Happy Black Monday, 30th Anniversary of 1987 Crash

Greed and fear make the markets, backed by $Trillions in guarantees from U.S. government

On October 19, 1987, "John Phelan, (then-Chair of the New York Stock Exchange), had been up throughout the night in his Manhattan apartment monitoring the bad news that was moving, like a tidal wave, toward the United States that Monday, October 19, 1987. Tokyo exchanges had closed after sustaining a record collapse in prices amid panic selling. The collapse triggered others around the globe. Disaster followed the sun and inexorably exacted its toll from Asia through Europe and then on to New York. Hong Kong was wiped out. In Australia the nation's leading market index lost 20 percent of its total value in the first forty minutes of trading. In Rome, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Paris, record losses were recorded. Down and down the prices plunged. In London the stock exchange was experiencing the single worst day in its history."

"At one point, as the grim reports kept flooding in, Phelan ... moved to a window overlooking the darkened New York skyline. He wondered if the world as he knew it was coming to an end, ... . (p. 377. Haynes Johnson, Sleepwalking Through History, American in the Reagan Years, 1991, (WW Norton and Company)) See also C-SPAN.

Celebrate Black Monday-1987 today by reading In These Times.

'The crash of ’87 is a reminder that for all its vaunted rationality, capitalism is an economic system driven by greed and fear.' With these words, long-time In These Times contributor David Moberg began the cover story from the Oct. 28–Nov. 3, 1987, issue.

Thirty years ago, 'Black Monday' sent markets into a tailspin across the globe. The ’87 crash was the largest single-day market crash in history, resulting in the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars on the stock market and shrunken pension funds.

The crash of 2008, and the resulting Great Recession, offered further evidence that the capitalist system is not just risky, but prone to crises. Today, the shaky foundations of our finance-centered economic system remain largely unchanged.

Today, October 19, 2017 the Dow Jones Industrial Average opened at a near-record, 23,107.47, (Bloomberg Markets).

We should rejoice, we are blessed by Donald Trump's stunning genius and astonishing strength.

Just last week Trump said this high value of the securities markets is shrinking the national debt, (CNN).

What can possibly go wrong?

Wisconsin's Ron Kind's Broken Promise

U.S. Rep. Ron Kind (Corporatist-Wisconsin) is among the worst of the anti-jobs campaign of the New Democrats.

This may cost Kind who faces a strong primary challenge from Myron Buchholz of Eau Claire.

From Berniecrats Unite! and Myron Buchholz

In a 2008 interview with the La Crosse Tribune, Kind said he’ll use his 'superdelegate' vote to support whichever candidate gets the majority among 3rd Congressional District Democratic primary voters. "I’m going to keep faith with the voters and respect their choice," said Kind.

Eight years later and Ron Kind has changed his tune. He continues to pledge his support for Hillary Clinton even though Bernie Sanders won the presidential primary in the 3rd Congressional district  by 61% to 39% over Hillary Clinton. That's unacceptable.

To date our campaign has influenced Kind to co-sponsor long-neglected environmental legislation, and to finally vote against endless war. Let's work together to insist that he pledge his 'superdelegate' vote for Bernie at the Democratic Party national convention in July. Here's a link to help you make your voice heard, lobbydelegates.com.

And please support our campaign. So far we've accomplished a lot together. There's no telling what we can accomplish on August 9th.

In Solidarity,

Myron

Republicans Call for Failure

"[Y]ou might have expected the debacle of George W. Bush’s presidency ... to inspire some reconsideration of W-type policies. What we’ve seen instead is a doubling down, a determination to take whatever didn’t work from 2001 to 2008 and do it again, in a more extreme form," writes Paul Krugman this morning, (New York Times).

Republicans are a wrecking ball, self-consciously, and the small swath of Americans voting in Republican primaries and caucuses love it, thirty-five days out from the Iowa caucuses.

Paul Ryan wants his dream shot at dismantling Medicare and Social Security, and any candidate running for the Democratic Party nomination should commit to protecting and expanding these programs from Republican destruction.

The next U.S.-led global economic crisis that will occur, should Republicans enact their radical economic and social policies, shows a Party resembling a nihilistic cult more than anything else.

Walker, Ryan, Johnson and GOP Hold Americans in Scorn

The racist John Birch Society's neofascist idealizations appeared near-extinguished with the death of Joe McCarthy, the rise of the Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson consensus on social insurance and public investments in infrastructure, jobs and public education, amid the victories of the American Civil Rights Movement for jobs and justice.

Like Lazarus, fascism is back, brought to life by five Republicans on the US Supreme Court, and the realization among a handful of rightwing political strategists that Americans remain sufficiently disengaged and despondent about their ability to secure the blessings of liberty for their families (United States Constitution) that rightist Republicans can create legal, non-biological entities and endow them with rights and power exceeding the American people with a 50/50 shot of people not knowing what happened.

In a typically insightful column this week, Nobel-Prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman, notes other derangements of the GOP-Koch mob in Congress and the GOP presidential clown car: A clueless and out-of-touch attitude that translates neatly into policy, (supplied by the corporate-funded, rightwing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)). (Center for Media and Democracy)

Krugman, commenting on the Federal Reserve's new study of the financial well-being of American households, (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, May 27, 2015 Press Release and Study), writes, "I am not, or not only, talking about right-wing contempt for the poor, although the dominance of compassionless conservatism is a sight to behold. ... But leave self-declared conservatives and their contempt for the poor on one side. What’s really striking is the disconnect between centrist conventional wisdom and the reality of life — and death — for much of the nation."

The Koch brothers-Ayn Rand strain of modern-day Birchism that Krugman references as tolerated and abetted in Washington is embodied in Wisconsin by Republicans led by Scott Walker, Paul Ryan and Ron Johnson.

Scott Walker is defined more completely by his malice, as his sociopathic contempt masks a ignorance combined with corruption, and an anti-intellectual bent that makes for a dangerous public officeholder who never faces presidential-level turnouts at the ballot box.

Though Krugman does not mention Wisconsin's trio of modern-day John Birchers in his latest column this weekend, Krugman has eviscerated Paul Ryan numerous times and repeated what is obvious: Ryan is a liar, and the GOP effort to attack Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is cowardly and dishonestly presented.

What the Fed study makes clear is that about one half of American families are living on the edge.

This is obvious to most Americans, remote to centrist conventional wisdom in D.C. , and a good thing to Scott Walker and Koch brothers holding malice the likes of which Wisconsin has never seen, or even contemplated.