Why All The Financial Suffering?
Many people point to all those foreclosures and the economic chaos and ruin that followed the 2008 housing market collapse. Much of it had been brought on by overzealous lenders who lured borrowers into teaser loans containing low front-end payments that later adjusted into much higher rates and higher monthly payments.
For those who hoped to refinance to offset the increase, the falling values of homes and the reduced available equity have pushed millions of homeowners into foreclosure and bankruptcy. But the problem of why there have been so many foreclosures goes much deeper.
Lessons that go unlearned
The painful lessons of 2008 and the giant bailout of the banks under the Bush Doctrine of “too big to fail” had already damaged the financial stability of many Americans and drove many families into financial hardship.
Yet as we move from 2008 to 2021 and beyond, these same banks were at it again by exploiting former President Trump’s tax breaks and his COVID assistance for big corporations. Many corporations used the money and tax breaks to buy back their stock, which increased the corporation’s market value and benefited the banks, wealthy shareholders, and bank executives.
Memories that falter and mistakes repeated
Should the current economy lapse into recession as now predicted or be triggered by some geopolitical catastrophe that causes stock prices to dive even further, do the big banks really expect a repeat performance of government-backed bailouts for the wealthy like the ones that caused the last great recession? Have we already forgotten the lessons we learned in 2008?
Banks should be allowed to fail and be restructured through bankruptcy
Until banks are allowed to fail (just like every other business), they will neither feel the sting of accountability nor will those who perpetrated fraud be held legally responsible for their criminal conduct. As we move into 2023, Wall Street greed remains unchecked. The poor and the middle class continue to decline towards financial despair – and the trend will continue until the voters finally cut the strings between big-money lobbyists and our nation’s lawmakers.
The problem is not capitalism…
It has been said that unbridled capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. But let’s be honest, it’s not our free market system that is the source of the problem, it has become the symptom of the problem. The source of the problem is that our political system that has been corrupted by power and greed and has steered politicians away from the fundamental principles of democracy. Politicians retain power by being re-elected. It is far easier to retain political power with big money interests by their side than to rely on one’s intelligence, compassion, and leadership skills.
We are not the victims of capitalism. We are the victims of allowing money, especially dark money, into a democracy that is designed to represent the best interests of all the people, not the best interests of the super-wealthy, and certainly not just one-tenth of one percent of our nation’s population.
The challenge is that we have let our system of democracy turn into a “pay-to-play” game of winners and losers. In doing so, Americans have unwittingly given their power to a handful of oligarchs that make up less than one-tenth of one percent of our population. And as history has proven over and over again, from oligarchy comes fascism.
If we learned anything from the attempted coup of 2021, our nation came dangerously close to losing our democracy and becoming a fascist state.
Supreme Court losing credibility
The Supreme Court, once a trusted institution, has turned out to be a much more fragile and less credible institution than previously thought. We only need to consider their decision on the Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission case, which effectively legalized and endorsed the current pay-to-play election system. In doing so, they have pushed the vast majority of our people into deeper levels of poverty, suffering, and, as we witnessed on January 6, 2001, rage.
As we enter 2023 with a polarizing ultra-right supreme court, the challenges we face will test the very foundations of our democracy and our commitment to its principles.
