It's Not About The Money-It's About The Injustice

In response to the widespread indignance over Barack Obama's having taken $400,000 from the Wall Street firm he'll soon give a speech to, Trevor Noah made a very good point in Obama's defense: "So the first black president must also be the first one to not take money afterwards?"

Noah then made an even more keen observation: "Instead of focusing on how Obama can make so much money from Wall Street for a speech, maybe we should be asking why Wall Street has so much money to give people for a speech: the loose regulations, the intensive lobbying and favorable — you know, the truth is, we can't get into all of this, there's too much, there's too much else that's going on that we have to talk about today." I'd like to get into it a lot more, actually, because there's a lot more to it than what Noah and the other liberals we see coming to Obama's aid on this Wall Street speech issue are saying.

The main defense they like to use seems to be that Obama has a right to take speaking fees, Wall Street firm or no Wall Street firm-sure, $400,000 is a lot for one speech, but why not let him make some money? This argument, similar to the one they like to use whenever a Democratic candidate takes corporate donations of "money makes the world go round," misses the entire reason so many aren't pleased with the situation.

Personally, my attitude wouldn't be any different if Obama's speech had paid a dollar, or if he somehow didn't have a legal right to make money in this way. Because as long as he's being rewarded by Wall Street, there is something deeply unjust about the whole thing.

I'm talking about the fact that, in accordance with Noah's righteous calls for focusing on the deeper problem of Wall Street greed, the resentment from progressives and others about Obama's compensation from the banks has everything to do with said greed. Obama and his party, whose financial relations with the major banking firms go a long way back, can be held responsible for virtually all the excessive power Wall Street currently holds. Obama, along with a crucial amount of other Democratic senators, voted to pass Bush's unnecessary and financial control-consolidating Wall Street bailouts in 2008.

Then, no doubt partly at the behest of the Wall Street insiders within the Obama administration, they took basically no action aside from Dodd Frank. They didn't prosecute the bank executives responsible for the crash, and most importantly they didn't undo the Clinton Wall Street deregulations, which are largely behind the crash in the first place. The results of this were disastrous.

Despite Democrats' (not even accurately founded) back-patting about the unemployment rate having gone below 5% under Obama, the recovery has been what I like to describe as a tower made of toothpicks. The housing bubble has blown right back up, along with the massive overestimation of stock and bond prices. This, coupled with the unprecedented financialization of the economy amid Democrats' failure to break up the banks, along with the record federal debt amid Democrats' failure to sufficiently raise taxes on the wealthy, has created grounds for a new economic crisis. And a crisis that's not far off at all, judging from the bursts in parts of the housing bubble that have already begun to appear.

To be fair, this next crash will also largely involve a reckoning with various larger forms of accounting fraud that society is tied in with too deeply for Obama to have fixed, such our dependence on a petroleum economy. But the reality is that a repeat of 2007-2008 is coming right up, and had Obama and Friends enacted the necessary reforms this crash wouldn't be anywhere near as bad. We also wouldn't have had the resurgence of the GOP and the election of Donald Trump, thus making those reforms here to stay, but that's a different story. My point is that while Noah also protested in his Daily Show rant that change doesn't start with Obama, at a crucial point in history, it did. And the unwillingness of Obama and his party to act at that point has had consequences we'll soon see the full catastrophic scope of.

And now Obama is being paid by the same financial institution whose industry he partnered with for eight years to transfer money away from the lower classes, and which is about to evaporate the money of said classes before quite possibly making another profit through new Wall Street bailouts. You see now, Trevor, why some aren't applauding with your show's audience at that?

In regards to this, along with the countless other hypocrisies and injustices that the Democratic Party has been involved with since its leadership's neoliberal transformation around forty years ago, I doubt the producers of the Daily Show or many other pro-establishment liberals will acknowledge there's a problem. Whatever Noah's personal views on Obama's legacy and the Democratic establishment, he and the rest of the beloved late night liberal comedy crew serve major media institutions that are more than fine with seeing these problems ignored or, better yet, re-framed in a positive light. Thus, it's no wonder Noah was allowed to briefly advocate for standing up to the rigged banking system in the quoted segment-as long as he deflects attention from the root causes of said system, him criticizing Wall Street itself is evidently nonthreatening to the oligarchy.

The good news is that as of the last couple years, every time one of the Democratic establishment's spokespersons has made power-serving statements like the ones mentioned, a consequential facet of the population has reacted by doing something to enact change. And 2016 Democratic primary election theft or not, their efforts are working quite impressively. After a month and a half of Medicare for all supporters leaderlessly pressuring House Democrats to support the H.R. 676 single payer bill, 98 out of the 193 said Democrats are now co-sponsoring it; according to the research of one Warren Lynch, Berniecrats have mostly taken over thirteen state Democratic parties; and as membership in the Democratic Socialists of America has grown rapidly in recent months, so has the electoral success of candidates who share its agenda.

So the types of progressives who aren't cheering on this objectively unfair spectacle of an ex-Wall Street president taking Wall Street money appreciate the concern of the Daily Show's corporate string-pullers, but we're not adopting their cheery attitude about it, not to mention about the monumental flaws in our economic and political systems that it represents. And when extreme financial concentration soon results once again in economic disaster, we expect many of the remaining loyal Democrats, who will suddenly find themselves scarcely able to pay for basic needs let alone cable to watch The Daily Show shortly after Obama left office, to join us in working towards the creation of a society that works for all of us.

But hey, Obama has a right to make money.

The Oligarchy Inches Towards Implosion

The New York Stock Exchange After Trump's executive order to partially bar Muslims from entering the U.S. caused markets to dip.

Following the death last year of the infamous noliberal trade deal the Trans-Pacific Partnership, its creators are now trying to bring it back in a new and even more dangerous form. The Trade in Services Agreement, in addition to including the TPP's aspects of allowing corporations to sue governments over lost profits and making it so that still more American jobs would be shipped out, expands on the TPP's unreasonably extended copyright laws in that it calls for the elimination of internet neutrality. In other words TiSA is the Christmas list of an oligarchy that didn't get what it wanted last year. And the worst part of this is that Donald Trump, the supposed champion of a fairer American trade model, may well be the one who passes it.

Trump, in addition to having rather suspiciously still not revealed his stance on TiSA, seems likely to pass it because he's deeply tied to one of the interests that would benefit from him doing so, by which I mean (you guessed it) Goldman Sachs. While Trump didn't take any money from the bank throughout his campaign, he's just as beholden to it as Hillary Clinton was, with much of his cabinet being made up of former Goldman executives. Telling from this, one could speculate, Goldman Sachs has pulled off a cruel bait and switch on the Rust Belt voters who decided the 2016 election. They've presented to these economically insecure whites a candidate that seemed far more likely than his opponent to prevent more U.S. jobs from being shipped out, and then made it so that he would sign a trade deal that posed even more of a threat to the livelihood of (for now) working people.

Assuming all of that is the case, the benefactors of the neoliberal order have stooped to a new low in their forty years-running quest for more. They've presented the victims of their plunder, tauntingly it seems, with a completely false way out of the vicious cycle of economic inequality. And their next power grab will be even more extensive and vicious.

As quickly and shrewdly as possible, the Trump administration is working towards full control over society for both the alt-right and the corporate state. Already, Trump and his far more sinister and intelligent puppeteers have begun to dismantle some of the fundamental facets of our democracy, having worked to dis-empower dissenting forces within the government as many of their lower-ranking allies have attempted to take away the public's right to peacefully protest.

And this is just a hint of what's coming. Throughout the following months, the Trump government, with the help of a terrorist attack for which they'll be inadvertently responsible, will conduct a staggering coup within the U.S. government. Opposition to the state and its ideology will be silenced. Mass incarceration and the authority of police will be expanded indefinitely. The glorification of nationalism, war, and violations of human rights that we experienced after 9/11 will repeat itself, this time to a far greater significance. The increased consolidation of economic and political power that's occurred for the past half-century will become turbocharged, along with the effort to suppress dissent from the public.

That is, if the public doesn't disable the state's authority do so so beforehand.

The resistance-by which I mean the resistance against not just the Trump regime but the neoliberal order in general-has gotten off to a more than respectable start. Around a third of the days since Trump's election have seen protests against him, organizations like Justice Democrats and the ACLU have experienced a massive surge in donations, and the various strikes and boycotts planned for Trump's term are gaining great momentum. But despite the massive energy we've seen building in opposition to the coming autocracy, I fear not enough is being done to avoid the fate mentioned above.

Too often do I see my fellow progressives dismissing the notion that Trump poses a threat to the republic as fearmongering spread by neoliberal Democrats. Too many Americans continue to regard Trump and his agenda as fairly nonthreatening, with just 46% opposing Trump's partial ban of Muslims, only 53% trusting a federal judge more than the president to decide the fate of a law, and a far too low 49% (citing a poll from last May) viewing Trump as a fascist. And most discouragingly, just 25% of Americans, and that's including just 40% of Democratic women, intend to become more politically involved.

And without a vast majority of Americans being firmly behind the resistance, its cause stands a good chance of failing. "We don’t have much time," one of this movement's leaders Kali Akuno is quoted as saying last week when talking to Chris Hedges. "We are talking two to three months before this whole [reactionary] initiative is firmly consolidated. And that’s with massive resistance."

The irony of all this, though, is that all the time, with every appalling action Trump and Friends take, they move themselves closer to a political black hole. And they may draw themselves into it within the time frame that Akuno mentions.

For the last eight years-or perhaps far longer-the world economy has been heading towards a crash that may be the 21sy century Great Depression. This lurch towards collapse has been due to a wide series of problems with how our economy is structured, most ominously among them the wind down of oil production that's been happening for the last several decades and will continue to happen, to disastrous effect, throughout the several decades to come. But in the shorter term, this depletion of resources has mainly been causing trouble in how we've chosen to order our economy.

Following the 1970's recession largely brought on by 1972's all-time peak in oil production, the advocates of a more elite-oriented economic system were provided with an opening for pushing their agenda. The political establishment, persuaded by the pitch that money needed to be saved amid the economic downturn, abandoned the model of restrained capitalism introduced by FDR and took on an economic worldview of free market fundamentalism. As a result, the economy has grown highly unstable since then, with a refusal on the government's part to provide a level economic playing field having increased poverty and stunted growth while lack of sufficient taxation on the wealthy has driven up the national debt. This unsustainable dynamic of a top-heavy economy, which has been present for the last forty years in not just the U.S. but in most other major countries, is setting us up for a repeat of the crash of 1929 (which, predictably, was also caused by extreme economic inequality). And this Judgement Day for neoliberalism is approaching very quickly.

As was also the case with the Great Depression, the next financial crisis will be set off by an American banking system that's come to be based on fraud. For the past twenty years, our economy has become more and more controlled by more and more corrupt financial institutions, starting with Clinton's Wall Street deregulations. After the crash that resulted from those policies, the government, incredibly, took an even more destructive course of action, having allowed the big banks to become further consolidated and powerful. Now the economy is in a better position than ever for failure, being highly financialized in addition to the two other problems I mentioned. And Donald Trump, with his tendency to disrupt markets and economically destabilizing ultra-neoliberal policies, is sure to speed up the arrival of the new financial crisis, which is expected to come sometime this year regardless.

When Trump and the neoliberal order push the economy off a cliff, though, it's possible they'll go right down with it. A great deal of those who for now remain politically apathetic, along with many current supporters of Trump and the status quo he represents, will no longer be willing to stand by when the consequences of the establishment's self-serving actions culminate in a sudden hollowing out of the middle class. Amid the staggering disappearance of wealth, a political vacuum will form in the ruins of Trump's coalition. And it will be filled by a movement to take the country back from moneyed interests that's strengthened by the newfound support of millions of the regime's former supporters.

From the start, the oligarchy has been gradually setting things up for its own demise. And it's reasonable to expect that very soon, the conditions will become right for a transition towards a sustainable and just society.