Tag: Class Warfare

“A Total System Failure”

Matt Stoller is the Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project. He is the author of the Simon and Schuster book Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, which Business Insider called “one of the year’s best books on how to rethink capitalism and improve the economy.” He also worked for a member of the Financial Services Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives during the 2008 financial crisis. (See his full C.V. at the American Economic Liberties Project).

Mr. Stoller was recently interviewed by Democracy Now where he critiqued the Congressional Pandemic Relief Bill. He describes not only the American pandemic response under Trump, but the formulation of this “relief” bill a “total system failure.”

Here are a few excerpts from that interview. You can watch or read the entire interview here.

“Well, I mean, it’s not really a $2 trillion bill. It’s more like a $6 trillion to $10 trillion bill. So, one of the reasons you can tell that the bill is packed with corporate goodies is that, you know, Congress is debating and trying to figure out, oh, you know, is it $2 trillion, a bunch of money for hospitals or money for cities, and meanwhile, a couple days ago, Larry Kudlow is on a press conference and says, “Actually, this is a $6 trillion bill.” And it’s like, how does a bill go from $2 trillion to $6 trillion without anyone really noticing? And the answer is, there’s a bunch of stuff in there — and, you know, there are people on Wall Street chattering about how it’s actually going to be $10 trillion, because, you know, what’s another four? And that’s how you know that the bill is just packed with stuff for Wall Street, for large monopolists.

“And it’s done through a variety of opaque slush funds — the Federal Reserve, the FDIC guarantees a bank debt. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that, you know, some of us who worked in the financial crisis noticed, paid attention to, said, “Oh, that’s where they’re stealing all the money.” And so there’s a bunch of stuff in there that’s going to get to Boeing and airlines, that we know about, has been reported. There’s also a bunch of stuff that’s going to get to the hedge fund guys that are bunkering down in their underground wine caves or whatever. And meanwhile, the stuff that we need, for normal people — the ventilators, the unemployment — you know, that’s going to dribble out. Small business is going to dribble out.

“And so, what you’re going to see is the $4 trillion to $6 trillion to $8 trillion of basically no-cost or low-cost guaranteed credit is going to be used by Citibank, JPMorgan, and then any big monopolist or large company that can get access to it, to buy up their competitors and buy up small business, who are obviously now in a really distressed state because they don’t have any revenue. So that’s what’s going to happen.

“And all of this stuff that’s happening, the handover of power to Wall Street, is happening under the really cynical guise of helping people in a pandemic. A lot of this money is going to go to — some of the money is going to go to hospitals. Some of the money is going to go to help people in the pandemic. So there’s some good stuff here. That, of course, is going to dribble out on the rickety infrastructure of the Small Business Administration and unemployment insurance. Our government has been hollowed out, so this stuff isn’t going to get out quickly.

“If you have — basically, if you have an account at a large bank, if you’re a wealthy investor like Goldman Sachs, there’s a whole set of programs that you can get access to at the Federal Reserve — at least this was the case in 2008, and the Fed says they’re setting up similar structures — where you can borrow from the Fed, and you can gamble with it. And then, if you lose — right? — in your gambling, then the Fed will — you don’t have to pay the loan back to the Fed. So, that’s one of the — you know, and this is one of the programs they say, “Oh, we need to provide liquidity in the markets,” or various other really super boring things that sound like — you kind of go to sleep when you’re like, “Oh, all these alphabet soup programs and all this kind of jargon.” But that’s really what it is. It’s just, you know, “heads, I win; tails, you lose.” And that’s a lot of what these programs are.

“I mean, the Fed has already hired BlackRock, which is one of the world’s largest asset managers, to manage this multitrillion-dollar bailout, and they’ve said that BlackRock is going to be allowed to participate in the bailout. So they’re running the bailout, and they’re participating in the bailout. They’re already stealing, before the vote, the bill has even passed the House.”

“The Strong Do What They Can While the Weak Suffer What They Must.” (Thucydides)

David Dayen is executive editor at The American Prospect. Read his article

David Dayen

from yesterday explaining the hidden — and horrendous — details in the pending Congressional “relief” bill slithering its way through Congress.

This bill is a good example of the malicious ways in which corporate capitalists exploit moments of national crisis. Naomi Klein’s important book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, is now essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the economic times in which we live.

Dayen details some of the ways that Disaster Capitalists, corporate vultures haunting the halls of power, eager to pick over the bones of America’s corona victims, are exploiting the current pandemic to further enrich themselves, just as they did in 2018.

Human nature never changes. As in ancient Greece, the haves are doing what they can for themselves, while the have-nots are suffering as they always do.

Below is an excerpt from the article “Unsanitized: Bailouts, A Tradition Unlike Any Other.”

“This is a robbery in progress. And it’s not a bailout for the coronavirus. It’s a bailout for twelve years of corporate irresponsibility that made these companies so fragile that a few weeks of disruption would destroy them. The short-termism and lack of capital reserves funneled record profits into a bathtub of cash for investors. That’s who’s being made whole, financiers and the small slice of the public that owns more than a trivial amount of stocks. In fact they’ve already been made whole; yesterday Wall Street got the word that they’d be saved and stocks and bonds went wild. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is running these bailout programs for the Fed, and could explicitly profit if the Fed buys its funds, which it probably will.

“This is a rubber-stamp on an unequal system that has brought terrible hardship to the majority of America. The people get a $1,200 means-tested payment and a little wage insurance for four months. Corporations get a transformative amount of play money to sustain their system and wipe out the competition…

“This bill is an outrageous betrayal, a testament to how power works and saves itself. And Congress is about to put itself on the hook for it. Schumer has the Senate under his thumb, and he praised this bill at 2am this morning, so that’s a done deal. Any House member could deny unanimous consent and stop this, but that would require getting to Washington, forcing everyone else back to Washington in the middle of a pandemic, and delay what is needed (if temporary) relief for everyday people. I doubt anyone will do it. Pelosi purposefully put this in place before turning to remote voting to make such an action toxic…”

Read the entire piece here.

Congress is Fueling the Flames of Our Next Revolution

This is a Robbery in Progress.

That’s the opening sentence to Kystal Ball’s (yes, that’s her real name) description of the “relief bill” crafted by Congress.

Ms. Ball is a co-anchor of “The Rising” on Hill TV. I heartily recommend watching.

Today she provided a very good, and very scathing, break-down of the big-money corruption that lies at the heart of the most recent Senate bail-out bill.

Her analysis goes to the point. Watch her below by clicking on Krystal’s nose:

Abigail Disney, A Rare Millionaire Who Talks Sense About American Inequality

Abigail Disney is heiress to the Disney fortune.  Walt Disney was her great uncle.  She is also a documentary film-maker and generous philanthropist.

I recently discovered a CNBC interview and a short film in which she argues for the importance of higher taxes on the top 1% of Americans.  This, obviously, includes her and her family fortune.

She is a rare person.  A very wealthy woman who recognizes the structural injustices and systemic inequality built into American society.

The first clip is from an interview on CNBC.

Pay close attention to the obvious pro-status quo, business-as-usual bias on display by the three network anchors asking her questions.  It’s not actually an interview as much as it is an interrogation.

It’s another example of the typical shallowness that passes as insight for our corporate media.  The older fellow on the far right clearly thinks tha Ms. Disney is nuts.

But we have always known that the capitalist, moneyed class hates those it sees as traitors to their class.

Ms. Disney targets the recent Trump tax overhaul, its excessive benefits for the rich and its favoritism for large corporations.  Watch it here.

The second clip comes from “Now This.”  Here Ms. Disney explains a few of the ways in which Trump’s tax cuts have enriched the already super-rich while doing little or nothing for the poor and the middle-class.  Watch it here.

Remember, we are living in the midst of class-warfare, folks.

And, guess what.  You and I are on the losing side.