I have a new essay on my web site. I think it's easier to just link to it than to fuss with the formatting options in this software:

Essay

The gist is that both private and government organizations are structured similarly. That is a top down, centralized, command and control system. This makes the belief that there is something inherently superior to private enterprise questionable.

I do show that they differ in governance. In a democracy there is a way for governments to be corrected when they aren't performing as desired, In private firms there isn't.

Before I get all the remarks from those who want to tell me that democratic government doesn't fulfill this ideal, I cover that as well. We have an imperfect democracy which is still better than the dictatorship of private enterprises.

Robert, lately neither entity has shown they even understand the meaning of the word accountability, as a skeptic sliding to cynic, I think it does not exist this accountability thing. The only failure is to the small group [and getting smaller] funding you. No democracy, just money raisers , or lobbyists, stockholders only through tort law [also being restricted, by scotus and the legislator members of their ruling family], otherwise it's board of directors, defining their own success, in coordination with SEC, that has been emasculated or bought, and now under the Unitary Executive, or 'in the family' they're 'made men'. What tactics possible to effect change? was brought up on another thread, but the choices to implement change should themselves be subject to the allusive standard of accountability...is it possible, does it effect the whole, does anything change?

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The last two paragraphs from the link sample to the full article Or, it wagers that one can repeat at the postmodern level the classical Marxist gesture of enacting the ‘determinate negation’ of capitalism: with today’s rise of ‘cognitive work’, the contradiction between social production and capitalist relations has become starker than ever, rendering possible for the first time ‘absolute democracy’ (this would be Hardt and Negri’s position).

These positions are not presented as a way of avoiding some ‘true’ radical Left politics – what they are trying to get around is, indeed, the lack of such a position. This defeat of the Left is not the whole story of the last thirty years, however. There is another, no less surprising, lesson to be learned from the Chinese Communists’ presiding over arguably the most explosive development of capitalism in history, and from the growth of West European Third Way social democracy. It is, in short: we can do it better.

Hardt Negri review..basically, war and empire, sound relevant? Well it starts there with Wilson's first try

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The essay, which Bourne never finished, is remembered for a pithy aphorism, “War is the health of the state.” This slogan has lately taken on a discomfiting resonance.

Warfare, Bourne observed, exercised a psychological effect on the nation wholly salutary to the state and the classes that ran it. It regimented life and terrorized dissenters, granting the state new powers to punish citizens for the mildest divergences from orthodoxy. Wilson’s lofty rhetoric about a world made safe for democracy was merely filigree on his dangerous idealism of the state. Inevitably, the democratic principles he so fervently boosted came into conflict with the state’s need for power. Just as inevitably, Bourne wrote, Wilson decided “that it is the naïver democratic values that must be sacrificed.”

Bourne’s manifesto is remarkably apposite today. It’s certainly a great source to plunder for antiwar rhetoric. Yet what the left needs to grasp is how profoundly the nature of warfare has evolved, especially in the last few decades—to understand the way these innovations have arisen in response to novel challenges to state power. In their new book, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri try to get a grip of this dynamic. The result is rich and sometimes surprising, and it marks a fruitful new direction.

Accountability seems to require transparency, with 'Cliff note sound bite education' for the masses so they do not ignore the story which the transparency offers.

You raise an issue I've also been thinking about - how to effect change. This is not specifically an issue about capitalism, it's true for all command and control organizations.

For example there are some religious denominations which make decisions based upon a quasi-democratic model, while there are others which depend upon a single authority figure. The same thing was true in the days of rule by monarchs. The abuse of absolute power is what led to the first formal constraints as detailed in the Magna Carta.

Today most firms are run as local dictatorships, this is true of capitalist ones as well as state-owned and even non-profit foundations. At most there is a small group of directors, rather than a single individual, but these are self selected. In fact non-profits are the least democratic of all organizations, since there aren't even stockholders to provide some counterbalance. I've had experience in trying to get such organizations to change and it is nearly impossible.

There have been some modest attempts at other forms of organization, there are some worker-owned businesses, unions are supposed to be democratic and there are co-ops for small producers.

When there is no avenue for formal governance we get abuse and revolution. I also maintain that centralized organizations become inefficient since there is no feedback mechanism.

Those who feel that the situation in the US is hopeless should be encouraged by the recent rise in citizen participation. It may take a generation for excesses to be corrected, but they usually do eventually. If democratic processes are incapable of causing change that that society is not just an imperfect democracy, but a false one. There are plenty of examples, for example the recent election in Kenya was rigged and the situation in Pakistan is also suspect.

Democracy requires not only elections, but the legal infrastructure of an independent legal system and civil service.

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If democratic processes are incapable of causing change that that society is not just an imperfect democracy, but a false one.

Robert, I think that's already the case

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Democracy requires not only elections, but the legal infrastructure of an independent legal system and civil service.

Which is exactly the part that is infected, or corrupted, [or working according to plan] depending on your personal degree of optimism. One system anarcho-syndicalism might be considered a hybrid, that includes the people, or proletariat, depending on you degree of pessimism.

New economy, again , remember it was new pre-Enron, pre-dotcom , new again. Then Krugman's new book reverses economic/political cause/effect

quote:

The normal economist's view is that economic changes drive political changes. Thus, the Depression led to the New Deal, for example. In our time, global competition, the IT revolution, and the demand for high skills led to higher inequality, which in turn meant a shrinking constituency for a populist politics and a larger constituency, among the winners, for the kind of top-down, class-warfare politics that today's GOP engages in.

Krugman had always believed—even "when I began working on this book"—that this was how things unfolded. "Yet," he writes of our era:

I've become increasingly convinced that much of the causation runs the other way—that political change in the form of rising polarization has been a major cause of rising inequality. That is, I'd suggest an alternative story for the last thirty years that runs like this: Over the course of the 1970s, radicals of the right determined to roll back the achievements of the New Deal took over the Republican Party, opening a partisan gap with the Democrats.... The empowerment of the hard right emboldened business to launch an all-out attack on the union movement, drastically reducing workers' bargaining power; freed business executives from the political and social constraints that had previously placed limits on runaway executive paychecks; sharply reduced tax rates on high incomes; and in a variety of other ways promoted rising inequality.

Elsewhere in the book, he explicitly, and in more detail, rebuts the view that market forces like technological change, immigration, and growing trade could possibly account for today's dramatic levels of inequality. He argues that what has happened is

largely due to changes in institutions, such as the strength of labor unions, and norms, such as the once powerful but now weak belief that having the boss make vastly more than the workers is bad for morale.

In Reich's book 'Supercapitalism' also holds none of the winners to blame, quoting Harold Macmillan cons. PM 'If you want morality, go to an archbishop' corporations don't do morality.
'

quote:

Originally posted by douglaslee:
New economy, again , remember it was new pre-Enron, pre-dotcom , new again. Then Krugman's new book reverses economic/political cause/effect

quote:

The normal economist's view is that economic changes drive political changes. Thus, the Depression led to the New Deal, for example. In our time, global competition, the IT revolution, and the demand for high skills led to higher inequality, which in turn meant a shrinking constituency for a populist politics and a larger constituency, among the winners, for the kind of top-down, class-warfare politics that today's GOP engages in.

Krugman had always believed—even "when I began working on this book"—that this was how things unfolded. "Yet," he writes of our era:

I've become increasingly convinced that much of the causation runs the other way—that political change in the form of rising polarization has been a major cause of rising inequality. That is, I'd suggest an alternative story for the last thirty years that runs like this: Over the course of the 1970s, radicals of the right determined to roll back the achievements of the New Deal took over the Republican Party, opening a partisan gap with the Democrats.... The empowerment of the hard right emboldened business to launch an all-out attack on the union movement, drastically reducing workers' bargaining power; freed business executives from the political and social constraints that had previously placed limits on runaway executive paychecks; sharply reduced tax rates on high incomes; and in a variety of other ways promoted rising inequality.

Elsewhere in the book, he explicitly, and in more detail, rebuts the view that market forces like technological change, immigration, and growing trade could possibly account for today's dramatic levels of inequality. He argues that what has happened is

largely due to changes in institutions, such as the strength of labor unions, and norms, such as the once powerful but now weak belief that having the boss make vastly more than the workers is bad for morale.

In Reich's book 'Supercapitalism' also holds none of the winners to blame, quoting Harold Macmillan cons. PM 'If you want morality, go to an archbishop' corporations don't do morality.
'

Wrecking ball of innovation