Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind:
The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal state
Source: "Membership List, May 1927," in the Morris L. Cooke Papers, box 66, FDR Library,
and The United States Government Manual 1937. Also: the Papers of John M. Carmody
The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal State: Career Matrix
"Liberal Businessmen" Ezekiel
U.S. Political Economy by Sector, 1910 to 1939
input-output matrices: capital formations and the two-party system
the downtown elite in little rock
from
Elizabeth Jacoway, "Taken by Surprise: Little Rock Business Leaders and
Desegregation," in Elizabeth Jacoway and David R. Colburn, eds., Southern Businessmen and Desegregation (Louisiana State University Press, 1982), pp. 31-33
On
all sides the cost of all-out resistance was painfully apparent, and at
this point many "ordinary" citizens found their voice. Most
hopeful of all the responses was the formation, under the leadership of
one of Little Rock's great ladies, Adolphine Fletcher Terry, of the
Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools. Conceived
originally as an organization to work for racial justice, the Women's
Emergency Committee quickly scaled down its objectives when the leaders
realized the timidity of the ladies and the possiblity of using the
schools issue to build a broad base of support for a more enlightened
position on the integration question. Housed in the Heights and
drawing its support primarily from the affluent fifth ward, the Women's
Emergeny Committee was a hopeful indicator of a change in the attitude
and awareness on the part of Little Rock's civic elite. As the
businessman husband of one of the ladies has suggested, the women could
speak out when often it would have been economically dangerous for the
men to do so.
Downtown businessmen also developed new insight into the Little Rock crisis in the fall of 1958. As Chamber of Commerce committees began to make industrial recruiting visits to cities in other states, only to learn that no one was interested in moving to Little Rock, the impact of the crisis on the community's economy bcame all too apparent. . . . At the beginning of the new year the incoming presdent of the Chamber of Commerce, E. Grainger Williams, shocked the crowd assembled to hear his inaugural address by calling for an end to the crisis. Discussion of the events in Little Rock had long been taboo in refined circles, for one was never sure of the convictions and sentiments of one's peers and associates; and so when Grainger Williams called for an evaluation of the cost of education and "the cost of lack of it," a gasp went through the crowd, followed shortly by a wave of applause. At last someone in a postion of authority had spoken out publicly, and soon public discussion of the crisis became acceptible." |
modernizers vs. traditionalists in North Carolina
from Paul Luebke, Tar heel politics 2000 (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), viii
Despite North Carolina's long-standing reputation for progressivism,
the term "progressive" should be applied cautiously. The reality
is that the state's political debate remains firmly controlled by two
well-institutionalized economic elites with somewhat conflicting
interests. One group, the modernizers, consists of bankers,
developers, retail merchants, the news media, and other representatives
of the business community who expect to benefit from change and
growth. The second group, the traditionalists, includes
traditional industrialists (in textiles, furniture, and apparel),
tobacco farmers, and others associated with the state's agricultural
economy who feel threatened by change and growth. Each group is
linked with politicians who represent its interests.
|
the biocultural niche of racism (dark matter of politics)
|
from Seymour M. Hersh, Reporter (Knopf, 2018)
City News . . . had been set up at the turn of the century by the
Chicago Newspapers to field reporters who would cover the city’s courts
and police headquarters, sparing money and staff for the big
boys. The bureau’s focus was on street crime—of which there was
plenty in Chicago—and its reportng served as a tip sheet for the big
dailies; the bureau was also a source of young, ambitious
reporters. City News had been made famous, briefly, by The Front
Page, the perennial hit play—later a movie—written by Ben Hecht and
Charles MacArthur. pp. 14-15
Most of the editors and reporters were cynics and wise to what can only be described s the Chicago way. The cops were on the take, and the mob ran the city. The City News reporters, with rare exceptions, were give access to crime scenes and allowed to park anywhere they wished as long as they displayed a press card on the dashboard. . . . The abmitious young reporters working the courthouses and police beats understood their mission was to live within the system and somehow make the city work. p. 18 . . . while on temporary night asignment for a week or two at police headquarters in Hyde Park, near the university. The process had quickly become familiar: hang around with other reporters; ingratiate yourself with the desk sergeant; buy him all the coffee he wants; help him, if he asks, with the last week’s Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle; and wait for the radio to sound off. Late at night comes a report of a deadly fire in the black ghetto a few miles to the west, with many victims. Off I go. . . . p. 21 What a story, I thought. . . . Mr. Dorfeld [a senior editor at City News] . . . said: “Ah, my good, dear, energetic Mr. Hersh. Do the, alas, poor, unfortunate victims happen to be of the Negro persuasion?” I said yes. He said, “Cheap it out.” That meant that my City News dispatch would report the following give or take a phrase: “Five Negroes died in a fire last night on the Southwest Side.” It might have also included an address. I thought, having worked for years in a family store in a black area, that I might know something about racism. Dornfeld taught me that I had a lot to learn. There was one final lesson to learn just before I would go off for compulsory army training, after only seven or so months on the job at City News. It was my shameful, but unavoidable, involvement in what we now call self-censorship. I was back on overnight duty at the central police headquarters [Chicago 1959] when two cops called in to report that a robbery suspect has been shot trying to avoid arrest. The cops who who had done the shooting were driving in to make a report. Always ambitious, and always curious, I raced down to the basement parking lot in the hope of getting some firsthand quotes before calling in the story. The driver—white, beefy, and very Irish, like far too many Chicago cops then—obviously did not see me as he parked the car. As he climbed out, a fellow cop, who clearly had heard the same radio report I had, shouted something like “So the guy tried to run on you?” The driver said, “Naw, I told the nigger to beat it and then plugged him.” I got the hell out of there, without being seen, called the bureau, and asked for the editor on duty. (It was not Billings.) [The night editor at City News.] What to do? The editor urged me to do nothing. It would be my word versus that of all the cops involved, and all would accuse me of lying. The message was clear: I did not have a story. But of course I did. So I waited a few days and then asked for and got a copy of the coroner’s report. The victim had been shot in the back. I took a copy of the report to an editor. He wasn’t interested. No one was interested. I had no proof that a felony murder had been committed other than what the killer himself had said, and he, of course, would deny it. So I left the story alone. I did not try to find and interview the cop who bfragged about doing the shooting, nor did I seek out his partner. Nor did I raise hell at City News. I shuffled of to six months of army t raining, full of despair at my weakness and the weakness of a profession that dealt so easily with compromise and self-censorship. pp. 21-2 |
| Strategic Elites: Institutions and Individuals |
Sectors of Realization/ Configurations of Capital |
Firms & Functions |
| See Elliot A. Rosen, Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Brans Trust: from Depression to New Deal Belmont, Baruch, Brookings, Lovett, Harriman (Columbia, 1977) for 1932 list |
Commodities in International Trade |
Tobacco, Cotton, Sugar, Corn, Wheat, Copper, Oil Shipping Legal Services Financial Services |
| National Civic Federation See Other People's Money, Pujo Committee, TNEC Morgan |
Securities Bloc |
Securities & Finance Legal Services Infrastructure (Railroads, Telephones, Electric Power, Urban Transportation) Primary Materials (Iron & Steel, Coal) Captive Capital Goods |
| Pollak Foundation The Taylor Society: elite non-manufacturing firms Filene's, Macy's, Bowery Savings Bank, Dennison Manufacturing |
Mass Consumption I: Mass Distribution & Mass Housing |
Mass Retailers Producer Services Real Estate Construction? |
| The Taylor Society: manufacturing firms | Mass Consumption II: Captive Production Inputs | |
| Twentieth Century Fund (founded by E. A. Filene) Committee for Economic Development CED Fed Reserve Hiss List see Mark Mizruchi, The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite (Harvard, 2013) |
Modern Machinery & Continuous Process Multinationals |
|
| Clinton Foundation Democratic Leadership Council Priorities USA Action: Contributors, 2016 cycle, $100,000 and above Future Forward USA 2024 |
Post-modern Capitalism: 1. the Production of Subjectivities
2. the Financialization of Everything |
|
| Provincial Elites | ||
| Mayberry Machiavellis The Price of Loyalty Arno Mayer, The persistence of the Old Regime : Europe to the Great War Michael W. Miles, The Odyssey of the American Right, 1980; The Kansas Experiment, New York Times August 5, 2015 |
Provincial Capital Formations |
Local Chambers of Commerce |
| Sodalities |
||
| Republican Gomorrah Seymour Hersch on Chicago p.d. Rita Johnson Bill Jenkins on Pontiac Ferguson, Mo. PD Staten Island D.A. Jackie Presser Barney Kluck on 1933 T&D strike | Sodalities/Patrimonialism ethnic, racial, religious, occupational | Police, Fire, Local Gov't, Local Services, Skilled Trades, Construction? |
| Patrimonial "Capitalism"? |
||
| Coers, Trump, Koch, Lind Piketty, Krugman, Adams, Weber, Randall |
Patrimonialism/Sodalities | the grand Herd is a coalition of little herds;the mob (pogrom/lynching?): electorates, constituencies, markets, hotels, casinos extractive industries (coal, oil, copper, etc. ) |
Elites in the Time of Trump
Future Forward PAC
| Contributor |
Occupation |
Praxis |
Amount |
| Michael Bloomberg |
Bloomberg Inc. |
privately held financial, software, data, and media company |
$19,000,000 |
| Dustin A. Moskovitz | Asana | software
company based in San Francisco whose flagship Asana service is a web
and mobile "work management" platform designed to help teams organize,
track, and manage their work. | $10,000,000 $10,000,000 $10,000,000 $5,000,000 $5,000,000 $5,000,000 $3,000,000 |
| James Simmons |
Euclidean Capital |
James Harris Simons (April 25, 1938 – May 10, 2024) was an American hedge fund manager, investor, mathematician, and philanthropist. He was the founder of Renaissance Technologies, a quantitative hedge fund. | $6,600,000 $2,500,000 |
| Reid Hoffman |
Greylock |
venture capital firm. The firm focuses on early-stage companies in consumer and enterprise software. |
$6,000,000 $3,000,000 |
| Christian Larsen |
Ripple |
Ripple
is the leading provider of digital asset infrastructure for financial
services. Send cross-border payments in real-time , engage with
tokenization and digital assets, and meet regulatory compliance
requirements—all in one place. |
$5,444,975 $2,969,975 |
| Jay Robert Pritzker |
Hyatt Corp. |
a
founder of the Hyatt Corporation, having purchased the first Hyatt
Hotel in 1957, and responsible for the corporation's evolution into a
multinational hospitality conglomerate. |
$5,000,000 |
| Marc Stad |
The Dragoneer Investment Group |
Marc
Stad is a tech investor and the founder of Dragoneer Investment Group,
which manages over $23 billion in assets. He has backed companies like
Airbnb, DoorDash and Uber, and was the youngest Commissioner in San
Francisco's history. |
$5,000,000 |
| Rory John Gates |
$3,000,000 |
||
| Sixteen Thirty FundDM |
dark money |
Soros et. al. |
$3,000,000 |
| Martha Karsh |
Oaktree Capital |
Since
its formation in 1995, Oaktree has become the largest distressed-debt
investor in the world. . . . Oaktree's clientele includes 65 of
the 100 largest U.S. pension plans, 40 state retirement plans in the
United States, over 500 corporations and/or their pension funds, over
275 university, charitable and other endowments and foundations, and 16
sovereign wealth funds.[18][19][20] According to The Wall Street
Journal, Oaktree has "long been considered a stable repository for
pension-fund and endowment money." |
$3,000,000 |
| Fred Eychaner |
News Web Corp. |
Newsweb
Corporation is a printer of ethnic and alternative newspapers in the
United States, based in Chicago, Illinois. The company also owns AM 750
WNDZ. Newsweb was founded in 1971 by Chicago entrepreneur, political
activist, and philanthropist Fred Eychaner to continue his printing
business. |
$3,000,000 $2,000,000 $2,000,000 |
| Kenneth Duda |
Arista Networks Inc. |
Arista
Networks, Inc. is an American computer networking company headquartered
in Santa Clara, California. The company designs and sells multilayer
network switches to deliver software-defined networking for large
datacenter, cloud computing, high-performance computing, and
high-frequency trading environments. |
$2,000,000 |
| Eric Schmidt |
Alphabet Inc. |
Alphabet
Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate holding
company headquartered in Mountain View, California. Alphabet is the
world's third-largest technology company by revenue, after Apple, and
one of the world's most valuable companies.[2][3] It was created
through a restructuring of Google, . . . [and] is considered one of the Big Five American
information technology companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, and
Microsoft. |
$1,600,000 |
| Reed Hastings |
Netflix |
Netflix
is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming
service. The service primarily distributes original and acquired films
and television shows from various genres, and it is available
internationally in multiple languages. |
$1,000,000 |
| Jeffrey Lawson |
Twilio |
Twilio
Inc. is an American cloud communications company based in San
Francisco, California, which provides programmable communication tools
for making and receiving phone calls, sending and receiving text
messages, and performing other communication functions using its web
service APIs. |
$1,000,000 |
| Erica Lawson |
U. of Cal. SF |
$1,000,000 |
| "Inside the Worst Three Weeks of Donald Trump’s 2024 Campaign" (Haberman int.) NYT Aug 10 The Aug. 2 dinner at the Bridgehampton, N.Y., home of Howard Lutnick, the Cantor Fitzgerald chief executive, was a high-powered affair. Among the roughly 130 people who dined under an air-conditioned tent were some of Donald Trump’s wealthiest supporters, including the billionaire hedge-fund financier Bill Ackman, who sat next to the former president, and Omeed Malik, the president of another fund, 1789 Capital. Later, at dinner under the tent, Harrison LeFrak, the scion of a New York real-estate family, whose father is an old friend of Mr. Trump’s, asked how Mr. Trump planned to take the narrative back from Democrats, and what his positive vision for the country would be. It appeared to be a request for reassurance. A week before the Hamptons fund-raiser, on July 25, Mr. Trump stunned one of his wealthiest patrons, Miriam Adelson, the widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, by having an aide, Natalie Harp, fire off a series of angry text messages to Mrs. Adelson in Mr. Trump’s name, according to three people with knowledge of what took place. The texts complained about the people running Mrs. Adelson’s super PAC, Preserve America, into which she is pouring millions of dollars to support Mr. Trump. At the time, Preserve America was spending nearly $18 million on a week’s worth of ads aiding Mr. Trump in three battleground states. The texts said that the officials running Preserve America were “RINOs” — Republicans in name only — and that Mrs. Adelson’s late husband would never have tolerated that, the people said. According to two of the people, aides to Mrs. Adelson later discovered that the outburst against her had been encouraged by another major Trump donor, h, who had hoped in vain that Mrs. Adelson would contribute to a rival super PAC that he backs. (A lawyer for Mr. Perlmutter did not respond to an email seeking comment, and an adviser to Mrs. Adelson, Andy Abboud, declined to comment.) |