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Writing at The American Conservative, Telly Davidson, author of Culture War: How the 90’s Made Us Who We Are Today (Like it Or Not), explains the economic destruction wrought from 2008 on through the Obama administration, which was filled with braindead elites held over from the George W. Bush administration or resurrected from the Clinton administration. The end result ended up being a winner-take-all charade handing wealth to the 1%. Thankfully the Trump administration has reversed many of the misguided policies of the Obama era and the economy is cranking. Davidson writes:
In addition to the usual (and deserved) remembrances of the September 11 attacks, this week also marks the grim anniversary of a very different but equally significant collapse. Ten years ago on September 15, the financial meltdown began that would usher in the recession of 2008.
It was the single worst financial crisis in the adult lifetime of almost everyone who was alive at the time. Yet you’d never know it from the way our ruling class has behaved ever since.
September 2008 spelled the beginning of the end of the “giants of industry” that had defined the mid-to-late 20th century American economy. General Motors, Merrill Lynch, Chrysler, Lehman Brothers, Maytag, Polaroid, Kodak, Continental Bakeries, K-Mart/Sears, Mervyns, Circuit City, Radio Shack, Borders, Blockbuster—all fell like 10-pins in a bowling alley. (Not to mention desiccated coal mines and steel factories and local newsrooms.) The few that are still alive today are mere shadows of their former selves.
The companies that survived and thrived during the Great Recession, and are currently powering today’s recovery—Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and Tesla—were all launched over the last two decades or so by the most fortunate factions of Millennials and Xers. These are people who have no adult memory of the Great Prosperity that their postwar parents and grandparents practically took for granted.
When Trump gave his inaugural address, Respectable Journalists™ were all a-Twitter about its atrocious bad taste and coded racial appeals. Yet for all its faults, the speech represented for many people the very first time that an A-list authority figure had truly recognized the shuttered factories, foreclosed homes, failing schools, and broken dreams that had been left in the wake of 2008.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama drank gallons of Kool-Aid from people like Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, and all the other Bill Clinton and George W. leftovers who had been asleep at the wheel for 15 years, and stolidly refused to lay a finger on executives’ heads.
During Obama’s first term, the top 1 percent took more than all of the gains from the economy after the crisis.
Meanwhile, at least 9.3 million families lost their homes to foreclosure due to the mortgage meltdown. For many Americans, the financial and psychological damage will be lifelong.
Read more here.
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