Paradise Papers: Secrets of the Global Elite

Link to a report by The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists:

“Paradise Papers: Secrets of the Global Elite”

 

Bonus links: “Joe Ricketts Is a Walking Case for a $1 Million Maximum Income” (“A maximum income—and progressive taxation more generally—is less about redistributing income than about redistributing power, though the two aims go hand-in-hand.”; this article does make numerous contradictory statements, though, first stating by way of a quote the principles of Modern Monetary Theory, then immediately contradicting them with reference to “starving public coffers of funds”; an important distinction here is between state and local jurisdictions that cannot issue currency, and a sovereign federal government that can) and “How the Rich Stay Rich” (this interview makes a misleading reference to a book that actually also admits that revolutions can cause equalization of wealth, but the interviewee seems to follow a similar defeatist line of thinking rebutted in War and Revolution: Rethinking the 20th Century, for example)

Alex Vitale – Police and the Liberal Fantasy

Link to an article excerpted from the book The End of Policing by Alex Vitale:

“Police and the Liberal Fantasy”

 

Bonus links: Review and “The Left Hand and the Right Hand of the State” and “Stop Kidding Yourself: The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People” and “Policing Class” and Punishing the Poor and The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power and The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison and “Locking Up the Lower Class” and “Police Make More Than 10 Million Arrests a Year, but That Doesn’t Mean They’re Solving Crimes” and “An Empire of Patrolmen”

Michael Hudson – Socialism, Land and Banking: 2017 Compared to 1917

Link to an article by Michael Hudson:

“Socialism, Land and Banking: 2017 Compared to 1917”

 

For a more nuanced and detailed account of Soviet bureaucracy, and the construction and dismantling of Stalinism, see The Soviet Century.  Combined with The Half Has Never Been Told, it is worth wondering whether industrialization is possible without slavery.  Also, it is worth questioning Hudson’s characterization of China as pursuing “socialist” policy, rather than being state capitalist — he basically just assumes such points.  Though this was intended as a speech to be delivered in China, so maybe he felt the need to pander on that point a bit.

Richard Wolff – The Political Economy of Obama/Trump

Link to an article by Richard Wolff:

“The Political Economy of Obama/Trump”

 

(One small caveat about this article.  This statement is misleading: “Strictly trickle-down economics was how his administration ‘handled’ the 2008-09 crisis. Nothing remotely like the New Deal’s taxing the rich to fund programs for the poor and middle was proposed or debated, let alone adopted as policy.” At the federal level, there is no need to tax the rich to pay for programs for the poor, because the USA is no longer on the gold standard as it was during the New Deal.  Today, money can simply be printed to fund these programs, within reasonable limits.  This is explained in detail by Modern Monetary Theory publications.).