$1 trillion<\/a> of the first $4 trillion of pandemic relief went into the pockets of the richest one percent of the population offers insight into the nature of the problem. To be clear, the money wasn\u2019t paid directly by the Federal government to the rich. The Federal government and the Federal Reserve dedicated large-scale funding to reviving financial asset prices, the rich own nearly all financial assets, therefore the effort to raise financial asset prices disproportionately benefited the already rich. The point: the structural forces that are now in place assure that this skewed distribution will continue.<\/p>\nSaving Wall Street restored the fortunes of the oligarchs, the executive class, and workers on Wall Street, but it left behind an extractive and predatory economic system that wasn\u2019t working for the bottom two-thirds of the class distribution before the Covid-19 pandemic struck. This tiny oligarchy of inherited wealth and self-enriched corporate executives is matched from below by a the low-wage, no benefit, perpetually tenuous, gig economy that now leaves twenty million workers displaced by the pandemic.<\/p>\n
Mainstream and leftish economists point to the low unemployment rate and rising wages in the lower tiers of the labor market as evidence that the economy had fully recovered before the Covid-19 pandemic struck. The question then is why one trillion of the four trillion dollars in pandemic relief spending that was dumped into \u2018the economy\u2019 found its way into the pockets of a few dozen billionaires? Again, there was no direct transfer\u2014 the point is structural. If you don\u2019t see this as evidence of deep structural flaws in the U.S. economy, we have a difference of opinion.<\/p>\n
The implied premise that motivated Barack Obama in 2009 was that restoring Wall Street would restore the economy that preceded the economic collapse. But the economy that preceded the crash was already a neoliberal gut-job, plus finance. By the end of Mr. Obama\u2019s second term, only the rich and PMC had recovered. The back-and-forth over what motivated the election of Donald Trump, Nazis versus populism, misses that the hangover from the serial neoliberal catastrophes that culminated in the Great Recession tie in time and geography to political unrest around the globe.<\/p>\n
To tie this together, the economic backdrop in which the Covid-19 pandemic arrived was not working for most people. Economists can use their favored metrics to argue this any way that they care to, but rising political instability ties in time, place, and political theory to ongoing economic crisis. The Biden government is deeply tied to both the neoliberal program in general, and Wall Street in particular, at this point of profound social need. There is no way in this context to serve multiple masters and still produce actual solutions. Mr. Biden\u2019s decision to double down on Obamacare is direct evidence that serving multiple masters is the plan.<\/p>\n
\u2013\u2013<\/em><\/p>\n\nThis post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair With a new government taking office, optimism regarding the capacity of government to \u2018work\u2019 again abounds. The Biden administration is making a host\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":532,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11687"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/532"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11687"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11688,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11687\/revisions\/11688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}