Reading the Economic Tea Leaves

Imagine a car careening around dark mountain roads during a rainstorm. The driver has no speedometer, but a set of brakes and plenty of power available at the accelerator. The passengers have both a need to get to their destination and an abiding concern for their own safety. They want to arrive promptly, but safely.

This story is a simple metaphor for the situation facing the US economy today. The dangerous roads represent the precarious state of the US economy still in disrepair in the aftermath of the 2007-9 systemic meltdown and suffering the devastation wreaked by the extra-systemic pandemic a decade or so later. The conjunction of these two unexpected disasters make the road ahead uncertain.

The lack of a speedometer represents the modern absence of any objective, material, universally accepted measure of value. In the past, the convention of measuring value by some rare metal like gold or silver would anchor the circulation of money and credit in something beyond the judgment or interests of central bankers or treasury officials who can set the “speed” of currency by fiat. But not today.

In the US, officials-- our economic “drivers” --have been pressing hard on the accelerator: buying up US debt and mortgage debt so that their growth will not devalue existing assets. In fact, their actions have more than met the challenge of devaluation-- asset deflation-- left by the 2007-9 crisis; they are now pumping up financial, home, and other asset values to new, seemingly limitless heights.

The “drivers” have suppressed interest rates which makes the cost of borrowing virtually zero, allowing corporations to access easy money for mergers, acquisitions, and stock buy-backs, further swelling asset values without touching corporate earnings.

Finding that pressing the accelerator on dangerous roads has not resulted in a crash, the emboldened bankers and policymakers have been pushing even harder, producing inflated values of assets and profits, while debt remains fixed and with little associated costs. Ruling elites and corporate executives fully support and reward these policies.

Thus was created a policymaker’s utopia: a limitless stimulus to the capitalist economy with no associated danger. Ruling class policy makers drink the same magic elixir that many on the left have urged: Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), the notion that fiat currency (currency free of any basis in a common material standard) allows currency expansion without any necessarily negative consequences. But they have hitched it to the interests of wealth and power. While US economic czars will not admit it, they have quietly tossed out their faith in the infamous Phillips curve, the close relationship of government spending and inflation, budget balancing and fiscal restraint.

Once, when Keynesian demand-side economics was popular, many policy makers also took to hiding this once-universal consensus for political reasons. Just as many read Keynes as justifying welfare spending and public-sector investment, ruling-class apologists insisted that “pumping up” the economy (bourgeois economics floats on metaphors) would result in massive inflation and crisis, while contradictorily endorsing obscene military spending and massive corporate subsidies and bailouts to do their “pump priming”!

Similarly, today’s elite policymakers mask their commitment to MMT remedies behind bluster about budget deficits and pay-as-you-go: they urge austerity, while government and quasi-government institutions spend money like drunken sailors, scarfing up assets and locking them up on their balance sheets in order to evade a deflationary crisis and to promote the stock market’s wild ride.

The limitless utopia imagined by US policymakers resulted in the Federal Reserve accumulating $8.76 trillion in assets by December 29, 2021, nearly $6 trillion of which they acquired since 2013. Had the assets (Treasury securities and mortgage securities) remained in the marketplace, the value of ALL securities would have dropped dramatically and the yield necessary to entice buyers would have risen sharply, discouraging future borrowing and retarding economic growth.

Instead, the Federal Reserve engaged in a massive inflation of financial assets to fend off the deflationary pressures inherited from the 2007-9 catastrophe, presenting investors and bankers with the gift that kept on giving: perpetual asset inflation and an assurance that the Fed would always have their back.

But eventually, the driver of a speeding car or those steering the US economy run into a sharp curve in the road and realize that they must slow down.

For the US economy, that curve in the road is consumer inflation. It is a misconception to see inflation as only arising in 2021. The first signs of fast-rising consumer inflation were indeed in 2021, but artificially induced asset inflation had preceded this for nearly a decade. Indeed, it was this asset inflation in conjunction with the shock of a collapse in supply brought on by pandemic lockdown and an even more dramatic rebound in demand that spurred the consumer inflation that now plagues the US economy.

How the masters of the economic universe thought that they could perpetually spur financial asset inflation without inducing inflation in more mundane, real-world markets-- autos, bacon, and eggs-- is truly astounding and hubristic. Most of us have the sense to slow down for the curves in the road.

******

Inflation will be with us for a while. Despite their initial Pollyanna assurances of a temporary inflationary blip, most of our economic gurus have come around to acknowledge that inflation has considerable staying power. The December year-to-year consumer price index (CPI) accelerated to 7% from November’s 6.8%, with December’s CPI constituting the biggest increase since June 1982.

Core producer-prices leaped a stunning 8.3%, the fastest on record, according to The Wall Street Journal, an ugly foretell of future consumer prices.

As I noted in late November, inflation is, ironically, itself like a virus, intensifying and spreading far and wide. Enterprises and institutions scramble to catch up to price increases with further price increases. Monopoly capitalism seizes on this opportunity to increase profit margins well beyond any catching-up level and driving inflation ever further. Small businesses and labor unions lag behind inflation, while the monopolies push it forward. It is the mega-firms, the giant monopolies, and not Labor or small business, that push the inflation spiral to greater and greater heights.

As they have in past inflationary periods, officialdom-- awakened to the danger-- are now set to “put the brakes” on the economy. Through raising interest rates and discontinuing buying securities, even selling off some locked in the Federal Reserve, they hope to slow down the economy. Of course, this “braking” will also slow down the tepid recovery from the earlier lockdown in response to the Covid pandemic.

Though clearly prescribed by the accelerating inflation, the slowdown could not come at a worse time. Nearly all of the retail and manufacturing figures for December 2021 were already trending down long before any Federal Reserve or Treasury braking was to occur. Total retail and food service sales dropped 1.9% from November, led by an 8.7% drop in online stores and 7% drop in department stores. Industrial production fell, with manufacturing down .3% from the previous month.

Fourth quarter 2021 reports also showed a significant drop in profits for two of the largest US banks, a departure from the unprecedented profit growth of the financial sector during the pandemic, an omen of pressure on profitability that will undoubtedly affect prices and interest rates.

******

What will inflation, higher interest rates, and slowing growth (In January, The World Bank revised its global growth estimate downward by roughly 25%) mean for 2022?

For some time, obscenely growing profits and nearly free money have generated an intense search for yield, as they did in the lead-up to the recession of 2000 and the 2007-9 crash. The growth of “blank check” companies, special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) and the surging of “unicorns” (privately-owned start-ups valued at over a billion dollars) places a lot of capital in a risky environment of slowing economic growth, rising costs, and higher financial costs. Even before the slowing economy and high inflation, start-ups were struggling. When investors, swollen with funds, seek out these dark, less regulated areas of economic activity in search of higher yields, trouble is often on the horizon. At the end of 2021, two thirds of initial public offerings (IPOs) traded below their opening price, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Rising interest rates may also endanger the mortgage/home-buying bubble, a phenomenon that has seen home prices soar at near-record paces, thanks to low-interest loans. Those pundits who derided the Chinese Communist Party’s pre-emptive strike on its own wildly anarchic residential construction boom may live to eat their words as the US home-buying spree unwinds.

With low union density, 2022 will likely see a loss in relative income of workers to inflation. A slowing economy and a squeeze on corporate profits will bring an increase in labor exploitation, more unemployment and more intense working conditions.

At best, we face a revisiting of the stagflation of the 1970s. At worst, a deflationary overshoot-- a deep recession like the early years of the Reagan administration.

How will we respond?

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com.

Bad Ideas

History is a corrective of ideas, serving as a reality check on intellectual inflation. Sometimes it takes years, decades, even centuries for big, even not so big ideas to be properly deflated.

I remember fondly many heated arguments with the late Fred Gaboury, a former union logger from the Northwest, who became an organizer for Trade Unionists for Action and Democracy, editor of Labor Today, and World Federation Trade Union representative to the United Nations. Fred was a serious thinker in ways that many of his contemporaries missed.

When the Eurozone-- the European monetary union-- was about to be established, I argued that between nationalism and uneven European development, a common currency was not sustainable. Posthumously, I conceded to Fred. But, today, there is plenty more reason to doubt the Eurozone’s future sustainability. History has yet to speak definitively.

As a retired worker, Fred followed trends in production and distribution closely. Me, not so much. When business writers began to herald modularization and just-in-time inventory production, Fred saw it as the next big thing, a profit-driven structural adjustment set to change the course of global capitalism.

With my usual knee-jerk skepticism, I argued that it was just a passing gimmick, something for the TV pundits to talk about. In any case, I argued, it would prove to be unworkable and ultimately disruptive to the production process.

Decades later, it seems that I was both wrong and, possibly, right. 

Wrong, because just-in-time distribution became a dominant mode with global supply chains. Virtually all production and distribution organized by monopoly capitalist enterprises moves product through their processes with none of the traditional back-up supply. There are no full-to-capacity warehouses filled with widgets for “just-in-case” scenarios or unanticipated short falls. That thinking has been rendered obsolete.

For the most part, the system works well, saving monopoly capitalism billions in costs. It works… until it doesn't!

History is speaking.

The pandemic brought the “efficient” system to its knees, demonstrating just how fragile this big idea actually is. The disruptive factor of massive layoffs, consumption declines, volatile production, and unanticipated imbalances today make lean production and instantaneous distribution look like genuinely bad ideas.  

Just-in-time has been replaced with never-in-time, as bottlenecks, late arrivals, and displacements choke off consumption. 

Shortages abound. Capitalist markets respond to shortages with higher prices. But it is not only material commodities, but also labor “commodities” that are in short supply and commanding higher “prices.” Labor costs rose by 8.3% in the 3rd quarter of 2021 (reflecting a 2.9% increase in hourly compensation and a 5% decrease in labor productivity, due largely to longer hours from the existing workforce). 

Workers sent home over the pandemic have been reluctant to return to work, whether it is from fear of infection, withdrawal from the rat race, or a sophisticated understanding of the gains possible from the withholding of labor. The result is a competition for labor, with capital offering bonuses, benefits, and higher wages to entice a shrunken labor market.

Labor compensation is now breaking through imagined barriers that restricted hourly wages to near flat growth for nearly half a century in the US and sapped the political will to advance the minimum wage.

One can only hope that the complacent, risk-averse labor leadership will learn a valuable lesson about the advantages of workers withholding their labor, a grand idea that deserves to be revisited.

While it is true that union workers are also on strike for better compensation (though with a frequency and volume well below that of a few years ago), it is clear that labor’s top leadership is cheering union militancy from the sidelines. 

Despite the assurances of those who believe that inflation is a thing of the past, manageably through Central Bank manipulation, rising prices have returned, and returned with a vengeance. 

After a long period of rescuing deflated financial values with central bank purchases of overvalued assets, after a lengthy regimen of ultralow interest rates designed to provide nearly free money to reviving risky or marginal investments, funding mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings, and open-ended SPACs, and generally overcoming post-crisis inertia, the central banks have seemingly overshot their targets.

They have overloaded a deflated and deflationary economy. October’s inflation rate of 6.2% reached a thirty-one-year high, topping 5% for the fifth straight month.

Put simply, the effort by central banks to energize a sluggish economy has created inflation, amplified by supply shortages and a labor force growing at a snail’s pace.

Those living below the highest quintile-- the home of the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie-- are seeing any material gains from worker’s advantages in the labor market erased by higher prices. And, of course, those on fixed incomes-- the poor and elderly-- are hurt the most.

More bad ideas coming home to roost.  

It’s safe to say that the Democratic administration, through its own courtship of monopoly capitalism, finds itself caught between the sharp blades of a scissors. On one hand, the party has pledged to provide a constantly shrinking, minimalist, but sorely needed relief package to a major section of its base. 

On the other hand, promiscuous spending on managing the empire-- military and security services, foreign meddling, corporate giveaways, reflating or isolating capitalist flotsam and jetsam, and the tax coddling of the rich-- result in the risk of any future essential spending on human needs becoming inflationary. Crowding out relief for the masses while partnering with monopoly capital is the signature of state-monopoly capitalism.

The return of inflation has quieted the idealist-left’s infatuation with Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), the notion that spending on peoples’ needs could come at no cost to the bourgeoisie, its minions, and the bloated capitalist state.

Adherents saw the massive spending on resuscitating crisis-ridden capitalism with no apparent serious effect on prices and concluded that the same kind of spending could support social welfare programs with no inflationary consequences. 

They overlooked the context. Massive Federal Reserve spending took place to address a profoundly deflationary systemic crisis. 

From the MMT perspective, it is not necessary to curb insane military spending or tax the rich. Waving the magic wand of MMT will permit solving all of capitalism’s irrationalities and injustices, while meeting the people’s needs through deficit spending. Candide’s best of all possible worlds is in the MMT theorist’s grasp.

The harsh reality of inflation upends this utopian dream. Another bad idea dashed. 

If it seems like the US left is addicted to bad ideas, it’s because most of the think-tankers, academic gurus, and labor polemicists that influence the broad left deny that gains for the majority come from a zero-sum game-- the wealthy and powerful must lose for the rest of us to win. They pretend that there are roads to social justice that pass through regions of social harmony and equitable sacrifice, a long-held principle that keeps people in the Democratic Party orbit. They look for shortcuts that will avoid a direct confrontation-- class struggle-- while still challenging capitalism’s privilege to dictate human affairs. When, in fact, we must challenge its very existence.

This misguided approach guarantees that bad ideas steeped in idealism will dominate-- ideas that promise success, without pain or confrontation.

MMT will not magically solve the problem of inequality; a chain of coops will not defeat monopoly capital; and two-party theatrics will not establish real democracy.

We need bigger and better ideas for those tasks.

With a near future of a crippling price rise motivated by exploding profits, a do-little political stratum obsessed with fund-raising and securing the approval of the rich and powerful, and a murderous, gangster foreign policy motivated by service to global capitalism, we can’t afford the luxury of toying with bad ideas.  

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Searching for Meaning in a Pandemic

Driven indoors by a deadly virus, most people, especially in the wealthier, advanced capitalist countries, are facing uncertainties unknown in their entire lives. The virus’s ruthless defiance of borders and all but the most privileged social cleavages has cast a shadow over expectations and prospects, while bringing the global economy to a near-standstill.

What can We Learn?

For those who have money and power, their interests come before the health and welfare of the rest of us. Most bourgeois politicians, top corporate executives, bankers, and billionaire investors are willing to risk the lives of the vulnerable to secure their own status and restart the capital accumulation process. Every day, we see anxious politicians lobbied by the agents of monopoly capital. They are ready to ignore the advice of academics and professionals who are experts in disease control and public health in order to send safely isolated workers back into danger. 

In the US, we have private health insurance and market-based health services rather than universal, equitable health care. The fact that the victims of the novel coronavirus could not be promptly diagnosed, triaged, and given care, the fact that response was so uneven, and the fact that health care providers had to compete for the scarce, but essential means to combat the virus demonstrates the tragic inadequacy of an industrial model relying on the market, profit, and the fetish of “efficiency.” Tens of thousands of lost lives expose this failure.

Where politicians in other countries have callously shrunk their national health services for political expediency, they, too, must answer for the unnecessary deaths of thousands.

We should learn that health industry administrators, faced with medical supply shortages and accelerating demand, are prepared to make life-and-death decisions based on protocols devised by so-called “bio-ethicists.” Rather than rallying behind victims’ families and health care workers, rather than seeking emergency powers to ramp up production or purchases, rather than mobilizing volunteers or lobbying for a more rational distribution of national resources, hospital administrations opt to choose which victims deserve to live.
Misnamed “bio-ethicists” compete to find the most “humane” way to select those for death. Some will remember the righteous indignation over “death panels” during the Obama-era healthcare debates. With real life-or-death decisions being taken, the anti-reform zealots are remarkably silent. 

The all-too-popular slogan “We are all in this together” has proven to be nonsense. Class and race remain the decisive factors in determining who wins and who loses. It’s not that Black, Latino, and poor people are selected as victims by the primitive infectious agent, but that social neglect, inequality, and discrimination renders them more vulnerable to the virus. The behavioral choices, access to information and prophylaxis, health care, conditions of shelter, transportation options, and general resources available to the disadvantaged determine that they will more likely be victims, suffer, and die. The media feign shock at numbers that reveal the vast overrepresentation of African American cases and deaths, as though racism, urban segregation, and poverty were already conquered.

Similarly, the media are astounded by the miles of backed-up cars clogging highways waiting for relief from food banks, as though food banks came into existence when the virus struck. Before the virus, the needy were expected to stand in line in shame for their modest handouts.

The virus has shown the privilege of celebrities, the ultra-rich, and the political stratum, who have secured tests and expedited, preferred attention to the dangers threatened by the virus. Forbes magazine documents how a “loophole” in the recovery act could allow up to 43,000 of the richest people in the US to enjoy a gift of up to $1.7 million while everyone else tries to pay their bills and live on a $1,200 stipend from the US Treasury.

The bottom feeders-- the scam artists, the predators on the elderly, the price gougers, the hoarders-- have come out in force to take advantage of fear. Despite unleashing these vermin in an era of deregulation and laissez faire, the government that spies on everyone shows no desire to stop the predation of a populace experiencing unprecedented insecurity.

The lessons learned in the last economic disaster go unheeded. Once again, the banks and monopoly capitalist firms are assured that their vulnerabilities and missteps will be publicly covered, even rewarded. The once detested excuse of “Too big to fail” has roared back with a vengeance. Despite the collapse of real economic activity, the equity markets have begun to recover and, shamefully, bounce back when new, unparalleled unemployment numbers are announced. Even The Wall Street Journal is compelled to notice “..a confounding reality: soaring share prices and a floundering economy” (4-17-2020). Investors know that relief for capitalism will always be in the wings, even if there is no bailout for the rest of us.

We should learn to scoff at talk of “recovery.” Since 2000, “recovery” has only meant that global financial institutions will manipulate interest rates, juggle questionable, inflated assets, and create new financial games of chance in order to put lipstick on an ugly capitalist pig. That corpulent pig-- stuffed with near-worthless financial junk-- has threatened to deflate for over twenty years. Only persistent manipulation by central banks has re-inflated the global monster. The “product” that economists and statisticians purport to measure is really bloated equity markets, debt-driven economic activity, and unhinged property values; all connection to reality-grounded value is long broken.

While this fictional “recovery” has been heralded, the circumstances of those who work for a living has stagnated or sunk (median household income in the US has risen by less than 4% since 2000), buoyed only by taking on more and more debt. The “desperation”  indicators-- like the inability of 40% of the people to sustain even a $400 unexpected bill-- are well documented. The coronavirus crisis has only brought into the spotlight the desperation that has followed in the wake of low wages, gig jobs, grinding healthcare costs, unaffordable housing, student-loan debt, and declining public services. For the vast majority, talk of a recovery is an insult.

Should we not ask why it is that the People's Republic of China has avoided the worst consequences of the virus, especially since they were the first to face its devastation? Could we learn how it is that the International Monetary Fund expects that the PRC economy is expected to grow this year, while the US is projected to decline by 5.9% and the EU by 7.5%? Could it be that its state-owned enterprises were able to respond quickly and decisively? Should we see the fact that the PRC banking sector is largely publicly owned and able to put the prompt and rational distribution of financial assets above profit-taking? Does it matter that the political leadership of the CPC-- the Chinese Communist Party-- is more responsible to the public than the soulless bourgeois parties of the West? Is it a coincidence that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam has accounted for no coronavirus deaths? These are ideas that never enter the conversation in the West.

What can We Expect?

As with the last major crisis over a decade ago, this crisis spawns numerous analyses and prognostications. Uncertainty breeds speculation and “experts” feel compelled to venture opinions. 

The truth is that even the experts remain baffled by the course of the coronavirus. Its behavior and the effectiveness of chaotic Western public policy are uncertainties at this stage, rendering the media blame-game meaningless, if not harmful. The exposure of the systemic weaknesses of capitalism in arresting a pandemic and serving the people is far more significant and immediate than the Trump-Biden horse race.

The state of the US economy is another matter. The nearly universal declining numbers do not lie. Nor does the immediate expectation of further decline. We also know that, in many ways, the economic collapse is unprecedented in the lifetime of almost everyone living today. 

In a short span, JPMorgan Chase forecast an annualized GDP drop of 25% and a rise in unemployment to 10%, only to revise their estimates to a 40% decline in GDP accompanied by 20% unemployment. Goldman Sachs projects that the downturn “will likely be four times worse than the financial crisis [of 2007-2009] and the U.S. will see its highest unemployment rate since World War II…” But the forecasts turn more pessimistic almost before the ink dries.

Ahead is a massive restructuring of global capitalism. Where it goes depends, of course, on subjective, political factors. But history teaches that the trajectory of capitalism, when experiencing a severe economic collapse, will generate a process of what Joseph Schumpeter, an apologist for capitalism, euphemistically called “a gale of creative destruction.” What that process produces, of course, could be deflected or shaped somewhat by political forces of right or left, but the prevailing tendency will be for stronger countries to shift their distress to weaker countries. The tendency will be for big capitals to smash or absorb smaller capitals, for concentration. The tendency will be to use unemployment and its accompanying pain to cheapen the cost of labor, to increase the rate of exploitation. The tendency will be to shift the balance of economic and political power further toward elites. In short, capital will attempt to restore its health by shifting its problems to the weak, destroying many and much in the process. 

Whether this trajectory is repeated as it was after the 2007-2009 crisis depends upon subjective factors-- today’s politics. 

Sterile debates, like the argument between the debt scolds (advocates of minimal government spending, austerity) and the new-age proponents of Modern Monetary Theory (the uncoupling of money expansion from a long-thought rigid relation to negative economic consequences like inflation), are not helpful today, though they are crowding other political options off the stage. 

The last 20 years of persistent, deeply rooted global deflationary pressure have left the zealots for balanced budgets and “moderate” debt with no argument. Central banks have injected trillions into economies with barely a hint of inflation resulting. Relatively extreme monetary inflation has barely contained the underlying deflation plaguing world economies. Thus, none of the near-hysterical inflation warnings proved justified.

The Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) proponents took this relatively limited experience of mounting debt and tepid inflation to demonstrate that MMT was more than a policy of limited application to a specific time and place, but a universal theory of money. In fact, it is a conditional theory, conditional upon very specific, historically determined conditions being met. 

In practice, MMT disconnects monetary policy from any objective standard of value (like gold, for example) and attaches it to the ultimate subjective standard, a fiat national currency. In as much as subjective confidence persists, MMT can persist. But a subjective standard-- because it is decoupled from objective value-- masks the underlying dynamics of the capitalist system; it distorts, rather than settles the chronic problems that plague the accumulation process. The massive bailouts of the last decade and of today appear to use central bank monetary activity to restore equity markets and financial institutions, but they merely isolate the rot and postpone a day of reckoning. The underlying problem remains unresolved, only to surface again, triggering another deflationary spiral, an unloading of “assets” without real value.

It would appear that bourgeois politics has found no other policy approach than austerity or MMT. Austerity, the prescription of the right and much of the center, has failed again and again, bringing countries like Greece to the brink of collapse.

And MMT-- applying a sling to a broken arm-- is the last gasp of the social democratic left, a panacea that promises to bring the best of all possible worlds: giving more to the needy without taking from the greedy. MMT sells an easy tactic that kicks the can of capitalist failure further down the road.

What is needed today is a radical solution to radical, unrivalled problems. 

Standing in the way of an effective approach is a wimpy, Nostalgia Left. 

For most of the trade union leadership, the dream is a return to the 1950s when the pesky Reds were subdued, the bosses allowed wages and benefits to track productivity in return for labor's cooperation with imperialism, and Blacks and women were not disrupting labor peace. 

The current centerpiece of the US Democratic Party-- financially secure, suburban social liberals-- long for a time before Trump when politics were courteous and the vast, growing economic inequalities were an unsightly, unfortunate, but tolerable blemish on the harmony of US civil society. 

Nearly all that remains of the old Democratic coalition, today ignored by the Democratic Party leadership, dreams of the era before Reagan, when Democrats actually gave a tepid voice to economic justice and worshipped at the altar of equal opportunity. Devoted to a fading memory of the New Deal, they place their hopes in a Democratic Party soul transplant. It’s not capitalism, but its ugly stepchild, neoliberalism, that they abhor. 

Too many of the aging radicals of the Old New Left were terrorized by McCarthyism, leading them to forage for something distant from Communism, to the left or right of real, existing Communism. Their search dashed, they have settled for a stale, visionless pragmatism. Their old 1960s antagonists would surely be amused at the irony. 

Thankfully, there are new generations of the left searching for big answers to the big problems of the moment. The last twenty years have shaped a less-than-promising future for millions of young people. And the spring of 2020 only promises far, far worse. To meet these challenges, one can hope that their journey takes more and more of them to revolutionary socialism, to the socialism of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, to the socialism that animated the working class movements for most of the last century and a half.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com