Krugman's recent statement that there has been no wealth creation in the USA since 2000 is a well crafted deception that makes it seem all Americans are in the same boat, all suffering alike from the same financial fate. Kumbaya -- we're all in this together.
The hell we are. In the tradition of Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics may I point out that the concept of no wealth creation since 2000 is Statistics.
It is beyond a Damned Lie.
It is an average of all US households. It states a net loss in wealth from 2000 to 2008. True, as far as it goes.
And by averaging 100% of American households, it goes far astray.
Go back again, and look at the wealthiest 10% of households. It will show a major gain in net wealth during those same years. Then look at the wealthiest 1% of households. They show a 100% net increase in wealth for those years. Doubling their wealth in 8 years -- an astounding gain by any standard. Only the sacking of ancient cities by nameless hordes comes close to this kind of sudden wealth gain.
The top 10% of wealthy households in our nation have done exceedingly well through these past eight years. These Villagers, as Digby calls them, have run the political, economic, and media systems for their own benefit, at the cost of everyone below them on the economic ladder. They pay half the income taxes of a garbage collector or secretary, and complain about paying that.
The top 10% of households own fully 70% of the wealth and property of this nation. They figure they own the place, so it is theirs to run as they see fit.
That leaves we, the people, camping out between these shining seas, living as and where and how the owners of the nation allow.
During the Bush years we, the people was robbed. The greatest transfer of wealth in the history of our species moved money by the hundreds of billions to the top 1% of our population.
Yes, it is hallucinated wealth, paper wealth, tallied in the form of occult derivatives, credit default swaps, special investment vehicles of every kind, and it is still there on paper -- it is the cesspool of toxic assets that our tax dollars are now redeeming at 100 pennies on the dollar when these garbage investments are worth nothing at all in the market. It is off the books even though the taxpayers are being asked to buy it unseen and unknown for as far into the future as required. Geithner, Summers, and Obama will do any song and dance necessary to keep these trillions in toxic assets off the books, off the market, and hidden from all eyes.
The lie is in plain sight, but Obama will not speak it. The wealthiest people in our nation are insisting -- forcing -- those paper profits to be reimbursed and repaid in full by taxpayer bailouts. They are flatly refusing to accept their losses of the Bush years. Sticking the taxpayers of this and the next generation with those losses is the Geithner Plan.
In a sense, the real theft is being conducted right now, by a new Democratic Administration in the form of paying these hallucinated profits in full with dollars stolen from the real Main Street economy. Toxic and fraudulent debt instruments running to thousands of billions of dollars are being paid in full unto the wealthiest few percent of our populace by means of reducing budgets for schools, cops, welfare, medical care, roads and everything else that serves the common man, and by taxing the working people of America more and more in each of the coming years.
That's the Geithner Plan that Obama is backing, when what should happen is for these high flying investors and gamblers to accept their investment losses. They will still be fabulously wealthy people after the monies they invested "at risk" is tallied up as the loss that it is.
It could all be cleaned up in thirty days by simply opening the books of every bank to Federal scrutiny, and letting the FDIC close, sell off, or recapitalize the ones that are bust according to established laws and procedures. If these zombie banks are not cleaned up, America faces ten to fifteen years of no growth whatsoever while these trillions in losses are repaid to the richest of the richest of our citizens.
Instead of accepting their paper losses as real losses, they want taxpayer greenbacks dumped into their zombie banks until those paper losses are papered over with dead Presidents.
No sane person would do it. It just isn't worth it -- except for one American in every hundred.
Various pundits and bloggers speak of restraining the banks, regulating the bankers, even arresting the bankers, rebooting the banking system, nationalizing the banks, forgiving consumer debts, canceling or nationalizing mortgages. Half measures all of them. Coverup of the crime that is in plain view, and needs redressing before the Republic slips entirely out of our hands.
Who do these people think they are? They think they own America, that's who they think they are.
The wealth of America was stolen, legally, fair and square during the Bush years. Robbed from the nation with a fountain pen, stolen by bankers and legislators, who are servants of a corrupt financial system owned and operated by and for the wealthiest few percent of our population. That's who Congress works for first, and that's who the banks work for.
The wealth of the nation can be taken back, legally, fair and square, with a fountain pen. Robbed right back, for the benefit -- the survival -- of the nation.
Some say it will take real cojones to move against the 1% who literally own and operate 70% of the assets and wealth of this nation. Who dares go up against the owners and operators of the whole damn country?
Cojones? We don't need no stinkin' cojones. We need fountain pens in the hands of honest men and women. And there are apparently none to be found in Washington, DC.
We can either replace who is in Congress, or we can scare the shit out of the ones who are there now. Never in history have the rich, the powerful, the comfortable given up any iota of their oversized share willingly. It has routinely been taken from them by the masses of people they abuse after they have abused them sufficiently. That's what's coming if Obama continue to cooperate in putting America up against the wall.
There is not the slightest reason to think Obama will stray from the Villagers Cause. Unless and until he has to.
Obama WILL inevitably be forced to nationalize most or all of the banks, and be forced to tax the rich heavily, and get the claws of the banks out of the homes and pockets of working Americans, but he and his team of bankers will only do this after the banks "too big to fail" utterly fail anyway in spite of repeated bailouts. He will do this only when he has no other choice. He will do this only when the streets are filled with arson and anger and throngs of people who will not go home, because they are hungry.
Until he does this, he is wasting his time and ours. The sooner he switches sides and becomes the President of the entire nation -- not just the wealthy Villagers atop our nation -- the better for all Americans, the ultra-rich included. This is no primrose path he is leading us down; it is a direct march into Third World status.
The Villagers atop America think they will survive the march and prosper thereafter; this is why they continue to steal openly from the people, laughing all the way to their banks, laughing at Congress right in the halls of Congress, and leaving less and less in the hands of each of us.
All they are doing is awakening a sleeping giant.