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?

Democratic Party Freezes Out Grassroots in Wisconsin, Nation

Updated - Someone should ask U.S. Rep. Ron Kind (D-La Crosse) why the national and Wisconsin Democratic Parties (DPW) are shutting out grassroots primary challenges against congressional incumbents.

WisPolitics is holding a luncheon for Rep. Kind to discuss policy issues at The Madison Club, 5 East Wilson Street in Madison at 11:30 a.m.-1:00 p.m. on March 29 next Tuesday.

Rep. Kind is facing a tough primary challenger in retired teacher Myron Buchholz (D-Eau Claire).

Kind is chair of the corporatist New Democrat Coalition and a champion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) 'trade' agreement now before Congress.

Buchholz opposes the TPP and is making the loss of manufacturing jobs and campaign finance the centerpiece of his campaign. Buchholz launched his congressional run in February.

One would think in progressive Wisconsin, in the tradition of Bob La Follette, voters should pick their representatives, not Party bosses.

Candidate Buchholz found out the Democratic Party bosses protect entrenched incumbents like Kind, who has received over $16,000 from the Koch brothers, (Craver, The Capital Times).

Money Talks, La Follette Walks

Democratic Party of Wisconsin (DPW) Chair Martha Laning is protecting Kind and the special interests funding his six-figure gig as a nine-term member of Congress.

Laning tells the Democrat in good standing, Myron Buchholz, that the DPW's voters' list, (Voter Activation Network (VAN)), will not be made available to Buchholz for his challenge to Rep. Kind, (Blogging Blue), (Cognitive Dissidence).

It's about money.

The money from the Koch brothers is nothing compared to the top four special interest sectors forking over money to Kind—Insurance, Pharmaceuticals/Health Products, Health Professionals and Securities and Investment—who have collectively donated over $391,000 in the 2015-16 election cycle alone, (Open Secrets, Center for Responsive Politics).

As of Dec. 31, 2015, Kind had over $2 million on hand and raised well over $1 million in 2015-16.

Name of the Game Is Money from Special Interests

Kind and the DPW are not unique. Shutting out, and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) hopes shutting down, grassroots challengers is a national phenomena.

"The Florida Democratic Party will not allow me access to our party's (voters') database and software because I am running against an incumbent Democrat," said Florida congressional candidate, Tim Canova (Fulton, Common Dreams). Sounds familiar.

Canova is mounting a grassroots challenge against the six-term congresswoman and chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida).

Message from the DNC, Schultz and the Party insiders' favorite, Hillary Clinton, to challengers fighting special interests is clear: Get lost, (Iannelli, Broward-Palm Beach New Times).

[Note: Breaking news out of Florida: "After being denied access to an important voter file that could help his campaign, Democrat Tim Canova, who is challenging incumbent Debbie Wasserman Schultz this August, will now get access to a campaign tool called the Voter Activation Network (VAN)," (Perry, Florida Politics).]

Missouri and other states report similar challenger obstruction by the state's Democratic Party.

"(N)ews outlets in Missouri reported last month on the fight over VAN access in that state, 'several Democratic candidates—who are also Ferguson movement leaders,' were blocked from the files by the state party. As one of the candidate's campaign managers put it, 'The sign almost says, 'Newcomers need not apply.'"

The DNC has become a funnel for special interests and Myron Buchholz and Tim Canova are not the right kind of special. The kind with a dollar sign and six figures to donate for services rendered.

This begs the question of Kind, posed by Myron Buchholz, which side are you on, Ron Kind?

Which Side Are You On, Ron Kind, Asks Congressional Challenger Myron Buchholtz

American industry moves manufacturing jobs overseas
as trade agreements championed by Rep. Ron Kind
(R-Wisconsin) have hollowed out the U.S. economy.
Now before congress, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)
would move entire industries overseas, as American
manufacturing jobs move into endangered-species territory.
Pictured above is a shuttered facility from La Crosse
Footwear Inc. that shipped 100s of American jobs to the
Far-East circa 2000-01. Who would want to ship away
American jobs and why?
Myron Buchholz demands an answer.

Rep. Ron Kind is to manufacturing jobs what Gov. Scott Walker is to higher education: Hostile.

Brilliant campaign video is out by Myron Buchholz for Congress (D-Eau Claire), challenging nine-term incumbent Rep. Ron Kind (D- La Crosse).

Kind is the chair of the "New Democrat" Coalition and a champion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) 'trade' agreement now before Congress.

TPP like other trade agreements will hollow out the American economy, ship jobs and industry overseas, and drive down American wages.

TPP was negotiated in secret for years, is heavily supported by Republicans, the pharmaceutical industry, an array of corporate special interests and Wisconsin's own Ron Kind, (Wallach, Goodman; Democracy Now); (Conyers, The Nation).

Why would any politician even consider TPP? Rep. Kind has no answer.

Myron Buchholz pays homage to Bob Dylan's classic Subterranean Homesick Blues (1965) in a video asking Rep. Kind, Which side are you on, Ron?

The video features images of the homeless, shuttered factories and foreclosed homes, as Buchholz asks in a lamenting tone, Which side are you on, Ron?

Small Number of Huge-Moneyed Interests Run the World, Says the New Scientist

Goya

The neo-liberal project of pacifying the world by creating state-supported networks of market forces remained the dream of arguably well-intentioned intellectuals from the H.W. Bush-Clinton years up until the 2008 crash.

Yet, for a project of such grand scope, the architects and principals rejected even a superficial analysis of the risks and threats to the general population, now enduring a catastrophe induced by hostile neocon powers who inherited the project.

The politcal neocons expanded the project scope to include a statist, reactionary, and authoritarian governmental structure.

And the expanded project is now loosed upon world populations.

Neocons retain genuine disdain for the vast majority of human beings on the planet, and are aggressively pursuing political power as exemplified by rightwingers such as the Koch Brothers implementing anti-family and anti-worker policies state-by-state, then country-by-country, they hope.

As Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie outline "the capitalist network that runs the world," one wonders who can stop this network.

By Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie

As protests against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.