Witch-Doctor Politics

The GOP strategic calculus for winning the upcoming election is based not on logic but witch-doctor politics.

The GOP is pursuing a curious, zero-sum strategy to win the upcoming election: risk the nation in a desperate play to win the election by puffing up the economy temporarily at the risk of provoking a pandemic explosion after Election Day. The GOP strategy is zero-sum because the GOP only wins by causing the voters to lose, an odd way to become popular, to put it mildly. With the whole country resembling Florida by November, the GOP supposes that American voters will be more desperate for jobs than terrified of exploding Coronavirus death rates.

It is difficult to understand the logic of the GOP stance, but the explanation appears to be that it in fact has no logic—being instead based on the following error: the GOP believes that a choice exists between a healthy economy and a healthy population. It is surely obvious to anyone who stops to think that workers terrified of bringing Coronavirus home to their families will be very reluctant to go to work and most workers cannot work from home. Moreover, if the workers themselves are sick, they will be home in bed. Therefore, a healthy economy requires a healthy workforce: the route to a booming economy is a population of working people both healthy and confident of staying healthy.

Why don’t the members of the GOP elite understand this? Simple, actually: the GOP elite is composed of rich people.

Rich people, in general, have a bias: they see themselves as special (and they are—they have good health care). Hence, they forget that the source of all that money they have sucked away from the rest of society is…all those millions who are working. The rich are calculating that they can persuade more than half the voters to vote for rich people who are simultaneously making them poorer and making them sick. The man in the street may indeed get suckered one more time, but hospitals have already maxed out their ICU’s in multiple red state regions, and the word is getting out. Storing corpses in emergency refrigerated trucks  [e.g., in Texas or Florida] eventually gets noticed…

Yet it is not actually all that hard to imagine a logical policy for achieving control over the pandemic as the first step toward sustainable economic growth:

1. minimize and manage mass amusements, perhaps allowing well-policed beaching by admitting those with last names beginning with A-C to go to a public beach within 50 miles of home every other Tuesday, etc.);

2. prohibit parties, at home and elsewhere, with more than two friends;

3. eliminate indoor attendance at unnecessary public amusements (e.g., bars, gyms) with financial support for business owners to transfer such activities into well-policed open areas by appointment only;

4. mandate masks whenever encountering others;require that all large gatherings register with medical officials in advance and present a plan for complete identification of participants and follow-up contact tracing for one month;

5. to boost the economy, set up desperately needed rural health clinics; fund low-cost ambulance service for all rural and urban areas (at a minimum for those who have lost jobs due to Coronavirus); redesign schools to maximize student safety; build healthy meat-packing plants;

6. define conditions for easing up, make clear that compliance with rules to control the disease is all about everyone cooperating, and harshly punish those who do not care about their neighbors.

Even rich GOP elitists could think up such logical rules for giving everyone an even chance to have a little fun in acceptable safety with Federal financial support…if they truly wanted a healthy workforce and a strong economy. In reality, no choice exists between a strong economy and a healthy society: these are two sides of the same coin. The GOP elite is, however, not playing for the long run; they just want to stay in power and are willing to sacrifice the long-term for victory in November, hoping that they can pull a fast one again and keep Trump even as a minority president for one more term.

Binary choices are usually nothing more than simplistic dreams; reality is not quite that simple. In our current situation, things are not truly too complicated, however. We just need to think logically about the process (first, control the pandemic; then, ease into the economy by demonstrating that we can protect our children in school and our workers on the job). Accept the need for such a logical process, then design and enforce for everyone a set of policies to govern for society as a whole. But the rich do not naturally think of solving problems for the benefit of all; on the contrary, they see the world as a place of privilege, not the common good, and they naturally think about protecting their privileges.

Hence, the GOP elite is not even looking for solutions; it is looking for privilege—for the advantage of its privileged members. The GOP elite sees the world in binary terms: “us rich” vs “you others.” The common good is not considered; the GOP elite mindset does not even allow for a positive-sum outcome. “Zero sum” means someone has to lose, and for someone accustomed to privilege, that is the only option. Sharing, considering the common good would automatically require a reduction in the degree of privilege. When you spend your life maximizing your own personal privilege, it is very difficult to imagine shaving even a little off your big, fat piece of the pie.

Zero-sum thinking is a trap, blinding one to feasible alternatives that would spring into view if the mind were open to analyzing problems from the perspective of searching for positive-sum solutions. Investing in education for all is a positive-sum strategy: a more educated population generates more creative solutions, expanding national wealth [see Joseph Stiglitz, People, Power, and Profits]. Reserving education for the children of the elite to maintain the privileged status of the rich is a zero-sum strategy in our highly competitive global environment causes a country to lag further and further behind. Exactly the same distinction applies to the positive-sum strategy of health care for all (including a national policy to combat epidemics) vs. the zero-sum strategy of dividing society into a privileged elite protected from disease and a mass of sick workers.

Sadly, the GOP elite has its eyes trained like a laser on retaining power by betting everything on a simplistic and false binary choice: momentarily revive the economy on the backs of dead workers or destroy the Republican Party and (who knows) perhaps the Republic. The GOP electoral campaign thus stands teetering on a see-saw, one foot on a raging epidemic, the other on a sick economy–feeling for just the right balance to avoid falling off before Election Day.

As the GOP continues to punish American workers by depriving them of financial assistance while threatening them with witch-doctor cures for the pandemic the GOP is fostering by its own internally contradictory policy, one cannot but wonder when American workers will start demonstrating with demands for lockdown as the road to a healthy economy.

The GOP calculus of victory is witch-doctor politics. Can workers break the spell?

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Aug. 3 Note: Imagine the cross-benefits (i.e., to both the economy and everyone’s health) if lockdown were so managed as to restrain mass gatherings while also funding the physical redesign of businesses and classrooms to protect workers, customers, and children! Not rocket science; where there’s a will, there are many ways.

Democracy Protesters Need Organization to Defeat Abusive Elites

A spreading movement to defend and expand democracy by citizens willing to face down repressive, militarized police in the streets is now being led by the people of Brazil and Turkey but represents the aspirations of people everywhere who are concerned about civil liberties and elite abuse of power. Unfortunately, the lack of both national and international organization in support of democracy activists has left citizens marginalized–not just in Turkey and Brazil but also the U.S.— while putting the initiative in the hands of an abusive political/corporate elite.

Tools of the Rich

The citizens of the U.S. are shortchanging themselves by allowing the super-rich to define taboos in order to prevent society from considering fundamental reforms that might preserve our democracy, enhance our security, and improve our lives…at the expense of constraining the ability of the super-rich to amass more wealth.

Romney Dares Refer to ‘Hatred’?!?

Romney has accused Obama of campaigning on “hatred.” Now that he has brought up that particular topic…

Class War in America

The super-rich have launched a class war against the people of the U.S., a war that, for most of our politically naive population, was revealed only with the Financial Crisis of 2008, yet the super-rich continue to gain ground. An extraordinarily clear statement describing how this class war against America is being fought was given in testimony before Congress on July 10, 2012 by Dennis Kelleher, President and CEO of Better Markets, Inc. His statement is invaluable in outlining concisely what occurred and forecasting in detail the likely consequences of a continued failure of Washington to start representing the interests of, not corporations and the super-rich, but the American people. Every word is worth reading. What follows is just the outline.

Customers, credit and credit markets, job creators, businesses, investors and
consumers – all of Main Street and much of America, for that matter – have been devastated by a terrible economy that is a direct the result of the financial collapse and economic crisis that began in 2007, reached a peak in 2008-2009 and continues to this day.  Indeed, it was the worst financial collapse since the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and it is the worst economy since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

While many played a role in the recent collapse and crisis, Wall Street is at the top of the list of those responsible because it caused that collapse and crisis by the reckless and irresponsible creation and distribution of toxic and often worthless securities, among their many other actions.

Unfortunately, Wall Street, many of the major financial industry participants, and their trade groups and other allies deny or minimize their role in the financial collapse and the economic crisis.  Moreover, they are trying to obscure and conceal the cost of the collapse and crisis.  Perhaps most importantly, they are also engaged in a comprehensive misinformation campaign that attempts to refocus the public debate away from the crisis and Wall Street’s role in creating it to the new financial reform law and the rules being put in place to prevent
another crisis and protect the American people, taxpayers, Treasury and economy.

Thus, before the “impact” of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law–more properly
understood as the Wall Street re-regulation law – on customers, credit and job creators can be properly considered, a thorough discussion of the Wall Street-created financial collapse and economic crisis that gave rise to that law must come first.  After all, it would be impossible to evaluate the impact of a law without the context and an understanding of why the law exists, what the law was intended to do and how it was designed to do it.

Wall Street was able to cause the collapse and crisis largely because it used its
economic power to gain political, academic, media and other power that enabled it to tear down the many laws, rules and regulations put in place during the Great Depression of the 1930s to protect the American people from Wall Street’s recklessness and greed.  It must be remembered that, after those laws, rules and regulations were put in place, our country did not have a financial or economic crisis on that scale for more than 70 years.

It must also be remembered that, even with all those many laws, rules and regulations– a truly unprecedented degree of government regulation of Wall Street and the U.S. capital markets – our country prospered; we built the largest and most broad-based middle class in the history of the world; and Wall Street, our financial industry, our nonfinancial businesses and our economy all thrived.
By 2000, virtually all of those protections were torn down and Wall Street was not just de-regulated, but almost entirely un-regulated.  The results are clear: after 70 years of regulation that protected the American people, our financial system and our economy, it took just 7 years for Wall Street’s unregulated investment, trading and other activities to cause what almost became a second Great Depression.
Those actions by Wall Street required the U.S. government to spend, lend, guarantee, pledge, assume, or otherwise use trillions of dollars to save Wall Street from itself and to prevent the crisis from becoming even worse.  While they may deny it, every single major bank and all of the other too big to fail financial institutions would have collapsed into bankruptcy but for the actions of the U.S. government and the taxpayer dollars used to bail them out and put them back on the road to profitability. Thus, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, AIG, Citigroup and the others are only
in business today because they were all bailed out by the U.S. government and the American taxpayer.

But, those bailouts were only part of the costs of that crisis.  The economic wreckage caused by Wall Street’s actions has touched every corner of our country:  high and persistent unemployment and under-employment, historically high foreclosures and underwater homeowners, slow-to-no economic growth, business failures, untold wealth destruction, widespread and growing poverty, and so many other costs continue to mount, including, increasingly, a loss of belief in the American Dream.

Just one measure of these costs reveals how deep and overwhelming the crisis has been and continues to be on our country:  the Federal Reserve Board recently released a study that shows that the net worth of the median family declined 38.8% in just three years, from 2007-2010, wiping out more than $7 trillion in wealth – almost two decades of  crisis. [Dennis Kelleher in testimony before Congress.]

That is what class war in America looks like.

The American Dream…for the 1%

When the rich get richer while the rest all get poorer and the rich campaign to increase their privileges, it amounts to class war.

(Click to View)

Democracy Now [6/6/12] pointedly describes the current state of the American Dream:

Several months before Occupy Wall Street, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” an article for Vanity Fair. He returns to the subject in his new book looking at how inequality is now greater in the United States than any other industrialized nation. He notes that the six heirs of the Wal-Mart fortune command wealth equivalent to the entire bottom 30 percent of American society. “It’s a comment both on how well off the top are and how poor the bottom are,” Stiglitz says. “It’s really emblematic of the divide that has gotten much worse in our society.” On Tuesday, Bloomberg News reported that pay for the top CEOs on Wall Street increased by more than 20 percent last year. Meanwhile, census data shows nearly one in two Americans, or 150 million people, have fallen into poverty or could be classified as low-income. “United States is the country in the world with the highest level of inequality [of the advanced industrial countries], and it’s getting worse,” Stiglitz says. “What’s even more disturbing is we’ve [also] become the country with the least equality of opportunity.”

The “rich enriching themselves by stealing from the poor” is not just a slogan; this is what it looks like. When the U.S. has the highest level of inequality among industrial countries and the least equality of opportunity, and the elite of the business world protected by top politicians in both major parties continue to demand more government welfare (e.g., low capital gains taxes) and less regulation, that adds up to class war.

Wisconsin: Second Victory for the Elite Over Society

The Wisconsin election was not about union power; it was about democracy, and the voters dealt democracy a major defeat, This is what class war by the rich looks like in a land of the shortsighted.

Two major battles in the developing class war in the U.S. have occurred in the past five years: 

1. the decision to provide Wall St. with a bailout without compensating public control over the negligent and/or criminal financial institutions that got the corporate welfare;
2. the victory of Wisconsin Governor Walker in his recall election campaign funded by outside corporate millions.

Real News summarizes the Walker victory:

In Wisconsin, Scott Walker has won the recall election. He remains the governor. Millions of dollars poured into Wisconsin, something like $45 million for Scott Walker, most of which came from outside the state. He outspent his Democratic rival, who spent somewhere close to $10 million—apparently, most of that money came from within the state.

The wise people of Wisconsin have determined that their enemies are those who protect their homes from burglars, those who risk their lives to quench fires, and those who teach their children. Such public workers do not deserve a chance to organize; the government should have the right to break its contracts with them as convenient. Will a Wisconsin policeman now think twice before risking his life to protect a victim? Will a Wisconsin fireman now think twice before entering a burning home to save the owner? And as for Wisconsin teachers, no doubt if they stop teaching altogether, the wise voters of Wisconsin will not even notice.


These two back-to-back elite victories over society may spark the awakening of the naive, short-sighted, and near comatose U.S. public, but at present they signal the nearly complete control over U.S. “democracy” by the super-rich. “Democracy” the U.S. remains in the sense that the voters did in fact have the power to win this one, had they only the wisdom to see their own common self-interest. Alas, “common self-interest” is a concept evidently too subtle for most, in that it is evidently self-contradictory over the short run, so corporate millions “bought” the election not through fraud (as far as I am aware) but through propaganda – convincing a big chunk of Wisconsin’s workers to support the rich rather than maintain solidarity with their own. Time will tell what happens to wage levels and working conditions in Wisconsin now that the rich have clear…and legal control.


It seemed,  back in the long, viciously cold winter of 2011, that the clarity of the struggle in Wisconsin between outside corporate greed trying to break the post-New Deal social contract with employees and the public–represented by police, firemen, and teachers–was so incontrovertible that even the most apolitical wage-earner could not help but understand his long-term interest. The tens of thousands who risked frostbite to defend their legal rights to organize so as to defend themselves against corporate organizations offered powerful evidence that Americans were finally awakening from their delusion that Washington politicians were serving them rather than their super-rich corporate patrons. Finally, it appeared, the neo-con/neo-liberal scam against America–so clearly exposed by the highly profitable “war on terror” along with the bailout of Wall St. and refusal of Washington to force corporate leaders to defend themselves in court–would be terminated by an awakened American public.


Unfortunately, the generation-long covert class war of the super-rich has been fought with enough skill that even such evidence as the profitable (for CEOs) war on terror and a corporate self-enrichment scheme that wrecked the U.S. economy has not convinced Americans that they need to fight back.


There is, however, much more to Walker’s victory than simply the self-delusion and shortsightedness of the American voter. One other critical facet is that this one-sided class war has now achieved so many victories that the whole structure of government is aligned on the side of the rich.  Black Agenda Report editor Bruce Dixon itemizes some of the legal weapons the rich have put into place to overthrow the New Deal compromise [6/6/12]:

…it was union leaders who damped down the calls for, and explicitly repudiated talk of a general strike. To be fair, under present federal and state laws, a union official who even calls for, let alone is part of pulling off a general strike is probably guilty of multiple felonies and conspiracies to commit, perhaps even RICO and terrorist prosecutions if judges and district attorneys are feeling ambitious. Such an official also risks confiscation of union funds and assets, either outright in a hurry or after prolonged expensive litigation. But that’s what people involved in movements do — they take individual and collective risks and they violate laws for the cause, whatever that happens to be.

It seems that it is perfectly OK for a couple of billionaire CEOs to organize with a handful of their buddies to buy an election, but for workers to organize to defend American society is now a crime. It is no coincidence that the U.S. increasingly looks today like the U.S. of 1929. When the rich control government officials and manage to slant the legal system in their private defense, where can the public go? You young folks better get off the Internet and read Steinbeck before it is too late.


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Update: Romney on Wisconsin

“[Obama] says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.” [Democracy Now 6/11/12.]

It is hard to think of anything more fundamental to civil society than good education and security for citizens in their homes and on the streets. Romney has made the attitude of the new Republican Party toward the American people all too clear.

Class War Fundamentals

Class war makes everything different: instead of agreement on the rules serving as the foundation for common success, society is split in two camps, with at least one trying to ruin the future of the other. If you happen to be part of the “other,” you need to know that you are under attack.

Class war makes everything different. If we are all united,everyone may still spend most of their energy trying to get theirs first, but we all agree on the rules, and the game is ultimately more like a picnic with a shortage of chocolate cake than a fight to the death: everyone can win at least a little, and everyone agrees that the best society is indeed one in which everyone wins. If the rich get richer, they do so only so long as the poor and the average simultaneously gain. If wars are fought, they are fought to defend society from real threats.

A class war situation is exactly the reverse. If society is split into two camps, haves and have-nots, with each side perceiving the game as zero-sum, the rich do not get richer by floating on a rising tide but by stealing what little the poor have, and the poor respond by trying to kill the rich. Rather than trusting the rich to run the government for the good of all, the poor concentrate on trying to dethrone the rascals. Rather than sharing to create a stable, healthy, productive society, the rich do one of three things: pretend the poor do not exist (the gated community strategy), keep the poor as cannon fodder and cheap labor (the Middle Ages and Wisconsin Republican strategy), or eliminate them (the Colombian cattle baron and Israeli strategy). Wars are not last resort efforts to protect the society but eagerly awaited opportunities for the rich to accelerate the process of self-enrichment; that is, foreign wars are primarily features of the domestic civil war, with calls for “patriotism” just so much wool to be pulled over the eyes of the man in the street, who is too busy trying to survive to give any serious thought to politics.

The existence of elites appears inevitable in all large modern societies. Most people simply do not have the interest to get involved, and the minute you trust others to govern on your behalf, you create an elite. We could of course make some simple and rather obvious legal changes to minimize the production of elites, the most fundamental perhaps being limiting any individual to holding office for only one term…ever. We could also institute national recall provisions, like that currently being used to challenge Wisconsin Governor Walker. And of course we could have a tax system that encourages everyone to work hard by promoting the growth of the middle class, as the U.S. so successfully did from the end of WWII (indeed, from the New Deal) until Carter lost the tax battle to elitists in the late 1970s. But these are issues that glaze over the eyes of most of the victims, and elitists are working very hard to undermine education in order to keep things that way.

If all this seems complicated, the reason is that we are educated purposefully to make us ignorant of these issues. Public education is primarily a vehicle to instill patriotism (whose uses have already been referred to) rather than to teach the tools for maintaining vigilance over those to whom we delegate power. Our educational system serves our ruling elite, not us. It is probably true that there is no better country on earth in which to obtain a genuine education, one that will make of you a citizen armed to protect yourself from elite abuse, but that requires effort – either go to a really good college and spend years studying history, politics, and economics under unusually open-minded professors or self-educate yourself by successfully navigating the intellectual mine field of the Internet, reading things that reveal how the world works. How one either selects the professors or negotiates the Internet intellectual mine-field without already being an expert is another question.

In any case, education is key, and elitists know this. Thus, one of the clearest clues to the real intentions of politicians is their attitude toward education. Those who strive to strengthen public education and protect academic freedom are defenders of liberty; those who want dictatorship (to put it bluntly – call it “rule by your betters,” if that makes you happy) will attack public schooling, shift funds to private schools with ideological agendas, attack teachers’ unions, and do everything they can to subordinate university professors to political control (e.g., curb freedom of speech for any who criticize Israel, try to end Federal funding of Islamic studies, call anyone who speaks Russian a “commie symp”).

The first two paragraphs attempt to make the concept of class war simple, but in practice class war is the ultimate in human duplicity and subtlety. The most difficult challenge of winning a class war is figuring out that you are under attack. And solid education in the social sciences is the only microscope with sufficient resolution to reveal the initial stages of the attack.

Do not despair, however. Eventually, the class war will become so clear that only those determined to remain blind will be unable to perceive it, for elites are condemned to suffering from an appetite they cannot quench. Eventually, no matter how rich the elites become, they will bite off one bite more than they can chew. Then, the whole social sand castle in which they have the tower suites will dissolve, hurting themselves at least as much as it hurts everyone else. At that point, if not sooner, you will know it is time to fight back.

U.S. Class War By the Rich: “Trickle Up”

Previously, I asserted that the American people are in the midst of, and—in great part because they do not know they are in the midst of it—losing a class war. This is an extreme assertion that no doubt shocks most readers, though one may imagine it does not at all shock the several million who have recently dropped out of the hopeless job market. In any case, the assertion needs to be defended, so let’s look a little deeper.

Back in the Great Depression, the working class almost started a class war in the U.S. out of desperation, but the elite compromised and shared a bit with the rest of American society, which was in the end very conservative and quite willing to let the rich remain rich (not to mention alive). The filthy rich—those who got rich by cheating rather than working hard, and yes, the term applied to some of the rich then as it does today—were not attacked, jailed, or even removed from their positions of privilege. Too selfish to feel any gratitude, in the 1970s, the rich saw their chance and launched a campaign to shove what we now call the 99%, for their campaign targeted the middle class just as much as blue collar workers, back into the depressed state they had occupied in 1929. When you examine the details and see the moderation of the aspirations of American workers and the extreme nature of the demands of the rich, it is hard to find a better term for this new campaign than “class warfare.” That is, the campaign was not designed to protect the rich; they were hardly at risk in a conservative society where everyone just wanted to join the rich and  believed he might just do it. No, the counterattack of the rich against the New Deal compromise was designed to defeat, defang, and debilitate everyone else.

Curiously, this anti-social campaign, which we call the Reagan Revolution, began with Carter. Whether he was complicit or just steamrolled is difficult to judge and another story. The most reasonable interpretation appears to be that both Carter and Reagan were more surfers on an elite wave than leaders. In any case, what matters to American society is that the moderate post-Depression compromise known as the New Deal suddenly began cracking apart under a conservative counterattack intended to destroy the bargaining power of everyone except CEOs. The New Deal was  “moderate” because it not only did not punish the rich for causing the Great Depression but even went so far as to permit them to remain rich; “moderate” is a kind characterization, for it certainly was not balanced. A balanced new deal would have leveled pay; a “radical” new deal would have eliminated the ruling class. A generation later a moderate deal that allowed the rich to remain rich as long as the rest could see steady improvement proved unacceptable to those rich, strong evidence that their elimination in 1929 might have been a good idea after all.

Since Americans are now groping in utter confusion for a solution to the mess that this conservative counterattack produced, the details matter. They matter because it is hard to see how the 99% can effectively defend themselves unless they understand the subtle ways in which the rich, with their lobbying army, are fighting this war. Occupy! Citizens may be heroes, but their street protest tactics are only the first phase and can hardly accomplish anything unless “we the people” do our homework.

Carter era defeats for the American people included the failure to pass tax reform, the failure to get a stronger consumer protection agency, and the failure of health care reform, and the failure to update labor relations laws to protect unions, and a cut in the capital gains tax. [See Hacker and Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics, pp. 98-100.] One might also mention a critical missing issue – even as TV was becoming the center of campaigns, no law was created to provide free TV time for candidates. The result of all these arguably small steps is, a generation later, about as hard to see as a tsunami: the electoral process has been so totally bought by the rich that democracy in the U.S. is more like gladiator games than anything related to government, American health care is scandalous as the worst in the developed world, we are plagued by poisonous consumer goods made by American companies but in China, unions are something old people can remember if they think carefully (with the final battle in the campaign to destroy worker rights now a cliffhanger in Wisconsin), and with the tax code punishing workers while rewarding Wall St. gambling, of course everyone who can is trying to gamble rather than work.

To many Americans, caught up either with daily lives or the drama of the Cold War, these initial battles under Carter of the class war by the rich did not seem all that dramatic, and, given the corruption of many labor unions at the time, also seemed somewhat justified. A generation later, with Wall St. having transformed itself from financer of American industry into a global casino for the rich to gamble with other people’s money and with some 15,000,000 unemployed (combining the unemployed looking actively for work and those who have given up in despair), those initial battles in the new class war appear far more significant than they did at the time.

Journalist Matt Taibi summarizes how the Class War by the Rich was being fought circa 2007:

Governor Kasich, yeah, and he was intimately involved with selling — getting the state of Ohio’s pension fund to invest in Lehman Brothers and buy mortgage-backed securities. And of course they lost all that money. And this, broadly, was really what the mortgage bubble and the financial crisis was all about. It was essentially a gigantic criminal fraud scheme where all the banks were taking mismarked mortgage-backed securities, very, very dangerous, toxic subprime loans, they were chopping them up and then packaging them as AAA-rated investments, and then selling them to state pension funds, to insurance companies, to Chinese banks and Dutch banks and Icelandic banks. And, of course, these things were blowing up, and all those funds were going broke. But what they’re doing now is they’re blaming the people who were collecting these pensions — they’re blaming the workers, they’re blaming the firemen, they’re blaming the policemen — whereas, in reality, they were actually the victims of this fraud scheme. And the only reason that people aren’t angrier about this, I think, is because they don’t really understand what happened. If these were car companies that had sold a trillion dollars’ worth of defective cars to the citizens of the United States, there would be riots right now. But these were mortgage-backed securities, it’s complicated, people don’t understand it, and they’re only now, I think, beginning to realize that they were defrauded. [Democracy Now 2/22/2011.]

Banks are, in moral terms, tools for society; they have no independent “rights.” When banks plot to defraud pension funds or behave with such abandon that they “just happen” to defraud pension funds on a regular and widespread basis, society needs to get itself new tools.

Now the mesmerizing (to the many naïve working class voters who supported Reagan while he ate their lunch, [not to mention the much more extreme gang under Gingrich that followed) the nonsense of trickle down has been exposed as the pure propaganda the small progressive sector claimed it was all along: cookie crumbs did not trickle down from the billionaire’s table for everyone else. That had actually been the New Deal “deal.” In reality, after Reagan, the rich became richer by stealing from the poor and by impoverishing the great middle class that personified the American dream. When a mortgage company CEO can skim a few thousand in excess fees off the top of hundreds of thousands of mortgages and then escape criminal responsibility by quickly selling those mortgages to…say, a Chinese bank, that CEO can do very well indeed, thank you, even in the midst of general disaster, and he can easily afford to contribute appropriately to the politicians who look the other way. That’s one good route for a rich man to get richer by stealing from the poor. It’s called “trickle up.”

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The Global View of Class Struggle – Immanuel Wallerstein

The world income squeeze is real, and not about to disappear. The structural crisis of the capitalist world-economy is making the standard solutions to economic downturns unworkable, no matter how much our pundits and politicians assure us that a new period of prosperity is on the horizon. [Common Dreams.]

Recognizing Class War

After a generation of subtle class war by the rich, a new pattern is emerging in the West: popular anger.

Which is more violent – a man who riots because he is starving and is being ignored by the authorities or a bank that sends in armed private thugs to evict a homeowner from a house the bank wants to foreclose on?

Which is more radical – forcing workers into unemployment or nationalizing the bank responsible for that wave of unemployment?

It is time for the West to wake up to socio-economic realities before the class war being provoked by the lust of the superrich returns us all to the grim battle between the extreme left and fascism. Bad as it has become, overall the last 75 years have been far better for Westerners than the bloody 1914-1945 war years. A rising class of educated, comfortable workers, both blue- and white-collar, is the goose that lays the rich banker’s golden eggs, and now these bankers are smashing those eggs out of pure spite – if they can’t have everything, they prefer to destroy society. That is what I call extremism. The total defeat and disappearance of the extreme left after the moderate tide of the New Deal compromise began lifting all boats contained a built-in poison: nothing inherent in that compromise actually prevented the super-rich from taking over, and the complacence of the increasingly comfortable and complacent middle class has permitted exactly that: the moderate middle moderately allowed the extreme right to continue to exist and now it is taking control.

The super-rich have many weapons, from wealth to the revolving door that enables them to control public policy and warp the system to their private advantage, but perhaps the most powerful weapon of the rich is linguistic: the rich define words, and both the complacent middle class and the increasingly angry but confused poor accept those definitions. As long as the 99% use the definitions of the super-rich, they will fail to see what is being done to them.


“Radical” is defined as anything that threatens the privileges of the rich. “Violence” is applied only to violence by the poor, never to violence by the rich. As for moderation, that would be an approach designed to preserve the livelihood that our society is accustomed to, would it not? Is it not self-evident that policies supporting the lives of all are moderate, while policies that steal from society for the benefit of some small group are…extremist?


Once our definitions are made logical, we can begin defending our values. How? Send Jamie Dimon to Hollywood to play the bad guy in a cops-and-robbers flic. Consummate actor that he is, he’d be a star. Then, appoint Elizabeth Warren to dismantle that great casino called J.P. Morgan and replace it with a thousand small-town banks that…do banking.

A pattern is emerging in the West as the class war of the rich slowly slaps people awake. The S&L crisis, today remembered only by William Black, was “unique,” so no lessons needed to be learned. Mexico was just Mexican; we quickly bailed out the Wall St. banks. The Asian Financial Crisis was just “Asian,” even though it exploded into Russia and Brazil, so what did that have to do with “us?” The dot.com crisis was amusing. No one was ever guilty, and even if they were, they were foreigners or nerds. Then came 2007 and a few million foreclosures. “Change” put a closet conservative who refused to jail billionaires into the White House, provoking the Occupy Movement; then France returned the Socialists to power; then Greeks said, “Enough!” And now Ireland will have a May 31 referendum on, essentially, the EEC policy of austerity for the poor and a pass for the rich. In the background looms Spain, with 20% unemployment, and over there, the Spanish Civil War is not forgotten.