Portside

The most important bank in Silicon Valley has failed, triggering economic uncertainty nationwide. To blame: tough-talking tech dudes, a reckless Congress, contradictory monetary policy, and even Barney Frank.

Reader Comments: Bank Failures, GOP DeRegulation; Pentagon Budget; MAGA in Office Bans Books, Not Guns; Workers and Their Unions; AI, False Promise of ChatGPT; Triangle Shirtwaist Anniversary; Ending the Vietnam War; Rosenberg Case 70 Years Later;

Bank lobbyists believe the Fed may now be encouraged to press ahead with tougher rules that it was just beginning to discuss before SVB’s meltdown.

Reader Comments: Tyre Nichols Murder; Ilhan Omar; Rent Control; Climate Disaster; David Crosby; Making Sense of the Ukraine War and confusion on the Left; Medical Debt; Reconstruction; Antisemitism; More Announcements; Cartoons;

While industrial capitalism got rid of the landlord class, capitalism still had economic rent, but instead of being paid to the landlord class, it is now paid to the banks in the form of interest.

Being in debt obliges people to work more and more, no matter how precarious the conditions. Debt, in other words, produces obedience, and it affects women differently to men.

Congress should immediately pass the Wall Street Tax Act,(A Financial Transaction Tax - FTT), which would tax the sort of high-speed trading that has turned the financial sector into a casino at the expense of our communities.

The banks turn a profit processing small businesses loans from the government.

This fight needs to start now and it needs to start with the unions, the progressive elected and working class activists.

History, Taylor writes, is not repeating itself with housing inequality, but cyclically proceeding as an inevitable effect of a racialized system perpetuated by capitalism.