Lloyd Blankfein Stumps For Bernie Sanders

In a canny burst of reverse psychology, the Wall Street banking mogul who helped crash the entire global financial system in 2008 today refreshingly declared that a President Bernie Sanders "would ruin our economy."

Since 94% of all the American household wealth "lost" in the crash is now in the hands of the oligarchy, it is safe to assume that what former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein really fears is that a Sanders presidency would put a damper on his winner-take-all economy - or what Citigroup had secretly dubbed the "plutonomy."

Blankfein tweeted;

If Dems go on to nominate Sanders, the Russians will have to reconsider who to work for to best screw up the US. Sanders is just as polarizing as Trump AND he’ll ruin our economy and doesn’t care about our military. If I’m Russian, I go with Sanders this time around.

Whether he knows it or not, Blankfein just bleated out a campaign commercial for Bernie. He implicitly signaled his fealty to Donald Trump, who also regularly and falsely claims that the phony opposition party doesn't care about "our military," But Blankfein is obviously referring to Bernie's own refusal to vote for the latest obscene $750 billion Pentagon budget, the successful bipartisan passage of which is bloating Goldman Sachs's own war-connected profits to the monstrous proportions to which it has become accustomed.

Blankfein's peevish McCarthyite tweet actually seems tailor-made to spur even more record, small-dollar donations to Bernie, who won the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday despite the best efforts of the corporate media to fool the country into thinking that second runner-up Amy Klobuchar was the break-out heroine of the night. The core media narrative is that since Bernie did not win by the same astronomically huge 40-point margin by which he trounced Hillary Clinton in 2016, it not only doesn't count, it is testament to the "chaos and divisiveness"  that Sanders brings to the Democratic Party establishment. As if that were a bad thing!

As far as the reviled "razor-thin" margin by which Sanders beat Pete Buttigieg in New Hampshire  is concerned, we should be honest and admit that Bernie is indeed having a tough time luring in old white conservative people too set in their ways and too attached to Medicare For Only Themselves to abandon the rejuvenating young fogey soul-brother they've found in Mayor Pete.

None of the coverage denigrating Bernie's victory that I watched last night mentioned tthat more young people voted for him than voted than for all the other primary candidates combined. He got more than half the entire youth vote of 18 to 29 year olds, while the 38-year-old Buttigieg received only 22 percent of this demographic.

Bernie's slim margin of victory is based simply upon the much higher number of older voters turning out on primary day. As Vox reports,

One caveat: Older people are simply a bigger part of the electorate. In New Hampshire’s Democratic primary, people 45 and older made up 63 percent of voters, according to the exit polls. People aged 18 to 29 made up just 14 percent.
Historically, this has also been true nationally:Young voters are less likely to turn out. In 2016, less than half of voters aged 18 to 29 went to the polls, while a majority in all other age groups voted, according to the US Census Bureau.

And since older people are more apt than younger people to read the New York Times, and the Washington Post and stay riveted to CNN and MSNBC  they thus might be more prone to internalize the mainstream "narrative," and make the manufactured - and rankly xenophobic -  paranoia of Blankfein and others their very own.

Maybe Prince Harry, who reportedly is making a "billion dollar handshake" with Goldman Sachs, can help. He and wife Meghan already appeared at the JP Morgan Chase Investment Summit in Miami over the weekend to share their mental health expertise with some of the same billionaires and pathocrats who plundered the economy in 2008 and who are now so very, very nervous that their turbo-charged free rides and their mammoth runaway government welfare benefits and their padded portfolios might be in store for the Bernie Brake Pad Special. They're certainly in dire need of a muffler job. And the way their entitled complaining keeps backfiring on them, they might even be headed for the junkyard reserved for totaled luxury limos.

Blankfein and his fellow paranoid plutes should just relax and stay hunkered down in their eight car garages and stop with the class war antics and refrain from raising Bernie's profile so much with their negative attention. Because Sanders is not threatening a communist revolution or an overthrow of capitalism, or a 90 percent wealth tax, or total world peace, or anything remotely close. He is no more radical than FDR, whose ultimate aim was to save predatory capitalism from itself.

Taken At the Flood

The waters in Texas were still rising, and thousands of people were still stranded or worse, but it's never too soon for the disaster capitalists of the plutonomy to begin licking their chops over all the potential windfall profits they can take from the thousand-year storm known as Harvey.

If New Orleans could privatize its entire public school system after Hurricane Katrina, just imagine the possibilities for the fifth largest metro area in the country. Houston, which boomed on climate-changing oil in the first place, can surely reinvent itself once the flood waters subside and all the disposable people - like the homeless, the old, the immigrant, and the unemployed - are but misty water-colored memories. 

Look on the bright side, advise the financiers and economists who dished on the future of south Texas to the New York Times. This epic flood is just a glitch in the never-ending march of progress!  Sure, there will be a temporary hiatus in Houston's economic "recovery" - dividends for the rich gained in large part from an orgy of pollution, deregulation policies not conducive to public safety, and ever-stagnating wages.

 The Houston metropolitan area, the nation’s fifth largest, accounted for 2.9 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product as of 2015, and that figure is almost certainly higher today. A good amount of that comes from trade: Texas accounts for about half of petroleum and gas exports, along with about a fifth of chemical exports.

But what about the billions of dollars in property damage and the fact that many of the storm's victims lack flood insurance? Not to worry. People have short memories, and pretty soon they'll be flocking back to town, escaping the cold winters and looking to buy or rent still relatively affordable homes.  An added Texas bonus: no state income tax. And Houston has no pesky zoning rules. 

But if other disasters are a guide, much of that lost potential will be diverted for now and made up later, through money spent on cleanup and rebuilding.

Moreover, factories and refineries are rarely running at full capacity, and as they come back online they can ramp up production to meet the backlogs that accrue. “Businesses have stockpiles and the ability to catch up,” said Christopher Thornberg, founding partner of Beacon Economics, a consulting firm.

This is rule number one of market neoliberalism: never let a serious crisis go to waste.

 As the floodwaters drain away and Texas shifts to clean-up mode, followed by a mammoth effort to replace what was lost, the daily modes of commerce will shift but not stop. Disruptions, displacement and property damage are quickly followed by federal aid and insurance checks.

 This is rule number two of neoliberalism: whenever things go terribly, terribly wrong because policy-makers have put profits over people, always look forward and never look back. No matter what happens to the little people, it will always be the best of all possible worlds for the obscenely rich. All they care about is the deluge of money sure to come their way as they suck up billions in dollars in no-bid government contracts to, when they're not lining their own pockets, construct even more shoddy dwellings at no personal cost to themselves and at much cost to the poor people left behind.

Disasters are just so cool:

In fact, when natural disasters do show up in economic data it is usually as a small growth bump a few months after the storm, when rebuilding accelerates and insurance checks are cut.

One might think that the scale of the damage would give future home buyers some pause. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, for instance, investors and homeowners had big questions about property values in coastal New York and New Jersey.

But thanks to boosterism by the likes of unindicted BridgeGate Governor Chris Christie, and the cornering of the property market by private equity sharks, real estate prices are booming. And it's during those manufactured, periodic crises known as government shutdowns that the vultures can really swoop down. When the beaches are closed to the public because of alleged lack of public funds, the rich and the powerful can still enjoy them with impunity. That's just what Chris Christie and his clan did this past July. These people no longer even care what the public thinks of them, of course, because their approval ratings were in the toilet to begin with. 

The predatory capitalist class is just taking a tip from Shakespeare's Brutus, who cynically remarked back in the day: “There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”

Or, as one financial wag put it about a millennium later in Citigroup's infamous study of the New Plutonomy:  "A rising tide lifts all yachts." 

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To my readers in Texas: all my good wishes go out to you. This feels very personal to me. I lived for an extended period in Houston and have made frequent visits to Austin and the Hill Country, where I also have family. We went through some pretty severe record flooding here in the Hudson Valley of New York in 2011, in the wake of Tropical Storm Irene. But it was not even remotely close to what Texans are experiencing. I can only imagine what you must be going through.

To everybody else: please consider making a donation to the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, or the charity of your choice.(see comments below.)