The GOP couldn't care less about the financial, or any other kind of, wellbeing of the average American! They would gladly crash the economy if it got them more donations from their obscenely wealthy donors or if it hurt Biden's and Democrat's chances in the next election. They are the party of sociopaths, who don't care about the common good, but only about themselves and those who can benefit them.

The obscenely wealthy are equally as devoted only to themselves and their insatiable, pathological need to make ever more money! No amount would ever be enough, because their greed is like an addiction that can only be satisfied by constantly gaining more money. This is only part of what gives their greed away as a pathology that is fundamentally driven by fear and insecurity as they already clearly have plenty of money to take care of themselves. They just keep needing more; more money, more possessions, more winning and more losing for the rest of us.

Why the GOP May Actually Want a Second Great Depression https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-the-gop-may-actually-want-a-second?

#GreedKills
#GOPIsThePartyOfTheRich
#GreedIsAPathology
#InsecurityComplex
#GreedIsAnInsecurityResponse

"This is why Kevin McCarthy’s proposed legislation to raise the debt ceiling would strip $80 billion from the IRS: the morbidly rich tax cheats who own him (with the Supreme Court’s blessing in Citizens United) don’t want to get caught.

They want to hang onto the trillions they made during the last two crashes.

And, apparently, they’re happily anticipating the next crash that their boy McCarthy and their bought-off Republicans in Congress are working hard to bring to pass with their debt ceiling manipulations.

— Economic downturns not only cut wages and present buying opportunities for the wealthy and corporate America, they also give massive companies far more leverage when negotiating with vendors, who are typically desperate smaller businesses.

— They retain access to credit so they can leverage their buying opportunities in ways smaller companies and working class individuals can’t.

— And their power to fight unionization increases exponentially as workers scramble and compete for jobs that have become vanishingly rare.

But the average American can be forgiven for thinking that Republicans would be reluctant to crash the economy. Their lived experience is very different from that of Elon Musk (532% increase in wealth during the single year of 2020), Mark Zuckerberg (86% increase), or Jeff Bezos (65% increase).

During the Bush Crash, average income for the poorest 10% of Americans fell by a full 23%, making business (and billionaires) much more profitable while working people were skipping meals and cutting pills in half.

Thirteen years later, the Trump Crash threw 8,500,000 Americans out of work: according to the World Economic Forum, the adjusted unemployment rate hit 22.7 percent in 2020, higher than even during the Bush Crash, and it’s taken a full three years for working people to get back to where they started before Trump so badly mismanaged the pandemic.

Small business revenue collapsed by more than a fifth under Trump, new business formation cratered, and by July 2020 one-in-five American families were behind on their rent. The rate of hunger in America doubled at the same time the GOP sought to cut food stamps (SNAP) and Medicaid benefits.

The Bush and Trump crashes, in other words, did the work the morbidly rich have been demanding for years. Wages fell, unions struggled, corporate profits hit highs literally never before seen in America, and hedge funds bought up millions of distressed single-family homes to flip into high-priced rentals.

The stock market became absurdly cheap with both crashes, providing both the multimillionaire members of Congress and their billionaire backers with what used to be once-in-a-lifetime buying opportunities.

Additionally, throwing the country into a depression would almost guarantee Joe Biden loses the 2024 election. Presidents are rarely re-elected when the economy has gotten worse on their watch. Just ask Donald Trump, Jimmy Carter, or Jerry Ford.

So don’t be so sure Republicans in the House and Senate won’t drag America into default and a second Republican Great Depression if they have a chance.

They and their billionaire backers have almost nothing to lose and a fortune to gain."

What connects Trump’s likely arrest with the bank bailouts? https://robertreich.substack.com/p/what-connects-trumps-call-to-protest

#InsecurityResponses
#GreedIsAnInsecurityResponse
#PowerHungerIsAnInsecurityResponse
#FearNInsecurityThreatenDemocracy
#Socialism4MeNotThee
#TheFedIsTheToolOfTheRich

"...In the midterm elections of 2022, Thiel donated $15 million to the Republican Ohio senatorial primary campaign of JD Vance, who alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”
...
What connects Thiel to the bank bailouts?

Days before Silicon Valley Bank failed, Thiel’s venture firm, Founders Fund, advised clients to pull their deposits out. This contributed to the run on the bank.

Some $50 million of Thiel’s own money was still stuck in the bank. Then, guess what? Thiel and other rich depositors got bailed out by the Fed.

Charges of hypocrisy have been leveled at Thiel and other wealthy depositors who claim to be libertarians but were rescued by the government.

There was nothing hypocritical about it. Thiel and others like him aren’t really opposed to government, per se. They’re opposed to democracy. They prefer an oligarchy — a government controlled by super-wealthy people like themselves.

Thiel is part of the anti-democracy movement, of which Trump is the informal leader.

Their antipathy to democracy comes from the same fear that the extremely wealthy have always harbored about democracy — that a majority could vote to take away their money.
...
Thiel and his ilk see in Trump an authoritarian strongman who won’t allow a majority to take away their wealth.
...
They also support the Fed. Like most of the world’s central banks, the Fed is removed from democratic accountability, out of fear that financial markets otherwise won’t trust them to do unpopular things like bailing out banks or controlling inflation by slowing economies and causing millions to lose their jobs. The Fed is run largely by bankers. You might say it’s part of America’s oligarchy.

A few years ago, Thiel wrote that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Presumably he was referring to the freedom of oligarchs like himself to be unconstrained by taxes and regulations. In this narrow sense, he’s correct: Oligarchy is incompatible with democracy. Nor is oligarchy compatible with the freedom of the rest of us.

Thiel and others like him want to return to an era when American oligarchs had freer reign. In that same essay, Thiel wrote:

'The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.'

But if “capitalist democracy” has become an oxymoron, it’s not due to excessive public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Thiel are undermining democracy with giant campaign donations to authoritarian candidates.

I’m old enough to remember a former generation of wealthy Republicans who backed candidates like Barry Goldwater. They called themselves “conservatives” because they wanted to conserve American institutions. But Thiel and his fellow billionaires in the anti-democracy movement don’t want to conserve anything — at least anything that came after the 1920s, including Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote (except for the Federal Reserve’s bailouts for the rich and its ability to draft average workers into fighting inflation).

The 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when the richest Americans siphoned off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest of America had to go deep into debt to maintain their standard of living and sustain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced. When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression.

It was also the decade when Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed."