Thin Ice

        Recent reports that the Republican priority for repealing Obama Care, overhauling the tax code, and securing the U.S.-Mexico border will delay the trillions promised by President Trump for infrastructure projects until 2018 signals that the people in small cities and towns in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where Trump signs are still pegged into front yards, face the hard reality—along with the rest of us—that modern governments serve as executors for Wall Street’s priorities. Remember, the Obama Attorney General, Eric Holder, never prosecuted a single bank CEO for the catastrophic mortgage finance collapse of 2008 that drove millions of people out of their homes.

        This agenda of Trump’s Wall Street billionaire cabinet is unfolding rapidly. The Republican replacement for the Affordable Health Care Act announced yesterday turns health policy into a money-making sorcerer for the Wall Street-based private insurance industries, the pharmaceuticals and the health technology companies. Dodd-Frank and SEC regulatory functions are slated for downgrading along with weaker EPA enforcement.

        The furious U. S. airstrikes underway this week against Yemen and Syrian dissident groups (whatever their merits may be, or not) are self-fulfilling strategies requiring huge increases in the military budget to replace the expended munitions; and of course North Korea and China loom.

        Meanwhile Trump-inspired ICE (Immigration and Custom Enforcement) sweeps are terrorizing  the eight million unauthorized immigrants in the U. S. labor force-- 2 million of them doing migrant farm work. (Pew Research Center, November  2016). The political lie feeding anti-immigration sentiments today belies the reality that much of the U. S. agricultural economy would collapse tomorrow without a steady supply of these migrant farm hands, who often have no legal status.

        This scene of moral desolation is reminiscent of the remark, attributed to William Faulkner, that the essence of racism in the South was the failure of the white man to call his darkly-born child, “my son, my son.”

      All of this is very serious penultimate business as Trump forces fight back against the image of Obama’s purity on wire taps and the secret worlds of government intelligence that leak.  Claiming “everyone does it” opens the door further to the demons of a daily kleptocracy. Here’s one example: The Yarborough case in Arizona. He’s President of the Arizona Senate:

        The Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization (Acsto) is one of the state’s largest voucher-granting groups. From 2010 to 2014 (the latest year recorded in federal tax filings), the group received $72.9 million in donations, all of which were ultimately financed by the state.

        Arizona law allows the group to keep 10 percent of those donations to pay for overhead. In 2014, the group used that money to pay its executive director $125,000. His name? Steve Yarbrough. Forms filed by the organization with the I.R.S. declare that he worked an average of 40 hours per week on the job — in addition, presumably, to the hours he worked as president of the State Senate.

       Yet the group doesn’t do all the work involved with accepting donations and handing out vouchers. It outsources data entry, computer hardware, customer service, information processing, award notifications and related personnel expenses to a private for-profit company called HY Processing. The group paid HY Processing $636,000 in 2014, and millions of dollars in total over the last decade.

        The owner of HY Processing? Steve Yarbrough, along with his wife, Linda, and another couple. (The “Y” in “HY” stands for “Yarbrough.”) According to The Arizona Republic, Acsto also pays $52,000 per year in rent. Its landlord? Steve Yarbrough. In June 2012, Mr. Yarbrough bought a car for $16,000. In July 2012, Acsto reimbursed him the full amount.    [NY Times March 2, 2017]

        But this is chump change compared to Wall Street where hedge funds engage in trading deal in trillions of dollars. Not just a few trillion, but many, many trillions of dollars.

       Don’t worry. We’re still needed.  Wall Street still needs the people’s money to buy retail, to borrow in the rental and mortgage markets. The reason the new White House squad of Bannon, etc. are filled with joy is that they are embarked on dismantling and  taking hold of an economy filled with the people’s money to provide collateral for their “puts” and hedges.

      Take this lesson to your Sabbath school next week.