At the Democrat debates tonight and tomorrow, 100% of the focus will be on the single individual named Donald J. Trump -- his evil nature, his coarse tone, his collusion with Russia, his treason, his far-right authoritarian subversion of American democracy, his love of similar far-right dictators (callback to Putin), and so on and so forth.
None of it will have to do with substantive issues. They could focus on healthcare, a major concern for voters, but that would heighten the people's awareness of Bernie being the only one who wants a single-payer system, while everyone else either outright rejects that proposal or dissimulates their opposition. The liberal media will be sure to rush right through that rabble-rousing topic.
Bernie's student debt jubilee is another topic that they'll allow five seconds of discussion on before rushing on -- it's too rabble-rousing, and too unconnected to Trump. The most important issue is to defeat Donald Trump, and restore American democracy to how it used to be.
These braindead morons are in for the shock of their lives when the GOP replaces Trump with literally anyone else (aside from a highly polarizing culture warrior like Ted Cruz). They will wait until late in the electoral season, to maximize the element of surprise. Suddenly, all of the Democrats' appeals to voters will go up in a puff of smoke.
"Vote for us in order to rid the White House of Trump! Wait, what's that? He's leaving after one term, so he won't be in office in 2021 no matter who wins the election? Uh, well, problem solved, I guess, but still... vote for us in order to... uh, prosecute Trump after he's already gone!"
They've been constructing their whole narrative based on the continuing threat that Trump poses in his role as the president -- so, once he voluntarily leaves in 2021, that threat vanishes. They cannot switch their message to one of pure vindictiveness, since that does not present some big common problem that we Americans must all unite together in order to solve. Acting like a bunch of petty vindictive middle school girls is not going to motivate anyone to show up to the voting booth.
After the GOP has preemptively neutralized Trump Derangement Syndrome as a potential GOTV issue, the Democrats will not have the monumental turnout that they did in the 2018 midterms. The seething rage will have no clearly defined target, and they will lose both attentional and emotional energy. There will be even more demoralized voters who stay home than in 2016. No high stakes, no point in leaving the house.
That collapse in Democrat turnout, more than a surge in favor of the Republican -- very unlikely since Trump has failed on his major 2016 themes -- will keep the Rust Belt states still very much in play for the GOP. Trump's replacement does not need to win all of them again -- just enough to clear 270. Ohio and Florida are already in the GOP column at this early stage (and North Carolina is not a blue state). If they get just Pennsylvania, it's over.
Only after the Democrats suffer total shock as the GOP snatches the rug out from under them, and they wake up from their concussion to discover that Trump's replacement has won the election, will they be forced to focus on populist material issues. Targeting individuals leaves the campaign completely helpless if that individual is no longer present, whereas targeting institutional and structural problems makes a campaign robust against the changing of particular individuals in the enemy's leadership.
That will also de-fang their obsession with fascism, Nazis, dictators, far-right authoritarianism, etc. Those systems all rely on a highly centralized command structure, and if we really faced such a threat, why would the purported dictator retire voluntarily after four short years? It's a retarded theory that makes no sense of the world and its problems, and it will lose any resonance that it might have enjoyed, once the so-called dictator bows out.
As usual, the technocratic geniuses behind the Democrat Establishment have absolutely no Plan B, and are blithely certain that Trump will be their rival. They are not even having a big debate over it and deciding overtly that Trump will be their rival, they're simply taking it for granted. And of course the clueless Left has been primarily focusing on the same issues as the neoliberal status quo Establishment -- far-right dictator, Nazi menace, etc. They will be of no use either during the campaign. It will truly be the blind leading the blind.
Only the people who are economically populist and morally conservative seem to have any hint of what is possible, and how to build a campaign that is robust to the potential major shocks. And they are marginalized by their supposed comrades on both the Left and Right, whichever they affiliate more with. It'll be a case of I Told You So after the 2020 election, and then a real effort to forge a real realignment after 40 years of neoliberalism.
I've decided not to rehearse my argument for why Trump will not be the GOP nominee, in the interest of space, but you can read my comments to a recent post beginning here. The evidence is extensive and plain to see, both historical parallels and current events (like the GOP refusing to endorse Trump as the next nominee during their meeting earlier this year).
Aside from all that evidence, just check your intuition -- does Trump right now strike you as someone who's preparing for the electoral fight of his life, or someone who's thoroughly checked out and only looking to save as much face as he can on his way out the door?
Maybe tonight's debate will be more in line with your predictions.
ReplyDeletePrediction checked out: they spent hardly any time on real issues, just the typical fluff about what their identities are, and standard lip service about abortion guns and climate.
ReplyDeleteThe only real issues covered in any depth were healthcare -- to what extent will private insurance continue to exist under your plan -- and that was wrapped up early so that nobody would remember by the end.
Tulsi bucked the trend on foreign policy, but we already knew she would flush out the woke imperialists from the anti-interventionists:
http://akinokure.blogspot.com/2019/01/tulsi-campaign-to-flush-out-woke.html
She's not a viable candidate anyway, but acting as reinforcements for the realignment candidate Bernie. Her message will not be carried into the Democrats' national and local campaigns.
The main rhetorical passages last night were all about Trump, and saved up for the climax of the evening -- immigration, Mueller, prosecuting Trump after he's gone, etc.
If nobody remembers anything that a candidate said, they effectively did not speak. Of what people actually heard at the time, and remember since, close to 100% was Trump-themed. And that will only get more intense after Mueller testifies before Congress.
I didn't watch tonight but from what I gather it was mostly support of open borders and Biden being attacked for opposing busing 40 years ago.
ReplyDeleteEven Bernie was leaning heavy on Trump as a major theme, when he's supposed to be the one detailing how awful things have been "over the past 40 years" -- including under Clinton, Obama, and whoever might have been in Trump's place in a different world (Hillary, Jeb, etc.).
ReplyDeleteBernie's trying to have it both ways, when he has to pull a realigner move like Trump did and say how awful things have been under his own party's rule during the neoliberal era. Trump de-sanctified Ronald Reagan during 2015-16 -- began as a flaming liberal on abortion and became somewhat conservative in later life, hahribble on trade, hahribble on immigration, but otherwise he was a pretty good guy, Ronald Reagan.
Or when Trump pointed straight over at Jeb and said YOUR BROTHER DID NOT PROTECT US ON SEPTEMBER 11TH. And what a clusterfuck your brother's war has been.
I know Democrats are more masochistic, conformist, and bootlicking of authority figures, so will resonate less with a Dem candidate who commits sacrilege against a hallowed Democrat like Clinton or Obama, but there are must be disaffected Independents who plan on voting in their primary. Or who would feel motivated to turn out if only someone would rail against the rigged system that both parties have been carrying out for 40 years.
Last night was even more Trump-themed than the first because they were the frontrunners, who are already positioning themselves for the general election.
ReplyDeleteAnd therefore, far more focused on racism / intersectionality, open borders, doubling down on NATO / imperialism, etc. -- the righteously woke return to the status quo ante Trump.
They could not be more fucked.
When Leftists say that "Trump is going to win" after signs like these, what they really mean is that Trump will win in his main area of contest -- memes, Twitter, debates, etc. He'll wipe the mat with all of them except Bernie, and even then Trump will be able to paint Bernie as truly crazy -- free healthcare for all 10 billion people around the world, paid for out of the pockets of our already depleted working and middle classes.
Still, Trump will not be the nominee. As I said in those earlier remarks, he will still campaign for his own replacement (cuck), but he does not need to be the nominee let alone the actual office-holder in order to beat up the Democrats rhetorically in the media world.
He may be restricted from local appearances where his brand is toxic, but that's it. In the national media, he'll be constantly hammering the crazy SJW direction that the Dems have gone off on during the past 4 years, when they were supposed to realign.
I suspect Trump will be the nominee otherwise the Democrats who will be forced to win a far left social justice type by the party will win easily
DeleteThe establishment knows this, read the polls saying how many people like trump, holds in breath and will just get back to business as usual in a few years
Trump has enough of a base not satisfied with the GOP establishment who note has no good candidate either to make sure that the republicans lose maybe every federal election going forward for good simply by staying home
The old "vote for us or they win" thing won't work anymore either, the base wants change and they'll get get it
Also even in poverty central where I live, people are hiring. This makes a big difference
Don't get me wrong the GOPe will happily throw elections to a Neo Liberal (the D version of the same coin) there really isn't one running,
A caveat, maybe Kamala Harris but a lot of Democrats loathe her.
Biden won't get the nod, he's Me Too's out and Bernie will never hold the Presidency being nearly 80 and far from vigorous
Now I could be wrong which is going to make US politics interesting in the Chinese curse sense
Disjunctive-on-disjunctive violence, as Jimmy Carter slams Trump for only winning thanks to Russian interference on his behalf.
ReplyDeleteThough he should have thrown in a reference to far-right authoritarianism and punching Nazis, for the full SJW appeal.
The Democrats have gotten so hooked on the Trump-rage drug, they'll be paralyzed by withdrawal once the GOP cuts off their supply by replacing Trump as nominee.
Tulsi was the only one to come off as realignment, not "the most intense version of options that already exist," whether that be the Left or Center.
ReplyDeleteBiden et al are running as the most Centrist neoliberal, while Bernie's campaign has sadly roped him into running as the Most Stereotypical Current Leftist, i.e. the "we'll do both" New Left from the '70s, after the libertarian cultural turn away from working-class populism.
You can't "do both" -- that's the most played-out, status quo kind of Leftist you could be in 2019. Over 40 years in charge of the Left, and those intersectionalist SJWs can only point to social-cultural degeneracy victories, not wins for the working class or victims of imperialism (domestic or foreign). Indeed, to win those social-cultural gains, they had to ally with the ghouls in the economic and foreign policy realms (like Justice Kennedy on gay marriage).
The people want radical change -- and someone who is economically populist and socially-culturally a moderate or conservative is just that change. Trump proved that concept can win by shaking up the electoral map and popular coalition make-up. As the opposition, the Democrats must either copy that basic strategy or accept their marginal opposition status forever.
Not only would the "do both" intersectionalist Bernie stumble during the general, he'll lose the Democrat primary before. We can check from the recent Dem primary for the Ohio and New York governor's races.
ReplyDeleteDennis Kucinich ran as a New Leftist in Ohio, Cynthia Nixon as a New Leftist in New York. That is, as economic populists and anti-imperialists, but also as hyper-progs on social-cultural issues (race, ethnicity, immigration, gay / tranny topics, and the rest).
Both lost their primaries to neoliberals who played to social-cultural moderates (Cordray in Ohio, Cuomo in New York). Those are a purple / swing state, and a safe blue liberal state. In both, the "most intersectionalist" lost with Democrat primary voters. Therefore, Bernie will lose with Democrat primary voters. They don't want the "most intersectionalist" at the national level any more than the state level.
Of course, Cuomo won his general race against the GOP since New York is a blue state, but Cordray lost his to the Republican since Ohio is purple / swing. Since the nation overall is not a great big safe blue liberal state, but at best swing post-Trump, the neolib who beats Bernie will go on to lose the general to whatever Republican replaces Trump.
Back in 2015-16, Bernie actually ran as a social-cultural moderate -- someone was liberal on some things (gay marriage) but conservative on others (tolerating gun rights, concern for rural people, "open borders is a Koch Brothers proposal"). Into 2017, he was still touting himself as someone who could bridge the divide between Bernie voters and Trump voters, on guns and other hot button issues, since he was not a psychotic extremist on those topics and could find a middle-way compromise. He touted his victories over Hillary in rural, flyover, conservative states.
But now he's abandoned that winning strategy, and is trying to hype up his now D- rating from the NRA, and playing to immigrant-heavy places -- hyper-diverse coastal elite megalopolises -- rather than everyday salt of the earth places like West Virginia that used to be bastions of New Deal Democrats (WV voted for Dukakis when Los Angeles, Chicago, and Bethesda all voted for George Bush).
As a direct result of that switch in strategy, he has plummeted below his 2016 support levels. In part, that's because Warren has broken into the race as another "most intersectionalist" candidate, and she can run laps around Bernie on social-cultural anarchy. So even those "most intersectionalist" voters will be open to switching to her, since Bernie is a second-rate intersectionalist. Having ditched his realignment strategy, that doesn't leave him with much else for support, and that's why he's struggling to even crack 20% in the polls, while Biden is comfortably at 30%+, and Warren has basically caught up to Bernie.
The New Left will forever be snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
When/if the Bernie campaign decides to reboot their failed intersectionalist approach and return to realignment, they can convince voters of their change by saturating media with this iconic ad from 2016:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nwRiuh1Cug
Classic all-American folk music (with the lyrics and text of "America" front and center), salt of the earth setting, an integrated African-American face here and there (no throngs of DACA-rinos in slums), Boomers and Millennials with smiles on their hopeful faces, small-town urbanites, well-meaning suburbanites, and rural people all working toward a shared goal.
Not only would that be a better message on its own, on a meta-level it would say "OK, we fucked up the current campaign, and we're going back to what you guys originally clamored for last time!"
That won't happen any more than the GOP's 2020 campaign will return to Trump's 2016 campaign against de-industrialization, the over-extended empire, and open borders. But on the off-chance that they do want to make the change, start with that old clip -- it's already made, ready to go out again.
"Disjunctive-on-disjunctive violence, as Jimmy Carter slams Trump for only winning thanks to Russian interference on his behalf."
ReplyDeleteThis also reminds me of a recent interview I read, w/Walter Mondale. Mondale is still an avid MSM junkie, and he regurgitated the standard line about Soviet, oops, I mean Russia, interference. Though he may have just said that half-heartedly to give the impression that he was still playing for the right team, without really caring all that much. Even Dems who came from an era of establishment foreign policy sanity (the 70's) can't resist the partisan urge to invalidate whichever Republican happens to be in the White House, even if it means resorting to toxic hostility to a foreign country.
"Dennis Kucinich ran as a New Leftist in Ohio, Cynthia Nixon as a New Leftist in New York. That is, as economic populists and anti-imperialists, but also as hyper-progs on social-cultural issues (race, ethnicity, immigration, gay / tranny topics, and the rest)."
To what degree are these people aware that Woke Twitter and degenerate yuppies represent, at best, 20-25% of the population (and heavily concentrated in a relative handful of no middle class metro areas and college towns, no less)?
How many times do the cultural/demographic anarchy promoters have to get their ass kicked before they learn? Look, even my hard-core Dem dad couldn't understand why BLM was front and center during the 2016 campaign. Why does dangerous black ID politics get to be so important?
The melt-up in the stock market accounts for the failure to realign on both sides. The economy was struggling during the final years of Obama, and that forced people to focus on material issues, and teams banding together to solve a common problem. Even comfortable people thought it might not last much longer.
ReplyDeleteBut then the insane investor class thought that a GOP tax cut would work new levels of wonder for the GDP, and the stock market took off like a rocket under Trump's first year. It underwent swoons during the second year, and is continuing to do so into the third.
But it's stagnating at all-time overvalued highs, rather than declining for awhile, as under the last years of Obama. So the professional classes are feeling pretty comfortable, on both the Left and Right. Global money supply is still sky-high, and that's what these culture warriors get their money from -- the tech bubble, the media bubble, the everything bubble.
Material security affords them the luxury of social / cultural / identity politics. Hopefully that reached its all-time peak last year with Me Too, cucks for Kavanaugh, and the rest of the trend toward "everybody's a Nazi" or "everything Trump does is 4-D chess".
Please God, let Jerome Powell put the final nail in the coffin already and pop the fucking bubble, and bring on the Second Great Depression already. At least they're not letting it melt up parabolically like in 2017, and are trying to keep it within a range of "close to all-time highs".
Not only will that allow for a more orderly cleansing of the economy (already bound to be a disaster after 10 years of poisoning), it will snap the populace out of its culture war indulgence. No time for luxuries in a depression, and that means the culture war goes first!
Thus far the Trump bubble has helped even here in high tax, high poverty California . The jobs aren't great and as a famous New Yorker put it "The rent is too damned high" but there is has been hiring . Who knows how long this can go on.
DeleteYou may not want the depression outcome. The next great depression might end up with a hot civil war instead of the cold one we have
The culture war isn't like in the 80's with a fairly homogeneous population arguing but something closer to a religious one in the Balkans. The gap is far larger now than it has been in I don't know, 60 or more years
This mess has as much to do with the utter inability of US systems to do the correct thing as with deep philosophical divide, acid throwing (or planned acid throwing anyway) Antifa going unchecked cannot exist with even a moderate Right. Someone has to go and if the Sate won't protect its citizens, it becomes illegitimate
Throw in the stress of a depression and the inevitable vengeance of the Left cramming Social Justice, massive tax increases, massive immigration and gun confiscation down the throats of the Right and you risk setting off a powderkeg
A satanist of all things opened an invocation in I think Alaska with roughly "That which does not bend shall break" This is wisdom and our system will end up being broken off at the hilt
Our old and decrepit leaders won't be able to fix anything, no Roosevelt or General Pinochet for that matter will come along , it will just get worse and worse till someone does something stupid like shoot someone over gun confiscation and all hell breaks loose
OT, Mike Cernovich got this peculiar and oddly confessional, threatening email today, July 3, that he posted on Twitter. The writer seemed like he'd just been triggered and was half-heartedly re-evaluating his violent plans for his proxies. You really have to check it out, Agnostic.
ReplyDeleteDonald Trump's campaign is on pace to raise $2 billion. Does that sound like someone who's going to drop out of the race?
ReplyDeletehttps://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/historic-trump-set-to-raise-record-2-billion-for-reelection-4-times-2016
Yes, because that's not money for him. It's all coming from the mega-donors, not 4 times the small donor support he had back in 2016, when he was the anti-Establishment champion.
ReplyDeleteHe's completely surrendered to the GOP Establishment in office, and has long ago handed over the re-election campaign to the cuckservatives at Talking Points USA, not Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, or anyone else in that vein.
If he's already surrendered on a small battle -- to put realigners in charge of the campaign, or the cuckservative Establishment -- he will necessarily surrender on a larger battle, like deferring to the GOP and its donor class by passing the torch.
He's the opposite of a fighter. To pick only the most recent example -- has he delivered on the threat to start rounding up the illegals "after 2 weeks" more than 2 weeks ago?
More like Donald J. Bluff
Another major betrayal from Donald J. Bluff: "Mexican-made autos stream across border at record rate in first half of 2019".
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/09/mexican-made-autos-made-up-16percent-of-us-market-in-first-half-of-2019.html
By now, 1 in 6 new cars in the American market are Mexican-made. Laugh all you want about the crappy junk that you're rich enough to avoid having to buy -- have fun driving, bike-riding, or being a pedestrian anywhere near roads that are increasingly clogged by shoddy Mexican-made shit.
So much for re-industrialization, reviving the Rust Belt, and providing the material basis for a modern welfare state.
If any Democrat wanted to win, they would be hammering Trump himself and the entire GOP -- who are controlled by the manufacturing sector, while the Dems are not. Trump cannot deliver the goods because his own elites would get fucked. Dems can do a better job b/c having auto factories in America doesn't bite into the bottom line of Wall Street banks, Silicon Valley tech giants, or the media / entertainment cartel.
Indeed, it is those elite sectors who have to pay for the welfare state, since their activity still occurs within our borders, in contrast to more and more manufacturing (high profit margin stuff) being done overseas where it cannot be taxed by Uncle Sam.
But the Dems are so emotionally crippled by Trump Derangement Syndrome that they'll continue avoiding the de-industrialization of our economy, no matter how hard it fucks over their own elites and their electoral base of Midwestern union members.
If they focus on those issues, they'd "sound just like Trump" from 2016 anyway, and therefore, racist, xenophobic, etc. We have to continue burning down our modern economic base, and with it our modern welfare state, in order to avoid being tarred and feathered as xenophobic protectionists.
The economic left can make one of two mutually exclusive choices: multicultural internationalism, or material equality within our own borders (for Americans only).
If they make the wrong choice, they should not receive support any more than the crooked de-industrializers on the GOP side.
By now, it's more worth our time to make a case directly to the Wall Street banks and the central bank, all of whom were sitting pretty during our industrial heyday of the New Deal era. After we began de-industrializing, they've all become zombie banks, and now that our central bank has been fatally compromised, there's no one bigger to bail the whole system out.
Economic leftists are simply too infected with multicultural globalism in the present, and it would take too long to cure them of their disease.
On the electoral side -- union manufacturing workers -- they're already on board with protectionism, just waiting for some entity with political power to run society in their interests.
We need a return to the New Deal, where the big labor unions and the big Wall Street banks were strange bedfellows whose alliance kept our society not only afloat, but reaching higher levels of prosperity and egalitarian distribution of resources.
As the unions have been decimated, so too have the big banks and the central bank, notwithstanding the fleeting bubbles in the finance sector over the past 40 years.
"We need a return to the New Deal, where the big labor unions and the big Wall Street banks were strange bedfellows"
ReplyDeleteHow can that be done? If you have any ideas, many here would like to read them.
Long story short, it's not going to happen for awhile. Peter Turchin's model of cycles in elite over-production is what's going on.
ReplyDeletehttps://aeon.co/essays/history-tells-us-where-the-wealth-gap-leads
Right now, and since the late '70s / early '80s when the neoliberal turn began, we're in the phase of elites being over-produced. This stems from rising levels of competitiveness. As elites become so over-produced and so hyper-competitive, they leave less and less for each elite member, and society breaks down.
That breakdown is amplified by the populism that comes from the commoners who become more immiserated by the elite over-production (parasitism, rent-seeking).
Once society breaks down, the elites change their minds and start to rein in their overweening ambition. This allows them to cooperate with one another, and across classes to help out the commoners.
That cooperation leads to a more egalitarian distribution of resources.
But eventually that gets taken for granted, especially by people who are too young to know of the earlier dark age when everyone was at each other's throats. This new naive generation assumes the Wonder Years will last forever by magic, no need to behave in a certain way to make sure it stays nice and prosperous.
They see no problem in striving all they can, leading to elite numbers soaring all over again, and ushering in a new era of competitiveness rather than cooperation.
The last time we were in this part of the cycle was the 1850s. That was the end of the Jacksonian era, akin to today's neoliberal Reagan era. Before each of these eras was a cooperative and egalitarian era, the Jeffersonian era (culminating in the Era of Good Feelings) and the New Deal (culminating in the Wonder Years of the literal 1960s, not the counter-culture and violence circa 1970, misleadingly capitalized as The Sixties).
That means we're going to have to go through another Gilded Age, then another Progressive era when Social Darwinism begins to fall out of favor. Only after that, a return to a Jeffersonian / New Deal phase.
Concretely in the short term, unions and populists should highlight to the big banks and central bank how unfair it is that the manufacturers have moved so much production outside the country, where it can't be taxed, leaving Wall Street and Silicon Valley to have to pick up more of the tax tab for funding our government.
ReplyDeleteAnd aside from current spending, our government has taken on enormous debt since 1980, compared to surpluses under the New Deal, because mfg owners and their vast working class can no longer be taxed to pay immediately for govt, leading to debt instead.
All that debt will wreck the finance sector -- either by them having to monetize that debt, or by defaulting, either one ruining the credit score of our central bank. Their financial assets become worth a whole lot less (they're denominated in dollars, which become funny-money under such printing schemes).
Also, with less and less real production being done here, the central bank has had to fill the void by injecting more and more monetary stimulus in order to "keep the economy going". But since it's just a bankers' bubble, it's not real, and will pop. That's not an emergency, "lender of last resort" function -- they're being used as an emergency every day for 40 years.
De-industrialization is to blame for that, since industrial-scale manufacturing is an organic and endogenous source of job creation with good wages. No need to stimulate constantly -- only now and again when the credit cycle tightens. (There was not a single bubble during the New Deal era.)
And of course, finance cannot provide the jobs themselves -- they are not labor-intensive, and will never be hiring in large numbers. Only labor-intensive employers can fill the void -- but with de-industrialization, that means shitty service jobs.
Industrial mfg has high profits margins, meaning if employers compete for workers, they have to pass along a lot of that profit to workers in wages. Retail, food, etc., are very low-margin activity, and leave little for employers to pass on. Only industrial mfg is both high-profit margin, and labor-intensive / high employment numbers. That alone can sustain a modern welfare state and economy.
There's likely more to the story, but that's the basic pitch. De-industrialization has thoroughly compromised the finance sector, all the way to the top, in stark contrast to the stable finance system of our industrial mfg heyday under the New Deal.
As for concrete solutions in finance, the increasing precariousness was caused by deregulation since 1980. And that did NOT benefit the big Wall Street investment banks -- they did not get deregulated until the late 1990s.
ReplyDeleteRather, early neolib deregulation was about "liberating" the middle and bottom tier financial orgs to claw their way up the pyramid to take on the stodgy old investment banks. Regional banks like Continental Illinois, the entire Savings & Loan sector, hedge funds, private equity (leveraged buy-out, corporate raiding), barely existed before 1980, let alone were they running riot.
That's who was soaring off the charts during the '80s and most of the '90s. It was all fake, so they kept going bust, but for awhile the investment banks did not have to bail them out. Continental Illinois was bailed out by the FDIC, the whole Savings & Loan sector by a special act of the federal government.
But when a big hedge fund, Long Term Capital management, went tits up in the late '90s, it was the Wall Street investment banks who had to bail it out. Imagine that -- this new breed of finance animal has been unshackled and eating your lunch for 15-20 years, and then when one of them kicks the bucket, it's YOU who has to pay for their enormous end-of-life services and funeral costs!
Immediately after LTCM's blow-up and bail-out, the investment banks demanded that they, too, be deregulated. If the middle and lower tier were unshackled, then the top tier had to be unshackled, too, in order to keep from going extinct at the hands of the upwardly mobile breeds.
It was only then that Glass-Steagall was repealed, and investment banks allowed to form into mega-banks.
That mega-ness directly caused them to blow up and need bailing out, in 2008. One didn't even make it -- Lehman Brothers. Think of it: every fly-by-night S&L from the '80s got bailed out, and now it was clear the upstart hedgies would always get bailed out. But one of the oldest investment banks on Wall Street? Sorry, don't count on it.
Now our central bank has gotten too big to fail, after jumping on a nearly 5 trillion-dollar grenade in order to "save the economy" after 2008. But it still has 80% of the shrapnel embedded in its body, meaning it can't absorb another blast -- and the next blast will be much bigger than 5 trillion. When the current bubble pops, the Fed will have a whole new order of magnitude of liabilities on its balance sheet, in the 10s of trillions of dollars.
And there is no higher bank to bail out the central bank that prints the world's reserve currency. No central bank of Planet Earth. No central bank of the solar system. No central bank of the Milky Way. No intergalactic central bank. No central bank of all parallel dimensions. This is, at last, the end of the line for bubble-blowing.
In order to de-scale the Wall Street mega-banks, we have to level the middle and lower tier of the finance world. That's where all the problems started. Impose regulations that put those actors back where they belong, where they're not challenging the investment banks at the top. Once its safe, the mega-banks can shrink back into Glass-Steagall style investment banks.
Big labor and their workers will have no problem with any of that. They don't thrive from the S&Ls, corporate raiders, and hedge funds -- if anything, they've gotten downsized into oblivion by them (private equity).
ReplyDeleteIt can be sold as "all actors in the finance sector will be taking on a smaller role, and reining in their deregulated free-for-all behavior". But the real action will be caging up the sub-investment bank tiers, who started the arms race in the first place. De-escalation of the finance arms race -- a nice way to sell it to populists.
Again, only Dems can pursue that -- they're controlled by the Wall Street mega-banks and central bank, while the GOP was controlled by the formerly low/mid-tier finance orgs who wanted to take on the big boys from Wall Street (S&L, private equity).