Will Walz or Vance Tackle Issue of VA Privatization?

OR WILL THE MODERATORS?!

By Suzanne Gordon, Steve Early

September 30, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


Image by Susan Ruggles, Creative Commons 2.0



Amid the rhetorical fog of their game-changing presidential debate in June, Donald Trump and his then-opponent only dealt with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in passing.

Former president Trump claimed that, after he vacated the White House, “crazy Joe Biden” no longer allowed military veterans to choose between VA care and private sector alternatives to it. When he was in the White House, Trump asserted, VA patients could “get themselves fixed up” in private hospitals and medical practices, rather than waiting “three months to see a doctor.” The results of this outsourcing were “incredible,” and earned his administration “the highest approval rating in the history of the VA.”

In response, President Biden understandably failed to make two points in response, either due to cognitive decline or cognitive dissonance. One, out-of-control spending on private care has left the VA-run Veterans Health Administration (VHA) with a projected $12 billion budget shortfall for fiscal year 2025—which is not good news for veterans. And two, a Democrat in the White House didn’t abandon privatization since there has been more of it under him than Trump.

Biden instead pivoted to talk about the PACT Act of 2022, which has helped nearly a million post-9/11 vets file more successful disability claims based on their past exposure to burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over the next decade, the PACT Act authorizes hundreds of billions of dollars for effective delivery of their medical care and financial benefits—but all of that is dependent on a well-functioning VA.

This brief and unilluminating exchange left unaddressed the real challenges facing the federal government’s third largest agency. The VHA operates the nation’s largest public healthcare system and provides high-quality, direct care (not insurance coverage) for former service members, who have low incomes or service related medical problems. But, in the September sequel to the presidential debate in June—with so many other things to talk about—veterans affairs became a topic little discussed by Trump or VP Kamala Harris.

Vance vs. Walz

The next opportunity for a more substantive exchange about the past, present, and future of VA care will be Tuesday night, Oct. 1. During their first and probably only vice-presidential debate, two former non-commissioned military officers will have the chance to embrace or reject the costly and disastrous bipartisan experiment with VA outsourcing that began under Obama, continued under Trump, and expanded under Biden.

Not surprisingly, Governor Tim Walz is the one more likely to do that. Because, on the campaign trail, Senator J. D. Vance– a fellow beneficiary of VA educational benefits–has been, in Trump-style, bashing the VA and talking up privatization.

In a recent podcast interview with Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL turned influencer, Vance claimed the agency is so slow moving and uncaring that “veterans spend three hours on the phone trying to get an appointment” and you even “have people commit suicide, because they’re waiting 28 days to get an appointment with a doctor.” The solution, according to Vance, is “give people more choice. I think you will save money in the process.”

After winning the first of six House races, before becoming governor of Minnesota, Walz joined the House Veterans Affairs Committee (HVAC)—a low-status committee assignment spurned by many aspiring politicians. In 2018, he joined just 69 other House Democrats in opposing the VA MISSION Act, one of Donald Trump’s proudest legislative achievements and the basis for his 2024 campaign pledge to make VA “patient choice” more widely available.

Walz warned, accurately, that MISSION Act outsourcing would force the VA to “cannibalize itself” by diverting billions of dollars from direct care delivery to reimbursement of private-sector providers. This incremental defunding of VHA hospitals and clinics now threatens to leave them in what Walz called a “can’t function situation.”

In Congress, Walz also became an advocate for fellow veterans with service-related conditions. His own hearing damage resulted from repeated exposure to artillery blasts, during 24 years of National Guard training exercises. He won applause for co-sponsoring a bill, focused on suicide prevention services; it was name after a Marine veteran who killed himself in 2011 after long struggles with PTSD and depression.

A Union Ally (Sometimes)

Walz’s role as ranking Democrat on a then Republican-led HVAC is fondly recalled by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents VA employees in his home state. During his first run for Congress, the then-high school teacher and coach reached out to local AFGE leader Jane Nygard, who discovered that “he’s not someone who just says something to make you happy, he actually takes action.”

According to Nygard, “whenwe had issues with the St Paul VA, which had bad management and low staffing, Congressman Walz, a fellow union member, listened to our union. He got the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service involved and we ended up having a three-day retreat with upper management. Eventually, upper leadership retired and labor relations improved.”

The one bad mark on Walz’s union report card is his vote in favor of the VA Accountability and Whistleblower Act of 2017. This Trump-era effort to strip VA workers of their due process rights in disciplinary cases was challenged in court by AFGE. To his credit, Biden’s VA Secretary Denis McDonough ended a five-year legal battle over implementation of the Act by reaching a settlement with the union last year. Thousands of unfairly fired workers became eligible for reinstatement or back pay, at a total cost estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars, according to the Federal News Network.

Other workers or managers terminated for “grievous misconduct” were not covered by this deal. Nevertheless, Trump has promised to “fire every corrupt VA bureaucrat who Joe Biden outrageously refused to remove from the job.” A campaign spokesman for Vance recently hailed the MISSION Act as “bipartisan legislation that expanded veterans’ access to quality care and cut needless red tape.” Tim Walz’s opposition to it was “not the kind of leadership veterans need in Washington,” the spokesman said.

Party Platform Differences

To do anything at the VA different or better than Biden did–or Trump before him–Walz and Harris first need to win in November. They can both boost veteran voter turnout, particularly in battleground states, by zeroing in on the skimpiness of the GOP’s plan for “Taking Care of Our Veterans”—all 47 words of it!

This lone paragraph, buried in the Republican platform adopted in Milwaukee, leads off with immigrant bashing. The Party pledges “to end luxury housing and Taxpayer benefits” for border-crossers and “use those savings to shelter and treat homeless Veterans.” In addition, a second Trump Administration will “expand Veterans’ Healthcare Choices, protect Whistleblowers, and hold accountable poorly performing employees not giving our Veterans the care they deserve.”

The equivalent Democratic Party platform statement is far more substantive. It covers veteran homelessness and suicide, PACT Act implementation, improving mental health programs, new services for female veterans, support for family members caring for VA patients, and cracking down on scams targeting veterans who file disability claims over their toxic exposures.

“Going forward,” the Democrats declare, “we will strengthen VA care by fully funding inpatient and outpatient care and long-term care, and by upgrading medical facility infrastructure.” Unfortunately, this otherwise laudable campaign pledge fails to acknowledge the reality of VA outsourcing, under Biden, which has further diverted funding from VA direct care and infrastructure upgrades for the last four years.

Tying Trump-Vance to Project 2025

At least some VA defenders in the Democratic Party are tying Trump and Vance to the VA-related recommendations of Project 2025. As Iraq war veteran and U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA.) points out, that Heritage Foundation playbook for the GOP “takes dead aim at veterans health and disability benefits.”

In August, Deluzio warned readers of Military.com that his Republican colleagues on the HVAC have often “sided with corporate interests to outsource care” for VA patients. And now their presidential transition planners at the business-backed Heritage Foundation want to refer even more vets to “costly private facilities, a fiscally reckless move that…has ballooned costs for the VA.”

According to Deluzio, the “ultimate endgame of these plans is to dismantle the VA’s own clinical care mission—should send shivers down the spines of America’s veterans and those who want the best care for them.”

On the campaign trail, Trump and Vance have been diverting attention from that “endgame” by positioning themselves, over and again, as defenders of “patient choice.” At a mid-August event at a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in western Pennsylvania, Vance referenced the very real healthcare access problems of “our veterans living in rural areas.” He assured his invitation-only crowd that, if “those who put on a uniform and serve our country… need to see a doctor, we got to give them veteran’s choice to give them that ability to see a doctor.”

In Detroit, at a late August convention of the National Guard Association, where he was warmly received, Trump again accused the Biden-Harris Administration of gutting his many “VA reforms” related to “choice” and “accountability.” He hailed VA outsourcing as a great system of “rapid service,” in which patients “go to an outside doctor…get themselves fixed up and we pay the bill.”

Between now and November 5, veterans need a lot more factual information about VA privatization to counter the steady drumbeat of “fake news” they’re getting from Trump, Vance, and the GOP. Let’s hope that now retired National Guard Sergeant Waltz steps up to the plate and takes a winning swat at the former Marine corporal from Ohio who became a Yale-educated lawyer and multi-millionaire venture capitalist with little personal need for the VA services so important to working class vets in his own state and others.

The Dutch Asylum Crisis Law Is Baseless And Dangerous

The new Dutch government has declared an “asylum crisis,” allowing it to take emergency anti-migration measures without parliamentary approval. Based on trumped-up claims about migrants, it rewards decades of far-right posturing on the issue.

By Helmer Stoel

September 30, 2024

Source: Jacobin


Dick Schoof, Prime Minister of the Netherlands, and Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, in July 2024.

On September 13, Dutch prime minister Dick Schoof held a press conference to announce his new government’s coalition agreement. Essential to these plans — as the coalition’s four right-wing to far-right parties had already agreed in May — is the introduction of an unprecedented “asylum crisis law.” In an extraordinary expansion of the tools to restrain migrants, it will allow the government to take anti-immigration measures without the approval of the parliament or senate.

The declaration of an alleged “asylum crisis” is the culmination of a more than two-decade-long offensive by right-wing populist forces. In 2001, the media-savvy dandy Pim Fortuyn, the father of this part of the political spectrum, changed the rules of Dutch politics by making an obsession with “immigrants” socially acceptable. Four years later, Geert Wilders founded his anti-Islam electoral vehicle, the Party for Freedom (PVV). The neoliberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) under Mark Rutte, in power for the last fourteen years, maintained a symbolic distance from the PVV, allowing its purported liberal “reasonableness” to compare favorably with Wilders’s “extremism.” Yet the PVV and several big Dutch media channels have constantly put migration on the agenda. Hamas’s October 7 attacks were further used to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment.

This provided the background for the November 22, 2023, general election, which set the stage for the new government. The snap vote came after then prime minister Rutte opportunistically let his government fall by refusing to compromise on migration; Dilan Yesilgöz, his successor as VVD leader, then embraced a far-right course on the issue. Presented with the choice between original and copy, at election time voters chose the former. In the vote, the PVV secured almost a quarter of seats in parliament. Other big winners were the right-wing populist Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB) and the vaguely Christian democratic New Social Contract (NSC).

After long, soap-operatic negotiations, a new cabinet was finally put together earlier this summer. The PVV, a party of which Wilders is the only member, lacked suitable seasoned politicians to deliver a prime minister. After a chaotic process, Schoof — a senior bureaucrat with no political experience, but who is former chief of the national counterterrorism unit — was shoved into the limelight. The government that Schoof now leads is the Dutch version of technopopulism, to use the term coined by Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti. Claiming to be “prime minister for all Dutch people” and to “address the real problems of the Dutch people,” Schoof offers a deeply political program dressed up as sober, technocratic pragmatism.

As elsewhere in Europe, migration has been declared the root of all evil. Dutch experts and engaged policymakers tirelessly point out that there is no “crisis,” but to no avail. In the course of 2023, for instance, the number of asylum seekers was no more than the average over the 1990s. In fact, the Netherlands’ acceptance of refugees is around the European average; Germany, Sweden, and Austria take in more people per capita. Just as crucially, the government’s exclusive focus on asylum seekers is highly misleading, since migrant workers make up the bulk of the migration flow. The Dutch labor market, which underwent far-reaching liberalization in the 1990s under the two liberal–social democratic cabinets, runs partly on cheap labor, which is shamelessly exploited in horticulture and distribution centers.

Still, migration is serving as a lightning rod to distract from growing social disparities. The real crises in society — the housing crisis, the energy crisis, and crisis over social security — mainly affect the working class and lower-middle class. These ills are partly a product of the VVD’s neoliberal policies, which have stopped the construction of social housing, slowly dismantled public services, and reduced real incomes. For years, the ruling parties of both center left and center right mainly represented the interests of relatively wealthy, university-educated urbanites and ignored the working class and the petty bourgeoisie. With a recent attack raising the value-added tax on higher education, books, and culture, the new far-right government seems to want a form of symbolic revenge.

Given that evidence of the migration “crisis” does not exist, it was no accident that during his presentation, new prime minister Schoof spoke of “an experienced crisis” — what people believe to be a drama. After the chorus about migration has been heard for decades, it has started to have its effect in creating a moral panic. It is reminiscent of what psychologists would call illusionary truth effect: false information is accepted as “true” through repeated exposure and familiarity. Although right-wing populism is often explained as emerging from a crisis, it just as often derives its success from staging its chosen narrative of crisis.

Before looking to solve a problem, one can first ask whether the terms of the problem make sense. Unfortunately, this is just what isn’t being done. Despite their declared abhorrence at Wilders’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, all parties on the left-wing side of the spectrum — the social democratic Labor Party (PvdA), the green party Groenlinks, and the Socialists — have over the years come to accept the terms of the problem as posed by the far right. Recently, Frans Timmermans, the leader of the PvdA-Groenlinks alliance, declared, “With us it is always possible to discuss how to make asylum policy stricter and more austere, as long as you stick to the law.” More than two decades after far-right leader Pim Fortuyn was murdered, his language has become hegemonic.

The announcement of the “crisis” is just the beginning. In a farcical spectacle, Marjolein Faber, the PVV minister for asylum and migration, has announced in a letter to the European Commission that the government is going to present an opt-out from the European migration pact. On her first international journey, she chose to visit Denmark — a country that negotiated an opt-out in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty to allow it stricter rules than other European Union member states for dealing with asylum seekers (for instance, they cannot appeal being rejected). Following in its footsteps, the PVV wants to treat migration on a European level as a zero-sum game. A competition between European countries for the strictest migration policies without collectively addressing the question of migration could potentially lead to a disastrous erosion of asylum seekers’ legal rights throughout Europe.

The novelist W. F. Hermans once described the idea that “we must not stay behind” as the typically Dutch angst. For at least the last two decades, the Netherlands managed to present itself as progressive on the world stage, even if this reputation was already living off the past. Now the small country can congratulate itself for not “staying behind” in another way: with the new government’s plans, at a stroke it finds itself at the forefront of the far-right wave in Western Europe.

Despite their significant differences with the PVV, parties like the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany and the Rassemblement National in France may push for similar measures. But discord is already emerging in the Netherlands’ far-right coalition government. The question is how long the staged “asylum crisis” can mask the cynical motives that lie behind it.

How Australia Helps the U.S. Destabilize Asia

By Max Lane

September 30, 2024

Source: Counter Punch



September 15 marked the third anniversary of the announcement of the AUKUS (Australia, the UK, the U.S.) agreement. The purpose of this agreement is for Australia to buy nuclear-powered submarines from the UK and the U.S. This increases interoperability with U.S. forces that are projecting their power in the region along the Chinese coast. Furthermore, Australia is participating in the QUAD and SQUAD, “[i]nformal Alliances in the Indo-Pacific.” The city of Darwin in northern Australia has been opened up for the U.S. forces, including planes carrying nuclear weapons. In addition, Australia has long housed bases for U.S. spy satellite systems. (For details of all these agreements, visit antiaukuscoalition.)

All this is consistent with history. The Australian capitalist class shares the understanding of the Global North versus Global South relationship and realizes that the ruling class’s best interest is in the Global North’s continued domination. The increased capacity of China to resist the U.S. hegemony, even if it is unable to defeat it, is seen as a threat. The hegemonic discourse in the media always refers to China as an adversary. In Australia, this is accentuated when talking about Australian imperialism’s “own backyard.”

Member of the Global Imperialist Club

For at least 150 years, Australia has been integrated into the network of rich industrialized countries much of whose wealth comes from colonial and modern imperialist exploitation of what is now called the Global South. Although a small imperialist economy, some of its biggest capitalists have investments in Global South countries, as far apart as Indonesia and Chile.

Australia has one of the highest GDP per capita in the world. Its wealth stems from this exploitation and from sharing in the exploitation of the Global South by the imperialist bloc. Its initial wealth, accumulated in the 18th and 19th centuries, was based on and boosted by a genocidal invasion. The latter enabled the theft of the continent’s land from its original inhabitants.

In foreign and security policies, the Australian state and the majority of the capitalist class have always believed that they shared the same strategic interests of the imperialist bloc. Since World War II, they have also shared the strategic interests of the United States.

In relation to Asia, the Australian state has shared the understanding with the United States that a socialist revolution in Asia is a threat to all imperialist interests. Since 1945, the Australian ruling class has waged a massive propaganda campaign among the Australian people on the “yellow peril” of communist China and the left-wing movements in southeast Asia. In addition, Australian troops were involved in South Korea, Malaya, and Indonesia before Vietnam. Even before the United States committed to the war in Vietnam, the Australian government was urging the United States to get involved.

Contradictions for Australia’s Capitalist Class

There is a contradiction for the Australian capital as a whole. “Over the past five years, the exports of Australia to China have increased at an annualized rate of 7.76 percent, from $84.8 billion in 2017 to $123 billion in 2022,” according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity. China usually tops the list of countries that Australia exports to. The current Australian government is doing all it can to improve business ties with China, including recently feting the Chinese Premier and other delegations. Commercial relations have also improved. At the same time, in the political sphere, anti-Chinese propaganda continues strongly. Open public dissent against AUKUS or similar policies from within the capitalist class or pro-capitalist politicians is minimal. The one outspoken critic is former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating who argues: that China is no security threat to Australia; that Taiwan belongs to China; and that the Australian economy needs the best possible economic relations with China.

Opposition to AUKUS

The opposition is weak and comes from the left and some center-left Greens parliamentarians. There are two main elements to the Australian left. The Greens party is a moderate left-of-center party with a small representation in the Senate and House of Representatives. They oppose AUKUS, emphasizing the waste of money, erosion of defense sovereignty to the United States, and the environmental impacts of storing nuclear waste. While it publishes progressive statements on China not being a threat, it does not seem to stress the same. The Greens do not initiate or lead mass campaigns or protests.

The peace movement and the far left include the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network and the Australian Anti-AUKUS Coalition. While active, these organizations are small and weak, with minimal public profile or impact. This reflects the 20-year decline of radical left organizations in Australia, especially those whose political perspective makes the Global North versus Global South struggle (imperialism) a major or basic framework.

These groups’ statements are therefore often slightly more radically worded versions of the Greens’. Nobody campaigns around the slogan: “China is not an enemy” nor links U.S. containment of China to imperialism.

Solutions

There is no magic solution to this weakness. The only way to undo the damage is by patiently explaining and helping build actions and a movement against imperialism.

One factor that may help this process is increasing the voices of the peoples’ movements of Asia on these questions among the Australian public, and especially among Australian youth who are beginning to raise questions on this issue. More visits to Australia by Asian friends would educate people with an imperialist perspective on the destabilizing impact of U.S. and Australian policies. This is urgent and very useful, and we must figure out how to overcome the infrastructural and financial challenges involved in achieving this goal.

Eat, Pray, Pollute

In Barcelona and beyond, people are rising up against a tourism industry that strains infrastructures, commodifies culture and destroys ecosystems.

By Christopher Ketcham

September 30, 2024

Source: Truthdig

Image by Czapp Botond.

In July, a crowd of 3,000 anti-tourism protesters descended with delighted malice on posh downtown Barcelona. They cordoned off hotels and eateries with hazard tape, as if demarcating a crime scene. They sprayed water guns at blithe holidaymakers seated in restaurants. Video footage showed unhappy couples and glowering young men chased from their seats by the mob, stunned at the indignity.

Shouting “tourists go home,” the protesters held signs that read, “Barcelona is not for sale.” They spoke of “mass touristification” and inveighed against the greed of restaurateurs, hoteliers and Airbnb landlords who profit from the madding crowd while the average Catalan struggles to survive the skyrocketing costs of daily life. One of the protesters told an interviewer, “The city has turned completely for tourists. What we want is a city for citizens.”

The revolt in Spain — resident population 47 million; yearly visitation 85 million — is no outlier in the hypervisited destination countries of Europe. From the Greek islands to Bologna and Venice, residents have risen up this year to say they will no longer accept the invasion of their native ground, as mass visitation strains infrastructure, natural resources and social sanity to the breaking point.

It’s the culmination of years of exploitation and maltreatment, said writer Chris Christou, who produces The End of Tourism podcast. “In the last decade, especially in southern Europe, we’ve seen local movements sprout and mobilize —typically from the grassroots Left — against the relentless conversion of home into a veritable theme park for ignorant foreigners.”

From 1950 to 2018, the number of international tourists rose from 25 million to an all-time pre-COVID high of 1.4 billion, according to Statista. By 2030, almost 2 billion tourists are projected to visit destinations across the globe.

Christou has documented the industry’s long train of offenses: environmental degradation; cultural appropriation and what he calls petrification (“the stasis or congealing of culture’s flow or growth”); spiraling economic inequality; the Airbnbization of dwelling; gentrification and displacement; corporate and government nepotism; the revolving door of corruption between tourism bureaus and industry; the rise of an extreme precariat labor force; and, not least, “the spectacled surveillance of place that effectively turns home, for local residents, into a turnstile Disneyland.” The industry is also a sizable factor in climate heating, producing at least 8% of all greenhouse gases.

Over the summer, the scourge of “overtourism” made headlines for the first time in the New York Times, the Guardian, Bloomberg, Forbes and Reuters. Mainstream media published images of thronged locales that had the character of Hieronymus Bosch’s visions of hell: people piling on one another, grasping, motioning, their forms indistinguishable, as the newly empowered consumers of the burgeoning global middle class swarm across Earth in record numbers.

And there is no end in sight.

In Barcelona, the big money is in maintaining not a city for citizens but the flux of Boschian creatures. Some 26 million visitors crammed into Barcelona in 2023 and spent nearly $14 billion. The Barcelona city council and the Catalan government dedicate millions of taxpayer euros to ensure this continual flow through global marketing campaigns that sing the city’s praises.

The pressures from hypervisitation and the greed of those who profit from it have become so great that residents have formed the Neighborhood Assembly for Tourism Degrowth, whose purpose is to reverse the toxic touristification process. The group’s cofounder, 48-year-old Barcelonan Daniel Pardo, described touristification as “a transformation enacted on a territory and a population” by governments in collusion with commercial interests. He believes that degrowth of tourism means regulating it nearly out of existence.

“It means not only regulating tourism markets but promoting other activities [for locals] in order to reduce the weight of tourism in the economy of the city,” Pardo told me. Most important is the recognition of the almost pathological dependence on tourism in Barcelona and the many places like it. The city has been shown to be painfully vulnerable to any unexpected crisis that upends travel patterns.

“It happened with COVID,” said Pardo, and “happened before that with a terrorist attack and before that with a volcanic explosion in Iceland.” And it will happen, sooner or later, because of the climate crisis and unleashed geopolitical chaos. “Better than keeping on the tourism wheel, which smashes lives, territory and environment, let’s plan a transition process for Barcelona which reduces this risky dependence,” Pardo said. “How? Not easy to say, since nobody is trying that almost anywhere.”

One place to start is with the ideological error in how we think of leisure travel as a right rather than a privilege.

“The right to fly does not exist. The right to tourism does not exist. You cannot extend a model of tourism everybody thinks about to all the population. It’s impossible,” Pardo said recently on The End of Tourism podcast. He added in an email to me that the central issue is “about the limits of the planet, something so many people absolutely do not want to hear about.”

The tourism explosion can reasonably be explained by the IPAT math formula used in the ecological sciences. Intended to measure how endless growth of modern industrial civilization strains a finite Earth, the formula states that impact equals population times affluence times technology.

With IPAT in mind, one could argue that too many would-be travelers with newly acquired affluence have access to new technologies. Easy online bookings and guides, smartphones in general for facilitating and smoothing the travel experience, high-quality digital photography and video equipment for use by amateurs on social media, with its influencers driving place-based envy and desire — all this combines in a noxious stew on an overpopulated planet of societies abased by lust for money.

Barcelonans armed with water guns are engaged in direct action in defense of the place they call home, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Those who oppose tourism today are in fact doing a service for humanity tomorrow. The reality is that travel as we know it will have to end if societies are to meet the reductions in carbon emissions to keep warming below catastrophic levels. Most likely the industry — along with the billions who see an exotic vacation in their near future — will not accept that judgment.

Paulo Freire’s Legacy And The Necessity of Critical Pedagogy in Dark Times

By Henry A. Giroux

September 30, 2024

Source: Counter Punch


Freire in 1963

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world

–Nelson Mandela

Paulo Freire, the radical Brazilian educator, would have turned 103 on September 19, 2025. Freire was not merely an academic; he was a revolutionary, a fierce champion of the oppressed whose lifelong fight for economic, educational, and social justice has left an indelible mark on generations of teachers, students, and cultural workers worldwide. His seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, was written under the brutal political repression of 1960s Brazil, yet its message reverberates even louder today in the face of rising authoritarianism and the war on critical thought. Freire knew that education is never neutral—it is always a political act. It either serves to liberate or to domesticate, to empower or to subjugate.

Born in 1921 in Recife, Brazil, Freire experienced poverty and inequality firsthand, shaping his lifelong commitment to the oppressed. A staunch advocate of liberation theology, he pioneered an emancipatory pedagogy rooted in critical literacy—a tool not just for understanding the world but for transforming it. Following the military coup in Brazil in 1964, Freire was imprisoned for 70 days before being exiled for nearly two decades. His return to Brazil in 1980 did not mark the end of his activism; until his death on May 2, 1997, Freire remained a voice for the marginalized and oppressed.

Paulo and I were close friends, working together from 1980 for fifteen years. I witnessed firsthand his unwavering belief that democratizing education is at the very core of political resistance. Today, as education comes under attack by neoliberal and authoritarian regimes worldwide, Freire’s ideas are more vital than ever. We saw this clearly when fascist president Jair Bolsonaro sought to smear Paulo’s name, discredit his legacy, and censor his books in Brazil—a testament to the enduring power of Freire’s vision.

In these perilous times, Freire’s work is not just relevant—it is a radical call to arms. As fascism resurges globally and civic culture crumbles beneath the weight of manufactured ignorance, remembering Freire is not enough. We must reclaim his legacy as a rallying cry to resist and rebel. Freire understood that education and politics are inseparable; teaching critically is an act of defiance, a direct challenge to oppression. His pedagogy is not a sterile method but a living project of freedom, a force against oppression. Freire wasn’t just an intellectual—he was a revolutionary whose work offers both analysis and a pathway to liberation. He understood that people must be informed to act for justice, and that education, inherently political, empowers individuals to reflect, manage their lives, and engage critically in the struggle for power, agency, and a more just future. Freire’s message was clear: an informed and critically engaged populace is the greatest force against tyranny, and education must serve as the foundation for this transformative power.

Paulo was well aware that people had to be informed in order to act in the name of justice. He observed that education in the broadest sense was eminently political because it offered students the conditions for self-reflection, a self-managed life, and particular notions of critical agency. Education was central to politics because it was a struggle over power, agency, identity, contexts, theory, and a vision of the future. Paulo Freire claimed that informed citizens are essential to the pursuit of justice. For him, education was inherently political because it fostered self-reflection, autonomy, and critical agency. Education, as a battleground over power, identity, and the future, stood at the heart of societal struggles. Freire’s contribution to pedagogy is unmatched—he rejected the notion of education as mere training or neutral transmission of knowledge. Instead, he saw pedagogy as a political and moral practice that equips students to become critical citizens, deepening their engagement with democracy. Freire’s vision was radical because he knew that only an informed populace could act in the name of economic and justice.

Paulo fervently argued that the value of education, civic literacy, and critical pedagogy could be measured by how much it improved people’s lives, gave them a sense of hope, and pointed to a future that was more just and free of oppression and domination. He believed that there was no possibility for social change unless there was a change in peoples’ attitudes, consciousness, and how they live their lives. Paulo rightly argued that a critical education could teach young people, the oppressed, and others not to look away, to take risks in the name of a future of hope and possibility. His radical belief in education’s power wasn’t just conviction—it was a commitment to social change, grounded in the idea that identity, power, and values are inseparable from political and educational struggles. Freire understood that theory doesn’t come first—real struggles do. He argued that you start with the concrete problems people face in their everyday lives, and that theory serves as a tool to confront and solve those problems. Theory, for Freire, is not an abstract exercise; it’s a weapon for liberation, drawn from the very ground of lived experience.[1]

At this critical juncture, education is under siege by the forces of fascism. Right-wing politicians and authoritarian regimes are not merely attacking the classroom—they are waging an all-out war on critical education. They seek to ban books, erase history, and crush dissent. These forces understand, as Freire did, that whoever controls education holds the power to shape the future. That’s why the battle for education is inseparable from the larger struggle for democracy and social justice. Education is not simply a path to individual advancement—it is the foundation of collective liberation.

Freire’s pedagogy is a rallying cry against authoritarianism. He exposes the ways in which those in power seek to turn education into a weapon of oppression. In contrast, Freire teaches that education must be a practice of freedom—a dynamic space where students and educators engage in critical dialogue, question power structures, and dare to imagine a world beyond the chains of domination. His work compels us to see education not as passive consumption, but as an active, revolutionary process—one that involves critically reading both the word and the world and taking collective action to dismantle the conditions of oppression.

The rise of fascist politics across the globe has revealed the latest stage of gangster capitalism in all its ugliness, which include the death producing mechanisms of systemic astonishing inequality, deregulation, a culture of cruelty, White Christian nationalism, systemic racism, and an increasingly dangerous assault on the environment. It has also made visible an anti-intellectual culture that derides any notion of critical education, that is, an education that equips individuals to think critically, take risks, think outside of the box, engage in thoughtful dialogue, appropriate the lessons of history, and learn how to hold power accountable. At the same time, the claims of global capitalism have been undermined as a result of its economic failures, the emptiness of its promises of upward social mobility, and the horrors it has let loose upon, especially in the form of endless wars, massive poverty and staggering concentrations of wealth in the financial elite.

It is hard to imagine a more urgent moment for taking seriously Freire’s ongoing attempts to make education central to politics. At stake for Freire was the notion that education was a social concept rooted the goal of emancipation for all people. This is a pedagogy that calls us beyond ourselves, and engages the ethical imperative to care for others, dismantle structures of domination, and to become subjects rather than objects of history, politics, and power.

This was a political project infused with a language of critique and possibility while simultaneously addressing the notion that there is no democracy without knowledgeable and civically literate citizens. Such a language is necessary to enable the conditions to forge a collective international resistance among educators, youth, artists, and other cultural workers in defense of public goods. Such a movement is important to resist and overcome the tyrannical fascist nightmares that have descended upon the United States, Hungary, Turkey, Argentina, and several other countries plagued by the rise of right-wing populist movements. In an age of social isolation, information overflow, a culture of immediacy, consumer glut, and spectacularized violence, it is all the more crucial to take seriously the notion that a democracy cannot exist or be defended without civically literate, informed and critically engaged citizens.

Education both in its symbolic and institutional forms has a central role to play in fighting the resurgence of anti-democratic cultures, mythic historical narratives, and the emerging ideologies of white supremacy and white nationalism. Moreover, as far-right extremists across the globe are disseminating toxic racist and ultra-nationalist images of the past, it is essential to reclaim education and critical pedagogy through the lens of historical consciousness and moral witnessing. This is especially true at a time when historical and social amnesia have become a national pastime matched only by the masculinization of the public sphere and the increasing normalization of a fascist politics that thrives on ignorance, fear, the suppression of dissent, and hate. Education as a form of cultural work extends far beyond the classroom and its pedagogical influence, though often imperceptible, is crucial to challenging and resisting the rise of fascist pedagogical formations and their rehabilitation of fascist principles and ideas.[2]

Cultural politics since the 1970s has turned toxic as ruling elites increasingly gained control of commanding cultural apparatuses turning them into pedagogical disimagination machines that serve the forces of ethical tranquilization by producing and legitimating endless degrading and humiliating images of the poor, immigrants, refugees, Muslims, and others considered excess, dismissed as wasted lives doomed to terminal exclusion. The geographies of moral and political decadence have become the organizing standard of the dream worlds of consumption, privatization, surveillance, and deregulation. Within this increasingly fascist landscape, public spheres are replaced by zones of social abandonment and thrive on the energies of the walking dead who are the embodiment of a culture of manufactured ignorance, cruelty, and misery.

Under a global gangster capitalism, the destruction of the public good is matched by a toxic merging of inequality, greed, and the nativist language of borders, walls, and camps. It is crucial for educators to remember that language is not simply an instrument of fear, violence, and intimidation, it is also a vehicle for critique, civic courage, resistance, and engaged and informed agency. We live at a time when the language of democracy has been pillaged, stripped of its promises and hopes.

Paulo was right in insisting that if right-wing populism and authoritarianism are to be defeated, there is a need to make education an organizing principle of politics and, in part, this can be done with a language, form of critical literacy, and pedagogy that exposes and unravels falsehoods, systems of oppression, and corrupt relations of power while making clear that an alternative future is possible. Language is a powerful tool in the search for truth and the condemnation of falsehoods and injustices. Moreover, it is through language that the history of fascism can be remembered and the lessons of the conditions that created the plague of genocide can provide the recognition that fascism does not reside solely in the past and that its traces are always dormant, even in the strongest democracies. Paulo was keenly aware of Primo Levi’s warning that “Every age has its own fascism, and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own free will.”

James Baldwin was certainly right in issuing the stern warning in No Name in the Street that “Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” Thinking is now viewed as an act of stupidity, and thoughtlessness is considered a virtue. All traces of critical thought appear only at the margins of the culture. Ignorance is not innocent, especially when it labels thinking dangerous while exhibiting a disdain for truth, scientific evidence, and rational judgments. However, there is more at stake here than the production of a toxic form of illiteracy celebrated as commonsense, the normalization of fake news, and the shrinking of political horizons. There is also the closing of the horizons of the political and pedagogical coupled with explicit expressions of cruelty and a “widely sanctioned ruthlessness.”[3]

Under such circumstances, there is a full-scale attack on thoughtful reasoning, empathy, collective resistance, and the compassionate imagination. As Toni Morrison has noted we live at a time when language is censored, reduced to a kind of narcotic narcissism, and cannot tolerate new or critical ideas. As a tool of domination, it becomes a dead language, stripped of its transformative potential. Instead of fostering critical thought, it erases history, promotes menace, subjugation, and is wielded as a practice of violence. Think of how language in support of Palestinian freedom has been censored, disabled, and hollowed out under the claim of being antisemitic.

Given the current crisis of politics engulfed in a tsunami of disimagination machines, educators need a new political and pedagogical language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which capital draws upon an unprecedented convergence of resources–financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military, and technological–to exercise powerful and diverse forms of control. If educators and others are to counter global capitalism’s increased ability to separate the traditional sphere of politics from the now transnational reach of power, it is crucial to develop educational approaches that reject a collapse of the distinction between market liberties and civil liberties, a market economy and a market society. Resistance does not begin with reforming capitalism but abolishing it. In this instance, critical pedagogy becomes a political and moral practice in the fight to revive civic literacy, civic culture, and a notion of shared citizenship. Politics loses its emancipatory possibilities if it cannot provide the educational conditions for enabling students and others to think critically, realize themselves as informed and engaged citizens willing to fight for social change in the name of democracy. There is no radical politics without a pedagogy capable of awakening consciousness, challenging common sense, and creating modes of analysis in which people discover a moment of recognition that enables them to rethink the conditions that shape their lives.

Freire was clear in arguing that as a rule, educators should do more than create the conditions for critical thinking and nourishing a sense of hope for their students. They also should assume the role of civic educators within broader social contexts and be willing to share their ideas with other educators and the wider public by making use of new media technologies. Communicating to a variety of public audiences suggests using opportunities for writing, public talks, and media interviews offered by the radio, Internet, alternative magazines, and teaching young people and adults in alternative schools to name only a few. Capitalizing on their role as public intellectuals, faculty can speak to more general audiences in a language that is clear, accessible, and rigorous. More importantly, as teachers organize to assert both the importance of their role as citizen-educators and that of education in a democracy, they can forge new alliances and connections to develop social movements that include and expand beyond working with unions.

In the current historical moment, it is all the more crucial to embrace critical pedagogy as a political and moral practice that cannot be removed from issues of power, assigned meanings, and definitions of the future. Education operates as a crucial site of power in the modern world. If teachers are truly concerned about safeguarding education, they will, as Paulo suggested have to take seriously how pedagogy functions on local and global levels. Critical pedagogy has an important role to play in both understanding and challenging how power, knowledge, and values are deployed, affirmed, and resisted within and outside of traditional discourses and cultural spheres. In a local context, critical pedagogy becomes an important theoretical tool for understanding the institutional conditions that place constraints on the production of knowledge, learning, academic labor, social relations, and democracy itself. Critical pedagogy also provides a discourse for engaging and challenging the construction of social hierarchies, identities, and ideologies as they traverse local and national borders. In addition, pedagogy as a form of production and critique offers a discourse of possibility—a way of providing students with the opportunity to link understanding to commitment, and social transformation to seeking the greatest possible justice.

This suggests that one of the most serious challenges facing teachers, artists, journalists, writers, and other cultural workers is the task of developing a language, discourse and pedagogical practices that connect a critical reading of both the word and the world in ways that enhance the creative capacities of young people and provide the conditions for them to become critical agents. In taking up this project, educators and others should attempt to create the conditions that give students the opportunity to acquire the knowledge, values, and civic courage that enables them to struggle in order to make desolation and cynicism unconvincing and hope practical. Hope in this instance is educational, removed from the fantasy of an idealism that is unaware of the constraints facing the struggle for a radical democratic society. Educated hope is not a call to overlook the difficult conditions that shape both schools and the larger social order nor is it a blueprint removed from specific contexts and struggles. On the contrary, it is the precondition for imagining a future that does not replicate the nightmares of the present, for not making the present the future.

As Freire noted, educated hope at best is a form of active social hope that dignifies the labor of teachers, offers up critical knowledge linked to democratic social change, affirms shared responsibilities, and encourages teachers and students to recognize ambivalence and uncertainty as fundamental dimensions of learning. Such hope offers the possibility of thinking beyond the given. Without hope, even in dire times, there is no possibility for resistance, dissent, and struggle. Agency is the condition of struggle, and hope is the condition of agency. Hope expands the space of the possible and becomes a way of recognizing and naming the incomplete nature of the present.

For Freire, the merging of politics and pedagogy is rooted in the dream of a collective consciousness and imagination fueled by the struggle for new forms of individual and collective identity that affirm the value of the social, economic equality, the social contract, and democratic values and social relations. Democracy should be a way of thinking about education, one that thrives on connecting pedagogy to the practice of freedom, learning to ethics, and identity to the imperatives of social responsibility and the public good.[4] For Paulo, education was not just a tool for defending democracy, it also enabled it. The fact remains that without hope there is no agency and without collective agents, there is no hope of resistance. In the age of nascent fascism, it is not enough to connect education with the defense of reason, informed judgment, and critical consciousness; it must also be aligned with the power and potential of collective resistance. We live in dangerous times. Consequently, there is an urgent need for more individuals, institutions and social movements to come together in the belief that the current fascist regimes of tyranny can be resisted, that alternative futures are possible and that acting on these beliefs through collective resistance will make radical change happen.

At a time when democracy is under relentless assault, Paulo Freire’s work is not just necessary—it is a revolutionary imperative for survival. We must reclaim education as a radical act of resistance, a space to nurture critical consciousness, collective power, unyielding civic courage, and collective change. . We must confront and dismantle the authoritarian forces that seek to transform education into a weapon of domination, embracing instead Freire’s vision of education as an emancipatory force—one that ignites the oppressed to reshape their world and forge a future anchored in justice, radical equality, and genuine democracy. Moreover, we must call not for reform but for structural change. This is a call not to merely lessen the horrors of capitalism but to replace it with a form of democratic socialism, while recognizing that capitalism and democracy are not synonymous.

In the face of rising fascism, Freire’s pedagogy demands we see education for what it truly is: a fight for freedom. He showed us that education is either an instrument of liberation or a tool of tyranny. Most of all it must be a practice of freedom and a project of collective emancipation. In an age starved of vision, Freire offered a revolutionary pathway, insisting that education, critical pedagogy, and civic literacy must be bound to a fierce responsibility to resist the unspeakable and unthinkable.

Freire inspired educators and cultural workers to act with bold conviction, audacity, and the fierce courage needed to confront the forces that would drag us back into a dark past—a past defined by fear, terror, and submission. He taught us not only to learn from history but to transform it, to stand in defiance of oppression, and to commit ourselves wholly to the struggle for justice, liberation, and radical joy. Now, more than ever, this is the moment for all of us who care about education as a defender and enabler of critical education to embody the spirit Freire invoked. We must rise with the conviction, audacity, and courage that he ignited within us—confronting those who seek to chain us to a history of fear and submission—and instead, fearlessly carve out a future rooted in justice, equality, and collective emancipation.

Freire’s legacy is not just a memory; it is a revolutionary flame burning brightly in the heart of the call for individual and collective resistance. In this age of rising authoritarianism, we must expand our understanding of education beyond traditional boundaries and infantile notions of empiricism and overt repression. We must see education in every space—as an act of defiance, a tool for liberation, and a force for emancipation. If we are to build a truly democratic socialist society, every corner of culture must become a site of critical inquiry and resistance, where citizens are empowered to challenge oppression and reimagine a world built on justice, equity, and freedom. Freire’s fire is ours to keep alive, fueling the struggle for a future where learning itself becomes an act of revolution.

Notes.

[1] Cindy Patton, “Refiguring Social Space,” in Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidman, eds. Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 227.

[2] See, for example, Jane Mayer, “The Making of the Fox News White House,” The New Yorker (March 4, 2019). Online: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-the-fox-news-white-house

[3] Pankaj Mishra, “A Gandhian Stand Against the Culture of Cruelty,” The New York Review of Books, [May 22, 2018]. Online: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/05/22/the-culture-of-cruelty/

[4] I take this up in Henry A. Giroux, Pedagogy of resistance (London: Bloomsbury Books, 2022).




Henry A. Giroux

Henry Giroux (born 1943) is an internationally renowned writer and cultural critic, Professor Henry Giroux has authored, or co-authored over 65 books, written several hundred scholarly articles, delivered more than 250 public lectures, been a regular contributor to print, television, and radio news media outlets, and is one of the most cited Canadian academics working in any area of Humanities research. In 2002, he was named as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period in Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present as part of Routledge’s Key Guides Publication Series.

The U$ Economy After GDP Revisions

Dean Baker

 October 1, 2024
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Gucci, downtown Detroit. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

The revisions to GDP data generally are not of much interest to anyone except a small group of economics nerds who follow the data closely. However, this year’s revisions are a big deal which should interest many people. Basically, they tell us a story of an economy that has performed substantially better since the pandemic than we had previously believed.

The highlights are:

+ An economy that grew substantially more rapidly than previously believed and far faster than other wealthy countries

+ Substantially more rapid productivity growth, suggesting more rapid gains in wages and living standards and a smaller burden of the national debt;

+ Higher income growth than previously reported, with both more wages and more profits;

+ A higher saving rate, meaning that the stories about people having to spend down their savings were nonsense.

There were also a couple of not-so-good items:

+ A higher profit share that is still near a post-pandemic peak;

+ A lower implicit corporate tax rate, although still well above the 2019 level.

Faster GDP Growth

Starting with GDP growth, the revisions indicate that GDP grew a cumulative total of 1.3 percent more than previously reported. This puts cumulative GDP growth since the fourth quarter of 2019 at 10.7 percent.

By comparison, among the G-7 Italy comes in second with 5.1 percent cumulative growth, less than half of the U.S. growth. Japan comes next at 2.4 percent (less than one-fourth the U.S. rate) and at the rear are the U.K. at -0.9 percent, Germany at -1.8 percent, and Canada -3.0 percent.

The growth we have been seeing is even more than was predicted before the pandemic. At the start of 2020, CBO projected that the economy would grow 8.2 percent between the fourth quarter of 2019 and the second quarter of 2024. The difference comes to almost $660 billion in annual output, or nearly $2,000 for every person in the country.

This means the economy under Biden-Harris has grown more rapidly than would have been expected if we had not had a worldwide pandemic. While the pandemic largely derailed growth in other major economies, it did not have that effect here. The performance since 2019 looks great by any measure, but especially if we grade on a curve.

A Productivity Speedup

Before the revisions, productivity growth averaged 1.6 percent from the fourth quarter of 2019 to the second quarter of 2024. This is slightly slower than in the four years just before the pandemic (fourth quarter of 2015 to fourth quarter of 2019), but considerably faster than the 1.1 percent average rate for the decade from the fourth quarter of 2009 to the fourth quarter of 2019.

While that story makes the case for a productivity uptick ambiguous, the picture will look much better when we factor in the effect of this revision, as well as the revision to employment growth reported last month. That revision implied that hours in the second quarter of 2024 were roughly 0.6 percent less than previously reported. With GDP now reported as being 1.3 percent higher, this means the level of productivity is roughly 1.9 percent higher in the second quarter of 2024 than is now reported. (The actual number will be somewhat different, since the calculations for both the numerator and denominator are somewhat more complicated than implied here.)

With these revisions, the average rate of productivity growth will come to roughly 2.0 percent in the years since the pandemic. This is a huge deal.

If we can sustain a 2.0 percent pace of productivity growth, it means that real wages can grow at a 2.0 percent annual rate without inflation or any erosion of profit shares (we will come back to this.) It also means that we can sustain 4.0 percent nominal wage growth, a somewhat faster pace than we are now seeing, and still hit the Fed’s 2.0 percent inflation target.

Faster productivity growth will also translate into faster GDP growth. If productivity grows 0.5 percentage points more rapidly than expected, then GDP will grow roughly 0.5 percentage points more than expected. This lowers the ratio of debt to GDP. If we sustain a 0.5 pp uptick in GDP growth for a decade, then GDP will be 5.0 percent higher ten years from now than if we didn’t have this uptick. This means, other things equal, the debt-to-GDP ratio will be 5.0 pp lower than we had expected.

For folks worried that our debt-to-GDP ratio is approaching a point where we are going to hit a crisis, this is very good news. It also is good news for those who would just rather not see such a large share of GDP handed out as interest payments on the debt.

Higher Income Growth Than We Had Thought

As noted, the revisions were larger on the income side than the output side. The cumulative revision to income was an increase of 3.8 percent. This meant both higher wages and higher profits than had previously been reported. Labor income was revised up by 1.5 percent compared to what had previously been reported. Profit income was revised up by an even larger amount, with the new figure 11.5 percent higher than the previously reported number.

There were also large revisions in percentage terms for income in proprietorships (mostly small businesses and professional practices), which were revised up by 5.4 percent. Income for farm proprietorships was revised up by an extraordinary 41.1 percent.

Saving Rate Was Revised Up

This is one outcome that was 100 percent predictable from the large statistical discrepancy (2.7 percent of GDP) between the output measure of GDP and the income side measure. These measures of GDP are defined as being equal. Revisions that moved the two measures closer together would either lower output, almost certainly meaning less consumption, or raise income, which would likely translate into higher disposable income. Either way, the saving rate would be revised upward.

That is exactly what happened in today’s report. The saving rate for the second quarter was revised up from 3.3 percent to 5.2 percent. That is somewhat below the 6.2 percent average in the four years before the pandemic, but not out of line with what we have seen in prior years. (The saving rate was 5.4 percent in 2016.)

This upward revision indicates that the whining seen in many news stories, about hard-pressed consumers being forced to draw down their savings, were not based in reality. The low saving rate reported in recent government releases was a measurement quirk, not something that existed in the world.

A Higher Profit Share

As has been widely noted, the profit share of income rose during the pandemic. This was most immediately attributed to the supply-chain problems during 2021-2022. However, as these problems receded into the past, many of us expected that the profit shares would revert to their pre-pandemic level. That does not seem to have happened.

Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis and Author’s Calculations.

With the revised data the profit share is almost back to its post-pandemic peak. It stood at 28.7 percent in the second quarter. This is down by 0.5 percentage points from its peak of 29.2 percent in the fourth quarter, but still up by more than 4.0 percentage points from the 2019 level. (This figure subtracts out the profits earned by the Federal Reserve banks from total profits.)

While the cause of this rise can be debated, its existence cannot. Whether or not greater market power is the cause, there clearly is substantial room for wages to rise at the expense of profits, unless for some reason we think the 2019 profit share was unsustainably low.

A Lower Tax Share of Corporate Profits

One unheralded success of the Biden-Harris administration was an increase in the share of corporate profits collected in taxes. This has been falling for the last five decades, partly due to a reduction in tax rates by also as a result of increased avoidance and evasion. The tax share of corporate profits has increased in recent years, presumably mostly as a result of increased enforcement.

In 2019 the share of profits paid in taxes was just 15.3 percent. In the unrevised data, the share stood at 22.3 percent in the first half of 2024. In the revised data it is 20.3 percent. This is still a considerable gain from the 2019 share, with the tax take almost one-third higher when measured as a share of corporate profits.

The Good Economic Picture Looks Even Better with Revisions

In sum, an economic picture that already looked extremely impressive before the revisions looks even better with this presumably better data. Perhaps most importantly, we now have a better story to tell about an uptick in productivity growth. If this can be sustained, the future could be much brighter than prior projections implied.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC.