Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by Scot Dutchy » Mon Jun 14, 2021 10:15 pm

Svartalf wrote:
Mon Jun 14, 2021 1:45 pm
Scot Dutchy wrote:
Mon Jun 14, 2021 7:01 am
Svarty we never had that. There was no feudal system. Our first king was William I and he was not a king in the English or French definition. He was originally Stadhouder of Holland. We did not have vast landowners. 40% of the country was underwater or marshland. When it was reclaimed it belonged to the community. People could buy the leasehold so as to build anything. Your lack of knowledge of Dutch history is comparable to that mine of French history.
My original knowledge of history was restricted to Scottish history. I later on in secondary school studied modern history.
I don't know where to check for places like Holland and Zeeland, but I can warrant you that Flanders at least was a classic feudal earldom, similarly, Edward III married a daughter of... and I have no reason to believe the Netherlands totally escaped the feudal form of governance, they were part of the Carolingian empire after all. And Edward III married a daughter of the Count of Hainault... and at the time, what is now Belgium was part of the Flemish/Frisian area.

Also, the office of Stadhouder was created to be a form of stewardship when the provinces' feudal lords were away... particularly in the late middle ages/early modern times when the provinces were under Burgundian or Habsburg sway, and so had come under feudal rulership of a distant lord.
Yeah of course Svarty. Nevermind Dutch history. You all know it so much better. There was never a feudal state here but who is bothered about facts. You say claims about a country that did not even exist. Flanders was not even a province. Most of Noord Holland did not exist. There was a large settlement around the Amstel-Dam and a few places on the North Sea coast. Utrecht and Leiden were much larger due to the Romans and the Route of Knowledge. The country was nothing like it was today. The Hague was a hunting lodge with a hedge around it (haag = hedge) but of course it was feudal.
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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by JimC » Tue Jun 15, 2021 2:13 am

I suspect it's all down to how you define "feudal". Scot, I think you are seeing it as a very narrow model, the traditional English feudalism. I'm sure the Dutch version was significantly different to this, but it probably had enough features to fit a broader version of feudalism...
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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by pErvinalia » Tue Jun 15, 2021 3:40 am


JimC wrote:I suspect it's all down to how you define "feudal". Scot, I think you are seeing it as a very narrow model, the traditional English feudalism. I'm sure the Dutch version was significantly different to better than this, but it probably had enough features to fit a broader version of feudalism...
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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by Svartalf » Tue Jun 15, 2021 7:20 am

Scot Dutchy wrote:
Mon Jun 14, 2021 10:15 pm

Yeah of course Svarty. Nevermind Dutch history. You all know it so much better. There was never a feudal state here but who is bothered about facts. You say claims about a country that did not even exist. Flanders was not even a province. Most of Noord Holland did not exist. There was a large settlement around the Amstel-Dam and a few places on the North Sea coast. Utrecht and Leiden were much larger due to the Romans and the Route of Knowledge. The country was nothing like it was today. The Hague was a hunting lodge with a hedge around it (haag = hedge) but of course it was feudal.
On the contrary, it's very interesting how the Dutch may have forgotten about their common European feudal roots to the point of denying them. but it's also interesting that Flanders may be perceived as having closer links to the Provinces than it actually had. And yes, I know that the developement of the cities is what helped them get out of feudalism earlier than the rest of Europe.
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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by Scot Dutchy » Tue Jun 15, 2021 8:36 am

Svarty old son, Flanders (Vlanderen) was the result of the 1813 uprising of the south. Before that time it did not exist. In fact there was hardly a name for the country. It was called the "low countries" or Nederland but that covered everything from Amsterdam to Duinenkerken or Dunkirk as it is known today. The simple fact that the land did not exist meant there were no landowners. Land that was created (most of Noord and Zuid Holland) was owned by the community. By no stretch of the imagination was it feudal.
In the East was there was landownership but the land was of so poor quality it was not worth owning and was occupied mostly by pachtboeren (tenant farmers) which were as close to peasants as you could get. van Gogh's "Potato eaters" comes from this region.

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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by Svartalf » Tue Jun 15, 2021 6:55 pm

Flanders was so inexistent before then that the Count of Flanders was one of the original peers of the kingdom of France
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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by L'Emmerdeur » Thu Jul 01, 2021 5:53 am

A critique of neoliberalism and a proposal that I expect would be strenuously opposed by the OP. It's a long read about economics, fair warning. :lol:

'Neoliberalism Has Depended on Huge Levels of Government Support for Its Entire Existence'
The most basic tenet undergirding neoliberal economics is that free market capitalism—or at least some close approximation to it—is the only effective framework for delivering widely shared economic well-being. On this view, only free markets can increase productivity and average living standards while delivering high levels of individual freedom and fair social outcomes: big government spending and heavy regulations are simply less effective.

These neoliberal premises have dominated economic policymaking both in the United States and around the world for the past forty years, beginning with the elections of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the States. Thatcher’s dictum that “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism became a rallying cry, supplanting what had been, since the end of World War II, the dominance of Keynesianism in global economic policymaking, which instead viewed large-scale government interventions as necessary for stability and a reasonable degree of fairness under capitalism. This neoliberal ascendency has been undergirded by the full-throated support of the overwhelming majority of professional economists, including such luminaries as Nobel Laureates Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas.

In reality neoliberalism has depended on huge levels of government support for its entire existence. The global neoliberal economic order could easily have collapsed into a 1930s-level Great Depression multiple times over in the absence of massive government interventions. Especially central to its survival have been government bailouts, including emergency government spending injections financed by borrowing—that is, deficit spending—as well as central bank actions to prop up financial institutions and markets teetering on the verge of ruin.

Bailouts have therefore not only repeatedly rescued neoliberal capitalism during periods of crisis, but they have also, as a result, reinforced neoliberalism’s most malignant tendencies. In 1978, just prior to neoliberalism’s rise, the CEOs of the largest 350 U.S. corporations earned $1.7 million, 33 times the $51,200 earned by the average private-sector non-supervisory worker. As of 2019 the CEOs were earning 366 times more than the average worker, $21.3 million versus $58,200. Under neoliberalism, in other words, the pay for big corporate U.S. CEOs increased more than ten-fold relative to the average U.S. worker. This curious conjunction—theoretical disdain for government alongside practical reliance on it—has amounted to champagne socialism for big corporations, Wall Street, and the rich and “let-them-eat-cake” capitalism for most everyone else.

...

[W]e can allow the reign of neoliberalism to continue. This is the path of least resistance, as it would proceed to shower rewards on financial titans and the wealthy. Of course, as we have seen, staying the course with neoliberalism will require regular bailout interventions. The scale of any such future bailouts will likely continue expanding, as the system’s vulnerabilities will continue deepening through financialization. But we can be certain that there will never be a shortage of economists prepared to defend neoliberalism under these circumstances and even nominate themselves to join a present-day Committee to Save the World.

[Or two alternate routes, the first of which is let big firms and financial markets suffer the consequences of their excesses and tendency to overindulge in speculation--practice what you preach.]

The problem with practice what you preach capitalism is that it has been tried, and the results are well-documented. It was under this approach that financial markets collapsed regularly throughout most of the history of capitalism. Charles Kindleberger described this pattern in his classic 1978 work Manias, Panics, and Crashes, in which he framed his historical analysis within Minsky’s Wall Street Paradigm. Kindleberger’s discussion begins with the notorious South Sea Bubble in 1720, during which the South Sea Company, a failing British slave-trading firm, managed to massively, if briefly, profit from obtaining inside information on how the British government was managing its debt. Kindleberger reveals that between this 1720 South Sea bubble fiasco and the 1929 Wall Street crash, financial crises occurred in the United States and Europe an average of approximately every 7.5 years (a pattern recognized 100 years earlier by Karl Marx). The press reports of the crises that spanned the roughly 200 years include: “One of the fiercest financial storms of the century,” in Britain in 1772; in Germany in 1857, “So complete and classic a panic has never been seen before”; and in 1929 in the United States, “The greatest cycle of speculative boom and collapse in modern times—since, in fact, the South Sea Bubble.”

At our present historical juncture, it would require a huge leap of faith to assume that the self-regulating properties of free markets could deliver a stable version of capitalism on their own. They have never succeeded in doing so in the past. Moreover, the extent to which contemporary capitalism has become financialized would make any such experiment in market self-regulation far riskier than it ever was in the 200 years that Kindleberger describes.

Thus, the only remaining alternative is to create an updated, reimagined version of the big government model of capitalism that prevailed in the immediate post-World War II era, before the rise of neoliberalism. Indeed, it was to avoid a repetition of the 1930s disaster that John Maynard Keynes, other economists, and Franklin D. Roosevelt led the movement to build alternative, big-government versions of capitalism. This idea became the New Deal in the United States and social democracy in Western Europe, with different specific configurations emerging in the various post-World War II advanced economies.

Extensive regulations of financial markets, public ownership of significant financial institutions, and high levels of public investment were integral features of New Deal and social democratic capitalism. Bailout policies were available as needed, but financial markets were more stable, and recessions shallower, during this period than throughout the preceding 200 years of capitalism. Average economic growth was also higher, with the gains from growth more broadly shared.

Of course, this was still capitalism. Disparities of income, wealth, and opportunity remained intolerably high, along with the social malignancies of racism, sexism, and imperialism. Ecological destruction, and global warming more specifically, was also beginning to gather force over this period, even though few people took notice at the time. Nevertheless, the New Deal and social democracy produced dramatically more egalitarian versions of capitalism than the neoliberal regime that supplanted these models.

A reimaged version of New Deal and social democratic capitalism will have to aggressively address the problems that continued to fester under the original models. However, a critical lesson we can learn from the massive bailout operations of the neoliberal era is that governments in the United States and other advanced economies can mobilize formidable resources to confront crises.

Focusing on the United States, one can readily envision how a reimaged New Deal—indeed, what has come to be called the Green New Deal—can work. The centerpiece must be a massive government-led investment program focused on supplanting our existing fossil fuel-dominant energy system that is destroying the planet with a clean-energy system that can put us on a viable climate stabilization path. This economy-wide investment project will generate millions of jobs engaged both directly and indirectly in creating a new energy infrastructure. This, in turn, will open opportunities to revive union organizing that can deliver higher quality jobs and better living standards. These jobs will need to be open to women and people of color, the population cohorts that have experienced systematic exclusion in U.S. labor markets for generations.

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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by Seabass » Sat Aug 07, 2021 1:41 am

This case is so insane that when I first became aware of it, I had trouble believing it was real. Our justice system is understandably considered a joke by many, but this is like something out of a dystopian novel.

Protests across the United States are calling for the immediate release of environmental and human rights lawyer Steven Donziger, who has been held under house arrest in New York for two years after being targeted by the oil giant Chevron. Donziger sued the oil giant in Ecuador on behalf of 30,000 Amazonian Indigenous people for dumping 16 billion gallons of oil into their ancestral lands. Ecuador’s Supreme Court ordered Chevron to pay $18 billion a decade ago, a major victory for the environment and corporate accountability. But Chevron refused to pay or clean up the land, and instead launched a legal attack targeting Donziger in the United States. A federal judge in July found Donziger guilty of six counts of criminal contempt of court after he refused to turn over his computer and cellphone. In an unusual legal twist, the judge appointed a private law firm with ties to Chevron to prosecute Donziger, after federal prosecutors declined to bring charges. “This is a broader threat to our society,” says Donziger. “We cannot allow in any rule-of-law country, or any country, private prosecutions run by corporations.”


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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by JimC » Sat Aug 07, 2021 1:55 am

You are now officially a corporateocracy rather than a democracy...
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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by Sean Hayden » Sat Aug 07, 2021 4:19 am

--that's so sick
Chevron is defending itself against false allegations that it is responsible for alleged environmental and social harms in the Amazon region of Ecuador. In February 2011, an $18 billion judgment—later reduced to $9.5 billion—was rendered against Chevron by a court in Lago Agrio, Ecuador, for alleged contamination resulting from crude oil production in the region.

On March 4, 2014, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that the $9.5 billion Ecuadorian judgment was the product of fraud and racketeering activity, finding it unenforceable.

The nearly 500-page ruling (1.6 MB) finds that Steven Donziger, the lead American lawyer behind the Ecuadorian lawsuit against the company, violated the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), committing extortion, money laundering, wire fraud, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations, witness tampering and obstruction of justice in obtaining the Ecuadorian judgment and in trying to cover up his and his associates’ crimes.
https://www.chevron.com/ecuador


Did he really pay off a judge or what? It's unlike the feds to not prosecute something like that right?

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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by Sean Hayden » Sat Aug 07, 2021 4:31 am

What an interesting story, and scary if he's innocent.
The Supreme Court of the Netherlands has ruled in favor of Chevron Corporation, rejecting the Republic of Ecuador’s attempts to annul decisions of an international arbitral tribunal in The Hague that ordered Ecuador to take all steps necessary to prevent enforcement of a $9.5 billion Ecuadorian judgment against Chevron anywhere in the world. The Ecuadorian judgment previously was found by the international arbitral tribunal and by U.S. courts to have been obtained through fraud, bribery and corruption.
https://www.chevron.com/stories/dutch-s ... or-dispute

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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by pErvinalia » Sat Aug 07, 2021 6:44 am

Dutch Supreme Courts are the best Supreme Courts.



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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by rainbow » Sat Aug 07, 2021 4:54 pm

JimC wrote:
Sat Aug 07, 2021 1:55 am
You are now officially a corporateocracy rather than a democracy...
Verily. Capitalism has metamorphosed into Corporate Fascism.
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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by rainbow » Sat Aug 07, 2021 4:56 pm

Scot Dutchy wrote:
Tue Jun 15, 2021 8:36 am
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Re: Capitalism, The Best Solution to Poverty

Post by Seabass » Sun Aug 08, 2021 1:05 am

'I've Been Targeted With Probably the Most Vicious Corporate Counterattack in American History'

Steven Donziger has been under house arrest for over 580 days, awaiting trial on a misdemeanor charge. It’s all, he says, because he beat a multinational energy corporation in court.



It's a beautiful day in New York, but Steven Donziger cannot leave his house. There’s an electronic bracelet around his ankle, and he is only permitted to leave for medical appointments, meetings with lawyers, and school events for his 14-year-old son. He needs permission from a pretrial-services officer each time—those are the terms of his house arrest. So on a 68-degree Thursday in March, he is getting fresh air by sitting in front of an open window in his apartment on 104th street in Manhattan while we talk on the phone. He has not been convicted of a crime. He's only been accused of a misdemeanor, and he's still awaiting trial. But, as of March 17, 2021, he has been locked up in his apartment for 589 days because, he says, he took on a massive multinational oil firm and won.

Donziger is a human rights lawyer who, for more than 27 years, has represented the Indigenous peoples and rural farmers of Ecuador against Texaco—since acquired by Chevron—which was accused of dumping at least 16 billion gallons of toxic waste into the area of the Amazon rainforest in which they live. Cancer is now highly prevalent in the local population. Some have called it the "Amazon Chernobyl." They first filed suit in New York in 1993, but Texaco lobbied, successfully, to move the proceedings to Ecuador. In 2011, the team of Ecuadorian lawyers Donziger worked with won the case, and Chevron was ultimately ordered to pay $9.8 billion.

But for Donziger, that was nowhere near the end. Chevron, a $260 billion company, went to a New York federal court to sue him under a lesser-known civil—non-criminal—provision of the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. They later dropped their demands for financial damages because it would have necessitated a jury trial. That is something Donziger has been unable to get. Instead, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, a former corporate lawyer whose clients included tobacco companies, became Donziger's judge-and-jury in the RICO case. He heard from 31 witnesses, but based his ruling in significant part on the testimony of Albert Guerra, a former Ecuadorian judge whom Chevron relocated to the U.S. at an overall cost of $2 million. Guerra alleged there was a bribe involved in the Ecuadorian court's judgement against Chevron. He has since retracted some of his testimony, admitting it was false.

But Kaplan, who refused to look at the scientific evidence in the original case, ruled the initial verdict was the result of fraud. And he didn't stop there. He ordered Donziger to pay millions in attorneys fees to Chevron and eventually ordered him to turn over decades of client communications, even going after his phone and computer. Donziger considered this a threat to attorney-client privilege and appealed the ruling, but while that appeal was pending, Kaplan slapped him with a contempt of court charge for refusing to give up the devices. When the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York declined to prosecute the case, Kaplan took the extraordinary step of appointing a private law firm to prosecute Donziger in the name of the U.S. government. The firm, Seward & Kissel, has had a number of oil-and-gas clients, including, in 2018... Chevron. Kaplan bypassed the usual random case-assignment procedure of the federal judiciary and handpicked a judge to hear the contempt case: Loretta Preska, a member of the Federalist Society, among whose major donors is... Chevron. Preska has, like Kaplan, rejected Donziger's requests to have his trial heard by a jury of his peers. Both judges declined Esquire's request for comment on Donziger's cases, citing court policy.

At this point, the details of Chevron's conduct in the Amazon are very far in the rearview. So are the allegations against Donziger with respect to his conduct in the initial case, though he has been disbarred based on Kaplan’s ruling. (A "special referee" appointed by the Supreme Court of New York, John Horan, found his law license should be reinstated, although the Appellate Division rejected those findings and that matter is still on appeal.) The question at hand is whether he should have an ankle bracelet on. On March 10, 2021, he went before a three-judge panel to argue for his release from pre-trial detention before the same appellate court that has largely rejected his prior appeals in the case. Their ruling on the pending appeal could come down any day now. In the meantime, in a conversation below edited for length and clarity, this is Donziger's side of the story.

In a lengthy statement emailed to Esquire, a Chevron spokesman said the company is not involved in the pending criminal case against Donziger and disputed his narrative about the case in Ecuador as well as the legal proceedings that have followed. Chevron noted that Judge Kaplan’s finding that the judgment against it in Ecuador was obtained by fraud was affirmed by the federal court of appeals and that the Supreme Court also declined to overturn the finding. “As he has for decades, Donziger is trying to shift attention away from the facts,” the spokesman said.
interview with Donziger follows:
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a ... se-arrest/
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