#Economics / Economy / Income / Financial

[lilithism1848]

[scottiestoybox]

Uninformed voters supported tRump and hurt themselves

[just-ray]

The budget guys….I am actually at a loss for words.

I think I’m going to need a few minutes because I am genuinely just dumbfounded. I watched the budget today live as it was being announced and I’m just…I don’t even know.

[2wn]

$45 > $100

[anotherpapercut]

it's so wild to me how many people (here in the us) have this attitude about the debt ceiling negotiations like "who cares? this will only affect rich stockbrokers anyway" because like. do y'all not realize that defaulting on our debt could trigger a MASSIVE recession that will come down the hardest on people who are already struggling, including major impacts for people who rely on things like SSI, Medicaid, and other forms of payment/assistance from the govt. as well as the usual steep rise in interest rates across the board affecting things like mortgages, credit cards and car loans

[greenthestral]

The Global Divide Widens: How the Pandemic Caused the First Rise in Between-Country Income Inequality in a Generation

The COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented global crisis, has left no corner of the world untouched. As nations struggled to combat the virus and its economic fallout, an alarming consequence emerged: the first rise in between-country income inequality in a generation. The pandemic's impact on economies has been uneven, leading to significant disparities in wealth and prosperity among nations. This article delves into the factors behind this growing global divide, its consequences, and the urgent need for collective action to address income inequality on an international scale.

The Global Economic Shock

When the pandemic struck, nations scrambled to implement restrictions, shutdowns, and social distancing measures to contain the spread. These actions disrupted supply chains, hampered production, and forced many businesses to close temporarily or permanently. Consequently, economies experienced severe contractions, leading to widespread job losses and reduced consumer spending.

However, not all countries were affected equally. Advanced economies with robust healthcare systems and strong fiscal policies managed to weather the storm better than developing or low-income nations. They were able to provide extensive stimulus packages to support businesses and citizens, preventing a complete economic collapse. On the other hand, many developing countries lacked the resources and capacity to respond effectively, exacerbating their economic struggles.

The K-Shaped Recovery

As the pandemic raged on, a phenomenon known as the "K-shaped recovery" emerged, where different segments of society experienced divergent economic trajectories. This concept extended to the global level as well, highlighting the varying degrees of impact on countries.

Some developed nations witnessed a swift recovery due to their ability to adapt to remote work and technology-based solutions. At the same time, several emerging economies faced prolonged recessions and setbacks, pushing them further behind. The disparity in economic growth between these two groups of countries widened, contributing to the rise in between-country income inequality.

Trade and Travel Disruptions

International trade and travel restrictions during the pandemic significantly affected economies' interconnectedness. Many nations rely heavily on trade partnerships and tourism for economic growth, but the restrictions disrupted these crucial income streams.

For countries heavily reliant on exports, reduced global demand and logistical challenges hampered their economic recovery. Similarly, nations dependent on tourism suffered greatly as travel restrictions kept tourists away, leading to an acute downturn in revenue and employment in the hospitality sector.

Vaccine Inequality and Economic Recovery

Another critical factor influencing the between-country income inequality was vaccine distribution. Access to vaccines played a vital role in determining a nation's ability to control the virus, reopen their economies, and regain economic stability.

While some wealthier nations procured vaccines in abundance and achieved high vaccination rates, many developing countries struggled to secure sufficient doses. The resulting delay in reaching herd immunity and reopening their economies further widened the gap between countries' economic recoveries.

Tech Advancements and Disparities

During the pandemic, technological advancements and digitalization took center stage as businesses and individuals shifted to remote operations and online services. Developed countries, equipped with robust digital infrastructure and skilled workforces, were able to adapt more effectively to the changing landscape.

In contrast, digital disparities in developing countries limited their ability to capitalize on technology's potential for economic growth. The lack of access to high-speed internet and digital skills hindered their participation in the global digital economy, perpetuating income inequality between nations.

Environmental and Social Impact

The pandemic's impact on income inequality goes beyond just economic measures. Environmental and social factors also played a role in exacerbating global disparities.

As the focus shifted to combatting the virus, several environmental initiatives and climate change efforts took a backseat. Developing countries, often bearing the brunt of environmental challenges, lacked the resources to prioritize sustainability during the crisis.

Moreover, vulnerable communities, already facing social inequalities, were disproportionately affected by the pandemic. The lack of adequate healthcare, education, and social safety nets in some nations exacerbated the divide between the rich and poor, both within and between countries.

Urgent Call for Global Solidarity

The rise in between-country income inequality during the pandemic highlights the urgent need for global solidarity and cooperation. Addressing this issue requires collective efforts and inclusive policies that prioritize equitable economic recovery.

International organizations, governments, and businesses must come together to ensure fair vaccine distribution, support sustainable development goals, and promote digital inclusivity. Efforts to reduce trade barriers and foster fair trade practices can also contribute to bridging the income gap.

Conclusion

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a catalyst for unprecedented changes on a global scale. While economies are slowly recovering, the rise in between-country income inequality remains a significant concern. The pandemic exposed existing fault lines and disparities, emphasizing the need for a more equitable and resilient approach to global economic growth.

As we navigate the aftermath of the pandemic, it is crucial to prioritize international cooperation and sustainable solutions. Only through collective action and shared commitment can we hope to address the challenges posed by income inequality and build a more inclusive world for all nations.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, medical, or legal advice. Please consult with a professional for personalized advice.

What's In It For Me? (WIIFM)

In this eye-opening blog article, you will gain a deeper understanding of the far-reaching consequences of the pandemic on global income inequality. Discover how the COVID-19 crisis has widened the gap between nations' economic prosperity, impacting both developed and developing countries. Learn about the factors behind this unprecedented rise in between-country income inequality and explore the urgent call for collective action to address this pressing issue. Whether you're concerned about the global economy, social justice, or sustainable development, this article will provide valuable insights that resonate with every global citizen.

Call to Action (CTA)

Ready to explore the impact of the pandemic on between-country income inequality? Click here to read the full blog article and be part of the conversation about building a more equitable and inclusive world. Together, we can drive change and work towards a brighter future for all nations.

Blog Excerpt

The COVID-19 pandemic has left an indelible mark on the world, and one of its most concerning consequences is the first rise in between-country income inequality in a generation. As economies faced unprecedented challenges, the disparity in economic growth between nations widened significantly. Developed economies with robust healthcare systems and fiscal policies seemed to fare better, while many developing countries struggled to respond effectively, exacerbating their economic struggles. This blog article delves deep into the factors contributing to this global divide, the K-shaped recovery phenomenon, and the impact of vaccine distribution. It emphasizes the urgent need for international cooperation and sustainable solutions to bridge the income gap and foster a more inclusive world.

Meta Description (320 characters)

Discover the first rise in between-country income inequality in a generation due to the pandemic. Learn about the impact, causes, and urgent call for collective action in this insightful blog article.

[the-asexuality-blog]

Just to make my position on the subject of Crab Day clear, since word is going around that the idea came from a highly objectionable person, I’m going to quote rather than reblog @skaldish:

This I agree with. I've seen other posts go around about it, so it wasn't just that one person.

But to make it clear, I'll take the time to explain to people why participating in Crab Day (and financially supporting Tumblr in general) is important:

It's unfortunate, but in this day and age, large websites like this one can't function without an exorbitant amount of income. For other social medias, the bulk of this income comes from Business-to-Business (B2B) transactions, often in the form of selling user data.

The thing y'all need to understand is that wealth is VASTLY different in the B2B economy than it is with B2C (business-to-consumer) economy. In fact, this is a huge reason why we're in an economic crisis...because the US is a nation with two economies, and the power of the dollar is astronomically different between the two of them.

Tech's standard of wealth is based in the B2B economy. Because Tumblr is in the Tech sector, it needs to play according to Tech wealth. Unfortunately, the way you earn Tech wealth is by selling Tech-related B2B products, and for social media websites, that product is user data.

It's a competitive market that sets a new standard of rotten with every transaction. In order to acquire data that's more valuable than your competitor's data, you have to be less ethical about how you source it...and also be willing to cross moral boundaries in regards to who you sell it to.

If Tumblr finds no other way of sourcing income, they have no choice but to participate in this data market or shut down.

However, Tumblr is the home of the secret third thing. In this case, this secret third thing is to work with the community rather than exploit it.

(That's what it looks like to me, anyway. I nether trust nor doubt Tumblr's words; that's not what's winning me over. Instead, I'm curious to know where they plan to go with this, because this is unusual as far as business practices go and I think it would be cool if they're trying to set a more holistic precedent for the social media of the future. I won't be able to see that conclusion if they go bankrupt though.)

So yes, participate in Crab Day. Just because one unpleasant person also condones it doesn't mean it's a bad idea.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How finfluencers destroyed the housing and lives of thousands of people

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

The crash of 2008 imparted many lessons to those of us who were only dimly aware of finance, especially the problems of complexity as a way of disguising fraud and recklessness. That was really the first lesson of 2008: "financial engineering" is mostly a way of obscuring crime behind a screen of technical jargon.

This is a vital principle to keep in mind, because obscenely well-resourced "financial engineers" are on a tireless, perennial search for opportunities to disguise fraud as innovation. As Riley Quinn says, "Any time you hear 'fintech,' substitute 'unlicensed bank'":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism

But there's another important lesson to learn from the 2008 disaster, a lesson that's as old as the South Seas Bubble: "leverage" (that is, debt) is a force multiplier for fraud. Easy credit for financial speculation turns local scams into regional crime waves; it turns regional crime into national crises; it turns national crises into destabilizing global meltdowns.

When financial speculators have easy access to credit, they "lever up" their wagers. A speculator buys your house and uses it for collateral for a loan to buy another house, then they make a bet using that house as collateral and buy a third house, and so on. This is an obviously terrible practice and lenders who extend credit on this basis end up riddling the real economy with rot – a single default in the chain can ripple up and down it and take down a whole neighborhood, town or city. Any time you see this behavior in debt markets, you should batten your hatches for the coming collapse. Unsurprisingly, this is very common in crypto speculation, where it's obscured behind the bland, unpronounceable euphemism of "re-hypothecation":

https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/10/rehypothecation-may-be-common-in-traditional-finance-but-it-will-never-work-with-bitcoin/

Loose credit markets often originate with central banks. The dogma that holds that the only role the government has to play in tuning the economy is in setting interest rates at the Fed means the answer to a cooling economy is cranking down the prime rate, meaning that everyone earns less money on their savings and are therefore incentivized to go and risk their retirement playing at Wall Street's casino.

The "zero interest rate policy" shows what happens when this tactic is carried out for long enough. When the economy is built upon mountains of low-interest debt, when every business, every stick of physical plant, every car and every home is leveraged to the brim and cross-collateralized with one another, central bankers have to keep interest rates low. Raising them, even a little, could trigger waves of defaults and blow up the whole economy.

Holding interest rates at zero – or even flipping them to negative, so that your savings lose value every day you refuse to flush them into the finance casino – results in still more reckless betting, and that results in even more risk, which makes it even harder to put interest rates back up again.

This is a morally and economically complicated phenomenon. On the one hand, when the government provides risk-free bonds to investors (that is, when the Fed rate is over 0%), they're providing "universal basic income for people with money." If you have money, you can park it in T-Bills (Treasury bonds) and the US government will give you more money:

https://realprogressives.org/mmp-blog-34-responses/

On the other hand, while T-Bills exist and are foundational to the borrowing picture for speculators, ZIRP creates free debt for people with money – it allows for ever-greater, ever-deadlier forms of leverage, with ever-worsening consequences for turning off the tap. As 2008 forcibly reminded us, the vast mountains of complex derivatives and other forms of exotic debt only seems like an abstraction. In reality, these exotic financial instruments are directly tethered to real things in the real economy, and when the faery gold disappears, it takes down your home, your job, your community center, your schools, and your whole country's access to cancer medication:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/08/greek-drug-shortage-worsens

Being a billionaire automatically lowers your IQ by 30 points, as you are insulated from the consequences of your follies, lapses, prejudices and superstitions. As @pixelpusher220@dmv.community says, Elon Musk is what Howard Hughes would have turned into if he hadn't been a recluse:

https://mamot.fr/@pixelpusher220@dmv.community/112457199729198644

The same goes for financiers during periods of loose credit. Loose Fed money created an "everything bubble" that saw the prices of every asset explode, from housing to stocks, from wine to baseball cards. When every bet pays off, you win the game by betting on everything:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_bubble

That meant that the ZIRPocene was an era in which ever-stupider people were given ever-larger sums of money to gamble with. This was the golden age of the "finfluencer" – a Tiktok dolt with a surefire way for you to get rich by making reckless bets that endanger the livelihoods, homes and wellbeing of your neighbors.

Finfluencers are dolts, but they're also dangerous. Writing for The American Prospect, the always-amazing Maureen Tkacik describes how a small clutch of passive-income-brainworm gurus created a financial weapon of mass destruction, buying swathes of apartment buildings and then destroying them, ruining the lives of their tenants, and their investors:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-05-22-hell-underwater-landlord/

Tcacik's main characters are Matt Picheny, Brent Ritchie and Koteswar “Jay” Gajavelli, who ran a scheme to flip apartment buildings, primarily in Houston, America's fastest growing metro, which also boasts some of America's weakest protections for tenants. These finance bros worked through Gajavelli's company Applesway Investment Group, which levered up his investors' money with massive loans from Arbor Realty Trust, who also originated loans to many other speculators and flippers.

For investors, the scheme was a classic heads-I-win/tails-you-lose: Gajavelli paid himself a percentage of the price of every building he bought, a percentage of monthly rental income, and a percentage of the resale price. This is typical of the "syndicating" sector, which raised $111 billion on this basis:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-housing-bust-comes-for-thousands-of-small-time-investors-3934beb3

Gajavelli and co bought up whole swathes of Houston and other cities, apartment blocks both modest and luxurious, including buildings that had already been looted by previous speculators. As interest rates crept up and the payments for the adjustable-rate loans supporting these investments exploded, Gajavell's Applesway and its subsidiary LLCs started to stiff their suppliers. Garbage collection dwindled, then ceased. Water outages became common – first weekly, then daily. Community rooms and pools shuttered. Lawns grew to waist-high gardens of weeds, fouled with mounds of fossil dogshit. Crime ran rampant, including murders. Buildings filled with rats and bedbugs. Ceilings caved in. Toilets backed up. Hallways filled with raw sewage:

https://pluralistic.net/timberridge

Meanwhile, the value of these buildings was plummeting, and not just because of their terrible condition – the whole market was cooling off, in part thanks to those same interest-rate hikes. Because the loans were daisy-chained, problems with a single building threatened every building in the portfolio – and there were problems with a lot more than one building.

This ruination wasn't limited to Gajavelli's holdings. Arbor lent to multiple finfluencer grifters, providing the leverage for every Tiktok dolt to ruin a neighborhood of their choosing. Arbor's founder, the "flamboyant" Ivan Kaufman, is associated with a long list of bizarre pop-culture and financial freak incidents. These have somehow eclipsed his scandals, involving – you guessed it – buying up apartment buildings and turning them into dangerous slums. Two of his buildings in Hyattsville, MD accumulated 2,162 violations in less than three years.

Arbor graduated from owning slums to creating them, lending out money to grifters via a "crowdfunding" platform that rooked retail investors into the scam, taking advantage of Obama-era deregulation of "qualified investor" restrictions to sucker unsophisticated savers into handing over money that was funneled to dolts like Gajavelli. Arbor ran the loosest book in town, originating mortgages that wouldn't pass the (relatively lax) criteria of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This created an ever-enlarging pool of apartments run by dolts, without the benefit of federal insurance. As one short-seller's report on Arbor put it, they were the origin of an epidemic of "Slumlord Millionaires":

https://viceroyresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Arbor-Slumlord-Millionaires-Jan-8-2023.pdf

The private equity grift is hard to understand from the outside, because it appears that a bunch of sober-sided, responsible institutions lose out big when PE firms default on their loans. But the story of the Slumlord Millionaires shows how such a scam could be durable over such long timescales: remember that the "syndicating" sector pays itself giant amounts of money whether it wins or loses. The consider that they finance this with investor capital from "crowdfunding" platforms that rope in naive investors. The owners of these crowdfunding platforms are conduits for the money to make the loans to make the bets – but it's not their money. Quite the contrary: they get a fee on every loan they originate, and a share of the interest payments, but they're not on the hook for loans that default. Heads they win, tails we lose.

In other words, these crooks are intermediaries – they're platforms. When you're on the customer side of the platform, it's easy to think that your misery benefits the sellers on the platform's other side. For example, it's easy to believe that as your Facebook feed becomes enshittified with ads, that advertisers are the beneficiaries of this enshittification.

But the reason you're seeing so many ads in your feed is that Facebook is also ripping off advertisers: charging them more, spending less to police ad-fraud, being sloppier with ad-targeting. If you're not paying for the product, you're the product. But if you are paying for the product? You're still the product:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#adfraud

In the same way: the private equity slumlord who raises your rent, loads up on junk fees, and lets your building disintegrate into a crime-riddled, sewage-tainted, rat-infested literal pile of garbage is absolutely fucking you over. But they're also fucking over their investors. They didn't buy the building with their own money, so they're not on the hook when it's condemned or when there's a forced sale. They got a share of the initial sale price, they get a percentage of your rental payments, so any upside they miss out on from a successful sale is just a little extra they're not getting. If they squeeze you hard enough, they can probably make up the difference.

The fact that this criminal playbook has wormed its way into every corner of the housing market makes it especially urgent and visible. Housing – shelter – is a human right, and no person can thrive without a stable home. The conversion of housing, from human right to speculative asset, has been a catastrophe:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

Of course, that's not the only "asset class" that has been enshittified by private equity looters. They love any kind of business that you must patronize. Capitalists hate capitalism, so they love a captive audience, which is why PE took over your local nursing home and murdered your gran:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#disposable-olds

Homes are the last asset of the middle class, and the grifter class know it, so they're coming for your house. Willie Sutton robbed banks because "that's where the money is" and We Buy Ugly Houses defrauds your parents out of their family home because that's where their money is:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/11/ugly-houses-ugly-truth/#homevestor

The plague of housing speculation isn't a US-only phenomenon. We have allies in Spain who are fighting our Wall Street landlords:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#fuckin-aardvarks

Also in Berlin:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/16/die-miete-ist-zu-hoch/#assets-v-human-rights

The fight for decent housing is the fight for a decent world. That's why unions have joined the fight for better, de-financialized housing. When a union member spends two hours commuting every day from a black-mold-filled apartment that costs 50% of their paycheck, they suffer just as surely as if their boss cut their wage:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/13/i-want-a-roof-over-my-head/#and-bread-on-the-table

The solutions to our housing crises aren't all that complicated – they just run counter to the interests of speculators and the ruling class. Rent control, which neoliberal economists have long dismissed as an impossible, inevitable disaster, actually works very well:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset

As does public housing:

https://jacobin.com/2023/10/red-vienna-public-affordable-housing-homelessness-matthew-yglesias

There are ways to have a decent home and a decent life without being burdened with debt, and without being a pawn in someone else's highly leveraged casino bet.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/22/koteswar-jay-gajavelli/#if-you-ever-go-to-houston

Image: Boy G/Google Maps (modified) https://pluralistic.net/timberridge

[robertreich]

Biden vs. Trump: Whose Economic Plan Is Better for You? 

Trump failed to deliver on his number one campaign promise:

President Trump presided over a historic net loss of nearly 3 million American jobs, the worst jobs numbers ever recorded under an American president.

This is no fluke. America’s economy has almost always done worse under Republican presidents. A New York Times analysis found that since 1933, the U.S. economy has grown nearly twice as fast on average under Democrats.

Now Trump’s defenders claim it’s not his fault that the economy collapsed under his watch. It was the pandemic. But there are two big things wrong with this.

First, the pandemic recession was as bad as it was because of Trump. His failure to lead with any national strategy left America in chaos throughout 2020, long after other nations had developed coordinated testing, tracing, and social distancing plans that allowed them to reopen their economies.

But secondly, even before the pandemic, Trump failed to deliver on his economic promises. Job growth slowed under Trump.

America added more jobs in President Obama’s last three years than in Trump’s first three.

Even before the pandemic most middle-class American households saw their incomes go down under Trump.

Trump’s major economic policy was cutting taxes on the rich and big corporations. He promised it would result in $4,000 annual raises for workers. How did that work out? Did you get a $4,000 raise?

Republicans keep claiming that if we just cut enough taxes on the rich, the wealth will “trickle down.” But it never works. Wage growth slowed after Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich and big corporations. And the Bush and Trump tax cuts didn’t trickle down either.

These giveaways to the wealthy came at the expense of investments in infrastructure, education, and health care, making life more expensive and difficult for everyone who isn’t rich.

They also exploded the debt and deficit. Reagan oversaw a 186% increase in the national debt — the biggest percentage increase in over 70 years. The Bush and Trump tax cuts, that mostly benefited corporations and the rich, are the main reasons why America’s debt is growing faster than the economy.

Republican presidents have led us into the three worst economic crises of the last century, and Democrats led us out of them.

Republicans talk about running the country like a business, but they want to run it the way Trump ran his businesses: with massive debts, a string of failures, and payouts for the folks at the top, while workers get shafted again and again. Given Republicans’ track record, why would any hard-working American put their financial security in the hands of a Republican president ever again?

[ladydeath-vanserra]

Inequality + Slums in Velaris

kinda 👀 at the people who think slums and designated Poor™️ areas are supposed to be normal, especially in acotar w Velaris. They *shouldn't* to be normal especially for VeLAriS

The UN Definition of a slum:

.... individuals living under the same roof lacking one or more of the following conditions: access to improved water, access to improved sanitation, sufficient living area, housing durability, and security of tenure

Slums form and grow in different parts of the world for many different reasons. Causes include rapid rural-to-urban migration, economic stagnation and depression, high unemployment, poverty, informal economy, forced or manipulated ghettoization, poor planning, politics, natural disasters, and social conflicts.

Rural–urban migration

Many people move to urban areas primarily because cities promise more jobs, better schools for poor's children, and diverse income opportunities than subsistence farming in rural areas.

this doesn't really apply to Velaris as it is a closed in separated city from the rest of the night court

Urbanization

Some scholars suggest that urbanization creates slums because local governments are unable to manage urbanization, and migrant workers without an affordable place to live in, dwell in slums.

Rapid urbanization drives economic growth and causes people to seek working and investment opportunities in urban areas.

However, as evidenced by poor urban infrastructure and insufficient housing, the local governments sometimes are unable to manage this transition. This incapacity can be attributed to insufficient funds and inexperience to handle and organize problems brought by migration and urbanization.

again, I don't see thus happening due to it being a private and secluded city unless they're taking in a rapid amount of SA survivors- the only outsiders brought into the city

Poor house planning

Insufficient financial resources and lack of coordination in government bureaucracy are two main causes of poor house planning.

This would mean that Rhysand is not paying attention to evenly distributed wealth or mindful government oversight in poor house planning. If there are low income folks, adequate housing is not being provided

Colonialism and segregation

Some of the slums in today's world are a product of urbanization brought by colonialism. For instance, the Europeans arrived in Kenya in the nineteenth century and created urban centers such as Nairobi mainly to serve their financial interests. They regarded the Africans as temporary migrants and needed them only for supply of labour.

The housing policy aiming to accommodate these workers was not well enforced and the government built settlements in the form of single-occupancy bedspaces. Due to the cost of time and money in their movement back and forth between rural and urban areas, their families gradually migrated to the urban centre. As they could not afford to buy houses, slums were thus formed.

I wouldn't say this qualified for Velaris, internally, but as for the Nightcourt as a whole, the separation of the CoN and Illyria from the golden city that is Velaris is very telling

The citizens of the CoN aren't allowed to leave the city and as we have seen from Rhysand, they will have businesses turn CoN citizens away in Velaris

Illyria is full of war torn camps where inequality thrives and there is not adequate housing or supplies, as we see when Cassian said he fought other children for supplies. We also see it when Cassian brings blankets for the Illyrians

Poor infrastructure, social exclusion and economic stagnation

Social exclusion and poor infrastructure forces the poor to adapt to conditions beyond his or her control. Poor families that cannot afford transportation, or those who simply lack any form of affordable public transportation, generally end up in squat settlements within walking distance or close enough to the place of their formal or informal employment.

This overall I feel best exemplifies Velaris. As far as we're made aware there aren't vehicles in Velaris and we don't make notice of any other forms of transportation besides winnowing. The closest we get is flying and we've only seen Cassian, Azriel, Rhysand and Feyre. With Winnowing, it's only Mor and Rhysand and Feyre.

Winnowing is not a common practice ability that all faeries have. There does seem to be a suggestion that there are people who can Winnow, though this is based on Rhysand telling Feyre about his dad being unable to Winnow into the HoW

This leaves many people being unable to have any form of transportation outside of walking.

Informal economy

Many slums grow because of growing informal economy which creates demand for workers. Informal economy is that part of an economy that is neither registered as a business nor licensed, one that does not pay taxes and is not monitored by local, state, or federal government.

There are very few businesses we see in Velaris. We see Rita's, the dive bar and some art studios. There isn't enough shown about legitimate businesses to really show much about an informal economy

Poverty

Urban poverty encourages the formation and demand for slums. With rapid shift from rural to urban life, poverty migrates to urban areas. The urban poor arrives with hope, and very little of anything else. They typically have no access to shelter, basic urban services and social amenities. Slums are often the only option for the urban poor.

Poverty has been witnessed with especially the Illyrians. But within Velaris, it stands to reason that the "grimy part of the city" where Nesta lives, and the bar she frequents, does not have the adequate infrastructure in place for proper wages- which would be Rhysands responsibility to make sure a minimums wage where people could thrive would exist

tldr: Velaris has slums and it's through Rhys' shitty job as a high lord by not creating adequate social systems or infrastructure where poor folks can live without being designated to the "grimy parts of the city"

[scottiestoybox]

Let's talk about finding out fast, tariffs, and Trump....

[houseofbrat]

Bernie Would Have Won

By Krystal Ball

There are a million surface-level reasons for Kamala Harris’s loss and systematic underperformance in pretty much every county and among nearly every demographic group. She is part of a deeply unpopular administration. Voters believe the economy is bad and that the country is on the wrong track. She is a woman and we still have some work to do as a nation to overcome long-held biases. 

But the real problems for the Democrats go much deeper and require a dramatic course correction of a sort that, I suspect, Democrats are unlikely to embark upon. The bottom line is this: Democrats are still trying to run a neoliberal campaign in a post-neoliberal era. In other words, 2016 Bernie was right.

Let’s think a little bit about how we got here. The combination of the Iraq War and the housing collapse exposed the failures and rot that were the inevitable result of letting the needs of capital predominate over the needs of human beings. The neoliberal ideology which was haltingly introduced by Jimmy Carter, embraced fully by Ronald Reagan, and solidified across both parties with Bill Clinton embraced a laissez-faire market logic that would supplant market will for national will or human rights, but also raise incomes enough overall and create enough dynamism that the other problems were in theory, worth the trade off. Clinton after all ran with Reagan era tax cutting, social safety net slashing and free trade radicalism with NAFTA being the most prominent example. 

Ultimately, of course, this strategy fueled extreme wealth inequality. But for a while this logic seemed to be working out. The Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended. Incomes did indeed rise and the internet fueled tech advances contributing to a sense of cosmopolitan dynamism. America had a swaggering confidence that these events really did represent a sort of end of history. We believed that our brand of privatization, capitalism, and liberal democracy would take over the world. We confidently wielded institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and WTO to realize this global vision. We gave China most-favored nation trade status.

Underneath the surface, the unchecked market forces we had unleashed were devastating communities in the industrial Midwest and across the country. By the neoliberal definition NAFTA was a roaring success contributing to GDP growth. But if your job was shipped overseas and your town was shoved into economic oblivion, the tradeoff didn’t seem like such a great deal.

The underlying forces of destruction came to a head with two major catastrophes, the Iraq War and the housing collapse/Great Recession. The lie that fueled the Iraq war destroyed confidence in the institutions that were the bedrock of this neoliberal order and in the idea that the U.S. could or should remake the world in our image. Even more devastating, the financial crisis left home owners destitute while banks were bailed out, revealing that there was something deeply unjust in a system that placed capital over people. How could it be that the greedy villains who triggered a global economic calamity were made whole while regular people were left to wither on the vine?

These events sparked social movements on both the right and the left. The Tea Party churned out populist-sounding politicians like Sarah Palin and birtherist conspiracies about Barack Obama, paving the way for the rise of Donald Trump. The Tea Party and Trumpism are not identical, of course, but they share a cast of villains: The corrupt bureaucrats or deep state. The immigrants supposedly changing your community. The cultural elites telling you your beliefs are toxic. Trump’s version of this program is also explicitly authoritarian. This authoritarianism is a feature not a bug for some portion of the Trump coalition which has been persuaded that democracy left to its own devices could pose an existential threat to their way of life. 

On the left, the organic response to the financial crisis was Occupy Wall Street, which directly fueled the Bernie Sanders movement. Here, too, the villains were clear. In the language of Occupy it was the 1% or as Bernie put it the millionaires and billionaires. It was the economic elite and unfettered capitalism that had made it so hard to get by. Turning homes into assets of financial speculation. Wildly profiteering off of every element of our healthcare system. Busting unions so that working people had no collective power. This movement was, in contrast to the right, was explicitly pro-democracy, with a foundational view that in a contest between the 99% and the 1%, the 99% would prevail. And that a win would lead to universal programs like Medicare for All, free college, workplace democracy, and a significant hike in the minimum wage.  

These two movements traveled on separate tracks within their respective party alliances and met wildly different fates. On the Republican side, Donald Trump emerged as a political juggernaut at a time when the party was devastated and rudderless, having lost to Obama twice in a row. This weakened state—and the fact that the Trump alternatives were uncharismatic drips like Jeb Bush—created a path for Trump to successfully execute a hostile takeover of the party.

Plus, right-wing populism embraces capital, and so it posed no real threat to the monied interests that are so influential within the party structures. The uber-rich are not among the villains of the populist right (see: Elon Musk, Bill Ackman, and so on), except in so much as they overlap with cultural leftism. The Republican donor class was not thrilled with Trump’s chaos and lack of decorum but they did not view him as an existential threat to their class interests. This comfort with him was affirmed after he cut their taxes and prioritized union busting and deregulation in his first term in office.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party put its thumb on the scales and marshaled every bit of power they could, legitimate and illegitimate, to block Bernie Sanders from a similar party takeover. The difference was that Bernie’s party takeover did pose an existential threat—both to party elites who he openly antagonized and to the party’s big money backers. The bottom line of the Wall Street financiers and corporate titans was explicitly threatened. His rise would simply not be allowed. Not in 2016 and not in 2020.

What’s more, Hillary Clinton and her allies launched a propaganda campaign to posture as if they were actually to the left of Bernie by labeling him and his supporters sexist and racist for centering class politics over identity politics. This in turn spawned a hell cycle of woke word-policing and demographic slicing and dicing and antagonism towards working class whites that only made the Democratic party more repugnant to basically everyone.

This identity politics sword has also been wielded within the Democratic Party to crush any possibility of a Bernie-inspired class focused movement in Congress attempted by the Justice Democrats and the Squad in 2018. My colleague Ryan Grim has written an entire book on this subject so I won’t belabor the point here. But suffice it to say, the threat of the Squad to the Democratic Party’s ideology and order has been thoroughly neutralized. The Squad members themselves, perhaps out of ideology and perhaps out of fear of being smeared as racist, leaned into identitarian politics which rendered them non-threatening in terms of national popular appeal. They were also relentlessly attacked from within the party, predominately by pro-Israel groups that an unprecedented tens of millions of dollars in House primaries, which has led to the defeat of several members and has served as a warning and threat to the rest.

That brings us to today where the Democratic Party stands in the ashes of a Republican landslide which will sweep Donald Trumpback into the White House. The path not taken in 2016 looms larger than ever. Bernie’s coalition was filled with the exact type of voters who are now flocking to Donald Trump: Working class voters of all races, young people, and, critically, the much-derided bros. The top contributors to Bernie’s campaign often held jobs at places like Amazon and Walmart. The unions loved him. And—never forget—he earned the coveted Joe Rogan endorsement that Trump also received the day before the election this year. It turns out, the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline is real! While that has always been used as an epithet to smear Bernie and his movement, with the implication that social democracy is just a cover for or gateway drug to right wing authoritarianism, the truth is that this pipeline speaks to the power and appeal of Bernie’s vision as an effective antidote to Trumpism. When these voters had a choice between Trump and Bernie, they chose Bernie. For many of them now that the choice is between Trump and the dried out husk of neoliberalism, they’re going Trump.

I have always believed that Bernie would have defeated Trump in 2016, though of course there is no way to know for sure. What we can say for sure is that the brand of class-first social democracy Bernie ran on in 2016 has proven successful in other countries because of course the crisis of neoliberalism is a global phenomenon. Most notably, Bernie’s basic political ideology was wildly successful electorally with Andrés Manuel López Obrador and now his successor Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, Lula Da Silva in Brazil, and Evo Morales in Bolivia. AMLO, in fact, was one of the most popular leaders in the entire world and dramatically improved the livelihoods of a majority of his countrymen. Bernie’s basic ideology was also successful in our own history.

In the end, I got this election dead wrong. I thought between January 6th and the roll back of human rights for women, it would be enough. I thought that the overtly fascist tendencies of Donald Trump and the spectacle of the world’s richest man bankrolling him would be enough strikes against him to overcome the problems of the Democratic Party which I have spoken out about for years now–problems Kamala Harris decided to lean into rather than confront. Elevating Liz Cheney as a top surrogate was not just a slap in the face to all the victims of American imperialism—past and ongoing; it was a broad signal to voters that Democrats were the party of elites, playing directly into right-wing populist tropes. While the media talked about it as a “tack to the center,” author and organizer Jonathan Smucker more aptly described it as “a tack to the top.” And as I write this now, I have zero hope or expectation that Democrats will look at the Bernie bro coalition and realize why they screwed up. Cable news pundits are already blaming the left once again for the failures of a party that has little to do with the actual left and certainly not the populist left. 

Instead, Trump’s victory represents a defeat of social democratic class-first politics in America—not quite final, but not temporary either. The Democrats have successfully smothered the movement, blocked the entranceways, salted the earth. Instead they will, as Bill Clinton did in the ‘90s, embrace the fundamental tenets of the Trumpist worldview. 

They already are, in fact. Democrats have dropped their resistance to Trump’s mass deportation policies and immigrant scapegoating. The most ambitious politician in the Democratic coalition, Gavin Newsom, is making a big show of being tough-on-crime and dehumanizing the homeless. Democrat-leaning billionaires like Jeff Bezos who not only owns Amazon but the Washington Post have already abandoned their resistance.

Maybe I will be just as wrong as I was about the election but it is my sense that with this Trump victory, authoritarian right politics have won the ideological battle for what will replace the neoliberal order in America. And yes, I think it will be ugly, mean, and harmful—because it already is.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Matt Wuerker, Politico

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 30, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Oct 31, 2024

On Friday, October 25, at a town hall held on his social media platform X, Elon Musk told the audience that if Trump wins, he expects to work in a Cabinet-level position to cut the federal government.

He told people to expect “temporary hardship” but that cuts would “ensure long-term prosperity.” At the Trump rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday, Musk said he plans to cut $2 trillion from the government. Economists point out that current discretionary spending in the budget is $1.7 trillion, meaning his promise would eliminate virtually all discretionary spending, which includes transportation, education, housing, and environmental programs.

Economists agree that Trump’s plans to place a high tariff wall around the U.S., replacing income taxes on high earners with tariffs paid for by middle-class Americans, and to deport as many as 20 million immigrants would crash the booming economy. Now Trump’s financial backer Musk is factoring in the loss of entire sectors of the government to the economy under Trump.  

Trump has promised to appoint Musk to be the government’s “chief efficiency officer.” “Everyone’s going to have to take a haircut.… We can’t be a wastrel.… We need to live honestly,” Musk said on Friday. Rob Wile and Lora Kolodny of CNBC point out that Musk’s SpaceX aerospace venture has received $19 billion from the U.S. government since 2008.

An X user wrote: “I]f Trump succeeds in forcing through mass deportations, combined with Elon hacking away at the government, firing people and reducing the deficit—there will be an initial severe overreaction in the economy…. Markets will tumble. But when the storm passes and everyone realizes we are on sounder footing, there will be a rapid recovery to a healthier, sustainable economy. History could be made in the coming two years.”

Musk commented: “Sounds about right[.]”

This exchange echoes the prescription of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, whose theories had done much to create the Great Crash of 1929, for restoring a healthy economy. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” he told President Herbert Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living

will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” 

Mellon, at least, was reacting to an economic crisis thrust upon an administration. Musk is seeking to create one. 

Today the Commerce Department reported that from July through September, the nation’s economy grew at a solid 2.8%. Consumer spending is up, as is investment in business. The country added 254,000 jobs in September, and inflation has fallen back almost to the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%. 

It is extraordinarily rare for a country to be able to reduce inflation without creating a recession, but the Biden administration has managed to do so, producing what economists call a “soft landing,” rather like catching an egg on a plate. As Bryan Mena of CNN wrote today: “The US economy seems to have pulled off a remarkable and historic achievement.” 

Both President Joe Biden and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris have called for reducing the deficit not by slashing the government, as Musk proposes, but by restoring taxes on the wealthy and corporations. 

As part of the Republicans’ plan to take the country back to the era before the 1930s ushered in a government that regulated business and provided a basic social safety net, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) expects to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. 

At a closed-door campaign event on Monday in Pennsylvania for a Republican House candidate, Johnson told supporters that Republicans will propose “massive reform” to the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare,” if they take control of both the House and the Senate in November. “Health-care reform’s going to be a big part of the agenda,” Johnson said. Their plan is to take a “blowtorch to the regulatory state,” which he says is “crushing the free market.” “Trump’s going to go big,” he said.” When an attendee asked, “No Obamacare?” he laughed and agreed: “No Obamacare…. The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we got a lot of ideas on how to do that.” 

Ending a campaign with a promise to crash a booming economy and end the Affordable Care Act, which ended insurance companies’ ability to reject people with preexisting conditions, is an unusual strategy.

A post from Trump last night and another this morning suggest his internal polls are worrying him. Last night he claimed there was cheating in Pennsylvania’s York and Lancaster counties. Today he posted: “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before. REPORT CHEATING TO AUTHORITIES. Law Enforcement must act, NOW!” 

Trump appears to be setting up the argument he used in 2020, that he can lose only if he has been cheated. But it is increasingly apparent that the get-out-the-vote, or GOTV, efforts of the Trump campaign have been weak. When Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump and loyalist Michael Whatley became the co-chairs of the Republican National Committee in March 2024, they stopped the GOTV efforts underway and used the money instead for litigation. They outsourced GOTV efforts to super PACs, including Musk’s America PAC.

In Wired today, Jake Lahut reported that door-knockers for Musk’s PAC were driven around in the back of a U-Haul without seats and threatened with having to pay their own hotel bills if they didn’t meet high canvassing quotas. One of the canvassers told Lahut that they thought they were being hired to ask people who they would be voting for when they flew into Michigan, and was surprised to learn their actual role. The workers spoke to Lahut anonymously because they had signed a nondisclosure agreement (a practice the Biden administration has tried to stop).

Trump’s boast that he is responsible for the Supreme Court’s overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion is one of the reasons his support is soft. In addition to popular dislike of the idea that the state, rather than a woman and her doctor, should make decisions about her healthcare, the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision is now over two years old, and state examinations of maternal deaths are showing that women are dying from lack of reproductive healthcare. 

Cassandra Jaramillo and Kavitha Surana of ProPublica reported today that at least two pregnant women have died in Texas when doctors delayed emergency care after a miscarriage until the fetal heartbeat stopped. The woman they highlighted today, Josseli Barnica, left behind a husband and a toddler. 

At a rally this evening near Green Bay, Wisconsin, Trump said his team had advised him to stop talking about how he was going to protect women by ending crime and making sure they don’t have to be “thinking about abortion.” But Trump, who has boasted of sexual assault and been found liable for it, did not stop there. He went on to say that he had told his advisors, “I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I am going to protect them.” 

The Trump campaign remains concerned about the damage caused by the extraordinarily racist, sexist, and violent Sunday night rally at Madison Square Garden. Today the campaign seized on a misstatement President Biden made when condemning the statement from the Madison Square Garden event that referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” They tried to turn the tables to suggest that Biden was calling Trump supporters garbage, although the president has always been very careful to focus his condemnation on Trump alone. 

In Wisconsin today, when he disembarked from his plane, Trump put on an orange reflective vest and had someone drive him around the tarmac in a garbage truck with TRUMP painted on the side. He complained about Biden to reporters from the cab of the truck but still refused to apologize for Sunday’s slur of Puerto Rico, saying he knew nothing about the comedian who appeared at his rally. 

This, too, was an unusual strategy. Like his visit to McDonalds, where he wore an apron, the image of Trump in a sanitation truck was likely intended to show him as a man of the people. But his power has always rested not in his promise to be one of the people, but rather to lead them. The pictures of him in a bright orange vest and unusually dark makeup are quite different from his usual portrayal of himself.

Indeed, media captured a video of Trump’s stunt, and it did not convey strength. MSNBC’s Katie Phang watched him try to get into the truck and noted: “Trump stumbles, drags his right leg, almost falls over, and tries at least three times to open the door…. Some transparency with Trump’s medical records would be nice.” 

The Las Vegas Sun today ran an editorial that detailed Trump’s increasingly obvious mental lapses and concluded that Trump is “crippled cognitively and showing clear signs of mental illness.��� It noted that Trump now depends “on enablers who show a disturbing willingness to indulge his delusions, amplify his paranoia or steer his feeble mind toward their own goals.” It noted that if Trump cannot fulfill the duties of the presidency, they would fall to his running mate, J.D. Vance, who has suggested “he would subordinate constitutional principles for personal profit and power.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[darkmaga-returns]

Via Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com,

Former Wall Street money manager Ed Dowd is a skillful financial analyst who said in May the economy was skidding. Now, Dowd predicts the economy is poised to “roll over” and soon.

Why is the Fed cutting rates with a record high DOW? Maybe they see the same thing he does. Dowd explains, “Real weekly wage growth was minus 2% going into the election. It is also interesting to know that minus 2% number of wage growth was also in 1980 when Ronald Reagan won in a landslide and also in 1992 when Bill Clinton won in a landslide…"

"I have never seen such blatant manipulation of government statistics.

There is government spending and government hiring to paper over what is truly a bad economy for the average man. When I was asked prior to the election who do you think will win the election, I said Trump has already won, according to the economic statistics. That’s why he won. Bobby Kennedy helped along with Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, lots of people switching and what have you. What really got Trump in was the economy, the real economy, not the stock market.

It was not the ‘everything is hunky-dory’ pablum from the mainstream media.

The real economy has been rolling over, and we are just waiting for the financial markets to figure this out.

When they do, Trump is going to inherit a turd of a financial market crisis.

Government statistics will be updated, and it will show we started a recession sometime this year…

The incoming Trump Administration has to get out in front of the narrative. This was already baked into the cake. They just got handed fraudulent books. So, they are basically going to get blamed for what is coming.

They have to get in front of the narrative and talk about what they were handed. They need to talk about how the stock market is not a real indicator of economic health like it was before the days of raw manipulation.”

[ZH: We have been endlessly reminding readers for the last six months that the 'always positive' macro headlines that appear every day after almost ubiquitously revised down in later months, hiding the reality that set the scene for Trump's almost unprecedented victory in the election - despite the endless charade promoted by legacy media that 'everything was awesome', it clearly wasn't (and isn't) and the rug-pull is coming.]

The other big problem that Trump needs to get in front of is the CV19 bioweapon vax disaster. Dowd says, “We have been monitoring and tracking excess deaths, disabilities and injuries such as heart attacks, neurological problems, cancers and liver issues…"

[dailyanarchistposts]

J.4.4 What is the “economic structural crisis”?

There is an ongoing structural crisis in the global capitalist economy. Compared to the post-war “Golden Age” of 1950 to 1973, the period from 1974 has seen a continual worsening in economic performance in the West and for Japan. For example, growth is lower, unemployment is far higher, labour productivity lower as is investment. Average rates of unemployment in the major industrialised countries have risen sharply since 1973, especially after 1979. Unemployment “in the advanced capitalist countries … increased by 56 per cent between 1973 and 1980 (from an average 3.4 per cent to 5.3 per cent of the labour force) and by another 50 per cent since then (from 5.3 per cent of the labour force in 1980 to 8.0 per cent in 1994).” Job insecurity has increased with, for example, the USA, having the worse job insecurity since the depression of the 1930s. [Takis Fotopoulos, Towards and Inclusive Democracy, p. 35 and p. 141] In addition, the world economy have become far less stable with regular financial crises sweeping the world of de-regulated capitalism every few years or so.

This crisis is not confined to the economy. It extends into the ecological and the social, with the quality of life and well-being decreasing as GDP grows (as we noted in section C.10, economic factors cannot, and do not, indicate human happiness). However, here we discuss economic factors. This does not imply that the social and ecological crises are unimportant or are reducible to the economy. Far from it. We concentrate on the economic factor simply because this is the factor usually stressed by the establishment and it is useful to indicate the divergence of reality and hype we are currently being subjected to.

Ironically enough, as Marxist Robert Brenner points out, “as the neo-classical medicine has been administered in even stronger doses, the economy has performed steadily less well. The 1970s were worse than the 1960s, the 1980s worse than the 1970s, and the 1990s have been worse than the 1980s.” [“The Economics of Global Turbulence”, New Left Review, no. 229, p. 236] This is ironic because during the crisis of Keynesianism in the 1970s the right argued that too much equality and democracy harmed the economy, and so us all worse-of in the long run (due to lower growth, sluggish investment and so on). However, after decades of pro-capitalist governments, rising inequality, increased freedom for capital and its owners and managers, the weakening of trade unions and so on, economic growth has become worse!

If we look at the USA in the 1990s (usually presented as an economy that “got it right”) we find that the “cyclical upturn of the 1990s has, in terms of the main macro-economic indicators of growth — output, investment, productivity, and real compensation — has been even less dynamic than its relatively weak predecessors of the 1980s and the 1970s (not to mention those of the 1950s and 1960s).” [Brenner, Op. Cit., p. 5] Of course, the economy is presented as a success — inequality is growing, the rich are getting richer and wealth is concentrating into fewer and fewer hands and so for the rich and finance capital, it can be considered a “Golden Age” and so is presented as such by the media. As economist Paul Krugman summarises, in America while the bulk of the population are working longer and harder to make ends meet “the really big gains went to the really, really rich.” In fact, “only the top 1 percent has done better since the 1970s than it did in the generation after World War II. Once you get way up the scale, however, the gains have been spectacular — the top tenth of a percent saw its income rise fivefold, and the top .01 percent of American is seven times richer than they were in 1973.” Significantly, the top 0.1% of Americans, a class with a minimum income of about $1.3 million and an average of about $3.5 million, receives more than 7 percent of all income — up from just 2.2 percent in 1979.” [The Conscience of a Liberal, p. 129 and p. 259]

So it is for this reason that it may be wrong to term this slow rot a “crisis” as it is hardly one for the ruling elite as their share in social wealth, power and income has steadily increased over this period. However, for the majority it is undoubtedly a crisis (the term “silent depression” has been accurately used to describe this). Unsurprisingly, when the chickens came home to roost under the Bush Junta and the elite faced economic collapse, the state bailed them out.

The only countries which saw substantial and dynamic growth after 1973 where those which used state intervention to violate the eternal “laws” of neo-classical economics, namely the South East Asian countries (in this they followed the example of Japan which had used state intervention to grow at massive rates after the war). Of course, before the economic crisis of 1997, capitalist ideologues argued that these countries were classic examples of “free market” economies. Right-wing icon F.A von Hayek asserted that “South Korea and other newcomers” had “discovered the benefits of free markets.” [1980s Unemployment and the Unions, p. 113] In 1995, the Heritage Foundation (a right-wing think-tank) released its index of economic freedom. Four of the top seven countries were Asian, including Japan and Taiwan. All the Asian countries struggling just a few years later qualified as “free.” Yet, as mentioned in section C.10.1, such claims were manifestly false: “it was not laissez-faire policies that induced their spectacular growth. As a number of studies have shown, the expansion of the Asian Tigers was based on massive state intervention that boosted their export sectors, by public policies involving not only heavy protectionism but even deliberate distortion of market prices to stimulate investment and trade.” [Fotopoulos, Op. Cit., p. 115] Moreover, for a long period these countries also banned unions and protest, but then for the right “free markets” always seem compatible with lack of freedom for workers to organise.

Needless to say, after the crisis of the late 1990s, the free-marketeers discovered the statism that had always been there and danced happily on the grave of what used to be called “the Asian miracle”. It was perverse to see the supporters of “free-market” capitalism concluding that history was rendering its verdict on the Asian model of capitalism while placing into the Memory Hole the awkward fact that until the crisis they themselves had taken great pains to deny that such a model existed! Such hypocrisy is not only truly sickening, it also undermines their own case for the wonders of “the market.” For until the crisis appeared, the world’s investors — which is to say “the market” — saw nothing but golden opportunities ahead for these “free” economies. They showed their faith by shoving billions into Asian equity markets, while foreign banks contentedly handed out billions in loans. If Asia’s problems were systemic and the result of these countries’ statist policies, then investors’ failure to recognise this earlier is a blow against the market, not for it.

So, as can be seen, the global economy has been marked by an increasing stagnation, the slowing down of growth, weak (and jobless) recoveries, speculative bubbles driving what growth there is and increasing financial instability producing regular and deepening crisis. This is despite (or, more likely, because of) the free market reforms imposed and the deregulation of finance capital (we say “because of” simply because neo-classical economics argue that pro-market reforms would increase growth and improve the economy, but as we noted in section C.1 such economics has little basis in reality and so their recommendations are hardly going to produce positive results). Of course as the ruling class have been doing well this underlying slowdown has been ignored and obviously claims of crisis are only raised when economic distress reach the elite.

Crisis (particularly financial crisis) has become increasingly visible, reflecting the underlying weakness of the global economy (rising inequality, lack of investment in producing real goods in favour of speculation in finance, etc.). This underlying weakness has been hidden by the speculator performance of the world’s stock markets, which, ironically enough, has helped create that weakness to begin with! As one expert on Wall Street argues, “Bond markets … hate economic strength … Stocks generally behave badly just as the real economy is at its strongest … Stocks thrive on a cool economy, and wither in a hot one.” In other words, real economic weakness is reflected in financial strength. Unsurprisingly, then, ”[w]hat might be called the rentier share of the corporate surplus — dividends plus interest as a percentage of pre-tax profits and interest — has risen sharply, from 20–30% in the 1950s to 60% in the 1990s.” [Doug Henwood, Wall Street, p. 124 and p. 73]

This helps explain the stagnation which has afflicted the economies of the west. The rich have been placing more of their ever-expanding wealth in stocks, allowing this market to rise in the face of general economic torpor. Rather than being used for investment, surplus is being funnelled into the finance market (retained earnings in the US have decreased as interest and dividend payments have increased [Brenner, Op. Cit., p. 210]). However, such markets do concentrate wealth very successfully even if “the US financial system performs dismally at its advertised task, that of efficiently directing society’s savings towards their optimal investment pursuits. The system is stupefyingly expensive, gives terrible signals for the allocation of capital, and has surprisingly little to do with real investment.” [Henwood, Op. Cit., p. 3] As most investment comes from internal funds, the rise in the rentiers share of the surplus has meant less investment and so the stagnation of the economy. The weakening economy has increased financial strength, which in turn leads to a weakening in the real economy. A vicious circle, and one reflected in the slowing of economic growth over the last 30 years.

The increasing dominance of finance capital has, in effect, created a market for government policies. As finance capital has become increasingly global in nature governments must secure, protect and expand the field of profit-making for financial capital and transnational corporations, otherwise they will be punished by dis-investment by global markets (i.e. finance capital). These policies have been at the expense of the underlying economy in general, and of the working class in particular:

“Rentier power was directed at labour, both organised and unorganised ranks of wage earners, because it regarded rising wages as a principal threat to the stable order. For obvious reasons, this goal was never stated very clearly, but financial markets understood the centrality of the struggle: protecting the value of their capital required the suppression of labour incomes.” [William Greider, One World, Ready or Not, p. 302]

For example, “the practical effect of finance capital’s hegemony was to lock the advanced economies and their governments in a malignant spiral, restricting them to bad choices. Like bondholders in general, the new governing consensus explicitly assumed that faster economic growth was dangerous — threatening to the stable financial order — so nations were effectively blocked from measures that might reduce permanent unemployment or ameliorate the decline in wages … The reality of slow growth, in turn, drove the governments into their deepening indebtedness, since the disappointing growth inevitably undermined tax revenues while it expanded the public welfare costs. The rentier regime repeatedly instructed governments to reform their spending priorities — that is, withdraw benefits from dependent citizens.” [Greider, Op. Cit., pp. 297–8]

Of course, industrial capital also hates labour, so there is a basis of an alliance between the two sides of capital, even if they do disagree over the specifics of the economic policies implemented. Given that a key aspect of the neo-liberal reforms was the transformation of the labour market from a post-war sellers’ market to a nineteenth century buyers’ market with its related effects on workplace discipline, wage claims and proneness to strike, industrial capital could not but be happy even if its members quibbled over details. Doug Henwood correctly argues that “Liberals and populists often search for potential allies among industrialists, reasoning that even if financial interests suffer in a boom, firms that trade in real, rather than fictitious, products would thrive when growth is strong. In general, industrialists are less sympathetic to these arguments. Employers in any industry like slack in the labour market; it makes for a pliant workforce, one unlikely to make demands or resist speedups.” In addition, “many non-financial corporations have heavy financial interests.” [Op. Cit., p. 123 and p. 135]

Thus the general stagnation afflicting much of the world, a stagnation which regularly develop into open crisis as the needs of finance undermine the real economy which, ultimately, it is dependent upon. The contradiction between short term profits and long term survival inherent in capitalism strikes again.

Crisis, as we have noted above, has appeared in areas previously considered as strong economies and it has been spreading. An important aspect of this crisis is the tendency for productive capacity to outstrip effective demand, which arises in large part from the imbalance between capitalists’ need for a high rate of profit and their simultaneous need to ensure that workers have enough wealth and income so that they can keep buying the products on which those profits depend. Inequality has been increasing particularly in neo-liberal countries like the UK and USA, which means that the economy faces as realisation crisis (see section C.7), a crisis which was avoided in the short-term by deepening debt for working people (debt levels more than doubled between the 1950s to the 1990s, from 25% to over 60%). In 2007, the chickens came hole to roost with a global credit crunch much worse than the previous finance crises of the neo-liberal era.

Over-investment has been magnified due to the East-Asian Tigers and China which, thanks to their intervention in the market (and repressive regimes against labour), ensured they were a more profitable place to invest than elsewhere. Capital flooded into the area, ensuring a relative over-investment was inevitable. As we argued in section C.7.2, crisis is possible simply due to the lack of information provided by the price mechanism — economic agents can react in such a way that the collective result of individually rational decisions is irrational. Thus the desire to reap profits in the Tiger economies resulted in a squeeze in profits as the aggregate investment decisions resulted in over-investment, and so over-production and falling profits.

In effect, the South East Asian economies suffered from the “fallacy of composition.” When you are the first Asian export-driven economy, you are competing with high-cost Western producers and so your cheap workers, low taxes and lax environmental laws allow you to under-cut your competitors and make profits. However, as more tigers joined into the market, they end up competing against each other and so their profit margins would decrease towards their actual cost price rather than that of Western firms. With the decrease in profits, the capital that flowed into the region flowed back out, thus creating a crisis (and proving, incidentally, that free markets are destabilising and do not secure the best of all possible outcomes). Thus, the rentier regime, after weakening the Western economies, helped destabilise the Eastern ones too.

So, in the short-run, many large corporations and financial companies solved their profit problems by expanding production into “underdeveloped” countries so as to take advantage of the cheap labour there (and the state repression which ensured that cheapness) along with weaker environmental laws and lower taxes. Yet gradually they are running out of third-world populations to exploit. For the very process of “development” stimulated by the presence of Transnational Corporations in third-world nations increases competition and so, potentially, over-investment and, even more importantly, produces resistance in the form of unions, rebellions and so on, which tend to exert a downward pressure on the level of exploitation and profits.

This process reflects, in many ways, the rise of finance capital in the 1970s. In the 1950s and 1960s, existing industrialised nations experienced increased competition from Japan and Germany. As these nations re-industrialised, they placed increased pressure on the USA and other nations, reducing the global “degree of monopoly” and forcing them to compete with lower cost producers. In addition, full employment produced increasing resistance on the shop floor and in society as a whole (see section C.7.1), squeezing profits even more. Thus a combination of class struggle and global over-capacity resulted in the 1970s crisis. With the inability of the real economy, especially the manufacturing sector, to provide an adequate return, capital shifted into finance. In effect, it ran away from the success of working people asserting their rights at the point of production and elsewhere. This, combined with increased international competition, ensured the rise of finance capital which in return ensured the current stagnationist tendencies in the economy (tendencies made worse by the rise of the Asian Tiger economies in the 1980s).

From the contradictions between finance capital and the real economy, between capitalists’ need for profit and human needs, between over-capacity and demand, and others, there has emerged what appears to be a long-term trend toward permanent stagnation of the capitalist economy with what growth spurts which do exist being fuelled by speculative bubbles as well as its benefits being monopolised by the few (so refuting the notion of “trickle down” economics). This trend has been apparent for several decades, as evidenced by the continuous upward adjustment of the rate of unemployment officially considered to be “normal” or “acceptable” during those decades, and by other symptoms as well such as falling growth, lower rates of profit and so on.

This stagnation has became even more obvious by the development of deep crisis in many countries at the end of the 2000s. This caused central banks to intervene in order to try and revive the real economies that have suffered under their rentier inspired policies since the 1970s. Such action may just ensure continued stagnation and reflated bubbles rather than a real-up turn. One thing is true, however, and that is the working class will pay the price of any “solution” — unless they organise and get rid of capitalism and the state. Ultimately, capitalism need profits to survive and such profits came from the fact that workers do not have economic liberty. Thus any “solution” within a capitalist framework means the increased oppression and exploitation of working class people.

[beardedmrbean]

As the 2024 presidential race enters its final stretch, former President Donald Trump appears to be gaining traction with at least some undecided voters. Two of those explained their reasoning on the latest episode of the Morning Meeting podcast.

Co-hosted by veteran political journalist Mark Halperin, former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, and political commentator Dan Turrentine, Monday's YouTube show explored why some voters who remain on the fence are now leaning toward Trump over Kamala Harris. Many of these voters cite concerns over economic instability and national security as key factors in their decision.

"Some of those undecided voters... have started to move toward Trump a little. That's why the number of undecideds is beginning to shrink," said Halperin, referencing recent poll numbers showing an improvement for Trump and explaining the shift among undecided voters.

The podcast featured insights from real voters, including Steve, a man from New Jersey, and Terry, a woman from Connecticut, with both finding themselves leaning back toward the former president as Election Day approaches. While neither expressed full support for Trump, they said they saw him as a more reliable option in uncertain times.

Steve, who voted for Trump in 2016 but did not support him in 2020, explained that his shift is driven by concerns over immigration and national security.

"It's a tough decision, but I'm leaning toward Trump," Steve said during the discussion. Although he still harbors reservations about Trump's behavior, Steve emphasized that issues like border security now take priority in his decision-making process.

Spicer, who served as Trump's first press secretary, emphasized the importance of personal persuasion in swaying undecided voters, downplaying the influence of high-profile celebrity endorsements that Harris has received over the past two months.

"The most impactful endorsement you can get is when a neighbor, a friend, a family member, or a coworker asks you to vote for someone," Spicer said.

Terry, another undecided voter from Connecticut, voiced dissatisfaction with the economy under the Biden administration. After casting a protest vote for Biden in 2020, she now feels "immediate remorse" for that decision. Her concerns focus on the financial struggles of lower-income Americans, particularly those who don't benefit from rising stock markets or retirement portfolios.

"Half of America—75 million people—do not have access to a 401(k) or a stock portfolio. We've got to help this segment... If we don't help the people without access to wealth, we're in trouble," she said.

The hosts also questioned Kamala Harris' campaign strategy as early voting continues. Halperin asked why Harris isn't doing more to engage voters in battleground states. "Why isn't she working harder? If you assume she's behind, why isn't she in three battleground states a day?" he wondered, suggesting that Harris' relatively limited schedule could be contributing to her struggles with undecided voters.

Dan Turrentine suggested that Harris' approach has been overly defensive, which may be hindering her momentum with key voter groups. "After the convention and the debate, she shifted into a defensive posture. She's been trying not to make mistakes and saying very little," the analyst said.

He also noted that Harris has focused on appealing to "soft" Republicans and specific voting blocs like Black men, rather than aggressively courting undecided voters regardless of their party affiliation or demographic.

Trump has seen encouraging signs over the last week following strong showings in several major national polls. Nate Silver, the polling guru who is closely modeling the race on his Substack, noted that, with 21 days remaining, the former president has reason to feel more optimistic about the race.

Silver's analysis indicated that Trump is gaining slight ground against Harris. His Silver Bulletin presidential model, which tracks polling data and electoral trends, showed a 0.3 percentage point shift in Trump's favor over the past week, signaling a more competitive race as the campaigns head into the final stretch.

The updated forecast reflects small but significant gains for Trump in key swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—states pivotal to both Trump's 2016 victory and his 2020 defeat. Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, are barnstorming those states this week, with multiple stops scheduled in all three over the coming days.