Tag Archives: Monopoly

Boris Brexits Brits! Brueghel’s Brussels Brunches. Sturgeon Smokes Scotland, Swamping Salmond. Angle Anglers Angry; World Watches Wall-Eyed

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THE DISMAL SCIENCE DEPT./
THE FOLK SONG ARMY DIV.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/27/the-guardian-view-on-britain-out-of-the-eu-a-treasure-island-for-rentiers

First an excellent editorial from the Guardian on why the Brexit bait-and-switch is, for the nation as a whole, disastrously unsound. It explains the effects of economic rent (whence the term rentier) and the difference between a productive or producers’ economy and a rentier economy (whence the game Monopoly). The working and middle classes aren’t nodding for Brexit — their heads are just jerking and bouncing at the ends of taut nooses, slipped around their necks by 250 years of Tories. Since Thatcher, their flailing feet don’t even touch the ground.

“Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in 1852 that “the Tories in England long fancied that they were in raptures about royalty, the church and the beauties of the ancient constitution, until a time of trial tore from them the confession that they were only in raptures about rent”. His assessment of early 19th-century Tories applies with unerring accuracy to today’s Conservatives.”

— Thus Spake The Guardian, December 27, 2020. Mirabile dictu, the Guardian is quoting Karl Marx!

Yes, BoJo did cut a deal on fish give-backs, and EU fishers will only have to give back 25% of the fish they’ve caught in British waters. (One assumes — hopes? — that is means a digital credit/debit arrangement, not a schlepp-the-fish-back -and-forth from one port to another arrangement.) That leaves them 75% of their catch. British fishwives are out already, hands flared around their mouths, calling salty oaths around BoJo’s cave-in. In a surprise rip-current, Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon hails the deal and downplays Caledonian grousing. Seems she’s much more slippery on Scottish independence than her retired mentor, Mr. Salmond, was; but she’s in power, and he isn’t. But in England, the fisherfolk are throwing harpoons at Bojo:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/dec/26/fishing-industry-brexit-deal-eu-fisheries

I knew “The Shoals of Herring” as beautifully covered by the Corries; but here is the Songwriter Himself, Ewan MacColl, hypnotically chanting a distillation of the lives of thousands of men who lived on the sea. The Victorian herring fleet out of Great Yarmouth was one of the industrial wonders of the world. It makes a fascinating counterpart to “The Song o the Fishgutters” from the previous blog: they were, of course, the girls in the packing plants on shore in “Yermouth toun.” Hairk:

The Bard of Prestonpans, Davy Steele, sings his great Fareweel tae the Fishin’.
Hear the delightfully incomprehensible ’10 Dreg Song.” I couldn’t find the lyrics, but I did find a whole website about “Dreg Songs!” In the nineteenth century, Scotsmen fished for oysters in the Firth of Forth by dragging dredges over the oyster ‘scalps’. To maintain a steady speed they sang as they rowed. Overfishing brought the industry to a close near the turn of the twentieth century and with it, the use of the dreg songs. For years the songs were hidden away – lost.… Read more below!!

https://bobwalser.com/category/dreg-songs/

Monopoly — The Fed Finally Sees The Cat

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www.nakedcapitalism.com

“Do You See The Cat?” A Georgist political badge
from the 1890’s.

What cat? Where? What are you talking about?
I don’t see any cat.

“American policymakers are giving more and more credence to the role of monopoly concentration in the economic restructuring that started in 1980, in the Reagan/Thatcher era, that shifted power and rewards from labor to capital. Importantly, these experts don’t just see monopoly as a problem; even basic economic courses show in toy models that they increase prices and decrease output. They also acknowledge that stagnant wages, rising profit share of GDP and escalating wealth concentration are bad outcomes economically and societally. A new paper by Fed economists Isabel Cair ́o and Jae Sim describes how they developed a model to simulate the impact of companies’ rising market power, in conjunction with the assumption that the owners of capital liked to hold financial assets (here, bonds) as a sign of social status. They wanted to see it it would explain six developments over the last forty years, and it did!
— Real wage growth stagnating and lagging productivity growth
— Pre-tax corporate profits rising rapidly relative to GDP
— Increasing income inequality
— Increasing wealth inequality
— Higher household leverage
— Increased financial instability“

— Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism blog, August 19, 2020

Hello, Kitty….

“The history of Monopoly can be traced back to 1903, when American anti-monopolist Lizzie Magie created a game which she hoped would explain the single tax theory of Henry George. It was intended as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies. She took out a patent in 1904. Her game, The Landlord’s Game, was self-published, beginning in 1906.

— Thus Quoth Wikipedia

Remember Henry George? The Philly boy who took ship and made good?

Monopoly, whether the board game, or the social suffocation, is death: the final squeeze of the octupus. But it is merely the end-point of the long squeeze, which is our morbid, irresponsible and socially destructive 40-year drive to concentrate wealth and poverty, back to the Gilded Age point that society is driven to extremis, which, folks, is where we are now.

During my lifetime, the wise precautions and regulations of the preceding 150 years of Progressivism, The New Deal, and The Great Society, have been thrown down, to re-admit the insidious octopus of Monopoly back into “our economy.” The drive towards monopoly is a feature, not a bug, of our current real estate laws, our tax laws, and our corporate governance. Ronald Reagan, George H.W.Bush, Bill Clinton, Bush/Cheney, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, each and every one, spent their time in the White House mostly in slippers at the back door, calling “Here, kitty, kitty….here, kitty kitty, kitty kitty….”

The Federal Reserve, as an institution, is full of wise people like those who wrote this report, but since the days of Alan Greenspan, it has been run by what can only be described as crazy right-wing voodoo grifter zealots. Have you caught the news that the Federal Reserve is now investing in the stock market? It’s true. This news sounds anodyne, but let me re-phrase it in terms that drive home what a destructive crime against humanity this innovation is: the king’s ministers are dumping poison into the city water supply, in order to kill everybody and seize their wealth. If Americans heard this message, would they rise up against the Fed? Oh…Flint. Forget it.

See the cat! Feel the Bern! I mean — er,……Vote for Biden.