When it comes to depicting the Gangbanksters' game, in his recent book The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs the Masters of the Universe Matt Kennard, investigative journalist and former Financial Times staff writer doesn't pull his punches. After condemning the American financial and corporate elites for growing fat "from looting abroad", he says the same "white-collar mobsters" have been [fighting and] winning a war against the people of the U.S., describing it as "a massive, underhand con". As it is Kennard is just tuning up, drawing more compelling, yet unsettling parallels with how monetarist economic ideologies have played out both in the American heartland and indeed across the rest of the world:
"They have slowly but surely managed to sell off much of what the American people used to own under the guise of various fraudulent ideologies such as the 'free market'. This is the 'American way', a giant swindle, a grand hustle. In this sense, the victims of the racket are not just in Port-au-Prince and Baghdad; they are also in Chicago and New York. The same people that devise the myths about what we do abroad have also built up a similar ideological system that legitimizes theft at home; theft from the poorest, by the richest."
For his part James Petras, after noting in a recent piece titled "Pillage and Class Polarization: The Rise of 'Criminal Capitalism'", [that] US employees faced the "greatest jump in income inequalities" over the past decade, observed that "profits, as a percentage of national income", have increased significantly. Further, the lion's share of this increase in income and profits went "to the banks and investment houses" of Wall Street; in fact they "increased at a faster rate than any other sector of the US economy." Along with observing these polar opposite trends, Petras' key point goes like this:
"[T]he employee-finance capitalist polarization is the direct result of the grand success of the trillion dollar financial swindles, the tax payer-funded trillion dollar bailouts of the crooked bankers, and the illegal bank manipulation of interest rates. These uncorrected and unpunished crimes have driven up the costs of living and producing for employees and their employers."
In order to come to grips with the state of play for average working- and middle-class Americans twenty-five odd years after Ronald Reagan rode into the sunset, some hard-core context and perspective is apposite. For many folks who've spent time probing the issues arising from the GFC and more broadly those to do with the modern global economy, the Gipper's election in 1980 is the closest garrison point to which we must return if we are looking at battling the anomalies and iniquities that corrode not just the capitalist edifice, but democracy itself. That said, whilst many of capitalism's less ardent admirers might welcome its demise, the so-called free market -- the cornerstone of its edifice -- will not go quietly into that good might. The "racket" is too damn good.
To the extent that free-market capitalism co-existed or was perceived to be synonymous with liberty, democracy, freedom, egalitarianism and opportunity of access to the American Dream prior to the 1980s, since Reagan rebooted the U.S. economy with his Milton Friedman-inspired neo-liberal economic policies, such deeply and widely held tenets became wholly owned and controlled subsidiaries of capitalism, with the aspirations embedded in them held hostage to the increasingly unregulated free market, no longer as achievable or accessible because the playing field was no longer level. Reagan's belief that the private sector, private enterprise, low taxes for the wealthy, and the profit motive is the answer to America's problems was to have an extraordinary impact not only on how domestic and foreign policy was developed; it became the primary foundation of economic policy in general, and particularly that which affected how America's financial sector operated.
One of several mantras that defined "Reaganomics" -- that of the so-called trickle down effect aka the 'rising tide that would lift all boats' -- was decidedly more a torrent than a trickle, and said "torrent" was going up not down. Now whilst this was not clearly spelled out in Reagan's glossy economic brochure, some folks still argue he truly believed that letting the bulls run free would actually benefit everyone. Others less kind might say it was because he got his prepositions confused. But it's hard to escape the conclusion the Old Hoofer in the best PT Barnum tradition played carny-barker to the masses, with the "masses" buying the 'every child player wins a prize' shill en masse.
In any event it culminated in a free-for-all, dog eat dog, everyman for himself form of anarcho-capitalism -- an updated, much improved version of the no-holds-barred mercenary mercantilism much reminiscent of the Gilded Age, only one that doesn't just eat its young, it eventually eats itself! Via the main pillars of neoliberalism, the Wall Street money mongrels assumed even greater control over the workings of the financial system than they had since the onset of the Great Depression, itself a direct outcome of uninhibited laissez-faire policies that facilitated rampant systemic fraud, economic opportunism and market manipulation. From that time onwards they and their successors, heirs and descendants have effectively written the rules of the game everyone has to play.
That this reality is even more evident now is axiomatic for all but the most ignorant, partisan, arrogant or deluded. These institutions -- Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, CitiBank, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and others -- are all run by avaricious, amoral uber-executives, who make the infamous Robber Barons of the Gilded Age look like blood descendants of the Good Samaritan. They -- in an unholy alliance with the corporate plutocracy and the mainstream media -- blithely buy and sell everyone from political candidates to party power brokers, think-tank heads, senior academics, regulators, lobbyists, lawyers, [to] members of Congress and yes, presidents even, as if they were acquiring a brand new, perfectly tailored suit. They are the ultimate welfare recipients of the socio-economic zeitgeist; they add nothing and snatch 'n grab everything.
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