Introduction
On January 20, 2009, as Barack Obama prepared to be inaugurated and to begin pursuit of a progressive agenda that he hoped would transform America into a more just society, a group of billionaires was meeting across the continent in California, to develop a strategy to neutralize the results of the recent election and to stop the agenda of the newly elected president.
The billionaires in attendance had been summoned by Charles and David Koch , longtime supporters of libertarianism and minimal government. Guests included like-minded billionaires: Charles Mellon Scaife , heir to Mellon banking and Gulf oil fortunes; Harry and Lynde Bradley , recipients of defense contracts; John M. Olin , a chemical and munitions producer, the Coors brewing family of Colorado; and the Devos family of Michigan and the Amway company.
For this group of billionaires, the election of Barack Obama was catastrophic. Everything he stood for was a threat. He believed in relative equality, and that meant the reform of taxation. Obama wanted universal healthcare, and that not only sounded like socialism, but also seemed a denial of the free market. And among other things Obama advocated for alternative (and clean) energy, and that sounded like government regulation. The Kochs, who had extensive energy interests of their own, and who owned miles of oil pipelines and were early advocates of fracking and traditional energy, were determined to stop Obama. The government, they complained, was intrusive and getting in the way of American freedom. Their billionaire friends agreed.
Super-Rich Rentiers and Inequality
It has become an obvious truth of our times that the super-concentration of wealth has become one of the greatest social threats of the modern era. It is abundantly clear that 2008 was far more than a warranted and necessary correction of the market for most of us. The super-rich, far from learning the necessary lesson that sharing is a good thing, instead have attempted to shift blame onto the classes below them. They have castigated the poor because they bought homes they could not afford, criticized the middle classes because they failed to get properly educated, and almost everybody else because they were not among the truly creative and intelligent. The super-rich do not recognize their contribution to the rise in inequality. They argue on the contrary that their greed—they don’t call it that—has contributed to a modern financial and economic revolution. Greed, they argue, is justifiable; they spend much of their wealth arguing the point. After all, the super-wealthy believe they are needed to generate the wealth that the rest of us share, even if we get less and less of it. They do not echo the belief held by the majority of us: the more that the rich take, the less there is for the rest of us. Some among the super-rich even argue that there will always be the 1%, and technically that is true: but there has never been a time in the USA—not in the modern era—when the 1% has controlled upward of 45% of US financial wealth and roughly half of that in income. The figures for the UK are about half that of the USA: the upper 1% in the UK owns almost 23% of the national wealth and about 15% of the national income. 1
Much of the wealth concentrated at the top is undeserved. It is not the result of competition and a hypothetical free market. On the contrary, what we have seen for some four decades is quite the opposite: a rentier economy in which huge profits are made because of the absence of competition and the suppression of a free market. A considerable portion of this wealth is the result of patents, monopolies, and subsidies of all sorts in everything ranging from energy and telecommunications to banking and finance. But it is in the financial sector especially that the greatest profits have been taken, based on income or rents derived from interest, dividends, and capital gains. In a word, the true winners in the modern era are the rentier class, those who derive income from ownership or control of scarce assets, or assets artificially made scarce, especially rents derived from the ownership of financial assets and intellectual property , including patents. 2
Even the narrowest definition of financial income shows that across the developed world, for twenty-nine countries studied between the 1960s and 1990s, rentier income accounted for most—in a few cases all—the growth in profits. 3 If only interest and dividends are counted as rent on financial assets, the countries in which the rentier share increased most, from top to bottom were: France, the UK, South Korea, the USA, Germany, Australia, and Belgium. In each of these countries, by 2000, rental income from financial assets accounted for over 20% of total income: the UK and Italy were not far behind. 4
The USA has become the leading rentier economy by far since 1980, which explains the extreme concentrations of income and wealth in the USA. Between 1980 and 2000, the rentier share rose more than sevenfold, accounting for a third of national income. 5 Almost two decades later, in 2017, financial services, including banking, insurance, and marketing, accounted for more than 40% of all domestic profits. In the USA, if only financial income and dividends are counted as rent, then rents account for 40% of national income. By consensus, this means the USA has become a rentier economy, dominated by a financial sector. If capital gains on financial assets are included as rent—as they should be since nothing of value has been created, then up to half of US national income may be derived from rents, a tidy sum extracted by the financial elite from everybody else. 6
From the Great Transformation to Neoliberalism and the Rentier Economy
It seems obvious that when there is an obscene concentration of income and wealth at the top, that markets have not been working as advertised by neoliberal economists and Wall Street financiers. It seems equally obvious that when wealthy elites manage to monopolize financial, intellectual, and physical property, as they have in the USA and UK especially, and increasingly elsewhere, that none of this has come about democratically. People do not vote themselves into oblivion. They do not consent to the loss of their jobs, they do not support the evisceration of their health, or applaud the loss of their homes. In a real democracy, there would not be a small elite controlling almost half the financial wealth of a nation, as in the USA, while most others have stagnant incomes, diminishing job security, and bleak futures.
Yet we have rentier capitalism, which defends the institutions that have created and maintained inequality and growing risk for the majority, in everything from healthcare to mortgages to food security.
So how do the financial elites, those who run the large banks, those who own intellectual property , those who own tangible property, often by transferring publicly owned assets to themselves through privatization —do it?
The only way to establish a rentier economy is to capture political power and to commodify politics by creating a rentier state. Politicians rely on rental income to win and remain in office; those who have rental income enter into client relationships with politicians who enable the continuing pursuit of rents. Staying in office means pandering to owners of rents; pursuing rents means supporting pliable politicians. As a result, citizens have become disengaged, political parties have become flattened and abandoned, and those voting have been willing to listen to demagogues who make promises they do not intend to keep. Rarely if ever do politicians mention rentier capitalism: they are too busy defending it. And some rentiers are in the highest office, such as Donald Trump .
Rentier capitalism is fraudulent. Those who practice it, using the rhetoric of neoliberalism , praise free markets. The implication is that their treasure is based on competition in a free market. But this is just rhetoric, there are no free markets: rentier capitalism means unfree markets. That is what rents are all about, avoiding competition. That is also why rentiers require control of media and political parties. It is important to convince the public that wealth has been earned in competitive markets. It is important, also, for political parties to embrace the rhetoric of “free markets.” Republicans and Democrats in the USA, and Conservatives and even Labor in the UK have done just that, embracing Wall Street and the City, respectively. We know the result: populist revolts against traditional parties. The Third Way offered by Tony Blair in the UK and by Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama in the USA has been abandoned by voters.
So how did the rentier class, especially the banking and finance sector, but also other rent seekers in real estate, telecommunications, healthcare, energy, and high-tech, get away with it? How did they capture the state and weld it to their neoliberal rhetoric and to policies of deregulation , privatization , financial manipulation, and low taxes? How did they create a system that bestows outlandish rents on the owners of financial, intellectual, and physical property?
The narrative begins with the Mount Pèlerin Society (MPS), a small group of mostly economists that first met in 1947 in Mont Pèlerin, Switzerland. From the beginning, the group pledged itself to an ideological core: free markets and a non-interventionist state. With added refinements such as low tax regimes, privatization of state assets, and deregulation , this has evolved into what is called neoliberalism .
The MPS has had an outsized influence on politics and the economy since at least 1972, when it first began to get traction. Many of its earliest members occupied high positions in politics and finance. Among them were Ludwig Erhard , who became the Chancellor of West Germany; Luigi Einaudi , who became president of Italy; Václav Krause, who became prime minister and then president of the Czech Republic; Arthur Burns, who became chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank ; and Roger Auboin, who became general manager of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). 7 And as many might know, Charles Koch , the billionaire supporter of libertarian and conservative causes and often the Republican Party, has been a member since 1970.
From the beginning, MPS had an incestuous relationship with financial capital. Its first conference was funded by Crédit Suisse. It is also a club of ideologues: candidates must be nominated by two sitting members, and they must demonstrate fealty to the stated aims of MPS. 8
MPS economists have been among the leaders promoting neoliberalism . Founding member, Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek , was invited to the London School of Economics in 1931, by Lionel Robbins, another founding member of MPS. Subsequently, Hayek became a professor at the University of Chicago. In 1974, his neoliberal views won a global audience when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics. He later defended the Pinochet regime in Chile, though he was aware of the oppressive and murderous nature of that regime. And while Hayek was honorary president of the MPS, he organized the meeting in a Chilean resort that planned the coup bringing Pinochet to power.
Ronald Reagan was a great admirer of Hayek. He claimed that Hayek was one of three people who most influenced him and subsequently invited him to the White House. And then there was George H. W. Bush, who in 1991 awarded Hayek the US Presidential Medal of Freedom. Margaret Thatcher was also a great admirer of Hayek and had been since her student days. She referred to his The Constitution of Liberty as a manifesto she could embrace. And what were the principles advanced by Hayek? Hostility to the public sector, objection to any kind of protection provided by the state, and opposition to progressive taxation, which Hayek thought oppressive and unjust. 9
But it was Milton Friedman who inherited the mantle of the MPS and made neoliberalism into an orthodox faith. He was the youngest inaugural member of the MPS in 1947. Associated with monetarism, Friedman was a supporter of Pinochet, Thatcher, and Reagan. In 1974, he was a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics, providing him with a platform to spread the new orthodoxy. Friedman was also professor of economics at the University of Chicago between 1946 and 1977, where he helped train generations of economists in his view of a hands-off state.
Arnold Harberger was far less famous, but his influence at the University of Chicago, where he initiated generations into the new economics, was almost as important as Friedman’s. Harberger once boasted that he had helped train more than twenty-five ministers of finance and more than a dozen central bank presidents. 10
Between 1980 and 2008, there were seventeen winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics who were from the University of Chicago or who were educated there. What had once been a pluralistic academic discipline now became hostage to an ideological paradigm. Critics of neoliberalism were disenfranchised and found themselves estranged from their profession as economists. In the name of market freedom, the market for economics professors suddenly became one-dimensional and anything but a free market. Leading academic journals also became captives of the ascendant free market view: those who did not pass the litmus test could expect not to get published in these prestigious journals, making advancement and tenure ever more tenuous.
Encouraged by MPS, and by the ubiquitous Milton Friedman , some of the most powerful financiers in the world began putting money into alleged think tanks: these included the Heritage Foundation , the Hoover Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute , the CATO Institute in the USA, and the Center for Policy Studies. In Sydney, Australia, the Australian Center for Independent Studies was established by Maurice Newman, a denier of climate-change.
The names of these institutes and centers suggest they are neutral and engaged in scientific research. In fact, what they have in common is that they all advocate the MPS agenda, especially as promoted by Milton Friedman . And what did Friedman promote? Abolishing Social Security, reducing or eliminating corporate taxes, getting rid of progressive taxation, abolishing unions, privatizing everything, including the post office, healthcare, retirement pensions , education, even national parks. Whatever belonged to the public had no value anyway, said Friedman, not until it acquired an exchange value. And, of course, Friedman advocated shrinking government. Inequality? It would not exist, he said, if free market rules were followed. 11 Inequality occurred because of government intervention. It could be solved by withdrawing government and relying on the free market.
The ideas of Friedman and like-minded economists had been around for a while, but had never gained traction. That was because they went against the Great Transformation following the two plus decades after WWII. That period, which we can date between 1945 and 1973, was based on social solidarity, or the notion that labor deserved labor-based (jobs and income) security. During this era, the share of income going to capital as profit and the share going to labor as wages and benefits were stable, and far more equal than it would become later. Government played a large role in maintaining this stability by limiting the income that could be taken by rents, outsized return on assets, whether financial, intellectual, or physical property. This was done in numerous ways: regulating railways and utilities because these could readily become monopolies; and regulating financial markets to deter speculation while encouraging lending for productive purposes. 12 The key to this period was labor peace, for example, the Treaty of Detroit of 1950, a five-year agreement that was negotiated between General Motors and the UAW. This pact was adopted nationally, and it became the model for many industrialized countries. In return for no strikes, labor was given a share of gains in labor productivity, mostly in non-wage benefits, including pensions and health insurance .
This was the height of social democracy. Those in full-time employment could depend on rising real wages, the growth of non-wage benefits—based partially on worker contributions—and entitlements to Social Security. For those not in employment, as long as they stayed a relative minority, they could be supported by a universally available social safety net. It was when this latter group grew, threatening to destabilize the agreements between capital and labor by enlarging the costs of the welfare state, that social democracy began to break down.
The system was hierarchical from the beginning. Those unable to find regular paid employment had to depend on the welfare state, supported by left and right governments, as a way to maintain social stability. Simultaneously, those in full-time employment had to pay more income taxes to maintain that state, and welfare for others, while rising contributions to Social Security also eroded real wages. And as the number of unemployed, or irregularly employed, grew, and as governments, including social democratic governments, applied means testing, the old model in which the fortunate helped support the less fortunate was dead. Means testing meant that what had been an entitlement for all was now a stopgap for the poor. It was the definitive end of the Great Transformation that had countered the previous era of free trade, blamed by many for the Depression. It also meant the end of social democracy as it had been. As Guy Standing put it, “previous generations of social democrats had understood [that] benefits designed only for the poor are invariably poor benefits and stand to lose support among the rest of society.” 13
Labor and social democratic parties everywhere shifted from solidarity, based on a model of mutual support, to the eradication of poverty. In some cases, Left parties even helped foster poverty, mainly by weakening the social safety net, adopting workfare policies that forced workers to apply for jobs that didn’t exist or that were demeaning and unsuitable, and diminishing social benefits to encourage taking temporary, low-paying, and poor-benefit jobs: in other words punishing and stigmatizing the unemployed for their unemployment . With worker solidarity increasingly a thing of the past, and as Left parties abandoned a splintering and “disappearing” working class, labor and social democratic parties veered to the right to attract the growing middle class. As for the working class, they were increasingly on their own.
There were other factors that contributed to the end of the Great Transformation. The emergence of Japan and South Korea as industrializing countries produced low-cost competition with the West for manufactured goods, beginning a crisis in balance of payments and manufacturing jobs. The tripling of the price of oil in 1973 following the emergence of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) only added to the inflationary pressures inherited from Keynesianism, which had relied on stimulating demand to produce full employment. Now too much stimulation, together with rising oil prices and wage gains, would only lead to runaway inflation. Moreover, profit margins were squeezed by energy costs, wage gains, generous benefit packages, and maintaining the welfare state, energizing the corporate world to deploy its ideological paradigm of neoliberalism .
And this was precisely where MPS and Milton Friedman and his acolytes came in. The emergence of a global market, the splintering of labor into organized labor and the “others,” difficulties with balance of payments because of emergent developing countries, and the inability of Keynesian policy makers to tame inflation, opened a new era. The closed national economy now had to compete with the open global economy. That provided an opportunity for the neoliberals. But that opportunity depended on gaining power, and that would mean getting the government out of the way of Big Business or simply capturing the government. As the corporate world and their neoliberal economists put it, the time was right for “free-trade,” which in corporate lingo meant deregulation and privatization .
Oligarchy and the Commodification of Everything
Milton Friedman ’s ideas could now be pressed forward globally. There was only one way to grow prosperity in the future: liberalize markets, privatize and commodify everything, and dismantle all institutions that protected people from market forces. Regulations could not be justified if they hindered growth; for Friedman, they hindered growth by definition. Friedman pressed forward. Left alone, he argued, markets rewarded efficient and punished inefficient firms. Friedman did not bemoan all that “creative destruction” brought about by “competition”: financiers, he argued, would help transfer assets to efficient companies. The same reasoning advocated for denationalization. After all, transferring assets from public ownership to the more “rational” and “competitive” free market meant more growth. And more jobs. This sounded right, and even New Labor and Tony Blair bought into this.
But financial deregulation didn’t quite behave as neoliberals predicted. Once financiers were set free, they had little interest in routing capital into productive activity. Not when it could be much more lucratively employed even if that meant accepting more risk and especially when that risk could be transferred to the taxpayer (pension funds for one). So financiers indulged themselves in frenzies of speculation. They made tons of money from interest, commissions, insider trading, and capital gains. The results as we all know, and as we detail in Chapter 3, were endless rounds of bubble economies. Hot money, foot-fancy capital chasing global opportunities, traveled at high velocity in and out of countries, wherever interest and profits were highest. Inevitably, the bubbles burst: the Latin American financial crisis of the 1980s, the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the financial and banking crisis of 2007, and the real estate bubble of 2008 followed. Yet even after all these crises, even after the collapse of the US hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management , which had two Nobel Prize-winning board members, neoliberal ideology remained ascendant. And even after daily events and common sense suggested that neoliberal-supported free markets and deregulation were a catastrophe for most of us, the political will to challenge Wall Street and the City never materialized.
The reason was politics. Armed with its free trade slogan, the MPS, associated think tanks, and the upper echelons of the 1% pursued their real agenda: growing rents in finance and banking, growing rents from intellectual property in telecommunications, hi-tech and Big Pharma, and growing rents from physical assets like energy. It turned out that about 80% of books that denied climate change was caused by the activities of mankind were connected to free market think tanks through their authors or publishers. 14 Many of these same think tanks were funded by fossil fuel interests. CATO Institute admitted to funding from Big Oil. In fact, its ties to Big Oil were extensive. The CATO Institute was founded with the oil fortune of Charles Koch , the conservative right-wing billionaire. The 200 top individual contributors included Charles and his brother David Koch , who also contributed through their Charles Lambe Foundation. CATO has received contributions from oil magnate Phillip Anschutz’s foundation. 15
The Heritage Foundation has also consistently denied climate change . Like CATO, it has received extensive support from the Charles Lambe Foundation, $4.8 million between 1998 and 2012. Among its contributors are ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal, fossil fuel companies that have both denied mankind’s contribution to climate change . Other major funders have included Amoco, Amway, Chase Manhattan Bank, Chevron, Exxon, Mobil Oil, and SmithKline Beckman, all of whom have had a so-called free trade, deregulation , low-corporate tax agenda: the presence of big oil can again hardly be missed. Not coincidentally, the Heritage Foundation has a long-term relationship with the MPS.
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has also clocked in on the free trade agenda. The same Charles Koch , of Big Oil interests, donated at least $8 million to AEI in 2005. ExxonMobil has also been a contributor to AEI: not a surprise that the AEI has consistently denied climate change . In early 2007, the Guardian reported that AEI was offering scientists and economists $10,000 each “to undermine a major climate change report” published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change . 16 The AEI has also described minimum wage hikes as reckless and Dodd–Frank ’s attempt to regulate Wall Street as a disaster. 17
The links between the MPS and the Institute for Economic Affairs are even more direct. The Institute was founded by Antony Fisher on the advice of (no less than) Friedrich Hayek : the explicit idea was to promote free market ideas and deregulation . Although it had a clearly libertarian basis, it presented itself as a neutral think tank whose views were disguised as science. This was hardly the case. It was funded by the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Mellon family—Richard Mellon Scaife—who inherited his fortune from Big Oil (Gulf). The Institute, unsurprisingly, was opposed to corporate taxes, repeating a pattern we have already seen: inherited fortunes based on concessions of public commons for private profit—oil in this case—being used to dismantle protection of public goods, shift tax burdens to the public, and promote deregulation by calling it free trade. 18
At the heart of neoliberalism , and of the outlook of MPS, are two incompatible arguments: a belief in so-called unregulated free markets and a belief that trade unions and collective bargaining, any collective body asserting the rights of labor, must be regulated. Whether dismantling regulation, privatizing the public sector, liberalizing capital markets, and deregulating Wall Street, while regulating labor, there is one objective: dismantle democracy, and capture the state, not necessarily in that order. On the one side, there is the religion of free trade, and on the other, the defense of property rights, regardless of how property was acquired, including concessions such as oil being granted by the state.
Plutocrats: Unleashing Capital, Regulating Labor, Capturing the State
What CATO, the Heritage Foundation , and other neoliberal institutions wanted was the free market, deregulation , withdrawal of the state, and the privatization of public goods: in a word, the free rein of capital. Their attitude toward Labor was the reverse; it had to be regulated or reregulated. It had also to be flexible, that is, shorn of protection, which meant weak unions and which also meant no borders for workers and the free movement of labor. This too was part of the neoliberal argument. Organized labor propped up wages and benefits, and that was a “distortion” of the natural laws of economics: it meant higher prices, lower profits, and the inability to compete in the global market. And what was the best way to tame labor? Capture the state for one. Control the media for another. Use political leverage to dismantle the institutions of liberal democracy. Control the science of energy, the science of dietetics. Use financial leverage to control the state. Operate through powerful financial circuits, largely invisible to the general public, to secure political power. The endgame had one objective: secure rents, extract wealth. Once again, the free market was but a smokescreen.
So how have the super-rich gained access and translated the ownership of assets into political power? Again, we see the MPS front and center. In 1954, it established a long-term relationship with the Bilderberg Group. The avowed aim? Promote “free market” capitalism. Annual Bilderberg meetings at global luxury resorts brought together prime ministers, directors of central banks, CEOs of multinationals and banks, and principals from think tanks and the media. Henry Kissinger has been a member, so has Mario Monti, former Prime Minister of Italy and former European Commissioner. 19 Bilderberg Group is linked to the US Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission through its members. Many members or former members of the commission have taken leadership positions in government, industry, and finance, at national and international levels. Several have headed the World Bank .
There are other informal networks of the super-rich: the World Economic Forum that meets in Davos and a number of multinational corporations linking the global (especially financial) elite. Most prominent is Black Rock, the world’s largest asset manager. It controls $4.5 trillion in assets, including corporate bonds, sovereign debt, and commodities and shares. With the leverage that comes from holding such assets, Black Rock gets a seat at many tables. It is a major lobbying force in North America and Europe, lobbying for the financial interests of its investors. 20 With global reach, and with its unrivaled assets, it operates almost as an unofficial broker and parallel but unelected government for the interests of the global super-rich.
Another conduit of the global super-rich that includes links to the Saudi royal family is the Carlyle Group , with linkages to military contracts. Carlyle Group qualifies as the world’s largest private equity company. Carlyle runs a portfolio of more than 200 companies, with a payroll of more than 675,000 employees. Prominent politicians appointed to its board reveal the links between the world of the global financial super-rich and the global political elite. President George H. W. Bush has been a member: so has former Secretary of State, James A. Baker; and so has former British Prime Minister John Major . 21 What these political figures share is a conservative outlook on how world financial and political interests should be shaped. All are the official representatives of the global financial elite, the owners of assets, be they financial, intellectual, or physical property.
What do Black Rock and Carlyle have in common with each other and with the global super-rich? Their common aim is to minimize tax obligations, build a global rentier economy that rewards capital above all else, and promote “free trade” by allowing private equity to expand assets with minimal government interference. A favorite technique? Establish pass-through entities that move corporate earnings directly to their owners, avoiding corporate taxation. This has been so effective that pass-through corporations now account for more than 25% of US companies. Despite the magnitude of Black Rock and Carlyle, and the assets they control, they remain largely invisible to the larger American public: exactly as they want to be. Such global companies can make effective use of tax havens , hiding both the income of corporations and the individuals who own and run them. That is what a rentier economy means. That is how assets managers can expand the return on capital, while minimizing returns to labor. The fact that the global super-rich have a common agenda, and common objectives, does not mean they are engaged in a clever global conspiracy. But they don’t have to be. Everything they do is legal. They are simply leveraging financial clout into political power. But there is something missing in all this. It is called democracy, and nobody gets to vote on all these dealings. And the ideological paradigm that the elitist think tanks are constantly promoting—as we have seen—is that there are no alternatives. This is globalization, a natural outcome of modern technological transformation. Just to be certain there are no reversals or surprises, the super-rich have moved to take over political parties.
Oligarchs: The Party Is Over
By 2016, it had become clear that political parties had reoriented themselves to serve the interests of the super-rich, including financial interests (banking, finance, and real estate) but also owners of intellectual property , especially in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and telecommunication, and owners of physical property, as in energy producers.
Political parties, beginning in the late nineteenth century, were clearly aligned with their class foundations. The Conservatives in the UK represented the landed class and the new industrial leadership. Labor, from its inception, represented the industrial proletariat. Allegiances were clear and uniform. And both parties had a well-defined platform, more or less ideologically consistent with the classes they represented.
In the USA, Democrats were on the Left and represented the interests of the industrial working class. Republicans represented the landed and industrial classes. In Europe, the social democrats represented the Left, and Christian democrats the Right. When the latter were in power, they generally embraced the policies of the social democrats. Social solidarity was maintained.
Until well into the 1970s, the political balance remained relatively secure. But this changed quickly when national economic borders were challenged, working classes were threatened by automation and cheap labor in emerging economies, and capital could be employed abroad more profitably without any “border” restrictions. Overnight, the class basis of Left parties collapsed. The working classes began to shrink, while those who had benefited from social democratic policies and risen into the middle class reoriented their thinking toward conservative parties. 22
Social democrats, including Tony Blair in the UK, Bill Clinton in the USA, Gerhard Schröder in Germany, and Göran Persson in Sweden , with a collapsing class basis, realigned themselves in what they called the Third Way . They embraced neoliberal economics and the free market. The class struggle was over, and they seemed to be saying. Wall Street and the City were no longer enemies. The more wealth accumulated by the filthy rich, the better for everybody else. Just redistribute, give the losers enough to keep them off the streets, and don’t worry about the loss of manufacturing jobs. As Clinton, Blair, and Gordon Brown put it, those weren’t coming back anyway. 23 Not only did the Third Way leaders fail to oppose rentier capitalism, and the moguls of finance especially, they quite literally handed over the reins of power to them. Tony Blair made the Bank of England independent, putting financiers at the helm of economic policy. Bill Clinton abandoned much of the base of the Democrats. He scuttled welfare as it had been known in 1996 with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. This so-called welfare reform was highly punitive toward poor families. It introduced restrictive time limits for entitlement to benefits and extended workfare , forcing people into poverty-wage jobs. For the working class, or what would be left of it, Clinton urged greater flexibility. He cautioned the young to get the education and skills they needed so they could enter the modern workforce.
How Wall Street Crushed Main Street and Corrupted Democracy
But, simultaneously, Clinton advocated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) , costing hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and later he supported China ’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) , forcing millions of American workers to face-off against cheap Chinese labor. And he was not done. He cravenly put Wall Street at the helm of Treasury, moving Robert Rubin directly from the investment bank Goldman Sachs to Secretary of Treasury. Later, Clinton helped remove the firewall between investment banks and commercial banks, by advocating the end of Glass–Steagall, which had acted to prevent those kinds of mergers since the 1930s. When the separation ended, speculative investment banks had direct access to the Treasury window; they had the same government guarantees as commercial banks once they merged.
Many economists credited the end of Glass–Steagall with the financial and mortgage meltdowns of 2007–2008. At the least, the merger allowed excessive leveraging and fueled speculation in unregulated derivatives. Why they were deregulated had nothing to do with the “free market.” While Rubin was unleashing the bankers to make sub-prime loans that produced the inevitable crash, and arguing against regulating derivatives—a major source of profit for Goldman Sachs , his former company—the Deputy Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers , was working hard to maintain unregulated derivative trading, despite their high volatility. In 1998, Summers famously called Brooksley Born, then the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. His message was clear: thirteen bankers were in his office and they were insisting that if she proposed regulating derivatives she would cause the worst financial crisis since WW II. 24
The invasion of Washington by Wall Street, led by Goldman Sachs and its neoliberal, so-called free trade philosophy, continued unabated. Derivatives remained unregulated. Hank Paulson, Goldman Sachs ’ CEO, became the Secretary Treasury in 2006. In 2007, he described the banking system of the USA as “healthy.” It was still “safe” as late as July 2008, according to Paulson. Several months later, he noticed that the economy had signs of sudden mortality. The reason was not so much Wall Street and the banking industry, but government inaction and mistakes. Wall Street was fingered for excessive risk-taking. He did not say that excessive risk-taking was the result of government inaction resulting from the pressure of Wall Street, led by Goldman Sachs .
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs attained a global presence at the highest levels of government. The Governor of the Bank of England , Mark Carney, had been a Goldman Sachs employee. So had William Dudley, chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. So was Jim O’Neill, over in the UK: he was a former chief economist for Goldman Sachs , before being ennobled and becoming a Treasury minister in 2015. O’Neill, with as much clairvoyance as Hank Paulson, predicted—not long before the financial crash of 2008—that many millions more were about to enter the ranks of the globally affluent. Instead, millions lost their jobs and homes and joined the ranks of the unemployed, victims of policies advocated by Goldman Sachs and Wall Street and the City. 25
Goldman Sachs was a major beneficiary, along with other financial houses, when Lloyd’s Bank was re-privatized following the British government’s rescue of the bank. Goldman was a major player in the lucrative area of bank bailouts. It and other financial firms profited from quantitative easing , a government policy that was highly beneficial to banks by giving them limitless liquidity. Unsurprisingly, these policies were largely written by the financial industry, further testimony that government at the highest levels bowed to the needs and whims of Wall Street.
During the 2008 crisis, both Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were granted the right by the government to become bank holding companies, giving them access to government liquidity. Translated, this meant direct access to the Treasury window at banker rates—close to zero interest. It seemed there was no limit to Goldman influence at the highest levels of government and no limits to its corruption. In 2014, Goldman Sachs was involved in a deal that merged two oil companies. Normally, this was not a problem. But in this case Goldman had a financial stake in one of the companies, and a Goldman banker had a personal stake. Despite this obvious conflict of interest, the New York Fed hardly raised an eyebrow, an indication that Goldman had ascended to the top of the power ladder.
What was happening in finance was not the so-called free market. It was rentier capitalism, or getting government out of the way so financiers could make even more money, knowing their bets would be covered by the state. 26 The Third Way was the ultimate capitulation to bankers and financiers. It meant the end of liberal values. It meant also that the Left was competing with the Right by copying its values: free market capitalism, telling workers they were on their own, dismantling the protective state, and the lingering shreds of the social contract.
And just as the Left was moving toward the center, the Right was moving further to the right, the hard right. It was also losing its class basis. Formerly, it could appeal to the successful middle class, enlarged by industrialization. But by the 1970s this class also was shrinking, especially in the US and the UK, to a large extent because of deindustrialization. Not able to look at the diminishing middle to win elections, the Right needed to appeal elsewhere. It looked to the world of finance, the world that possessed the wealth to fund elections—and think tanks. And it looked to the growing minions disaffected by the Left, workers left behind by deindustrialization who saw the export of their jobs, or were replaced by machines, or saw Left parties abandon their unions.
As the Left and its base fragmented, the Right moved quickly to seize the advantage caused by financial crises. In the USA and UK, this could be easily followed. The line was always the same: too much government regulation and not enough free market and/or free trade. 27 The Left and the Right seemed to converge on this point. Unleash the bankers, unleash free traders. The market is rational: government is not. Don’t trust government planners or regulators. Ironically, 2008 was only a slight burp. Neoliberals continued to dominate government. They were still not held accountable. In fact, they largely invaded government. Even President Obama brought Wall Street into his administration: Timothy Geithner at Treasury, Larry Summers at the National Economic Council.
The New Oligarchs and the Dismantling of Democracy
Just to make certain, Conservatives everywhere began to reorganize the electorate and electoral strategies. Majorities would no longer be needed to win elections, not if enough voters lost the right to vote, not if electoral boundaries were redrawn. Once in power after 2010, British Conservatives moved to strengthen their position by redrawing constituency boundaries. They also extended the franchise to expatriates living abroad for fifteen years, an elderly group previously disenfranchised, but sure to be part of the Conservative electoral base once enfranchised. Another measure changed the voter registration system in place since 1918, which had allowed an individual in each household to register all eligible voters in the same household. This change, made just ahead of the 2016 elections, was projected to lead to a drop of almost two million voters, consisting mostly of the young, students, ethnic minorities, and residents of inner cities, all of whom were most likely to vote for left-wing parties. This new calculus became the basis for redistributing seats away from traditionally Labor urban areas with multiple-occupancy and private rental housing toward suburban and rural areas favoring Conservatives. 28
The funding of political parties has also been changed to help Conservatives. The ceiling for donations to political parties has been raised, but Labor’s funding base has been limited. This has been done by giving union members an opt-in choice for political funding that previously was automatic. This is despite the fact that there is no comparable rule for corporate political donations: shareholders do not have to give consent to opt-in. As a result, Labor loses some £1 million annually. 29
But when it comes to raising the ceiling on what can be donated to political parties, the USA has again led the way. Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission famously led to the verdict that corporations are people and are therefore entitled to First Amendment rights, notably the freedom of speech. This decision by the Supreme Court in 2010, effectively eliminated any ceiling on what a corporation could commit to a political campaign, and ushered in the era of unlimited corporate influence, or the New Oligarchy in the USA. Rentier capitalists, worried about the financial meltdown of 2008, and the possibility this would become global and effect their assets, and also beset by the election of Barack Obama , decided they needed to do more than engage in a war of ideas through their think tank mouthpieces.
In January 2009, a group of eighteen billionaires met, led by Charles and David Koch . Many of these rich elite had long promoted an ultra-conservative, free market, deregulation , privatization agenda, through the think tanks they funded. The election of Barack Obama , however, was a dire warning: the new president did not share the ideological paradigm of the billionaires. Not on taxes. Not on free trade. Certainly not on deregulation , or getting the government out of their way and letting the market make so-called corrections. The market was rational, but an Obama-led government was not.
Altogether the eighteen billionaires in attendance, as of 2015, were worth more than $214 billion. In one room only there were more billionaires than there had been altogether in 1982. 30 The Koch brothers alone had an estimated worth of $14 billion each in 2009. Between them, they owned the second largest private company in the USA. Their assets included four-thousand miles of pipelines, oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and coal and chemical companies among other businesses. 31 The Kochs had successfully grown their business, but they had also inherited considerable wealth from their father, Fred, as had a number of the billionaires at their clandestine meeting. In fact, Fred Koch’s wealth was not just considerable, much of it was made through deals with Stalin’s Russia, and later, he helped Hitler and Nazi Germany build oil refineries that would be useful for Hitler’s military machine. 32
The men in the “conference” with the Kochs were not just rich, they were super-rich, and they were not just the top 1%, they were the top 0.01%. A number were in oil, and some were in finance, especially private equity , the buying and selling of companies. Others were in hedge funds. What they all shared in common was the fear of government intrusion into their business affairs. Virtually, all were climate change deniers. The Kochs led the way, opposing government environmental regulations that would hurt their fossil fuel interests. This elite group was also held together by opposition to government regulation and taxation—hedge funds and private equity firms were virtually unregulated, and they wanted to keep them that way. 33
Among the better-known financiers attending the meeting were Steven A. Cohen , Paul Singer , and Stephen Schwarzman. Cohen was under criminal investigation for insider trading, and in other words he had done everything to avoid market rules and competition. Singer was an ideological free market conservative who made his fortune by buying distressed debt in economically failing countries and then taking aggressive action to collect that debt. Despite his free market ideology, he pressed government to squeeze impoverished countries to help him collect the debts he had bought. Schwarzman also stood out for excess. He came under government scrutiny after taking advantage of the carried-interest tax loophole, which allowed him to pay lower capital gains taxes on profits. 34 These men were all stunning examples of rentier capitalism, using the free market as a smoke screen to render their financial affairs invisible, evading taxes by avoiding government scrutiny, screaming free market when they wanted the government to remain out of their way, and seeking to influence government when it came to getting energy and other concessions such as military contracts.
Another billionaire attendee at the Koch seminar was Richard Strong, founder of the mutual fund Strong Capital Management. He was banned from the financial industry for life after an investigation by New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer revealed that he had illegally timed trades to benefit his friends and family. He subsequently paid a fine of $60 million and issued a public apology. 35 Philip Anschutz, founder of Qwest Communications, whose net worth in 2015 was estimated by Forbes to be $11.8 billion, was also at the Koch conference. A Christian who funded movies with biblical themes, he once tried to avoid paying any capital gains taxes by using a transaction known as prepaid variable forward contracts: he promised to give shares to investment firms at a later date in return for cash up front—that would be untaxed since no shares actually were transferred. The transaction didn’t stand up in court (though on a technicality). But the verdict meant that Anschutz was officially a tax cheat. 36
It was this group of elite ultra-rich, led by the Kochs, that was instrumental in dismantling democracy as it had been known and practiced in the USA. The most dramatic victory came with the controversial case known as Citizens United . This was a political action committee, founded in 1988, funded largely by the Kochs. Citizens United was from the first a propaganda machine, arguing that it supported “traditional American values of limited government, freedom of enterprise, strong families, and national sovereignty and security.” 37 But the objective of Citizens United was anything but traditional. For one, Koch funding was largely concealed. For another, “limited government” meant minimizing taxes, while “freedom of enterprise” meant climate change denial, the ideological paradigm of Big Oil.
It took more than two decades, but when the Supreme Court ruled in the case Citizens United v Federal Election Commission that corporations were persons with first amendment rights, it revoked any limits on how much corporations could spend on political campaigns, so long as they did not directly fund candidates. The court’s decision effectively led to Political Action Committees (PACs) that could receive as much money as was offered, so long as the PAC didn’t coordinate its actions with a political campaign. And there was more: the court validated the principle that individuals could also give unlimited funding to a PAC(s).
Once the sluice gates were open, how to employ the support of billionaires became paramount. With Obama controlling Washington, the strategy aimed at congressional elections and the control of state gubernatorial offices and state assemblies. It was in the latter assemblies where the new congressional districts would be redrawn following the 2010 census: control the redistricting, and it would be possible to redraw districts to advantage rural and suburban populations, where Conservative supporters lived, and disadvantage urban areas where poorer and ethnic populations lived, likely voters for Democrats. To implement the Redistricting Majority Project, several Koch-supported operatives took over the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), which previously functioned as a catchall bank account for corporations that wanted to influence state laws. All that was needed now, with all limits on funding removed, was to raise the money. By the end of 2010, huge donations were being raised. Tobacco companies Altria and Reynolds gave millions. Walmart contributed millions more, so did the pharmaceutical industry and rich private donors who had attended the Koch conference in 2009. By the end of the year, the RSLC had raised $30 million to fund state elections for governor and state assemblies, while the Democrats had raised only $10 million. 38
The ploy worked. Consider the following illustration from Wisconsin polling results in 2012. Election data from five of Wisconsin’s eight US House districts, seventeen of thirty-three state Senate districts, and fifty-six of ninety-nine state Assembly districts voted Republican for president—although Mitt Romney lost the state as a whole by nearly 7 points. 39 During the midterm elections in 2014, the Kochs spent more than $300 million in support of right-wing candidates. They had great success: nine out of ten of the candidates they helped fund were elected. 40 By the end of 2016, Republicans controlled thirty-two state legislatures to the Democrats twelve; thirty-four states had Republican governors while only fifteen governors were Democrats.
With Obama’s second term coming to an end, the Koch-led juggernaut had a chance to take over Washington as well. For the 2016 election, the political war chest accumulated by the Kochs and their narrow circle of billionaire friends reached an unprecedented $889 million, completely dwarfing the scale of money that in the days of Watergate was considered deeply corrupt. The Kochs actually committed more spending to 2016 races than either the Democrats or the Republicans were able to raise. 41 But they had a deep aversion to Donald Trump , so they concentrated on state and congressional campaigns, helping to preserve right-wing congressional Republican seats in key states such as Wisconsin and Texas.
One of the principal claims for electoral democracy is “no taxation without representation.” With the Kochs and select conservative billionaires leading the way, that foundation of democracy has been replaced by representation without taxation. It isn’t just that billionaires can establish PACs to buy politicians with invisible money. In the USA, it is also about establishing charitable foundations, now numbering more than 100,000, that reroute untaxed money into political campaigns with little if any scrutiny. 42 This has allowed billionaires like the Kochs to claim charitable contributions that reduce their tax bill, while still using their untaxed monies for political purposes by simply rerouting money into so-called charitable foundations.
The USA may lead the way when it comes to corrupting the democratic processes, but Britain, as we know, is not far behind. There as in the USA, the super-rich oligarchs who own the means of communication can employ the full power of modern communication technology to sway public opinion and dictate public perception about what is and what is not “reality.” Truth becomes a function of power, power itself becomes truth, and the public interest vanishes into the dim horizon.
As in the USA, the British oligarchy is dominated by rentier capitalists, who support candidates receptive to their deregulating, privatizing, and free trade paradigm. Leading the way in Britain is Rupert Murdoch , the same media mogul who owns Fox News in the USA. Murdoch controls an extensive media empire in Britain that includes Sky television, The Sun, the largest tabloid in Britain, and The Times, the establishment newspaper. Despite Murdoch’s considerable political leverage through the media he controls, he is not British, he was not born in Britain, and he doesn’t live in Britain. Moreover, Murdoch’s media empire holding company, News Corps, was found, when Tony Blair was Prime Minister, to have paid almost nothing in taxes dating back to the late 1980s. The tax sums that were paid were so meager that a task force consisting of representatives from Australia, Canada, the UK, and the USA was formed to investigate why. When fear of a backlash from Murdoch and his media stalwarts emerged, the investigation was dropped, despite the fact that a study of 101 subsidiaries of News Corps over a period of eleven years concluded that profits of $1.4 billion had hardly been taxed at all. 43
Had Britain been a democracy in a meaningful sense, Murdoch would not have been protected by any political party, let alone New Labor. But he was hardly the only billionaire who had managed to ingratiate himself with Third Way New Labor. Despite the assurances of Chancellor Gordon Brown that he would not grant tax relief to millionaires (and billionaires) who shifted income and profits to offshore tax havens , he was not interested in holding the super-rich accountable. The UK’s fifty-four billionaires in the year 2006 had an estimated income of £126 billion. Income tax liabilities should have been about £50 billion: in fact they were estimated to be £14.7, about 0.14% of what they should have been. 44
Even under New Labor, the British oligarchy was thriving. The power of money and media combined was simply irresistible and corrupting. As Guy Standing has reminded us, no political party in Britain has won a general election since 1974 without the support of Rupert Murdoch and his media empire. Even after several of Murdoch’s employees and associates were convicted of illegally hacking mobile phones and bribing police officers, Murdoch was still treated as a quasi-royal by Britain’s leading politicians. Andy Coulson, erstwhile editor of the (now defunct) Murdoch-owned tabloid, News of the World, was hired by David Cameron as press secretary when Cameron was still in the opposition. Later, Cameron brought Coulson to Downing Street, before the former was forced to resign when he was charged, and later convicted, of phone hacking. And when Tony Blair became the leader of Labor in 1994, he traveled to Australia to reassure Murdoch that Labor would not be a threat to the interests of Murdoch. 45
In the UK, Conservative Party campaigns are routinely funded by billionaire oligarchs and by multinational financial corporations, most of which pay little if any taxes in Britain. Prior to the 2015 general election, the hedge fund, Caxton Associates played a key role bankrolling the Conservatives campaign: Caxton Associates is registered in the US tax haven of Delaware. 46
In 2016, the annual Black and White Ball that is used by Conservatives to raise funds was sponsored by Shore Capital, an investment bank registered in Guernsey, another tax haven. The wife of the chairman, who donated £500,000 to the Tories , had helped to organize earlier balls as well. In fact, the Black and White Ball was a veritable gold mine for Conservatives, a happy hunting ground for the super-rich. In 2014, the ball was attended by guests whose estimated wealth was more than £22 billion. A year later, some twenty-seven of the fifty-nine wealthiest hedge fund managers listed on the Sunday Times Rich List had donated more than £19 million to the campaign chest of the Conservatives. The world of finance and the Conservative Party were so tight that Michael Farmer, a hedge fund manager who had contributed more than £6.5 million to the Tories , was made co-treasurer of the party and given a peerage. 47
The sums given by hedge funds were large enough to be corrupting, and they showed how much influence money could buy. The investment turned out to be a golden egg. In 2013, after the Conservatives had already reaped millions in donations from hedge fund managers, Chancellor George Osborne abolished a stamp duty reserve tax on investment funds, returning the favor of the hedge funds that had supported the Tories . The tax savings paid by hedge funds was an estimated £147 million, a figure that swamped the sums acknowledged above. Had donations of the Conservatives been considered an investment, then the return was impressive. 48 From the point of view of the public and the public good, the whole affair was simply a swindle, evidence of a new oligarchy, and a republic of the super-rich.
New Monopoly Rent Seekers
When George W. Bush entered the White House as president, he inherited a budget surplus of 2.4% of gross domestic product (GDP). Within 4 years, he turned that into a deficit of 3.6%, an almost unprecedented turnaround in such a short space of time. How was he able to squander so much public treasure in such a brief period? Between 2002 and 2005, agricultural subsidies doubled. Tax expenditures, mostly a system of subsidies and preferences embedded in the tax code, increased by more than 25%. And tax breaks for the president’s friends in the oil and gas industry increased by billions more dollars. 49
Since 2008, as President Bush was exiting office, more and more sectors of the economy have been dominated by giants: Goldman Sachs , Citibank, JPMorgan-Chase, Google , Amazon , Facebook, Microsoft , and Apple are household names. These companies have taken disproportionate percentages of market share, buying out potential rivals, or squeezing them out, creating near monopolies in the process. And as the economic power of the few has been established, so has the free market been corrupted: monopoly or duopoly or oligopoly is bound to produce less competition and be less entrepreneurial. Robert Reich has provided the evidence. As the giants have solidified their economic power, the number of new firms entering the market in the USA has declined from well over 14% in 1978 to just over 8% in 2011. Meanwhile, the number of firms exiting has remained relatively stable, from just above 10% in 1978 to just under 10% in 2011. 50 Much of what has happened in the USA and the UK, as well, is because of the failure to enforce anti-trust laws sufficiently, or the unwillingness to pass new laws regulating industry: in a word, the capturing of political parties by rent-seeking corporate super-rich, leading to the withering of democracy.
The telecommunications industry, with just a few leaders like Comcast, is no exception. The USA has some of the highest broadband prices among developed countries, but it is the leader in some of the slowest speeds, features that seemed to become permanent by 2016. As Robert Reich has pointed out, the average peak Internet connection speed in America is 40% slower than in Hong Kong or South Korea. The reason the costs are so high and the service so poor is that most Americans have to rely on local cable monopolies if they want to connect to Internet. The USA lags behind Sweden , Estonia, Hong Kong, Japan, and almost all developed countries in fiber connections, placing it twenty-eighth worldwide in speed of Internet access and twenty-third in terms of cost. 51 Even Russia, despite its lagging technology, has faster Internet speeds at a cost of about $10 per month. 52
The slow speeds and high costs of cable service in the USA are because of monopoly or near monopoly conditions. In other words, limited or no competition; anything but a competitive market. Once again, it does not have to be this way. All the inhabitants of Stockholm have high-speed service for $28 per month. This happened only because Stockholm built fiber lines and then leased them out to private operators. The result was intense competition, low prices, and universal coverage. The city quickly recovered its costs and has been bringing in millions of dollars in revenue for itself. 53 All this happened because Stockholm blocked monopoly, but still allowed a free market: in fact, it established a free market.
[Cable companies] have successfully pushed twenty states to enact laws prohibiting cities from laying fiber cables. In 2011, John Malone, chairman of Liberty Global, the largest cable company in the world, admitted that when it comes to high-capacity data connections in the United States, ‘Cable’s pretty much a monopoly now’. Indeed, by 2014 more than 80 percent of Americans had no choice but to rely on one single cable company for high-capacity wired data connections to the Internet. Since none of the cable companies face real competition, they have no incentive to invest in fiber networks or even to pass along to consumers the lower prices their large scale makes possible. 54
Chattanooga has avoided the monopolistic practices of industry by building its own high-speed, efficient, fiber-optic network. But Comcast, which enjoys a virtual monopoly in some markets, sued Chattanooga’s utility company twice by 2014 and was promoting a well-oiled PR campaign to discredit the city-owned and managed service. 55 Meanwhile, nineteen states have imposed significant obstacles to communities that might want to follow the Chattanooga example, while several states, Missouri, Nevada, and Texas, have enacted outright bans on community owned and operated cable and high-speed fiber-optic networks. 56
Telecommunication companies are intent mostly on eliminating competition. The best way to do that is to buy influence, which means once again the diminishing of democracy. To assure this, they have utilized an army of lobbyists, who mostly lobby the Federal Communication Commission (FCC ), which oversees the telecommunication industry, or they target members of Congress who sit on relevant committees, including the Senate Subcommittee on Communication, Technology, and the Internet, and the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. As noted by the Center for Responsive Politics in 2014, eighteen people had both lobbied for Comcast and spent time in the public sector. Of those, twelve were registered lobbyists for Comcast, with five of them having spent time at the FCC . It was a case once again of the revolving door syndrome. The most flagrant illustration of this was Meredith Baker. She was an advocate of the industry before she was appointed to the FCC in 2009. She remained a member of the FCC for almost two years, but then cut her four-year term short to become Comcast’s senior vice president of government affairs. 57
Baker, who said she saw no conflict of interest, made a transition from FCC leadership to industry that was hardly unprecedented. Michael Powell, chairman of the FCC between 1997 and 2005, became the CEO of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA), an industry group, in 2011. And Jonathan Adelson, an FCC commissioner between 2002 and 2009, became the CEO of PCIA, the Wireless Infrastructure Association, in 2012. 58
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, two years after Michael Powell became CEO at NCTA, the NCTA spent $19.6 million lobbying in Washington. Between the years 2006 and 2016, it spent at least $12 million annually just lobbying Congress. 59 In the 2014 election cycle, Democrats and Republicans each received more than $8 million in campaign contributions from the NCTA. 60
One of the principal objectives of cable companies like Comcast, aside from maintaining monopolies, has been a long-term objective to soften or eliminate net neutrality, which, currently, lawfully enforces a free and open network. Cable companies want to eliminate net neutrality because they could then dictate access and price. Should net neutrality be abolished—and Donald Trump and his administration support its abolition—then Internet as known today will disappear, replaced by unprecedented rent-seeking opportunities in which various companies will have to pay to play. 61
The fossil fuel energy sector provides another illustration of welfare for the rich, though leaders of this industry praise themselves for providing the world’s energy needs. Unfortunately, the gains of this industry, which siphons off billions in taxpayer-funded subsidies around the world, mostly because it is granted monopolistic rights to extract energy from the ground, establish not only monopoly privileges, but also its unseemly share of government largesse means much less for energy renewables. The cost of subsidizing fossil fuel companies everywhere is not only dangerous to our health, it is robbing people around the globe of their treasure. Globally, in 2013, according to the International Energy Agency, fossil fuel companies reaped $550 billion in subsidies. In its annual World Energy Outlook, the agency reported that oil, gas, and coal received four times more subsidies than renewable energy sources solar, wind, and biofuels, which globally were given subsidies of $120 billion. 62 Of the $550 billion worldwide subsidies for fossil fuels, US taxpayers underwrote $21 billion. 63
The UK has done even worse. It is alone among G7 nations in increasing fossil fuel subsidies, although the Coalition government had pledged to phase them out. Back in 2015 in the UK, production subsidies of about $9 billion helped underwrite fossil fuel companies—mostly foreign owned, while an additional $5.6 billion subsidized fossil fuel production abroad, including in Russia, Saudi Arabia, and China . Additionally, Chancellor George Osborne announced early in 2015 that taxpayers would underwrite new tax breaks for North Sea oil and gas production that would cost about $2.5 billion by 2020. 64
Damning as these figures are, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) says that global subsidies are much higher if you factor in the cost of environmental damage: about $4.9 trillion (6.5% of global GDP) in 2013 and about $5.3 trillion (6.5% of global GDP) in 2015. That meant significant rises in global pollution caused by fossil fuel use and damage from that use. These much higher figures are more realistic because they factor in fiscal, environmental, and human welfare impacts—for example, health costs, damage to water systems, toxicity caused by extraction, and rising ocean acidity—the carbon imprint globally. 65
In 2011, Graeme Maxton weighed in on the energy controversy. He noted that annually the world economy was growing by $1.5 trillion, but every year the carbon imprint, global damage to the environment, was rising by $4.5 trillion. How did he explain this? The damage caused by fossil fuel use was three times greater than the wealth that was added if the damage was priced into the cost of consuming dirty energy. 66
The figures of Graeme Maxton and the IMF suggest a much higher cost to the world economy, to human health, and to the environment, because of enduring reliance on non-renewable energy. They also suggest that the cost of maintaining the energy super-rich is not only expensive, it is dangerous. But here again the ultra-wealthy have used leverage and money to acquire power: Rex Tillerson , CEO of Exxon, has become Secretary of State in the USA, despite no experience in diplomacy, and despite Exxon contracts with Russia and President Putin, even while there remains suspicion that Russia tampered with the US election process. While the vast majority of scientists are admonishing us to reduce carbon pollution, both the USA and the UK are blithely racing in the other direction. Not only has the USA elected a global warming denier as president, Donald Trump has put Scott Pruitt in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency, an agency he has sought to abolish! The British do have a carbon tax, but they have largely failed to provide incentives for innovation in non-renewable energy.
Welfare for the energy rich has been a continuing fixture in American politics and is part of the revolving door syndrome that has come to characterize crony (rentier ) capitalism in the USA. There are no shortages of illustrations. A Shell petrochemical refinery in Pennsylvania was offered a state subsidy of $1.6 billion in 2012, the same year the company made a profit of $26.8 billion. The lucrative deal was helped along by the then Republican governor, Tom Corbett, who received more than $1 million in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry. ExxonMobil’s upgrades at its Baton Rouge, Louisiana refinery—the second largest in the USA—benefited from $119 million in state subsidies starting in 2011, a year that the company made a $41 billion in profit. Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana, expressed pride that he had attracted so much new investment to Louisiana, but more than $1 million between 2003 and 2013 went directly to the governor to help him run his political campaigns. And in Ohio, a jobs subsidy plan worth $78 million was granted to Marathon Petroleum beginning in 2011, a year in which the company made $2.4 billion profit. 67
The US oil and gas industry has spent millions on lobbying to maintain concessions, subsidies, and tax deferments. In 2016, the industry spent more than $119 million just lobbying Congress. Between 2008 and 2015, it spent more than $143 million annually just in lobbying. In 2009, it spent almost $180 million. 68 In 2016, the super-rich in the oil and gas sector pumped $107 million into Republican presidential super PACs, more than half of that money going to Senator Ted Cruz, best known for his denial of climate change . 69 Not only did the industry rack up undeserved rents and corrupt democracy, it cast as much suspicion as possible on climate change and the scientists who observed and reported it.
Our price system is flawed, because it doesn’t reflect accurately the scarcity of many of these environmental resources…. When the oil industry pushes for more offshore drilling and simultaneously pushes for laws that free companies from the full consequences of an oil spill, it is, in effect, asking for a public subsidy…. Because the oil and coal companies use their money to influence environmental regulation, we live in a world with more air and water pollution… the costs show up as lower standards of living for ordinary Americans, the benefits as higher profits for the oil and coal companies. 70
What Stiglitz does not quite say is that the fossil fuel industry is granted a monopoly when it is allowed to extract wealth not only from the ground, but from the public commons, and then to get subsidies while doing it. The result is a massive transfer of wealth from the 99% to the upper echelons of the 1%, which increases its treasure by not being accountable for the carbon imprint it puts into the environment. The relative absence of competition allows the heavily subsidized oil and gas industry to make handsome profits, even if they have declined in a sluggish market. In the year 2013, the top five oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell—earned $93 billion in profits. 71 A year later, with oil prices sliding, the big five hardly noticed: their profits for 2014 reached $90 billion. 72 For the same year, all public companies involved in extracting, transporting, refining, distributing, and trading in fossil fuels, in the USA and Canada, netted $257 billion. 73 Yet the top twenty fossil fuel energy companies paid an effective tax rate of a little over 11%, though they claimed a much higher rate. What was the difference? Almost 90% of owed federal taxes were deferred, which meant that virtually all resources extracted outside the USA went untaxed: proving once again that the energy super-rich are expensive. 74 And they don’t need to be competitive, not when they have the kind of political clout we have already observed.
Some countries don’t think the 99% have a moral obligation to support the super-rich. They think that what is in the ground should belong to the commons, to all citizens of a country, and not just a wealthy elite. Norway is one of the countries where oil has mostly remained publicly owned. Since the first discoveries of oil in 1969 in the North Sea Basin, Norway has produced about forty billion barrels of oil equivalence. Britain, which shares the North Sea Basin hydrocarbons roughly equally, has produced about 42.8 billion barrels of oil equivalence, a number that is close to Norwegian production. This means that Norway has been as productive as Britain, producing hydrocarbons at a rate comparable to British production. But the comparison ends there. The difference is that oil in the UK is privately owned and exploited, meaning that profits are held privately. Since 1986, when the British controlled part of the North Sea Basin was privatized, the UK government has received a revenue stream only through taxation. 75
Norway has taken a fundamentally different approach. More than 50% of its hydrocarbon production in the North Sea comes through Statoil—in which the state has a majority stake—while remaining hydrocarbon assets are owned completely by Norway through the State Direct Financial Interest. Although Norway has direct ownership of most of the oil industry, and imposes a heavy tax on the private sector of the industry, it is just as productive as Britain, which has wholly privatized North Sea oil, and yet Norway delivers more revenues (by far) to its citizens while still attracting investment.
The results show just how much rent is collected—or wealth is extracted—by the British oil elite. Between 1971 and 2015, the UK government generated $470 billion in revenues from its North Sea Basin, while the Norwegian government generated $1197 billion from its own North Sea petroleum reserves. The discrepancy in Norway ’s favor is enormous: these figures suggest that privatizing British oil in the 1980s—which only brought a sum of about $1.6 billion dollars to Treasury then—costs the British taxpayer about $730 billion over a period of around 44 years: an enormous subsidy for the rich who cashed in on what had been the commons. 76
Unlike the British experience, Norway has used its oil revenues to establish the Oil Fund, the largest sovereign fund in the world, which in May 2016 stood at $819 billion. Had Norway followed the example of the UK, there would be no publicly owned sovereign fund, but a transfer of Norwegian oil wealth into a newly minted Norwegian energy elite.
Add up the enormous sums transferred to private oil-production companies in Britain, the loss of tax revenues in the USA because oil companies defer taxation indefinitely—or forever, add tax incentives for exploration, subsidies given by the USA and UK governments to oil and gas companies by not pricing in environmental damage, and the incalculable cost of the damage to Earth and health, and what emerges is a different calculus than the one submitted by the energy industry. Compound that by the vastly unequal investment in fossil fuels at the expense of renewable energy sources, something like 400% greater, and you begin to get a sense of how costly it is to maintain the super-rich who run the energy sector.
The question that goes begging is: Why don’t the British do as the Norwegians do? The answer is even proclaimed in the Conservative Party’s manifesto, which outlines a plan to “lead international action against climate change ” but immediately pledges to ensure oil and gas plays a “critical role” in UK energy provision. 77
Critical role, indeed, helped along by generous donations to political parties from the oil and gas industry. Since Theresa May became Prime Minister, top oil executives have donated more than £390,000 to the Conservative Party . Among the highest donors is Ayman Asfari, CEO of Petrofac, a Jersey-registered oil and gas firm: he has contributed £90,000. Mr. Asfari is a Syrian-born businessman who has been questioned about bribery, corruption, and money laundering at his company. 78
Ian Taylor, CEO at the world’s largest oil trader, Vitol, has personally contributed £47,000 to the Conservatives since Theresa May became the head of the Conservatives, adding to the hundreds of thousands he had previously donated. A former Vitol partner, Matthew Ferry donated £124,000 to the Tories just between 2016 and 2017. After he left Vitol, he established his own investment company, which invests in the oil and gas sector. Another pay-to-play figure is Russian-born Alexander Temerko, formerly deputy-chairman of the Yukos Oil Company in Russia, who became a British citizen in 2011. He has donated another £63,800 to the Conservative Party. 79 The British may be behind their American counterparts for excess and for the sums they contribute, but the results are much the same: a captive political party dependent on donations from the super-rich, and not responsive to the electorate. Another episode in the corruption of democracy, another example of pay-to-play politics, and yet another illustration of sometimes foreign-born executives with murky pasts leveraging large sums of money with invisible origins to capture rents through political influence.
Conclusion
With political parties under the influence of the new oligarchs and obedient to the interests of global corporations, with the deliberate promotion of doubt and the proliferation of fake news, with the increasing inequality between Wall Street and Main Street, and with much of the media controlled by the super-rich, disillusionment with conventional politics and parties was inevitable. Donald Trump may be totally unfit to be president, yet he intuitively noticed what Hillary Clinton and the Democrats never acknowledged: the pain of Main Street, and the unfair accumulation of riches and influence of Wall Street. Offering simplistic cures, and mixing utter falsehoods (Muslims and immigrants are the main problem, and tax breaks for the rich will help everybody) with grains of truth (most people have not experienced recovery from the Great Recession , and the elites are the problem—excluding Trump), making it unclear where truth ends and falsehood begins, Trump was able to capitalize on the deep despair of many if not most Americans.
Corruption of politics and parties has become almost universal. Governments cannot be democratic when political parties are funded by billionaires who benefit from tax havens and deferments, and who lobby incessantly for deregulation of the industries they control. As the Panama Papers noted, at least seventy-two former or current heads of state or government have benefited from tax havens . 80 If reform is to come, despite the occasional maverick politician like Bernie Sanders or perhaps Jeremy Corbyn , it seems unlikely it will come from traditional political parties, certainly not in the USA or Britain.
Notes
- 1.
Facundo Alvaredo, Thomas B. Atkinson, Thomas Piketty , and Emmanuel Saez , “The Top 1 Percent in International and Historical Perspective,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 4–6. http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.27.3.3.
- 2.
Guy Standing , The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay (London: Biteback Publishing, 2016), 2–4. See also Rana Foroohar, Makers and Takers: How Wall Street Destroyed Main Street (New York: Crown Business, 2017), for an incisive analysis of rentier capitalism, blaming its beneficiaries’ predation for social and economic inequality and retarded economic growth.
- 3.
Dorothy Power, Gerald Epstein, and Matthew Abrena, “Trends in the Rentier Income Share in OECD Countries, 1960–2000” (Political Economy Research Institute Working Paper 58A, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2003), online at http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1045&context=peri_workingpapers. See also Arjun Jayadev and Gerald Epstein, “The Correlates of Rentier Returns in OECD Countries” (Working Paper Series No. 123, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2007), 4–9, at https://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_papers_101-150/WP123.pdf.
- 4.
Standing, Corruption of Capitalism, 23–24.
- 5.
Power, Trends in Rentier Income, 49, Figure IV.1.1; Standing, Corruption of Capitalism, 24.
- 6.
Ibid. Also, Power, Trends in Rentier Income, 49, Figure IV.1.1. See especially E. Goldberg, E. Wibbels, and E. Mvukiyehe, “Lessons from Strange Cases: Democracy, Development, and the Resource Curse in the US States,” Comparative Political Studies 41 (2008): 477–514.
- 7.
Standing, Corruption of Capitalism, 243.
- 8.
Ibid., 244.
- 9.
Ibid., and Jack Lawrence Luzkow, The Great Forgetting: The Past, Present and Future of Social Democracy and the Welfare State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 53–54.
- 10.
Marion Fourcade, “The Construction of a Global Profession: The Transnationalization of Economics,” American Journal of Sociology 112, no. 1 (2006): 181; Standing, Corruption of Capitalism, 245–46.
- 11.
Milton and Rose D. Friedman, Two Lucky People: Memoirs (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 594; Luzkow, The Great Forgetting, 85. For the Free Trade Paradigm, John Weeks, Economics of the 1%: How Mainstream Economics Serves the Rich, Obscures Reality and Distorts Policy (London: Anthem Press, 2014). See also Foroohar, Makers and Takers, 90–111.
- 12.
Standing, Corruption of Capitalism, 7.
- 13.
Ibid., 9.
- 14.
Graham Readfearn, “Research Reveals Almost All Climate Science Denial Books Linked to Conservative Think Tanks,” Desmogblog, March 20, 2013.
- 15.
Brad Johnson, “CATO’s Pat Michael’s Admits That 40 Percent of Funding Comes From Big Oil,” Think Progress, https://thinkprogress.org/catos-pat-michaels-admits-40-percent-of-funding-comes-from-big-oil-9db8d728a494/.
- 16.
Ian Sample, “Scientists Offered Cash to Dispute Climate Study,” Guardian, February 2, 2007; see the United Nations, “Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report” (New York: United Nations Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change, 2007), https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr.pdf.
- 17.
Michael R. Strain, “Seattle Do-Gooders Just Shot Themselves in the Foot,” American Enterprise Institute , June 7, 2014, at http://www.aei.org/publication/seattle-do-gooders-just-shot-themselves-in-the-foot/; Peter J. Wallison, “The Case for Repealing Dodd-Frank ,” American Enterprise Institute , November 26, 2013, http://www.aei.org/publication/the-case-for-repealing-dodd-frank/.
- 18.
Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016), 4, 65–66.
- 19.
See the list of members for the annual meeting in 2015, http://www.businessinsider.com/list-of-ceos-and-politicians-invited-to-2015-bilderberg-conference-in-austria-2015-6.
- 20.
Standing, Corruption of Capitalism, 248–49.
- 21.
Ibid., 249; see also “Meet the Carlyle Group ,” at http://www.hereinreality.com/carlyle.html#.WZijmTOZMcg.
- 22.
Luzkow, The Great Forgetting, 86–94.
- 23.
Ibid., 84; see especially Jeff Faux, The Global Class War: How America’s Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future—And What It Will Take to Win It Back (New York: Wiley, 2006), 47.
- 24.
Simon Johnson and James Kwak, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (New York: Vintage, 2011).
- 25.
Standing, Corruption of Capitalism, 262.
- 26.
Luzkow, Great Forgetting.
- 27.
Standing, Corruption of Democracy, 255, see Footnote 13 for Chapter 7.
- 28.
Ibid., 254–55.
- 29.
Ibid., 255–56.
- 30.
Mayer, Dark Money, 9–10.
- 31.
Ibid., 2.
- 32.
Ibid., 27–29.
- 33.
Ibid., 12–13.
- 34.
Ibid. See also Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everybody Else (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), 3.
- 35.
Mayer, Dark Money, 14.
- 36.
Ibid., 14–15.
- 37.
See the statement of purpose at citizensunited.org.
- 38.
Mayer, Dark Money, 243.
- 39.
Craig Gilbert, “GOP Redistricting Leaves Its Mark on 2012 Election,” Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, December 10, 2012, at http://archive.jsonline.com/blogs/news/182754381.html.
- 40.
Andy Kroll, “2014: The Year of Koch,” Mother Jones, November 6, 2014, at http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014???/11/koch-steyer-senate-elections-rove-big-money/.
- 41.
Nicholas Confessore, “Koch Brothers’ Budget of $889 Million for 2016 is On Par With Both Parties’ Spending,” New York Times, January 26, 2015; Isaac Chotiner, “Are the Kochs Really Sitting This One Out?,” Slate, May 31, 2016, an interview with Jane Mayer, at http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2016/05/how_charles_and_david_koch_will_wield_their_power_in_the_2016_race.html; see also Mayer, Dark Money, 8, and 143–44, for earlier campaign finance abuses.
- 42.
Standing, The Corruption of Capitalism, 258.
- 43.
Stewart Lansley, Rich Britain: The Rise and Rise of the New Super-Wealthy (London: Politico’s, 2006), 187.
- 44.
Eric Shaw, Losing Labour’s Soul: New Labour and the Blair Government, 1997–2007 (London: Routledge, 2007), 56.
- 45.
Standing, Corruption of Capitalism, 257–58.
- 46.
Daniel Boffey, “The Super-Rich Helping to Plan a Glamorous Tory Fundraiser,” Guardian, February 7, 2015.
- 47.
Standing, Corruption of Capitalism, 259.
- 48.
Ibid., 260.
- 49.
Joseph Stiglitz , The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2015), especially “The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush,” 30–31.
- 50.
Robert B. Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 30–31, especially figure 1: The U.S. Economy Has Become Less Entrepreneurial Over Time.
- 51.
Ibid., 31–32
- 52.
This is based on personal experience. The cost for efficient and reliable Wi-Fi Internet is about $10 per month in Moscow.
- 53.
Reich, Saving Capitalism, 32.
- 54.
Ibid.
- 55.
Ibid.
- 56.
David Morris, “To Save the Internet We Need to Own the Means of Distribution,” The Huffington Post, June 28, 2014, online at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-morris/internet-net-neutrality_b_5226232.html.
- 57.
Robbie Feinberg, The Comcast-FCC Revolving Door, Open Secrets Blog (Washington, DC: The Center for Responsive Politics, 2014), at https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2014???/04/the-comcast-fcc-revolving-door/.
- 58.
Ibid.
- 59.
Center for Responsive Politics, Database, https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000022131&year=2012.
- 60.
Sarah Zhang, “How Much Money Big Cable Gave the Politicians Who Oversee the Internet,” https://gizmodo.com/how-much-money-big-cable-gave-the-politicians-who-overs-1657002442. All figures based on Center for Responsive Politics, opensecrets.org.
- 61.
Nikhil Reddy, “Net Neutrality in 2017,” Huffington Post, August 23, 2017, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/net-neutrality-in-2017-what-you-should-know_us_599debf0e4b06d67e334fa94.
- 62.
Damian Carrington and Harry Davies, “US Taxpayers Subsidizing the World’s Biggest Fossil Fuel Companies,” Guardian, May 12, 2015; see also Alex Morales, “Fossil Fuels with $550 billion Subsidies Hurt Renewables,” Bloomberg, November 12, 2014, online at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-12/fossil-fuels-with-550-billion-in-subsidy-hurt-renewables; International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2014 (Paris: International Energy Agency, 2014), online at http://www.iea.org/bookshop/477-World_Energy_Outlook_2014.
- 63.
Oil Change International, “Fossil Fuel Subsidies Overview,” at http://priceofoil.org/fossil-fuel-subsidies/.
- 64.
Damian Carrington, “UK Becomes Only G7 Country to Increase Fossil Fuel Subsidies,” Guardian, November 12, 2015.
- 65.
David Coady, Ian Parry, Louis Sears, and Baoping Shang, “How Large are Global Energy Subsidies” (IMF Working Paper, IMF, Washington, DC, 2015), at https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2015/wp15105.pdf.
- 66.
Graeme Maxton, The End of Progress: How Modern Economics Has Failed Us (Singapore: Wiley, 2011), 1.
- 67.
Carrington, “UK Fossil Fuel Subsidies,” Guardian, November 12, 2015.
- 68.
Center for Responsive Politics, “Oil and Gas Industry Profile: Summary 2017” (Washington, DC: Center for Responsive Politics, 2017), at https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=E01.
- 69.
Suzanne Goldenberg and Helena Bengtsson, “Oil and Gas Industry Has Pumped Millions into Republican Campaigns,” Guardian, March 3, 2016.
- 70.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), 123–24.
- 71.
Daniel J. Weiss and Miranda Peterson, “With Only $93 Billion in Profits, the Big Five Oil Companies Demand to Keep Tax Breaks” (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, February, 2014), at https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2014/02/10/83879/with-only-93-billion-in-profits-the-big-five-oil-companies-demand-to-keep-tax-breaks/.
- 72.
Danielle Baussan and Miranda Peterson, “Sliding Oil Prices Still Yield a $90 Billion for Big Oil” (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, February, 2015), at https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2015/02/03/105935/sliding-oil-prices-still-yield-90-billion-2014-for-big-oil/.
- 73.
Oil Change International, “Profits for Oil, Gas and Coal Companies Operating in the US and Canada” (Washington, DC: Oil Change International, May 2015), online at http://priceofoil.org/profits-oil-gas-coal-companies-operating-u-s-canada/.
- 74.
Taxpayers for Common Sense, Effective Tax Rates for Oil and Gas Companies: Cashing in on Special Treatment (Washington, DC: Taxpayers for Common Sense, July, 2014), 3–5, at http://www.taxpayer.net/images/uploads/downloads/TCS_ETR_Report.pdf.
- 75.
David Manley and Keith Myers, “Did the UK Miss Out on 400 Billion Worth of Oil Revenue” (London: National Resource Governance Institute, 5 October 2015), online at http://www.resourcegovernance.org/blog/did-uk-miss-out-£400-billion-worth-oil-revenue.
- 76.
Ibid.
- 77.
Ben Chapman, “Conservatives Pledge ‘Unprecedented’ Support for Fossil Fuels After Receiving Almost £400,000 from Oil Bosses,” Independent, May 23, 2017.
- 78.
Ibid.
- 79.
Ibid.
- 80.
Standing, Corruption of Capitalism, 278.