Category: Class Warfare Page 18 of 36

Anthony Ruelas watched for what seemed like an eternity as his classmate wheezed and gagged in a desperate struggle to breathe.

The girl told classmates that she was having an asthma attack, but her teacher refused to let anyone leave the classroom, according to NBC affiliate KCEN. Instead, the teacher emailed the school nurse and waited for a reply, telling students to stay calm and remain in their seats.

When the student having the asthma attack fell out of her chair several minutes later, Ruelas decided he couldn’t take it anymore and took action.

“We ain’t got time to wait for no email from the nurse,” a teacher’s report quotes him as saying, according to Fox News Latino.

And with that, the 15-year-old Gateway Middle School student carried his stricken classmate to the nurse’s office, violating his teacher’s orders.

What sort of person is Ruelas?

Mandy Cortes, Ruelas’s mother, told KCEN that she assumed her son–who has been suspended in the past–was to blame when the school informed her that he had been suspended again.

… “He may not follow instructions all the time, but he does have a great heart,” she said, noting that she was now considering home-schooling him.

The boy is, in other words, a troublemaker with authority issues. Thank goodness, eh?

I imagine most readers are familiar with the Milgram experiment, where university students were told to shock people by authority figures and most did so.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)

I’ve always been curious what the people who refused were like, but oddly, that research did not appear to have been done.

Until now (h/t S. Brennan).

A new Milgram-like experiment published this month in the Journal of Personality has taken this idea to the next step by trying to understand which kinds of people are more or less willing to obey these kinds of orders. What researchers discovered was surprising: Those who are described as “agreeable, conscientious personalities” are more likely to follow orders and deliver electric shocks that they believe can harm innocent people, while “more contrarian, less agreeable personalities” are more likely to refuse to hurt others.

“The irony is that a personality disposition normally seen as antisocial—disagreeableness—may actually be linked to ‘pro-social’ behavior,'” writes Psychology Today‘s Kenneth Worthy. “This connection seems to arise from a willingness to sacrifice one’s popularity a bit to act in a moral and just way toward other people, animals, or the environment at large. Popularity, in the end, may be more a sign of social graces and perhaps a desire to fit in than any kind of moral superiority.”

…The study also found that people holding left-wing political views were less willing to hurt others. One particular group held steady and refused destructive orders: “women who had previously participated in rebellious political activism such as strikes or occupying a factory.”

Most people who are popular and too agreeable do not have strong red lines. Their morality is set by authority figures and peer groups. Whatever seems okay with the people around them is okay with them.

I wrote about this in the past in my post on the Decline and Fall of Post-War Liberalism. One key part of breaking an essentially egalitarian economic order was finding and destroying the people who wouldn’t go along to get along, the people who would fight.

Graph of incarceration in the US over time

From Wikipedia

This was done by creating a set of bullshit laws: Drug laws. Consensual activity which harmed no one (especially in the case of marijuana) was made illegal.

The sort of people who wouldn’t obey rules, laws, or orders that didn’t make sense to them disobeyed those laws and went to prison in droves, where they were destroyed politically, economically, and personally. The vast majority had committed no violence.

The gut was ripped out of America’s working and lower class troublemakers.

Since then, our method of child-raising has become one of high-surveillance. “Helicopter parenting” means children rarely spend time doing anything not approved of by parents or other authority figures. Police patrol schools. Children have cell phones, allowing their parents to check on them any time they want. Houses increasingly have internal surveillance systems to keep track of children.

People who are under constant supervision with little time to be alone or to be with friends without authority supervision tend to become “go along to get along” people, unused to thinking for themselves, and used to jumping through hoops for the approval of authority. Their entire lives have been about doing so, after all.

This is especially true of our elites, and while it’s usually been truer of them than the lower orders, it has become even more so than it was in the past. You could get into an Ivy league school in the past based on pure genius and talent; today you need excellent grades, an extra-curricular record which precludes alone time, and an essay which hits all the proper, authority-pleasing conformist points.

Society does not work for everyone when it becomes authoritarian and conformist. People are what they do, to a remarkable degree. We already had a system designed to create conformity (school is nothing but a conformity producing machine: sit down, speak only when called on, and do what you are told to do in exchange for adult approval and a decent future). The system we have now is even more designed to produce people who won’t stand up when asked, frankly, to be Nazis. Or torturers (an activity of which most Americans approve).

The troublemakers are the guarantors of your freedom and prosperity. When they are are broken, both will soon follow.

They were broken. Both followed.

Failure Is the Precondition for Fascism

By Ian Welsh

On February 3, 2016

Comments

Nuremburg

Well, not all the time, but it is one of the necessary preconditions.

More broadly, when the old regime has failed (lost a war, bungled the economy), then people are willing to try something else. This “something else” may mean electing someone like FDR. It may be allowing someone like Stalin or Hitler to rise to power. It may be opting to try Communism. It may be electing someone as mild as Corbyn.

Or it may take the form of someone like Trump or Cruz.

Unhappiness occurs during decline.

Decline. The US economy has been lousy for most people for decades. Since somewhere between 1968 and 1980. 1968 was the peak of wages for working class white males, for example. You are surprised they are unhappy? They have been in decline for almost 40 years.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)

Women’s wages were rising through much of the period. They might be less than men’s, but they were rising.

Happiness is predicated on doing better than in the past. It doesn’t have to better by much, it just has to be better.

Since 2008, the economy, for the majority of the population (over 80 percent, over 90 percent by some calculations), has been bad. They have lost income. Their houses are worth less. They are less likely to be employed, much less have that lesser job.

They are ripe for fascism.

They are ripe for any sort of radical change offered by anyone who doesn’t parse; doesn’t feel, like one of the current set of elites. Trump does not, Cruz does not, Sanders does not. In Britain, where the situation is similar, Corbyn does not.

This is the beginning of the time of changes. Some countries will choose well, others will not, but the issues of how and by whom countries are run is in play–in a way it has not been in my lifetime.

The Bailouts Caused the Shitty Economy, Part 2

By Ian Welsh

On February 1, 2016

Comments

Back in 2013, I wrote an article making the argument that bailouts were responsible for the bad economy.

The reason the economy has not recovered and will not recover for at least a generation is because of the overhang of bad debt, the glorification of financial “profits” (they aren’t), the failure to de-financialize the economy, and the confirmed control of government by the rich.

There is also a section on alternatives to the what we did. “We should do something,” is not the same as, “We must do what we did.”

But, be clear, the economy would be better now if we had not done anything. Yes, the immediate two years after the financial collapse would have been worse, but we’d be better off now than we are.

I think we need to note, first, where we are.

We are about to go into worldwide recession. In other words, the good part of this business cycle is mostly over. In many countries, it has been over for some time.
Peak to peak—from the peak of the last recovery to the peak of this recovery, the employment to population ratio has not recovered. It didn’t recover in Bush’s economy either, by the way.
Median incomes in the US have dropped. This is true in a number of other countries.
All of the gains of the recovery went to somewhere between the top 3 percent to top 5 percent. And really, that means the top 1 percent, .1 percent, and so on.
The rich are now richer than they were before the crash.
China is has hit the mercantile wall. After the financial collapse, they were the engine of global demand. But with so many of their customers in austerity, this could not be maintained.

In other words, the economy never actually recovered. You can argue it did, dishonestly, by looking at stats like unemployment (which don’t consider people who have given up looking for jobs), or GDP, but for most people, this is a shit economy, at best.

It has, however, been a good economy to be rich in.

Now, as I’ve been writing about what Capitalism is this last week, I think it’s worth noting something very fundamental.

The 2000’s economy was sick. It was doing the WRONG THINGS. It was doing them with trillions of dollars. Derivatives such as CDOs, vast expansion of borrowing for stock buybacks, the housing bubble, and so on.

It was doing things which had negative real returns–even measured in money. That these actions had negative, real returns was revealed in the financial collapse when those derivatives were worth ten cents or less on the dollar, and by the fact that central banks and governments had to spend trillions on the bail out.

Measured in human welfare, the mal-investment was worse. When you measure this in “opportunity cost,” meaning what we could have done with those resources instead, which would have increased human welfare, the cost was beyond vast: There are no words.

Capitalism is a system where markets make the primary economic investment decisions through price signals and the availability of money (these are not always identical, which is why I separate them).

More to the point, markets say, “If you are making money, do more of what you are doing.” The assumption is that if you’re making money, other people want what you’re doing, and that what people want is what has the most social utility—the greatest welfare for the buck.

I trust it is obvious to anyone but those brainwashed by the cult of economic utility that, in the 2000’s, the individuals who were making the most money were not creating welfare. They were, instead, reducing human welfare, absolutely and relative to other options.

The other case for capitalism and markets is that they are supposed to be self-correcting. People may make money doing the wrong thing due to market failures, but eventually they will lose that money.

They did.

I repeat, they did. The people making the wrong decisions lost all their money. They lost more than all their money.

We have a shitty economy now because we bailed them out. They then went back to doing all the wrong things, but with a huge debt overhang and more power.

What we needed was new economic decision makers. We needed the people who had all that money to lose their money and thus their political power, making it possible for a different set of people to make money.

Those people would have started off with a lot less money, and a lot less power, and that means there would have been a lot less money in politics, which would have fixed a swathe of problems political, social, and economic.

All that was required for this to happen was to DO NOTHING. Let the banks and brokerages and so on go out of business, and allow the process of law to proceed. The laws on the books at the time made most of what bankers and shadow bankers and various other decision makers doing illegal. Rather than allowing them to pay fines to indemnify themselves against law breaking, actually apply the law. Start with RICO statutes (conspiracy), grab their emails, and prosecute for fraud. (They were, essentially, all engaged in some fraud or another, though I don’t have time to go into that in this piece).

As an additional slice, all their remaining assets would have been seized as proceeds of crime, and they would have had to rely on public defenders.

This is what happens if you just follow the laws and regulations on the books. No special action is needed. None. Except to ensure laws are actually followed, I guess. That it requires special action for rich people to be subject to the law, is, however, part of the point.

So, we have a shitty economy now because we did not get rid of the people making terrible decisions who caused the financial collapse. We have a shitty economy because of the bailouts.

I went into personal decline in 2009 because I recognized that a watershed opportunity had been missed. It was our last chance to get off the train to Hell, really. Oh, we’ll get off that train one day, but we’ll already be in Hell.

The bailouts caused this shitty economy.

Much of what happened was a case of Obama’s decision making, either through action or inaction. TARP passed because he pushed it, for example. Bankers were not properly prosecuted because his DOJ chose not to do so. Many consider the actions of the Fed beyond his purview, but they are wrong.

The full argument is in my pieces “What Can Obama Really Do?” written in 2010, and “Could Obama Have Fixed the Economy?” written in 2014, though I also wrote an absurd number of pieces at Firedoglake on specific policy in real-time. I know for a fact that those articles reached the White House (though I don’t know if Obama ever read them). I know they were included in Dodd’s briefings.

Many other people were writing good proposals at the time as well. People more famous than I. The ideas were available.

So, I once said I don’t hate Clinton. I don’t hate Obama any more, but I did for a long time. He had a historic opportunity to be the next FDR. He deliberately chose not to be, and to instead help and defend the people who caused the financial crisis.

Obama triumphalists who go on about what a great president he is are either misinformed or cockroaches. The true cost of anything is the opportunity cost, and Obama’s opportunity cost is beyond large. Everything he could have done, and did not even try to do.

This is a bad economy, in terms of the numbers that matter to ordinary people. Less have work, and those who do make less money. It is about to get worse. Obama, and yes, Bernanke at the Fed, and Tim Geithner, and various other central bankers and politicians (including, yes, Bush), are responsible for how bad this economy is.

I will add that the most logical, good stimulus, would have been a massive energy project, in which America’s buildings were all retrofitted to be at least energy neutral. It would have directly put to work the people who needed that work, it could not be offshored, with some fairly simple policy, it could have created a solar manufacturing industry in America, and so on.

This means that some of the losses of climate change will also be Obama’s responsibility. Opportunity cost, again.

Enough.

The Obama presidency will go down as a huge failure to historians looking back in even 20 years. The larger point is this: Capitalism does have some virtues, and one of them is wiping out people who are doing the wrong thing. That doesn’t mean that “all bailouts” were a bad idea, but bailouts of the people who caused the crisis (bankers, shadow bankers) were. The primary bailouts caused the lousy economy.

There will be another crisis. Learn the lesson of the last one. If we don’t, well, crises will continue until we do.

If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Japanification Revisited

By Ian Welsh

On January 8, 2016

Comments

The thesis Stirling and I were running from the early 2000’s was that the plan under which America’s elites were operating was Japanification. Run a bubble, and when it bursts refuse to take losses and go into stagnation.

This thesis has proved out repeatedly.

Let’s shine a light on the past. The oldest articles are in the wilds of dead blogs, but there are a few still available.

August 6, 2008:

In Japan, they call it the Bright Depression. Ever since the 1980s bubble burst, the Japanese economy has never been able to rev up its engines and roar again. Slow growth or small contractions have been the rule. It hasn’t been awful. It hasn’t actually been a classic depression. But, somehow, the good times have never come back. Unemployment, never previously a problem, just won’t go away.

….

There is going to be a recovery, it has already started in Asia. Job numbers should start turning around in the spring in the US, though the number of people employed as a percentage of the population will not recover this economic cycle, and probably not for a generation.

However, Japanification doesn’t mean you don’t get some recoveries. You do, then they sputter out. Employment never really recovers, wages stagnate, and things are just generally lousy without plunging the country into an all out depression. So, yes, in that sense the country was “saved’ from a Great Depression, but choosing the worst alternative.

….

The end result of Japanifying, regressive taxation (whether direct or indirect) and attempting to restart the financial casino will not be pretty. There will not necessarily be any immediate disaster, and some numbers will look good. But the fundamental problems of the economy under Bush have not only not been fixed, they have been made worse and the evidence is being systematically buried. There won’t be another financial crisis immediately, but another one has been made inevitable.

This has all borne out.

June 6th, 2009:

The strategy is simple enough.

1) Give the banks money.

2) Let them avoid acknowledging as much of their losses as long as possible.

3) Allow them to gouge taxpayers for as much as possible, to dig themselves out of their own hole over a number of years.

The end result of this is going to be Japanification–at best. Not a “lost decade,” as many folks have said, but a semi-permanent wavering between slight job gains and job losses, where a good economy never, ever, comes back. And because the US, unlike Japan, is not a net exporter, it’s questionable how long Japanification can work in the US, in any case.

Fun stuff.

November 12, 2009:

There is going to be a recovery, it has already started in Asia. Job numbers should start turning around in the spring in the US, though the number of people employed as a percentage of the population will not recover this economic cycle, and probably not for a generation.

However, Japanification doesn’t mean you don’t get some recoveries. You do, then they sputter out. Employment never really recovers, wages stagnate, and things are just generally lousy without plunging the country into an all-out depression. So, yes, in that sense, the country was “saved’ from a Great Depression, but by choosing the worst possible alternative.

Called shot. Accurate.

February 20, 2010:

Once more, the percentage of Americans employed will not recover to pre-Great Recession levels for at least a generation, probably longer. This is a deliberate policy choice and everything Obama and Bernanke has done—from refusing to take over banks, to refusing to force lending at reasonable rates, to engaging in an inadequate stimulus, to refusing to make banks recognize their losses, to doing everything they can to encourage slashing Social Security and Medicare, has had the effect of making Japanification more and more likely.

This is just a small selection of posts. I may go through the called shot posts at the time of the stimulus, TARP, and so on, but heck, they just say the same thing.

By papering over the problem, by “extending and pretending,” Bernanke, Geithner, Congress, and Obama (Bush gets a nod, but TARP would not have passed without Obama, it is his child) ensured a generation’s worth of shitty economy for most people.

Yes, if we had chosen not to “extend and pretend,” the hit in 2009 and 2010 would have been worse, BUT the economy today would be far far better. In choosing the method we chose to do the bailouts, we also made the choice to have a shitty economy. Employment has never recovered, in terms of the percentage of the population, and will not (we’re about to hit a recession), wages are down for much of the population, and all the gains of the last economic cycle have gone to the top three to five percent.

Mind you, there was an historic stock bubble. The rich are even richer than they were in 2007. Obama and Bernanke’s policy has done what it was intended to: It has preserved, and then increased, the wealth of the rich.

If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Best Paid People in Our Societies Are the Worst People

By Ian Welsh

On January 7, 2016

Comments

In our society, who earns the most?

Basically people in the financial industry. Bankers, for shorthand.

Why? Because they can print money. In fact, they print almost all the money in society.

There is an argument that inequality exists because some people are just so much more productive than others.

This argument is a fantasy. To be sure there are a few “ten times” programmers and inventors who improved society and so on, but, as a group, the people who earn the most money in society are the people who destroy the most value. Bankers, prior to 2008, destroyed more money than they had made for the last decade. This is not in question. They destroyed trillions.

If they had taken their losses, they and almost every rich person in the First World would have been wiped out. Toxic debt was trading at less than ten cents on the dollar before the Fed stepped in and started accepting it as collateral at near par and said that it could be kept on books at “mark to model,” rather than market prices.

The effects of this were real. Real companies went out of business. Real people lost jobs. Real people wound up on the street. Real incomes cratered. Drive around suburban and exurban America. Look at the empty malls. The damage is right there.

Private bankers and financial execs make almost all of the investment decisions in our society. They decide what will be built, what jobs will be created, etc. They are the people who decide if something will happen and they make terrible decisions–even based on their own valuation system.

Based on what society needs, combined with central bankers, they make even worse decisions.

The bull market that started in 1980 and continues today has made a lot of people rich, and built a lot of houses (which were then condemned to keep their prices artificially high).

But there was an opportunity cost.

An opportunity cost is what wasn’t done.

The opportunity cost of the great bull market (that created all the oligarchs) is all the infrastructure work that wasn’t done, and all the avoiding climate change that wasn’t done. Or the fact that NASA was not properly funded, so that we had to wait until now to finally get cheap, reusable rockets.

The cost of this will be the many deaths from climate change, among other things.

That is the cost of bankers salaries, and oligarch’s tax rates, and the great bull market.

These people are not the most productive people in society, they are the most destructive people in society. They make the money they do because they have a positional advantage; they have more power than other people.

Earnings have nothing to do with merit, social usefulness, or productivity. They are a measure only of how much some people were able to grab. In this, they are little different than looting barbarians, replete with the huge death toll, and the raping (all the rapes which occur in the prison-industrial complex), and the pillaging, and so on.

Do not speak of “salary” and “merit” in the same sentence except with scorn. When the CEO doesn’t show up, so what? When the janitor doesn’t show up, though, hey! We find out who really matters.

If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Free and Prosperous Societies Occur Only When the Basis of Power Is the People

By Ian Welsh

On January 5, 2016

Comments

Any apparent exception will end quickly, and is usually a legacy from a time when the people were needed.

Franchise tracks the dominant military arm pretty close to exactly. The Swiss are free because of their fights in Pike formations. Most of Dark Ages and Medieval Europe’s were not free, because the dominant military arm was cavalry. As the dominant military arm moves to infantry, the franchise and freedom expand.

When a society becomes militarily mass-mobilized, all the men get the vote. When a society is militarily mass-mobilized and it’s industrialized, all the women get the vote because they are needed to run the industry while the men are away fighting.

Militarily mass-mobilized societies require that the citizens be healthy enough to fight. In WWI, the British were aghast at the number of men who were ineligible for the draft because their health was too weak, or they were too short, and so on. They did something about it.

Agricultural societies tend towards the patriarchal, because much of the work requires men’s heavy muscles. Horticultural societies, where women can do the work, tend towards egalitarianism. Likewise, hunter-gatherer societies in climes where gathering provides most of the food, tend towards egalitarianism; the exception here is when the most valued food is gathered by the men. In traditional Eskimo society, for instance, where the men provided essentially all the meat and the women processed it, was not egalitarian.

Humans have three sources of power: military, productive, and (in modern societies) consumptive. Consumers are not useless in our society, but consumption is still the weakest leg of the tripod. The rich are happy to consume more, after all.

The conditions for widespread prosperity have faded. We no longer have mass-mobilized armies, but professional standing armies, and we are moving towards smaller armies with more robots, both autonomous and remote-guided.

Technological progress has made manufacturing far more efficient, and it requires far less people. The rest of the economy, unless it is required for manufacturing, now matters far less. Most service work is not highly valued and does not translate into military power, and extraction labor is a minor part of most economies.

The final source of power for ordinary individuals is simply the threat they pose to elites. As we move away from the mass-mobilized “just need a rifle” military, this fades as well. To the extent it still exists, it is being managed by the time-honored “oppression” method, with new technology allowing for a Panopticon State which would have made Orwell pine for the weak and limited surveillance of Big Brother.

This is not to say the commoners are entirely powerless. The full power of denial of area techniques shown in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere hasn’t been properly appreciated. These strategies would have worked just fine in the First World. Drones are cheap, and, in principle, could be manufactured by ordinary technicians. These aren’t F-16’s; you can make them in your garage.

Still, mass mobilization warfare is no longer the model, factories are not begging for more workers, there exists no longer any large expanses of land needing to be conquered in the name of colonialism, administered, or farmed.

As for money, banks make it, not people. We may move to a world where we fully appreciate that money is made out of thin air and reclaim control of money for the public, but so far the movement has been in the other direction–printing more and more of it for rich people.

At this point, most people are superfluous. As such there is no reason for elites to allow them freedom, power, or prosperity.

If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Why Inequality Is Intrinsically Bad

By Ian Welsh

On January 3, 2016

Comments

For most of human existence, humans lived in hopelessly egalitarian societies. Hunter-gatherer bands, and even early agricultural communities, were very egalitarian.

If you want to go evolutionary, humans evolved in egalitarian surroundings. We were not chimpanzees, living in terrible authoritarian structures full of fear.

Inequality is interpreted by humans as a THREAT. This causes a chronic fight or flight response, which causes health and performance issues.

This is true even of the people on the top of the hierarchy. Those who have more power or money fear those below them.

The data on this, which is extensive in the book The Spirit Level is unambiguous. Even when people’s needs are met, the more unequal a society, the more unhealthy everyone is and the more unhappy they are.

Those who feel lower on the totem pole also perform worse than they would otherwise would. Remove the feeling of inequality, and they perform better.

This is before we get to the social effects, which are pernicious. Those at the top of the heap distort politics to keep themselves at the top of the heap, and engage in repression.

In middle agricultural societies like Egypt, and even late ones like medieval Europe, you see vast amounts of resources going into ideology, which is to say religion. The Pharoah is a God, he owns everything. Medieval kings (and beyond) have the “Divine Right of Kings”, they are chosen by God. The Indian caste system, and even Confucianism (slightly better because you can lose the mandate of Heaven), are other examples.

What would Egypt have been like if all the resources which went into making Pharoah look like GOD, had gone into general welfare? It was a vastly rich society, which produced floods of crops; the wonder of the ancient world.

All inequality is, in part, the result of an ideological push. When we examine societies transitioning to higher inequality, it always includes the creation of an ideology which justifies it.

This is because all power within a human society (not between societies) is ideological at base. It may be enforced by men with weapons, but if those men stopped believing in the justifying ideology, or, in many cases, if most of the subjects stopped believing in it, the inequality would end. Power over people requires power over their imaginations, over what they think is right, their ideas about the natural order, and so on.

The 1980s were the “Greed is Good” decade. What followed was the most unequal industrialized society in modern history–but the ideology came first.

You must convince humans that large amounts of inequality are justified.

This is patent nonsense in most cases. The bankers, who are the best paid people in our society, destroyed more value than they created in the 2000s, even by their own accounting methods. Compensation has nothing to do with real value, and at this point it is probably negatively correlated. A teacher or nurse produces far more value than almost all bankers. Indeed, so does a janitor or a garbage collector. Not that this is difficult to pull off, as bankers, frankly, produce negative value.

The rich, as a class, are parasites. They arrogate to themselves the right to give permission for others to do things. That being the case, their only existential justification is if more beneficial work occurs because of their “management” than would otherwise. In the history of the world, this has been more rare than not.

Inequality is thus a political and organizational negative. It ensures that more effort goes into unproductive and destructive activities, which are of benefit to very few.

Inequality is unhealthy, makes people unhappy, and distorts politics in terrible ways.

These negatives are intrinsic to inequality. Beyond a relatively low level, there is no such thing as “good” inequality.

More on this in future pieces, including discussing the “incentive effect.”

If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

CEO Martin Shkreli Arrested for Securities Fraud

By Ian Welsh

On December 17, 2015

Comments

Shkreli is the pharma CEO who famously raised the price of an AIDS drug over 5,000 percent and bought an one issue Wu-Tang record that no one else will hear if he doesn’t want them to.

Securities arrests don’t happen by accident, and they don’t happen just because someone has committed securities fraud. There is so much securities fraud that practically anyone involved the markets beyond the retail investor level could be charged with something. Many investigations are ongoing at any given time, and only a few can (or will) be prosecuted–and prosecuting someone as rich as Shkreli is always a political decision.

This is a message:

Rook the proles as much as you want, but don’t scream it to the world. We have a good thing going here, sonny, and we don’t tolerate people who might wreck it.

Despite his cartoon-villain behaviour, Shkreli is far from the worst CEO in America.

Billionaires may do as they please. There is only one rule: “Don’t destroy the game.”

If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Class Warfare Page 18 of 36

What Sort of Person Does Evil or Stands by While Evil Is Done?

Failure Is the Precondition for Fascism

The Bailouts Caused the Shitty Economy, Part 2

Japanification Revisited

The Best Paid People in Our Societies Are the Worst People

Free and Prosperous Societies Occur Only When the Basis of Power Is the People

Why Inequality Is Intrinsically Bad

CEO Martin Shkreli Arrested for Securities Fraud