Barry Sternlicht.

Thomson Reuters

• The Fed’s scramble to hike rates and lower liquidity is draining the stock market, Barry Sternlicht warned.
• The billionaire investor pointed to the Fed’s delayed response to inflation, which risks tipping the economy into a recession.
• “So you thought the healthy fish would survive and the sick fish would die. But the Fed is draining the entire pond, so everyone’s going to die.”

The Fed’s scramble to hike rates and kill off inflation is draining the stock market, Barry Sternlicht said on Tuesday, warning that even the “healthy fish” would die as the economy and liquidity start to shrink.

In an interview with Bloomberg, the chairman and CEO of Starwood Capital criticized the Fed for its delayed response to tackling inflation and over-liquid market conditions. Soaring prices have finally prompted the central bank to issue aggressive rate hikes and begin shrinking its balance sheet this year – but the rapid pace of tightening could easily send the economy into a recession, economists have warned.

“Powell is unbelievably late doing this. He sat still while the meme stock craze was going,” Sternlicht said, adding that the belated reaction could kill off investors’ gains across the entire market.

“There were really smart things that people did, and there were smart fish in the pond. And there were stupid things people did and they were idiot investments. … So you thought the healthy fish would survive and the sick fish would die. But the Fed is draining the entire pond, so everyone’s going to die,” he said. 

His warning echoes that of other experts, who have predicted stocks will crater as the Fed scrambles to tighten the economy. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon warned stocks could fall another 20%, and “Dr. Doom” economist Nouriel Roubini said that stocks could plunge as much as 40%.

Sternlicht added that the Fed could be overtightening the economy by basing rate hikes on the Consumer Price Index, which remains well above the 2% inflation target. But that index lags behind the economy by around 18 months, experts have said, meaning the central bank could be basing its rate-hike decisions on outdated information — and it risks screeching the economy into a downturn.

Currently, the Fed expects to keep hiking until it hits a terminal rate of 4.6%. That’s more than a full percentage point above the current fed funds rate, and it could mean the central bank is set to hammer the economy, costing “millions” of jobs around the world, he said.

“I just get so angry when people say the Fed needs credibility to fight inflation. Wait. You’ll get what you want. You’ll get this recession; it’s definitely coming.”

But despite anticipated market volatility, he noted long-term investment opportunities could be coming to the surface, as stocks will eventually be discounted and some will be poised to rebound. 

“I am personally looking for opportunities that I think represent incredibly compelling long-term investments, and I think you’re beginning to see them,” Sternlicht added.

“Despite earning tens of billions of dollars each year, the public knows little about the prison industry and those that profit from it.”

Alexandra Lobo

Vehicles of Extraction

By Paris Marx

Volume 25, no. 2, Bleeding Earth

After years of false starts, the electric vehicle (EV) finally seems to be picking up steam. Last year, the Biden administration announced ambitious targets to increase the adoption of EVs, along with funding for a number of measures aimed at making them more attractive to Americans. By 2030, the president wants half of all new vehicle sales to be electric. To encourage that, the government is providing financial incentives for drivers to buy them, installing new charging stations across the country, helping build the supply chain, and extending support to retool the factories that are manufacturing these supposed cars of the future.¹ It’s a comprehensive plan for a large-scale effort, and industry seems to be on board.

In 1990, the California Air Resources Board mandated automakers to begin selling EVs, but after opposition from car companies, the oil industry, and the George W. Bush administration, it was reversed in 2003. This time, automakers seem to be taking the transition seriously. All the major companies are in the process of rolling out electric models and announcing ambitious targets for more, and some are even setting dates for the phase-out of the internal combustion engine that has powered our vehicles for the past century.

The oil industry won’t be happy to lose such a major source of demand, but the mining industry is eager to capitalize on the shift and use it to greenwash their extractive operations. EVs may not need to be filled with gas, but that doesn’t mean they’re clean, green driving machines. Their batteries are highly resource-intensive, requiring minerals from all over the world, and rising demand for EVs will produce a rush to increase extraction. Vehicle batteries account for much of the growth in mineral demand, and it won’t be extracted without serious consequences.

Following decades of delay, it’s refreshing to see political leaders finally beginning to recognize the climate crisis and the transportation sector’s contribution to it. But as interests converge around EVs, their environmental benefits are being exaggerated: the absence of tailpipe emissions is being used to paint them as a silver bullet for sustainable mobility and to distract from the many problems they don’t solve—and the new ones they’ll create.

Car Economy

In his influential work Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design Since 1880, the late British urban planner Peter Hall wrote that, “at the end of the 1920s, it was still possible to see the car as a benign technology.”² The car had not yet cemented its dominance over North American streets, let alone those of Europe, and as a result its drawbacks were not immediately clear. Sprawling suburbs that enforced car dependency had not yet been built; automobile-produced air pollution caused by the mass adoption of cars was still decades away; cars were associated with touring instead of hours stuck in traffic; and their contribution to the climate crisis was an unimaginable concern. Still, their growing presence on city streets prompted a backlash.

When the automobile emerged, it found itself in competition with trains, streetcars, carriages, bicycles, and people’s own legs as the means for people to get around. Cars allowed drivers to go faster than other road users, but as they intruded into shared streets with rules and norms adapted to lower speeds, the death toll began to mount. In Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, historian Peter Norton documented that by the 1920s the disproportionate numbers of children and young women killed by cars spurred protests, demonstrations, and attempts to limit the speed and capabilities of automobiles. Ultimately, however, such efforts were not successful in halting the car’s takeover of the mobility system.

As automobile sales grew, and especially following the Second World War, a strong lobby formed that favored remaking communities and transportation infrastructure to facilitate—or even enforce—the mass adoption of the automobile. The automotive industry was at the forefront of this effort, but so were its suppliers (most notably the oil industry) and the new businesses that relied on the automobile. Meanwhile, suburban expansion served real estate developers, and the construction industry prospered with all the homes, roads, and highways that needed to be built. As these industries generated employment, particularly unionized manufacturing jobs, labor groups also got on board as the government subsidized the buildout of the automotive city and changed everything from tax policy to the legal code to encourage people to become motorists.

As the fossil fuel industry that powers our vehicles is responsible for environmental catastrophes, it becomes clear that we should rethink our dependence on the personal vehicle and our decision to build our communities in ways that force people to drive.

Manufacturing automobiles created jobs, building infrastructure generated economic activity, and the suburbs provided a means of wealth creation for certain segments of the population. However, there were and remain many drawbacks to mass automobility and the subsequent virtual abandonment of other forms of transportation across much of the United States. A significant decline in road deaths achieved in the early 2000s has been virtually wiped out. They’ve been soaring in recent years, reaching their highest number since 2005 with 42,915 deaths in 2021.³ On top of that, the air pollution generated by motor vehicles is estimated to cause an additional 53,000 premature deaths every year.⁴ Before the COVID-19 pandemic, commute times were actually getting longer as drivers spent more time in traffic and were forced to move further away from work due to soaring home prices.⁵ All that time behind the wheel also has detrimental effects on people’s health.⁶

Beyond the human cost, car ownership also has a high financial cost for the driver. In 2021, the American Automobile Association estimated that someone buying a new vehicle would pay an average of $9,666 every year when all the costs were accounted for. The bill is even higher for owners of trucks and SUVs, and it has soared as fuel prices have gone through the roof in early 2022.⁷ Even more crucial is the fact that transportation accounts for 27 percent of total emissions in the United States, while the fossil fuel industry that powers our vehicles is responsible for environmental catastrophes the world over,⁸ and it becomes clear that we should rethink our dependence on the personal vehicle and our decision to build our communities in ways that force people to drive. But the big question right now is whether focusing narrowly on electrification will enable us to achieve the necessary transformation.

EVs for the Few

When politicians and corporate leaders talk about EVs, it’s common for them to refer to the vehicles as “zero-emissions,” making them seem like the obvious solution to the climate impact of automobiles. But this conflates the lack of tailpipe emissions with an overall absence of emissions. The language is intentionally designed to mislead the public about the bargain we’re signing up for, leaving us in the dark about how little will really be solved by electrifying the vehicle fleet.

I want to be explicit about this point: in the vast majority of cases, the lifecycle emissions of an EV will be less than an internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV), but they may not always be as much lower as we expect. When an EV rolls off the assembly line, its emissions are higher than that of an ICEV because the production of its battery is an emissions-intensive process. After a certain number of miles driven, the lifecycle emissions of the vehicle will fall below that of an equivalent ICEV—the specific number depends on many factors, including the efficiency of the vehicle, the initial emissions profile of the battery, and whether the battery is being charged on a grid powered by fossil fuels or renewables.

However, the EV rollout has faced an important problem: many early EVs, particularly the much-hyped status symbols sold by Tesla, haven’t accumulated enough miles to make up for its higher initial emissions. For the most part, EVs are expensive, so many of the early buyers have been high-income individuals who do not use them as their primary vehicles. Not only were those wealthy drivers the beneficiaries of subsidies aimed at reducing the price of EVs, but since the vehicle’s real benefits come from replacing the miles driven in someone’s primary ICEV, they aren’t delivering the environmental benefits that we would expect.

The International Energy Agency estimates that the demand for minerals used in batteries will soar by 2040, including by up to 1,900 percent for nickel, 2,100 percent for cobalt, and 4,200 percent for lithium.

Norway is often held up as the standard-bearer for the EV transition, but when researchers at the University of Sussex and Aarhus University spoke to experts in the Nordic countries, they encountered significant concerns about the equity of the policy. One of the experts explained, “In the beginning, I thought the negative reactions to Teslas was [sic] related to envy or jealousy. But after thinking more about it, it’s a rational and emotional reaction. Why should we lose a lot of money for rich people getting a cheap, expensive, luxury car?” Another told the researchers that Tesla drivers have a high income, yet a Tesla Model X owner received subsidies equivalent to 30,000 trips on the bus or subway in 2016, showing just how much more the wealthy Tesla owner was valued above transit riders.⁹

Mining Boom

Electrification will be a key part of any transportation policy that aims to significantly reduce emissions, but the decision to place so much emphasis on electric personal vehicles and to distract consumers from their drawbacks—if not outright deny them—is financially and politically motivated. Many of the same interests that promoted the automobile in its early years now see a potential benefit in a relatively swift transition to EVs and the expectation that people replace their existing vehicles on an accelerated timeline.

The auto industry will profit from selling millions of new vehicles, and there’s an expectation that will create new manufacturing employment as companies scale up production. Those industrial jobs are likely to be unionized, a bonus for politicians when they hit the campaign trail. Then there’s the manufacture of the batteries and the extraction of all the minerals that will go into creating them—which will be a boon for the mining industry.

The International Energy Agency estimates that the demand for minerals used in batteries will soar by 2040, including by up to 1,900 percent for nickel, 2,100 percent for cobalt, and 4,200 percent for lithium.¹⁰ That will mean the expansion of existing mines and the opening of new ones, and thus major profits for international mining companies. The push to move supply chains to North America and Europe is already spurring protests to stop extractive projects with human and environmental consequences. But the majority of the mining will continue to occur in the Global South, where the externalities will be out of sight and mind for Western consumers.

For example, EVs recently overtook smartphones as the biggest source of demand for cobalt, representing 34 percent of the global total.¹¹ Most cobalt continues to be extracted from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and even though Elon Musk has talked about experimenting with cobalt-free batteries, Tesla signed a deal with mining giant Glencore in 2020 for cobalt to supply its German and Chinese factories.¹² Cobalt extraction in the DRC has produced enormous harm to the environment, the miners, and the surrounding communities. Tesla was one of several companies sued by the families of children who were killed or injured while mining cobalt in the DRC, including at mines controlled by Glencore.¹³

A truly sustainable world will require us to reckon not just with our emissions but with the broader harm and injustice that has arisen from our capitalist system.

Lithium is another of the minerals necessary to the electric transition, and while there are efforts to increase its extraction in North America and Europe, much of the future supply is likely to come from the salt flats of South America, where existing developments already threaten the water supplies of local communities without sharing the benefits. The governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Mexico are seeking to secure national control over their lithium supplies so that revenues may be used to improve living conditions for their citizens, rather than just padding the bottom lines of multinational mining companies. Unsurprisingly, global capitalist forces, which have long reaped the rewards, are mobilizing to secure their interests.

A Just Mobility Transition

In 2019, Bolivian president Evo Morales fled the country after false allegations of electoral irregularities, which he later called a “lithium coup” by US-backed interests looking to gain control over the country’s reserves of the mineral. Musk added fuel to the fire when he tweeted, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” In truth, it’s highly unlikely that Morales was deposed over lithium, but the event and its broader context does point to the power struggles in a resource-intensive transition to supposedly “clean” technologies.

The wealth of the global North has long depended on the colonial and imperial subjugation of the rest of the world to extract resources and accumulate riches. The auto industry, with its vast supply chains, is no stranger to this history. Yet as we face the need to reassess not just how we move, but the larger social and economic structures through which we move, we have an opportunity to build an environmentally sustainable world that transcends those historical precedents. The future being pushed by the automotive industry, the mining industry, and the political leaders who want to perpetuate the status quo will do no such thing. A mobility transition that merely replaces ICEVs with EVs will maintain imperialist extraction from the South to serve the North, just with some tinkering for a different resource mix.

A truly sustainable world will require us to reckon not just with our emissions but with the broader harm and injustice that has arisen from our capitalist system. This in turn will compel us to challenge automobility, as well as the physical environment we’ve built to support it, at a much more fundamental level. Instead of obliging everyone to buy their own vehicle at great human, financial, and environmental cost so that businesses can enrich their owners and shareholders, the state needs to make serious investments that allow us to escape our forced dependence on the automobile. People tend to forget the massive commitment that forced an earlier generation into cars and out to the suburbs: that energy now needs to be channeled into reversing those mistakes.

If we want to get serious about solving climate change and global inequality, we need collective mobility solutions that center reliable and affordable public transit, while ensuring people can safely and conveniently choose to take their bike instead of owning a car. But we also need to think beyond mobility to the communities we live in, locating services within a reasonable distance of our homes and keeping housing affordable so we can live in dense, vibrant neighborhoods without having to worry about landlords and speculators sending costs through the roof. Realizing such a vision requires more than investment; it forces us to transform the economic structures that profit global capitalists, replacing them with structures that support a good life for all.

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Notes

The post Vehicles of Extraction appeared first on Science for the People Magazine.

Research repeatedly shows that expanding inequality is intimately tied up with the destruction of the planet. We can’t save the world without taking on the rich.

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Earth can’t afford the rich. (Getty Images)

France, 2018. The country is paralyzed by a huge series of protests against moves by President Emmanuel Macron to raise green taxation on fuel while simultaneously abolishing the wealth tax on the superrich. The protestors become known as the gilets jaunes, or “yellow vests.” Such is the fury that the president is forced to reverse the increase in fuel tax. Climate policymaking at its most class-blind, his high-handed move spectacularly backfires.

With Europe crippled by high gas and energy prices this winter, there are some who have been saying this is an opportunity to speed a green transition, a kind of shock treatment to get us all somehow “used” to high energy prices and being forced to consume less.

Given the suffering these dramatic increases in prices are inflicting on poor people across the continent, forcing many to choose between heating and eating, such hair-shirt sentiments seem brutal to me. I suspect they’re rarely made by those who themselves will struggle to pay their heating bills.

They are also, I think, politically crazy. We will only be able to deliver the dramatic transformation in our economies needed to stop climate change if all of society agrees and believes it is the right thing to do. It can’t be forced onto people like a dose of cod liver oil. There’s a huge risk that climate action becomes identified with a patronizing, liberal elite, and is lambasted by right-wing populists everywhere, speeding our planet faster toward disaster.

At the root of this is the failure to properly see climate change as a class issue. Climate change is almost always seen in terms of different nations, the rich world versus the developing one. If personal emissions come into it, they are invariably per capita averages for each nation.

It is true that everyone in rich countries need to reduce their carbon emissions, whether rich or poor. But national averages obscure as much as they inform. Fortunately, new analyses by a handful of actors looking at the carbon emissions of different income groups — in particular, the emissions of the top 10 percent and top 1 percent — is gaining traction.

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Inequality in Emissions: What Does the Data Show?

Put simply, the climate crisis is being caused by the richest class in every country. They’re the ones who are recklessly driving us over the precipice of planetary breakdown.

An Oxfam analysis with the Stockholm Environment Institute found the following:

• The per capita emissions of someone in the top 1 percent is 100 times higher than someone in the bottom 50 percent, and 35 times higher than the target for 2030.
• Since 1990, the richest 5 percent was responsible for over a third of the growth in total emissions. The top 1 percent was responsible for more than the whole of the bottom 50 percent.
• For about 20 percent of the human population — corresponding to the working and lower-middle classes in rich countries, mainly — per capita emissions actually fell from 1990 to 2015.

Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty carried out a similar analysis, which includes the following chart. You can see the dip for those in the global distribution that correspond to the working and lower-middle classes in rich nations. Their emissions remain too high to be in line with climate targets, but it’s notable that they were the only group whose emissions fell.

Source: World Inequality Report

 The richest 10 percent globally are mainly to be found in rich countries, but not exclusively. Yet the inequality in emissions is replicated at a national level in rich countries too. Nationally, the emissions of the richest 10 percent dwarf those of the rest of the income distribution, whether you are in France or India.

Other studies have also begun to look at microdata on the “carbon lives” of the very richest. One study examining the emissions of twenty of the world’s richest billionaires found that each produced on average eight thousand tons of carbon dioxide. For comparison, the average citizen in a rich country produces around six tons — and the amount needed to hit the 1.5 degree C global safety target is just over two tons per person. New analysis of the private jet flights of the superrich has also revealed that celebrities and billionaires emit more carbon in minutes than ordinary people do in a year.

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The Investments Issue

Not only are the emissions of the rich incredibly high and growing, but the nature of their emissions is also completely different. For the richest people, most of their emissions — up to 70 percent — come from their investments. This mirrors inequality as a whole: for most of society, income is from work; for the richest, it’s from the return on capital.

The lifestyle emissions of a billionaire might be a thousand times higher than average, but their investment emissions can be a million times higher. We’re working on a new analysis of billionaire investment emissions that will be published in November, ahead of this year’s UN climate change conference.

People near the bottom of the income scale often do not have a lot of choice over their carbon emissions. They may be living in poorly insulated rental housing or have to drive to work because of inadequate public transport. As in every other aspect of life, the richer you are, the more choice you have, and the more agency to change your life — a rule that applies to lifestyle consumption emissions, but even more to investment emissions. You get to choose where you invest your money. The continued bankrolling of fossil fuels and polluting industries by the very rich, to my mind, is therefore completely indefensible.

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Must Billions Stay Poor to Save the World?

At Oxfam, our primary concern is with those in the poorest half of society, in every county, but particularly in countries in the Global South. We want everyone on earth to have not just what it takes to survive but what it takes to thrive. Everyone has a right to safety, a decent income, good home, free public health care, schools, public transport, parks. Every family should have a fridge and a television. Everyone should have access to a smartphone, a computer, and the internet.

For some, the fear is that if we achieve that and enabled all 8 billion of us to live a decent life, we would rapidly overshoot the natural carrying capacity of our planet, not just for carbon but for other planetary boundaries too. This fear of growing populations in the Global South is often used to shift the blame onto developing countries: some argue that while the fault of carbon emissions may have historically been with rich nations, it’s now the billions of Chinese and Indian people we should worry about.

What analysis categorically shows is that the hundreds of millions that have escaped poverty globally in the last twenty years are only a small part of the dramatic increase in emissions. In fact, nearly half of the rapidly accelerating growth in total emissions — and the attendant rise in climate crisis risks and damage — hasn’t occurred to the benefit of the poorer half of the world’s population. It’s just allowed the already wealthy top 10 percent to augment their consumption and enlarge their carbon footprints.

It’s true that, if we were to stay at current levels of inequality, in order to deliver a decent life for all, global GDP growth would have to increase way beyond our planet’s ability to sustain it. Over the last forty years, every dollar in global GDP growth has seen 46 cents go to the top 10 percent, and only around 9 cents go to the bottom half of humanity. The bottom 10 percent of humanity received less than one cent of every dollar in global income growth. This distribution is so unfair and inefficient that to lift all of humanity above the poverty line of $5 a day would require the global economy to be 173 times bigger than it is. That’s an environmental impossibility.

Does this mean that the goals of planetary survival and a decent life for all are incompatible? That to save our planet, the majority of humanity must stay forever poor and hungry? Not necessarily. Everything depends on the level of inequality.

It’s been well noted that people all over the world, when asked how unequal their countries are, consistently and massively underestimate the scale of the divide. And when asked for their preferred level of “fair inequality,” while this differs between societies, the majority consistently want their society to be a lot more equal than it actually is.

A recent study in Nature took these inequality preferences and combined them with the carbon emissions required for everyone on earth to have decent living standards. They found that if societies worldwide actually matched what their citizens felt was a level of “fair” inequality, it would be possible for all of humanity to have a decent living and stay within the energy limits to prevent 1.5 degrees of global heating.

The evidence is clear that the richest people in our society are a huge part of the problem, through their unsustainable luxury lifestyles and their investments that bankroll the fossil fuel economy. A massive reduction in inequality is the only way that everyone on earth can live a decent life and guarantee the future of our planet.

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A Whole New Way to Look at Fighting Climate Breakdown

Looking at the emissions of different income groups and the nature of those emissions has the potential to transform climate policymaking. To maintain any level of fairness, the richest must make by far the biggest cuts to their emissions. This is true in both rich and developing countries.

This means, for example, that we should have not a flat carbon tax but a progressive carbon tax: the more carbon you use, the higher the tax you pay. Polluting investments should have additional punitive taxation put on them or, better still, simply be banned. Luxury goods and private jets should be heavily taxed or heavily restricted. Each national action to tackle climate should be taken progressively, in ways that make the richest, highest emitters shoulder most of the cost, and in turn contribute to increasing equality, not inequality.

General increases in taxes on the richest and on wealth, as well as other moves to rapidly reduce inequality, also take on a whole new climate imperative. Our planet simply cannot afford the very rich.

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This work has been made possible by the support of the Puffin Foundation.

Outside spending on 2022 federal midterm elections topped $1 billion, surpassing the nearly $701.8 million spent by outside groups through Oct. 4 during the 2018 midterms.

With the 2022 elections just five weeks away, outside groups are on track for record federal spending in what OpenSecrets has projected will be the most expensive midterm ever. The Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United v. FEC decision in 2010 paved the way for a sharp increase in outside spending.

At this point in the 2018 election cycle, outside groups supporting Democratic congressional candidates had spent more money than those backing Republicans. Democrats went on to flip the U.S. House during the so-called “Blue Wave,” but a “Red Wave” may be coming in 2022.

Conservative outside groups are currently outspending liberal ones 2-to-1 during the 2022 midterms, and Republicans are slightly favored to retake the U.S. House, polling analysis by FiveThirtyEight found. Democrats are slightly favored to keep control of the U.S. Senate, FiveThirtyEight projects, but races in battleground states have attracted massive outside spending this election cycle as Republicans push for control of the chamber.

The Pennsylvania Senate race, which the Cook Political Report returned to a toss-up on Tuesday, is currently the most expensive race this election cycle. Outside groups poured nearly $38.1 million into the Senate primaries in the Keystone State. The heated general election contest between Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D) and Mehmet Oz, the GOP nominee and former host of “The Dr. Oz Show,” has attracted over $66.8 million in outside spending from the May 17 primary through Oct. 4.

Outside spending by groups supporting or opposing Republican candidates drove the most expensive primary elections, including the Senate race in Pennsylvania. An outside spending surge and an endorsement from former President Donald Trump helped venture capitalist J.D. Vance clinch the GOP nomination in Ohio, where Cook Political Report rates the Senate race as leaning Republican.

Outside groups spent over $12.7 million during the primary supporting Vance, who is running against Rep. Tim Ryan (D–Ohio) for the open seat. Since the primary, outside groups have spent nearly $14.4 million supporting Vance and only about $5.1 million supporting Ryan.

Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel, who largely bankrolled the pro-Vance super PAC Protect Ohio Values, told guests at a fundraiser for Blake Masters that Thiel believes Vance is on track to win in Ohio. Thiel plans to shift fundraising efforts to support the GOP nominee for U.S. Senate in Arizona, CNBC reported. The race leans Democratic, the Cook Political Report projects, and Masters has lagged behind incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly (D–Ariz.) in Marist and Suffolk University polls released last week. Kelly also significantly outspent Masters ahead of the Arizona primary, according to OpenSecrets data, and reported millions more on hand heading into the general election.

Four of the five races that have attracted the most outside spending during the general election are considered toss-ups — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin. Outside groups have spent more money supporting candidates in these races than almost any other.

Sens. Raphael Warnock (D–Ga.), Catherine Cortez Masto (D–N.V.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) are all fighting to defend seats the other party hopes to pick up in the battle for control of the Senate.

In Georgia, Warnock is facing GOP nominee Herschel Walker, a former star running back and first-time federal political candidate. In Nevada, Cortez Masto is facing the state’s former Attorney General Adam Laxalt (R). Johnson is defending his seat against Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes (D) in Wisconsin.

The top-spending groups in the 2022 cycle were two Republican-aligned super PACs that together devoted nearly $181.5 million to retake majorities in both chambers of Congress.

The Senate Leadership Fund, which is linked to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), spent almost $95.7 million, while the Congressional Leadership Fund spent more than $85.8 million. The majority of expenditures were made opposing Democratic candidates.

The conservative group Club for Growth reported spending $59.2 million, and the libertarian advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, founded by David and Charles Koch, spent $37.6 million.

Only one Democratic-aligned group was among the top five in independent expenditures: Senate Majority PAC, a super PAC linked to Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.). The group spent more than $62 million targeting prominent Republican candidates such as Johnson and Oz.

Another top spender, Protect Our Future PAC, founded and primarily funded by billionaire cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried, dedicated $24.2 million in support of Democratic primary candidates vying for House seats.

Shhh! Don’t Tell the Fed or Mainstream Media that Systemic Contagion at Wall Street Banks Is Already Here

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 10, 2022 ~ At Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s last press conference on September 21 he said that there is “good reason to think that this will continue to be a reasonably strong economy.” Unfortunately, the U.S. can’t have a strong economy without strong banks willing and able to lend. And there are serious storm fronts in that area that the Fed Chair and mainstream media are choosing to ignore. Last week multiple news outlets raised the question as to whether the troubles at Credit Suisse signaled another “Lehman moment.” (See here, here, and here, for example.) A “Lehman moment” refers to the former 158-year old Wall Street investment bank, Lehman Brothers, collapsing into bankruptcy on September 15, 2008 during a widening financial crisis on Wall Street. Because Lehman was the only major Wall Street firm that the Fed allowed to collapse into bankruptcy (rather … Continue reading →

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