Epstein Files | WSJ releases 50th bday letter from Trump to Epstein

[superrific]

1. “I used to be a leftist until I studied the evidence.”

This is the classic professional class redemption arc. You believed the radicals, then read a few things, and now you think you see clearly. But your go-to examples ignore key facts. Chile’s success was built through dictatorship and violent repression. Cambodia’s gains reflect low starting points and brutal labor conditions. And the East Asian countries you cite did not follow free-market orthodoxy; they used state planning, capital controls, and industrial policy. What you are presenting as technocratic clarity is just selective evidence filtered through neoliberal assumptions. More importantly, your personal intellectual journey is not a substitute for structural analysis. You keep mistaking biography for argument.

2. “Science works, and leftists deny truth.”

No one is denying that science works. The critique is that science and technology do not exist outside politics. Who funds the research? Who owns the results? Who benefits from the innovation? The internet you credit to technocrats was built with public investment, then handed off to private monopolies. That is not a denial of truth; it is a critique of how power operates.

Your horror at the idea of regular people having a platform says the quiet part out loud. You do not want democratic participation; you want gatekeeping. And somehow you believe that position makes you the rational one.

3. “Bernie and the left have no theory of disagreement, just accusations of corruption.”

We do have a theory of disagreement. It is called material interests. Political views are shaped by class position, institutional incentives, and systems of power. If someone supports tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, and privatized services, I do not assume they are evil. But I also do not pretend their views emerge from a vacuum. They reflect a worldview shaped by elite institutions. You personalize every structural critique, then accuse the left of lacking nuance.

4. “The IMF and World Bank were reformed.”

Superficially, yes. The rhetoric has changed. But the basic priorities of fiscal discipline, deregulation, and privatization still drive their interventions. Countries in crisis are still pushed to cut social programs, liberalize markets, and attract foreign capital. That is the continuity I'm pointing to.

7. “Corporations are necessary. The left does not understand that.”

We understand the contradiction just fine. Corporations are central to modern capitalism, and they are also extractive and unaccountable. The goal is not to eliminate corporations overnight. It is to regulate them, democratize them, and ensure they serve public needs instead of just shareholder value. That is called political economy.

What runs through your entire response is a refusal to distinguish between structure and self. You treat critiques of systems as attacks on your personal identity. You turn disagreement into drama. You substitute autobiography for analysis. I am not here for your origin story. I am here to talk about power.
And frankly, it is deeply disrespectful to continually infantilize my arguments. You respond not as if I’m raising good-faith political critiques but as if I’m just confused or naive. That condescension is not only exhausting, it is a form of dismissal that avoids real engagement.

It’s honestly flabbergasting that you’d accuse me of having no commitment to truth. I laid out a historically grounded, structurally coherent critique of elite consensus without attacking you personally. You responded not by engaging the ideas but with a condescending monologue full of emotional projection and personal grievance. You continually collapse structural critiques into personal attacks because you can’t separate disagreement from your own biography. That’s not a commitment to truth either, it’s intellectual narcissism. You don’t have a theory of political disagreement, you have a theory of personal vindication. Don't project your own attitudes surrounding political debate onto me.

I’ve tried to engage seriously with you a lot, but you keep turning these conversations into a re-litigation of your own personal disputes that have nothing to do with me. I’m not going to keep responding to the same recycled pablum just because you’ve mistaken me for your past.

1. I do want gatekeeping. It was maybe something of a reasonable argument in the 1990s to suggest that gatekeeping was anti-democratic.

In an era where the president of the United States gets ideas from a twitter personality known as catturd, one would think gatekeeping would a better reputation. We didn't get true fascism until the gates completely fell. Because it turns out that giving microphones to ignorant, uneducated, hateful people doesn't serve the ends of justice or truth. It just floods the zone with shit.

Those are the options in the modern world: gatekeeping or flood the zone with shit. Which side are you on?

2. "Corporations are central to modern capitalism, and they are also extractive and unaccountable. The goal is not to eliminate corporations overnight. It is to regulate them, democratize them, and ensure they serve public needs instead of just shareholder value. That is called political economy."

This is a lot of bullshit, but what do I know, having taught corporate law for a decade. You can't fucking democratize a corporation. The whole purpose of a corporation is not to be democratized. It isn't as if this "democratize the corporations" sentiment hasn't been tried. It was extensively tried, particularly in India and the Indians abandoned it as unworkable.

Here are a few things for you to chew on:

A. The genius of the corporation is the separation of ownership and control. It means that capital can be amassed and deployed to good uses, without interference from people who don't know what they are talking about. You want a doctor or a lawyer to finance a steel mill with their capital. You do not want the doctor or lawyer trying to tell the steel mill how to operate. In fact, that system of public control of corporations exists nowhere because it doesn't work.

B. One of the best ways for a corporation to be corrupt is to have a dual mandate. You have no idea how many times corporations do horrible things; they get sued by their investors, who don't want to do horrible things; and the corporation hides behind the supposed effects for stakeholders.

The reality is that the famous Gordon Gekko speech was, ironically enough, mostly correct. Gordon Gekko started his speech by recounting the tremendous amount of bureaucratic overhead consuming the firm's resources. As he said, there are thirty some vice presidents of the company up on stage right now. Those vice presidents were well paid and not productive. They didn't give a fuck about labor, but they would hide behind it when it helped them preserve their jobs. They didn't give a fuck about the community, but they would give money to the arts and say that they waste all this money because they are reaching out to the community.

C. How exactly do you think corporations should serve public needs? Who gets to determine what is a corporate need? The fact is that companies can be charitable if they want. They can serve public needs if they so choose. For small, local companies, that can work. But if was a good idea to implement across the board, don't you think someone would have done it?

3. Material interests are not a theory of disagreement. In fact, it's quite the opposite. You're saying that genuine disagreement doesn't exist because everything is material interests. I'm a bit baffled as to why you make such a grievous error. I mean, this is not difficult.

4. There was, in fact, one leftist who really pissed me off. Who angers me even to this day. His name is Ralph Nader, and he is more to blame for our current predicament than the Fairness Doctrine ever could have been. But you know, I can't separate argument from self, even though nobody talks abstractly as much as I do.

5. "Superficially, yes. The rhetoric has changed. But the basic priorities of fiscal discipline, deregulation, and privatization still drive their interventions. Countries in crisis are still pushed to cut social programs, liberalize markets, and attract foreign capital. That is the continuity I'm pointing to."

This is not a conspiracy. It's necessity. A country in crisis doesn't have enough capital by definition, which is why it is defaulting on its debt. Attracting foreign capital is the only way out, again by definition. The countries that do attract foreign capital -- like Chile -- can stabilize and then grow more actually liberal over time -- as in Chile. Here are some countries that did not restructure their economies to attract that capital: Zimbabwe, Bolivia, North Korea (duh), Burma/Myanmar, etc. Did you know that every country in SE Asia is considerably richer than Myanmar? Every single one, even Cambodia. Hmm, maybe foreign capital isn't so bad.

 

[superrific]

Critiquing the “abundance agenda” or neoliberalism is about examining how power and resources get allocated, not about assigning bad faith motives to every individual who holds those views.

I am very far from the only person who thinks y'all conflate these two things on the regular. In fact, this is one of the reasons why people find leftists insufferable. And it's a common tendency on the left. It's why I stopped subscribing to the Nation. It was a compendium of bad faith attacks about irrelevant things.

For instance: to say that Chile fared way better economically than Argentina is a demonstration that export led growth is vastly superior to import substitution. Pointing out that fact doesn't excuse Pinochet. It has nothing to do with him, except for a knee-jerk reaction that everything associated with Chile must be bad. I don't credit Pinochet for anything. And there's really no way of determining what would have happened under Allende. The two biggest booms for the Chilean economy were: a) the rise of California wines, which opened the door for wines from around the world because actually European wines were not so much better; and b) the reduced cost and greater effectiveness of refrigerated transport, which allowed Chile to export seafood all over the globe. Pinochet didn't do that.

At the same time, there are other places in South America that could produce wine. Why don't they? Because they have just never quite come to terms with export led growth.

 

[Centerpiece]

But Rush was broadcasting before 1987, on the radio, and some of his worst, most incendiary comments came from that time. Why?

Because policing the Fairness Doctrine was a fucking nightmare. It was hard enough on broadcast TV. On radio, it was not even a thing.

The reason Rush was able to obtain a huge audience was that people had stopped paying attention to AM radio. You know, video killing the radio star and all that. AM radio was ancient; it had poor sound quality; and after FM it had become a medium of niche programs appealing mostly harmlessly to niche audiences.

Ironically, this is an area where elites most dropped the ball because of their elitism, and it rarely gets mentioned. Who was the core Rush Limbaugh audience in the early years? Delivery truck drivers. Repairmen working in shops. Retail clerks -- especially in small businesses or family owned-and-operated. They didn't tune into hear Rush specifically, not at the time. They tuned in because they listened to radio at work.

Educated elites didn't listen to radio at work. They worked in offices, not trucks. So they thought Rush was nothing but a curiosity, a relic, a guy who was making a few bones broadcasting on zombie stations located in underdeveloped areas like the Missouri bootheel. I saw the danger because I worked in a couple of repair shops and saw the reaction. The minute people started calling into Rush saying, "ditto," I realized we had a problem.

Rush was not syndicated and broadcast NATIONALLY until 1988. Why is that? Before 1988, he was a bullshit 2 bit talk radio jock type out of Sacramento. NOBODY had heard of Rush outside of NoCal. Before that, he worked for a Kansas City radio and was FIRED after only 1 year.

In 1988, shortly after the Fairness Doctrine was repealed - lo, and behold, Rush is syndicated NATIONALLY. It's all well-documented. Once that happened, and broadcast radio (AM or otherwise) didn't have to produce both views (L and R), the right-wing radio talking heads phenomenon took root. The rest is history.

No amount of trying to equivocate or re-write that history holds water.

 

[superrific]

This shift has several consequences: it changes how companies behave, often prioritizing short-term gains for shareholders over long-term investment in workers, innovation, or infrastructure.

The irony here is that this criticism was largely concocted by Martin Lipton, one of the greatest corporate lawyers ever. Wachtell Lipton famously only represented (and this is not 100% true these days but close) the executives who run companies. In the annals of corporate law, there are a lot of cases with captions of the form [union name] v. [corporate name], because labor union pension funds would often sue executives. Martin Lipton was never once on the side of the unions.

I'm not saying this view is wrong. Far from it. There's evidence going both ways. Most of the research on both sides is polemical, and there is still a current of old 1980s personal grievances involved in these disputes. It's hard to sort wheat from chaff there.

It's just ironic that you're citing a critique of financialization that was invented by the ruling class (Martin Lipton being absolutely 100% an unrepentant and occasionally unethical member of the ruling class). Note: I didn't say invented. This particular criticism has been around for a long time, but Marty mainstreamed it and financed a lot of the research justifying it.

 

[superrific]

Rush was not syndicated and broadcast NATIONALLY until 1988. Why is that? Before 1988, he was a bullshit 2 bit talk radio jock type out of Sacramento. NOBODY had heard of Rush outside of NoCal. Before that, he worked for a Kansas City radio and was FIRED after only 1 year.

In 1988, shortly after the Fairness Doctrine was repealed - lo, and behold, Rush is syndicated NATIONALLY. It's all well-documented. Once that happened, and broadcast radio (AM or otherwise) didn't have to produce both views (L and R), the right-wing radio talking heads phenomenon took root. The rest is history.

No amount of trying to equivocate or re-write that history holds water.

Post hoc fallacy.

IIRC -- I'm not 100% on this -- call-in shows satisfied the Fairness Doctrine because the audience participation was deemed to be a contrary point of view. So it wasn't the Fairness Doctrine holding him back. I'd say the reason ABC news got interested in syndicating him was that in 1988, I'm sure you recall, liberal was a four letter word. Trolling the libs was a thing back then too, and Rush did it best (if one can use that term to describe him).

We can agree to disagree on this if you'd like, but I stand by my analysis.

 

[superrific]

It’s incredibly insulting to compare seriously disputing my structural critiques to arguing with a “stalk of broccoli.” That kind of dismissive language doesn’t advance any discussion,

Now who's personalizing? I didn't say your critiques were a stalk of broccoli. I said that I wouldn't bring such a non-weapon to an intellectual gun fight. I don't spout off opinions that are backed by nothing. I've read deeply in leftist philosophy, probably to an extent you don't realize (I do have a masters degree in intellectual history). Moreover, I still agree with some of it. I think Marcuse is more relevant than ever. Same with Adorno. I always liked Adorno and I defended him back in the 90s when the idea of the "authoritarian personality" became widely mocked. Tables have turned now.

I just happen to know that free trade is a good thing. If you don't care about statistics, ask yourself why there are no tariffs between towns, or between states, or even regions (except in Canada, apparently, but that is likely being changed). What is different about buying paper from a mill in WA or BC? I would argue every single critique you can apply there also applies to locating an auto plant in Alabama or South Carolina instead of Michigan or New York.

 

[finesse]

All this political theory is fine but 99% of the American public, including me, need to see a working growing full scale model. Suggestions? I know I'm being a bit flip but you've got to have some steak with the sizzle to sell it. I'm not saying you're wrong nearly so much as I'm saying I don't see how you get people to try it. I'm not seeing a whole lot of room for give and take or compromise.

 

[Healing]

I'm not seeing a whole lot of room for give and take or compromise.

The historical throughline of political edge cases.

 

[superrific]

1. If the gates have fallen, it's because the people who were supposed to be standing at them failed so spectacularly that the public stopped listening. You can sneer at “catturd” all you want, but that doesn’t explain why decades of elite gatekeeping gave us Iraq, the financial crisis, mass incarceration, and historic inequality. The “flooding of the zone with shit” didn’t happen in a vacuum, it happened after a generation of gatekeepers used their position to protect a broken status quo. People lost faith not in expertise itself, but in the institutions that dressed up self-interest and ideology as neutral expertise. You want a better informed public? Start by rebuilding trust through accountability, not censorship.

2. You say democratizing corporations is “bullshit,” but this just reflects how narrow your framework is. Nobody is suggesting that a Fortune 500 company becomes a town hall overnight. But there are concrete proposals and historical models, from worker co-ops to codetermination to public ownership, that challenge the current dogma of shareholder supremacy. And yes, India experimented with forms of industrial democracy and faced challenges, but that doesn’t discredit the concept any more than the 2008 crash discredits capitalism. You’re arguing from a place of professional habituation: corporate law, as it stands, is your map, so anything outside of it looks like fantasy. But the point of politics is to redraw the map.

3. You're misunderstanding what a materialist analysis is actually saying. It’s not that genuine disagreement doesn’t exist. It’s that our ideas, values, and political positions don’t emerge in a vacuum. They are shaped, in part, by our material conditions: our class position, economic interests, and relationship to power. That doesn’t erase sincerity or intellect, it contextualizes them. People often sincerely believe things that happen to align with their position in a hierarchy. That’s not a moral judgment, it’s how ideology operates. What’s baffling is how someone trained in law, a field that constantly grapples with motive, power, and incentive, acts like this is some alien concept. Material interests aren’t a reduction of all disagreement, but they are a key lens for understanding why some ideas flourish and others are pushed to the margins. That’s not conspiracy.

4. your ire is still directed at the one guy who dared to criticize the corporate capture of both parties. Nader didn’t steal your vote. If anything, he revealed that the center-left had no plan for a post-industrial economy except “trust us.”

5. You're treating IMF-style restructuring as if it’s gravity: inevitable, neutral, and universal. It’s not. It’s a political project that reflects a specific vision of development and global order. Countries in crisis often have few choices precisely because institutions like the IMF only offer one model: open up markets, cut public spending, attract capital.

So many assumptions here.

1. I understand that concept of materialist analysis. But you offered it as a theory of disagreement, which it's not and your post more or less admits as much. Ideas and political positions are shaped, in part, by . . . ok, what's the other part? Of course our views are shaped by our environment. Of course people talk their own book, as they say on Wall Street.

But if Ralph Nader and I were coming from roughly the same place (his bio is not unlike mine), why did we reach such different conclusions? Why do I think Nader's economics are ridiculous, whereas he thinks they are wonderful? This is what a theory of disagreement has to explain. I'd recommend Jurgen Habermas if you'd like a fuller, more detailed treatment. But for a message board, maybe I can point out that your analysis that Nader was "criticizing the corporate capture of both parties" replicates what I've been saying. It's always virtue against decadence. I'm a big fan of speaking truth to power, but I think it's important to get the truth part right and that's where the left fails so miserably. They are too often focused on the "to power" part.

2. "You’re arguing from a place of professional habituation: corporate law, as it stands, is your map, so anything outside of it looks like fantasy" is a perfect example of the perverse dynamic here. You don't know shit about corporations. Nothing. I know that as surely as I know that ZenMode knows jackshit about anything he prattles on about. The idea that my view is too narrow holds about the same water as any of ZenMode's nonsense.

Apparently that doesn't stop you from a preposterous accusation that somehow I'm just a slave to my map. You have no idea what I've written about corporate law. You don't know why I went into corporate law -- it was, actually, to bring a liberal perspective to a field that was too often dominated by conservatives. I have plenty to say about the ways corporate law can distort public debate: for example, any time you hear a CEO go on TV and talk about how he has to do some horrible thing because fiduciary duties to shareholder, he's lying. That's not the way fiduciary duties work.

But it is simply the truth that worker co-ops cannot build semiconductor plants. Public ownership has a long track record of abject failure. It's also true that the shareholder supremacy you talk about is not the law. Delaware corporate law is quite the opposite: it's board of directors supremacy. You probably see those two things as the same, which is why you shouldn't be talking about corporate law. When you don't know the terms of debate, probably you should read or listen more.

3. Elite gatekeeping of media gave us the financial crisis? Really? REALLY? Do you know what caused the financial crisis? You don't. It wasn't fucking gatekeeping media. In fact, people like Paul Krugman saw right through the bullshit and if we had all listened to Paul, we'd have nipped it in the bud. Alas. The Iraq War was boosted primarily by Fox News. In other words, it was caused by the barbarians, not the gatekeepers. You weren't alive back then, so you probably don't remember how much pushback the claims of WMDs etc got questioned in the gatekeeping media. Yes, there was Judith Miller from the Times, but that's a single example. Fox News, though, allowed for demagoguing.

Catturd was not created by a breakdown of legacy media. It was created by a decades long propaganda effort that has created an alternative reality for so many people. They weren't disillusioned with legacy media because they didn't trust it. They were disillusioned because the gatekeepers were saying things that the catturds of the world didn't like. In particular, gay rights. And the refusal of the mainstream media to indulge the racism of the right.

4. Why do you think countries turn to the IMF? Not because it's fun for the government -- actually, it's usually quite the opposite. They turn to the IMF because their own economies have been run into the ground. Usually it's terrible policy, although sometimes countries get battered by natural catastrophes like extended droughts that deplete capital.

The IMF is the last resort. They get called when everything else fails.

 

[heelinhell]

1. If the gates have fallen, it's because the people who were supposed to be standing at them failed so spectacularly that the public stopped listening. You can sneer at “catturd” all you want, but that doesn’t explain why decades of elite gatekeeping gave us Iraq, the financial crisis, mass incarceration, and historic inequality. The “flooding of the zone with shit” didn’t happen in a vacuum, it happened after a generation of gatekeepers used their position to protect a broken status quo. People lost faith not in expertise itself, but in the institutions that dressed up self-interest and ideology as neutral expertise. You want a better informed public? Start by rebuilding trust through accountability, not censorship.

2. You say democratizing corporations is “bullshit,” but this just reflects how narrow your framework is. Nobody is suggesting that a Fortune 500 company becomes a town hall overnight. But there are concrete proposals and historical models, from worker co-ops to codetermination to public ownership, that challenge the current dogma of shareholder supremacy. And yes, India experimented with forms of industrial democracy and faced challenges, but that doesn’t discredit the concept any more than the 2008 crash discredits capitalism. You’re arguing from a place of professional habituation: corporate law, as it stands, is your map, so anything outside of it looks like fantasy. But the point of politics is to redraw the map.

3. You're misunderstanding what a materialist analysis is actually saying. It’s not that genuine disagreement doesn’t exist. It’s that our ideas, values, and political positions don’t emerge in a vacuum. They are shaped, in part, by our material conditions: our class position, economic interests, and relationship to power. That doesn’t erase sincerity or intellect, it contextualizes them. People often sincerely believe things that happen to align with their position in a hierarchy. That’s not a moral judgment, it’s how ideology operates. What’s baffling is how someone trained in law, a field that constantly grapples with motive, power, and incentive, acts like this is some alien concept. Material interests aren’t a reduction of all disagreement, but they are a key lens for understanding why some ideas flourish and others are pushed to the margins. That’s not conspiracy.

4. You’re still mad at Ralph Nader? Twenty-five years later? In 2024, the Democrats ran one of the weakest campaigns in modern history, and your ire is still directed at the one guy who dared to criticize the corporate capture of both parties. Nader didn’t steal your vote. If anything, he revealed that the center-left had no plan for a post-industrial economy except “trust us.” If the system is so fragile that a third-party candidate pulling single digits can bring it down, the problem is the system, not the guy pointing at it.

5. You're treating IMF-style restructuring as if it’s gravity: inevitable, neutral, and universal. It’s not. It’s a political project that reflects a specific vision of development and global order. Countries in crisis often have few choices precisely because institutions like the IMF only offer one model: open up markets, cut public spending, attract capital. That isn’t neutral policy, it’s coercion dressed up as expertise. Yes, Chile became an export powerhouse, but at what cost? Labor rights were crushed, inequality soared, and democracy was suspended for nearly two decades. The idea that other countries “just haven’t come to terms” with export-led growth ignores the political resistance such models generate when people refuse to be sacrificed on the altar of investor confidence. There is nothing apolitical about how foreign capital moves. It moves toward exploitation, deregulation, and regimes willing to discipline labor.

4 ) My beef is not with Ralph Nader; it's the naive voters that wasted their votes on Nader. He won 1.6% of the vote, enough to prevent the Iraq war. And to add a cherry to this election debacle, another 5000 voters thinking they were voting for Gore actually cast those votes for Pat Buchanan because of the infamous butterfly ballot.

Those naive Nader voters led to the election of GWB, the Iraq war, and the Great Recession. That is on them full stop.

My hope is that liberal youngsters will mature politically and recognize that supporting liberal incremental change has moved us further down to becoming a more perfect union. Hard left flame throwing burn down the house strategies will not further the cause.

I applaud the protests in LA but hope violence from protesters does not become the story

 

[TarSpiel]

If you're trying to undermine my point by pointing out that Martin Lipton mainstreamed the critique of shareholder primacy...

 

[superrific]

If you're trying to undermine my point by pointing out that Martin Lipton mainstreamed the critique of shareholder primacy, you’re actually reinforcing it. That even a figure like Lipton, deeply embedded in elite corporate law and no friend to labor, felt compelled to challenge the corrosive effects of financialization on long-term corporate health only underscores how far the problem had gone.

LOL. You have no idea what you're talking about. Why are you arguing with me about this? I FUCKING WORKED AT LIPTON'S LAW FIRM.

He didn't feel "compelled to challenge the corrosive effects of financialization." It was bullshit all along. You see, this is how the merger world worked in the 1970s:

A. Bidder makes an offer to buy a company. Board rejects it. So then bidder launches a tender offer to acquire a controlling share on the market, and uses it to take control of the company on the cheap.

B. Board of directors could try various defense strategies, including antitrust. But they weren't very effective -- hence the huge corporate raiding wave of the early 1980s.

Here's how the merger world worked in the 1980s.

A. Bidder makes an offer to buy a company. Board rejects it and calls Marty Lipton. They put in place something called a poison pill, which prevents the bidder from acquiring the company without board approval.

B. Marty Lipton & co. would then negotiate with the bidder to do the deal as a friendly transaction. Usually this involved payoffs to the corporate executives (it was how the golden parachute was invented). It also involved big payments to the law firm, which is how WLRK became by far the most profitable law firm in the country, with partners taking home double what they did at other big firms.

Marty's financialization critique was always about justifying the poison pill. Why should investors not be free to take the offer or leave it? Well, part of it was that they weren't informed about all the great things the board was doing for the long-term health of the company. That was the argument. It was bullshit. Everyone sort of knew it was bullshit, but they adopted it. In reality, what was driving the whole thing was part B: the ability to complete deals on a friendly posture, which was more lucrative for everyone involved. Eventually Marty gave up on the financialization piece, using shorthand to argue about long-term investment but really the main consideration was that the poison pill delivered better deals for shareholders.

 

[superrific]

Most people aren't going to read political theory, and they shouldn't have to. They already feel the effects of a broken system in their daily lives. They know their wages aren't keeping up. They know their rent is eating half their paycheck. They know they can't afford to get sick. That’s the real starting point—not theory, but lived experience.

And while we don’t have a nationwide model yet, there are real-world examples out there right now: worker co-ops, tenant unions, community land trusts, public power, municipal broadband, and some of the most successful union campaigns we’ve seen in a generation. The problem is not that people won’t try these things, it’s that the political and economic system keeps them small, underfunded, or buried.

1. Criticizing the abundance agenda, and then citing the problems the abundance agenda tries to challenge as the basis for your own argument, is a take I suppose. Why is rent eating half their paycheck? Why is it way more expensive to build in California than in Texas? That's a fact. Texas' way is not necessarily better for many, many reasons, but if housing is a major problem, build more housing!

2. Why does the political and economic system keep those efforts small or underfunded? Is it because of neoliberalism? Or because every time a Dem president expands labor rights, the subsequent GOP administration undoes that progress or more.

3. You want to know why I'm frustrated by Nader and the Naderites? Well, here's an anecdote. A while back, the Supreme Court issued one of the most anti-union decisions since the 1890s when the Sherman Act was interpreted to be a union-busting tool. It was authored by Alito. Alito was the driving force behind it -- having complained about unions endlessly until he finally got a majority to take them down.

If Ralph Nader had not run for president in 2000; if he hadn't been out there talking about a uniparty and blurring the distinctions between the two parties, Samuel Alito would not have been a Supreme Court justice. In all likelihood, Justice Tatel would have been writing opinions upholding union rights. Oh, and campaign finance reform -- another issue where Roberts and Alito did so much damage even before Citizens United.

The reason that unions are underfunded is not Bill Clinton or Barack Obama or Joe Biden. It's GWB and Trump and Ralph Nader. It isn't neoliberalism. As applied to labor rights, that term is even more bullshit than usual. If you knew anything about labor law, you'd know that there are more volumes of NLRB adjudications than all federal court cases. Well, I don't know if that's technically accurate, but the density is much higher. That's because the NLRB is always changing its stripes. Dems come in and expand union rights through adjudications. Then the GOPers come in and retract those rights in subsequent adjudications.

 

[superrific]

Honestly, leaning on Adorno and Marcuse as your main touchstones just shows how out of date your framework is. Leftist thought has evolved a lot since your 1990s masters degree. Many of us have rejected large parts of the Frankfurt School and poststructuralist stuff because it doesn’t fit today’s world (and actively contributed to many issues leftists within my camp talk about today). You’re basically arguing from an outdated playbook and acting like that means you “get” the left now.

Dude, you're both digging deeper and showing your limitations. You might have rejected the Frankfurt School -- indeed, it wasn't popular in the 90s -- but Adorno has never been so relevant. The authoritarian personality is the best empirical explanation for Trumpism and the global rise of fascism. Basically, fascists are fascists not because of class interests but because they are bad people. Look up Dark Triad and right-wing orientation.

 

[superrific]

So if Lipton’s critique of shareholder primacy was a cover story for consolidating boardroom power and enriching executives and lawyers, then that’s an even starker example of how elite rhetoric about long-termism or stakeholder value is used instrumentally. Not as a real challenge to financialization but as a way to reassert control within its logic. You seem to be saying: “don’t trust the financialization critique because I saw how cynically it was used.” I’m saying: the fact that it was so easily co-opted by cynical actors confirms how hollow and brittle our current model is.

Try again, this time without claiming that being wrong makes your point even more true.

 

[nycfan]

 

[Healing]

Oh, let ‘em go. It’s the most substantive conversation on this site.

 

[nycfan]

Sorry by all means keep going — I was just spiking a reference to the OP as a (failed) joke, not to dissuade the debate.

Besides, I have no say in the matter, just out here posting with no Mod powers.

 

[finesse]

I need to stop for my own mental health anyways lol

Too late. Besides ,you're on a roll.

 

[superrific]

1. You're setting up a false binary. Of course people with similar backgrounds can come to different conclusions. That doesn’t invalidate material analysis any more than two siblings choosing different religions invalidates the role of upbringing. A materialist lens doesn’t pretend to explain everything, but it does offer a framework for understanding why certain worldviews dominate and others get marginalized. That’s not a replacement for other kinds of analysis; it’s a corrective to the idea that ideas float freely, unshaped by power or interests.

2. I don’t pretend to be a corporate lawyer. My point wasn’t about your legal credentials, it was about worldview. You’re describing the boundaries of what is legally permissible under current corporate structures, while I’m trying to talk about what might be politically possible if we shift the framework. I’m not surprised that Delaware law doesn’t enshrine shareholder supremacy in literal terms. But I don’t think you’d deny that, in practice, maximizing shareholder value is still the north star of most major corporations. That’s the issue I’m raising: how economic norms, not just legal texts, shape behavior.

Also, no one said worker co-ops are going to build semiconductor plants overnight. That’s a straw man. The real question is whether we can diversify ownership models and democratize economic decision-making in some sectors, especially where there’s already a public role, like energy, healthcare, or housing.

3. The point isn’t that media gatekeeping caused the financial crisis. It’s that elite institutions, media included, lost legitimacy after a series of historic failures, from Iraq to Wall Street deregulation to growing inequality. People don’t turn to figures like catturd because they’re just anti-gay or racist. Many turn to them because they believe (rightly or wrongly) that official channels stopped telling the truth or representing their interests.

4. Of course countries don’t call the IMF for fun. But that doesn’t mean the medicine they’re given is neutral or technocratic. It reflects a certain ideology: austerity, liberalization, and market primacy. You say they’re called when everything else fails, but what’s been ruled out before that? Land reform? Capital controls? Public investment? The IMF prescribes a very specific treatment plan, and it has a long track record of worsening conditions in the name of “stability.”

1. I don't want to set up a false binary. We've in the past come to an agreement that a) people tend to have their worldview shaped by their own experience and interests and b) tends is the key word there, as it's oversimplified with respect to a lot of people. I'd say it's a bit odd to be relying too heavily on material analysis in today's politics, which is characterized by a) college educated liberals voting against their own economic interests out of concerns about justice, fairness and social liberties vs b) a working class voting against its own interests because of concerns about wokeism. But anyway, we all know that people sometimes vote on the economy and sometimes not.

So if we can agree on that, maybe we can paint with a narrower brush? It's not just me who takes offense at the "neoliberal elites ruined everything" narrative. There are plenty of folks on this board who would -- who will, one supposes -- benefit greatly from Trump's tax cuts (even if they would benefit more if they weren't lawyers), and yet who consistently vote Democratic.

2. Land reform is frequently the reason that countries require IMF assistance, so yes it gets tried. Public investment too. The reason that Argentina went broke is that they went all-in on the public investment approach, but the public corporations were horribly inefficient. So eventually the government, not getting enough revenues to cover its generous pension programs, had to start selling off the public investments. That gave them enough income to see things through . . . until they were out of investments to sell. Then the shit hit the fan. Were those assets auctioned at firesale prices in corrupt bidding processes? Sometimes they were. And that's a challenge for any leftist political program that requires state involvement. Governments are too often corrupt.

3. Most states now have established a relatively new form of public-minded incorporation: the "benefit corporation" or "b-corp." It's been in the news because OpenAI was trying to reincorporate as a for-profit b-corp (can't remember if it went through with it officially), but most b-corps are small businesses. For instance, the Park Slope food coop -- a famous worker-coop with a long pedigree -- is being sold. If it was a b-corp (don't know if it is or not), the new buyer would have to respect certain principles on which the company was founded, such as the market has to remain a coop for all eternity.

The uptake on b-corps surprised me; I didn't think they offered enough to make it worth the trouble, but perhaps I was wrong about that. Anyway, there is a corporate form available for these small businesses.

There are no industrial b-corps, though. Not that I know of. You cannot run a steel mill with inflexible fairness principles. Well, you can and there's a name for it: bankrupt steel mill. THIS isn't a worldview. This is empirical reality. It's not a fun reality, but that's the way the world works. The evidence is staggering. I can't rule out the possibility that there is some ideal form of organization that is workable and just, if only we reorganized society in that manner. But there's also no evidence in favor of that view. It's just hopium and anecdote. I don't think it's a good idea to overturn the whole apple cart in order to chase a dream that might or might not be real.

In other words: there are no alternatives to shareholder primacy that I can see. The irony here is that shareholder primacy works according to your materialist analysis. I'm sure you've thought about that, so it's not news to you. I'm confirming and explaining it. The law favors the board. But the law also allows the board to be compensated with stock, which makes the board into shareholders, and thus their interests are aligned with shareholders, so shareholder primacy becomes the same thing as managerial primacy. The whole system depends on managers always pursuing their own interests. It's economic self-interest all the way down.

But the alternative is a dual-mandate system that has the distinct disadvantage of relying on people to balance those dual mandates. Is that a decision you want to entrust to Jamie Dimon? It will be even worse, because if they are pursuing their own interests, they can shape the dual mandate however they want, in the way that advantages them most. This is one reason I brought up Marty Lipton. In the real world, the dual mandate model creates monstrosities like the management of whatever company Gordon Gekko took over. Did Gordon Gekko improve matters? In one way, yes. In another, more comprehensive sense, no.

4. If you want an example of a company that doesn't give a fuck about its investors, I would offer you: Tesla. It doesn't give a fuck about them for an odd reason: the shareholders of Tesla are Musk fanboys in a stable configuration of investment wealth that has surprised everyone with its longevity. But anyway, Elon does what Elon wants, right? And one of the things he wanted to do was invest billions of dollars in something called a Cybertruck.

That was a common story in corporate law. In fact, one reason that debt-financing became the norm in the merger world is that the interest payments were seen as a feature, not bug: because the profits had to be paid out as interest payments, those profits couldn't be wasted on pet projects like the Cybertruck. To the extent that shareholders are, these days, organized enough to demand dividend payments, it functions the same.

The point is that shareholder primacy rules because it works the best. Is it possible that we could have a benevolent AI emerge that has no material interests of its own, and thus could be trusted to make allocation decisions for companies without agency costs. If so, we don't need shareholder primacy. If not, then shareholder primacy works better than everything else.