{"id":97215,"date":"2016-10-25T11:02:44","date_gmt":"2016-10-25T15:02:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/countingpips.com\/?p=97215"},"modified":"2016-10-25T07:03:46","modified_gmt":"2016-10-25T11:03:46","slug":"presidential-election-who-benefits-most-from-the-establishments-status-quo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/2016\/10\/presidential-election-who-benefits-most-from-the-establishments-status-quo\/","title":{"rendered":"Presidential Election: Who Benefits Most From the \u201cEstablishment\u2019s\u201d Status Quo?"},"content":{"rendered":"
October 25, 2016<\/div>
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By WallStreetDaily.com<\/u><\/a> \"Presidential<\/p>\n

We\u2019re two weeks out from yet another federal election. Plus \u00e7a change, plus c\u2019est la m\u00eame chose: The more it changes, the more it\u2019s the same thing.<\/strong><\/i><\/p>\n

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The U.S. government knows who you are.<\/p>\n

And it probably would have little trouble tracking you down, because there\u2019s a pretty strong likelihood that it has a searchable image of you.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the chilling conclusion of a report from the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology released October 18, 2016.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe result of a year-long investigation and over 100 records requests to police departments around the country,\u201d reads The Perpetual Line-Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America<\/strong><\/em><\/a> \u201cis the most comprehensive survey to date of law enforcement face recognition and the risks that it poses to privacy, civil liberties, and civil rights.<\/p>

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\u201cCombining FBI data with new information we obtained about state and local systems, we find that law enforcement face recognition affects over 117 million American adults. It\u2019s also unregulated.\u201d<\/p>\n

And who\u2019s to blame for that?<\/p>\n

Two weeks from today, we\u2019ll go to the polls (well, maybe as much as 50% of our total population of 324 million, if we\u2019re lucky) to elect a new president, 34 senators, and 435 members of the House of Representatives.<\/p>\n

There are countless state and local races and issues on ballots across the country, as well.<\/p>\n

But come the end of voting on November 8, not much is likely to have changed.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s tempting to say that Donald Trump, a charismatic figure around whom discontented Americans have rallied over the past 15 months, and Bernie Sanders, who embodied the leftist form of this widespread disaffection but was thwarted by a well-oiled machine, landed some blows against the empire.<\/p>\n

Still, the machine seems likely to prevail two weeks from today.<\/p>\n

The Washington Consensus runs on national security and neoliberalism. And we let it.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

We succumbed to fear in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and we cling to consumerism as the primary ideology of our everyday life.<\/p>\n

The big winner \u2013 perhaps the only<\/em> winner \u2013 is Corporate America.<\/p>\n

Even the idea shops are for sale.<\/p>\n

Gawker writes that a joint New York Times<\/em>-New England Center for Investigative Reporting investigation published on August 8, 2016, found that \u201cseveral major think tanks, while they profess to be purely research-driven organizations eager to assist in America\u2019s robust policy debates, court companies for charitable donations in exchanges for pushing their corporate agendas.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the NYT reported<\/strong><\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Thousands of pages of internal memos and confidential correspondence between Brookings and other donors \u2013 like JPMorgan Chase, the nation\u2019s largest bank; K.K.R., the global investment firm; Microsoft, the software giant; and Hitachi, the Japanese conglomerate \u2013 show that financial support often came with assurances from Brookings that it would provide \u201cdonation benefits,\u201d including setting up events featuring corporate executives with government officials, according to documents obtained by The New York Times<\/em> and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.<\/p>\n

Similar arrangements exist at many think tanks. On issues as varied as military sales to foreign countries, international trade, highway management systems and real estate development, think tanks have frequently become vehicles for corporate influence and branding campaigns.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

These are not new problems.<\/p>\n

Indeed, 180 years ago, in a May 27, 1836, speech, Senator John C. Calhoun, noted, \u201cA power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various and powerful interests\u2026 and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Calhoun was perhaps the most eloquent defender of the concept of states\u2019 rights in the Ante-bellum period. He also spoke forcefully on the dangers of the tyranny of the majority, though, ironically, he also defended Southern traditions, including slavery, and was the ideological godfather of that group of radicals known as \u201cfire-eaters.\u201d<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s easy to dismiss Calhoun and his ideas with the benefit of \u201cpresentism.\u201d Let\u2019s not, however, mince words: Slavery was a moral wrong, a violation of natural law from the jump.<\/p>\n

But Calhoun\u2019s influence on U.S. public policy and political thinking can\u2019t be dismissed, particularly when it comes to understanding the agglomeration of power.<\/p>\n

Another slaveholding Southerner, Thomas Jefferson, is now a legendary champion of agrarian democracy, widely credited with saying, \u201cThat government is best which governs least.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it was actually Henry David Thoreau, reflecting on slavery, the Mexican-American War, and U.S. imperialism, who first turned the phrase to open his famous pamphlet On the Duty of Civil Disobedience<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Thoreau also had in mind the stultifying impact of industrialization and proliferating market ideology on liberty of conscience.<\/p>\n

That it\u2019s not really a Jeffersonian maxim \u2013 and so not expressly part of the Founders\u2019 thinking \u2013 is important. Context is critical. Thoreau was reacting to slavery and the expansion of U.S. territory via war to expand indentured servitude.<\/p>\n

Liberty of conscience more than economic liberty was on his mind.<\/p>\n

Thoreau lived during a period of rapid economic growth, at the tail end of the Industrial Revolution. He was concerned by free enterprise and its capacity to reduce man to mere producers, buyers, and sellers.<\/p>\n

In Walden<\/em>, he pondered the \u201cseemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.\u201d<\/p>\n

And he warned, \u201cBut lo! Men have become the tools of their tools.\u201d And those tools were functions of slavery and war.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve done away with the latter. The former, however, is still a primary organizing principle for society and government.<\/p>\n

At the conclusion of Backfire: How to Destroy a Presidential Candidate<\/strong><\/em><\/a>, a documentary short produced by Nate Silver\u2019s data journalism outfit FiveThirtyEight.com, the veteran political reporter Sam Donaldson sums up the American-style struggle for power:<\/p>\n

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The way to look at politics today \u2013 unfortunately \u2013 is not the way that purists would have it. It\u2019s not the way young people want it. It\u2019s the way it is<\/em>. And the way it is is tough<\/em>. Unyielding. Almost anything works. If it works, never mind if it\u2019s ethical. Never mind whether it\u2019s fair. Never mind whether it\u2019s factual. If it works, for you, do it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

To the power elite that run our empire, the ends justify the means.<\/p>\n

The good news is people are starting to wake up to their distorted reality.<\/p>\n

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This Week In\u2026<\/h2>\n

Anger<\/strong><\/a>, which, as FT Alphaville\u2019s David Keohane explains, is a phenomenon driving voters not just in the U.S. presidential election but in electoral contests all over the developed world:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a bigly trend<\/strong><\/a> with enormous consequences for fiscal and monetary policy. But the rise of voter rage in advanced democracies is a hard narrative to chart, what with the lack of data and the abundance of anecdote.\u201d<\/p>\n

Keohane shares a set of charts and tables compiled by Marvin Barth of Barclays Plc, who defines \u201cvoter rage as a drop in the combined vote share of the center-right and center-left parties as voters shift to parties that they believe better reflect their frustrations.\u201d<\/p>\n

The bottom line is the \u201cbiggest source of voter rage appears to be a sense of economic and political disenfranchisement.\u201d<\/p>\n

Smart Investing,<\/p>\n

David Dittman
\nEditorial Director, Wall Street Daily<\/i><\/p>\n

The post Presidential Election: Who Benefits Most From the \u201cEstablishment\u2019s\u201d Status Quo?<\/a> appeared first on Wall Street Daily<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By WallStreetDaily.com We\u2019re two weeks out from yet another federal election. Plus \u00e7a change, plus c\u2019est la m\u00eame chose: The more it changes, the more it\u2019s the same thing. The U.S. government knows who you are. And it probably would have little trouble tracking you down, because there\u2019s a pretty strong likelihood that it has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","no-post-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97215"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97228,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97215\/revisions\/97228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}