CRONY CAPITALISM - HOW MUCH WILL THE AMERICAN PEOPLE LET THEIR CRONY BANKSTERS PLUNDER AND DESTROY A NATION?

OBOMB'S CRONY BANKSTERS DESTROYED MORE 

THAN A TRILLION DOLLARS IN AMERICAN HOME 

VALUES AND NOW THEY'RE COMING BACK FOR MORE WITH THE BANKSTES' RENT BOY BIDEN!

Decades of decaying capitalism have led to this accelerating divide. While the rich accumulate wealth with no restriction, workers’ wages and benefits have been under increasing attack. In 1979, 90 percent of the population took in 70 percent of the nation’s income. But, by 2017, that fell to only 61 percent.

“This was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013 that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”

Obama paid $600,000 for a single speech

 

In the two years since leaving the White House, former President Barack Obama has spent his time raising and solidifying his position in the uppermost echelons of the top one percent of Americans. Obama has raked in exorbitant amounts of money for public speaking events and made deals worth millions with multiple companies.

Despite his quip, made during the depths of the Great Recession, that “at a certain point you’ve made enough money,” there seems to be no such limit for the Obamas. His family has amassed so much wealth that even Obama himself said he was surprised in a speech in South Africa last year.

Since he left office, the former president has given an estimated 50 speeches a year to corporate audiences for hundreds of thousands of dollars per event. In 2017, the same year he left office, Obama was officially recognized as one of the top ten highest paid public speakers in the US.

Photo of former president Barack Obama. (Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Just last month, Obama was reported to have been paid nearly $600,000 to speak at the EXMA conference in Bogotá, Colombia. According to the Bogotá Post, EXMA is Colombia’s largest marketing and business event of the year and one of the largest in Latin America. Simply titled, “A conversation with President Barack Obama,” his talk purportedly addressed “influential growth strategies” in marketing and other aspects of the marketing economy.

Colombia is infamous for the corruption prevalent in its public sector and military, 

which costs the country $17 billion a year, equivalent to 5.3 percent of its GDP. 

Colombia exports half of the world’s cocaine and its drug cartels have been known

to have a hand in the government. Corruption and drug money are so rampant that

Colombia’s Inspector General likened it to “the new cartel.”

While Obama warns of the danger of “exploding inequality” in his speeches, the massive sum granted to him for one night in Bogotá is more than 10 times what the typical household in the US makes in a year, and 72 times the average worker’s annual income in Colombia.

Notably, Obama’s purse was nearly triple the amount Hillary Clinton was paid for her notorious speeches to Goldman Sachs that revealed her and the Democratic Party as Wall Street stooges. Former President Bill Clinton was paid just $200,000 per speech when he toured Latin America in 2005.

A key factor in Obama’s newfound and growing wealth are those who profited from his presidency. A number of his public speeches have been given to big Wall Street firms and investors. Obama has given at least nine speeches to Cantor Fitzgerald, a large investment and commercial real estate firm, and other high-end corporations. According to records, each speech has been at least $400,000 a clip.

During his presidency, Obama bragged that 

his administration was “the only thing 

between [Wall Street] and the pitchforks.”

In fact, Obama handed the robber barons and outright criminals responsible for the 2008–09 financial crisis a multi-trillion-dollar bailout. His administration oversaw the largest redistribution of wealth in history from the bottom to the top one percent, spearheading the attack on the living standards of teachers and autoworkers.

Under Obama’s watch the stock markets soared as the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased by 149 percent. Meanwhile, the “war on terror” in the Middle East was expanded with Obama becoming the first president to spend every day of his two terms at war, much to the delight of the military-industrial complex.

As the wars raged on and the financial oligarchs fattened themselves off the ever-increasing mountain of wealth being concentrated at the top of society, real wages stagnated and an unprecedented opioid overdose crisis spun out of control. Rising numbers of “deaths of despair” during Obama’s tenure, particularly among the working class, resulted in a decline in life expectancy unprecedented in the modern era.

In addition to monetary rewards for his service to the financial elite and military-intelligence apparatus, Obama has been lavishly feted by socialites and billionaires such as Richard Branson. Obama was Branson’s special guest in 2017 on a private island where the pair were seen kite surfing and enjoying the amenities of Branson’s exclusive resort.

Michelle Obama has also benefited after the family’s departure from the White House. The couple signed a $65 million book deal with publishing company Penguin Random House for their political memoirs. Michelle’s memoir “Becoming” was the best-selling book of 2018 with over 10 million copies sold. The pair also signed multi-year deals with Netflix and Spotify to produce content aimed at “fostering dialogue” and promoting diversity in entertainment.

Obama’s lucrative post-White House career hobnobbing with the corporate, entertainment and financial elite epitomizes the revolving door relationship between the US government and the private sector. Obama’s rewards are simply retroactive bribery for services rendered to the capitalist elite, who have welcomed him with open arms.

"The fight by transportation workers against these appalling conditions requires the building of new organizations, independent of the pro-corporate trade unions and the two parties of the Wall Street banks, the Democrats and Republicans. The rational reorganization of the transportation industry calls for a socialist program oriented to the interests of workers and the traveling public, not the profiteering of the banks."

the depression is already here for most of us below the super-rich!

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/12/jerome-powell-warns-wall-streets.html

Trump and the GOP created a fake economic boom on our collective credit card: The equivalent of maxing out your credit cards and saying look how good I'm doing right now.

*

Trump criticized Dimon in 2013 for supposedly contributing to the country’s economic downturn. “I’m not Jamie Dimon, who pays $13 billion to settle a case and then pays $11 billion to settle a case and who I think is the worst banker in the United States,” he told reporters.

*

"One of the premier institutions of big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a government bailout on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama will produce social unrest, “in light of the potential impact of central bank actions in driving inequality between asset owners and labor."  

*

"Overall, the reaction to the decision points to the underlying fragility of financial markets, which have become a house of cards as a result of the massive inflows of money from the Fed and other central banks, and are now extremely susceptible to even a small tightening in financial conditions."

*

"It is significant that what the Financial Times described as a “tsunami of money”—estimated to reach $1 trillion for the year—has failed to prevent what could be the worst year for stock markets since the global financial crisis."

*

"A decade ago, as the financial crisis raged, America’s banks were in ruins. Lehman Brothers, the storied 158-year-old investment house, collapsed into bankruptcy in mid-September 2008. Six months earlier, Bear Stearns, its competitor, had required a government-engineered rescue to avert the same outcome. By October, two of the nation’s largest commercial banks, Citigroup and Bank of America, needed their own government-tailored bailouts to escape failure. Smaller but still-sizable banks, such as Washington Mutual and IndyMac, died."

*

The GOP said the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" would reduce deficits and supercharge the economy (and stocks and wages). The White House says things are working as planned, but one year on--the numbers mostly suggest otherwise. 

New York taxi drivers driven to penury and suicide

A recently published series of articles by the New York Times has exposed the brutal exploitation of New York City taxi drivers due to predatory lending practices. This, compounded by growing competition from ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft, has led to extreme economic stress, nearly a thousand bankruptcies, and at least eight suicides by taxi, limousine, and ride-hailing drivers last year alone.

Much as with the housing mortgage bubble a decade ago, banks and other private lenders used shady and deceptive practices to lure drivers into taking out enormous loans to purchase taxi medallions. Ownership of these city-regulated medallions allows an individual to drive their own cab rather than work as an employee of a corporate fleet, which own large numbers of medallions, and have long been known for corruption and the exploitation of drivers.

In earlier decades purchase of a medallion, the value of which had historically grown at a modest rate, was seen as a sound investment. Through hard work a driver could achieve a relatively decent standard of living.

In recent times, however, the introduction of predatory lending practices by a growing number of companies specializing in “medallion loans” targeting individual cabbies resulted in a boom-and-bust cycle, which has devastated many of the city’s largely immigrant taxi drivers. This was compounded by an influx of other lenders seeking new investment “opportunities” after the 2008 crash drove them out of the real estate market. Some fleet owners intentionally bid up medallion prices in order to inflate the value of their own holdings. Among those who participated in such schemes was Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former attorney. He and his wife owned more than 30 medallions.

These practices greatly inflated the price of medallions, creating a huge bubble which, when it burst, left individual drivers who had purchased the highly over-valued medallions with unsustainable debt. The Times found that from 2002 to 2014 the price of a medallion increased by a factor of five, from $200,000 to over $1 million. Over the same period taxi drivers’ incomes have been stagnant or declined. New York taxi drivers, on average, saw a $10,000 reduction in their yearly earnings between 2013 and 2016, according to the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.

As prices rose, lenders encouraged borrowers to refinance based on the premise that the trend would continue upward forever, much as with the pre-2008 housing bubble, with no consideration of the borrower’s underlying financial status. Many drivers now owe hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The city itself benefited financially from the inflated prices, using the sale of new medallions as a revenue stream, realizing upward of $855 million from sales and taxes under the administrations of Mayor de Blasio and his predecessor Michael Bloomberg; a thousand new medallions were sold under Bloomberg’s administration. At the same time, government oversight of lending practices was loosened. Meanwhile, reports raising warning flags were ignored as the wealthy profited.

The bubble burst in late 2014, in part under the increasing competitive pressure from ride-hailing services (Uber launched in New York City in 2001). Since then, the price of medallions tumbled to below its 2002 level, leaving the approximately 4,000 drivers who purchased them with mountainous debt and an enormously diminished asset. Nearly a thousand have so far declared bankruptcy, and many more may soon follow.

This was, in effect, a Ponzi scheme in which the lenders deliberately inflated prices. They lured unsuspecting drivers, many of them immigrants with limited English-language skills, with the prospect of being their own boss. However, victims were not warned of the debt-trap they were entering.

According to the Times, “The investigation found example after example of drivers trapped in exploitative loans, including hundreds who signed interest-only loans that required them to pay exorbitant fees, forfeit their legal rights and give up almost all their monthly income, indefinitely.” Lenders snowed borrowers under with a blizzard of added charges. “Rather than raising interest rates, they made borrowers pay a mix of costs—origination fees, legal fees, financing fees, refinancing fees, filing fees, fees for paying too late and fees for paying too early, according to a Times review of more than 500 loans included in legal cases.”

Loans also included a “balloon” clause whereby the interest rate would increase to as high as 24 percent if the loan wasn’t repaid in three years.

Lenders profited at both ends. First, by sucking profits from drivers’ debt payments, then, as prices collapsed, by purchasing hundreds of medallions at cut-rate prices from bankrupt drivers while sending debt collectors to extract whatever other assets the drivers might have.

Similar practices spread to cities across the country.

Lenders have denied wrongdoing, despite the striking similarities with the predatory practices that led to the financial crisis of 2008. And the city, which regulates the taxi industry via its Taxi and Limousine Commission, also denies responsibility, despite the fact that a 2010 study prepared for the city warned of the growing bubble.

The New York State attorney general recently launched an investigation into lending practices in the industry. And the city has now announced its own inquiry. Little can be expected from such actions, undertaken by agencies that allowed these practices to go on unhindered for years.

Drivers for ride-hailing services, such as Uber and Lyft, also suffer extreme exploitation, as highlighted by the world-wide strike in early May. The strike was an international event with rideshare drivers participating in the United States, Australia, Great Britain, France, Nigeria, Kenya, Chile, Brazil, Panama, Costa Rica, Uruguay and other countries, emphasizing the shared experience of workers facing a common enemy.

Uber is deliberately lowering driver earnings in order to maximize the projected stock windfall for investors. The company announced a further 25 percent cut in driver compensation per mile last winter, with Uber now taking an average 33 percent in commission for each ride. Drivers in the US, who are treated as independent contractors, average a poverty wage of $10 to $12 per hour, with few if any benefits. One Uber driver in New York City told the World Socialist Web Site that he works 100 hours a week and averages less than $14 an hour in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

The similarity of conditions facing taxi, livery, and ride-hailing drivers is illustrated by the note posted on Facebook by Doug Schifter, 61, a limousine driver who committed suicide last year: “I worked 100-120 consecutive hours almost every week for the past fourteen-plus years. When the industry started in 1981, I averaged 40-50 hours. I cannot survive any longer with working 120 hours!” “This is SLAVERY NOW. … I don’t know how else to try to make a difference other than a public display of a most private affair.”

One cabbie, Roy Kim, 58, who hanged himself last November, had bought a medallion the year before and was more than half a million dollars in debt.

An Uber driver, Fausto Luna, also 58, who was deeply in debt, committed suicide last October by throwing himself in front of a subway train.

Reports indicate that Uber has been collaborating with car dealers and financiers to push their drivers into purchasing vehicles under exorbitant terms similar to the predatory lending practices to which taxi drivers have been subject. Meanwhile, the recent Initial Public Offerings (IPO) of Uber and Lyft raised billions of dollars for each company.

The bursting of the medallion price bubble was due to a convergence of a number of factors. The growth of ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Lyft, which have taken significant market share, has been compounded by the city’s significant increase in the sale of medallions, putting more taxis on the street. The result is the pitting of one section of the working class against another, causing extreme economic and emotional stress.

Under these conditions, the unscrupulous lending policies, which astronomically inflated the price of medallions, was inevitably destined to cause a collapse. Just as with the housing bubble, prices could not continue rising forever, with devastating consequences for the working class. Just as in 2008, while the corporate gangsters will be rescued, the big business politicians will do nothing to alleviate the suffering of the victims of these crimes.

The fight by transportation workers against these appalling conditions requires the building of new organizations, independent of the pro-corporate trade unions and the two parties of the Wall Street banks, the Democrats and Republicans. The rational reorganization of the transportation industry calls for a socialist program oriented to the interests of workers and the traveling public, not the profiteering of the banks.

Suicide rates for doctors and young physicians among highest in the US population

 

Doctors in the United States confront a high suicide rate as a result of stressful working conditions and excessively long work hours.

Director and chairman of the Southern California Permanente Medical Group, Dr. Edward Wilson, told CNBC that it is estimated that one doctor dies every day by suicide in the US due to “stress and rigorous work schedules.”

Doctors and health professionals within the US, according to Ellison, are “stressed to the breaking point” due to stifling work schedules and mounting pressures that stem from patient care.

Depression, the primary cause of suicidal ideation, affects an estimated 12 percent of male physicians and 19.5 percent of female physicians, but doctors are often hesitant to seek treatment due to the stigma associated with mental health problems.

As a result, doctors have the highest suicide rate among any profession in the country: 28 to 40 per 100,000 persons compared to 12.3 per 100,000 for the general population.

According to Ellison, recent data shows that 44 percent of physicians show signs of physical and emotional exhaustion, or “burnout,” which can lead to further mental health problems as doctors have difficulty adequately taking care for themselves, such as eating and sleeping properly.

Changes made to the way hospitals and medical centers operate in recent years may have improved the efficiency of the American healthcare system, but at the cost of longer and more exhaustive work schedules for doctors. Doctors are now spending less time with patients in traditional care settings and more time fulfilling extraneous tasks traditionally performed by adjunct staff and employees.

As a result, the suicide rate among physicians has exploded in recent decades. The suicide rate among male and female physicians is 1.41 and 2.27 times higher than that of the general male and female population, respectively.

For example, Dr. Benjamin Shaffer, a renowned surgeon from Washington D.C., hung himself in 2015 after taking his son to school. He had struggled his entire life with anxiety and a severe form of insomnia, which afforded him little time to sleep before operating on and treating patients.

Just days before he committed suicide and in the face of growing personal turmoil, his psychiatrist prescribed two new drugs which merely exacerbated his anxiety and insomnia and even led to paranoia. After he was told that he would need medication for the rest of his life, he concluded that he could never live a normal life again and decided to kill himself.

High suicide rates are also prevalent among medical students. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for medical students. They are three times more likely to kill themselves than their peers in the same age group. As many as 30 percent of medical students suffer from depression.

The work schedules for young doctors transitioning from medical school, customarily referred to as “residents,” are extremely onerous. Residents are expected to work up to 80 hours a week with single shifts that can last up to 28 hours.

These grueling schedules are largely the result of the centralized matching system for residency applicants in the hospital labor market and the monopoly held by a handful of hospital chains. Although employer-controlled labor markets are typically prohibited by anti-trust laws, the system remains the only avenue for residents to become fully licensed doctors.

Centralized matching, commonly referenced as “the match,” allows a handful of employers to select residency applicants without them having any legal right or ability to negotiate the terms of their contracts. This grants hospital conglomerates free rein to implement excessive hours and lower pay.

In 2002, a group of residency students filed a lawsuit against the for-profit selection system, deeming it an unlawful “contract” or “conspiracy” designed to undermine federal antitrust laws. After a federal district court initially ruled that “the match” may be illegal and give an unfair advantage to healthcare institutions, Congress passed legislation immunizing medical training programs from antitrust lawsuits.

Thus, residency programs give hospital employers access to a well-educated, but super-exploited and over-burdened workforce. As a 2017 article in The Atlantic noted, “while residency-program administrators no doubt take their educational obligations seriously, residents are also a cheap source of skilled labor that can fill gaps in coverage.” Resident salaries are generally equivalent to those of the hospital cleaning staff and about half of what nurse practitioners get paid even though residents typically work much longer hours.

The long hours residents are compelled to work causes tremendous physical and psychological stress. In response, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (AGGME) implemented a “duty-hour” reform policy in 2003, which lowered the maximum weekly hospital working hours from 120 to 80 and the length of single shifts from 48 to 28 hours.

However, this change did little to lessen the severity of residents’ schedules. Surveys show that the reforms led to virtually no changes in work and sleep hours.

A large reason behind the failure of the reforms is that hospitals have not increased the rate of new hires to keep up with the rising demands of healthcare operations. Between 1990 and 2010, the number of patients admitted to teaching hospitals rose 46 percent, but the number of residency spots only increased 13 percent.

SUICIDE IN AMERICA

Kay S. HymowitzBrian C. Anderson

May 29, 2019 

The Social Order

Kay Hymowitz joins City Journal editor Brian Anderson to discuss a challenge facing aging populations in wealthy nations across the world: loneliness. Her essay in the Spring 2019 issue, “Alone,” will be released online this Sunday.

“Americans are suffering from a bad case of loneliness,” Hymowitz writes. “Foundering social trust, collapsing heartland communities, an opioid epidemic, and rising numbers of ‘deaths of despair’ suggest a profound, collective discontent.”

Evidence of the loneliness epidemic is dramatic in other countries, too. Japan, for example, has seen a troubling rise in “lonely deaths.” The challenge, Hymowitz says, is to teach younger generations the importance of family and community before they make decisions that will further isolate them.

Audio Transcript

Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blogs podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Joining me on the show today is Kay Hymowitz, the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a longtime contributing editor at the magazine. Her latest piece in City Journal is called “Alone: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness.” That's the subtitle. It's one of the great pieces she's ever written in City Journal and I encourage you to find it on our website. Lastly, just one more announcement. We created a new email address for the show, so if listeners want to get in touch and drop a comment or share an idea, you can now email us at podcast@city-journal.org. That's podcast@city-journal.org. That's it for the introduction. We'll take a quick break and we'll be back with Kay Hymowitz.

Brian Anderson: Hello again everyone. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal and joining us in the studio now is Kay Hymowitz. She's a contributing editor at City Journal and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. You can follow her on Twitter @KayHymowitz. And she's the author of many books, most recently the New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back, which came out in 2017. And prior to that, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys, which came out in 2011. We're here today though to talk about her latest piece in City Journal called Alone. Kay, thanks very much for joining us.

Kay Hymowitz: I'm happy to be here, Brian.

Brian Anderson: So let's just start off. What made you want to write about the topic of loneliness, and what is the state of loneliness in America?

Kay Hymowitz: Well, let me start by saying I didn't actually set out to write about loneliness. I knew it was a great topic, but I wasn't exactly sure how to approach it. And I stumbled across an article that inspired me by two social scientists, I think they're demographers. And they described something called a rise of kinlessness, that is a rise in the number of people who have no kin, older people who have no kin. And it was very eye opening and I began to see that the breakdown of the family that I've been studying for maybe 15 years now and that I had mostly talked about in relation to its impact on children was also having quite an impact on older people, particularly aging adults. And that some of the despair that we were hearing about, the deaths of despair, the opioid crisis and so on so forth, are actually disproportionately made up of divorced and single, well, of men, in particular. So I realized that we're looking at something big here in terms of the family breakdown and its ultimate impact is something that I hadn't quite foreseen or thought of.

Brian Anderson: It's probably worth rehearsing some of the numbers in terms of this breakdown in family. Divorce rates for married couples, I think, are probably double what they were back in the 50s.

Kay Hymowitz: They are indeed.

Brian Anderson: But in some ways the picture's even darker. You have a 40% of kids, I think, are born to unmarried mothers now. That's up from 5% in 1960. And strikingly the rate of women who don't give birth at all, I think, has doubled or is much higher. Yeah. And you could go on and on in this vein. This is obviously the core of your argument that's having a big impact on loneliness and kinlessness and this whole phenomenon. So say a bit more about that and what do you think is driving it?

Kay Hymowitz: Well, I think that a lot of what's happening is due to a change in our understanding of what the family is, what its purpose is. I talk a lot in the article about the beginnings of what I see is the unraveling of the family, or shall we say, a kind of assault on, on the traditional family. I want to clarify that as we go on. I see the beginnings of it in something that demographers call the Second Demographic Transition. We sometimes talk about the, in ordinary parlance, we talk about the 60s or the Sexual Revolution. But those were actually an American reflection of something that has, as I said, demographers have been studying. The second demographic transition they believe is partly the result of affluence as he, as the societies in the west in particular, but also over time Japan and others, as they got richer, families were not as essential to mere survival as they had one been. Now this was intensified this fact by the introduction of the birth control pill, obviously because you could control sexual reproduction without worrying about whether you're married or not. And what the theory is that this would introduce a different set of values, anti-authoritarian, and little bit of anti-tradition. Individualistic. As people began to see they could be freer to find other ways of living than to depend entirely on family or depend mostly on their families. And in fact, following the second demographic transition, um, there was a huge increase as you, just as you just pointed out in your numbers in the percentage of divorces, the percentage of non-marital births. And this by the way, is not just true in the United States, but in other developed countries. Not all of them, but many. And also of fatherlessness. So I think that these ideas that emerged with affluence and the second demographic transition made it possible for people to think very differently about how they were going to live. And I should say now, because I'll be talking about the downsides of this, what followed from the second demographic transition. But it did really give people a lot of freedom. And there's no question that there were many people for relieved from very miserable and even violent marriages. As a result of the second demographic transition. There were many different ways to think about letting the people, it was possible to not be married if you really didn't want to. Which I think has worked nicely for some individuals. And of course it opened up the door to gay marriage, for much more freedom for gays and lesbians. So there is a tremendous upside and I don't want to discount that. But what I try to do in this article or show that there's some real downsides that we haven't quite understood.

Brian Anderson: What are some of those downsides? Why is it a problem for society that people are increasingly alone? And what are some of the manifestations of that that are negative?

Kay Hymowitz: Right. So one of the things that I try to do in the article is to remind people that kinship, those close family relations, blood and marital relations, have been kind of the linchpin of societies practically since we came out of the caves. It is absolutely fundamental to every society. The relationship between kin and what it does is... Those relationships define certain kinds of obligations. We tend to be more protective of kin and to understand our roles better when in relation to kin. Everything else, all of our other relationships may be very important to us, but we're making those up pretty much as we go along. And the kinship... As we've sort of gotten rid of that basic building block, or we've sort of undermined it through the divorce revolution, the sexual revolution in the second demographic transition, we've undermined the way kin work. So one point I make is that there's been a huge rise in cohabitation and particularly among less educated and lower income people. Cohabitation has become a kind of substitute for marriage. And the hope among, social scientists and sociologists and economists was always that gradually people would realize that you could cohabit, but you really ought to stay together. That it would be a kind of it, that it would be a kind of marriage or marriage light. But in fact, that's not what's happened. What's happened is that the, the norm of cohabitation is much more transitory, impermanent, fragile, and unpredictable. And those couples who were cohabitating and do not go onto marry tend to break up much, much more quickly.

Brian Anderson: This is even true when they have children?

Kay Hymowitz: Oh yes, definitely. The children of cohabiting couples are having a very, very different upbringing than the children of married couples. Now, it's true. we do have higher rates of divorce than we used to, although it's stabilized. And one of the reasons it's stabilized is that so many people are not getting married anymore, they are cohabiting. The upshot is that there are an awful lot of children, as I've pointed out many times before growing up in very unstable environments, but then an awful lot of parents, particularly men, who are losing direct contact with their kids. Now most men, after a divorce or after a child out of marriage, try to maintain some contact. But that tends to, it's not always true, that tends to fade out over time. Remember a lot of the people who are cohabiting, having children as their cohabiting are young, and understandably if that relationship doesn't work out, that go on and seek out another one. Well, what often happens is that there is a new family that develops out of that second union and possibly even a third or forth. So the child is faced with a, and fathers too, are faced with this rolling cast of people, none of whom have quite the connection of the kin of the old fashioned can relationships so that those men are frequently on their own as they get older. And if I could just add a little personal observation here that some people might not agree with, men just don't make homes or, you know make even make friends quite the way that women do. And we do have some data on this as well.

Brian Anderson: Looking around the world, and you noted this earlier, we know that the US isn't the only country facing problems of loneliness. One of the most striking examples in your story is Japan, which was seen just an incredible rise in what they call "lonely deaths." Maybe you could describe a little bit the situation there and how Japan is dealing with it?

Kay Hymowitz: Japan is an interesting contrast. to the United States in some ways in other western countries because non marital childbearing, single motherhood is relatively rare, unlike here. And also divorce is, relatively rare. It's getting, it's getting more common. What's happening instead is that an awful lot of people are not having children, so therefore their fertility rates are very, very low.

Brian Anderson: Well below replacement rate, I believe?

Kay Hymowitz: Well below replacement. Ours are low, but this is lower. I read one a social Japanese social scientists who said that the basic concept of the family in Japan is dead. So there's an awful lot of elderly people on their own, living alone. And by the way, dependent on the state to support them because they don't have any family to speak of. Or their family has moved away, or is extremely busy with work. We know that the Japanese are workaholics. But they started to see this rise in lonely deaths, which, we're beginning to see here too. And it became such a phenomenon in Japan that the newspapers started to cover, local newspapers would start to cover these stories that were happening very frequently. And in addition, this was the part that kind of, caused me to sit up and wonder. There are businesses now, there are cleanup companies, to take care of apartments after a lonely death because what happens is that when somebody dies and they're alone and nobody's really watching out for them, they often die in their apartment. Nobody knows they're dead. Nobody finds them until the telltale smell of decaying body. And it makes a huge mess for building owners or landlords. So they've started these companies, these cleanup companies. And I believe I mentioned the name of one of them, which is kind of grim. It's called Next.

Brian Anderson: Yeah.

Kay Hymowitz: But these companies, there are a fair number of them and they've become an essential, essential part of Japanese life.

Brian Anderson: It's a very, very grim reality. I've been reading a book by Cal Newport called Digital Minimalism, and it's an argument against being immersed in social media and other forms of technologically driven distraction. He says, we need to set more time for our sanity sake to be alone or at least off of the Internet and this constant bombardment of, of connection with other people. In other words, he's saying technology is making us constantly exposed to other people in ways that can harm us. At least if it goes too far. How does social media and the constant judgment that people sometimes feel themselves under through social media if they're participating in it, how does that intersect with the argument that you're making?

Kay Hymowitz: Well social media, I'm thinking of Facebook in particular was supposed to bring us all together. Right? It was the social network. We were going to create all these new social networks and you know, I think some people have been able to use it that way. I have ordered up to make contact with old high school friends or whatever, but it has also added to a sense of anxiety as people post pictures of their happy family occasions. They can look like things are just so wonderful and peachy keen for everybody else while you're feeling down in the dumps. So what does that expression, "fomo," fear of missing out? You're missing parties that you might've been invited to... People are taking wonderful trips that you, you know, don't have anybody to travel with or whatever. So I think it can exacerbate loneliness in that way because you're constantly comparing yourself to other people at their peak moments because that's when people post their pictures. And there is something about, aside from the fomo, aside from that, the kinds of connections you make through social media don't seem to be the same as those should make in real life. I haven't seen wonderful research on this yet, but it seems to me an area ripe for exploration. It seems so clear somehow that you can be online, communicating, even playing games with people, from all over the world, and seemingly making new friends and still feel quite lonely and be lonely because you turn off the computer or walk into another room and you're alone.

Brian Anderson: A lot's been written, especially since the election of Donald Trump, about the state of rust belt communities. The opioid crisis, which you mentioned earlier. How much in your view is the family breakdown you're describing having an impact on those communities? And is it part of what's causing the problem or is it an outgrowth of the breakdown in those communities? Economic breakdown.

Kay Hymowitz: Yeah, there's no question that family breakdown exacerbates and intensifies the loss of these communities, or rather the jobs, the factories that have left. If you lose your job and you lose your wife or husband because to opioids, or they've just left, then you've got real trouble. You don't have anybody to support you through difficult times. One of the things I argue in that piece is that the breakdown in the family has not affected educated and well off people anywhere near to the extent that it has... well, blacks, and also now the white working class that came a little bit later. And I think what we underestimated, we who lived through the second demographic transition and played a role in pushing it actually because I was in college in the 1960s when a lot of these ideas were being tested out and promulgated. If the educated classes, the more well to do classes, were able to figure out a way to maintain their families, what they didn't anticipate, or that none of us anticipated, was that it would be much harder for people who were living more on the edge, who had evictions to worry about or layoffs or a factory closing. You need, in those cases, a culture that really supports, a cultural environment, that really supports the idea of the family and of kinship as people... as people that are there for you in hard times.

Brian Anderson: Providing a network of support...

Kay Hymowitz: That's right. That's right. And in those communities instead, we saw a more and more of a collapse of the family. Now was it possible that, we could have, in a different cultural environment, it could have been different? Maybe, maybe. It's very hard to disentangle the cause and effect here, but there's no question that they go hand... the loss of the working class or the manufacturing jobs, has definitely been related to the breakdown of the family in the working class. Now I should mention that one of the things that's happened as a result, well, related again to the breakdown of the family in those communities, is this opioid crisis. Opioids, as you may know, is now killing more people than traffic accidents, than car accidents. And I was amazed to see in a recent study that the victims or the people who die of opioid death are much more likely to be single, unmarried or divorced men. And that speaks of exactly what I've been trying to describe. I think that women are better at creating their own social networks. This was something that the sociologist, Eric Klinenberg, who wrote a book called Going Solo, about people living alone. It's something he noticed as he started to interview people who were living alone. Even among the elderly women were more likely to want to live alone. They didn't want to remarry if there were widowed or divorced. But who kept fairly rich lives, they were still able to... they volunteered. They had friends, networks of friends that they could go out with, and that sort of thing. So, and if there were children, they were closer to the kids than a single father. So they had all those supports. Men seem to suffer much more loneliness than women. And you know, we can debate from here to eternity why that is. But there it is.

Brian Anderson: Well, to ask a final question, and it's how you conclude your piece: What might be necessary to start re-knitting the social fabric in a way that might address this problem. You mentioned Tom Wolfe's idea of a "Great Re-learning." Say a little bit about that?

Kay Hymowitz: Well first, I should say that there are a lot of government programs for seniors, a lot of, on the federal level and the city and local level. There are all kinds of ways that civil society jumps in. Seniors Helping Seniors is one group, Meals on Wheels, organizations like that. They are absolutely essential and beneficial and I don't want to knock them at all, but they don't begin to address the loss that a lot of people are feeling, or the loneliness. So one of the things that struck me in thinking about all this was how much joy and pleasure so many of my friends, and I should say I'm 70 years old, so many of my friends now with grandchildren, would mostly worry when their kids were growing up about their careers. They would focus so much on their education. Starting from early on, we were the beginning of helicopter parents, not quite as bad as today, but it did begin quite a while ago. But never talking about this other, what I consider to be the other big goal in life: to find a spouse, a kind and reliable and giving spouse who will make a good mother or father for your children. Because most people are going to want children. And society's depend on them wanting children. Those parents didn't talk to their kids about these things. And yet here I was going to weddings and watching these grandchildren being born and the parents were going nuts. I thought, well, why wouldn't they ever talk about the joy of this stage of life and of the connection that we now have with our children. And this is one lovely thing of the that has followed the second demographic transition is, I think, there's a much, much less of a generation gap between me and my kids then there was between me and my own parents because,

Brian Anderson: Yeah, I think that's true.

Kay Hymowitz: And there's a kind of companionship and friendship that I didn't see in my day so much. We have that, and it's a source of great comfort and pleasure. I think for most of the people that are able to experience it. So I note all that because I want readers to realize that this is something we don't talk about to our kids very much. And so we have another generation, growing up, who have never heard those words or any of those concepts from their parents or from anybody.

Brian Anderson: Well maybe it's a time for a different kind of conversation. In any case, don't forget to check out Kay's brilliant essay in City Journal, it's called Alone. It's in our latest issue you can find it on our website and we will link to it in the description. You can follow Kay on Twitter @KayHymowitz. You can also find City Journal on Twitter, @CityJournal and on Instagram @CityJournal_MI, and always, if you like what you've heard on the podcast, give us a nice rating on iTunes. Thanks for listening, and thanks, Kay Hymowitz, for joining us.

EYE ON THE NEWS

An Addiction Crisis Disguised as a Housing Crisis

Opioids are fueling homelessness on the West Coast.

Christopher F. Rufo

June 14, 2019 

The Social Order

California

By latest count, some 109,089 men and women are sleeping on the streets of major cities in California, Oregon, and Washington. The homelessness crisis in these cities has generated headlines and speculation about “root causes.” Progressive political activists allege that tech companies have inflated housing costs and forced middle-class people onto the streets. Declaring that “no two people living on Skid Row . . . ended up there for the same reasons,” Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, for his part, blames a housing shortage, stagnant wages, cuts to mental health services, domestic and sexual abuse, shortcomings in criminal justice, and a lack of resources for veterans. These factors may all have played a role, but the most pervasive cause of West Coast homelessness is clear: heroin, fentanyl, and synthetic opioids.

https://www.city-journal.org/opiods-homelessness-west-coast?utm_source=City+Journal+Update&utm_campaign=7b016d8c41-

Homelessness is an addiction crisis disguised as a housing crisis. In Seattle, prosecutors and law enforcement recently estimated that the majority of the region’s homeless population is hooked on opioids, including heroin and fentanyl. If this figure holds constant throughout the West Coast, then at least11,000 homeless opioid addicts live in Washington, 7,000 live in Oregon, and 65,000 live in California (concentrated mostly in San Francisco and Los Angeles). For the unsheltered population inhabiting tents, cars, and RVs, the opioid-addiction percentages are even higher—the City of Seattle’s homeless-outreach team estimates that 80 percent of the unsheltered population has a substance-abuse disorder. Officers must clean up used needles in almost all the homeless encampments.

For drug cartels and low-level street dealers, the 

business of supplying homeless addicts with 

heroin, fentanyl, and other synthetic opioids is 

extremely lucrative. According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the average heavy-opioid user consumes $1,834 in drugs per month. Holding rates constant, we can project that the total business of supplying heroin and other opioids to the West Coast’s homeless population is more than $1.8 billion per year. In effect, Mexican cartels, Chinese fentanyl suppliers, and local criminal networks profit off the misery of the homeless and offload the consequences onto local governments struggling to get people off the streets.

West Coast cities are seeing a crime spike associated with homeless opioid addicts. In Seattle, police busted two sophisticated criminal rings engaged in “predatory drug dealing” in homeless encampments (they were found in possession of $20,000 in cash, heroin, firearms, knives, machetes, and a sword). Police believe that “apartments were serving as a base of operations that supplied drugs to the streets, and facilitated the collection and resale of stolen property.” In other words, drug dealers were exploiting homeless addicts and using the city’s maze of illegal encampments as distribution centers. In my own Fremont neighborhood, where property crime has surged 57 percent over the past two years, local business owners have formed a group to monitor a network of RVs that circulate around the area to deal heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamines. Dealers have become brazen—one recently hung up a spray-painted sign on the side of his RV with the message: “Buy Drugs Here!”

What are local governments doing to address this problem? To a large extent, they have adopted a strategy of deflection, obfuscation, and denial. In her  #SeattleForAll public relations campaign, Mayor Jenny Durkan insists that only one in three homeless people struggle with substance abuse, understating the figures of her own police department as well as the city attorney, who has claimed that the real numbers, just for opioid addiction, rise to 80 percent of the unsheltered.

The consequences of such denial have proved disastrous: no city on the West Coast has a solution for homeless opioid addicts. Los Angeles, which spent $619 million on homelessness last year, has adopted a strategy of palliative care—keeping addicts alive through distribution of the overdose drug naloxone—but fails to provide access to on-demand detox, rehabilitation, and recovery programs that might help people overcome their addictions. The city has been cursed, in this sense, with temperate weather, compounded by permissive policies toward public camping and drug consumption that have attracted20,687 homeless individuals from outside Los Angeles County.

No matter how much local governments pour into affordable-housing projects, homeless opioid addicts—nearly all unemployed—will never be able to afford the rent in expensive West Coast cities. The first step in solving these intractable issues is to address the real problem: addiction is the common denominator for most of the homeless and must be confronted honestly if we have any hope of solving it.

$2,198,468,000,000: Federal Spending Hit 10-Year High Through March; Taxes Hit 5-Year Low

By Terence P. Jeffrey | April 10, 2019 | 5:09 PM EDT

(Getty Images/Ron Sachs-Pool)

(CNSNews.com) - The federal government spent $2,198,468,000,000 in the first six months of fiscal 2019 (October through March), which is the most it has spent in the first six months of any fiscal year in the last decade, according to the Monthly Treasury Statements.

The last time the government spent more in the October-through-March period was in fiscal 2009, when it spent $2,326,360,180,000 in constant March 2019 dollars.

Fiscal 2009 was the fiscal year that began with President George W. Bush signing a $700-billion law to bailout the banking industry in October 2008 and then saw President Barack Obama sign a $787-billion stimulus law in February 2009.

At the same time that the Treasury was spending the most it has spent in ten years, it was also taking in less in tax revenue than it has in the past five years.

In the October-through-March period, the Treasury collected $1,507,293,000,000 in total taxes. The last time it collected less than that in the first six months of any fiscal year was fiscal 2014, when it collected $1,420,897,880,000 in constant March 2019 dollars.

The difference in the federal taxes taken in and the spending going out resulted in a federal deficit of $691,174,000,000 for the first six months of the fiscal year.

During those six months, the Department of Health and Human Services spent the most money of any federal agency with outlays of $583.491 billion. The Social Security Administration was second, spending $540.426 billion. The Department of Defense was third, spending $325.518 billion. Interest on Treasury securities was third, coming in at $259.687 for the six-month period.

Both individual and corporation income taxes were down in the first six months of this fiscal year compared to last year. In the first six months of fiscal 2018, the Treasury collected $736,274,000,000 in individual income taxes (in constant March 2019 dollars). In the first six months of this fiscal year, it collected $723,828,000,000.

In the first six months of fiscal 2018, the Treasury collected $80,071,070,000 in corporation income taxes (in constant March 2019 dollars). In the first six months of this fiscal year, it collected $67,987,000,000.

(Historical budget numbers in this story were adjusted to March 2019 dollars using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator.)

(Table 3 from the Monthly Treasury Statement, seen below, summarizing federal receipts and outlaws for the past month and for the fiscal year to date and compares it to the previous fiscal year.)

 

 

 

 

 

After Lehman's Collapse: A Decade of Delay

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/01/after_lehmans_collapse_a_decade_of_delay.html

By Jon N. Hall

Now that the 2018 midterms are over, folks can address the elephant in the room. If one tuned into Fox Business midday on January 7, one heard legendary corporate raider Carl Icahn dilate on the dimensions of the pachyderm, which he pegged at $250 trillion. That’s the size of worldwide debt. But can that be right -- it’s more than eleven times the official U.S. federal government’s debt? And in case you didn’t notice, it is a quarter of one quadrillion bucks. Pretty soon we’ll be talking real money.

Icahn’s $250T quotation for worldwide debt came out last year. On September 13, Bloomberg ran “$250 Trillion in Debt: the World’s Post-Lehman Legacy” by Brian Chappatta, who draws off data from the Institute of International Finance’s July 9 “Global Debt Monitor,” (to read IIF reports, one must sign up). Chappatta wonders how the world’s central bankers can “even pretend to know how to reverse what they’ve done over the past decade”:

[Central banks] kept interest rates at or below zero for an extended period […] and used bond-buying programs to further suppress sovereign yields, punishing savers and promoting consumption and risk-taking. Global debt has ballooned over the past two decades: from $84 trillion at the turn of the century, to $173 trillion at the time of the 2008 financial crisis, to $250 trillion a decade after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s collapse.

Chappatta breaks global debt down into four categories: financial corporations, nonfinancial corporations, households, and governments. In every category, global nominal debt rose from 2008 to 2018, with the debt of governments hitting $67T. In the important debt-as-a-percentage-of-gross-domestic-product measurement, three of the categories rose while only financial corporations fell, “leaving their debt-to-GDP ratio as low as it has been in recent memory.” Global banks seem to be “healthier and more resilient to another shock.” After reporting on worldwide debt, Chappatta then looks at U.S. debt.

What’s interesting about debt in America is that as a percentage of GDP, households and financial corporations have sharply reduced their debt. It is only government in America that has seen a sharp debt-to-GDP uptick, and it was quoted at more than 100 percent of GDP. That’s rather higher than for all government debt worldwide.

Besides the massive racking up of debt over the last decade there’s something else that should concern us: the massive creation of new money. One of the ways money is created is when central banks engage in the “bond-buying programs” that Chappatta refers to. We call such programs “quantitative easing.” When the Federal Reserve buys assets, like treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, it needs money. So the Fed just creates the money ex nihilo.

Since the U.S. isn’t the only nation that has been busy buying bonds and creating money, one might wonder just how much money there is in the world. In June of 2017,HowMuch put out “Putting the World’s Money into Perspective,” which is a nice little graphic that puts the category “All Money” at $83.6T.

In November of 2017, MarketWatch ran “Here’s all the money in the world, in one chart” by Sue Chang, who in her short intro to the chart has some interesting things to say about global money, including cryptocurrencies. She writes of “narrow money” and “broad money” and pegs the latter at $90.4T, (or what Sen. Everett Dirksen would call “real money”.) If you want to examine Chang’s chart more closely, I’ve “excised” it here for your convenience; don’t miss the notes on the right margin. (Because its depth is 13,895 pixels, you might want to just save the chart to your computer rather than print it off.)

So, in addition to an historic run-up in debt, there’s been a monster amount of new money created. Chappatta calls it the “grandest central-bank experiment in history.” His use of “experiment” is apropos, as one wonders whether the world’s central bankers and their economists really know what they’ve been doing.

One ray of hope might just be President Trump’s choice of Jerome Powell as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, (Trump has such good instincts about people). One can get a sense of the man from his January talk with David Rubenstein at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. (video and transcript). It’s refreshing that Mr. Powell disdains the “Fed speak” used by his predecessors.

Chappatta’s article is quite worth reading, and it’s not very long. The charts are user-friendly, although animated ones are a bit “creative.” The last section, “China Charges Forward,” is especially worthwhile.

This is the post-Lehman legacy. To pull the global economy back from the brink, governments borrowed heavily from the future. That either portends pain ahead, through austerity measures or tax increases, or it signals that central-bank meddling will become a permanent fixture of 21st century financial markets.

Given those alternatives, let’s try a little austerity. But austerity would entail spending cuts, and Congress has a poor history in that regard. In fact, since fiscal 2007, the year before the financial crisis, total federal spending has gone from $2.72T a year to more than $4T. While austere citizens deleverage and get their fiscal affairs in order, Congress shamefully borrows and spends like never before.

Congress’ solutions are to bail out, prop up, and do whatever it takes to avoid reforming what it has created. So they farm out their responsibilities to the Federal Reserve. Indeed, in the July 17, 2012 meeting of the Senate Banking Committee (go to the 53:50 point of this C-SPAN video), Chuck Schumer told Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke the following:

So given the political realities, Mr. Chairman, particularly in this election year, I'm afraid the Fed is the only game in town. And I would urge you to take whatever actions you think would be most helpful in supporting a stronger economic recovery… So get to work, Mr. Chairman. (Chuckles.)

So the Fed is “the only game in town” because there are only monetary solutions for the economy, right? There aren’t any fiscal solutions, as they would involve Congress, and Congress is busy running for re-election, right? Sounds like you’re abdicating your responsibilities, Chuck.

The last decade has been an exercise in delay. Congress has avoided doing the difficult and unpopular things that would help avoid future financial collapses. If Congress were serious about balancing the budget, then social programs would be on the chopping block, because that’s where the real money goes.

Jon N. Hall of ULTRACON OPINION is a programmer from Kansas City.

 

 

 

 

 

"The Federal Reserve is a key mechanism for perpetuating this whole filthy system, in which "Wall Street rules."

Wall Street rules

 

The Federal Reserve sent a clear message to Wall Street on Friday: It will not allow the longest bull market in American history to end. The message was received loud and clear, and the Dow rose by more than 700 points.

Hundreds of thousands of federal workers remain furloughed or forced to work without pay as the partial government shutdown enters its third week, but the US central bank is making clear that all of the resources of the state are at the disposal of the financial oligarchy.

Responding to Thursday’s market selloff following a dismal report from Apple and signs of a manufacturing slowdown in both China and the US, the Fed declared it was “listening” to the markets and would scrap its plans to raise interest rates.

Speaking at a conference in Atlanta, where he was flanked by his predecessors Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, both of whom had worked to reflate the stock market bubble after the 2008 financial crash, Chairman Jerome Powell signaled that the Fed would back off from its two projected rate increases for 2019.

“We’re listening sensitively to the messages markets are sending,” he said, adding that the central bank would be “patient” in imposing further rate increases. To underline the point, he declared, “If we ever came to the conclusion that any aspect of our plans” was causing a problem, “we wouldn’t hesitate to change it.”

This extraordinary pledge to Wall Street followed the 660 point plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Thursday, capping off the worst two-day start for a new trading year since the collapse of the dot.com bubble.

William McChesney Martin, the Fed chairman from 1951 to 1970, famously said that his job was “to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going.” Now the task of the Fed chairman is to ply the wealthy revelers with tequila shots as soon as they start to sober up.

Powell’s remarks were particularly striking given that they followed the release Friday of the most upbeat jobs report in over a year, with figures, including the highest year-on-year wage growth since the 2008 crisis, universally lauded as “stellar.”

While US financial markets have endured the 

worst December since the Great Depression, 

amid mounting fears of a looming recession 

and a new financial crisis, analysts have been

quick to point out that there are no “hard” 

signs of a recession in the United States.

Both the Dow and the S&P 500 indexes have fallen more than 15 percent from their recent highs, while the tech-heavy NASDAQ has entered bear market territory, usually defined as a drop of 20 percent from recent highs.

The markets, Powell admitted, are “well ahead of the data.” But it is the markets, not the “data,” that Powell is listening to.

Since World War II, bear markets have occurred, on average, every five-and-a-half years. But if the present trend continues, the Dow will reach 10 years without a bear market in March, despite the recent losses.

Now the Fed has stepped in effectively to pledge that it will 

allocate whatever resources are needed to ensure that no 

substantial market correction takes place. But this means 

only that when the correction does come, as it inevitably 

must, it will be all the more severe and the Fed will have 

all the less power to stop it.

From the standpoint of the history of the institution, the Fed’s current more or less explicit role as backstop for the stock market is a relatively new development. Founded in 1913, the Federal Reserve legally has had the “dual mandate” of ensuring both maximum employment and price stability since the late 1970s. Fed officials have traditionally denied being influenced in policy decisions by a desire to drive up the stock market.

Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, appointed by Democratic President Jimmy Carter in 1979, deliberately engineered an economic recession by driving the benchmark federal funds interest rate above 20 percent. His highly conscious aim, in the name of combating inflation, was to quash a wages movement of US workers by triggering plant closures and driving up unemployment.

The actions of the Fed under Volcker set the stage for a vast upward redistribution of wealth, facilitated on one hand by the trade unions’ suppression of the class struggle and on the other by a relentless and dizzying rise on the stock market.

Volcker’s recession, together with the Reagan administration’s crushing of the 1981 PATCO air traffic controllers’ strike, ushered in decades of mass layoffs, deindustrialization and wage and benefit concessions, leading labor’s share of total national income to fall year after year.

These were also decades of financial deregulation, leading to the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s, the dot.com bubble of 1999-2000, and, worst of all, the 2008 financial crisis.

In each of these crises, the Federal Reserve carried out what became known as the “Greenspan put,” (later the “Bernanke put”)—an implicit guarantee to backstop the financial markets, prompting investors to take ever greater risks.

In 2008, this resulted in the most sweeping and systemic financial crisis since the Great Depression, prompting Fed Chairman Bernanke, New York Fed President Tim Geithner and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (the former CEO of Goldman Sachs) to orchestrate the largest bank bailout in human history.

Since that time, the Federal Reserve has carried out its most accommodative monetary policy ever, keeping interest rates at or near zero percent for six years. It supplemented this boondoggle for the financial elite with its multi-trillion-dollar “quantitative easing” money-printing program.

The effect can be seen in the ever more staggering wealth of the financial oligarchy, which has consistently enjoyed investment returns of between 10 and 20 percent every year since the financial crisis, even as the incomes of workers have stagnated or fallen.

American capitalist society is hooked on the toxic growth of social inequality created by the stock market bubble. This, in turn, fosters the political framework not just for the decadent lifestyles of the financial oligarchs, each of whom owns, on average, a half-dozen mansions around the world, a private jet and a super-yacht, but also for the broader periphery of the affluent upper-middle class, which provides the oligarchs with political legitimacy and support. These elite social layers determine American political life, from which the broad mass of working people is effectively excluded.

The Federal Reserve is a key mechanism for 

perpetuating this whole filthy system, in 

which “Wall Street rules.” But its services in behalf of 

the rich and the super-rich only compound the fundamental and 

insoluble contradictions of capitalism, plunging the system into 

ever deeper debt and ensuring that the next crisis will be that 

much more violent and explosive.

In this intensifying crisis, the working class must assert its independent interests with the same determination and ruthlessness as evinced by the ruling class. It must answer the bourgeoisie’s social counterrevolution with the program of socialist revolution.