President Joe Biden's inauguration address cited many challenges facing our country.
Anger, resentment, hatred.
Extremism, lawlessness, violence.
Disease, joblessness, hopelessness.
Later he added:
This is a time of testing.
We face an attack on democracy and on truth.
A raging virus.
Growing inequity.
The sting of systemic racism.
A climate in crisis.
America’s role in the world.
He left out greed, which hollowed out Main Street over the last several decades. Ten years ago a business reporter wrote me saying:
I have seen so many people -- particularly those in their 50s - 70s -- taken apart by what has happened in their industry as greed has hollowed out the economy. These are people took pride in their jobs and held themselves to this invisible standard that we all just took for granted, but is being wiped out.
The Carlyle Group scares me more than anything I've ever seen on Wall Street. It seems to exist to corrupt politicians and it's hard to know who they even represent.
I watched a video interview of (David) Rubenstein and his arrogance is really beyond tolerance. He was going on about the debt ceiling problem and how there would need to be cuts in services and higher taxes. When the reporter asked him about tax on carried interest he turned really disdainful and said that this "only" amounted to $22 billion over some number of years and this was not serious money. Boy, nothing like everybody doing their small part to save the country from oblivion!
Red and Blue political teams catered to the PEU class, (private equity underwriter).
Billionaire PEU founders became household names as they made government policy, while eviscerating the middle class.
PEU owned companies rose dramatically over the terms of Presidents Cliinton, Bush (W), and Obama. Trump gave the billionaire boys the tax cuts they said they deserved. Virtually none of these new found riches went to workers. Executives and sponsors took the proceeds for themselves.
Americans know the crumbs haven't fallen from the king's table, despite numerous assurances that something other than their lifeblood would trickle down. Greed has done this. The PEU boys had decades of not doing their part.
The Biden Cabinet is chock full of PEUs. I don't envision Biden's greed and leverage boys turning on their own, however that is required.
America's rising middle class was the golden goose. The PEU boys killed it.
Update 1-25-21: This is what the greed and leverage boys helped create:
A study published a few years ago by two of America’s most respected political scientists, Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page of Northwestern, concluded that the preferences of the average American “have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically nonsignificant impact upon public policy”. Instead, lawmakers respond almost exclusively to the moneyed interests – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns.
The capture of government by big business has infuriated average Americans whose paychecks have gone nowhere even as the stock market has soared.
The populist movements that fueled both Bernie Sanders and Trump began in the 2008 financial crisis when Wall Street got bailed out and no major bank executive went to jail, although millions of ordinary people lost their jobs, savings and homes.
Update 2-1-21: The Carlyle Group has a new affiliate, Two Six Technologies to pull millions from Uncle Sam's wallet for defense and intelligence.
Update 2-7-21: Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote " Many are understandably angry after being left behind in vast enclaves of unemployment and despair." His piece ignores the role the Blue Team had in selling the average citizen down the road the last two and a half decades.
