Your writing makes it very clear what a sloppy mess the Republicant party is. McCarthy got his picture all over the news for proposing the same old nasty crap— the rich get richer while the workers stay in their place.
Your writing makes it very clear what a sloppy mess the Republicant party is. McCarthy got his picture all over the news for proposing the same old nasty crap— the rich get richer while the workers stay in their place.
It's had to believe that the rich getting way richer was not always the ulterior motive under the patent fairy-tale scenarios presented by "Reaganomics". The "austerity" part is bait and switch; pubic treasuries and Main St. bank accounts were billed as certain to proper as never before. Forty + years later, it's mainly mega-yachts and personal spacecraft that are riding high.
Sullivan's phase " the surest path to restoring the middle class" assumes that the reader knows that the US "middle class" has been in decline over they years "Reaganomic" policies; which was always a predictable outcome. The real modern Republican objective, besides their quest for Absolute Power, has been a return to the bad old days of "The Gilded Age", if not warmed-over feudalism.
JL I read that down near Mar a Lago as well as in New York some of the present day Gilded Agers pay $100,000-to-200,000 annually to belong to exclusive restaurants where they can easily book reservations. Personally, my wife and I find Starbucks a bit pricy.
Keith, You have showed interest in the country's banking policy. Here are the major findings of Fed Reserve's report out today, more to come.
'Fed says it must strengthen banking rules after SVB’s collapse (excerpts)
In a scathing report, the Federal Reserve on Friday outlined a series of disastrous decisions that led to the downfall of Silicon Valley Bank — including failures by the central bank’s own supervisors to ward off last month’s crisis.'
'The much-anticipated 114-page report set the stage for a new, aggressive push by the Fed to restrengthen bank regulation, in an attempt to tighten up many of the rules that were eased by Congress on a bipartisan vote in 2018 and loosened further by the Fed in 2019.'
'Barr, nominated by President Biden as the Fed’s chief banking cop in 2022, wrote the report on SVB and will lead the push for new rules. He has long been a critic of past moves to weaken oversight of the banking system, which he had helped strengthen after the 2008 financial crisis.'
‘Barr’s investigation pointed to four main culprits, with blame spanning from the bank’s reckless executives to Congress’s push to weaken oversight of the banking system. The report also characterized SVB’s meltdown as a perfect storm of compounding hazards: the bank’s explosive growth, a weak supervisory culture at the Fed, even the pandemic’s interference with routine examinations.’ (WAPO) Article printed in today’s paper. Sorry, gifted option not available.
FERN The SVB disbalance between rushed outflow of hot deposits and long-term low-interest assets is a harbinger for further bank panics.
You may have heard of the collapse of over 7,000 banks as FDR took office in March, 1933. Banks then (and now) do not have sufficient cash to pay customers who rush to withdraw their deposits.
The S&L debacle in the 1980s reflected this. S&Ls were limited as to the interest on their deposits. When money market funds evolved, during high inflation of the late 70s-early 80s depositors rushed to move their deposits into money funds. The S&L, with long-term, low-interest assets went bust. I recall that the government ended up with a $150+/- bill.
Currently the first tier banks are under rather strict SEC regulations. This has been weakened under Trump for the $50-250 billion banks, and is even worst for the smaller banks. These smaller banks are most vulnerable on local commercial loans, including real estate.
Especially if there is a national debt default, I foresee another bank crisis. Most recently the Fed/Treasury stepped in to guarantee deposits over the $250,000 FDIC limit. Were this to become a repeat government finger in the bad bank dike again, longer term this will cause a further disbalance in our banking system/
Ah, 'short-term', there is the rub. How do you answer your question, Keith? I respond by recommending stronger regulation and examining the details provided by the Fed's Report.
'Warren, Senators, Call on Fed to Strengthen Rules for Banks with Assets Over $100B
“In order to restore sufficient safety practices to the banking system and restore consumers’ confidence in the soundness of their banks, the Fed must immediately exercise its authority to apply enhanced prudential standards and supervision to banks with $100-$250 billion in assets,” the senators wrote.'
'Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Jack Reed (D-R.I.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Angus King (I-Maine), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) wrote the Vice Chair for Supervision of the Federal Reserve (Fed) Michael Barr, calling on him to exercise the Fed’s authority to apply stronger regulation and supervision to banks with assets totaling $100 to $250 billion. ' See link below.
‘The review spanned hundreds of pages and painted a picture of a bank that grew rapidly in size and risk with limited intervention from supervisors who missed obvious problems and moved slowly to address the ones they did recognize. And it outlined a range of changes to bank oversight and regulation — from stronger deterrents against risk-taking to possible curbs on incentive compensation for executives at poorly managed banks — that the Fed will consider in response to the disaster.’ (NYTimes) Sorry, gifting option not available.
Nancy Yes! Years ago we invested in a Jura cappresso machine.I remember years of commuting to NYC on the 6:36 a. M. Express where we got a cup of hot coffee for 10 cents. Tasted pretty good.
Yes, their ulterior motive is a permanent, white-supremacist, male-dominated, theocratic oligarchy in which as much money as possible is funneled upward as fast as possible. To support that, government spending on anything but the military and strategic infrastructure is to be eliminated, as are taxes on the "makers" and all regulations. But that approach favors only a small minority of the population, at the expense of the great majority, thus the population must be controlled: Only the "right" people can be allowed to vote; women and people of color must not have autonomy of any sort or meaningful opportunity lest they gain a bit of political and economic power; non-traditional religious views and gender roles/definitions are to be shunned and forcefully sent to the margins, if not oppressed altogether; only the "right" information is to be disseminated publicly and taught to the younger generation.
I'd have said that the ideal was a return to the plantation economy and social structure of the antebellum South, but warmed-over feudalism is a good way of putting it as well.
The Hartmann Report had an eye opening letter about how religious competition has always led to theocratic suppression and even killing of women. This always happens when men start fearing that there is not enough of the economic pie for themselves. They don't like the idea of sharing with women or minorities and can't conceive of growing the pie bigger (in contradiction of what they claim tax cuts will do.) This goes all the way back to the Salem with trials.
Jaci Statton wanted her baby, but the fetus wasn’t developing properly and was dying inside her. If it wasn’t removed from her uterus it might kill her, too. She was experiencing vaginal bleeding, high blood pressure, debilitating cramps, and “intense nausea.”
As reporter Ben Felder wrote for The Oklahoman:
“The longer the fetus remained inside her, the higher risk she would be for internal bleeding, kidney and liver failure, and even a stroke.”
She and her husband first went to a nearby hospital, but — like one-in-six hospital beds in America — it was run to earn money for the Catholic Church and so refused to provide her with any help beyond fluids.
Next up was the hospital at the University of Oklahoma Medical Center but that, too, was a dead end. As Felder reported:
“They said, ‘We can't touch you because of the Oklahoma law,’ Statton recalled the doctors telling her husband, even as they acknowledged the pregnancy posed serious health risks and removing the fetus was the best medical decision.”
To save her life, Jaci’s husband drove her to an abortion clinic in Kansas where she was forced to walk through a gamut of jeering anti-abortion protestors carrying signs proclaiming their followers should “STONE ALL THE WHORES!”
If it seems to you like women in Red states are the subjects of witch hunts, you’re right. And it has nothing to do with “life”: it’s all about economic and political power.
Prior to the 1980 election, the official position of the GOP was the same as the Democratic Party. Pre-viability abortions were a decision to be made by a woman alone, with consultation — if she wished — with her physician, spouse, and/or religious counselor.
California Governor Ronald Reagan had, in fact, signed into law the nation’s most permissive abortion regulation in 1967, a full six years before the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade decision. And Reagan’s 1980 running mate, former Texas Congressman George HW Bush, had supported Planned Parenthood — including abortion rights — all the way back to the 1960s as well.
But leading up to the election of 1980, the Reagan campaign determined that the growing backlash to Roe v Wade was a great issue to help ride to victory in the polls. It combined a general Republican distrust of the Supreme Court — dating back to the 1954 Brown v Board decision desegregating public schools — with an embrace of both Catholic and Evangelical Protestant positions that were ardently opposed to abortion.
In this, the Reagan campaign was following a long tradition of men seizing political power on the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) backs of women. The first widespread witch hunts in the 1500s, in fact, were the Catholic Church’s response to the growing Protestant Reformation competing successfully for church membership.
As researchers Peter T. Leeson and Jacob W. Russ noted in The Journal of the Royal Economic Society:
“Europe’s witch trials reflected non-price competition between the Catholic and Protestant churches for religious market share in confessionally contested parts of Christendom. By leveraging popular belief in witchcraft, witch-prosecutors advertised their confessional brands’ commitment and power to protect citizens from worldly manifestations of Satan’s evil.
“Similar to how contemporary Republican and Democrat candidates focus campaign activity in political battlegrounds during elections to attract the loyalty of undecided voters, historical Catholic and Protestant officials focused witch-trial activity in confessional battlegrounds during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation to attract the loyalty of undecided Christians.”
But there was also an economic dimension to the witch hunts, one that is also resurgent today.
In the late 1500s and early 1600s, women who performed abortions or provided birth control were most of the early victims of witch hunts because children were a source of cheap labor for the feudal lords, who essentially owned their serfs and their children.
Multiple studies of that era now show that times of economic insecurity most closely correlated with upsurges in witch hunts and the often gruesome murders of women who practiced reproductive medicine. Times of economic prosperity, on the other hand, tended to go hand-in-hand with more permissive attitudes toward birth control and abortion, and a pause in the witch hunts.
Which may account for the modern era’s swing back toward witch hunts against women seeking or providing abortion.
In 1973, when the Supreme Court legalized abortion nationwide, the American middle class was prosperous.
Wages and wealth of working-class people were growing at a rate faster than that of the morbidly rich, who were restrained by a top 74 percent income tax bracket. A single breadwinner could buy a house and car, raise a family, take an annual vacation, and even set aside money for a comfortable retirement.
In the midst of this prosperity, progressive attitudes toward abortion prospered.
Outside of Catholic circles, in fact, the Roe decision wasn’t even particularly controversial in 1973. It would be another few years before the label “right to life” would be appropriated from the anti-death-penalty movement and used to rebrand the anti-abortion movement.
Reagan’s imposition of neoliberal “trickle down” economics ended the expansion of the world’s largest and most prosperous middle class, which had reached almost 65 percent of American families by 1980.
With a series of massive tax cuts on corporations and the morbidly rich, along with 18 tax increases on average working people, the Reagan administration began the collapse of the middle class to the roughly 45 percent of Americans in it today.
As working class Americans became more impoverished by Reaganism, racist and misogynist sentiments blossomed, becoming mainstream within the GOP by the time Rush Limbaugh gave them voice with his condemnation of “Feminazis!”
The unspoken rallying cry in response to the simultaneous impoverishment and browning of America was, “More white babies!”
Working class white men increasingly saw brown-skinned immigrants, African Americans, and women as economic competitors. The growing national prosperity pie that had once seemed unlimited quickly became perceived as a zero-sum game in the post-Reagan era.
Reaganomics produced a $50 trillion transfer of wealth from the homes and savings accounts of America’s working class into the money bins of the morbidly rich, where that money remains to this day. It set off a scramble for what little was left.
If white men could knock out more than half the population — the 51 percent women and the roughly 15 percent Blacks — there was more money to split up among themselves.
While most white men merely intuited that forbidding women abortions would reduce their representation in the workplace both through parenthood and pregnancy-related deaths, social scientists were proving it.
Five states had legalized abortion prior to the Roe decision: in addition to Reagan’s California, the procedure was also available in Alaska, Hawaii, New York, and Washington state. As researchers found comparing statistics from those states with similar states where abortion was still criminalized prior to 1974:
“Abortion legalization reduced the number of women who became teen mothers by 34% and the number who became teen brides by 20%... [L]egalization reduced maternal mortality among Black women by 30-40%...”
Today, however, abortion is becoming less and less available in the United States, and it’s literally killing women. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among American women between 20 and 24 years old, and the third-leading cause of death among women 25-34.
A new study published three months ago in the American Medical Association’s journal JAMA Psychiatry found that in the years between Roe and 2016 — as so-called TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws went into place in state after state making it harder to get an abortion, closing clinics, and mandating invasive rape-like ultrasounds — those laws led to a measurable increase in female suicide:
“Enforcement of TRAP laws was associated with higher suicide rates among reproductive-aged women (β = 0.17; 95% CI, 0.03 to 0.32; P = .02) but not women of postreproductive age (β = 0.06; 95% CI, –0.11 to 0.24; P = .47) nor to deaths due to motor vehicle crashes (β = 0.03, 95% CI, –0.04 to 0.11; P = .36). Among reproductive-aged women, the weighted average annual-state level suicide death rate when no TRAP laws were enforced was 5.5 per 100,000. Enforcement of a TRAP law was associated with a 5.81% higher annual rate of suicide than in pre-enforcement years.”
Religious freaks and workplace-insecure men are no longer burning women at the stake for the heresy of having or providing abortions.
Instead, they’re using the power of the state to set them up to die often agonizing deaths, all while bragging about their brutality to win elections.
For more information on the state of abortion in America today, I highly recommend Jessica Valenti’s newsletter, Abortion Every Day.
Barbara S WOW! What a detailed history of the projection onto women of the need to resolve essentially competitive religious problems most recently morphed into political difficulties. An amazing tangle with a LONG history.
How ironic that TFG cries "witch hunt" every time he's held to account; yet another example of projection of his own deficits and moral vacuousness!
Yes! I love your addition of TFG's trite reliance on the phrase witch hunt. You are so right. THe Hartmann Report has been doing some fabulous writing on gun control lately, including a whole book on the history of guns in America. I'm ranking him right up there with Heather as daily required reading, though he is more openly left wing partisan in his languaging. (Which I'm OK with since he backs it up with facts and reasoning.)
Here is today's Hartmann Report, which links economically and politically to Naomi Klein's Shock Capitalism, which details how thr Rich have been able to leverage economic and political shocks that devastate the poor and Middle classes into great wealth and even more power for the rich.
Why the GOP May Actually Want a Second Great Depression by Thom Hartmann Apr 23 2023
This is a story as old as capitalism. During the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, for example, some of America’s greatest fortunes were made or massively expanded.
In yesterday’s Daily Take, I laid out a scenario where Kevin McCarthy and congressional Republicans could crash our economy by forcing a default on US debt, producing what could easily be a depression as deep and deadly as the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s.
When I discussed this with people on the radio yesterday, several responded with incredulity.
“Why would the Republicans,” they asked, “who generally represent the interests of corporations and the rich above all else, risk crashing the stock market and economy where those very same wealthy people have their money invested?”
The question itself reveals a misunderstanding of how things work for the morbidly rich.
They are, uniquely, in a position to profit from the same economic downturns that wipe out average working people or those who’ve put their money into 401Ks locked into the market or certain stocks.
This is a story as old as capitalism. During the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, for example, some of America’s greatest fortunes were made or massively expanded.
Joe Kennedy, who’d made a pile of money manipulating the stock market, bailed out as the market began its slide and even shorted the market, increasing his wealth. But once it had crashed, when everybody was broke, he bought stock with a vengeance. “Cash is king” was the phrase of the day, and Kennedy was well stocked in cash (he even bought a movie studio). By the end of the Depression, he was one of the richest men in the nation.
J. Paul Getty’s favorite phrase was, “Buy when everyone else is selling, and hold on until everyone else is buying.” It’s something you can only do at scale if you’re fabulously rich to begin with.
The afternoon of the Great Crash — Black Tuesday — under Republican President Hoover in 1929, Getty skipped his parents’ golden wedding anniversary to head to Wall Street where he began buying stocks, particularly in small oil companies that were in trouble.
“It is the opportunity of a lifetime to get oil companies for practically nothing,” Getty later wrote. Out of that, he became one of the richest men in the world.
Flash forward to the modern era.
When Wall Street banks — exploiting Republican-demanded deregulation of banking and investment rules — crashed the American economy in 2007, home prices (and, thus, homeowner equity) collapsed by 21%. Over 10 million Americans lost their homes to banking predators like “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin, and tens of millions of others were underwater.
The stock market plummeted by over 50%. On October 9, 2007 the Dow was at its all-time peak of 14,164.53 but by March 5, 2009 it had collapsed to 6,594.44.
While over 8 million Americans lost their jobs and were wiped out as the Bush Crash started today’s homelessness crises, the top 1 percent saw it as a buying opportunity.
People were desperately unloading stocks in their 401Ks at a loss just to pay the bills, as wages plummeted in the face of a loose labor market.
But the morbidly rich were doing great.
Between 2009 — the bottom of the Bush Crash — and 2012 when the recovery really began, the top 1 percent of Americans saw their income grow by over 31 percent. Fully 95 percent of all the income increases in the country were seized by the top 1 percent of Americans during that period.
As the economy recovered, rich people who’d used their increased income to buy stocks at the market bottom rode the S&P 500 up by 462 percent to 2020. A billion dollars invested in 2009 became 462 billion in just 11 years, a period during which the combined wealth of American billionaires went up by over 80 percent.
The Trump/Covid Crash of 2020 presented America’s morbidly rich with another brand new and huge opportunity to get richer on top of a crisis brutalizing the rest of America.
Once again the market collapsed and working people, now out of work, were selling their stocks at a loss just to pay the mortgage and buy food. But for the wealthy, it was a gift from God.
March 16, 2020 — just after Trump declared a pandemic and lockdown — the Dow sustained the largest single-day crash in its entire history. For the investor class, Trump and his billionaire buddies, this was an even better opportunity than the Bush crash of 2007!
Fewer than three months later, on June 4th, we learned that the seven richest people in America had seen their fortunes increase by fully 50 percent. And with Trump’s massive tax cut for his fellow billionaires, they could keep most all of it: by that time the average American billionaire was paying less than 3 percent in income taxes (a situation that persists to this day).
Just during that one single terrible pandemic year of 2020, the Institute for Policy Studies documents, the world's 2,365 billionaires saw their wealth increase by a full 54%, as U.S. billionaires saw their net worth surge 62 percent by $1.8 trillion. Average billionaire wealth worldwide increased 27% in that one year alone.
Billionaire’s taxes have fallen by a full 79 percent since Reagan’s election in 1980, and a 2012 analysis found that as much as $32 trillion was safely squirreled away in tax-fraud offshore shelters.
This is why Kevin McCarthy’s proposed legislation to raise the debt ceiling would strip $80 billion from the IRS: the morbidly rich tax cheats who own him (with the Supreme Court’s blessing in Citizens United) don’t want to get caught.
They want to hang onto the trillions they made during the last two crashes.
And, apparently, they’re happily anticipating the next crash that their boy McCarthy and their bought-off Republicans in Congress are working hard to bring to pass with their debt ceiling manipulations.
— Economic downturns not only cut wages and present buying opportunities for the wealthy and corporate America, they also give massive companies far more leverage when negotiating with vendors, who are typically desperate smaller businesses.
— They retain access to credit so they can leverage their buying opportunities in ways smaller companies and working class individuals can’t.
— And their power to fight unionization increases exponentially as workers scramble and compete for jobs that have become vanishingly rare.
But the average American can be forgiven for thinking that Republicans would be reluctant to crash the economy. Their lived experience is very different from that of Elon Musk (532% increase in wealth during the single year of 2020), Mark Zuckerberg (86% increase), or Jeff Bezos (65% increase).
During the Bush Crash, average income for the poorest 10% of Americans fell by a full 23%, making business (and billionaires) much more profitable while working people were skipping meals and cutting pills in half.
Thirteen years later, the Trump Crash threw 8,500,000 Americans out of work: according to the World Economic Forum, the adjusted unemployment rate hit 22.7 percent in 2020, higher than even during the Bush Crash, and it’s taken a full three years for working people to get back to where they started before Trump so badly mismanaged the pandemic.
Small business revenue collapsed by more than a fifth under Trump, new business formation cratered, and by July 2020 one-in-five American families were behind on their rent. The rate of hunger in America doubled at the same time the GOP sought to cut food stamps (SNAP) and Medicaid benefits.
The Bush and Trump crashes, in other words, did the work the morbidly rich have been demanding for years. Wages fell, unions struggled, corporate profits hit highs literally never before seen in America, and hedge funds bought up millions of distressed single-family homes to flip into high-priced rentals.
The stock market became absurdly cheap with both crashes, providing both the multimillionaire members of Congress and their billionaire backers with what used to be once-in-a-lifetime buying opportunities.
So don’t be so sure Republicans in the House and Senate won’t drag America into default and a second Republican Great Depression if they have a chance.
They and their billionaire backers have almost nothing to lose and a fortune to gain.
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You’ve wrapped up the evolution of American conservatism over the last 40+ years quite succinctly, pts. I so wish I’d seen it coming. Not a bit of suspicion. I honestly did not realize conservatism in the US could ever be that diabolical. I’ve been gobsmacked these past 3, 4 years. Wow.
a big part of the problem is how media giants frame it. headline suggest that Biden should negotiate with GOP, that it is on him not them to fix what they broke. Look at how they frame their headlines and focus their stories.
Your writing makes it very clear what a sloppy mess the Republicant party is. McCarthy got his picture all over the news for proposing the same old nasty crap— the rich get richer while the workers stay in their place.
It's had to believe that the rich getting way richer was not always the ulterior motive under the patent fairy-tale scenarios presented by "Reaganomics". The "austerity" part is bait and switch; pubic treasuries and Main St. bank accounts were billed as certain to proper as never before. Forty + years later, it's mainly mega-yachts and personal spacecraft that are riding high.
Sullivan's phase " the surest path to restoring the middle class" assumes that the reader knows that the US "middle class" has been in decline over they years "Reaganomic" policies; which was always a predictable outcome. The real modern Republican objective, besides their quest for Absolute Power, has been a return to the bad old days of "The Gilded Age", if not warmed-over feudalism.
Really hacks me that NASA is contracting with private space man Musk for, well, anything. They will regret the eggs they put in his basket.
JL I read that down near Mar a Lago as well as in New York some of the present day Gilded Agers pay $100,000-to-200,000 annually to belong to exclusive restaurants where they can easily book reservations. Personally, my wife and I find Starbucks a bit pricy.
Keith, You have showed interest in the country's banking policy. Here are the major findings of Fed Reserve's report out today, more to come.
'Fed says it must strengthen banking rules after SVB’s collapse (excerpts)
In a scathing report, the Federal Reserve on Friday outlined a series of disastrous decisions that led to the downfall of Silicon Valley Bank — including failures by the central bank’s own supervisors to ward off last month’s crisis.'
'The much-anticipated 114-page report set the stage for a new, aggressive push by the Fed to restrengthen bank regulation, in an attempt to tighten up many of the rules that were eased by Congress on a bipartisan vote in 2018 and loosened further by the Fed in 2019.'
'Barr, nominated by President Biden as the Fed’s chief banking cop in 2022, wrote the report on SVB and will lead the push for new rules. He has long been a critic of past moves to weaken oversight of the banking system, which he had helped strengthen after the 2008 financial crisis.'
‘Barr’s investigation pointed to four main culprits, with blame spanning from the bank’s reckless executives to Congress’s push to weaken oversight of the banking system. The report also characterized SVB’s meltdown as a perfect storm of compounding hazards: the bank’s explosive growth, a weak supervisory culture at the Fed, even the pandemic’s interference with routine examinations.’ (WAPO) Article printed in today’s paper. Sorry, gifted option not available.
FERN The SVB disbalance between rushed outflow of hot deposits and long-term low-interest assets is a harbinger for further bank panics.
You may have heard of the collapse of over 7,000 banks as FDR took office in March, 1933. Banks then (and now) do not have sufficient cash to pay customers who rush to withdraw their deposits.
The S&L debacle in the 1980s reflected this. S&Ls were limited as to the interest on their deposits. When money market funds evolved, during high inflation of the late 70s-early 80s depositors rushed to move their deposits into money funds. The S&L, with long-term, low-interest assets went bust. I recall that the government ended up with a $150+/- bill.
Currently the first tier banks are under rather strict SEC regulations. This has been weakened under Trump for the $50-250 billion banks, and is even worst for the smaller banks. These smaller banks are most vulnerable on local commercial loans, including real estate.
Especially if there is a national debt default, I foresee another bank crisis. Most recently the Fed/Treasury stepped in to guarantee deposits over the $250,000 FDIC limit. Were this to become a repeat government finger in the bad bank dike again, longer term this will cause a further disbalance in our banking system/
Any thoughts about a short-term ‘solution?’
Ah, 'short-term', there is the rub. How do you answer your question, Keith? I respond by recommending stronger regulation and examining the details provided by the Fed's Report.
'Warren, Senators, Call on Fed to Strengthen Rules for Banks with Assets Over $100B
“In order to restore sufficient safety practices to the banking system and restore consumers’ confidence in the soundness of their banks, the Fed must immediately exercise its authority to apply enhanced prudential standards and supervision to banks with $100-$250 billion in assets,” the senators wrote.'
'Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Jack Reed (D-R.I.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Angus King (I-Maine), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) wrote the Vice Chair for Supervision of the Federal Reserve (Fed) Michael Barr, calling on him to exercise the Fed’s authority to apply stronger regulation and supervision to banks with assets totaling $100 to $250 billion. ' See link below.
https://www.warren.senate.gov/oversight/letters/warren-senators-call-on-fed-to-strengthen-rules-for-banks-with-assets-over-100b
'Warren, Porter, Dozens of Democratic Lawmakers Introduce Bill to Repeal 2018 Rollback of Critical Dodd-Frank Protections' See link below
https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warren-porter-dozens-of-democratic-lawmakers-introduce-bill-to-repeal-2018-rollback-of-critical-dodd-frank-protections
‘The review spanned hundreds of pages and painted a picture of a bank that grew rapidly in size and risk with limited intervention from supervisors who missed obvious problems and moved slowly to address the ones they did recognize. And it outlined a range of changes to bank oversight and regulation — from stronger deterrents against risk-taking to possible curbs on incentive compensation for executives at poorly managed banks — that the Fed will consider in response to the disaster.’ (NYTimes) Sorry, gifting option not available.
And I bet the coffee at your house is better than Starbucks!
Nancy Yes! Years ago we invested in a Jura cappresso machine.I remember years of commuting to NYC on the 6:36 a. M. Express where we got a cup of hot coffee for 10 cents. Tasted pretty good.
Well it sure is better than Starbucks at my house and I am enjoying some right now.
Yes, their ulterior motive is a permanent, white-supremacist, male-dominated, theocratic oligarchy in which as much money as possible is funneled upward as fast as possible. To support that, government spending on anything but the military and strategic infrastructure is to be eliminated, as are taxes on the "makers" and all regulations. But that approach favors only a small minority of the population, at the expense of the great majority, thus the population must be controlled: Only the "right" people can be allowed to vote; women and people of color must not have autonomy of any sort or meaningful opportunity lest they gain a bit of political and economic power; non-traditional religious views and gender roles/definitions are to be shunned and forcefully sent to the margins, if not oppressed altogether; only the "right" information is to be disseminated publicly and taught to the younger generation.
I'd have said that the ideal was a return to the plantation economy and social structure of the antebellum South, but warmed-over feudalism is a good way of putting it as well.
The Hartmann Report had an eye opening letter about how religious competition has always led to theocratic suppression and even killing of women. This always happens when men start fearing that there is not enough of the economic pie for themselves. They don't like the idea of sharing with women or minorities and can't conceive of growing the pie bigger (in contradiction of what they claim tax cuts will do.) This goes all the way back to the Salem with trials.
Jaci Statton wanted her baby, but the fetus wasn’t developing properly and was dying inside her. If it wasn’t removed from her uterus it might kill her, too. She was experiencing vaginal bleeding, high blood pressure, debilitating cramps, and “intense nausea.”
As reporter Ben Felder wrote for The Oklahoman:
“The longer the fetus remained inside her, the higher risk she would be for internal bleeding, kidney and liver failure, and even a stroke.”
She and her husband first went to a nearby hospital, but — like one-in-six hospital beds in America — it was run to earn money for the Catholic Church and so refused to provide her with any help beyond fluids.
Next up was the hospital at the University of Oklahoma Medical Center but that, too, was a dead end. As Felder reported:
“They said, ‘We can't touch you because of the Oklahoma law,’ Statton recalled the doctors telling her husband, even as they acknowledged the pregnancy posed serious health risks and removing the fetus was the best medical decision.”
To save her life, Jaci’s husband drove her to an abortion clinic in Kansas where she was forced to walk through a gamut of jeering anti-abortion protestors carrying signs proclaiming their followers should “STONE ALL THE WHORES!”
If it seems to you like women in Red states are the subjects of witch hunts, you’re right. And it has nothing to do with “life”: it’s all about economic and political power.
Prior to the 1980 election, the official position of the GOP was the same as the Democratic Party. Pre-viability abortions were a decision to be made by a woman alone, with consultation — if she wished — with her physician, spouse, and/or religious counselor.
California Governor Ronald Reagan had, in fact, signed into law the nation’s most permissive abortion regulation in 1967, a full six years before the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade decision. And Reagan’s 1980 running mate, former Texas Congressman George HW Bush, had supported Planned Parenthood — including abortion rights — all the way back to the 1960s as well.
But leading up to the election of 1980, the Reagan campaign determined that the growing backlash to Roe v Wade was a great issue to help ride to victory in the polls. It combined a general Republican distrust of the Supreme Court — dating back to the 1954 Brown v Board decision desegregating public schools — with an embrace of both Catholic and Evangelical Protestant positions that were ardently opposed to abortion.
In this, the Reagan campaign was following a long tradition of men seizing political power on the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) backs of women. The first widespread witch hunts in the 1500s, in fact, were the Catholic Church’s response to the growing Protestant Reformation competing successfully for church membership.
As researchers Peter T. Leeson and Jacob W. Russ noted in The Journal of the Royal Economic Society:
“Europe’s witch trials reflected non-price competition between the Catholic and Protestant churches for religious market share in confessionally contested parts of Christendom. By leveraging popular belief in witchcraft, witch-prosecutors advertised their confessional brands’ commitment and power to protect citizens from worldly manifestations of Satan’s evil.
“Similar to how contemporary Republican and Democrat candidates focus campaign activity in political battlegrounds during elections to attract the loyalty of undecided voters, historical Catholic and Protestant officials focused witch-trial activity in confessional battlegrounds during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation to attract the loyalty of undecided Christians.”
But there was also an economic dimension to the witch hunts, one that is also resurgent today.
In the late 1500s and early 1600s, women who performed abortions or provided birth control were most of the early victims of witch hunts because children were a source of cheap labor for the feudal lords, who essentially owned their serfs and their children.
Multiple studies of that era now show that times of economic insecurity most closely correlated with upsurges in witch hunts and the often gruesome murders of women who practiced reproductive medicine. Times of economic prosperity, on the other hand, tended to go hand-in-hand with more permissive attitudes toward birth control and abortion, and a pause in the witch hunts.
Which may account for the modern era’s swing back toward witch hunts against women seeking or providing abortion.
In 1973, when the Supreme Court legalized abortion nationwide, the American middle class was prosperous.
Wages and wealth of working-class people were growing at a rate faster than that of the morbidly rich, who were restrained by a top 74 percent income tax bracket. A single breadwinner could buy a house and car, raise a family, take an annual vacation, and even set aside money for a comfortable retirement.
In the midst of this prosperity, progressive attitudes toward abortion prospered.
Outside of Catholic circles, in fact, the Roe decision wasn’t even particularly controversial in 1973. It would be another few years before the label “right to life” would be appropriated from the anti-death-penalty movement and used to rebrand the anti-abortion movement.
Reagan’s imposition of neoliberal “trickle down” economics ended the expansion of the world’s largest and most prosperous middle class, which had reached almost 65 percent of American families by 1980.
With a series of massive tax cuts on corporations and the morbidly rich, along with 18 tax increases on average working people, the Reagan administration began the collapse of the middle class to the roughly 45 percent of Americans in it today.
As working class Americans became more impoverished by Reaganism, racist and misogynist sentiments blossomed, becoming mainstream within the GOP by the time Rush Limbaugh gave them voice with his condemnation of “Feminazis!”
The unspoken rallying cry in response to the simultaneous impoverishment and browning of America was, “More white babies!”
Working class white men increasingly saw brown-skinned immigrants, African Americans, and women as economic competitors. The growing national prosperity pie that had once seemed unlimited quickly became perceived as a zero-sum game in the post-Reagan era.
Reaganomics produced a $50 trillion transfer of wealth from the homes and savings accounts of America’s working class into the money bins of the morbidly rich, where that money remains to this day. It set off a scramble for what little was left.
If white men could knock out more than half the population — the 51 percent women and the roughly 15 percent Blacks — there was more money to split up among themselves.
While most white men merely intuited that forbidding women abortions would reduce their representation in the workplace both through parenthood and pregnancy-related deaths, social scientists were proving it.
Five states had legalized abortion prior to the Roe decision: in addition to Reagan’s California, the procedure was also available in Alaska, Hawaii, New York, and Washington state. As researchers found comparing statistics from those states with similar states where abortion was still criminalized prior to 1974:
“Abortion legalization reduced the number of women who became teen mothers by 34% and the number who became teen brides by 20%... [L]egalization reduced maternal mortality among Black women by 30-40%...”
Today, however, abortion is becoming less and less available in the United States, and it’s literally killing women. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among American women between 20 and 24 years old, and the third-leading cause of death among women 25-34.
A new study published three months ago in the American Medical Association’s journal JAMA Psychiatry found that in the years between Roe and 2016 — as so-called TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws went into place in state after state making it harder to get an abortion, closing clinics, and mandating invasive rape-like ultrasounds — those laws led to a measurable increase in female suicide:
“Enforcement of TRAP laws was associated with higher suicide rates among reproductive-aged women (β = 0.17; 95% CI, 0.03 to 0.32; P = .02) but not women of postreproductive age (β = 0.06; 95% CI, –0.11 to 0.24; P = .47) nor to deaths due to motor vehicle crashes (β = 0.03, 95% CI, –0.04 to 0.11; P = .36). Among reproductive-aged women, the weighted average annual-state level suicide death rate when no TRAP laws were enforced was 5.5 per 100,000. Enforcement of a TRAP law was associated with a 5.81% higher annual rate of suicide than in pre-enforcement years.”
Religious freaks and workplace-insecure men are no longer burning women at the stake for the heresy of having or providing abortions.
Instead, they’re using the power of the state to set them up to die often agonizing deaths, all while bragging about their brutality to win elections.
For more information on the state of abortion in America today, I highly recommend Jessica Valenti’s newsletter, Abortion Every Day.
https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=302288&post_id=117275768&utm_source=post-email-title&isFreemail=true&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo1MTgwMTcxLCJwb3N0X2lkIjoxMTcyNzU3NjgsImlhdCI6MTY4MjUxNzE2NiwiZXhwIjoxNjg1MTA5MTY2LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMzAyMjg4Iiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.fjcY_GAE7t3yXcabpDHHKPfaIfM2Vn8BTJ_Jjcq4I4g
Barbara S WOW! What a detailed history of the projection onto women of the need to resolve essentially competitive religious problems most recently morphed into political difficulties. An amazing tangle with a LONG history.
How ironic that TFG cries "witch hunt" every time he's held to account; yet another example of projection of his own deficits and moral vacuousness!
Yes! I love your addition of TFG's trite reliance on the phrase witch hunt. You are so right. THe Hartmann Report has been doing some fabulous writing on gun control lately, including a whole book on the history of guns in America. I'm ranking him right up there with Heather as daily required reading, though he is more openly left wing partisan in his languaging. (Which I'm OK with since he backs it up with facts and reasoning.)
Here is today's Hartmann Report, which links economically and politically to Naomi Klein's Shock Capitalism, which details how thr Rich have been able to leverage economic and political shocks that devastate the poor and Middle classes into great wealth and even more power for the rich.
This is a story as old as capitalism. During the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, for example, some of America’s greatest fortunes were made or massively expanded…
Why the GOP May Actually Want a Second Great Depression by Thom Hartmann Apr 23 2023
This is a story as old as capitalism. During the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, for example, some of America’s greatest fortunes were made or massively expanded.
In yesterday’s Daily Take, I laid out a scenario where Kevin McCarthy and congressional Republicans could crash our economy by forcing a default on US debt, producing what could easily be a depression as deep and deadly as the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s.
When I discussed this with people on the radio yesterday, several responded with incredulity.
“Why would the Republicans,” they asked, “who generally represent the interests of corporations and the rich above all else, risk crashing the stock market and economy where those very same wealthy people have their money invested?”
The question itself reveals a misunderstanding of how things work for the morbidly rich.
They are, uniquely, in a position to profit from the same economic downturns that wipe out average working people or those who’ve put their money into 401Ks locked into the market or certain stocks.
This is a story as old as capitalism. During the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, for example, some of America’s greatest fortunes were made or massively expanded.
Joe Kennedy, who’d made a pile of money manipulating the stock market, bailed out as the market began its slide and even shorted the market, increasing his wealth. But once it had crashed, when everybody was broke, he bought stock with a vengeance. “Cash is king” was the phrase of the day, and Kennedy was well stocked in cash (he even bought a movie studio). By the end of the Depression, he was one of the richest men in the nation.
J. Paul Getty’s favorite phrase was, “Buy when everyone else is selling, and hold on until everyone else is buying.” It’s something you can only do at scale if you’re fabulously rich to begin with.
The afternoon of the Great Crash — Black Tuesday — under Republican President Hoover in 1929, Getty skipped his parents’ golden wedding anniversary to head to Wall Street where he began buying stocks, particularly in small oil companies that were in trouble.
“It is the opportunity of a lifetime to get oil companies for practically nothing,” Getty later wrote. Out of that, he became one of the richest men in the world.
Flash forward to the modern era.
When Wall Street banks — exploiting Republican-demanded deregulation of banking and investment rules — crashed the American economy in 2007, home prices (and, thus, homeowner equity) collapsed by 21%. Over 10 million Americans lost their homes to banking predators like “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin, and tens of millions of others were underwater.
The stock market plummeted by over 50%. On October 9, 2007 the Dow was at its all-time peak of 14,164.53 but by March 5, 2009 it had collapsed to 6,594.44.
While over 8 million Americans lost their jobs and were wiped out as the Bush Crash started today’s homelessness crises, the top 1 percent saw it as a buying opportunity.
People were desperately unloading stocks in their 401Ks at a loss just to pay the bills, as wages plummeted in the face of a loose labor market.
But the morbidly rich were doing great.
Between 2009 — the bottom of the Bush Crash — and 2012 when the recovery really began, the top 1 percent of Americans saw their income grow by over 31 percent. Fully 95 percent of all the income increases in the country were seized by the top 1 percent of Americans during that period.
As the economy recovered, rich people who’d used their increased income to buy stocks at the market bottom rode the S&P 500 up by 462 percent to 2020. A billion dollars invested in 2009 became 462 billion in just 11 years, a period during which the combined wealth of American billionaires went up by over 80 percent.
The Trump/Covid Crash of 2020 presented America’s morbidly rich with another brand new and huge opportunity to get richer on top of a crisis brutalizing the rest of America.
Once again the market collapsed and working people, now out of work, were selling their stocks at a loss just to pay the mortgage and buy food. But for the wealthy, it was a gift from God.
March 16, 2020 — just after Trump declared a pandemic and lockdown — the Dow sustained the largest single-day crash in its entire history. For the investor class, Trump and his billionaire buddies, this was an even better opportunity than the Bush crash of 2007!
Fewer than three months later, on June 4th, we learned that the seven richest people in America had seen their fortunes increase by fully 50 percent. And with Trump’s massive tax cut for his fellow billionaires, they could keep most all of it: by that time the average American billionaire was paying less than 3 percent in income taxes (a situation that persists to this day).
Just during that one single terrible pandemic year of 2020, the Institute for Policy Studies documents, the world's 2,365 billionaires saw their wealth increase by a full 54%, as U.S. billionaires saw their net worth surge 62 percent by $1.8 trillion. Average billionaire wealth worldwide increased 27% in that one year alone.
Billionaire’s taxes have fallen by a full 79 percent since Reagan’s election in 1980, and a 2012 analysis found that as much as $32 trillion was safely squirreled away in tax-fraud offshore shelters.
This is why Kevin McCarthy’s proposed legislation to raise the debt ceiling would strip $80 billion from the IRS: the morbidly rich tax cheats who own him (with the Supreme Court’s blessing in Citizens United) don’t want to get caught.
They want to hang onto the trillions they made during the last two crashes.
And, apparently, they’re happily anticipating the next crash that their boy McCarthy and their bought-off Republicans in Congress are working hard to bring to pass with their debt ceiling manipulations.
— Economic downturns not only cut wages and present buying opportunities for the wealthy and corporate America, they also give massive companies far more leverage when negotiating with vendors, who are typically desperate smaller businesses.
— They retain access to credit so they can leverage their buying opportunities in ways smaller companies and working class individuals can’t.
— And their power to fight unionization increases exponentially as workers scramble and compete for jobs that have become vanishingly rare.
But the average American can be forgiven for thinking that Republicans would be reluctant to crash the economy. Their lived experience is very different from that of Elon Musk (532% increase in wealth during the single year of 2020), Mark Zuckerberg (86% increase), or Jeff Bezos (65% increase).
During the Bush Crash, average income for the poorest 10% of Americans fell by a full 23%, making business (and billionaires) much more profitable while working people were skipping meals and cutting pills in half.
Thirteen years later, the Trump Crash threw 8,500,000 Americans out of work: according to the World Economic Forum, the adjusted unemployment rate hit 22.7 percent in 2020, higher than even during the Bush Crash, and it’s taken a full three years for working people to get back to where they started before Trump so badly mismanaged the pandemic.
Small business revenue collapsed by more than a fifth under Trump, new business formation cratered, and by July 2020 one-in-five American families were behind on their rent. The rate of hunger in America doubled at the same time the GOP sought to cut food stamps (SNAP) and Medicaid benefits.
The Bush and Trump crashes, in other words, did the work the morbidly rich have been demanding for years. Wages fell, unions struggled, corporate profits hit highs literally never before seen in America, and hedge funds bought up millions of distressed single-family homes to flip into high-priced rentals.
The stock market became absurdly cheap with both crashes, providing both the multimillionaire members of Congress and their billionaire backers with what used to be once-in-a-lifetime buying opportunities.
So don’t be so sure Republicans in the House and Senate won’t drag America into default and a second Republican Great Depression if they have a chance.
They and their billionaire backers have almost nothing to lose and a fortune to gain.
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© 2023 Thomas Hartmann
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You’ve wrapped up the evolution of American conservatism over the last 40+ years quite succinctly, pts. I so wish I’d seen it coming. Not a bit of suspicion. I honestly did not realize conservatism in the US could ever be that diabolical. I’ve been gobsmacked these past 3, 4 years. Wow.
Warmed-over feudalism?
No, it's more like occupation by a vicious foreign invader, plus quislings.
Good comment, JL, but I'd like some additional info about the "pubic" treasuries. They don't sound very "proper" to me.
Typo, i think. Try prosper in that sentence instead.
Yes, it's surely a typo. A funny one, however.
Feudalism?
Feudalism with no responsibility, no reciprocity, no protection for the serfs, no duty to any higher power?
Pure unadulterated exploitation.
No, those words are too weak.
Vampirism.
How's that for a policy?
As for the sTrumpets and sTrumpettes turning tricks in Congress...
a big part of the problem is how media giants frame it. headline suggest that Biden should negotiate with GOP, that it is on him not them to fix what they broke. Look at how they frame their headlines and focus their stories.
100 percent. And the media needs to change this false framing.
The will not, though. They frame the news in such a fashion because it sells more clicks and creates more advertising revenue.😭😠
In any case, I believe Biden's team is capable of handling the negotiations.
Totally agree!
That's the way they like it, uh, huh, uh, huh - to borrow from the Bee Gees.
Daniel, KC and the Sunshine Band.....
Elizabeth Iler! As Mary Wells would say, "You beat me to the punch, that time"!
I’m smiling at your “punch”, Joanne!
Yeah, sometimes I get a little punchy!!! 😊
More appropriate Bee Gees - “Stayin’ Alive”
You're my kind of guy, Daniel...sing it!
I was once asked to sing in a church choir. My response, " You guys are really THAT desperate ? WOW ! ".
Daniel Appleton, what about KC and the Sunshine Band?
I like Hugh Jackman better, after hearing him in The Greatest Showman. It's everything you ever want, everything you'll ever need.....
Daniel: here is the link on YT: https://youtu.be/q3svW8PM_jc
Gracias !