On July 16, 2013, Goldman Sachs, the fifth largest US bank by assets announced its second quarter profits doubled the previous year to $1.93 billion. J. P. Morgan, the largest bank made $6.1 billion in the second quarter up 32% over the year before and expects to make $25 billion in profits in 2013. Wells Fargo, the fourth largest bank, reaped $5.27 billion, up 20%. Citigroup’s profits topped $4.18 billion, up 42% over the previous year.
The financial crash of 2008-2009 and the bailouts that followed reinforced the dominance of Wall Street over the US economy. The result is that the parasitic financial sector is extracting enormous rents and profits from the economy and depriving the productive industries of capital and earnings. The recovery and boom of corporate profits since the crisis turns out to be concentrated in the same financial sector which provoked the crash a few years back.
The ascendancy of the plutocracy has been accompanied by cuts in public spending on health, education and social services. (Though painful, these cuts would be much larger and catastrophic had the regressive GOP House, steered off of the rails by the Tea Party, not been reigned in some. You may think it is coincidental that the very same plutocrats who benefit from the ascendancy of the financial sector at the expense of the common good are among those responsible for starting and funding the Astro Turf, manufactured, ill-informed rage-fest that is the Tea Party. You would be wrong).
The bi-polar world of rich bankers in the North racking up record profits and workers everywhere receiving a shrinking share of national income spells out the class basis of “recovery” and “depression,” prosperity for the few and immiseration for the many. This is typified by Detroit, once the cradle of both the auto industry and the organized industrial workers’ leap into the middle-class. The big three auto companies have relocated overseas and to non-union states while the billionaire bankers “restructure” the economy, break unions, lower wages, renege on pensions and rule by administrative decree.
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