There are 7 billion human beings on this planet, and there is a delicate balance that must be honored, for all to survive, to be respected, and to understand the most basic premises, of how civilizations proper or just blow up.
Most of the 7 billion human beings on this planet, are not especially interested in becoming Bill Gates, or Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, or Rupert Murdoch, or Oprah Winfrey.
Most human beings on this planet, are content and happy, if they have enough to have a roof over their heads, food to keep their families alive, some kind of decent health care that will not bankrupt them, and everything else is gravy and the 'bones' the Oligarchy throws to us. Now that time has been destroyed, fully destroyed. The balance of power between the haves and the have nots has been reached it's critical corruption mass. Why are we so surprised?
We know how we got here and why we got here: the balance of dignity and the laws of civilizations have been ignored.
The strange thing to me is this: the working class in our nation, do not ask for much, they never have. In Europe, 6 weeks of vacation is where they draw the line in the sand, in Europe, raising the age of Social Security to 62 years of age was huge, but in our nation? Give me a fucking break.
The truth is that our own nation began a horrifying world wide economic catastrophe, that has led us all into a 'domino effect' that we continue to ignore.
I'm not the least surprised as to the uprising in the Middle East. They are angry, they have no jobs, they have no way to support their families, and in the end, it is simply a matter of common decency. A starving child in your arms, that needs help and food, and the basic loss of dignity to earn a living, is exactly why we see the world exploding in front of our eyes. What did we expect?
The rules of laws, that were honored for centuries have been ignored, and we all know this. Not only do we know this, 'we' as what I would call the 'highest information voters...the Democrats' know how it happened, and why it happened.
This critical mass of corruption, is now playing out in front of our eyes, and, what? We are surprised by it? Not me. What we see happening world wide has nothing to do with Muslims or religion, or race, it has to do with the basic human dignity of how the workers of this world, support their rulers, and that fairness of play, that is tantamount to keeping that balance in check.
We lost all of that, and it began in our nation. The Imperial Presidencies have been on the rise.....since Ronald Regan. When the laws of this nation were ignored, to look forward, instead of the laws that mattered to most Americans, we were all fucked from that point forward. This has absolutely nothing to do with partisan politics.
When NAFTA, and globalization, Deregulation, got stuck down our throats, we lost it all, regardless of how it happened...it happened. When the Wall Street Wizards, backed by the Bankers/Lending Agencies created their nefarious Weapons of Mass Destruction, and infiltrated the rest of the world wide endless 'housing bubble,' while Greenspan/Bernanke, the AAA Rating agencies, the SEC, the NYSE, and the rest of the revolving door regulators, sat on their hands, while Wall St/the Bankers raked in trillions of dollars, this set off a chain reaction, that had led to the loss of millions of jobs worldwide. The result is the destruction of pension funds, and now the governors in our nation are talking about slashing Medicare, and of course, there likely hood of Social Security being dismantled, privatized because of course, 'someone has to pay for the sins of Wall St/the Bankers,' and evidently, the Oligarchy (even with what is happening across Egypt and the Middle East) is still not getting the memo:
Robbing 'Peter' to pay 'Paul' (while you are starving Paul, and calling on so called 'austerity' measures) at the hands of those workers, who have already paid, and paid and paid again, is exactly what produces world wide strife, civil disorder, the breakdowns of societies and revolutions, and as we can see what is going on in our own political body: extremism of the worst kind, that is senseless and destructive.
When Pelosi and Obama decided to take impeachment off the table, it had absolutely nothing to do with the laws of this nation. But you bet your ass, that Darrell Issa, is putting it right back on the front burner.
It is all about power, money and corruption, and deep oppression and that tenuous, delicate balance has been tipped over over the cliff, and of course, we are witnessing the outcome of a Shock Doctrine gone insane: the workers of this world are sick and tired of being fucked, and we all know why this has happened, and why it has happened: The Bankers of the World and the Wall Street elite of the World, not only caused this worldwide catastrophe, and have literally 'gotten away with facing any responsibility of any true consequences, but made trillions of dollars off the backs of those workers, who unwillingly were forced into bailing them out' but now instead, our national and international governments, are doubling down, and attacking those most vulnerable citizens. The elderly, the poor, the disabled, the millions of people who are starving, who have been thrown out of their own homes, as poverty is skyrocketing throughout the world.
I know that bobswern mentioned this information in his excellent and informative diary today (he always does such an amazing job), but I think it bears repeating, because it is just so stunning:
Friday, January 28, 2011
Guest Post: Inequality In America Is Worse Than In Egypt, Tunisia Or Yemen
→ Washington’s Blog
Egyptian, Tunisian and Yemeni protesters all say that inequality is one of the main reasons they’re protesting. However, the U.S. actually has much greater inequality than in any of those countries. Specifically, the "Gini Coefficient" – the figure economists use to measure inequality – is higher in the U.S.
Gini Coefficients are like golf – the lower the score, the better (i.e. the more equality). According to the CIA World Fact Book, the U.S. is ranked as the 42nd most unequal country in the world, with a Gini Coefficient of 45. In contrast: * Tunisia is ranked the 62nd most unequal country, with a Gini Coefficient of 40. * And Yemen is ranked 76th most unequal, with a Gini Coefficient of 37.7. * Egypt is ranked as the 90th most unequal country, with a Gini Coefficient of around 34.4.And inequality in the U.S. has soared in the last couple of years, since the Gini Coefficient was last calculated, so it is undoubtedly currently much higher.) So why are Egyptians rioting, while the Americans are complacent?
Well, Americans – until recently – have been some of the wealthiest people in the world, with most having plenty of comforts (and/or entertainment) and more than enough to eat. But another reason is that – as Dan Ariely of Duke University and Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School demonstrate – Americans consistently underestimate the amount of inequality in our nation. As William Alden wrote last September: Americans vastly underestimate the degree of wealth inequality in America, and we believe that the distribution should be far more equitable than it actually is, according to a new study. Or, as the study’s authors put it: "All demographic groups — even those not usually associated with wealth redistribution such as Republicans and the wealthy — desired a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo." The report ... "Building a Better America — One Wealth Quintile At A Time" by Dan Ariely of Duke University and Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School ... shows that across ideological, economic and gender groups, Americans thought the richest 20 percent of our society controlled about 59 percent of the wealth, while the real number is closer to 84 percent. Here’s the study.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/...
Remember this figure for the rest of your lives:
Americans thought the richest 20 percent of our society controlled about 59 percent of the wealth, while the real number is closer to 84 percent. Here’s the study.
I am so sad about the past few days of world wide events, but I am not in the least surprised by them. Any sense of common decency for our fellow man, any sense of even a iota of sense of fair play has been completely ignored. Any sense of morality and the laws that protected people of our nation and the world at large as a society have been ignored and systematically destroyed.
We must go back to respecting the working people of this world, and stop rejecting the idea, that those that caused this huge financial meltdown, are the least of those that should be paid off. WE ALREADY FUCKING PAID.
The only people that should be giving back (as patriots, at least pretending to act like decent human beings,) that should have at the very least a sense of gratitude and a sense of responsibility to their fellow citizens, are the leaders of our nation, and of course, those that were directly responsible for allowing this world wide calamity to occur.
One of my all time favorite writes and activist is Charles Huge Smith, and as usual, he has given me permission to include his latest brilliant series of articles as written by By Zeus Yiamouyiannis:
The Big Squeeze: Predicting the Effects of Savings Extortion and Abuse of the Middle Class (January 27, 2011)
I am pleased to present a uniquely clear-sighted three-part series by frequent contributor Zeus Y. on the consequences of our corrupt financial-political Status Quo being exploited by a rapacious Financial Elite.
Part I: Oligarchy Becomes Anarchy Introduction
By now it should be clear even to the most optimistic observer that the global financial system has given itself over to systemic lawlessness. Once international banks were effectively allowed to print their own money in an unregulated "shadow" system and have it redeemed full value by national taxpayers, the charade was over. The only thing left, at this point, given the full cooperation of governments and an eerie world-wide non-enforcement of law, is for banks, like a cancer to savage and consume every concrete store of non-counterfeit productivity and asset value.
Not only have governments from China to the United States committed themselves to a chess game meant to eke out relative advantages on a sinking ship, but they have positively rewarded those who are speeding the collapse. A simple, cannibalistic economic rule now persists until a new system emerges: Economic manipulation, destruction, and extortion are simply more profitable, far more profitable, than good old fashion value creation. Disaster capitalism will be pursued full force.
Whether a country is communist or capitalist, authoritarian or marginally democratic, no longer matters. Citizens globally have been made to be the pawns and patsies of a universal financial Ponzi scheme that can only end in carnage. Who cares if this insures debt peonage for the world and likely mass austerity, suffering, and shortages. There’s a buck to be made! Who cares if my own children will be choking on the garbage I spewed into the financial air and water system. I’m rich!
When morality, reason, and sovereignty collapse together, we are left with outright anarchy, in everything but name. This is a reality so uncomfortable that hundreds of trillions dollars more of citizen retirement savings and other assets are likely to be tragically liquidated trying to regain stability and finance the "lean times" in the hopes of the promised upturn.
Act I: Oligarchy Becomes Anarchy
This anarchy and its suicidal impulse was brought to a head, but by no means started with, the collapse of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. These crises did however confirm that the gatekeepers had become one and the same with the barbarians at the gate.
The same story kept repeating itself and was easily predicted by the news accounts of single "rogue" traders damaging storied banks in England, France, and other countries in the past decades: The techno-nouveau riche found vulnerabilities in the "civilized" corruption and racketeering of the establishment banks. These vulnerabilities expanded and softened as banks adopted unfettered gambling as a way to produce huge profits. When gambling didn’t pay, scapegoats were identified and jailed, the sins of the system were larded on those individuals, and nothing changed systemically.
Later, young guns armed with razor wits and high-powered computers saw that they could guarantee for themselves multi-billion dollar profits by not only betting on collapse but aiding and abetting (and even sometimes directly causing) a crash of the very banks they worked for or dealt with. Supported by a profit-by-any-means mentality, they simply took market manipulation to the next logical level, and a Pandora’s box of financial ills was loosed on to the world.
Consider Lehman Brothers. As detailed in Danny Schechter’s movie Plunder, Lehman Brothers was brought down by a spate of naked short selling simultaneously coupled with exotic very short-term anonymous short positions worth hundreds of millions of dollars. One can conclude with high probability given the established dynamic that those who engineered this and profited enormously from it were former employees or colleagues of said employees who migrated to hedge funds.
These players were insider enough to be privy to accounting tricks and frauds, the Repo 105 scams and so forth, being perpetrated by Lehman Brothers. They knew that Lehman Brothers was hiding gargantuan losses and skating on an illusory margin, so they devised a way to push them off the cliff by naked short selling and entrepreneurially betting on their own success. Why not teach the old farts a thing or two about their own game and laugh all the way to the proverbial bank.
With the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the collapse of the walls between conventional banking, investment banking, investment rating systems, and government regulation, the financier class had completed its nefarious project, a fungible two-tiered economic system "unhinging" finances from concrete reality, productivity, and value creation.
On one hand, a shadow banking system created hundreds of trillions of dollars of counterfeit wealth through the construction and leveraging of derivatives and mark-to-model assets. This was sold and exchanged for real assets, i.e. businesses and real estate. In addition trillions of dollars more in real wealth were siphoned off in transaction fees, bonuses, and profit taking. Financial, criminal, and civil liabilities were, and are still being, avoided through regulatory and governmental capture. On the other hand, infiltrated real value assets are being simply taken over: foreclosed upon, reassigned, and used as guarantees for this colossal fraud. Shadow liabilities are being hidden or shifted on to taxpayers’ bills.
Unsurprisingly, hedge funds like Magnetar saw an opportunity to profit from this inequality under the law by lobbying banks to construct highly rated junk investment portfolios and then betting against those portfolios many times over. So you have the young amoral renegade side of the elite sparring with the crooked establishment side in what amounts to them as one big galactic video game. When they lose, they always have another life. When they win, they take home the money and the title. Someone else pays.
It has to be noted that there is no personal stake in this game. Naked short selling, for instance, is phantom selling, selling shares you don’t actually own. Phantom buying, which is what is currently propping up the stock market, is using Fed-funneled money to buy up your own stocks. Risk has been removed from the system. There is only liability, profit, and power. Those of power and size taking great "risks" can leverage those risks into an extortion demand: "take our liabilities off our books, allow us to valuate them for as much as we want, and/or hide them for as long as we like or we’ll blow up the system." Governments, with the exception of Iceland, said, "Please, financial terrorist, don’t do that. We’ll do anything you ask."
If free market capitalism existed and worked these banks would have been allowed to collapse, their losses eaten by bond and stock holders, and civil and criminal charges filed against institutions and individuals. However, to do so would have exposed the rot and common criminality in the interlinked global system. Accountability would have indicted the people and connections behind the curtain, so the entire anarchic enterprise has to be covered up and its costs shifted to taxpayers, in a vicious downward cycle, which only accelerates rapaciousness and irrational incentives and punishes savings and responsibility.
Savings interest rates have been near zero for years, lower than inflation. Unemployment is high and people are liquidating their assets to pay for their costs of living. In addition, their future earnings and children’s savings being charged in advance for the multi-trillion dollar malfeasance of banks. Pensions are being looted and/or liquidated along with other real assets.
The major U.S. banks, on the other hand, reported within quarters of the crash they created, that they were able to go through an entire quarter without a single losing trading day. That is pretty easy to do when so-called toxic assets are offloaded to the Federal Reserve for 100 cents on the dollar and when banks receive hundreds of billions of 0% interest rate money and turn around and buy Treasury bonds with 3% interest, "paying" taxpayers back with interest earned on the debt these same banks caused.
No violations are too egregious or too pervasive for the Department of Justice or the SEC to ignore, no infraction too obvious or ridiculous to be covered up. These offices weakly go after the penny ante "bad apples" and keep a bubble system propped up and hopped up on its own version of financial adrenalin. A short laundry list of the most tragicomic examples:
Fraudclosure: hundreds of thousands of mortgages being processed by robosigners, recorded and shifted around electronically, and their paper trails neglected or destroyed, contrary to even the most basic commerce and property laws. Not a single significant prosecution yet.
Exchanges selling shares in precious metals without even having close to the reserves in physical metal to back up and JP Morgan’s "alleged"
Mortgage insurers simply not paying their obligations.
Multiple insurance on the same properties paid out in multipliers above the actual value of the property.
Verified cases of houses being "foreclosed" upon that were already bought with cash.
Same property sold to different owners.
Extorted "marked to model" FASB standards fraud.
With no effective reserve requirements, leverage limits, or accounting standards, institutions with power can simply make up any amount they choose. The above examples show how rampantly institutional entitlement has evolved to claim and sell any property they choose, and valuate and sell any instrument they conjure up.
Power is all about access, and evidence shows where the current power resides. National governments in full collusion and cooperation with gigantic international financial corporations, have opened the floodgates of access to the "little people’s" wealth through bailouts, Fed policy, and quantitative easing, and clanged shut the castle door of the financial elite by allowing them to establish the value of thei r own assets and to concoct, rate, and sell almost any financial asset or instrument with no accountability, transparency, or enforcement.
By Zeus Yiamouyiannis, Ph.D., copyright January, 2011
http://www.oftwominds.com/...
The other two parts of this great truth telling and incisive writing, are just as important, and I hope you take the time to read them:
The Big Squeeze, Part 2: Abused Fundamentals and Fake Markets: How They Play Out (January 28, 2011)
and so is Part 3, today:
The Big Squeeze: Part 3: The Quiet Rebellion: Civil Disobedience, Local Markets, and Debt Erasure (Guest essay)
January 29, 2011
I am pleased to present Part 3 of a uniquely clear-sighted three-part series by frequent contributor Zeus Y. on the consequences of our corrupt financial-political Status Quo being exploited by a parasitic Financial Elite.
http://www.oftwominds.com/...
The reason we, in this world are in a state of revolution, and upheaval, is very easy to understand:
What is going on in the world has absolutely nothing to do with religion, or race or any of that:
It has to do with the Oligarchy and Plutocrats, that have become so fucking insane and out of control and greedy, that now, what we see happening in the world is exactly what they deserve.
God bless us all in this time of upheaval, but let us remember, this:
The workers of this world, were kind and giving and loving, and whenever there has been a horrifying nationwide event, we all came together to help each other out, but now, that we face a true world wide calamity, let us remember who is responsible for it, and why it is occurring.
Unemployment that is skyrocketing throughout the entire world, is a direct result of the 'Great Heist of 2008,' that not only could have been avoided, but was ignored on purpose.
From Dean Baker:
Using simple economic analysis and the arithmetic we all learned in 3rd grade it was possible to recognize the housing bubble as early as 2002. It was also possible to know that the bursting of the bubble would be bad news for the economy and that the news would get worse as the bubble grew larger. The Fed had enormous power with which to shoot at the bubble. First, Greenspan and Bernanke could have used the resources of the Fed to document the evidence for the existence of the bubble and highlight the consequences of its bursting. Note that this is not about mumbling "irrational exuberance." The idea is have the Fed's research staff put out paper after paper showing that house prices were hugely out of line with their historic levels with no plausible explanation in the fundamentals. This research could have been highlighted in Congressional testimony and other public appearances by Greenspan and other top Fed officials.
The second step involves the Fed's regulatory power. The deterioration of lending standards and outright fraud in issuing mortgages that is documented in the FCIC report was knowable to regulators at the time. (I knew about it because people from around the country were telling me about abuses by their friends/relatives in the mortgage industry. And, I have no regulatory authority.) The Fed could have used its regulatory authority to crack down on the banks that were issuing fraudulent mortgages and to prod the SEC to go after the investment banks that were securitizing them. Finally, if steps one and two did not work, the Fed could have raised interest rates. Greenspan has always been dismissive of the idea that higher interest rates could have popped the bubble, noting that long-term rates stayed low in 2005 and 2006 even as short-term rates rose by several percentage points. This is again a silly cop out.
Suppose that Greenspan started a round of rate increases with the explicit target of popping the housing bubble. For example, suppose he announced the first half point rise in the federal funds rate and said that he would continue to raise interest rates until the real value of the Case-Shiller 20 City index fell below its 2000 level. This likely would have gotten the attention of financial markets and had some impact on house prices. Instead Alan Greenspan, with Ben Bernanke at his side, did nothing. In fact, at several points he seemed to foster the bubble by dismissing the concerns of those who raised questions about the run-up in house prices. There is a real problem of incentives here. Greenspan and Bernanke would have gotten serious heat from the financial industry if they had done the right thing and shot at the bubble. After all Angelo Mozillo, Robert Rubin, and many other rich and powerful types were getting very rich. On the other hand, they seem to have suffered zero consequence from doing nothing, even when their failure to act had absolutely disastrous consequences.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Thank you Mr. Baker, but the words 'absolutely disastrous consequences,' is the understatement of the century.
And of course, above all, 'We Must Support Our Troops,'
More troops lost to suicide
By John Donnelly
For the second year in a row, the U.S. military has lost more troops to suicide than it has to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Soldiers. The reasons are complicated and the accounting uncertain — for instance, should returning soldiers who take their own lives after being mustered out be included? But the suicide rate is a further indication of the stress that military personnel live under after nearly a decade of war.
Figures released by the armed services last week showed an alarming increase in suicides in 2010, but those figures leave out some categories. Overall, the services reported 434 suicides by personnel on active duty, significantly more than the 381 suicides by active-duty personnel reported in 2009. The 2010 total is below the 462 deaths in combat, excluding accidents and illness. In 2009, active-duty suicides exceeded deaths in battle.
Last week’s figures, though, understate the problem of military suicides because the services do not report the statistics uniformly. Several do so only reluctantly. Figures reported by each of the services last week, for instance, include suicides by members of the Guard and Reserve who were on active duty at the time. The Army and the Navy also add up statistics for certain reservists who kill themselves when they are not on active duty. But the Air Force and Marine Corps do not include any non-mobilized reservists in their posted numbers. What’s more, none of the services count suicides that occur among a class of reservists known as the Individual Ready Reserve, the more than 123,000 people who are not assigned to particular units. Suicides by veterans who have left the service entirely after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan also are not counted by the Defense Department. The Department of Veterans Affairs keeps track of such suicides only if the person was enrolled in the VA health care system — which three-quarters of veterans are not.
http://www.congress.org/...
Yet we don't even question how we could spend 3 trillion on Iraq? Let alone the continuing cost of yet another 'dumb war,' Afganistan?
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/01/the-three-trillion-dollar-war-2/
Whenever I hear a a congress critter discussing deficit spending, the first thing I do is check their vote on the Iraq war to see if they are legitimately concerned about deficits, or not.
Deficit hawk or Hypocrite? You decide:
• Iraq War Resolution, Roll Call Vote – House (clerk.house.gov)
• Iraq War Resolution, Roll Call Vote – Senate (senate.gov)
You will find most of these born again deficit hawks are hypocritical partisan hacks . . .
And then again, in our new Sputnik JFKee/Obama SOTU speech, to 'look to the future' while ignoring how the entire world is blowing up in front of our own eyes, as millions have no jobs, and who caused that calamity, we know the realities:
The freeze would cover the agencies and programs for which Congress allocates specific budgets each year, including air traffic control, farm subsidies, education, nutrition and national parks. But it would exempt security-related budgets for the Pentagon, foreign aid, the Veterans Administration and homeland security, as well as the entitlement programs that make up the biggest and fastest-growing part of the federal budget: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
The payoff in budget savings would be small relative to the deficit: The estimated $250 billion in savings over 10 years would be less than 3 percent of the roughly $9 trillion in additional deficits the government is expected to accumulate over that time.
The initiative holds political risks as well as potential benefits. Because Mr. Obama plans to exempt military spending while leaving many popular domestic programs vulnerable, his move is certain to further anger liberals in his party and senior Democrats in Congress, who are already upset by the possible collapse of health care legislation and the troop buildup in Afghanistan, among other things.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
As sad as it is all to me, and it is deeply sad to me, but what we are witnessing before our eyes, is a direct result of what occurs, when the Oligarchy just does not get the message:
There must be a sense of fair play, laws, and honor of the working people throughout the world. There must be a sense of respect for our own troops, with suicides at an all time high rates, where our entire national treasury is being drained by the MIC, and the Banks and Wall Street at random.
A special thanks to my friend Charles Smith, and to you Mr. Baker, but once again, your statement:
That what we are now seeing as the world is unraveling.....'absolutely disastrous consequences,' is the understatement of the century.
What we are indeed seeing is the consequences of our own government, and the governments throughout the world, doubling down on their new so called 'austerity measures' on the weakest and most vulnerable, who gave the most: their hearts, their souls, their best to their nations to simply have a small, piece of the pie, and nothing more.
Apparently, that wasn't enough for the Plutocrats of this world.
Thanks as always. I welcome a civil debate on this diary.
Ms. B.