Monthly Archives: November 2019

TFUSA Meeting Sunday, November 24th, 2019

Posted on by
Reply

Thinkers Forum USA

Cordially invites all participants to the monthly Meeting/Discussion

On Sunday, November 24, 2019

Time

12: 05 PM

To

2: 30 PM

Speaker

Fayyaz A Sheikh

Topic

Is Liberal Democracy necessary for Capitalism to flourish?

Moderator

Dr. Nasik Elahi

Location

Casa Del Mare

536 N. Highland Ave, Upper Nyack, N.Y. 10960

845 353 5353

Brunch served after lecture

Outline of topic for discussion.

Is Liberal Democracy necessary for Capitalism to flourish? (Brief thought by F. Sheikh).

James Wang argues in his article in Eurozone (https://www.eurozine.com/the-end-of-the-liberal-world-as-we-know-it/) that there is an alternative for capitalism to flourish without Liberal Democracy. He writes, “While the rest of the world concentrated on the fall of the Berlin Wall, another wall in China brought about a different type of change. The economic power the most populous country has accumulated is now challenging the western claim that only liberal democracy would provide ideal circumstances for capitalism.”

China’s economic policy confirms that capitalism and authoritarianism or one-party rule can not only exist together but also re-enforce each other. One party rule provides consistency, reliability and efficiency in streamlining the economic policies which provides assurances to capital markets to plan for the future. It eliminates the chaos and messiness of the liberal democracy. China’s success has given heart to former communist Eastern European countries which are keeping capitalism but abandoning liberal democracy and reverting back to authoritarianism. Even some Asian and Pacific countries are adopting the same model.

However, it is too early to make a conclusion and it needs more time to prove that this model is sustainable. When critical population mass in these countries is economically self-sufficient, will they settle for just economic success or ask for more personal liberties and civil rights? The author thinks China has already provided the answer to this. I think it is still too early to conclude and will need few more decades to have the answer. Up to now, USA has been accommodating to China and hoping for liberalization of Chin’s policies. But now, dissatisfied with China’s economic policies and surprising strength, USA has started to fight back and it creates uncertainty how the China will adjust, react, and that will impact not just upon the future relationship between capitalism and liberal democracy, but perhaps it will also provide the road map to follow in the future for all other countries.

I wrote above paragraphs few months ago as “Brief Thought” but did not posted it. Today I came across another Book Review article by Don Nexon  “Exit from Hegemony”. The author argues that every country is picking parts of liberalism as it suits it, and that could be a problem for liberal global order. Below is interesting chart of comparison between USA and China. 

http://www.exitfromhegemony.net/2019/11/03/there-isnt-one-way-of-doing-liberal-international-order-and-that-might-be-cause-for-alarm/

https://www.eurozine.com/the-end-of-the-liberal-world-as-we-know-it/

 

Tip Of The Inequality Iceberg, The College Admission Scandal.

Posted on by
Reply

Shared by

Syed Ehtesham

The children of working stiffs learned a brutal lesson this week as federal prosecutors criminally charged rich people with buying admission to elite universities for their less-than-stellar children.

The lesson is that no matter how hard you work, no matter how smart or talented you are, a dumb, lazy rich kid is going to beat you.

It’s crucial that everyone who is not a wealthy movie star, hedge fund executive, or corporate CEO—that is, 99 percent of all Americans—sees this college admissions scandal for what it really is: a microcosm of the larger, corrupt system that works against working people, squashing their chances for advancement.

This system is the reason that rich people and corporations got massive tax breaks last year while the 99 percent got paltry ones. It is the reason the federal minimum wage and the overtime threshold are stuck at poverty levels. It is the reason labor unions have dwindled over the past four decades.

This system is the reason we cannot have nice things. Despite all that land-of-equal-opportunity crap, the rich ensure that only they can have nice things, starting with what they can buy legally and illegally for their children and rising through what they can buy legally and illegally from politicians who make the rules that withdraw money from the pockets of working people and deposit it into the bulging bank accounts of the fabulously rich.

When the mastermind of the elite university admissions scheme, William Singer, pleaded guilty this week, he exposed the launching pad available to the well-heeled to guarantee that their children will be well-heeled. Even after the wealthy pay for their heirs to attend prohibitively expensive private preparatory academies, their grades, test scores and extracurricular activities may not add up to enough to gain them entrance to Ivy League universities, from which a degree virtually assures an overpaid position on Wall Street, and with it, another generation of wealth accumulation.

Singer admitted he developed a work-around for the wealthy. The indictment revealed that, through Singer, parents handed between $15,000 and $75,000 to college entrance exam administrators to fabricate top-notch test scores for low-achieving offspring.

That lower amount—$15,000—paid by the rich to pad SAT and ACT scores is a good example. It’s a figure of trifling import to a one-percenter. It is, however, the entire year’s earnings of a parent working full-time at the federal $7.25 minimum wage. That parent may have a child who received a perfect SAT score—without cheating—who has earned straight As, even in advanced placement classes, who excelled in soccer and served as class president. But that child of a minimum-wage worker won’t get into Harvard because the rich kid took his place with falsified test scores and faked athletic achievements.

And the rich kid and his parents have the means to ensure that members of the next generation of the family have the same opportunity to cheat their way to the top and remain there. They have the money to buy just the right politicians, something that the perverse Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court facilitated. The right-wing court ruled that rich people and corporations could give unlimited money to elect politicians of their choice.

For further reading click bellow.

Download View

There isn’t One Way of Doing Liberal International Order, and that Might be Cause for Alarm – By Dan Nexon

Posted on by
Reply

( This article is part of discussion on next TFUSA meeting-f.sheikh)

Many discussions about the end of “liberal international order” play out in extremely stylized (one might even say “crude”) terms. Some treat liberal ordering as an all-or-nothing deal, in which the only alternatives are a “rules-based order” or realpolitik, unconstrained great-power conflict. Those who treat American leadership as essential to international liberal order sometimes adopt this rhetoric—even if some of the same analysts elsewhere stress that other liberal democracies may be able to substitute for the United States.

Liberal order is not all or nothing; we do not face a future that either takes the form of “rules-based order” or “the law of the jungle.” There have been many different forms of liberal ordering over the past two hundred years.

In Exit from Hegemony we distinguish between three major components of liberal order.

  • Political liberal governance: “The architecture of international orders is politically liberal to the extent that it establishes the responsibility for governments to protect some minimal set of individual rights for their citizens, with more liberal orders favoring developed liberal-democratic governance among their members.”
  • Economic liberalism, which “refers to the belief in, and commitment to, encouraging open economic exchange and flows among states.”
  • Liberal intergovernmentalism “concerns the means, or form, of international order.” It “favors… multilateral treaties and agreements, international organizations, and institutions that make rules and norms; monitor compliance with those rules and norms; resolve disputes; and provide for public, private, and club goods.” It “also manifests in bilateral agreements and institutions that reflect principles of juridical sovereign equality even when concluded by states that are significantly unequal in their power relations.”  Full Article