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hjohn3 · 1 year

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Why the Tories Always Win

The Factors Behind Recent Conservative Electoral Success and Why Next Time Will be Different

By Honest John

IT’S ALMOST a cliche in the U.K. that its Conservative Party is the most effective electoral machine in Europe. Since the Second World War, there have been twenty one British General Elections and the Tories have won twelve of them and usually then ruled for much longer periods than Labour: by 2024 they will have held power for 49 out of the seventy eight years since 1945. This ability of the Conservatives to persuade the 42% or so of the electorate to vote for them required for victory under the First Past The Post electoral system in Britain, has long been a source of frustration and puzzlement on the part of left leaning voters and commentators. This has particularly been the case over the last thirteen years during which the Conservatives have won four consecutive General Elections (albeit not always with a Parliamentary majority), during which the Tories appear to have reinvented themselves numerous times and yet presided over a precipitate decline in living standards, governmental corruption and wholesale neglect of public services. By most objective measures the recent Conservative record in office is dreadful and yet they have kept on winning. Why is this and will the next General Election (which will probably take place in 2024) be any different?

In assessing Tory success, it is worth running through the built in advantages that the Conservatives enjoy over the Labour Party in all circumstances, but particularly when they are in office. Overwhelmingly the class and power structures of the U.K. work in their favour as the traditional anti-socialist and anti-reform party of the establishment. Even non partisan political and economic opinion will tend to veer to the right of centre, and even extreme political positions taken by an increasingly ideological Tory Party will be treated with a level of respect and lack of scrutiny rarely afforded to equivalent opinion on the left. The Tories also benefit from the inbuilt social and educational inequality of the U.K. which has created a soft elite, often educated in the same public and private schools, who offer each other jobs, contracts, networks and influence: a world that became shockingly visible under the decadent premiership of Boris Johnson, and which functioned in clear sight under the Old Etonian “chumocracy” of David Cameron. Finally, the media landscape that has to be navigated by the Labour Party is overwhelmingly hostile to even moderate left wing opinion. Tory supporting newspapers, most egregiously the Daily Mail and Daily Express, supplemented by an increasing number of right wing broadcasting outlets, are vicious in their deconstruction of anti Tory individuals and opinion, and wield a disproportionate influence on British public opinion, even in the digital age.

If the above factors were the sole explanation for regular Conservative success, then the Labour Party, and before Labour’s ascendancy from the 1920s, the Liberal Party, would scarcely have got a look in, but in fact non Tory parties have won significant victories over the Conservatives in the past, but usually proved incapable of holding onto power in the long term. Tory victories are achieved not simply through class dominance, educational advantage and right wing media propaganda: their regular success relies on the Tory ability to develop political narrative that a substantial minority of the country’s citizens will believe and to shift position shamelessly and opportunistically to maintain that grip on the narrative. The Conservatives have always been far better at this technique than their opponents, and nothing has illustrated Tory nimbleness, cynicism and dishonesty than the perambulations the five Conservative leaderships have taken the country through in the thirteen years since returning to power in 2010.

2010: Fixing the Roof

Despite his “heir to Blair” rhetoric, and promising to meet Labour spending commitments in 2007, David Cameron turned on a sixpence to exploit the impact of the 2008 financial crash, aided and abetted by his svengali shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, to turn Labour’s own narrative of fiscal restraint on itself. This duo portrayed persuasively the significant increase in public debt that came about due to to Gordon Brown’s determination rescue the banking sector, as a result of Labour financial profligacy. The simplistic accusation that the Labour government failed to “fix the roof while the sun was shining” cut through to an electorate suddenly being told not only would “savage” public spending cuts have to be made, but their own real term incomes were set to, at best, stagnate. Cameron’s Tories, in setting this - fundamentally untrue - narrative were very lucky in that an atmosphere of crisis was promoted at the time by the World Bank, the IMF, and the European Central Bank, culminating in the brutal treatment of debt laden Greece by the EU. Suddenly, the previously little known or regarded AAA credit rating became, according to a knowing Osborne, the only measure of effective financial governance if the U.K. was to avoid the fate of Greece. Cameron and Osborne were also fortunate that the Liberal Democrats had fallen into the hands of Nick Clegg’s right wing Orange Book faction, enabling the eventual Coalition Government that saw the Tories return to power after thirteen years in 2010, despite not gaining a Parliamentary majority at the General Election. Crucially, the Conservative comeback was also aided by Labour itself accepting the need for what came to be known as “austerity” in public funding and wage growth. The result was the disastrous decade of austerity economics which saw the Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition pursue an ideological campaign to not just reduce the deficit, but to diminish the size of the state permanently, something that in the light of the subsequent pandemic and withdrawal from the EU, has fatally crippled the ability of the British government to function.

2015: the Long Term Economic Plan

In the five years following the 2010 election, the narrative of austerity became established and Labour offered no counter economic story of any depth, despite numerous left wing economists putting forward strong cases that austerity in Europe and the U.K. was at best blind faith in the orthodoxies of neoliberal free market ideology and at worse, a political choice designed to enrich the already wealthy and undermine the ability of the state to restrain that process. The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, schooled in the practice of triangulation by Blair and Brown, was unable or unwilling to match the radicalism of his Tory opponents. His and Labour’s position of agreeing with the basic tenet that the national debt had to be brought down but not within the duration of a single Parliament, which had been Osborne’s stated aim, was patronised as “austerity lite” and therefore could not gain traction with voters who, perhaps not unreasonably, felt if there was a crisis, then it needed to be dealt with as soon as possible. Cameron and Osborne exploited weak public understanding of national finances, analogising sovereign debt to household debt (Cameron’s notorious and spurious “maxed out credit card”) and pursued a single policy of public spending cuts and pay restraint which quickly shut off growth, reduced living standards and discouraged investment. Despite this, Cameron continued to tout his detail-free “long term economic plan” which asserted that once government debt was under control and private investment could replace that of the state, the good times would return. Given this dominance of the economic narrative by the Tories, with feeble Labour resistance to it, the Coalition government would probably have been re-elected in 2015 anyway. But what gave the Tories their narrow majority was the stoking of fear on the part of a significant proportion of the southern English electorate that a possible minority Labour government would be sustained in power by the Scottish National Party and resources and influence would therefore flow north of the border. This fear was brilliantly exploited by Tory propaganda, most notably by a poster showing Miliband literally in Alec Salmond’s pocket, (itself a riff on a Spitting Image sketch from the 1980s, showing a hapless David Steel similarly “owned” by David Owen). The painstakingly accumulated Liberal seat haul of 57 seats, curated by Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy, was eviscerated at the General Election by the Tories, Liberal Democrat seat numbers collapsing to just 8. Labour’s own seat numbers also fell dramatically thanks to the loss of all but one of its its Scottish seats to the SNP (probably thanks in no small part in Miliband working with Cameron on the independence referendum the previous year), creating a seats gap between Tories and Labour which was unassailable. And Labour didn’t just lose votes to the SNP, but also to the Welsh and English nationalists of Plaid Cmyru and UKIP respectively, which ominously turned many former safe Labour seats marginal. Aided as ever by the right wing press in creating a story of Labour being both weak but somehow also a danger to the union, Cameron was able to win the first Conservative majority since 1992.

2017: False Dawn

The period between the 2015 and 2017 General Elections was one of the most turbulent in British political history. David Cameron spectacularly self destructed by delivering on his promise to the Eurosceptic right of his party, now organised into the baleful European Research Group (ERG), to hold a referendum on EU membership. Insouciantly believing the common sense of the British people and his own political skill would deliver a vote to remain, Cameron framed the referendum as a single in/out question. This enabled the populist right, mobilised by Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson into the Leave campaign, to drive a coach and horses through the technocratic and doom laden arguments of their Remain opponents. Having lost the vote, Cameron simply walked away, stepping down as Tory leader and announcing he would also step down as an MP at the next election. Succeeded by the dull and dutiful Teresa May, the Conservative government immediately triggered Article 51 of the European Treaty and commenced the process of Brexit. Uncomfortable with the relatively small Tory majority and deceived by opinion polling that showed both Conservative and her personal ratings much higher than that of Labour, May called a snap General Election in 2017. The result, which saw May lose the Tories their majority, and Labour make a net gain of 30 seats, was, in retrospect, something of an oddity. In the face of a genuinely anti austerity insurgent pitch by Corbyn Labour, May was flat footed and uninspiring and the Tory poll lead evaporated during the election campaign itself. For all May’s ineptitude, and the Labour left’s lionising of the 2017 result, what is not commented on sufficiently is the temporary collapse of the English nationalist vote in the wake of the Brexit referendum and the split of UKIP’s 2015 vote almost equally between Tory and Labour. Corbyn won 40% of the vote, the best Labour performance since 1997, but so did May, achieving the best Tory share of the vote since 1992, and maintaining that large seat disparity between Tory and Labour. This led to May to being able to govern comfortably as a minority administration with DUP support. Contrary to the claims of Corbyn loyalists, Labour did not “nearly” win in 2017 at all. In fact, despite for once not controlling the narrative, the Tories still maintained their grip on the people who usually vote - the elderly small-c conservatives, not attracted to Corbyn’s vision. The Corbyn surge was in actuality sustained by new Labour voters from the young and the left, who were often voting Labour for the first time and they did not stick around. Labour also saw their traditional vote share reduce in many of their heartland and northern seats, their voters unimpressed with Corbyn’s metropolitan leftism. In an early warning of the earthquake about to come, many northern Labour MPs were re-elected by the skins of their teeth in 2017. Corbyn’s seeming triumph was a false dawn.

2019: Getting Brexit Done

The 2019 General Election was erroneously described at the time as a political realignment, with the more fevered commentators claiming Boris Johnson’s unique blend of nationalist populism and commitments to address regional inequalities could keep Labour out of power for a generation. In fact the fragile nature of Johnson’s coalition was visible from the start and would have required a politician of genuine vision and ability to hold it together, and not the vacuous and mendacious incompetent that the country soon saw in Johnson. However, what this election did illustrate was the extraordinary ability of the Conservatives to seize and exploit a new political narrative, regardless of the extent to which it contradicted its previous incarnation. By putting their trust in Johnson, the Conservative Party forged a Faustian pact with a charlatan, who quickly became the vehicle of the ERG ultras to take Britain out of the EU with a minimal deal and to begin the process of turning the country into a low regulation, low tax offshore haven in which these dubious characters could continue to enrich themselves and their cronies while posing as champions of the people’s will. No matter that the Cameron and May governments had run an austerity regime dependent on low cost trading and the free markets of the EU - after the Tory vote collapsed under the challenge of Farage’s Brexit Party in the Euro elections of 2019, the Conservatives faced an existential crisis and the “long term economic plan” was now expendable. They turned to the conman Johnson to persuade a weary electorate, particularly in those seats in what came to be termed the “red wall” of former northern and Midlands Labour strongholds, that he could “get Brexit done” and then deliver economic good times once more. The result was Labour’s most devestating defeat, certainly since 1983 and arguably since 1931: the Conservatives were returned with a majority of 80 seats, their fourth election victory on the trot. Once again the Tories were helped by their allies in the right wing press and of course by the Labour Party itself. The vigour and careful political thinking behind Corbyn’s 2017 campaign had entirely dissipated by 2019. Labour was riven with factionalism, mired in anti semitism and almost entirely dysfunctional. Embematic of this hopelessness was Labour’s extraordinary policy of “neutrality” on Brexit: a cack handed attempt to keep its Leave voting heartlands on side while maintaining the support of its metropolitan, activist and liberal Remain voters. It pleased nobody. The Tories were in fact vulnerable potentially to the Liberal Democrats, who campaigned to reverse Brexit and this message could have caused the newly nationalist Conservatives difficulty in the their Remain voting southern seats. But again the Tories were fortunate in their opposition: fear of Jeremy Corbyn becoming prime minister kept the Tory Remain voters loyal to Johnson, even though they loathed him. Labour suffered a similar collapse to 2015, losing 12 seats to the SNP and 48 to the Conservatives respectively.

2024: No Excuses Left

In many ways, the almost continual disasters of Conservative government since 2019 are a classic case of political chickens coming home to roost. The damage inflicted on the economy and wider society by ten years of austerity are real and fundamental. The parlous condition of the British state was laid bare by the Covid pandemic and for all the Johnson regime’s negligent response, any government would have struggled given the degraded state of Britain’s health, prevention and emergency planning systems after a decade of financial squeeze. The re-emergence of inflation due to global factors has also been a significant challenge, but no one could have foreseen just how spectacularly the most effective electoral machine in Europe would trash its own reputation, alienate its voters and visit even more harm on an economy already weakened by their previous policy failures, and in such a short time. The topsy turvey lunacies of recent Tory Britain have been hard to keep up with: the lies, corruption and non delivery of Johnson, his hypocrisy writ large by the seemingly endless saga of “Partygate; the utter failure of Brexit to deliver any of the gains promised so loudly by Johnson and the ERG, their project instead characterised by workforce shortages, supply problems , bureaucracy, increased illegal migration and inflated costs of trading; the ludicrous chaos and damage of Liz Truss’ experiment in tax cutting ideology from which the value of U.K. bonds and mortgage markets have still to recover, and the palpable weakness of the unelected Rishi Sunak, continually trying to bridge and please a divided party with contradictory and at times, downright vile policy. The modern Conservative Party is bereft of ideas or purpose, no longer offering plan or narrative, no matter how spurious. The Tory ability to exploit circumstances to their advantage and to tell a story of good times to come seems to have deserted them with the facts of their stewardship continually getting in the way. People are worse off, public services are not working and there is a general atmosphere of national decline. The electorate at last have tired of believing Tory promises after 13 years of non delivery. Even the feebleness of the Labour opposition can no longer be relied upon. Labour for all its caution and Blairite sound bites, does have a genuinely innovative platform on green economics, inward investment and constitutional reform. Keir Starmer maybe an unlikely transformative leader, but he offers something distinctive but non threatening, despite most of the platform being derived from the Corbyn manifestos. The stubborn 20 point Labour opinion poll lead, no matter what stunt Sunak pulls, or how much he is lauded in the press for at last coming good, indicates the electorate have made up their mind: there will be change in 2024. The seats mountain Labour has to climb is such that a minority Labour government still remains a distinct possibility but the votes for a transformative agenda will be there across the non-Tory parties and re-election is likely, possibly at a subsequent, early, general election.

The Tories seem to have so broken their long standing bond of trust with the electorate that they could be out of power for fifteen years, particularly if Labour is ruthless enough to pursue constitutional reform and introduce PR. The Conservatives have had too long in office and inflicted incalculable harm on the structures and fabrics of the country under a succession of some of the worst Prime Ministers the country has ever seen. The end of this chaotic, self serving and disgraceful period of governance of the U.K. cannot come soon enough.

23rd March 2023

#british politics #conservative party #tories #austerity economics #general elections #why do the Tories always win?#labour party #david cameron #theresa may #boris johnson

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Why the Fed wants to crush workers

The US Federal Reserve has two imperatives: keeping employment high and inflation low. But when these come into conflict — when unemployment falls to near-zero — the Fed forgets all about full employment and cranks up interest rates to “cool the economy” (that is, “to destroy jobs and increase unemployment”).

An economy “cools down” when workers have less money, which means that the prices offered for goods and services go down, as fewer workers have less money to spend. As with every macroeconomic policy, raising interest rates has “distributional effects,” which is economist-speak for “winners and losers.”

Predicting who wins and who loses when interest rates go up requires that we understand the economic relations between different kinds of rich people, as well as relations between rich people and working people. Writing today for The American Prospect’s superb Great Inflation Myths series, Gerald Epstein and Aaron Medlin break it down:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-01-19-inflation-federal-reserve-protects-one-percent/

Recall that the Fed has two priorities: full employment and low interest rates. But when it weighs these priorities, it does so through “finance colored” glasses: as an institution, the Fed requires help from banks to carry out its policies, while Fed employees rely on those banks for cushy, high-paid jobs when they rotate out of public service.

Inflation is bad for banks, whose fortunes rise and fall based on the value of the interest payments they collect from debtors. When the value of the dollar declines, lenders lose and borrowers win. Think of it this way: say you borrow $10,000 to buy a car, at a moment when $10k is two months’ wages for the average US worker. Then inflation hits: prices go up, workers demand higher pay to keep pace, and a couple years later, $10k is one month’s wages.

If your wages kept pace with inflation, you’re now getting twice as many dollars as you were when you took out the loan. Don’t get too excited: these dollars buy the same quantity of goods as your pre-inflation salary. However, the share of your income that’s eaten by that monthly car-loan payment has been cut in half. You just got a real-terms 50% discount on your car loan!

Inflation is great news for borrowers, bad news for lenders, and any given financial institution is more likely to be a lender than a borrower. The finance sector is the creditor sector, and the Fed is institutionally and personally loyal to the finance sector. When creditors and debtors have opposing interests, the Fed helps creditors win.

The US is a debtor nation. Not the national debt — federal debt and deficits are just scorekeeping. The US government spends money into existence and taxes it out of existence, every single day. If the USG has a deficit, that means it spent more than than it taxed, which is another way of saying that it left more dollars in the economy this year than it took out of it. If the US runs a “balanced budget,” then every dollar that was created this year was matched by another dollar that was annihilated. If the US runs a “surplus,” then there are fewer dollars left for us to use than there were at the start of the year.

The US debt that matters isn’t the federal debt, it’s the private sector’s debt. Your debt and mine. We are a debtor nation. Half of Americans have less than $400 in the bank.

https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/personal-finance/articles/49-of-americans-couldnt-cover-a-400-emergency-expense-today-up-from-32-in-november/

Most Americans have little to no retirement savings. Decades of wage stagnation has left Americans with less buying power, and the economy has been running on consumer debt for a generation. Meanwhile, working Americans have been burdened with forms of inflation the Fed doesn’t give a shit about, like skyrocketing costs for housing and higher education.

When politicians jawbone about “inflation,” they’re talking about the inflation that matters to creditors. Debtors — the bottom 90% — have been burdened with three decades’ worth of steadily mounting inflation that no one talks about. Yesterday, the Prospect ran Nancy Folbre’s outstanding piece on “care inflation” — the skyrocketing costs of day-care, nursing homes, eldercare, etc:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-01-18-inflation-unfair-costs-of-care/

As Folbre wrote, these costs are doubly burdensome, because they fall on family members (almost entirely women), who have to sacrifice their own earning potential to care for children, or aging people, or disabled family members. The cost of care has increased every year since 1997:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/18/wages-for-housework/#low-wage-workers-vs-poor-consumers

So while politicians and economists talk about rescuing “savers” from having their nest-eggs whittled away by inflation, these savers represent a minuscule and dwindling proportion of the public. The real beneficiaries of interest rate hikes isn’t savers, it’s lenders.

Full employment is bad for the wealthy. When everyone has a job, wages go up, because bosses can’t threaten workers with “exile to the reserve army of the unemployed.” If workers are afraid of ending up jobless and homeless, then executives seeking to increase their own firms’ profits can shift money from workers to shareholders without their workers quitting (and if the workers do quit, there are plenty more desperate for their jobs).

What’s more, those same executives own huge portfolios of “financialized” assets — that is, they own claims on the interest payments that borrowers in the economy pay to creditors.

The purpose of raising interest rates is to “cool the economy,” a euphemism for increasing unemployment and reducing wages. Fighting inflation helps creditors and hurts debtors. The same people who benefit from increased unemployment also benefit from low inflation.

Thus: “the current Fed policy of rapidly raising interest rates to fight inflation by throwing people out of work serves as a wealth protection device for the top one percent.”

Now, it’s also true that high interest rates tend to tank the stock market, and rich people also own a lot of stock. This is where it’s important to draw distinctions within the capital class: the merely rich do things for a living (and thus care about companies’ productive capacity), while the super-rich own things for a living, and care about debt service.

Epstein and Medlin are economists at UMass Amherst, and they built a model that looks at the distributional outcomes (that is, the winners and losers) from interest rate hikes, using data from 40 years’ worth of Fed rate hikes:

https://peri.umass.edu/images/Medlin_Epstein_PERI_inflation_conf_WP.pdf

They concluded that “The net impact of the Fed’s restrictive monetary policy on the wealth of the top one percent depends on the timing and balance of [lower inflation and higher interest]. It turns out that in recent decades the outcome has, on balance, worked out quite well for the wealthy.”

How well? “Without intervention by the Fed, a 6 percent acceleration of inflation would erode their wealth by around 30 percent in real terms after three years…when the Fed intervenes with an aggressive tightening, the 1%’s wealth only declines about 16 percent after three years. That is a 14 percent net gain in real terms.”

This is why you see a split between the one-percenters and the ten-percenters in whether the Fed should continue to jack interest rates up. For the 1%, inflation hikes produce massive, long term gains. For the 10%, those gains are smaller and take longer to materialize.

Meanwhile, when there is mass unemployment, both groups benefit from lower wages and are happy to keep interest rates at zero, a rate that (in the absence of a wealth tax) creates massive asset bubbles that drive up the value of houses, stocks and other things that rich people own lots more of than everyone else.

This explains a lot about the current enthusiasm for high interest rates, despite high interest rates’ ability to cause inflation, as Joseph Stiglitz and Ira Regmi wrote in their recent Roosevelt Institute paper:

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/RI_CausesofandResponsestoTodaysInflation_Report_202212.pdf

The two esteemed economists compared interest rate hikes to medieval bloodletting, where “doctors” did “more of the same when their therapy failed until the patient either had a miraculous recovery (for which the bloodletters took credit) or died (which was more likely).”

As they document, workers today aren’t recreating the dread “wage-price spiral” of the 1970s: despite low levels of unemployment, workers wages still aren’t keeping up with inflation. Inflation itself is falling, for the fairly obvious reason that covid supply-chain shocks are dwindling and substitutes for Russian gas are coming online.

Economic activity is “largely below trend,” and with healthy levels of sales in “non-traded goods” (imports), meaning that the stuff that American workers are consuming isn’t coming out of America’s pool of resources or manufactured goods, and that spending is leaving the US economy, rather than contributing to an American firm’s buying power.

Despite this, the Fed has a substantial cheering section for continued interest rates, composed of the ultra-rich and their lickspittle Renfields. While the specifics are quite modern, the underlying dynamic is as old as civilization itself.

Historian Michael Hudson specializes in the role that debt and credit played in different societies. As he’s written, ancient civilizations long ago discovered that without periodic debt cancellation, an ever larger share of a societies’ productive capacity gets diverted to the whims of a small elite of lenders, until civilization itself collapses:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/07/michael-hudson-from-junk-economics-to-a-false-view-of-history-where-western-civilization-took-a-wrong-turn.html

Here’s how that dynamic goes: to produce things, you need inputs. Farmers need seed, fertilizer, and farm-hands to produce crops. Crucially, you need to acquire these inputs before the crops come in — which means you need to be able to buy inputs before you sell the crops. You have to borrow.

In good years, this works out fine. You borrow money, buy your inputs, produce and sell your goods, and repay the debt. But even the best-prepared producer can get a bad beat: floods, droughts, blights, pandemics…Play the game long enough and eventually you’ll find yourself unable to repay the debt.

In the next round, you go into things owing more money than you can cover, even if you have a bumper crop. You sell your crop, pay as much of the debt as you can, and go into the next season having to borrow more on top of the overhang from the last crisis. This continues over time, until you get another crisis, which you have no reserves to cover because they’ve all been eaten up paying off the last crisis. You go further into debt.

Over the long run, this dynamic produces a society of creditors whose wealth increases every year, who can make coercive claims on the productive labor of everyone else, who not only owes them money, but will owe even more as a result of doing the work that is demanded of them.

Successful ancient civilizations fought this with Jubilee: periodic festivals of debt-forgiveness, which were announced when new monarchs assumed their thrones, or after successful wars, or just whenever the creditor class was getting too powerful and threatened the crown.

Of course, creditors hated this and fought it bitterly, just as our modern one-percenters do. When rulers managed to hold them at bay, their nations prospered. But when creditors captured the state and abolished Jubilee, as happened in ancient Rome, the state collapsed:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/08/jubilant/#construire-des-passerelles

Are we speedrunning the collapse of Rome? It’s not for me to say, but I strongly recommend reading Margaret Coker’s in-depth Propublica investigation on how title lenders (loansharks that hit desperate, low-income borrowers with triple-digit interest loans) fired any employee who explained to a borrower that they needed to make more than the minimum payment, or they’d never pay off their debts:

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-sales-practices-of-biggest-title-lender-in-us

[Image ID: A vintage postcard illustration of the Federal Reserve building in Washington, DC. The building is spattered with blood. In the foreground is a medieval woodcut of a physician bleeding a woman into a bowl while another woman holds a bowl to catch the blood. The physician's head has been replaced with that of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.]

#pluralistic #worker power #austerity #monetarism #jerome powell #the fed #federal reserve #finance #banking #economics #macroeconomics #interest rates #the american prospect #the great inflation myths #debt #graeber #michael hudson #indenture #medieval bloodletters

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