Scoffing in Singapore, praise in Philippines: how Asia sees Hong Kong’s extradition bill protests

The mammoth marches that involved an estimated 2 million people have inspired a range of views from the region’s citizens and direct action veterans

Some are in favour, and see hope in Hongkongers’ audacity – while others run the gamut from shrill condemnation to ambivalence

Bhavan Jaipragas  

Phila Siu  

Published: 11:00am, 22 Jun, 2019

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3015618/scoffing-singapore-praise-philippines-how-asia-sees-hong-kongs

Even for the likes of Malaysia’s Hishamuddin Rais, a veteran leader of the country’s pro-democracy Bersih marches that repeatedly brought Kuala Lumpur to a standstill in recent years, Hong Kong’s mammoth anti-extradition protests over the past fortnight have been a sight to behold.

“I mean, I was just so happy to see the young people. So many of them, so capable, and so clear in what they want. Us ‘grandaddies’ and ‘grandmummies’ of street politics can only observe and learn from the Hong Kong youth,” Hishamuddin, a firebrand civil activist for the last five decades, told This Week in Asia.

Like the self-styled Malaysian rabble-rouser, admiration – even envy – was the prevailing feeling among the citizens, civil activists and political observers of Hong Kong’s closest neighbours as they witnessed the city take to the streets in unprecedented fashion to oppose the politically charged extradition bill  mooted by the government of Chief Executive Carrie Lam  Cheng Yuet-ngor.

The likes of the Philippines  – the Southeast Asian nation nearest to Hong Kong – and 

South Korea  have a long tradition of street protests. But even there, the Hong Kong protesters’ audacity, in particular their open defiance of the city’s ultimate political masters in Beijing, has gained them widespread praise.

Social media users from across the region also commended the protesters’ civil behaviour after they cleaned up after the marches, and on several instances let ambulances pass through streets flooded with people.

However, the adulation was not uniform across the region.

In Singapore – seen by many as Hong Kong’s sister city – where protests are rare due to tough rules governing freedom of assembly, one well-known establishment figure scoffed at the protesters for having “lost all sense of reality”.

Retired top diplomat Bilahari Kausikan suggested Beijing might need to get involved to quell the street protests.

Civil activists who had led protests in the Lion City, meanwhile, said people in the city state were unlikely to come out in the same manner as Hongkongers because they had been “conditioned” to be apprehensive of direct action.

Large-scale protests are expected to continue in Hong Kong this weekend after the city’s government failed to respond to demands to scrap the extradition bill, which would for the first time have allowed suspects in the semi-autonomous city to be extradited to mainland China.

Still, there has been some immediate impact, with Chief Executive Lam issuing a rare apology for attempting to push through the bill, which she has now vowed to indefinitely suspend.

However, the embattled leader continues to enjoy Beijing’s backing.

On Monday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said Lam’s resignation – a key demand of protesters – was out of the question.

The Beijing unit overseeing the city’s affairs, the Hong Kong and Macau office, meanwhile has said it respected Lam’s climbdown on the extradition bill, and expressed support for the police force’s efforts to maintain law and order.

Chinese officials have expressed deep displeasure over foreign governments’ open support for the protests, which they view as outside interference in a domestic matter.

Tam Yiu-chung, Hong Kong’s only representative to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, quoted officials after a meeting this week with liaison office director Wang Zhimin as saying that foreign powers had issued at least 67 statements to “interfere” with events in Hong Kong.

STRENGTH IN NUMBERS

Nonetheless, in the Philippines, some citizens are wondering if they can employ direct action to extract climbdowns from an increasingly assertive China.

In the latest brush-up between the two countries, a Chinese vessel sunk a Philippine fishing boat on June 9 – the same day Hongkongers staged the first of their massive protests.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte  has sought to play down the incident, at one point decrying “stupid politicians” for hyping up what was “just a collision”.

Critics have slammed that stance as yet another instance of his kowtowing before Chinese aggression. Duterte in the past maintained that he was taking a pragmatic approach with Beijing because the Philippines could not afford to go to war with the Asian power.

Gideon Lasco, a local academic and columnist, said Hong Kong’s resistance against the extradition bill offered a fresh perspective on the matter.

“[The Hong Kong protests] can inspire Filipinos to realise that military might is not the only ‘power’ we have. There is strength in numbers,” he said. “There is strength in simply being on the moral high ground, and having other people – or nations – behind you.”

Such clarion calls by Lasco and other Filipinos seem to be gaining traction.

In a viral tweet last week, Lasco said: “Incident after incident, it is very clear that Chinese forces are harassing our people, grabbing our islands, and destroying our reefs in the West Philippine Sea. If the citizens of Hong Kong and the government of Vietnam can stand up to China, so can we and so should our government.”

Gideon Lasco

✔@gideonlasco

Incident after incident, it is very clear that Chinese forces are harassing our people, grabbing our islands, and destroying our reefs in the West Philippine Sea.

If the citizens of Hong Kong and the gov’t of Vietnam can stand up to China, so can we and so should our government.

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Jianne Soriano, who was born and raised in Hong Kong, echoed the sentiment.

Said the 23-year-old: “As a Filipino-Hongkonger, I feel stuck on both sides with a common thread which is China. I agree that what’s going on in Hong Kong is about the extradition bill, but also think that the message they are sending to others outside Hong Kong is that they can stand up to a superpower – which is exactly what the Filipino people and even the Filipino government should do.”

In South Korea, where demonstrations have been ubiquitous since democratisation from military rule in the 1980s, social media users expressed similar resonance with the Hong Kong protesters’ struggle.

Many took to social media to suggest the anti-extradition protests were similar to the demonstrations in late 2016 and early 2017 that eventually forced the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye.

Referring to Lam’s apology on Tuesday, one Twitter user likened her address to similar public mea culpas by former presidents Lee Myung-bak and Park, both of whom are serving jail time for corruption. Some have signed online petitions calling for current President Moon Jae-in to weigh in and support the Hong Kong protesters.

Moon has maintained silence so far – expectedly, considering the impact any statement could have on ties with Beijing.

US-based South Korean political blogger Jumin Lee said the supportive response towards the Hong Kong protests on social media showed the country’s citizens “feel like what happened to them is happening to Hong Kong as well.”

SINGAPORE, WHY NO LOVE FOR HONG KONG?

In Singapore, while many lauded the civic-minded behaviour of protesters, few seemed to support their cause outright.

Former ambassador Bilahari’s shrill condemnation of the demonstrations on social media garnered strong support from his followers.

“These HK people have lost all sense of reality. At some point [Chinese President Xi Jinping] must act if this continues,” the former diplomat wrote on Facebook on Monday, after the demonstration on June 16 in which organisers said a record-breaking 2 million people took part.

“I am sure he would prefer to deal with HK after relations with the US stabilise, and that is not going to happen any time soon,” Bilahari said. “The HK people are probably banking on just that.”

Asked by This Week in Asia about the Hong Kong demonstrations on the sidelines of an interreligious harmony conference in the city state this week, a handful of civil servants, local researchers and company executives almost unanimously expressed ambivalence over the demonstrations.

Office workers in the central business district also expressed limited support for the Hong Kong protests.

“That is their culture. I think in Singapore, even if the government allows it, people won’t gather like that. There are other ways [to express dissent] … to make your anger known,” said sales executive Paul Sim.

Gilbert Goh, a prolific organiser of small-scale protests in the city state’s sole free-speech park, said he was unsurprised by the lack of support for the protests among his compatriots. “I think the [ruling People’s Action Party (PAP)] has done a good job. They say ‘You come out against us, there will be repercussions’ … so people are conditioned not to go against the authorities.”

Goh was the organiser of a series of protests between 2013 and 2015 over a controversial government white paper that suggested the country’s population could swell to 6.9 million people in two decades. The government later dialed back the significance of the projection, suggesting instead that its expected population figure in 2030 was much lower.

The first of Goh’s anti-immigration protests garnered some 5,000 people, widely viewed as the largest demonstration since Singapore’s independence in 1965.

Under the rule of the PAP, in power since 1959, protests are rare because of tough rules governing street demonstrations. They are not banned, but require police permits – which have not been issued for political demonstrations for decades.

Last year, artist Seelan Palay served a jail term in lieu of a fine after he was convicted of being “part of a public procession without a permit”.

His solo protest, in memory of one of the country’s late political detainees, involved performance art in which he walked to three different locations holding a mirror. At one point he stood in front of parliament holding the mirror.

Palay’s case has been cited by civil activists to demonstrate what they claim are draconian restrictions on free assembly. Said Goh: “It comes down to culture. Hong Kong, they have a kind of British culture, they believe in protests. Here we are very Confucian, obeying authority. It takes a lot of stirring of sentiment and patriotism to get people to come out.”

Roy Ngerng, a government critic successfully sued for defamation by Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, blamed PAP “propaganda” for locals’ harsh view towards protests.

“There is propaganda that protests will harm stability … but even [founding father] Lee Kuan Yew was involved in protests in the 1950s. Demonstrations were normal in the 1960s until dissent was stifled through laws enacted by the PAP,” said the political blogger, who now lives in Taiwan.

Ngerng’s open support for the Hong Kong protests has been one of the talking points on social media in Singapore this week. A main cause for the chatter was a picture showing him holding a banner at a Taipei rally last Sunday that said “Don’t let Hong Kong be like Singapore where people live in fear”.

PEOPLE POWER

Back in the Philippines, where the so-called People Power Revolution was staged to topple dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, some say there are salutary lessons for Hong Kong from their country’s experience with direct action.

A second bout of demonstrations, dubbed “People Power 2”, toppled Joseph Estrada as president in 2001. Estrada was imprisoned for plunder but was subsequently released and served for a period as mayor of Manila.

Political scientist Maria Ela Atienza of the University of the Philippines Diliman suggested the country was suffering a “people power fatigue” because of a lack of progress arising from the two major social movements.

On issues like the South China Sea dispute, she said it was unlikely metropolitan Filipinos would take to the streets like their Hong Kong counterparts, given that the impact of Chinese assertions in the waters so far affected only fishermen from far-flung regions.

Hong Kong’s latest protests were “laudable” in that they managed to galvanise a “united front” of students, professionals, the religious sector, and even mothers, the professor said.

There was a cautionary tale from Thailand too, where demonstrators in the late 2000s and early 2010s railed against the country’s royal-urban elite for throttling elected governments backed by rural folk.

Protests were proscribed after a coup in 2014, and restrictions are expected to be kept in place despite the return of nominal democracy following elections in March.

Prominent pro-democracy columnist Pravit Rojanaphruk in a commentary this week said young people in his country were reticent to take to the streets after having borne witness to how “reckless and irresponsible protest leaders on both sides” put people in harm’s way during erstwhile clashes.

“While rights to demonstration are fundamental to a democratic society, as seen in Hong Kong this week, Thais now seem keen to see other avenues for political action used up first,” Pravit wrote. “Massive street protests will only return to Bangkok when all other channels for political action have been exhausted.”

Hishamuddin, the Malaysian veteran activist, said what he witnessed on television screens beaming live images of the Hong Kong protests reinforced time-tested fundamentals of direct action.

“In Hong Kong, they are defending their democratic life – a core part of their identity. In Malaysia, we were fighting for free and fair elections,” Hishamuddin said. “Whatever it is, when you go out on the streets, you must have a clear key objective that strikes at the heart of Mr and Mrs Ordinary.

“We are seeing that in Hong Kong today … the young people know what they want. There may be difference in opinion on tactics, the struggle between [hardline and compromise] methods. But what is clear is that this trend of street protests is not going anywhere in Asia. We will not see the last of it, in Hong Kong or elsewhere.”

Additional reporting by Crystal Tai

A Deadly Epidemic Is Hitting Trump Supporters the Hardest

JUN 19, 2019

OPINION

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/a-deadly-epidemic-is-hitting-trump-supporters-the-hardest/

We hear a lot about suicide when celebrities like Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade die by their own hand. Otherwise, it seldom makes the headlines. That’s odd given the magnitude of the problem.

In 2017, 47,173 Americans killed themselves. In that single year, in other words, the suicide count was nearly seven times greater than the number of American soldiers killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars between 2001 and 2018.

A suicide occurs in the United States roughly once every 12 minutes. What’s more, after decades of decline, the rate of self-inflicted deaths per 100,000 people annually — the suicide rate — has been increasing sharply since the late 1990s. Suicides now claim two-and-a-half times as many lives in this country as do homicides, even though the murder rate gets so much more attention.

In other words, we’re talking about a national epidemic of self-inflicted deaths.

Worrisome Numbers

Anyone who has lost a close relative or friend to suicide or has worked on a suicide hotline (as I have) knows that statistics transform the individual, the personal, and indeed the mysterious aspects of that violent act — Why this person?  Why now? Why in this manner? — into depersonalized abstractions. Still, to grasp how serious the suicide epidemic has become, numbers are a necessity.

According to a 2018 Centers for Disease Control study, between 1999 and 2016, the suicide rate increased in every state in the union except Nevada, which already had a remarkably high rate.  In 30 states, it jumped by 25% or more; in 17, by at least a third.  Nationally, it increased 33%. In some states the upsurge was far higher: North Dakota (57.6%), New Hampshire (48.3%), Kansas (45%), Idaho (43%).

Alas, the news only gets grimmer.

Since 2008, suicide has ranked 10th among the causes of death in this country. For Americans between the ages of 10 and 34, however, it comes in second; for those between 35 and 45, fourth. The United States also has the ninth-highest rate in the 38-country Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Globally, it ranks 27th.

More importantly, the trend in the United States doesn’t align with what’s happening elsewhere in the developed world. The World Health Organization, for instance, reports that Great Britain, Canada, and China all have notably lower suicide rates than the U.S., as do all but six countries in the European Union. (Japan’s is only slightly lower.)

World Bank statistics show that, worldwide, the suicide rate fell from 12.8 per 100,000 in 2000 to 10.6 in 2016.  It’s been falling in China, Japan (where it has declined steadily for nearly a decade and is at its lowest point in 37 years), most of Europe, and even countries like South Korea and Russia that have a significantly higher suicide rate than the United States. In Russia, for instance, it has dropped by nearly 26% from a high point of 42 per 100,000 in 1994 to 31 in 2019.

We know a fair amount about the patterns of suicide in the United States.  In 2017, the rate was highest for men between the ages of 45 and 64 (30 per 100,000) and those 75 and older (39.7 per 100,000).

The rates in rural counties are almost double those in the most urbanized ones, which is why states like Idaho, Kansas, New Hampshire, and North Dakota sit atop the suicide list. Furthermore, a far higher percentage of people in rural states own guns than in cities and suburbs, leading to a higher rate of suicide involving firearms, the means used in half of all such acts in this country.

There are gender-based differences as well. From 1999 to 2017, the rate for men was substantially higher than for women — almost four-and-a-half times higher in the first of those years, slightly more than three-and-a-half times in the last.

Education is also a factor.  The suicide rate is lowest among individuals with college degrees. Those who, at best, completed high school are, by comparison, twice as likely to kill themselves.  Suicide rates also tend to be lower among people in higher-income brackets.

The Economics of Stress

This surge in the suicide rate has taken place in years during which the working class has experienced greater economic hardship and psychological stress.  Increased competition from abroad and outsourcing, the results of globalization, have contributed to job loss, particularly in economic sectors like manufacturing, steel, and mining that had long been mainstays of employment for such workers. The jobs still available often paid less and provided fewer benefits.

Technological change, including computerization, robotics, and the coming of artificial intelligence, has similarly begun to displace labor in significant ways, leaving Americans without college degrees, especially those 50 and older, in far more difficult straits when it comes to finding new jobs that pay well. The lack of anything resembling an industrial policy of a sort that exists in Europe has made these dislocations even more painful for American workers, while a sharp decline in private-sector union membership — down from nearly 17% in 1983 to 6.4% today — has reduced their ability to press for higher wages through collective bargaining.

Furthermore, the inflation-adjusted median wage has barely budged over the last four decades (even as CEO salaries have soared).  And a decline in worker productivity doesn’t explain it: between 1973 and 2017 productivity increased by 77%, while a worker’s average hourly wage only rose by 12.4%. Wage stagnation has made it harder for working-class Americans to get by, let alone have a lifestyle comparable to that of their parents or grandparents.

The gap in earnings between those at the top and bottom of American society has also increased — a lot. Since 1979, the wages of Americans in the 10th percentile increased by a pitiful 1.2%. Those in the 50th percentile did a bit better, making a gain of 6%.  By contrast, those in the 90th percentile increased by 34.3% and those near the peak of the wage pyramid — the top 1% and especially the rarefied 0.1% — made far more substantial gains.

And mind you, we’re just talking about wages, not other forms of income like large stock dividends, expensive homes, or eyepopping inheritances.  The share of net national wealth held by the richest 0.1% increased from 10% in the 1980s to 20% in 2016.  By contrast, the share of the bottom 90% shrank in those same decades from about 35% to 20%. As for the top 1%, by 2016 its share had increased to almost 39%.

The precise relationship between economic inequality and suicide rates remains unclear, and suicide certainly can’t simply be reduced to wealth disparities or financial stress. Still, strikingly, in contrast to the United States, suicide rates are noticeably lower and have been declining in Western European countries where income inequalities are far less pronounced, publicly funded healthcare is regarded as a right (not demonized as a pathway to serfdom), social safety nets far more extensive, and apprenticeships and worker retraining programs more widespread.

Evidence from the United States, Brazil, Japan, and Sweden does indicate that, as income inequality increases, so does the suicide rate. If so, the good news is that progressive economic policies — should Democrats ever retake the White House and the Senate — could make a positive difference. A study based on state-by-state variations in the U.S. found that simply boosting the minimum wage and Earned Income Tax Credit by 10% appreciably reduces the suicide rate among people without college degrees.

The Race Enigma

One aspect of the suicide epidemic is puzzling.  Though whites have fared far better economically (and in many other ways) than African Americans, their suicide rate is significantly higher. It increased from 11.3 per 100,000 in 2000 to 15.85 per 100,000 in 2017; for African Americans in those years the rates were 5.52 per 100,000 and 6.61 per 100,000. Black men are 10 times more likely to be homicide victims than white men, but the latter are two-and-half times more likely to kill themselves.

The higher suicide rate among whites as well as among people with only a high school diploma highlights suicide’s disproportionate effect on working-class whites. This segment of the population also accounts for a disproportionate share of what economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have labeled “deaths of despair” — those caused by suicides plus opioid overdoses and liver diseases linked to alcohol abuse. Though it’s hard to offer a complete explanation for this, economic hardship and its ripple effects do appear to matter.

According to a study by the St. Louis Federal Reserve, the white working class accounted for 45% of all income earned in the United States in 1990, but only 27% in 2016.  In those same years, its share of national wealth plummeted, from 45% to 22%.  And as inflation-adjusted wages have decreased for men without college degrees, many white workers seem to have lost hope of success of any sort.  Paradoxically, the sense of failure and the accompanying stress may be greater for white workers precisely because they traditionally were much better off economically than their African American and Hispanic counterparts.

In addition, the fraying of communities knit together by employment in once-robust factories and mines has increased social isolation among them, and the evidence that it — along with opioid addiction and alcohol abuse — increases the risk of suicide is strong. On top of that, a significantly higher proportion of whites than blacks and Hispanics own firearms, and suicide rates are markedly higher in states where gun ownership is more widespread.

Trump’s Faux Populism

The large increase in suicide within the white working class began a couple of decades before Donald Trump’s election. Still, it’s reasonable to ask what he’s tried to do about it, particularly since votes from these Americans helped propel him to the White House. In 2016, he received 64% of the votes of whites without college degrees; Hillary Clinton, only 28%.  Nationwide, he beat Clinton in counties where deaths of despair rose significantly between 2000 and 2015.

White workers will remain crucial to Trump’s chances of winning in 2020.  Yet while he has spoken about, and initiated steps aimed at reducing, the high suicide rate among veterans, his speeches and tweets have never highlighted the national suicide epidemic or its inordinate impact on white workers. More importantly, to the extent that economic despair contributes to their high suicide rate, his policies will only make matters worse.

The real benefits from the December 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act championed by the president and congressional Republicans flowed to those on the top steps of the economic ladder.  By 2027, when the Act’s provisions will run out, the wealthiest Americans are expected to have captured 81.8% of the gains.  And that’s not counting the windfall they received from recent changes in taxes on inheritances. Trump and the GOP doubled the annual amount exempt from estate taxes — wealth bequeathed to heirs — through 2025 from $5.6 million per individual to $11.2 million (or $22.4 million per couple). And who benefits most from this act of generosity?  Not workers, that’s for sure, but every household with an estate worth $22 million or more will.

As for job retraining provided by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, the president proposed cutting that program by 40% in his 2019 budget, later settling for keeping it at 2017 levels. Future cuts seem in the cards as long as Trump is in the White House. The Congressional Budget Office projects that his tax cuts alone will produce even bigger budget deficits in the years to come. (The shortfall last year was $779 billion and it is expected to reach $1 trillion by 2020.) Inevitably, the president and congressional Republicans will then demand additional reductions in spending for social programs.

This is all the more likely because Trump and those Republicans also slashed corporate taxes from 35% to 21% — an estimated $1.4 trillion in savings for corporations over the next decade. And unlike the income tax cut, the corporate tax has no end date. The president assured his base that the big bucks those companies had stashed abroad would start flowing home and produce a wave of job creation — all without adding to the deficit. As it happens, however, most of that repatriated cash has been used for corporate stock buy-backs, which totaled more than $800 billion last year. That, in turn, boosted share prices, but didn’t exactly rain money down on workers. No surprise, of course, since the wealthiest 10% of Americans own at least 84% of all stocks and the bottom 60% have less than 2% of them.

And the president’s corporate tax cut hasn’t produced the tsunami of job-generating investments he predicted either. Indeed, in its aftermath, more than 80% of American companies stated that their plans for investment and hiring hadn’t changed. As a result, the monthly increase in jobs has proven unremarkable compared to President Obama’s second term, when the economic recovery that Trump largely inherited began. Yes, the economy did grow 2.3% in 2017 and 2.9% in 2018 (though not 3.1% as the president claimed). There wasn’t, however, any “unprecedented economic boom — a boom that has rarely been seen before” as he insisted in this year’s State of the Union Address.

Anyway, what matters for workers struggling to get by is growth in real wages, and there’s nothing to celebrate on that front: between 2017 and mid-2018 they actually declined by 1.63% for white workers and 2.5% for African Americans, while they rose for Hispanics by a measly 0.37%.  And though Trump insists that his beloved tariff hikes are going to help workers, they will actually raise the prices of goods, hurting the working class and other low-income Americans the most.

Then there are the obstacles those susceptible to suicide face in receiving insurance-provided mental-health care. If you’re a white worker without medical coverage or have a policy with a deductible and co-payments that are high and your income, while low, is too high to qualify for Medicaid, Trump and the GOP haven’t done anything for you. Never mind the president’s tweet proclaiming that “the Republican Party Will Become ‘The Party of Healthcare!’”

Let me amend that: actually, they have done something. It’s just not what you’d call helpful. The percentage of uninsured adults, which fell from 18% in 2013 to 10.9% at the end of 2016, thanks in no small measure to Obamacare, had risen to 13.7% by the end of last year.

The bottom line? On a problem that literally has life-and-death significance for a pivotal portion of his base, Trump has been AWOL. In fact, to the extent that economic strain contributes to the alarming suicide rate among white workers, his policies are only likely to exacerbate what is already a national crisis of epidemic proportions.

The One Issue That Could Determine Trump's Re-Election Bid

Thom Hartmann / Independent Media Institute

JUN 19, 2019

OPINION

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-one-issue-that-could-determine-trumps-re-election-bid/

If he times it right, Donald Trump might set back the Democratic Party for a generation or more; if he misses, he’ll go down in history along with Herbert Hoover as the guy who brought the nation an economic disaster.

Back in 2007 and early 2008, many of us were convinced that an economic crash was coming, and that George W. Bush and his Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, and Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, knew it.

And we also thought that they were doing everything they could to hold it off so it would happen after the 2008 election, so if a Democrat was elected they could say the crash was because people were “worried about the incoming Democrats,” and if McCain won it would be his problem, not Bush’s.

It appears that Trump may be doing the same thing, only, as with so many of his High Crimes (a phrase that includes “serious misuse or abuse of office”), he’s being much more public about it. On June 15, he tweeted, “if anyone but me takes over… there will be a Market Crash the likes of which has not been seen before!”

The question now is whether he’ll have the same bad luck Bush did in not being able to forestall it by a year or so.

Bush knew the business cycle that had cranked up during the late 90s was coming to an end, and he, Greenspan, and Paulson did everything they could to hold it off.

Between 2001 and 2003, he pushed through Congress and signed fully three major tax cuts for wealthy people and businesses, including massive cuts to dividend and capital gains income. This poured hundreds of billions in borrowed money into the economy, wiping out the $236 billion budget surplus Bill Clinton had left him and throwing us into a $458 billion annual deficit in 2008.

To further goose the economy, Bush and Cheney illegally got us into two wars, raising defense spending from the $290 billion ceiling it had hit during the 1990s to over $595 billion in 2008, pouring literally trillions into the defense industry.

In particular, the old Ayn Rand cult member and acolyte Alan Greenspan got into the act by lowering the Fed funds rate—the basis of U.S. interest rates—from 6.5 percent at the end of 2000 to below 2 percent in 2002. Greenspan kept the interest rates below 2 percent right up until just after the election of 2004, when he let them float up slightly. Bush rewarded his good efforts by reappointing him as Fed chair in 2005, which many speculate was why he’d jacked up the economy so hard leading up to the election of 2004, giving Bush a credit-fueled “feel good economy.”

And it was insanely credit-fueled. Between 2000 and 2006, housing prices in the United States doubled because the low interest rates, combined with repeated Republican deregulation of the banking and security sectors, allowed millions of unqualified new home buyers into the marketplace, driving demand toward the sky.

Trump, Steven Mnuchin, and Jerome Powell have virtually cloned the process, from tax cuts to defense spending to low interest rates, and the inevitable result is increasingly obvious to financial publication opinion writers. Op-eds in staid publications like the Financial Times and the Economist are, with growing frequency, somewhere between, “The sky is about to fall!” and, “There’s a meteor coming the size that wiped out the dinosaurs!”

And with good reason.

The entire “supply side” scam that if the rich people get richer it’ll help us all is totally discredited, but, in deference to their billionaire donors, the GOP still clings to it. Their policies, true to their proclamations, have raised the wealth of the top 1 percent by a total of $21 trillion just in the years since Reagan’s last months in office, leaving them sitting on over $30 trillion in assets and cash.

In fact, though, demand is what drives economies. And, while rich people might buy a few yachts and fancy mansions, it’s the purchasing power of the bottom 99 percent that is known by economists as “aggregate demand” and actually moves marketplaces.

Reaganomics—the neoliberal economic system we’ve been living under continuously since 1981—has wiped out the purchasing power of the bottom 99 percent. In the same time that the rich have gotten $21 trillion richer, the bottom 50 percent of Americans have lost—vanished, gone forever, lost—over $900 billion.

Cheap credit is the only thing that’s keeping most Americans buying anything beyond groceries and medicine, and both of those are exploding in price because of climate change, monopoly, and fraud. It’s not a question of if, but when the working people of America will stop going deeper and deeper in debt simply to maintain their current lifestyles.

And as more and more Americans downsize their housing or even become homeless (we’re the only developed country in the world to have homeless teachers, nurses, and fast-food workers), their ability to keep the American economy afloat will collapse even with 1.5 percent interest rates. Right now, half of us would get wiped out by a medical or car expense of just a few hundred dollars, having to turn to friends, family, a new credit card, or GoFundMe to stay afloat.

Back in 2007, I started refusing to read advertisements on my radio/TV show for banks and subprime lenders. It infuriated our advertising sales team, but I was openly warning people on the air that an economic winter was coming, and couldn’t in good conscience then tell them to take on more debt.

We’re there again. In some very real ways, in fact, we never got out of it.

Over the past five years, if there had not been a multitrillion-dollar increase in government, corporate, and individual borrowing, the U.S. economy would have contracted, rather than grown.

All of our national economy’s growth has been on borrowed money for all of Trump’s presidency: there’s quite literally no “there” there.

This is not how a healthy economy is supposed to work; instead, Trump is maintaining and inflating an economic Potemkin village, a pretend economy made out of cardboard, chicken wire and bubble gum that will collapse in the face of the first stiff economic wind.

If Trump and his collaborators can hold back the winds until November of next year, the GOP has a chance in the elections.

And, as a bonus for Trump, if Democrats sweep the 2020 elections and Powell and Mnuchin pull out the economy’s temporary props right afterward, crashing the economy, Republicans will blame Democrats for the ensuing economic disaster for the next generation or two.

On the other hand, if Trump can’t pull it off, get ready for some epic tiny-finger pointing.

And a crash before the election could offer our nation an opportunity, should Democrats nominate an actual progressive who will take us off the neoliberal Reaganomics we’ve suffered under since 1981.

A 2021 return to New Deal Keynesian economics, which rescued America after the Republican Great Depression and built the strongest middle class in history between 1933 and 1980, could return working-class Americans to opportunity, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In either case, winter is coming, and we all need to be prepared, both politically and economically.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

Luciano Pavarotti sings "Nessun dorma" from Turandot (The Three Tenors in Concert 1994)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWc7vYjgnTs

Slavoj - Evening Lecture - “Disorder Under Heaven” - 2019-06-13

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh-5m8Xm4-4&feature=em-lsp