financialization

disambig, see FIRE, financial

merri ok

it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism

see wall st

see extraction

see disaster capitalism

---

1 24 an robt reich

when I was a boy, my father sold dresses and blouses to the wives of factory workers. As the wages of those workers rose through the 1950s, my father earned enough to expand his business to a second shop in another factory town not far away. We were by no means rich, but he earned enough to put us in the middle class.

For three decades after World War II, the average hourly compensation of American workers rose in lockstep with the nation’s productivity gains. In other words, as workers produced more value, they got more pay.

It was a virtuous cycle, from which our family and tens of millions of others benefited: The economy grew, and the middle class expanded. Its purchasing power rose, causing the economy to grow faster. This fueled new investments and innovations that further enriched and enlarged the middle class.

But then, beginning in the late 1970s, the virtuous cycle came to a halt.

While productivity gains continued much as before and the economy continued to grow, wages began to flatten. Starting in the early 1980s, the median household’s income stopped growing altogether, when adjusted for inflation.

Today, the median household is earning just a bit more than it did in 1979, 45 years ago (adjusted for inflation).

If you’re a non-supervisory worker who relies on an hourly wage — still the vast majority of workers — you’re earning no more than you earned in 1969. Job security also declined.

So, despite an economy that’s far larger and more productive than it was 40 or 50 years ago, the typical American worker has gone nowhere.

The standard explanation attributes this to neutral “market forces,” especially globalization and technological innovations that have made many working Americans less competitive.

While surely important, the standard explanation can’t account for much of what’s happened. It doesn’t explain why the transformation occurred so suddenly, over a relatively small number of years. Nor why other advanced economies facing similar forces didn’t succumb to them. Nor why so much of the nation’s income and wealth have gone to the top.

America’s middle class has shrunk because of its declining bargaining power — orchestrated and directed by America’s oligarchy. The economic gains that would otherwise have gone to the middle class went instead to the moneyed interests at the top. Let me explain.

1. The financialization of the economy

Before the 1980s (as I noted in our discussion about the decline of the common good), large corporations were in effect owned by all their stakeholders, who were assumed to have legitimate claims on them.

As early as 1914, the popular columnist and public philosopher Walter Lippmann called on America’s corporate executives to be stewards of America. “The men connected with [the large corporation] cannot escape the fact that they are expected to act increasingly like public officials …. Big businessmen who are at all intelligent recognize this. They are talking more and more about their ‘responsibilities,’ and their ‘stewardship.’”

This vision of corporate governance came to be widely accepted by the end of World War II. Frank Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, declared in a 1951 address that typified what other chief executives were saying at the time:

*“The job of management is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly affected interest groups … stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large. Business managers are gaining professional status partly because they see in their work the basic responsibilities [to the public] that other professional men have long recognized as theirs.”

Pulp and paper executive J.D. Zellerbach told Timemagazine that “[t]he majority of Americans support private enterprise, not as a God-given right but as the best practical means of conducting business in a free society … . They regard business management as a stewardship, and they expect it to operate the economy as a public trust for the benefit of all the people.”

But a radically different vision of corporate ownership emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It came from corporate “raiders” who mounted hostile takeovers with high-yield junk bonds.

The raiders used leveraged buyouts and undertook proxy fights against the “industrial statesmen” who, in their view, were depriving shareholders of the wealth that properly belonged to them.

The raiders assumed shareholders were the only legitimate owners of the corporation and that the only valid purpose of the corporation was to maximize shareholder returns.

This transformation did not happen by accident. It was a product of changes in laws governing corporations and of financial markets — changes that were promoted by the monied interests, America’s oligarchs.

In 1974, at the urging of pension funds, insurance companies, and Wall Street, Congress enacted the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. Before then, the giant portfolios of pension funds and insurance companies could be invested in only high-grade corporate and government bonds. Legally, it was their fiduciary obligation.

The 1974 Act changed that, allowing pension funds and insurance companies to invest in the stock market — thereby making a huge pool of capital available to Wall Street.

In 1982, another large pool of capital became available when Congress allowed savings and loan banks — the bedrocks of local home mortgage markets — to invest their deposits in a wide range of financial products, including junk bonds and other risky ventures promising high returns.

The convenient fact that the government insured savings and loan deposits against losses made these investments all the more tempting (and ultimately cost taxpayers some $124 billion when many of the banks went bust).

Meanwhile, the Reagan administration loosened other banking and financial regulations and simultaneously cut the enforcement staff at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

All this made it possible for corporate raiders to get the capital and the regulatory approvals they needed to mount unfriendly takeovers.

During the whole of the 1970s, there had been only 13 hostile takeovers LBO of companies valued at $1 billion or more. During the 1980s, there were 150.

Even where raids did not occur, CEOs felt pressured to maximize shareholder returns for fear their firms might otherwise be targeted. Hence, they began to see their primary role as driving up share prices.

The easiest and most direct way for CEOs to accomplish this feat was to cut costs — especially payrolls, which constitute most firms’ largest single expense.

Accordingly, the corporate statesmen of the 1950s and 1960s were replaced by the corporate butchers of the 1980s and 1990s, whose nearly exclusive focus was to “cut out the fat” and “cut to the bone.”

When Jack Welch took the helm of GE in 1981, the company was valued by the stock market at less than $14 billion. When he retired in 2001, it was worth about $400 billion. Welch accomplished this largely by cutting payrolls.

Before his tenure, most GE employees had spent their entire careers with the company. But between 1981 and 1985, a quarter of them — 100,000 in all — lost their jobs, earning Welsh the moniker “neutron Jack.” Even when times were good, Welch encouraged his senior managers to replace 10 percent of their subordinates every year in order to keep GE competitive.

Other CEOs tried to outdo even Welch. As CEO of Scott Paper, “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap laid off 11,000 workers, including 71 percent of headquarters staff. Wall Street was impressed, and the company’s stock soared.

When Dunlap moved to Sunbeam in 1997, he promptly laid off half of Sunbeam’s 12,000 employees. (Unfortunately for Chainsaw Al, he was caught cooking Sunbeam’s books; the SEC sued him for fraud, and he settled for $500,000, agreeing never again to serve as an officer or director of any publicly held company.)

In consequence of this change in the purpose of the American corporation, share prices soared, as did the compensation packages of CEOs. The results have been touted as “efficient” because resources theoretically have been shifted to “higher and better uses.”

But the human costs of this transformation have been huge. Millions of workers have lost jobs and wages. Many communities have been abandoned.

Nor have the efficiency benefits been widely shared.

As corporations have steadily weakened their workers’ bargaining power, the link between productivity and workers’ income has been severed.

Almost all the gains from growth have gone to the top. As noted, the average worker today is no better off than his or her equivalent 40 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Most are less economically secure.

Not incidentally, few own any shares of stock.

The richest 1 percent of Americans now own 52 percent of all the shares of stock owned by Americans. The richest 10 percent, 93 percent. The nation’s economic gains, once distributed broadly to the working and middle class — have been siphoned to the top.

2. Globaloney

Wages have also been suppressed because workers who are worried about keeping their jobs have accepted lower pay, relative to the economy’s productivity gains, than they did 40 years ago.

Here again, political decisions steered by the nation’s oligarchy have played a significant role. Some of the prevailing job insecurity is the result of trade agreements that invited American companies to outsource jobs abroad.

The conventional view equating “free trade” with the “free market” — in contrast to government “protectionism” — is wrong.

Just as all nations’ markets reflect political decisions about how they should be organized, so-called “free trade” agreements entail complex negotiations about how different market systems are integrated.

Within these negotiations, the interests of large corporations and Wall Street, to fully protect the value of their intellectual property and financial assets, have repeatedly trumped the interests of average working Americans to protect the value of their labor.

3. The Fed and inflation

When the Federal Reserve raises interest rates and Congress opts for austerity to reduce federal budget deficits — two policies favored by the oligarchy — the resulting unemployment also undermines the bargaining power of average workers.

Higher unemployment keeps wages low. This means higher corporate profits, leading to higher returns for shareholders.

The high inflation after the pandemic was driven in part by supply shortages and a major government stimulus. But it was also driven by monopolistic corporations using the excuse of inflation to raise their prices.

The Fed, however, believed that a root cause of inflation was wage growth, and it set out to slow the economy and loosen the labor market by raising interest rates. Here, too, the strategy was consistent with the views of the moneyed interests and was pushed by them.

4. The risk-shift to workers

Public policies that emerged during the New Deal and World War II placed most of the risks of economic change on large corporations rather than workers — through Social Security, worker’s compensation, 40-hour workweeks with time-and-a-half for overtime, and employer-provided health benefits (wartime price controls encouraged such tax-free benefits as substitutes for wage increases).

By the 1950s and 1960s, a majority of the employees of large companies remained with the companies for life. Their paychecks rose steadily with seniority, productivity, the cost of living, and corporate profits. When they retired, they received generous corporate pensions.

But after the junk-bond and takeover mania of the 1980s, that relationship broke down.

Even full-time workers who have put in decades with a company can now find themselves without a job overnight — with no severance pay, no help finding another job, no health insurance, and little or no pension.

Nearly one out of every five working Americans is now in a part-time job. Many are temporary workers, freelancers, independent contractors, or consultants, whose incomes and work schedules vary from week to week or even day to day. Two-thirds of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck.

The risk of getting old without a pension is rising.

In 1980, more than 80 percent of large and medium-sized firms gave their workers “defined-benefit” pensions that guaranteed them a fixed amount of money every month after they retired.

Now, fewer than 10 percent of companies provide their workers defined-benefit pensions. Instead, they offer “defined contribution” plans whose risks have been shifted to the workers. When the stock market tanks, as it did in 2008 and then again in 2020, their 401(k) plans tank along with it.

A quarter of all workers with so-called “matching” defined-benefit plans get no match because they don’t earn enough to contribute to them.

Meanwhile, the risk of a sudden loss of income continues to rise. Even before the crash of 2008, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics at the University of Michigan found that over any given two-yearstretch, about halfof all families experienced some decline in income.

Those downturns have become progressively larger. In the 1970s, the typical drop was about 25 percent. By late 1990s, it was 40 percent. By the mid-2000s, family incomes rose and fell twice as much as they did in the mid-1970s, on average.

Workers who are economically insecure are not in a position to demand higher wages. They are driven more by fear than by opportunity.

This is another central reality of American capitalism as organized by those with the political power to make it so.

5. The demise of labor unions

Fifty years ago, when General Motors was the largest employer in America, the typical GM worker earned $35 an hour in today’s dollars.

Today, America’s largest employer is Walmart, and the typical entry-level Walmart worker earns about $11 an hour.

This doesn’t mean the typical GM employee a half-century ago was “worth” four times what the typical Walmart employee today is worth. The GM worker was not better educated or motivated than today’s Walmart worker.

The real difference is that GM workers a half-century ago had a strong union behind them that summoned the collective bargaining power of all autoworkers to get a substantial share of company revenues for its members.

Because more than a third of workers across America then belonged to a labor union, the bargains those unions struck with employers raised the wages and benefits of non-unionized workers as well. Non-union firms knew they would be unionized if they did not come close to matching the union contracts.

Today’s Walmart workers do not have a union to negotiate a better deal. They are on their own. Because only 6 percent of today’s private-sector workers are unionized, most employers across America have no incentive to match union contracts. This puts unionizedfirms at a competitive disadvantage.

The result has been a race to the bottom.

Some argue that the decline of American unions is simply the result of “market forces.” But other nations have been subject to many of the same “market forces” and continue to have strong unions. In Sweden, 90 percent of workers in the private sector are unionized. These unions continue to provide their middle classes sufficient bargaining power to command a significant share of economic growth — a much larger share than that received by the middle class in the United States.

Why the difference? Look to politics and the allocation of power.

***

The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 guaranteed American workers the right to organize into unions and imposed on employers the legal responsibility to bargain with them.

As unions gained economic power in the late 1930s and 1940s, they gained greater. political power and wielded it to further enlarge the bargaining clout of American workers. After the legendary Treaty of Detroit in 1950, when Big Business and Big Labor agreed to share productivity gains in exchange for labor peace, the rate of unionization increased dramatically, as did wages and benefits.

Which is why, by the mid-1950s, almost a third of all American employees in the private sector of the economy belonged to a union, and why the median wage increased in tandem with productivity growth.

But starting in the late 1970s, the process went into reverse. Union membership began to decline, as did the economic and political power of unions, along with the bargaining clout of most workers.

The reasons for the decline involved the changes I’ve already noted — globalization, labor-replacing technologies, and a shift in the purpose of the corporation to maximizing shareholder returns.

But the decline of labor unions was also the consequence of political and legal decisions demanded by the monied interests.

When the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 allowed states to enact “right-to-work” laws, workers who did not pay dues got a free ride off of those who did, thereby undermining the incentive for anyone to join a union in the first place.

Until the 1980s, such laws had minimal effect because they were enacted in southern and western states. Most industries remained in the north.

But as corporations came under increasing pressure to show high returns and cut labor costs, many CEOs found “right-to-work” states more alluring. Even the old heartland industrial states of Indiana and Michigan have enacted “right-to-work” laws.

CEOs whose corporations had high percentages of unionized workers moved, or threatened to move, to “right-to-work” states.

Additionally, Reagan’s notorious firing of the nation’s air traffic controllers for going on strike (which he had a right to do because they had no right to strike) signaled to the nation’s large employers that America had embarked on a different era of labor relations.

Workers who inhabited the local service economy — retail, restaurants, custodial, hotels, elder and child care, hospitals, transportation — faced a different challenge. Their jobs were in less danger of disappearing, because they couldn’t be outsourced abroad and most would not be automated. In fact, the number of local service jobs in America has continued to grow.

But because so many workers expelled from the older industrialized economy had no choice but to seek local service jobs, service-sector employers easily found people willing to work for low wages, few benefits, and little chance of advancement.

Walmart and major fast-food chains, such as Starbucks, have been aggressively anti-union. They’ve blocked union votes, fired workers who tried to organize, refused to enter into contract negotiations, and intimidated others into rejecting the union — all in violation of the National Labor Relations Act.

A succession of Democratic presidents have promised legislation streamlining the process for forming unions and increasing penalties on employers who violate the law, but nothing has come of these promises. (President Biden has been the first to strengthen the National Labor Relations Board and encourage it to enforce the law.)

The result of all this has been a steady decline in the percentage of private-sector workers who are unionized. Despite the jolt of labor activism in 2023, that percentage continues to drop.

The decline parallels the declining share of total income going to the middle class.

Take a look:

6. Summary

The underlying problem is that average working Americans have steadily lost the bargaining power to receive as large a portion of the economy’s gains as they received in the first three decades after World War II. As a result, instead of the middle class growing, it has shrunk.

To attribute this to the impersonal workings of the “free market” is to ignore how the market has been reorganized since the 1980s. America’s oligarchs — the moneyed interests — have spearheaded this reorganization in order to receive a steadily larger share of the nation’s economic gains. As those gains have risen, so has the oligarchy’s power to accumulate even more.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Next week we’ll look at whether — and how — countervailingpower can be restored so that more of America’s poor and working class can ascend into the middle class once again.

*Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.*

---

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/billionaire-tax/

Series: The Secret IRS Files

Inside the Tax Records of the .001%

One day in July 1985, three young men from Philadelphia, their lawyer and a burly Pinkerton guard arrived at a horse track outside Chicago carrying a briefcase with $250,000 in cash.

Running the numbers on a Compaq computer the size of a small refrigerator, Jeffrey Yass and his friends had found a way to outwit the track’s bookies, according to interviews, records and news accounts. A few months earlier, they’d wagered $160,000, gambling that, with tens of thousands of bets, they could nail the exact order of seven horses in three different races. It was a sophisticated theory of theracing odds, honed with help from a Ph.D. statistician who’d worked for NASA on the moon landing, and it proved right. They bagged $760,000, then the richest payoff in American racing history.

But that summer day, when they presented their strikingly long list of bets at the track window, they were turned away. Their appeal to the track owner got them ejected. Yass, just 27, then sued for the right to place the bets. The track’s lawyer fumed to a federal judge that the men were trying to corner the betting market “through the use of their statistics and numbers.”

Yass lost, but that year he and his friends repeated variations of the strategy at horse and greyhound tracks around the country. Then they decided to turn their focus from a world of hundreds of thousands of dollars to a world of billions: Wall Street.

Four decades later, the firm he and his friends founded, Susquehanna International Group, is a sprawling global company that makes billions of dollars. Yass and his team used their numerical expertise to make rapid-fire computer-driven trades in options and other securities, eventually becoming a giant middleman in the markets for stocks and other securities. If you have bought stock or options on an app like Robinhood or E-Trade, there’s a good chance you traded with Susquehanna without knowing it. Today, Yass, 63, is one of the richest and most powerful financiers in the country.

But one crucial aspect of his ascent to stratospheric wealth has transpired out of public view. Using the same prowess that he’s applied to race tracks and options markets, Yass has taken aim at another target: his tax bill.

There, too, the winnings have been immense: at least $1 billion in tax savings over six recent years, according to ProPublica’s analysis of a trove of IRS data. During that time, Yass paid an average federal income tax rate of just 19%, far below that of comparable Wall Street traders.

Yass has devised trading strategies that reduce his tax burden but push legal boundaries. He has repeatedly drawn IRS audits, yet has continued to test the limits. Susquehanna has often gone to court to fight the government, with one multiyear audit battle ending in a costly defeat. The firm has maintained in court filings that it complied with the law.

Yass’ low rate is particularly notable because Susquehanna, by its own description, specializes in short-term trading. Money made from such rapid trades is typically taxed at rates around 40%.

In recent years, however, Yass’ annual income has, with uncanny consistency, been made up almost entirely of income taxed at the roughly 20% rate reserved for longer-term investments.

Congress long ago tried to stamp out widely used techniques that seek to transform profits taxed at the high rate into profits taxed at the low rate. But Yass and his colleagues have managed to avoid higher taxes anyway.

The tax savings have contributed to an explosion in wealth for Yass, who has increasingly poured that fortune into candidates and causes on the political right. He has spent more than $100 million on election campaigns in recent years. The money has gone to everything from anti-tax advocacy and charter schools to campaigns against so-called critical race theory and for candidates who falsely say the 2020 election was stolen and seek to ban abortion.

ProPublica has pieced together the details of Yass’ tax avoidance using tax returns, securities filings and court records, as well as by talking to former traders and executives. (The former employees spoke on condition of anonymity, with many citing a desire to avoid angering Yass.)

Through a spokesperson, Yass declined to be interviewed for this article. The spokesperson declined to comment in response to a long list of questions for Susquehanna and the firm’s founding partners.

Gregg Polsky, a University of Georgia law professor and former corporate tax lawyer who was retained by ProPublica to review Susquehanna’s tax records, said the tax agency may have more to scrutinize. The strategies revealed in Yass’ records, he said, were “very suspicious and suggestive of potential abuse that should be examined by the IRS.”

More than 35 years after he was booted from the racetrack outside Chicago, Yass still lives to gamble. Not just on horses, but on poker and on the market. He sheepishly admitted, in a podcast discussion, that he has even placed wagers on his children’s sports games.

Asked to describe his approach to trading at Susquehanna, Yass once reached for a poker analogy. “If you’re the sixth-best poker player in the world and you play with the five best players, you’re going to lose,” he said. “If your skills are only average, but you play against weak opponents, you’re going to win.”

That philosophy along with, Yass freely admits, a lot of luck, has made him a billionaire many times over.

Compared to many of his fellow billionaires — he’s richer than Hollywood mogul David Geffen, retail brokerage king Charles Schwab and “Star Wars” creator George Lucas — Yass doesn't seem particularly interested in the trappings of extreme wealth.

Yass and his wife, Janine, raised four children in the leafy college town of Haverford, on the Main Line outside of Philadelphia. Their large but unremarkable house could easily be the home of a successful doctor rather than one of the richest men in the country. In his quarter-zip pullover sweater, Nikes and no-nonsense rimless glasses, he’d be impossible to pick out of a crowd at the suburban country club where he plays golf.

If Yass collects expensive art or maintains a megayacht, he has managed to do so in complete secrecy. What comes closest to an identifiable trophy asset is a house in the ultra-exclusive Georgica Association beach neighborhood of East Hampton on New York’s Long Island. Even that property, purchased for $12.5 million in 2005 and held through an LLC, is in an area known as “bucolic and understated.”

Those who have worked with Yass say he lives less for spending money than for the competition of the market and the thrill of taking calculated risk. Yass softens any impression of ruthlessness by deploying a practiced humility and comedic timing. “Some people like art history,” he once explained, “I like probabilistic analysis.”

Yet when it comes to his philosophical outlook, he eschews the jokes. He speaks of capitalism in religious terms. Making new markets, he likes to say, is a “mission from God.”

Like many religious stories, his begins with a conversion experience.Born in 1958 to two Queens CPAs, Yass said reading the economist Milton Friedman’s “Capitalism and Freedom” as a young man delivered him from an early flirtation with socialism.

By the time Yass graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1979, he was already captivated by trading. (His father had also helped nurture Yass’ love of horse racing by taking him to local tracks to see harness racing, according to Forbes.) Yass’ college thesis weighed whether the budding market in stock options could be justified as socially useful. “I concluded that it should exist,” Yass later cracked. “I got a B.”

After college, he moved to Las Vegas for a year and a half to play poker professionally. Then he returned to the East Coast and settled in Philadelphia, where he began trading options. The previous decade had seen aburst of academic interest in the financial instruments, including a pioneering model of how to more accurately price them.Yass later called the model, and its broader implications for how to make mathematically sound decisions, “the most revolutionary idea in a long, long time.”

A share of stock is a relatively simple concept: It’s a small ownership stake in a company. An option, by contrast, is a contract that confers the right to buy or sell a given stock at a particular price and time in the future.

Options attract mathematically minded traders since a complex set of variables, including the underlying stock price, volatility, time and interest rates, determine how much one of the contracts is worth.

Options are a versatile tool. They can appeal to the risk-averse:Traders can use them as insurance to guarantee they will be paid at least today’s price when they sell in the future. They are also useful to the risk-embracing — gamblers who want to place outsized bets on how a stock will perform. (Here’s how a speculator would use an option: In early June, shares of Netflix were trading at below $200. If the speculator thinks the company’s fortunes will improve dramatically this summer, they could pay just $4.50 each for options to buy the stock at $250 in mid-August. If the stock soars over that figure, they could make a mint.)

In options Yass found more than a finan...

---

https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/toxic-soup-regulatory-greed-financialized/

How 'a toxic soup of regulatory inertia and corporate greed' has 'financialized' American life: report

no lnx

Alex Henderson May 11, 2022

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, during his presidential campaigns of 2016 and 2020, called for a lot more regulation of Wall Street and the financial sector — including private equity firms. And Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has had a lot to say on the subject as well, arguing that private equity firms have become much too powerful.

Such firms have been around for a long time, but they have grown in prominence in recent decades. Journalist Hannah Levintova discusses this topic in an in-depth article published in Mother Jones’ May/June issue and on its website as well. Levintova observes that “investment firms that execute buyouts” have “expanded their grip on ever more pieces of civic life,” and she views that “grip” as incredibly negative.

“Buoyed by LBOs and other forms of financial engineering,” Levintova explains, “they have come to be known as‘private equity’ because they invest in transactions that are walled off from the public markets. In just a few decades, they’ve bought up everything from dental offices to international call centers to Taylor Swift’s sorrowful ballads and mined them all for profit.”

Levintova adds, “Private equity’s favored methods for taking over companies have been back in the news this spring, thanks to Elon Musk’s $44 billion LBO of Twitter, where Musk has himself played the role of a private equity firm, securing billions in debt that he plans to load onto the social media company.”

According to Levintova, even the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t slowed down the growth of private equity firms.

“In 2020,” Levintova observes, “the private equity sector generated about $1.4 trillion — about 6.5% of the United States’ GDP, and a jump from two years prior, when it was 5% of GDP. Private equity firms also managed $7.3 trillion in assets in 2020 — roughly the value of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Tesla combined. Nearly 12 million workers — one in every 14 employees in the United States — collect paychecks from companies run by private equity.”

Private equity firms, Levintova warns, have been able to “financialize the basics of Americans’ lives.”

“While reporting for this package,” the Mother Jones reporter notes, “I heard from friends and colleagues who’ve eyed thenew private equity owners of their doctor’s office, their fertility clinic, or their apartment building with a mix of skepticism and fear. I got a letter informing me that the electric and gas provider in my home state of Rhode Island — a local, independent company — was about to be purchased by a company heavily invested with a private equity fund based in Manhattan.”

Levintova blames a “toxic soup of regulatory inertia and corporate greed” for the growth of private equity firms.

“In the popular imagination, private equity is often portrayed as a vulture, or some other scavenger that feasts on the sick and dying — gross but unavoidable,” Levintova explains. “But the bulk of the work done by modern-day private equity firms is not to finish off sick companies, but rather, to stalk and gut the healthy ones. This type of predation is the result of 50 years of policies that have prioritized the profit-making of a few over the wellbeing of many.”

Levintova argues that the late right-wing economist Milton Friedman deserves some of the blame for the predatory practices of private equity firms. Friedman was the godfather of what is known as “shareholder economics,” which argues that companies are under no obligation to worry about the good of society—their only obligation is to their shareholders. Liberal economists like Robert Reich, former secretary of labor in the Clinton Administration, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman have been major critics of Friedman and the Chicago school of economics.

“For a long time,” Levintova writes, “corporations worked in the plain way that you’d imagine they should work: They created a product or provided a service, and if they did a good job of it, they turned a profit…. Simple enough. But a confluence of factors in the 1970s flipped that model on its head. Suddenly, the value of a business was measured less by how well it served its customers, and far more by the profits it reaped for its investors. University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman helped propel this change with a 1970 manifesto in the New York Times.”

Private equity, according to Levintova, have prospered from the economic hardship of others —first during the early 2000s recession, then during the Great Recession of the late 2000s/early 2010s. After the financial meltdown of 2008, she laments, private equity firms experienced “explosive growth.”

“In the last decade, private equity has taken control of more than 80 retailers, leading to the loss of 1.3 million jobs,” Levintova notes. “A firm named for theAyn Randcharacter Howard Roark has bought up so many restaurants that it now employs nearly 1 million fast-food workers nationwide, all while successfully lobbying Congress to kill legislation mandating a $15 minimum wage.”

Levintova continues, “Private equity incursions into real estate have left no form of housing unscathed, driving up the costs of both owning and renting any type of house or apartment or mobile home. They’ve bought up for-profit colleges, driving down graduation rates while increasing student debt. They’ve sought gains in the obscure crevices of our mutual existence, from contact lenses to port-a-potties to ketchup. And they’ve enveloped the health care sector, including hospitals, dermatologists, ophthalmologists, veterinarians, hospice care, and nursing homes, often leading to increased medical costs for patients and a drop in the quality of care.”

---

ref

file:///C:/Users/breas/OneDrive/Documents/Windows%20Files%20(PC)/AlterNet%20Folder%202022%20(PC)/HANNAH%20LEVINTOVA

Everything Everywhere All at Once: How Private Equity Rules Your World

HANNAH LEVINTOVA AND TIM MURPHY

---

no lnx many

Everything Everywhere All at Once: How Private Equity Rules Your World

From your favorite burger joint to your local dentist, PE titans are invested in almost everything you do.

HANNAH LEVINTOVA AND TIM MURPHY MAY+JUNE 2022 ISSUE

Over the past four decades, private equity has become a powerful, and malignant, force in our daily lives. In our May/June 2022 issue, Mother Jones investigates the vulture capitalists chewing up and spitting out American businesses, the politicians enabling them, and the everyday people fighting back. Find the full package here.

With more than $4.5 trillion in investments in thousands of companies across dozens of industries around the globe, private equity is everywhere—from the stores you shop at and the companies you work for to the food you eat and the music you listen to. You don’t have to go to the Hamptons to live the private equity life—just take a walk down your street. So what are you waiting for? Explore what the industry can do for you:

[MOTHER JONES TOP STORIES

The Fossil Fuel Industry’s Expansion Plans Will Be the Death of Us]

Public to Private

Where do the biggest private equity firms get their money for leveraged buyouts? If you’re a public worker, it might be your pension fund. Altogether, these funds hold about $480 billion in private equity investments, even though one study found that PE performed about as well as stock market index funds over the last 15 years—but with far higher fees.

Fast Food & Food Stamps

From Burger King to Qdoba, the fast-food sector is being gobbled up by PE firms, including Roark Capital, which is named after an Ayn Rand character and whose portfolio includes Dunkin’, Arby’s, Jimmy John’s, and many more. The Atlanta-based firm employs nearly 1 million food service workers—among the most likely of workers to need food stamps.

Final Chapter

After a 2011 leveraged buyout, private equity firms TPG and Leonard Green saddled J. Crew with $1.7 billion in debt and used a financial engineering strategy dubbed the “J. Crew Trapdoor” to shield assets from creditors before it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2020. Other PE acquisitions of major retailers, such as Toys“R”Us and Payless ShoeSource, have also resulted in bankruptcies.

Leagues of Their Own

Oil guys and spoiled scions are the sports owners of the past. These days, it’s private equity–backed ventures such as the Fenway Sports Group, which owns baseball’s Boston Red Sox, hockey’s Pittsburgh Penguins, and English soccer’s Liverpool FC.CVC Capital Partners took a $2.2 billion stake in Spain’s cash-strapped La Liga last year, and many soccer fans fear that this sort of financialization will fuel more tradition-busting ventures, like last year’s aborted European “Super League.”

Smile, Sucker

In most of the US, dentists are required to own their practices. Yet private equity has found a way around this, buying up 27 of the top 30 dental support organizations—companies that handle a practice’s business side. In 2013, the Senate investigated, focusing on a DSO, owned partially by Carlyle, that had taken over Small Smiles. The chain, which serves primarily low-income children, paid employees based on how many expensive (and often unnecessary) procedures they convinced kids and parents to get.[extraction pun]

The Old College Try

Tax-exempt endowments of elite universities have become a major source of capital for private equity schemes. In one recent year, Yale paid PE firms more than double what it shelled out in tuition assistance. PE firms from KKR to Warburg Pincus have also eagerly invested in for-profit colleges, guzzling up student loan cash. A 2020 study showed that when private equity buys for-profit schools, graduation rates drop and student debt grows.

Flip or Flop

Blackstone and other firms scooped up hundreds of thousands of homes on the cheap after the Great Recession and converted them to rentals. The result was a massive redistribution of wealth from middle-class families to large firms; instead of building equity, tenants face rising rents and evictions. By 2019, PE firms also controlled 150,000 mobile-home sites, often jacking up utility and other site fees.

Prison Profits

Private equity investors hold major stakes in most elements of the corrections industry—from prison food to ankle monitors. Three PE companies control nearly 80 percent of the correctional phone market, while two others provide medical care to inmates in at least 36 states. This market concentration has allowed firms like HIG Capital and Platinum Equity to rake in large profits by driving up the costs of calls to loved ones or reducing food portions to encourage commissary purchases.

Life Support

By 2019, PE firms already owned 409 hospice care providers. KKR recently purchased BrightSpring Health Services, among the largest home health care providers, for $1.3 billion. One analysis predicted that PE takeovers would likely limit staff visits to sick patients and cut labor costs, based on trends in for-profit hospices. These same trends have already been documented in nursing homes, another major acquisition target.

Real Estate Predators Tried to Cash In on the Pandemic. Then Tenants Fought Back.

HANNAH LEVINTOVA

Private Equity's Smash-and-Grab Economy

HANNAH LEVINTOVA

Medical Debts Have Counted Against 43 Million Americans’ Credit Scores. That Is Finally About to Change.

---

CFTC act

Food prices[

Institutions such as hedge funds, pension funds and investment banks^[93] have been instrumental in pushing up world food prices in the last five years, with investment in food solely as a commodity rising from $65bn to $126bn (£41bn to £79bn) between 2007 and 2012, contributing to 30-year highs. Financial institutions now make up 61% of all investment in wheat futures.

According to Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on food, there was a rush by institutions to enter the food market following the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.^[93] De Schutter told the Independent in March 2012: "What we are seeing now is that these financial markets have developed massively with the arrival of these new financial investors, who are purely interested in the short-term monetary gain and are not really interested in the physical thing – they never actually buy the ton of wheat or maize; they only buy a promise to buy or to sell.

The result of this financialisation of the commodities market is that the prices of the products respond increasingly to a purely speculative logic. This explains why in very short periods of time we see prices spiking or bubbles exploding, because prices are less and less determined by the real match between supply and demand."^[93]In 2011, 450 economists from around the world called on the G20 to regulate the commodities market more.^[93] Rising food prices over recent years have been linked with social unrest around the world, including rioting in Bangladesh and Mexico,^[93] and the Arab Spring.

---

commodification monetization of person /brand

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/bitclout-the-dystopian-crypto-based-social-app-popularized-by-stop-the-steal-leader-ali-alexander/

bitClout: The Dystopian Crypto-Based Social App Popularized by ‘Stop The Steal’ Leader Ali Alexander

ByKarim Zidan | April 21, 2021 12:49 pm

Website of the BitClout social media network with sing up button on the smartphone screen. (Viktollio / Shutterstock.com)]

“The future of social media just got a lifeline.”

These were the words spoken by Ali Alexander, the far-right organizer behind the so-called Stop the Steal movement, during a recent interview on” YouTube show. Dressed in his signature plain orange sweater and seated against a beige backdrop that gave no hints as to his whereabouts, Alexander spoke about BitClout, a decentralized social media platform developed on blockchain technology that allows users to buy and sell tokens based on people’s reputations or “clout.” Creators and celebrities can monetize their internet presence by allowing their fans to invest in their “creator coins,” while general users can speculate and invest in people and posts to drive up their value as they would on the stock market.

In a nutshell, BitClout is a combination of Twitter, Patreon, and Robinhood—a one-stop shop that provides a social media platform and crypto-exchange for influencers and content creators.

Alexander’s fascination with BitClout is unsurprising. The application serves as an alternative to mainstream social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, both of which have banned his accounts after the events of Jan. 6. And while sites such as Parler and Gab have fashioned themselves as censorship-free alternatives to Twitter, BitClout stands out because of its decentralized nature. According to BitClout’s official website, the application has “no company behind it—just coins and code.”

“It is the most exciting thing I have seen on the internet—ever,” Alexander, who refers to himself as “The BitClout Oracle,” explained during the interview. “This is going places.”

While BitClout has excited users clamoring for a censorship-resistant social media platform, the application has already courted plenty of controversy since its launch in March 2021. The start-up has been criticized for prepopulating its network with some 15,000 accounts created around popular Twitter profiles without their account-holder’s permission, allowing users to invest in coins for people like Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian, YouTube sensation Mr. Beast, and Ariana Grande.

BitClout’s commodification of individuals is eerily dystopian. It also raises questions about the future of decentralized social media and the people who profit off it.

A Decentralized, Dystopian Social Space

When a Twitter user informed William Shatner, the renowned Canadian actor best known icon for his portrayal of Captain James T. Kirk in the original “Star Trek” series, that he had an account on BitClout, the actor was not impressed.

“It’s a scam and I’ve not authorized my name or likeness to be used,” Shatner wrote on Twitter in March. “So if you see my name or photo there it’s not been authorized.”

Shatner, whose coin price is currently valued at $553 despite never signing up for an account, is not the only public figure to complain about BitClout’s controversial tactics. Other celebrities have complained about having their likeness monetized without their permission, while prominent crypto law firm Anderson Kill P.C. sent a cease-and-desist letter to the BitClout’s alleged founder on behalf of their client Brandon Curtis, the chief research officer at decentralized cryptocurrency exchange Radar Relay, for using his private information without his consent.

“Adopting Bitcoin’s aesthetic to raise VC funding to carry out unethical and blatantly illegal schemes like BitClout: not cool,” Curtis tweeted.

...

---

medium 221

Water Is Being Traded on the Stock Market for the First Time

Some say trading water as a commodity could help mitigate future water crises, but others are highly…

Drew Costley in Future Human

---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/ayn-rand/

cdv

Behold! Death rides upon a pale horse — and Death is a Republican.

The coronavirus pandemic has now killed more than 500,000 people in the United States. This is roughly equivalent to the cumulative number of Americans lost in World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars. These deaths from the coronavirus were largely preventable.

Instead, at almost every opportunity Donald Trump and his regime, through willful negligence if not outright sabotage and negligent homicide, made decisions which caused more deaths, not fewer, from the pandemic.

The country's season of mass death, now nearing its one-year anniversary, will negatively impact American society for generations to come.

A new report by The Lancet, one of the world's leading medical journals, shows in great detail how the Trump regime's response to the coronavirus (and the country's well-being more generally) actually shortened Americans' lifespans through incompetence and malevolence.

The report, titled "Public policy and health in the Trump era" features this summary:

The global COVID-19 pandemic has had a disproportionate effect on the USA, with more than 26 million diagnosed cases and over 450 000 deaths as of early February, 2021, about 40% of which could have been averted had the US death rate mirrored the weighted average of the other G7 nations.

Many of the cases and deaths were avoidable. Instead of galvanising the US populace to fight the pandemic, President Trump publicly dismissed its threat (despite privately acknowledging it), discouraged action as infection spread, and eschewed international cooperation. His refusal to develop a national strategy worsened shortages of personal protective equipment and diagnostic tests. President Trump politicised mask-wearing and school reopenings and convened indoor events attended by thousands, where masks were discouraged and physical distancing was impossible.

The racial disparities are extreme: the life spans of Black and brown Americans have been shortened, compared to whites. Given the Trump regime's racial authoritarian policies, as well as its overall hostility to nonwhite people, such an outcome is a feature and not a bug. The Lancet report continues: "COVID-19 has increased the longevity gap between Black and white people by more than 50%, ... Overall, in the USA, Black and Latinx people have incurred more total years of potential life lost than white people because of COVID-19, although the white population is three to four times larger."

In addition, since 1980 public policies have reduced Americans' lifespans by 3.4 years as compared to the other "advanced" countries in the G7 (with data included through to 2018). America's public health problems considerably predate Trump's tenure in office — but his regime made them much worse.

On this, The Lancet report specifically notes Trump's "disdain for science and manipulation of hatred," adding that his "Make America Great Again" promise "camouflaged policies that enriched people who were already very wealthy andgave corporations license to degrade the environment for financial gain."

The mass death from the coronavirus pandemic reflects a broader pattern of negative outcomes, largely caused by the Republican Party and broader right-wing "conservative" movement.

As exhaustively documented by public health experts and other social scientists, across a range of policies such as gun violence, tax policy, the environment, access to health care, education, voting rights and the size and strength of the social safety net more generally, Republican policies over the last several decades have resulted in the deaths of many more Americans, compared to the policies advocated by Democrats.

While Republicans and the right market themselves as being "pro-life," in reality their policies could more fairly be described as pro-death. These dire outcomes rest on the following foundation.

Neoliberalism or "gangster capitalism."Every part of society is to be financialized and subjected to the forces of the market. There is no innate value to human life and human dignity. "Democracy" is but a tool for the market and the moneyed classes to gain more control over society through a process that superficially legitimizes their authority and rule. In this sociopathic worldview, there are "makers and takers," "productive" people as compared to those deemed to be "parasites" and "surplus" human beings. Social democracy is to be destroyed and ultimately replaced by "market forces" and some version of "managed democracy" or "competitive authoritarianism".

Social Darwinism. This is a belief in the "survival of the fittest," where government is seen as having no obligation to the collective good. Moreover, instead of an understanding that government exists to solve problems that are greater than the ability of any one person to resolve, the state instead becomes a tool for plutocrats and other elites to secure more power and resources, at the public's literal expense.

Right-wing libertarian fantasies of "self-reliance," "freedom" and the evils of government. Modern conservatism and the right-wing movement have constructed their own alternate reality, one that rejects empirical reality and expert knowledge, and confuses dogma with truth. In total, it is a closed epistemology, a hallucinatory ideology where self-serving fantasies about the "economy" and "human nature" are taken as inviolate truths. This is a form of religious politics in which faith supersedes reason, substantive evidence and truth.

One of the central figures in this right-wing fantasy world is novelist and self-styled philosopher Ayn Rand, whose semi-coherent theories have helped to create an America where cruelty and selfishness have been elevated into virtue.

Lisa Duggan, author of the recent book "Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed," locates Rand relative to the current age of capitalist barbarism by observing that Donald Trump is not the only person in contemporary America "who mistakenly envisages himself as a Rand hero":

... the government and business world is full of Rand fans who read Atlas Shrugged in high school. The blend of right-wing white nationalism, combined with hard, zombie neoliberalism that rules the Republican Party right now does not align with Rand's purest economic and political vision.But the unifying social cruelty, the full deference to the wealthiest as the most deserving of tax breaks, the representation of the poor and of immigrants as unworthy and undeserving of any kind of assistance, the opposition to unions, to universal health care, to minimum wages — that is pure Rand.

Many advocates of these policies learned to legitimize them, learned to moralize them, as in "greed is good," from reading Rand or just from existing in a Randian milieu (we can be pretty sure Trump has not actually read Rand!). She is the dour visage presiding over the cruelties of our contemporary moment.

Coronavirus fascism. The Trump regime, the Republican Party and the right-wing movement do not believe in multiracial democracy. Fascism uses violence and destruction as a means of creating a "new" world, one based on a return to some mythical past. To that end, the death and misery caused by the coronavirus pandemic creates an opportunity to undermine democratic institutions (and the very idea of government itself) as well as to target those who are deemed to be "the enemy" for elimination.

Because coronavirus fascism wields power over its followers in part by arousing their fears, it is not entirely surprising that in the 2020 election Trump actually did better in regions of the country hit especially hard by the pandemic.

In a near-perfect crystallization of the cruel values the sustain today's Republican Party and right-wing movement, Tim Boyd, the Republican mayor of Colorado City, Texas, wrote on Facebook that those suffering through that state's ice and snow disaster and electrical outages should: "Sink or swim it's your choice! The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! ... If you are sitting at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there waiting for someone to come rescue you because your (sic) lazy [it] is [a] direct result of your raising." (Boyd was at least forced to resign in disgrace.)

Why do rank-and-file Republicans, Trumpists and other right-wing voters support leaders and policies that literally cause them illness, suffering and death?

There are many reasons, including a vast propaganda and disinformation machine comprised of the right-wing media, Christian nationalist churches and related organizations, schools and other socializing agents that create and sustain an alternate reality.

Political parties have become a marker of personal identity. This is especially true of Republicans and right-leaning independents. Because today's Republican Party is a full-on white supremacist organization, loyalty to the party (and to its neofascist leader) is an embrace of white identity as central to one's personhood. As a function of that relationship, any criticism of the Republican Party and right-wing movement is seen as an attack on the believers' sense of being and their emotional, psychological, cognitive and material investment(s) in white privilege and white supremacy.

Perhaps most importantly, rank-and-file Republicans, Trumpists, and other members of the white right believe themselves to be in an existential struggle against various enemies: liberals and progressives, Democrats in general, nonwhite people, Muslims, immigrants and other "enemies" who want to "end their way of life". Therefore, to embrace death is understood to be a patriotic act in service to a better future.

Ultimately, today's Republican Party and broader right-wing movement are a death cult, whose millions of ardent followers are willing to sacrifice themselves and their families to sustain it. Much to the dismay of the Democrats and others who believe in "normal politics," this is the reality we must all face. No "bipartisanship" or "unity" or "common ground" is possible with a fanatical death cult. Joe Biden's great task and responsibility is to make decisions with that fact in mind and then find a way forward to political victory and a better American society.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/a-cruel-experiment-how-46-million-people-were-trapped-by-student-debt

The democratic principle of tuition-free education in our country pre-dates the founding of the United States. The first public primary education was offered in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, and its legislature created Harvard College the following year to make education available to all qualified students. Even before the Constitution was ratified, the Confederation Congress enacted the Land Ordinance of 1785, which required newly established townships in territories ceded by the British to devote a section of land for a public school. It also passed the Northwest Ordinances, which set out the guidelines for how the territories could become states. Among those guidelines was a requirement to establish public universities and a stipulation that “the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” After the nation declared independence, Thomas Jefferson argued for a formal education system funded through government taxation.

Jefferson’s vision took form over the course of more than a century, as state and local governments began creating primary schools and then high schools. The federal government became involved in higher education in the 19th century with the creation of land grant colleges and other institutions, used primarily to teach agriculture and education after the Civil War. These institutions created opportunities for people who had long been locked out of the learning process, including formerly enslaved African Americans and impoverished people of all races.

State universities and colleges rapidly expanded as well. By the middle of the 20th century, low-cost or tuition-free education was available in many American states. After the Second World War, the federal government once again turned to education to promote opportunities for its citizens and economic growth for all. The G.I. Bill paid educational expenses for 8 million people, without regard to individual wealth, which helped create a robust middle class and contributed to the vibrant growth economy of the 1950s and 1960s. While those opportunities were still denied to many people as the result of racism, efforts were underway to improve educational access for people of color.

The Reagan era ushered in a belief that government programs, including education, stood in the way of people’s dreams and should be severely cut back. Public goods came to be seen as investments, ones that were purely economic in nature. For these reasons, among others, a nation that had expanded publicly funded education for centuries decided to reverse course. Instead of funding higher education on the principle that it benefits us all, the country began shifting the cost to individual students. in the 1950s, as part of the National Defense Education Act, student loans were created as an experiment in social engineering. Concerned about competition with the Soviet Union, policymakers wanted to increase students’ capabilities in math and sciences. To do that, the country needed more teachers. So, lawmakers offered loans to college students, with the opportunity to have half the loan canceled after 10 years if they became teachers.

The experiment failed. Researchers have not been able to prove that the student loan program led more people to become teachers, despite multiple attempts to do so. The experiment was also cruel. Over the years, the student loan program was expanded, with the claim that a student’s personal investment in their education was an “investment” that would pay off in higher wages. Banks and other private lenders were brought into the process and given considerable incentives and subsidies to issue student loans, without considering the burden being imposed on the student. This financial opportunity was given to banking interests that were already wealthy, with little thought of the resulting damage to an economically sustainable future.

Proponents of financializing the cost of higher education argued that it was cheaper to lend money to students than it was for federal and state governments to provide grants for their education, even after paying subsidies to the private sector for their loans. An entire industry grew up around this process. State and nonprofit guaranty agencies were created to insure the loans. These agencies got paid, no matter what: when loans were issued, when loans became delinquent, when borrowers defaulted, and when they collected on defaulted loans.

In response, most states created guaranty agencies so they could make money from people who needed to borrow to pay for ever-increasing tuitions and fees.Now, states had an extra incentive to cut funding for public higher education. Not only would they save on expenditures, but they could increase the need for students to borrow, which increased their revenue. In many cases, these guaranty agencies don’t handle the loans themselves.They pass the work on to private debt collectors who take collection fees and are aggressive in their handling of cases.

The system took on a life of its own. By the mid-1990s, student loans had surpassed grants in funding students’ higher education. But a system built on debt financing only works if borrowers pay back their loans. That led Congress to make the system even crueler with the Bankruptcy Amendments and Federal Judgeship Act of 1984, which exempted student loans from bankruptcy proceedings and subjected borrowers to draconian collection tools. These tools included wage garnishment without a court order and the seizure of Social Security checks and tax refunds. The Clinton and Obama administrations attempted to lessen the burden slightly by allowing the federal government to lend directly to students while introducing income-based repayment options, but the system’s fundamental cruelty remains unchanged today.

It is time to recognize that the cruel experiment in financing higher education through student loans has failed. It has captured 46 million people and their families in a student loan trap, including people who received vocational training, and has weakened the financial strength of higher education. Inescapable debt is a major driver of social collapse. It has made the racial wealth gap worse and weakened the entire economy, as debt holders are prevented from buying homes or consumer goods, starting families, or opening new businesses. It’s time to restore funds for higher education and cancel student debt for the victims of this failed experiment.

Learn more at Freedom to Prosper.

Mary Green Swig is a senior fellow at the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University and co-founder of Freedom to Prosper.

Steven L. Swig is a senior fellow at the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University and co-founder of Freedom to Prosper.

David A. Bergeron is a senior fellow for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress. Bergeron previously served as the acting assistant secretary for postsecondary education at the U.S. Department of Education.

Richard “RJ” Eskow is senior adviser for health and economic justice at Social Security Works. He is also the host of The Zero Hour, a syndicated progressive radio and television program.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/elizabeth-warren-sounds-the-alarm-on-a-mounting-housing-crisis-and-the-profiteers-who-will-take-advantage/

During her 2020 presidential primary campaign, Sen. Elizabeth Warren had a lot to say about the United States’ housing crisis — and after suspending her campaign and endorsing former Vice President Joe Biden (now the presumptive Democratic nominee), the Massachusetts senator continued to address the subject. Warren, in an op-ed she wrote for the Washington Post with Carroll Fife (director of the Oakland office of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment), stresses that the coronavirus pandemic has made a brutal housing crisis even worse. And private equity firms, according to Warren and Fife, are hoping to cash in on the misery by gobbling up “distressed real estate.”

“The nation is facing an acceleratinghousing crisis,” Warren and Fife warn. “Too many people had no stable housing before the pandemic hit, and COVID-19 has made the problem even worse. Renters who were already facing an affordable housing shortage — with many spending more than half of their income on rent — now have no federal rental assistance or federal protection from eviction. Homeowners have less than a month left of foreclosure protection. And more than 30 million people receiving unemployment insurance just saw their benefits cut by $600 a week, raising the threat of a wave of defaults that could trigger a double-dip recession.”

But while “families” see as a “looming catastrophe,” they add, “private equityfirms just see dollar signs.” And Warren and Fife cite a Wall Street Journal report that investors are hoping to buy “distressed real-estate assets at bargain prices.”

According to Warren and Fife, such “profiteering” is “straight out of private equity’s playbook during the 2008 financial crisis."

"Following the 2008 crash,” they explain, “corporations that grabbed up properties on the cheap, converted those homes into rentals and turned into the worst kind of slumlords — jacking up rents, neglecting maintenance requests and health and safety concerns, and eagerly assessing fines, fees and eviction notices. Other corporate-owned homes were left vacant in a hoarding of housing stock. We cannot stand by while this history repeats itself.”

Warren and Fife’s recommendations range from “strong federal legislation to guard against the coming wave of evictions and foreclosures, including emergency rental assistance” to preventing “predatory companies from further destabilizing neighborhoods and profiting off the displacement of families.”

“If we fail to prevent another private equity real estate grab,” Warren and Fife warn, “we risk allowing another massive upheaval in the housing market that could wreak more havoc on low-income Americans — especially black and brown families still recovering from losing their homes a decade ago. Against a decades-long backdrop of racist federal policies that have impeded black homeownership, lawmakers’ refusal to proactively address this problem would be an indefensible oversight that would again give Wall Street carte blanche to use a national crisis to enact a massive, generational transfer of wealth from vulnerable Americans to corporations."

---

rental housing becomes the next bubble gt recession CDS? blackstone

---

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-housing-rights/global-investors-wreaking-havoc-on-low-income-renters-u-n-says-idUSKCN1R71L5

3/19

(Thomson Reuters Foundation) -Large investment firms are worsening global housing shortages by forcing vulnerable out of low-income homes and upgrading them for higher rents, said United Nations human rights experts, who appealed to countries to tighten up regulation.

These firms had become the world’s biggest landlords, and “converted homes into financial instruments and investments”, said Leilani Farha, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, in a statement released Tuesday.

“Landlords have become faceless corporations wreaking havoc with tenants’ right to security and contributing to the global housing crisis,” she said.

Farha and Surya Deva, chairman of the U.N. Working Group on business and human rights, wrote to Blackstone Group LP, the world’s largest private equity firm, and authorities in Denmark, Ireland, Spain, Sweden, the United States and Czech Republic.[have laws that req action; US not sign treaties/agreement int'l]

Preferential tax laws and weak tenant protections in these countries have left vulnerable communities at risk of eviction and homelessness, they said.

“We remind all States, that while gold is a commodity, housing is not, it’s a human right,” they said.

---

extensive interviews on Oaktown homeless

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-november-18-2019/

Community Empowerment (ACCE) Action and Oakland Community Land Trust (OakCLT).

:{:{}:

clt spox says more (esp lux) condos does not drive down cost of housing [SF East] b/c it's not asset but commodity, thus simple supply & demand does not apply

:{:{}:

---

https://www.alternet.org/2013/06/4-plagues-getting-handle-coming-apocalypse/

hazen 2013

...

The four “plagues” are very potent. With financialization we are confronting a new hyper form of capitalism, underway for years, but especially apparent with the crash of 2007. Author David Graeber describes the financialization of capitalism in an interview with the SF Bay Guardian as “… casino capitalism, speculation… they are making money out of thin air. … It is based on getting everyone in debt.”

Graeber adds that the profits of Wall Street are increasingly based on finance, not commerce, which means “…they go into your bank account and take your money.” Extracted by the finance sector are mortgages, credit card debt, loan debt, all the fees and penalties you are not noticing. Graeber estimates the finance sector is at or near 20 percent of the economy.

Privatization is pervasive in our culture, tearing the moorings away from democratic ideals and the commons—the common ground that has held many communities together for centuries. Schools, highways, parks, many things we hold dear are being taken away from public stewardship. Perhaps the privatization of water, where the huge multinational Nestle is leading the way globally,is the most daunting. In his thorough analysis of Nestle, the world’s largest food company and the most profitable corporation in the world according to the Global Fortune 500, Andrew Gavin Marshall writes that Nestle’s chairman, Peter Brabeck, believes that nature is not “good,” that there is nothing to worry about with GMO foods, that profits matter above all else, that people should work more, and that human beings do not have a right to water.

The signs ofmilitarization are increasingly visible in the nation’s police forces, especially with drug raids, as well as the escalated capture of undocumented immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the point where far more immigrants have been deported during the Obama administration than during George W. Bush’s tenure. There is also now a massive private prison operation mainly to handle those immigrants arrested.

The U.S. is still by far the world’s largest arms dealer, and we have military bases in 63 countries, and all across the U.S. as well, with nearly 1,140,000 soldiers in uniform.

The militarization of America was on graphic display in the over-reactions in response to the Boston bombing. The entire city of Boston was shut down and a kind of martial law declared as millions were told to stay indoors and lock up. Public events were canceled, transportation in and out of the city ceased, people were stranded at the airport—and all because a wide array of police forces were searching for a wounded 19-year-old on foot. The horrible bombing with its horrendous death and destruction traumatized many. But it is likely that the overwhelming police response—local police, ATF, FBI, DEA, etc.—traumatized the population even more. The military model of “lockdown” has become the default response to many disturbances. The use of SWAT teams all over the U.S. has increased dramatically, as the military has supplied local police forces with a wide array of super-powerful weaponry, often far beyond what is needed.

Cornell West Speaks

In a recent dialogue with Institute of New Economic Thinking’s (INET) Rob Johnson at Columbia Theological Seminary, Cornell West used the first three of what I am now calling “plagues” as examples of what is scaring him as he sees our society heading toward fascism. I thank him for his help in advancing my thinking.

I was struck by what West said, but I realized that it is necessary to add criminalization as a fourth plague for a fuller picture. In our world of mass incarceration, we see students, poor people, the homeless, debtors, drug users, and whole neighborhoods being criminalized in huge numbers. One powerful example is in the efforts by the New York Police Department known as “stop-and-frisk.” Since Michael Bloomberg became mayor of New York City in 2002, stop-and-frisk increased by 600%, from 100,000 New Yorkers targeted to almost 685,000 in 2011. Nearly 90% of those stopped are black or Latino.

Mass Incarceration and the New Jim Crow

More than 2 million people in jail has resulted in what author and lawyer Michelle Alexander has called the “New Jim Crow,” in her book of the same name. Despite the civil rights movement, theoretical progress on racism, and even an African-American president, more people of color are in jail than were ever slaves; more people are jailed in the U.S. than in any other place in the world. As Alexander writes: “Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.”

According to the NAACP, from 1980 to 2008, the number of people incarcerated in America quadrupled, from roughly 500,000 to 2.3 million people. Today, the US is 5% of the world population and has 25% of the world’s prisoners.

Millions in jail is part of a strategy of mass incarceration fueled by the highly funded and militarized war on drug users, which is primarily aimed at the poor and people of color. The racist caste of the criminal justice system is overwhelming: African Americans, incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites, now constitute nearly one million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population. Mass incarceration accomplished in the 21st century what slavery accomplished more than 150 years ago: the oppression and disenfranchisement of a whole generation of black men.

So, looking through the lens of these four plagues provides me with a useful handle on what is happening to our country, and to the globe. They help explain trends and shifts that are destroying the middle class, exacerbating poverty, keeping millions in jail, and traumatizing many millions more. Most of it can be attributed to one or more of the plagues, and often all four.

Essential Ingredients for the Success of the Plagues

But I don’t want to stop here. To best understand the plagues, there are several cross-cutting fundamentals of U.S. capitalism which fuel the oppressive nature of the plagues and help us understand how they interact.

1. Follow the money: For every unfair, exploitative and destructive force going on in America—and there are so many—some corporations or groups of people are profiting. Not only are they making a lot of money, they have also very likely built a powerful infrastructure to ensure the security of their cash flow using a potent array of tools to protect their interests. These are lobbyists, PR agents, campaign contributions, trade associations to agitate for their interests, and with overarching powerful giant entities like the chamber of commerce to provide the protective umbrella.

2. When following the money, it is often the case that the system picks on the weakest. Long ago, someone figured out that the easiest way to make a lot of money is to paradoxically target those who don’t have much.Or use powerless people as scapegoats to leverage access to large pots of money. One example is state lotteries, about which AlterNet’s Steve Rosenfeld explains: “What many people don’t know about lotteries is that they prey on those who can least afford it.” State lotteries amount to a hidden tax on the poor. They eat up about 9 percent of take-home incomes from households making less than $13,000 a year. They siphon $50 billion a year away from local businesses—besides stores where they’re sold.

Another example is that the privatization of the public school system is on the backs of poor kids, with the discredited fantasy that schools will be improved when people make money off of them. "Rent to own,” “payday loans” and many other tactics of capitalism all exploit poor people.

The best way to maximize profits and make radical changes in policies is to take advantage of crises. We all know what happened after the horrible death and destruction of 9/11. Our government, the Bush administration, orchestrated the most gigantic overreaction in history, turning a criminal case to the ongoing “war on terror,” which has transformed most of our lives in many negative ways. [aka disaster cap'l]

The aftermath of 9/11, which includes the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, also created the most extraordinary secret government in the history of humankind. The Washington Post, in an unprecedented investigation that took two years, discovered a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in oversight. “After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is a system incredibly massive –1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.”

Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine has helped us understand that when crises erupt, those in power will use the opportunity to increase power in extreme and undemocratic ways, in what is now called “Disaster Capitalism.” For example, as Kristen Rawls reports, after the massive impact of Hurricane Katrina, most of the schools in New Orleans’ Parish were replaced by charter schools.

What to Do—The Challenges Ahead

How do we fight these massive interlocking forces that often seem impossible to slow down, let alone stop and change? Well, there is good news and bad news.

The first answer is, we don’t stop the machine, at least now, because we can’t, not at this moment in history, anyway. At the present,there is no large-scale, coordinated, funded plan, across issue lines to organize a mass movement capable of putting a dent in the juggernaut;and there are some major problems on the social change organizing front to be sure.

The Occupy movement was a great moment, and a popular response to financialization and militarization. But then we saw the surveillance state in action as police power along with the titans of big finance crushed the dissent. Certainly Occupy generated, at least for a time, a new level of discourse on economic fairness and exploitation. But it is already a memory, and the system of the “four plagues” grinds on as the wealth gap increases every week.

On the other hand, no one could have predicted Occupy. Is there another upheaval waiting to explode?

....

kos arendt 2015

describe the current state of our democracy, just substitute "Usury, Class War, Beast-starving, and Privatization" for the Biblical "Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death". Make no mistake, the oligarchs have decided it's Apocalypse-time for our middle-class democracy, and they have set the horsemen upon it.

It is impossible to call what we have in America today capitalism. What we have is looting, asset-stripping, sweatshopping, extortion (politely, collecting monopoly rent), cronyism, and the purchasing of the government with the intent to destroy it. As far as the oligarchs believe, any physical task of genuine economic value (as opposed to shuffling money around to make a killing), is worth doing only in foreign countries with cheap, submissive labor and minimal environmental and health regulations.

In a previous diary The Future of the Middle Class: Slumlords, sharecroppers, and racist vigilantes I described the end goals of the Billionaire Class. In this diary, I describe, hopefully in soundbite-able terminology, the means by which they intend to get there.

The orange trumpet blows and the horsemen are loosed.

1. Usury as Pestilence

Pestilence: a contagious or infectious epidemic disease that is virulent and devastating; something that is destructive or pernicious.

Usury is all of the above: virulent, destructive, pernicious, and contagious. From the 1980s dawn of the neoliberal era, usorious interest rates have been a constant parasitical drain on citizens and an absolute plague for manufacturers. I cannot write better than the classic article on the subject by the labor lawyer, Thomas Geoghegan:

we dismantled the most ancient of human laws, the law against usury, which had existed in some form in every civilization from the time of the Babylonian Empire to

the end of Jimmy Carter's term, and which had been so taken for granted that no one ever even mentioned it to us in law school. That's when we found out what happens when an advanced industrial economy tries to function with no cap at all on interest rates.

Here's what happens: the financial sector bloats up. With no law capping interest, the evil is not only that banks prey on the poor (they have always done so) but that capital gushes out of manufacturing and into banking. When banks get 25 percent to thirty percent on credit cards, and 500 or more percent on payday loans, capital flees from honest pursuits, like auto manufacturing...All of this used to be so obvious as not to merit comment. What is history, really, but a turf war between manufacturing, labor, and the banks? In the United States, we shrank manufacturing. We got rid of labor. Now it's just the banks.

Thomas Geoghegan, Infinite Debt

Coupled with usury, credit card companies employ massive fines and fees (which they generate by manipulating the order in which bills and payments accrue to accounts), as well as unscrupulous collection agencies. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is the slightest of shelters against the racketeering that passes as legitimate business. As for payday loans, they are nothing more than loan sharking. It is disgusting that this practice is not outlawed. It is so awful that even Evangelicals have come out against it.

High Frequency Trading, as well documented in Micheal Lewis's Flash Boys, is another cream-skimming scam by the bankster elite. Billions are made by computerized front-running that would have long since been declared illegal if the banksters did not own the DOJ, lock, stock certificate, and barrel.

In short, citizens and manufacturers are plagued by usury and other forms of financial parasitism; and, in an age when every step of a transaction can be turned into a mouseclick, we are shaken down by fees and click-through licenses at every turn for every action. The internet is crawling with digital highwaymen (your money AND your rights). Financial pestilence is bleeding us, and bleeding the poorest among us to death.

2. Class War

There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.

― Warren Buffett

Only propagandists and ideologues actually believe there is no class war from above. You have to put out both eyes not to see it. From the union-busting of Thatcher and Reagan down to the give-away privatizations of national land and mineral rights, the assets and infrastructure paid for and built by the middle class has been looted or demolished.

As I wrote earlier, the rich behave towards infrastructure the same way a slumlord behaves towards his properties. It is a fixed asset to be milked until useless. That is, the ruling class does not build, it extracts.

Another front of the class war is the assault on skilled labor via the H1-B visa program. This program replaces American workers with lower-cost, foreign, contract tech workers. There are many horror stories of Americans being forced to train their replacements under the threat (extortion) of losing what pitiful benefits they might get upon being dismissed. Big tech firms keep getting the number of visas raised, even as tech workers' organizations point out the "can't find suitable American workers" canard is a lie unless, by suitable, you mean "able to work for third-world wages while living ten to an apartment".

One of the most repeated soundbite justifications for the class war (despite it being a pathetic humbug) is "Shareholder Value", a philosophical fiction invented in the 1970s.

In American business...one key theory says that the purpose of corporate enterprise is to “maximize shareholder value.” ...(The) theory, in a nutshell, said there was an inherent conflict in business between owners (shareholders) and managers, that this conflict had to be resolved in favor of the owners, who after all owned the business, and the best way to do that was to find a way to align those interests by linking ...executive compensation primarily to the stock price...

There are many problems with this idea, which appears to be more of a solution in search of a problem. If the CEO is driving the company into bankruptcy or spends too much money on his own perks, for example, the previous theory of business (and the company bylaws) say shareholders can vote the bum out....The only problem is the alignment of interests suggested by (shareholder value) works just as well – maybe even better – if management just cooks the books and lies. And so shareholder value maximization gave us companies like Enron (Jeffrey Skilling in prison), Tyco International (Dennis Kozlowski in prison), and WorldCom (Bernie Ebbers in prison).

Robert Cringely, Who is killing the computer industry and why

This strategy is so bad that it has been denounced by even the likes of Neutron Jack Welch.

Maximizing shareholder return is bad policy both for public companies and for our society in general. That’s what Jack Welch told the Financial Times in 2009, once Welch was safely out of the day-to-day earnings grind at General Electric: “On the face of it,” said Welch, “shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy… your main constituencies are your employees, your customers, and your products. Managers and investors should not set share-price increases as their overarching goal. … Short-term profits should be allied with an increase in the long-term value of a company.”

Robert Cringely

Anentire financialized ecosystem of asset-stripping, outsourcing, junk bonds, and vulture capitalists has been built upon this nonsensical theory that green-lights the most sociopathic behavior of CEOs, who already had dictatorial authority within their corporate dictatorships. This foundational kaka of the class war is what the progressives need to denounce constantly until the repetition and the linking of all this horrible financial fundamentalism finally shows up on the middle class's radar.

And this is but one facet of the total immersion propaganda that the market is God and can do no wrong. Labor, having been pummeled by it for forty years, clearly understands the war and tries to fight back:

the neo-liberal model (is) that the universe revolves around the financial sector as religion. It is a theocracy, but of the most ancient, it is the transformation of the worship of the golden calf; but now money...

...we must also revolt against this economic order. It is the same order that saved JP Morgan Chase, but let Detroit and now Puerto Rico fail. It is the same religion that would sacrifice the earnings of American students with rising student debt and de-invest in public higher education. It is the same religion that would sacrifice American jobs and labor standards and back the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We must see these as the same struggle to restore sanity and purpose to role of government and its servant, the economy.

AFL-CIO, Economics as Religion

Warren and Sanders are the most active in exposing and denouncing the class war. The fact that all the smearing (socialist, elitist, professor...) has only increased their popularity says that it is possible to talk over the corporate media and their "the market is God" propaganda. We desperately need to continue to do so.

3. Governmental famine, or "starving the beast"

Large numbers of formerly middle-class people have yet to figure out that a war on government is a war on the middle class. They simply do not understand how today's society came to be.

It is the government that legislated the 40 hour week (now largely dishonored and avoided) and the benefits tied to it (unemployment insurance, pension security, overtime pay, sick leave, etc.).

It is the government that legislated a tax-writeoff for home mortgages and that subsidized the FNMA system until it was privatized.

It is the government that provided some semblance of a retirement system (Social Security) and a medical care system for the elderly (Medicare), both of which ruthless oligarchs like Peter Peterson have been actively trying to loot and destroy for the last thirty years.

It is the government that built and funded many great state universities with affordable tuition, and even free tuition via the GI bill. Now, reactionary fascists like Scott the Sociopath Walker brazenly defund education. The Congressional GOP fight to politicize science and cut liberal arts funding. And the government eats the seed corn by making tens of billions of dollars from overpriced, undischargable student loans, often from crooked, for-profit "universities".

If you take away education, health care, home ownership, and retirement security, there is no middle class. And that is exactly what the oligarchs want. They want ignorant, insecure, unhealthy peasants who will not make any trouble, and who will die young, sparing the oligarchs having to spend any money on "useless eaters". Again, see my take on the future of the middle class.

The flip side of the coin is the obscenely bloated military budget, in all its disguises: the military itself, the Department of Energy and the nuclear weapons complex, the $80B black budget for intelligence, all the NGO front organizations involved in overseas political agitation, the hydra-headed and incompetent and constitutionally beyond-the-pale Fatherland Security apparatus. There is always plenty of money for this death-dealing, soul-killing machinery, even as all the peaceful programs that support the middle-class are put on the chopping block. The military feasts while the government starves.

In some ways, the starving of government is a vanity project. The oligarchs want to show that they once again dominate, like the Second Coming of the Robber Barons. Demanding that the government never grow, but always shrink is, in a way, akin to the barbaric practice of footbinding among Chinese nobles.

In both cases, the role is to have a servant who is crippled and totally dependent, but nevertheless serves as an ornament and testament to the power and "benevolence" of the master. What we have been unknowingly witnessing for the last twenty years are the screams of a victim being cruelly tortured by violently constraining its natural development.

4. Privatization as the Death of democracy

Every time a government function is privatized, the citizenry loses control over that function, and the power of government to regulate is diminished. The new owners get to play by all the class war and usury rules cited above. This strategy of taking a hundred small bites has been brilliantly profitable, and morally disastrous.

The Obama administration has rammed charter schools down everyone's throat, to the ultimate financial benefit of hedge fund investors. Studies now show that, corrected for cherry-picked student populations, charter students perform no better than normal schools. Plus, the list of crooked charters (busy "enhancing shareholder value" while going bankrupt and walking away from the wreckage) grows by the week.

Private prisons with no accountability are allowed to gouge prisoners for every necessity (phone calls, food, visitation), while using their literal slave labor to run honest businesses out of what little is left of a home market in America. In what passes for a "free market", the prison companies are guaranteed a certain number of prisoners. That is in the face of the massive over-incarceration in America. The soulless ghouls who vote for this stuff supposedly represent the people. I think not.

Mercenaries and contractors get no-bid defense contracts. The atrocities of their soldiers fall under no code of military justice. The State Department has "Blackwater/Xi/Academi" security teams. Gee, no possibility of corporate intimidation there. For this we fought a revolution and a civil war?

In the crazier parts of the country, fire departments are privatized (Crassus of Rome is smiling from hell.) Gated communities abound.

The howls to privatize everything grow louder every day, but they are by and large a distraction. The real action, the death of real government, the reduction of it to a footbound trophy is coming.

The three secretly negotiated "trade agreements", TPP, TTIP, and TISA will enthrone secret corporate world government over and above any democracy. Nameless corporate judges in secret "courts" will decide what laws interfere with some sociopathic corporation's "future profits". This is fucking pre-crime for democracies.

We have already seen our very own Congress repeal "country of origin" labeling after losing a "case" in a NAFTA "court". A Canadian financial firm is suing to get rid of Dodd-Frank. Nothing to see here. Move along.

As for the citizens, what chance do they have when the government is sold out. After the educational system is dismantled, they will be as clueless about what is going on as a peasant in Chad, and as powerless as a striker in a banana republic.

For years, it has not been possible to sue certain corporations (so much for the standard "remedy" of the "free market" propagandists). Health insurance companies can't be sued for denial of coverage (although Obamacare did made it illegal to deny certain coverages). In Colorado, gun shops cannot be sued for selling massive quantities of arms to mass murderers. There is legislation before congress to deny the right to sue payday lenders. Because the GOP has no shame. These laws are but a preview of a completely corporatized government: it will be immune from petty lawsuits by the commoners.

And, in the most fascistic of Red States, Wisconsin, the lying scumbag governor (who uses his hand-picked State Supreme Court to dodge multiple payoff and campaign finance accusations) has rammed through a law to make the deliberations of the legislature secret. He did this in our supposed "democracy". Just think how bad it is going to get when the three-Ts kick in.

The end

There is a straight line from payday loan sharking to Greek austerity. From individual citizen to entire country, if you get caught by the banksters, you will be ruthlessly bled until there is nothing left or until you die.

The oligarchs have been tearing the leaves off the tree of democracy, one at a time, for decades. Now that the tree is all but dead, they are bringing out the chainsaw to take it down.

We are one vote in our completely corrupt Congress from giving up our democracy. It is that simple. The fact that only a tiny percentage of the population is even aware of these issues gives me little hope.

The reign of the corporate anti-Christ on earth is at hand; and only billionaires will be raptured. They will be laughing their asses off about the fundamentalists who enthroned the "greatest false prophet" of corporatism.

I weep for my country and for its honest, hardworking citizens. The cluelessness is strong in them.

---