Discover Top Posts Tagged with #panitch

To get straight to the point, I am a liar. A good one, yes, but a liar nonetheless. And no matter how good a liar you are, the fact of the matter is, the truth will always come back to haunt you.

Amanda Panitch, Damage Done

#amanda panitch #amanda #panitch #damage done #damage #done #straight #point #liar #i #good #one #matter #fact #truth #always #come #back #haunted #you

#73. Surprises, Leo Panitch, and an African violet.

This will be a short pre-Christmas post, just to cheer you up a bit. The first part is a short comment on Leo Panitch, a Canadian scholar and academic most of you will never have heard of who died recently of Covid-19. The second part is a short update on my situation which keeps throwing up unwelcome surprises for us. Leo Panitch (1945-2020) Panitch was a Jewish kid from Winnipeg. I was a…

View On WordPress

#oncology #Panitch #@dentistry #@oncology #@Panitch #African Violet #dentist #Leo Panitch #myeloma

The American state had of course also undergone massive change alongside the dynamic development of the economy. Territorial expansion had taken place through the addition of new states, not colonies, and produced such a great 'plurality of interests' that, as Madison had hoped, the masses for the most part showed little common motive or capacity to come together to challenge the ruling classes. This territorial expansion took place largely through the displacement or extermination of the native population, and the blatant exploitation not only of the black slave population but also of debt-ridden subsistence farmers. Yet not the least difference between these lay in the space it gave white farmers to infiltrate the frontier in a 'chaotic and headlong process' that sustained, and often invited, the expansion that occurred through purchase and conquest by the federal government. After establishing settlements as facts on the ground- regardless of native treaty rights, or imperial French of Spanish ones- they agitated for their incorporation by the federal government as new states. And state 'rights' within the federation meant a lot. They were strong enough to eventually produce a civil war; and it was self-government at this level that lay at the heart of the localist democracy that commentators from Hegel and de Tocqueville to Marx all noted as so distinctive of the American state. But this does not mean that the federal government was unimportant- far from it. As Charles Bright points out, it 'maintained the currency, funded the national debt, collected the customs, registered patents and- what was most important- assisted in the transfer of public land and natural resources to private hands and thereby played a key role in the conversion of the vast continental inheritance for commercial exploitation.' And the whole political system was held together by two nation-wide party networks of locally based patronage and logrolling machines, and by the federal customs, land and post offices through which national revenues were distributed, votes mobilized and alliances maintained. This state played from the start a very active role in the growth of American capitalism. Apart from protective tariffs, there was a host of federal, state, and city public works infrastructure projects, and widespread financial aid directly provided to new industries. Legislation in all jurisdictions was lenient on businesses declaring bankruptcy, and harsh on workers resisting exploitation. As 'haphazard and uncoordinated' as all this often was, it nevertheless added up, as McCraw says, to 'a reasonably coherent formula that today would be called an import-substitution but still market-conforming and entreprenuerially-oriented strategy for rapid economic growth.' It was through this active state that 'laissez faire' was enthroned by mid-century. The courts proved especially important in promoting the conversion of inactive land to competitive developmental use, rejecting feudal legal principles imported from English common law, facilitating the rapid growth of commodity and labor markets, and countering what capitalists saw as the dangerous tendencies of local democracy. After the Civil War the doctrine of 'due process' (articulated in the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the rights of freed slaves) was exploited to secure the crystallization of capitalist power in the legal form of the modern corporation, and to redefine the old concept of 'takings' in the Fifth Amendment (that is, confiscation of land by the state for public use) so as to constrain the use of taxation or regulatory powers that might have the 'consequence' of lowering the market value of corporate assets or expected profits. (By the last decades of the twentieth century, this would have significant implications for the way property rights would come to be defined in international trade and investment agreements advanced by the US, and international law more generally.)

Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire

How the United States was built by the Federal government and state power

No invisible hands here.

#leo panitch #sam gindin #panitch #marxism #united states #sociology #geography #politics #history #settler colonialism #political economy #economics #globalization #globalism

The ride home had been quiet, again, but this one was a comfortable kind of quiet. Like the quiet after a thunderstorm, when the air is soft and everything still smells like rain.

Amanda Panitch, Damage Done