Creating Money and Blowing Big Bubbles
OMG! I’m hopeful!
Are you feeling a bit unsteady, like me? I’m on the edge of getting dizzy, I’m breathing so deeply. Last time I wrote you, white supremacists had just bashed into Congress. So why my elation? We have a compassionate President in the White House who knows what he’s doing. A principled Attorney General now heads our Justice Department.
Vaccinations are ahead of an already ambitious schedule, and there’s promise of a beautiful, unmasked summer of hugs and laughter together, if only we finish this pandemic marathon. Best of all there are public dollars headed toward Main Street where you and I live and shop, instead of where it usually goes, to Wall Street.
Republicans pretend to be worried about Biden’s Covid Relief bill. $1.9 trillion for the people ? Too much! They’ve forgotten the Federal Reserve’s gushing spigot of money after Wall Street’s crash in 2008 to the tune of $29 trillion and just this past year another $9 trillion in a quiet bailout of the repo market. Did you and your community get any of those bucks?
An Economy of Our Own has put together another terrific team of women economic thinkers, who know about money: what it is, what it’s good for, and what’s so very wrong .
Ellen Brown and I, who both serve on AEOO’s advisory board, will be talking with Green Money writer and Investment Relations Director at Self-Help Credit Union, Ebony Perkins; Mary Sanderson with the Green Party and the Alliance for Just Money, and Prof. Adrienne Massanari, whose writing and research sheds light on the internet culture of the GameStop scandal.
If you’re lucky, you may be invested for your retirement in Wall Street mutual funds, or maybe you have the Robinhood app on your phone. But keep in mind what the Senate Banking hearing on March 10 revealed about the Robinhood/Gamestop nuttiness that has been in the news. The bottom half of Americans below the median income line only own one percent of Wall Street’s wealth. All black households, whatever their income, own only one percent.
Our wealthiest one percent of Americans own 34 percent of stocks and the wealthiest 10 percent own 84 percent , and Wall Street is busy gambling, awash with money from their tax cut. Though a few small “retail investors” made money with GameStop, it’s clearer than ever that the big boys own the casino, and the house always wins. While the pandemic was bashing Main Street, and ten million workers lost their jobs, billionaire wealth grew by $1.3 trillion . Something’s wrong with this money picture.
As ever, Zoom of Our Own webinars are free . Still, we so appreciate those of you who have volunteered donations . Our digital-savvy staff makes it possible to keep on bringing you good news and solutions, and they need to eat too. I hope to see you on March 29th. Keep on with those healthy, deep breaths, and stay safe. — Rickey
