these fellows, who in some ways were pirates, learned some of their appreciation for liberty from that. Robert Morris ran a pirate fleet during the Revolution. Like I said, pirates tended to be more democratic. Privateers, not so much. As I've noted before Thom Paine also learned something about democracy from crewing on Privateers. The ones that treated people fairly also operated more democratically -- and more like free pirate ships.
Just some thoughts from an article I've been reading.
When we think of pirates we don't usually think of lawyers. We think of hard men with eye patches and peg legs. The basis of all piracy is high seas theft and private warfare. The two have always overlapped. We romanticize piracy because the foundation of many wealthy family fortunes is in piratical behavior. All pirates seek loot, wealth, power, and to fight enemies on the Seas. Privateers confine their piracy to enemies of their country. Pirates don't. But it's not that simple. The legalization of private warfare that enables piracy, makes an incentive to corrupt law, corrupt piratical behavior, and legalized theft.
I've been studying, talking to people and blogging about infrastructure for a number of years now. What is happening in California is a stark example of the inevitable result of our tradition of privateering with infrastructure. It's an old cycle:
Back in the 19th century, the pioneer economist, Henry George divided the properties necessary for production into 3 categories:
Capital is defined as that wealth that is used as input into making more wealth. In Henry George's world Capital is not the money itself, unless that money is spent on capital goods;
In Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" Capital Stock were things like Sheep or Goats kept to breed to produce more sheep and goats. With material goods one can tell a capital good from something more abstract because a capital good depreciates unless additional resources are put into maintaining, updating, refreshing it. Capital Goods cost money. We protect income from capital goods because it will be consumed by the use of those goods. In
Henry George did a good job of explaining all those things and his ideas informed the early stages of industrialization in the United States, with common sense definitions and clarity. See:
Henry George was soon shoved aside by others, including some people who had initially been his disciples and who hijacked his movement. They wanted land property, natural resources, and simple wealth to be treated as capital and borrowing its virtues, taxed as if it were productive wealth. Actual capital, needs constant refresh. But corporations need guaranteed income. Investing in capital or wages is a cost. For a corporation profit is defined as wealth minus those costs. The course of investment in capital is a fine one, but the temptation to live on rents and coast is ever-present. At one time policy makers understood this. They exempted ONLY capital type expensing. But by lumping all wealth, including financial wealth and rents from property or hijacking wages, as "capital", wealthy people can make money by renting their wealth. They no longer have to invest their money in the constant refreshing and updating that is needed to keep a property up. They can live on depreciating investments and by even junking them, instead.
We've seen this with leveraged buyouts. A company is bought, loaded with debt, the debt is backed by depreciating assets, but purchased premised on the notion that it will be invested in capital goods. The people doing leveraged buyouts lend money, get their money back with interest, pay themselves godawful salaries and then junk or bankrupt the companies they purchased with investor money. This is not capitalism, this is privateering.
The latest example of this is Pacific Gas and Electric and their power outages. It has been easier for the owners of PG&E to use decades old infrastructure and put bandaids on it, than to refresh or modernize it. Their mandate is to make as much short term money as possible. Long term profit in the old sense, as a strong, modern, vital, robust system, was secondary to maximizing payments to top executives and stockholders. When that failure combined with climate change to disastrous consequences, they declared bankruptcy. Like the Turnpikes of old, revenues were diverted to pockets not maintenance because they see a monopoly situation
I would suggest that folks in California invest, big time, in solar, wind and stored water energy. We also need to stop pretending that privateering works. Although that is not the line pedaled by Cato and such. Champions of privateering will tell you that public and private partnerships "Work better" because they mix investor money with government money. The downside of that is that in cases where there is an underlying monopoly they also profiteer with tolls and fees. There is also no incentive to continue investing in refresh and update once the monopoly is established. The worst effect of privateering with public goods is that they become private goods available to an elite and excluding others. In the end that usually has led to alternative technologies coming along. But that doesn't make it an optimal solution.
And PG&E illustrates what happens when a public good is privatized. Just as Enron did. Just as we are seeing with internet platforms like facebook or twitter.
Cato article (which spins like a Tazmanian Devil):
I'm in the process of disambiguating older posts. This is part of a series, I'll come back to it later.
There is a lane for social goods and there is a lane for private goods. Henry George made the distinction based on whether the goods can be sensibly sold in markets.
Modern theorists insist that the distinction between market capitalism and socialism is in whether the goods involved are "rivalrous" or "excludable." That definition involves the behavior of consumers and sellers and power.
Excludable means that someone with power, a governor, can say "you can't enter here." It refers to the ability of people with power, government, to put gates on a resource, service or product. The natural commons is non-excludable. Yet historically westerners have seized, marked boundaries, claimed and fenced land and tried to do the same with oceans and even clouds. Rivalrous means that the good is limited in availability.
Vital Goods, food, medicine, shelter, are by definition rivalrous, but rationing them via markets is barbarous. If a good is vital and someone can exclude people from using it, then by George's version that is a natural monopoly. Excluding goods from markets is a means to make them more "rivalrous". His definition of monopoly is based on the moral effects, the natural rights of those who "should" have access to them. The Rivalrous and Excludable argument has more to do with power.
The purpose of capital, historically, has been to make the formerly unavailable more available. Our ancestors found their health and life-spans limited by access to resources. Capital is about marshaling resources for both public and private benefit. There is little to share socially without the use of capital to make production, goods and services more efficient and/or better quality.
To Henry George and other early modern writers, capital was something very specific, it was wealth reused "in the course of production." Such wealth, like;
Capital is the wealth, tools and equipment that go into production.
The governorship of capital is either in the hands of the folks using those tools themselves, or in the hands of managers. Those managers can work for a government, or work for some private owner. Private owners call themselves "capitalists" but they really are property owners who are renting and managing capital. Capitalism is simply a term for a system where the ownership and governorship of capital is in private hands. Capitalists employ people and manage them. Private government versus public government. Is private government necessarily better? That is problematic.
A Collective is a "group of people acting as a group." By that definition the only time one is not dealing with a collective is when a single person is running an owner operator business where he/she does everything him/herself. Therefore there is no "collectivism versus capitalism." The battle is between private governorship of collectives or some kind of republican and democratic forms. There is a range of involvement from pure democracy where nothing gets done unless everyone agrees, to some kind of hierarchy.
Businesses work best when they pay attention to republican and democratic principles. It is probably right to disparage purely collective decision making because that only works on a very very small scale. When scaling up to a Republic or some kind of federation you need a certain amount of hierarchy. But in any case large organizations are collective organization. This is definitional
A collective organization is can be governed democratically, oligarchically, or as a tyranny. We get sold "individual" enterprise as free enterprise. But unless Zuckerberg is the only run involved in facebook, he's managing a collective. An enterprise solely owned it is solely owned by a single person backed by a hierarchy is "monarchy" or "tyranny," by definition. If someone has a hundred or 100,000 employees, it doesn't matter. Ownership is government, enabled by legal documents registered with a court. If government turns into simple arbitrary ownership, that is usually bad government. Dictators make themselves extremely wealthy. In some cases they own their country and make themselves monarchs. "Capitalism" is often a problematical term that confuses the organization of productive property with some kind of governing system.
For those reasons I no longer refer to predatory "capitalism" as capitalism. I call it privateering. Privateering is the conversion of government into private hands. Profiteering, legal piracy, Private warfare, modern corporate raiders, grifting and grafting, are all modern forms of privateering. Thus the issue is not capitalism versus democracy or socialism, but pirates versus common good, using propaganda and legal tricks to make their thefts perfectly legal. Privateers seek private separate power and advantage. That is tyranny, not a virtue.
Not all wealth is capital.
When we are talking about nature's bounty or of goods and services that don't fit into a market mold, we are talking about goods and services that don't fit a pure capital mode. We call such goods “social Goods” because they are a “proper social function,” this is a social lane. In modern times it gets labeled socialism, but they are social goods whether or not they are controlled by the people as a whole or governed by rich people.
When public goods, like parks, farms, and similar are handed over to private hands they are usually turned into gated club goods. A formerly non-rival good, by excluding people from using it becomes a gated good. Those with the resources to trade for the good get access to it, others are excluded. This creates market failure. Markets only work when the goods sold are non-rival (nobody hurt by purchase, plenty of hamburgers or cookies for example) and non-exclusive (meaning anyone can buy and sell in the market). Monopoly puts vital goods in the hands one one or a small number more people, who then can extract tolls from their access.
Vital social goods; food, medicine, health care, communications, transport, can be distributed through markets, but unless the markets enforce access, transparent information and resourcing for all actors, monopolists will turn them into gated goods, forcing artificial rivalries and excluding access arbitrarily. A free market is a creation not an accident. Some markets are never free. Hospitals, emergency services, and infrastructure, either belong to all the people or they risk being artificially gated or rivalrous goods where competition is life or death and resources extracted in the exchange. Example is when companies can buy drug patents and then raise prices to insane levels. Those are not free markets.
More:
The capitalism lane is what can be bought or sold in a market, justly. A good is in the lane of markets if:
Things that have those three attributes are in the capitalist lane. The social goods lane can also have capitalists involved and use markets, but if they do:
The kinds of goods described in Henry George's comments in 1890 were very profitable, because they could be governed by monopolists and denied to those not willing or able to pay an obviously inflated price, or in the case of monopsony, not sellers denied sales unless they pay an artificially low price. HG was describing market failure and social goods. It is not socialism when social goods are under governorship or at least control of the people as a whole through their representatives. It is monopoly capitalism, and privateering.
An essay in Scientific American titled: The tragedy of the tragedy of the commons, debunks a seminal article that claimed that the obstacle to progress was “the tragedy of the commons” Unfortunately, as the article by By Matto Mildenberger on April 23, 2019 explains:
“The man who wrote one of environmentalism’s most-cited essays was a racist, eugenicist, nativist and Islamaphobe—plus his argument was wrong.” [Scientific American Article]
When we think of pirates we picture them with eye patches, bandanas or fancy head-dresses, but pirates are anyone who uses property without the permission of its rightful owners. Privateers are pirates who use war and the political system to make their thefts, usurpations and conversions legal. That broader definition has been used since the beginning. Piracy is in the eye of the Beholder.
When we think of pirates we picture them with eye patches, bandanas and at sea. But the word buccaneer comes from people raising cattle and making leather. While a pirate is a thief who sails the seas. Brigand is a pirate but also a generic term for a thief who can be on land. Pirates and thieves are outlaws -- unless they have a permit to steal. Then they are called privateers.
Pirates and privateers have operated in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, the black sea, the Caspian, the Baltic Sea, the Atlantic, Pacific, every ocean and many lakes around the world.
Pirates and privateers engage in private warfare. The term when that private warfare is conducted on land is "filibustering." A Filibusterer was a soldier in a private army operating on land. Sometimes they were also mercenaries -- who are soldiers who work for a private force. Piracy and privateering have always been a feature of war and conflict. From:
In Pirates of the Caribbean, it looks like the Pirates are fighting the British Navy, but they really were fighting the East India Company, which was a rival pirate gang, but perfectly legal. Ironically, our revolution started as a fight against the East India Company too. The "Tea Parties" were about a Government sanctioned effort to take over and monopolize the tea trade by putting competitors out of business with artificially low prices on British carried tea, and taxes on American Ships. There is some evidence that the first American colonies were founded as pirate refuges.
Piracy and land hunger go together. The Saxons who invaded in Britain were hungry for farms. The Vikings were hungry for land. The settlers of the Americas from Eurasia, were property hungry; land, loot, slaves, wealth, likewise. Privateering is about acquiring property.
The distinction between privateers and pirates has always been a parsed legal one. American "filibusters", like the Walkers, Texans, Jacksons, etc.... were considered pirates by the Spanish speaking people they plagued. The privateer may have a legal permit from his own country --> but he is waging war and war is violent and illegal in the fundamental moral sense. from the Point of view of the people we were attacking.
Pirates, profiteers, and the industries who inherit their traditions, may be perfectly legal, but they are amoral to immoral buzzards who violate norms and do things that ought to be illegal
Privateering companies are no better than pirate fleets, except they are somewhat constrained by laws. When they engage in theft, smuggling, private warfare, as part of a war or under some legal permit. So when the Government says that theft is legal, it is privateering. When people don't bother to get "clothed in the law" and engage in naked robbery of some kind, it is piracy. Privateers get to hang pirates.
I see Privateering as an ideology. I explained in a post first written in 2014:
Thus, modern pirates are people who sell copies of movies or songs without paying royalties to their legal owners. Modern privateers setup abusive contracts to acquire such ownership. Thus modern pirates are usually dressed in fancy Armani or other well tailored suites, carry portfolios and have degrees from classy law schools, and are legally privateers not pirates. The victims, on the other hand, may have actually written the song they are charged with piracy for using. An abusive contract can take ownership of things like authorship, that no person can really sell, since selling the rights to a work doesn't change who wrote it. But modern pirates don't usually have peg legs anymore. It is much safer to bribe a judge or pay a legislator to change the law.
For example in our system if one reproduces music without the permission of the corporate owner, even if you were the author. You are a pirate. The USA constitution gives people rights to inventions and writings for limited times for the purpose of stimulating commerce. Privateers lobbied to expand the time patents and copyrights operate long enough so they become virtual titles of nobility. Intellectual property, if it existed, should be the property of the inventor. Under the power of corrupt lobbying and influence pedaling, intellectual property becomes a rental property of giant conglomerates and wealthy individuals. No longer a connection to invention and no longer a limited right with a limited term. That is who privateering works.
Most of us are used to them the way someone gets used to living in a pig-sty. This post is about some alternatives. But first we have to identify the real pirates.
The biggest pirates have usually dressed better than the drifters and thieves that get labeled as pirates. If they aren't lawyers they can afford them. Worse, they can usually afford (or are) politicians. They can write the law. The term for this was "privateer" in the past. Modern Letter of Marquees come in the form of Corporate Charters or their ability to acquire patents, trade-marks, copyrights, from the creators. Modern pirates hang the hapless as pirates. They are known to sue and take the money of artists who made the mistake of selling their original work to them. That the original work belongs to them by basic right and can't be sold legitimately, doesn't matter to the pirates. They write the laws. They are privateers.
Privateering is the right word because it is when the government grants a right of private government to an individual or hierarchy bound by contract [corporation]. Privateering is based on privatizing basic public function and enables profiteering, private warfare, smuggling, swindle and theft, all perfectly legal because the law has been modified to make it so.
This post is about privateering and the money power. The subject is frequently distorted by cultlike arguments, but the reality is that our system of inequality, of periodic economic failure, is based on grifting and cons that depend on privatized money.
Of course the most lucrative way to loot everyone, is to issue privatized money. Whether it is bit coin or fly by night banks, the goal is the same, to legally counterfeit money! Letting Wall street or private Pirates using banks to coin money as debt is an economy wrecker and that is the subject of this post.
Gerrymandering is wrong. This year, SCOTUS, decided to chicken out on dealing with the problem. They acknowledge that Gerrymandering is bad politics, unjust politics and a terrible thing. But they tell society they can't fix it. Justice Kagan wrote a powerful dissent on the subject:
“For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities,” [SCOTUS]
If a problem is beyond judicial solution, that indicates bad design.
“And not just any constitutional violation. The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives.” [SCOTUS]
Gerrymandering is also corruption.
“These gerrymanders enabled politicians to entrench themselves in office as against voters’ preferences.” [SCOTUS]
I started this post on September 17, 2018. Actually I thought I'd published it back then. It talks about democracy and how we used to practice it and how Trump is subverting it. With Trump's efforts to use decree powers to build his Southern Border wall, this assault is now in the critical stage. He's declaring a National Emergency, where there is none.
When I debate with some Radical Right folks, they will tell me,
“The United States is a Republic not a Democracy”
Well John Locke dealt with that question more than 300 years ago. In a Federated Republic, which is what we are, democratic features are either part of the equation or the country is tyranny!
Since the 90s we've had a cycle of the GOP running the same con over and over again. Initially some of the more sane Republicans would push back. It was George Herbert Walker Bush who called Reagan's economics a con, "Voodoo Economics" and who helped coin the term "trickle down economics." The more honest cons in the Reagan Administration soon knew that their con didn't work. David Stockman would admit it later. Summarized in the famous quote:
“None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers.” —David Stockman
The Atlantic Magazine describes his cognitive dissonance in an article titled "The Education of David Stockman." The entire Reagan Administration knew from 1981 on that lowering marginal taxation on the wealthy and making up for tax cuts with cost shifting to workers, doesn't help the economy.
Even so “trickle down” was very popular among the "donor class", so its shills held (and still hold) their noses and supported the con anyway. They rationalized that if they adopted the Hitlerian Big Lie principle and repeated a lie often enough it becomes an article of faith.
Consequently, among republican business preachers and operatives, this con is an article of faith. kind of a 13th commandment.
₽rivateers engage in the following:
The theme of piracy and privateering to describe our current economic system, much of our current political system, and the ideology of our modern Republican Business classes. Not that Democrats aren't sometimes pirates and privateers. It is just not their stated ideology.
Privateering is at the heart of the worst of modern capitalism; the "privateering spirit. As I've noticed before privateering is defined as using private enterprises to accomplish missions assigned to government. Initially the term was window dressing for legal piracy. As I've noted before both the British Navy and the USA navy emerged from the private navies of legal pirates like Sir Francis Drake. The successful descendants of pirates became the lords and barons of British Society, and more importantly of British foreign trade, adventurism and the admirals of the fleet.
The heart of the matter is that modern business relies on contractual relationships, and ₽rivateering relies on the inequity of contracts that involve power relationships. The difference between a pirate and a privateer is that privateers are bound by contracts that grant them license, and use those contracts to abuse law and power.
To illustrate, Pirates, were simply outlaws. For that reason pirate ships often were more democratic and the officers and crew more free, aboard ship, than the crews of privateers, who were often little more than slaves to ambitious, greedy power hungry captains. However, the ideal privateer operated his ship as if it were a pirate ship and treated their crew with respect. Thus the lines between pirate and privateer were often blurred. On land they had to follow rules. At sea "dead men tell no tales" was often practiced to avoid getting caught by officials while robbing and stealing at sea while ostensibly doing legitimate business. The result was the legal pirates were often hanging known pirates. Privateers have always tended to be pirates. But pirates rarely get to be privateers unless they can manage to avoid being caught.
Modern privateers don't need eye patches, peg legs. They wear Armani suits and carry briefcases. They enslave through contracts, loans, lawsuits and hostile takeovers. No need for cannon. They frequently own (or are) Judges and law enforcement. But when the cops are the criminals, who will enforce the law? Piracy led to privateering and privateering enabled:
Power establishes Inequitable relationships established through abusive contracts and debt. The robbed can be robbed over and over again. Privateers would do anything for trade goods and property:
So the irony of modern privateers is that often they are playing all sides. Robbing people, and arresting robbers. Smuggling and arresting smugglers. Bribing people and taking Bribes. Piracy attracts con artists and grifters. A Grifter is a con artist who has a plan B for avoiding getting caught. Grift + Drift to new marks. Privateering only works when the pirates can attract a crew and governments can hire them. Since it is based on looting, it hollows out any actual capital that might have been there.
Modern pirates operate through the use of contracts, courts and information and power disparity. This post is about their historic involvement in drug smuggling.
Privateers engage in the following:
First, piracy is a term for theft and the thieves who commit those thefts. It is also used in other contexts, such as labeling those who use copyrighted material without permission. People usually restrict the meaning to thieves operating on the seas. Piracy has been a feature of world history since at least the 14th century BC, when pirates were described in Egyptian and Canaan correspondences. The Sea People's who disrupted Minoan and Mycenaean life, were pirates. So were both the Greeks and the Trojans.
When an entire nation engages in piracy, it is considered legal by the State and the term for that is “privateering.” The distinction between privateers and pirates is often a corrupt barely legal one.
Moreover, the term itself "private + teering" implies private warfare, private government, and government sanction and allocation of loot. In the European World and the British one, specifically, Admiralty courts adjudicated loot from the sea, both that acquired through privateering and "salvage." Admiralty courts and similar, through auctions served the role of legitimizing loot, slavery, salvage, and thus laundering proceeds from smuggling, buccaneering, piracy, "filibustering (private warfare), traditionally, for centuries. They have ranged from laundering implicit corruption (we didn't know!) to explicitly corrupt money laundering.
The vehicle for traditional piracy was the "letter of marquee." That was a contractual instrument that granted and individual or bearer, the right to "take prizes" from ships belonging to a country the contractual authority, government, was at war at. The concept of "letter of marquee" was also behind some early corporations such as the East India Company, from around 1601, which is one of the models for the modern corporation. They would grant the company or bearer, the power to wage private warfare, on the seas and often on land as well, to raid, steal, attack and capture enemy ships. Sometimes pirates would have letters of marquee from both sides of a conflict so they could simply attack anyone passing thru a chokepoint.
Thus privateering has traditionally represented legalized robbery under cover of contract. Essentially privateering enabled economic royalty, as the companies granted this power could govern their crews as they pleased. Some privateers behaved like pirate ships and treated their crew well. But many employed the sailor as slave model of governance. Privateers, warships and private shipping in general in general, were infamous for beatings, whippings, poor food, low pay and tyranny, (defined by John Locke as power exercised for Private, separate advantage) over thier crews. Pirate ships were often a model for rough democratic governance. Ironically legal pirate ships, not so much. The purpose of privateering was to acquire property for private ownership. The attitude of privateering is anything for a buck.
Thus the enemy of liberty is in fact privateering because privateering is the conversion of what should be ruled for the common good into private property ruled for the advantage of the few. Privateers were pirates, who, operating under a Letter of Marquee, were authorized to engage in private warfare on behalf of the State. Generalizing that meaning, privateers are those who engage in commerce, warfare, theft, espionage or any other action, under the protection of Government. Privateers are private government. That privateers originally were also pirates, often from the point of view of other countries who had issued no such letters, just illustrates the barbarity of the practice. Privateering is as old as piracy. Vikings were only pirates to the people of the lands they predated.
Even classical pirates, lived lives, internally that were governed by democratic rules. When Thom Paine served as a privateer:
“At sixteen, in 1753, he brought it off. He shipped out on a privateer — a private warship authorized by the English government to attack and loot commercial vessels sailing under the flag of any nation with whom England was legally at war.”
He tells of that experience that he experienced good captains and bad captains. The Good captains treated the crew with respect. The bad captains whipped and beat their crew and looked down on them as little more than vermin. The British Royal Navy whipped and beat sailors. Pirates and the better Privateers, motivated them.
The tradition of both the United States and the British (including Scotland and all of Ireland) is founded on privateering. The major Sea Captain Families even called themselves "Sea Dogs" and they'd later branch out into other businesses. But most of their businesses were or derived from Privateering. Thus Privateering involves the Following Activities, when either barely legal or they don't get caught:
Financial Capitalism as Laundering ill gotten goods. Most money is either some kind of private debt, or in emergencies it might be recycled loot. It always comes from labor in some way. Financial Capitalism arrogates wealth and uses some of it to generate more wealth. Actual capitalism mixes labor with wealth and winds up a public good even when not intended to be.
Thus Privateering is at the root of the modern world, European Adventurism, and European Thievery. Often it was excused as "saving" benighted souls. But more often the souls that were reduced to abject subjection were originally noble souls reduced by the forces of kleptocracy and kakacracy. From the Point of View of European ship captains and many of their crew, taking slaves on the "Guinea coast" of Africa was simply yet another way to make a living. But from the point of view of their victims, such as Frederick Douglas describes in a famous quote:
“The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery” -Douglass, p84
Privateering has even become an ideology. Modern Pirates don't have peg legs or carry a saber. They wear suits and carry brief cases. They seek to privatize, "enclose the commons;" take what had been an institution, property or service that is intended for the public good, and turn it to private control. This is not "free-market economics" it is free booting economics. The ideology of piracy is expressed by people like Donald Trump who say we did wrong by not seizing Iraqi Oil fields when we invaded Iraq. That is what pirates do.
I've written about this before so I may come back to this post and put in references. I just wanted to make it plain (and relatively succinct) what I'm talking about when I talk about privateering.
“The Falange Espanola Tradicionalista y de las JONS shall engage in “direct, bold and combative” revolution.”
The Falange like other fascist groups had in common the attachment to violence both as a tool for seeking and maintaining power; and a tool for indoctrination and propaganda. The Word "Falange comes from the Greek Military formation known as the Phalanx. The Falange like the Fascists in Italy and the Nazis in Germany, saw themselves as a spearhead for revolution. Jose Antonio Primo De Rivera and Franco, both saw violent revolution as a solution to the problem of “Republicanism” and “Permissivism.”
George Lakoff recommended using the word Privateering to describe klepto political policies like privatization. That term turns out to be extremely appropriate for understanding the modern confidence scheme movement that calls itself "conservative." They like to say they are for "Capitalism" and against "Socialism" but privateering is a bait and switch operation where fake capitalists acquire rents and usurp property they can use to extract loot. It is not what most people think of when they think of "free enterprise."
The term "privateer" ought to push buttons and make alarms go off for people who are paying attention. Our US mob always wants to be legal, so it buys politicians to legalize what would be criminal anywhere else. It turns out our own Mafia is the inheritors of the "Brotherhood of the Coast" and a tradition of piracy (Sea Dogs) that still infects our politics and business. it truly can be seen as an ideology that masques itself as "capitalism."
This ideology embraces the following basic principles:
FDR called these the principles of “economic royalism” & hinges on the following beliefs:
The notions that:
The Far Right calls a government that provides basic services "socialism", but they practice the privatization of anything that nature provides all of us and its placement into private hands. Land, minerals, water resources, all traditionally belong to “the commons” and yet we give them to private persons or privately owned companies to manage and extract wealth from. If someone by an accident of birth comes to own a part of nature's bounty, that is privilege not effort, labor or merit.
A privateering ideology is also an ideology of nobility. The constitution says that no titles of nobility should be granted. But it seems that granting property to self appointed nobility, that they can extract rents from, is fine.
When what was previously run for the common good, is enclosed, turned out for profit. The term for that is "enclosing the commons." It is analogous to when land barons started stringing barbed wire across the plains and killing wandering cattlemen (free rangers). It is analogous to giving people "titles of nobility", except it usually is laundered through legal processes.
We give titles of nobility to Owners of;
And these owners extract profits from profiteering in medicines, health care products, and by overcharging everyone. They don't invest in new medicines or technologies so much as extract rents from existing products. When they do invest in new products they mark up the products so high very little of the investment is actual investment.
A rentier doesn't care if the building, corporation or land he owns is kept in good order, or if people eat or survive. All they care about is extracting their rents.
At the basis of oppression is the enforcement of criminal, unjust or oppressive contracts. US law has always treated criminal contracts as unenforceable. But when government is corrupt, it legalizes what would have been considered criminal in the past. Thus people are saddled with huge debt, with interest, for attending college; with criminal loans for their homes. With unconscionable rents. And have no recourse. This is privateering. It is legalized looting.
Our country outlawed slavery, but it comes back to life through abusive contracts and abusive use of the law. Those who can't pay debts used to get put in debtor prisons. The system is trying to bring those back. The government outlawed the use of bankruptcy for dealing with education debts, and people are losing everything to debt for healthcare. Getting an education is a public good, not only for the student, but for society. Health care is a "non-refusable" public good where people will die if they can't get what they are unable to afford. Extracting profits and using debt to enslave people who need those services is engaging in modern slavery. Privateers used to have to grab and smuggle people from Africa. All they have to do now is print money through a bank and loan it to someone in our days.This is legal piracy, loan sharking and enslaving people.
The Federal Government, thru, corrupt legislators and judges gave rights to corporations as artificial persons, in the 1880s, at the very same time they were taking it from the persons that the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments were intended to protect. Privateers, as economic royalists, love the Royal "we." The Corporation as a "person" asserts the rights to having a religious belief, to telling its employees what to do, and the right to enslave employees, take their labor and stiffing them on promised compensation. Many a CEO claims to speak for all his employees, they often claim to own their labor, innovations and enterprise. And they take a cut of everything.
And thanks to corrupt SCOTUS, they claim a right to bribe and extort politicians into doing their bidding with unlimited corporate money. Monopolies and centralized power are putting pirates in charge of the country.
A Convincing case has been made that without public investment, there would be little private wealth and it would be so poorly distributed that there would no longer be what we now think of as a middle class. The argument of con artists is that public investment doesn't improve society. This was a Reagan Era trope and is patently false. But it is also an excuse for privateering. The fact is that without public investment; no electrical grid, oil, canals, railroads, roads and highways. In fact no real civilization. The government is not allowed to treat its capital investment as capital due to accounting tricks perpetuated by pirates over a period of centuries. Even our money is privatized by legal pirates. Since the beginning of the country the absurdity of issuing private notes based on treasury notes has been obvious to critics. Yet, we depreciate direct treasury notes and let the Federal Reserve serve as a tongue louse on our financial system.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/neweconomics/distribution-wealth-little-productivity-everything-power/
