What the Ultra Wealthy Really Want

Every “civilized” society socializes the risks and burdens of providing for the basic needs of its citizens. It shares the costs across the entire population. Some needs can only be provided for in this way — health care, the best example, is an unaffordable luxury for most citizens unless everyone equitably shares the cost of maintaining a widely accessible system.

You know everything you need to know about the top 0.1 percent of the US population (exemplified by the Kochs, Sacklers, Waltons and Adelsons) when you understand what they really want from the government they have co-opted or bought over the last 40 years: They want out of this bargain — in perpetuity, from generation to generation.

Having siphoned off half the nation’s wealth for themselves, they now want it established in law that the wealthiest are not responsible to the other 323 million of us. That if the rest of us want a broadly accessible health care system, we should build and pay for it ourselves. This is how they define “freedom.”

No class of people has enjoyed such privilege in any Western society since the French Revolution.

"Economic Expansion"

There are mornings when I'll feel drawn to a headline like this. I don't mean to pick on this firm or this analyst, particularly, but this here is American-style capitalism distilled to its purest, most venomous essence. Net:

After nine straight years of economic growth -- but actually after almost four decades in which capital assets and corporate profits have grown almost uninterrupted, while wages of working people have stagnated at near-zero growth rates -- Wall Street sees incipient "wage gains" not as an abatement in America's savage inequality but purely as a threat to corporate profitability.

After lax accounting and corporate governance standards led to a continuous stream of corporate malfeasance in the Bush years and, ultimately, the 2008 financial meltdown, the orgy of corporate risk-taking is firing up all over again. Underwriting standards, tightened after the Bush-Paulson bank bailouts of 2007-08, have been relaxed again. Another credit deterioration is coming.

Bad news: Wall Street likes the brutally regressive Trump tax reform plan. Good news: Wall Street doesn't think it has a chance of passing, at least not this year.

Wall Street is worried about the deteriorating situation on the Korean peninsula. But while the rest of us worry that Trump's idiotic bluster could inadvertently start a war that would cause 10 to 20 million casualties, Wall Street is worried about the impact on trade.

This is how Capital thinks. This report is basically bullish.

If you actually work for a living, you should invest in a pitchfork. Capitalism has built a great empire in the US. But. It. Has. Stopped. Working. For. You.