What the public is not sufficiently alert to is that Big Business has been profitably taking over control, if not outright ownership, of these public assets.
In the new book, Banking on the People, by Ellen Brown, readers can get an idea of the way large banks, insurers, and the giant shadow banking system -- money market funds, hedge funds, mortgage brokers, and other unregulated financial intermediaries -- speculate and shift deep risk and their failures onto Uncle Sam. These corporate predators gouge customers, and, remarkably, show a deep aversion for productive investment as if people matter.
Moreover, they just keep developing new, ever riskier, multi-tiered instruments (e.g., derivatives) to make money from money through evermore complex, abstract, secret, reckless, entangled, globally destabilizing, networks. Gambling with other people's money is a relentless Wall Street tradition.
The crashes that inevitably emerge end up impoverishing ordinary people who pay the price with their livelihoods.
Will the Democrats and other engaged people take Trump on if he tries to make "socialism" the big scare in 2020? Control of our political economy is not a conservative/liberal or red state/blue state issue. When confronted with the specifics of the corporate state or corporate socialism, people from all political persuasions will recognize the potential perils to our democracy. No one wants to lose essential freedoms or to continue to pay the price of this runaway crony capitalism.
The gigantic corporations have been built with the thralldom of deep debt -- corporate debt to fund stock buybacks (while reporting record profits), consumer debt, student loan debt, and, of course, government debt caused by drastic corporate and super-rich tax cuts. Many trillions of dollars have been stolen from future generations.
No wonder a small group of billionaires, including George Soros, Eli Broad, and Nick Hanauer, have just publicly urged a modest tax on the super wealthy. As Hanauer, a history buff and advocate of higher minimum wages, says "the pitchforks are coming."
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