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Plutocracy in the USA? A billionaires’ election system?

Posted by: on: November 8, 2014

Plutocracy system in the USA?

A billionaires’ election system?

Since when as the common people actually elected who they knew is right for the job?

Are the Us citizens imagining that they have just elected the new Congress?

In a formal way, they did have. The public did vote.

In a substantive way, it’s not true that they have chosen their government.

 posted this Nov. 11, 2014

Understanding and Overcoming America’s Plutocracy

This was the billionaires’ election, billionaires of both parties.

While the Republican and Democratic Party billionaires have some differences, what unites them is much stronger than what divides them, a few exceptions aside.

Indeed, many of the richest individual and corporate donors give to both parties. The much-discussed left-right polarization is not polarization at all. The political system is actually relatively united and working very effectively for the richest of the rich.

There has never been a better time for the top 1%. The stock market is soaring, profits are high, interest rates are near zero, and taxes are low.  (But real wealth generated by the working people has not materialized in this economy)

The main countervailing forces — unions, antitrust authorities, and financial regulators — have been clobbered.

Think of it this way.

If government were turned over to the CEOs of ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs, Bechtel, and Health Corporation of America, they would have very little to change of current policies, which already cater to the 4 mega-lobbies: Big Oil, Wall Street, defense contractors, and medical care giants.

This week’s election swing to the Republicans will likely give these lobbies the few added perks that they seek: lower corporate and personal tax rates, stronger management powers vis-à-vis labor, and even weaker environmental and financial regulation.

The richest of the rich pay for the political system — putting in billions of dollars in campaign and lobbying funds — and garner trillions of dollars of benefits in return.

Those are benefits for the corporate sector — financial bailouts, cheap loans, tax breaks, lucrative federal contracts, and a blind eye to environmental damages — not for society as a whole. The rich reap their outsized incomes and wealth in large part by imposing costs on the rest of society.

We can’t actually tote up the total spending on this campaign by the richest donors because, thanks to the Supreme Court, much of the spending is anonymous and unreported. Still, we know that the Koch Brothers, through their complex web of shell groups, put in at least $100 million and probably much more.

Many other billionaires and corporate contributions helped to raise the total kitty to more than $3.6 billion.

The evidence is overwhelming that politicians vote the interests of their donors, not of society at large. This has now been demonstrated rigorously by many researchers, most notably Princeton Professor Martin Gilens.

Whether the Republicans or Democrats are in office, the results are little different. The interests at the top of the income distribution will prevail.

Why does the actual vote count for so little?

People vote for individuals, not directly for policies.

They may elect a politician running on a platform for change, but the politician once elected will then vote for the positions of the big campaign donors.

The political outcomes are therefore oriented toward great wealth rather than to mainstream public opinion, the point that Gilens and others have been finding in their detailed research. (See also the study by Page, Bartels, and Seawright).

It’s not easy for the politicians to shun the campaign funds even if they want to. Money works in election campaigns. It pays for attack ads that flood the media, and it pays for elaborate and sophisticated get-out-the-vote efforts that target households at the micro level to manipulate who does and does not go to the polls.

Campaigning without big money is like unilateral disarmament. It’s noble; it works once in a while; and it is extremely risky. On the other hand, taking big campaign money is a Faustian bargain: you may win power but lose your political soul.

Of course there are modest differences between the parties, and there is a wonderful, truly progressive wing of the Democratic Party organized in the Congressional Progressive Caucus, but it’s marginalized and in the minority of the party.

So many Democrats have their hand in the fossil-fuel cookie jar of Big Oil and Big Coal that the Obama administration couldn’t get even the Democrats, much less the Republicans, to line up for climate-change action during the first year of the administration.

And how do Wall Street money managers keep their tax privileges despite the public glare? Their success in lobbying is due at least as much to Democratic Party Senators beholden to Wall Street as it is to Republican Senators.

Is there a way out?

Yes, but it’s a very tough path. Plutocracy has a way of spreading like an epidemic until democracy itself is abandoned.

History shows the wreckage of democracies killed from within. And yet America has rallied in the past to push democratic reforms, notably in the Progressive Era from 1890-1914, the New Deal from 1933-1940, and the Great Society from 1961-1969.

All of these transformative successes required grass-roots activism, public protests and demonstrations, and eventually bold leaders, indeed drawn from the rich but with their hearts with the people: Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy.

Yet in all of those cases, the mass public led and the great leaders followed the cause. This is our time and responsibility to help save democracy. The Occupy Movement and the 400,000 New Yorkers who marched for climate-change control in September are pointing the way.

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“Total moral surrender”: Broken justice system on Wall Street

Posted by: on: May 23, 2014

 “Total moral surrender”: Broken justice system on Wall Street

Matt Taibbi relentless coverage of Wall Street malfeasance turned him into one of the most influential journalists of his generation, but in his new book, “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap,” Matt Taibbi takes a close and dispiriting look at how inequality and government dysfunction have created a two-tiered justice system in which most Americans are guilty until proven innocent, while a select few operate with no accountability whatsoever.

 tells Salon about Geithner’s excuses, Piketty’s success and Nixon’s cronies this MAY 20, 2014:

Salon sat down last week with Taibbi for a wide-ranging chat that touched on his new book, the lingering effects of the financial crisis, how American elites operate with impunity and why, contrary to what many may think, he’s actually making a conservative argument for reform.

The interview can be found below, and has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

"It’s total moral surrender": Matt Taibbi unloads on Wall Street, inequality and our broken justice systemMatt Taibbi (Credit: AP/Louis Lanzano)

So, what is “The Divide”?

The book is really just about why some people go to jail and why some people don’t go to jail, and “the divide” is the term I came up with to describe this phenomenon we have where there are essentially two different criminal justice systems, one that works in one way for people who are either very rich or working within the confines of a giant systemically important institution, and the other system that works in another way for people who are without means. And that’s what the book is about.

A point you make in the book, though, is that the justice system is starting to treat people who aren’t poor or part of a marginalized group with a level of brutality we tend to think is only reserved for the oppressed.

I made a conscious decision to start the book with the story of Abacus Federal Savings bank, which is this little bank in Chinatown.

The people who run that bank were not poor. They weren’t even what you would typically classify as members of the victim class … But why was that bank prosecuted and why was Goldman Sachs or Chase not prosecuted?

What I was trying to get at was, in this new reality, [legal authorities] consider it not feasible to go after companies of a certain size, and [Abacus] is how small you have to be now to be targeted …

There was an SEC commissioner who talked about “shot selection,” like in basketball, [and] how you should go for the baskets with the greatest chance of scoring.

So while it may be more satisfying to go after the bigger companies, you’re more likely to get a successful action against a smaller company.

It’s not just about poor people, it’s also just about the way the regulatory system works. Bureaucracies organically flow toward the easier result, and the easier result is always a smaller company, an undefended person, a low-level drug dealer.

The regulatory system hesitates before it decides to proceed against a well-heeled, well-defended company [against which] they’re going to have to fight for years and years and years just to get the case in court …

It’s not just about the poor, it’s more about how there’s a class that enjoys impunity and then there’s everybody else.

Do you think this is a new development?

Certainly the rich have always had it easier than the poor. I think that’s a story as old as a story can be. But what we’re seeing recently is that there have been a couple recent developments that have significantly worsened the situation, both going back to the Clinton years: Clinton signs on to welfare reform, Clinton and the Democrats begin to court the financial services sector and begin to adopt deregulatory policies.

Now you have political consensus in both parties on both issues; both have the same approach to poverty, to people at the bottom, and they have the same approach to enforcement.

What begins as deregulation of Wall Street concludes, ultimately, in potentially non-enforcement of crime; and what begins as being “tougher” on welfare cheats in the ’90s, and being tougher on the whole process of giving out benefits, devolves into something pretty close to the criminalization of poverty itself …

And that’s just something that happens naturally when you have a political consensus, which is what we have now. Including the additional factors of the Holder memo —

Would you mind explaining the Holder memo?

Holder, as deputy attorney general in the Clinton years, outlined what was actually sort of a “get tough on crime” document. He gave prosecutors all these tools to go after big corporations.

But, at the bottom [of the memo], he outlined this policy called “collateral consequences,” which was — all it really said was, if you’re a prosecutor and you’re going after a big corporation that employs a lot of people, and you’re worried about innocent victims, you can seek other remedies.

Instead of criminally prosecuting, you can do a deferred prosecution agreement, a non-prosecution agreement or, especially, you can levy fines.

When he wrote that, it was nearly a decade before the too-big-to-fail era, but when he came back to office [as Obama’s attorney general], this idea, which initially had been completely ignored when he first wrote it, suddenly [becomes] the law of the land now, insofar as these systemically important institutions are concerned.

The administration’s come out and overtly talked about collateral consequences and talked about [how] they can’t go against companies like HSBC and UBS because they’re worried about what the impact might be on the world economy.

What’s interesting about it is that this idea suddenly matches this thing that happened with our economy where we have the collapse of the economy in 2008, [and] instead of breaking up these bad companies, we merged them together and made them bigger and more dangerous.

Now they’re even more unprosecutable than before, now this collateral consequences idea is even more applicable. And that’s the reality we live in now; it’s just this world where if you can commit an offense within the auspices of a company like that, the resolution won’t be a criminal resolution, it will be something else.

The argument is similar to why they said they couldn’t prosecute people for torture: because the CIA is systemically important, because we can’t risk pissing off the national security community, because we can’t risk disturbing the national security system.

And where does it end? We’re sitting in the offices of “The Intercept” right now. What if you say you really want to pursue the illegal surveillance program? How could you do it? It’s a $75 billion mechanism that isn’t just contained in the United States.

It’s across multiple countries; it doesn’t exist in any one place; it’s everywhere. If you were to move against the smallest member of the conspiracy, you’d have to involve thousands of people. It’s impossible to even conceive of what that kind of [system-preserving] approach would be.

That’s exactly what the situation is. We have companies that are essentially beyond the reach of what we would traditionally think of as the law, which is a crazy concept because, even back in the ’70s, it was reinforced in every American’s mind that even the president could be dragged into a criminal case.

And now, we can’t even conceive of taking Lloyd Blankfein to court for lying to Congress.

An unspoken assumption undergirding this logic is the idea that these systems which we can’t mess with are actually working. As I’m sure you’re aware, former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s memoir is now out, and in the reviews I’ve read, there’s something of a consensus view that the book shows how Geithner’s completely internalized the idea that the financialization of the economy is ultimately good for everybody.

So when people bring up all the things he could have done but didn’t do, his response is, Well, this is a good system, basically, and the most important thing is to keep it functioning.

So what’s the answer to that?

I’d say it inevitably makes a more radical response necessary.

I mean, it’s funny, [Geithner’s] shifting rationale … because the initial rationale, when Geithner first came to office and the economy was still fragile … is that he was concerned about the consequences of what he called “market-altering” prosecutions.

Geithner was worried that … if he were to suddenly delve into the dealings of a Countrywide — which might have the capacity to bring down Bank of America or AIG, which they were trying desperately to rehabilitate in its pseudo-nationalized state — [that] the economy was too fragile.

Well, we’re five, six years out of the crisis now, and the economy is ostensibly stabilized enough that we could theoretically entertain those kinds of prosecutions, but, exactly as you said, the rationale has kind of shifted to “This is a functioning system; it would cause too much damage to a fruitful and essentially functional international economy to take on these firms.”

We’ve kind of made the strategic decision to resolve these matters with this crude system in which [authorities] just take a check from HSBC for working with drug traffickers, or they take a check from UBS for raiding LIBOR. That’s much more radical than “Let’s not fuck with the economy while we’re still in the middle of a crisis.”

And additionally, by the way, part of Geithner’s justification for everything that happened is that the bailouts worked. And I think there’s a community of regulators who are in that camp, who feel like we did what we had to do to keep it all from falling down.

So, they say, “Why would we want to go back and open that Pandora’s box again? We had to make these difficult decisions. The bailout was maybe distasteful, but it worked. So let’s not go and dig that all up again.”

But that conflates different issues. Do we give all these companies a pass for robo-signing? For mass perjury? Do we give them a pass for subprime mortgage fraud?

Do we give rating agencies a pass for giving out phony ratings? That doesn’t make sense in terms of helping the economy become more functional and more able to serve the needs of everybody. All it really does is allow people to get away with crimes.

Some elites also argue — both in regard to the financial crisis as well as the torture regime — that we should be sympathetic to regulators or torturers because they were operating in a chaotic and stressful environment. We weren’t there, so we can’t judge, basically.

This is another thing that’s in my book. Lehman Brothers, right? So, this huge fiasco happens with the sale of Lehman Brothers to Barclays … Barclays bought off insiders at Lehman to basically rig the sale in Barclays’ favor …

And when the creditors who got screwed out of billions of dollars tried to get the courts to reopen the matter, the judge in the case, Judge Peck, explicitly came out and said, Well, it’s sort of like war, where one can talk about the fog of war, we can talk about the fog of Lehman.

This is an extraordinary situation, things were happening, decisions were made. It’s exactly as you said, the justification essentially becomes: shit happens. And that’s crazy. It’s total moral surrender, and just like the torture issue, there’s the “How can you judge if you weren’t there?” idea. I mean, that takes away our ability to judge anything if that justification holds. That’s just crazy.

To make a reference to our shared alma mater [Bard College], this line of argument reminds me of something Hannah Arendt once wrote — I think it was in “Origins of Totalitarianism,” but I’m not sure — which was, essentially, that people are more able to make the right judgment about a situation when they’re not in it.

When you’re not in the middle of something, you’re more able to see it from every angle and draw a fully informed, rational conclusion.

That’s absolutely true. There was a kind of collective Stockholm Syndrome that formed around the entire financial services sector and the regulatory sector. They were very much thrown together in the middle of this crisis, innocent and guilty alike, and they crafted this solution to get us all out of it.

And things were learned about what had gone on before 2008, but they essentially collectively decided they weren’t going to look into those things because they’re weren’t a part of the solution for getting out of the crisis.

They were the wrong people to judge what was happening during that period. They really needed outside, independent observers to go in and look to see [whether] was this really fraud or [whether] was this market mania, over-zealousness.

And every sane observer who has looked at it has said it was fraud, it was mass criminality — and [the financial sector is] not really the people you would want to ask for an objective opinion about that stuff.

That view goes so strongly against the rationale Obama gave when he first announced his economic team. Critics said, “The people you’ve picked to fix this mess are the ones who created it to begin with!” And Obama and his team would say, “Well, who knows it better?”

Exactly — they brought in all the people who had helped to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, who helped push through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.

Not only did they create too-big-to-fail essentially through the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act but they … greatly accelerated the financialization of the economy with the total deregulation of the derivatives market.

And these are the people you’re going to bring back to sit in judgment of what went on? They were the people who are screwing up to begin with — exactly the people you don’t want to have looking at this thing.

I started covering this Wall Street story way back in late 2008, and, from the very beginning, I heard disappointment on Wall Street from financial professionals who said Obama had missed this teachable moment.

Here’s this politician with these great communication skills, who could have come in and explained to people what had happened before 2008, that the banking sector had decided to massively engage in this totally socially useless activity of creating toxic mortgages and selling them off to people all around the world.

And instead of doing that, instead of creating a modern-day Pecora Commission and getting to the bottom of it and creating new and safer vehicles for people to trade in, they just threw a bunch of money at the problem and brought in all the same hacks who had created the problem and tried to sweep it under the rug.

Naming your book “The Divide” — was that intended at all to be a nod toward “The Great Divergence”?

No, it wasn’t intended to be that. I really struggle with titles. And headlines also. “Spanking the Donkey” was a really good title. I liked that one a lot.

“The Divide” is a little bit more of a serious book [than my others]; there’s less humor and less of that kind of jokey narrative stuff than in anything else I’ve written. So I think it’s an appropriate title, it seems to me.

I bring it up because it feels like wealth inequality is kind of this specter that’s hovering above the whole discussion of the two legal systems.

It’s all related. The Thomas Piketty thing, why are people interested in that? Elizabeth Warren’s book, Michael Lewis’s book, what Glenn’s doing over there with “The Intercept” — it’s this growing story about institutional inequality that is getting more and more pronounced with each passing year. And the impunity of certain institutions and certain individuals is growing all the time.

It’s a question that people are thinking about. Ten years ago, 15 years ago, you would never have seen a book like Thomas Piketty’s flying off the shelves, because it would have been too taboo for anyone to be asking out loud if there’s anything inherently dysfunctional about our form of corporate capitalism.

But people are asking that question now because it’s just so obvious and ubiquitous. Not just in the criminal justice system that I’m writing about, but in everybody’s life now. So yeah, I think we’re all kind of talking about the same thing; it’s just we’re talking about different parts of it.

I think looking at its effect on the criminal justice system is especially useful, too, because it’s evidence of Piketty’s argument about how inequality isn’t just bad economically, but is corrosive to our values, it’s a problem —

Morally.

Yes, morally.

Morally, it doesn’t work anymore. You just cannot have a society where people instinctively know that certain people are above the law, because it will create total disrespect for authority among everybody else. And that’s completely corrosive.

You need to have people believing in the system to some degree — even if it’s just an illusion, you need to have them believing. And that was … another thing I was trying to get to in this book, the difference between what happened in the Bush years, with the scandals with Adelphi and Enron and Tyco, and what happened now, [when] they just stopped seeing the necessity of keeping up appearances.

They didn’t even make a few symbolic prosecutions, and so it leaves the entire public with this glaring statistic that there were no prosecutions and there was massive crime. How does that make anybody else feel? How does it make you feel when you pay a speeding ticket, you can’t write that off, but HSBC can write off its $1.9 billion fine for drug trafficking?

People start to think about these things, and they start losing their faith in the system and it doesn’t work anymore. It’s funny, because when they talk about income inequality on the campaign trail and in these elections …

They always talk about it in this unthreatening, antiseptic way, and it’s just so much more extreme than that. It’s much broader and more disgusting problem than the way they typically present it in our political debate. So that was another thing I was trying to do, was to try to bring out the grotesque nature of the whole thing.

To your point about accountability, it reminds me of what some Nixon supporters — like Ronald Reagan — said during Watergate, before Nixon resigned, about the president’s cronies: They did things that were illegal but they weren’t, y’know, crimes.

Exactly. I heard that and very similar expressions all throughout this process. They weren’t crime crimes. Like, what does that even mean? There’s a difference between committing a crime and just breaking the law? There really isn’t a difference, and especially — even when you dig under the service of what the malefactors and the villains in my book did — they really werecrimes.

If you saw “Scarface” and that scene when Tony Montana is walking into the bank with his duffel bags full of money and walks out without the duffel bags, well, that’s what HSBC was doing, they were washing the money for murderers.

Price fixing? I mean, c’mon, that’s what the mafia does. Bribery? The Jefferson County case where they’re bribing local officials to get them into bad swap deals? It’s organized crime.

But in many cases they’re paper crimes so they don’t seem so bad, or they’re merely enabling somebody who’s violent so they’re not the person with actual blood on their hands, or it’s pennies at a time from millions of people — the “Office Space” model of crime — so people don’t feel like it’s a big robbery. I mean, that’s a crazy distinction. It’s an Orwellian expression.

You know, with your comment about how people need to believe in the system to some degree, it occurs to me that in a fundamental way, you’re actually making a small-c conservative argument. You’re not saying we need to burn everything to the ground and start over, you’re saying we need to stick with the principles we supposedly all believe in.

People forget that all my sources come from Wall Street. They’re all capitalists, they’re all ardent capitalists. They grew up, their passion in life was reading Adam Smith and believing in that whole world.

And I came into this story 6 years ago, whatever it was, not really knowing a whole lot about it, but certainly I never would have described myself as an ardent capitalist …

When people ask me what the solutions are to these problems, for me, the fastest shortcut to everything being cleaned up is disentangling the government from its unnatural support of these too-big-to-fail institutions, forcing them to sink or swim on their own in the real free market.

I never would have imagined myself making that argument five or six years ago, but that’s the argument … These people, not only are they not being prosecuted, but they’re not subject to the normal forces of the market anymore, and in a way that enables them even more …

If you were to force these companies to sink or swim on their own they’d be vaporized instantly. We see this every time there’s any hint the government is going to stop bailing these companies out or may consider not doing it in the future — they lose billions of dollars in market capitalization overnight …

It’s a very conservative argument [I’m making]. I’m not advocating for socialism; I’m advocating for the “Schoolhouse Rock” version of what we were taught about democracy and capitalism, and we have a long way to go just to get back to that.

 

Elias IsquithElias Isquith is an assistant editor at Salon, focusing on politics. Follow him on Twitter at @eliasisquith, and email him at eisquith@salon.com.
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US “Wall Street” and Petrodollar strategy. And the Rothschild financial stories

Posted by: on: May 28, 2012

“Wall Street” and the Rothschild owning biggest US banks

You might be suspicious that I am posting a few articles using Nalliah Thayabharan as a different pen name. That is not the case: Nalliah has been responding with extensive replies to a few of my posts.

This reply is a “comment” to my https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2012/05/18/finally-mighty-market-finance-and-liberal-capitalism-have-human-faces-to-confront/

“Wall Street is a confidence trick, a dazzling edifice built on paper promises, gambling, bets and rampant speculations. Wall Street doesn’t manufacture or produce anything.  Attractive Wall Street is built on paper.

Wall Street speculation caused a 70% increase in the price of wheat from June to December 2010 and severed food crisis in more than 35 countries.  It does not seem that there was a significant change in the global food supply or in food demand. The total value of Wall Street speculative financial derivatives reached more than $600 trillion – about 10 times global GDP.

Wall Street’s speculative derivatives are virtually untaxed and banks often avoid paying tax on profits from selling derivatives. Every consumer is paying more for commodities including food and fuel due to the excessive speculation by Wall Street.

Modern day bank robbers are at Wall Street and they wear grey suits and no masks. Rampant speculators, propagandists and financiers of Wall Street are all given some unfair advantage over the average consumers and taxpayers and the cumulative effect of the people watching selfishness prevail over the public interest has been an undermining of the public’s trust in the present US government.

There’s no question that Wall Street is rigged against the average consumers and taxpayers. Wall Street has a lot more information. Wall Street jerry-rigged the system so that Wall Street always win.  If Wall Street loses trillions, the US Treasury will bail the Wall Street out so it can go back and do it again.

About 50 trillion dollars in global wealth was erased between September 2007 and March 2009, including 7 trillion dollars in the US stock market, 6 trillion dollars in the US housing market, 8 trillion dollars in the US retirement and household wealth, 2 trillion dollars in the US individual retirement accounts, 2 trillion dollars in the US traditional defined benefit plans and 3 trillion dollars in the US non-union pension assets.

Greed, arrogance and incompetence created a massive meltdown, cost trillions, and still Wall Street comes out richer and more powerful.

There are trillions dollars of new money taken again from Americans to make deals and hand out outrageous bonuses. And when these trillions run out, Wall Street will come back for more until the dollar becomes junk. The value of the US dollar declined very significantly during the last 70 years.  The value of the US dollar in 1940 was worth 2,000% more than the value of the US dollar now.

The USA emerged from the World War II as the richest and most industrialized country in the world, with 50% of world’s manufacturing facilities. But today the USA is basically approaching bankruptcy. Many big US manufacturers are outsourcing to Mexico and China to increase their profits, adding more unemployment in the USA.

Manufacturing jobs in the USA declined 37% between 1998 and 2010. Since manufacturing industries has declined in the USA, the US competitiveness in the global marketplace has also declined.

Robust financial markets don’t imperil capitalism.  In the early 1980′s, Wall Street began to escape reasonable important regulations of the marketplace. The US government gradually adopted a “too big to fail” policy for the Wall Street, saving lenders with failing businesses from losses.

The demise of Glass Steagall act helped spawn the credit crisis by allowing the Wall Street to create financial instruments that allowed them to escape reasonable limits, including constraints on speculative borrowing and requirements for the disclosure of important facts. The extremely lucrative hedge funds and other risk management derivatives including credit default swaps don’t fund or invest in successful growing businesses. The credit default swap market was the single biggest cause of the crash 4 years ago.

Wall Street’s suicidal “liberal capitalism” built on rampant speculation eventually posed an untenable risk to the US economy—a risk that culminated in the trillions of dollars’ worth of the US government bailouts and guarantees that the US government scrambled starting in late 2008.

But in 2008, the US government was compelled to replace private risk takers at the Wall Street with government capital so that money and credit flows wouldn’t stop, precipitating a depression. As a result, Wall Street became impervious to the vital market discipline that the threat of loss provides.

Wall Street lenders of the financial markets continue to understand that the US government would protect them in the future if necessary. This implicit guarantee by the US government harms capitalism and economic growth.

The top 6 US banks had assets of less than one fifth of US GDP in 1995. Now they have two third of US GDP. The financial crisis was created by the Rothschild owned biggest US banks to consolidate power. The big banks became stronger as a result of the bailout by the US Treasury. The big banks are turning that increased economic clout into more political power. Wall Street has undue influence on the US government policies and this situation reflects a failure of democratic representation for the other 99% Americans.

Oligarchy is the political power based on economic power. And it’s the rise of  Wall Street in economic terms, that it’d turn into political power. Wall Street will  then continue to feed that back into more deregulation, more opportunities to go out and take reckless risks and capture trillions of dollars.

Wall Street only has the lobbyists. Today more than 42,000 Wall Street lobbyists manipulate USA’s 537 elected officials with huge campaign contributions that fund candidates who support their agenda. It no longer matters who’s the President of USA.

The political and economical leadership of the US has chosen to cartel profits and transformed the US economy to serve the colluding and unlawful oligarchy.  The political and economical leadership of the US is bailing out failed paradigms with trillions of dollars while committing social injustice to its people. The political and economical leadership of the US including the US Congress have now become Wall Street’s “Trojan Horses”.

The US banks are borrowing money at near zero interest from the US government, then lending it back to the US government at even mere fractions higher interest than they are paying. The net interest margin made by the US banks by lending the money back to the US federal government in the first 6 months of 2011 is 210 billion dollars.

George W Bush and Barrack Obama have doubled the US debt, and the American people reaped no benefits from it. The US military is out of Iraq.There is no victory in Afghanistan, and after a decade of protracted war, the US military does not control Afghanistan. Huge sums of US taxpayers’ money have flowed into the US armaments industries and great power invested into Homeland Security. The American empire works by stripping its citizens of wealth and liberty.

The organizers and profiteers of war and death – the past four generations of Bush family – Samuel P Bush, Prescott S Bush, George H W Bush and George W Bush along with a group of international investment bankers and corporate executives, have been instrumental in creating and profiting from extremely costly and destructive wars. Four generations of Bush family have reaped tremendous profits from the wars they orchestrated. The war profiteers of Wall Street are now pushing the US towards a nuclear war with Iran.

On 2012 New Year’s Eve, with almost no mainstream media attention given to it, President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, or NDAA, into law codifying indefinite military detention without charge or trial into law for the first time in American history. The NDAA’s dangerous detention provisions would authorize the president — and all future presidents — to order the military to pick up and indefinitely imprison people captured anywhere in the world, far from any battlefield.

Obama’s administration, and all future administrations can now use the military to detain individuals, including political dissidents – even American citizens on US soil – without trial or formal charges. Without court involvement or a jury deciding you are actually guilty. And “detain” is really a euphemism for IMPRISON, of course, in a semi-secret military black site, without access to an attorney, potentially for life.

Obama also signed into law what could trample American’s First Amendment rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of speech. The Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011, or Trespass Bill, signed into law by Barack Obama on March 9, 2012, “potentially makes peaceable protest anywhere in the US a federal felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.”

More specifically, peaceful protest within proximity to those protected by the Secret Service, including presidential candidates and the President, may be a federal felony now.

Worse, a former high-ranking NSA official, who spent more than three decades within the spy agency, just recently came out in a nationally televised interview and asserted that more than 20 trillion of American citizens’ communications have been intercepted – mostly without a warrant or judicial review of any kind.

The NSA is now building a $2 billion data centre in Utah to crunch all of this data. In other words, $2 billion of American taxpayer dollars are going toward spying on American citizens within the US without warrant or court approval. This is not only an outlandish waste of money, it’s illegal.

Also reporters at USA Today are now claiming that Pentagon-sponsored “propaganda contractors” have initiated a widespread character assassination and reputation destroying campaign against them.

Due to  the oligarchs’ rapacious looting and their purchase of a politically protected luxurious lifestyle, the people of the US are on the road to permanent serfdom under a police state. Tens of millions in the US live desperate slave-like existences and they hold little hope for a better life.

The democracy was not given to the people of the US on a platter. It is not theirs for all time, irrespective of their efforts. Either people of the US organize and they find political leadership to take this on or they are going to be in deep trouble.

The failures of governance to address the current critical issues have already produced catastrophic consequences. Now we are experiencing a major global paradigm shift and it is still unfolding. Thirty-two US States including California, Illinois, Nevada, Arizona, Florida, New Jersey and Michigan are on the brink of insolvency as their tattered and fading economy is now direr than ever.  Inevitably in very near future the US government will order police or military to martial law which may lead to a second American revolution.

In 1792, the US Congress adopted legislation titled “An act establishing a mint, and regulating the Coins of the United States”. Section 9 of that act authorized the production of the dollar coin and each to contain 416 grains of standard silver.

In July 1944 an agreement was reached at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference which pegged the value of gold at US$35 per troy ounce and the whole world looked on US$ as the gold standard in purchases.

But in 1971, the US President Nixon took the US$ off the gold standard after his administration realized that the privately owned Federal Reserve no longer had enough gold to buy back every dollar that foreign governments were handing in.

In 1973, the US President Nixon asked King Faisal of Saudi Arabia to accept only the US$ in payment for oil, and to buy US Treasury bonds, notes and bills with their excess profits, so that USA can continue spending money and not pay it back.  In return, the USA pledged to protect Saudi Arabian oil fields from seizure by USSR and other nations including Iraq and Iran….

Most countries around the world are forced to control trade deficits or face currency collapse, but not the USA. This is because of the US$’s reserve currency role and the underpinning of the reserve role is the petrodollar. Every nation needs to get US$ to import oil, some more than others. This means their trade targets US$ countries.

The vast majority of the oil is traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange and the London International Petroleum Exchange and both oil exchanges are owned by the US corporations and transact oil trades in only in US$.

The entire global trade structure today works around this dynamic, from Russia to China, from Brazil to South Korea and Japan. Every country aims to maximize US$ surpluses from their export trade. Currently over 13,000 billion of newly printed US$ is flooding into international commodity markets each year.

The reality is that the value of the US$ is determined by the fact that oil is sold in US$. If the denomination changes to another currency, such as the euro, many countries would sell US$ and cause the banks to shift their reserves, as they would no longer need US$ to buy oil. This would thus weaken the US$ relative to the euro.

In February 2011, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has called for a new world currency that would challenge the dominance of the US$ and protect against future financial instability. In May 2011 a 32-year-old maid, Nafissatou Diallo, working at the Sofitel New York Hotel, alleged that Strauss-Kahn had sexually assaulted her after she entered his suite. Strauss-Kahn quit IMF on May 18, 2011.

If any country attempt to eliminate the Petrodollar system and dump surplus US$ into the international and US financial markets to cause the quick collapse of the US$ may be attacked with HAARP (see note 2) to destabilize its economy and currency and to prevent a move away from the US$ and the petrodollar system. 

War is used as a continuous foreign policy with the USA in present egregious and unlawful abuse of their superpower status.

The US manufacturers who can’t compete with low-priced Chinese goods must either lower their costs or go bankrupt. To lower their costs, many US manufacturers are outsourcing to India and China, adding more unemployment in the USA. Manufacturing jobs in the USA declined 35% between 1998 and 2010. Since manufacturing industries declined in the USA, the US competitiveness in the global marketplace also declined.

The US economy is in a deep hole and US shouldn’t dig any more. Reckless money printing by privately owned Federal Reserve – known as “Quantitative Easing” (see note 3) and economical stimulus packages introduced in the aftermath of the Credit Crunch, has made very little impact on the growth of the US economy.

Current US economic growth is not adequate enough to create jobs and to get an economy back on track. The USA is living beyond its means and cannot cut expenditures or increase taxes to narrow the deficit. Now the banks are under enormous pressure to lend more money but reckless lending by banks got the US into this mess in the first place.

The credit crunch initiated in 2007 in the subprime mortgage market in the US had devastating spill-over effects for China’s exports. The scarcity of US$, due to the repatriation and leveraging flows into the US financial system caused a sudden plunge in the external demand for goods manufactured by China and triggered the consequent lay-off of several millions of workers in China. This experience encouraged China to use its own currency in trade.

The US may have averted a debt default by compromising on how to cut the US budget deficit, but underlying problems remain and those economic woes are driving a global search for an alternative reserve currency.  The USA now needs a net inflow of several billions US$ a day to cover its deficit.

The US President Barack Obama launched his primary anti-foreclosure plan, the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) in 2009 to encourage the US banks to rewrite mortgages of about 4 million homeowners at risk of losing their homes. But the fight against foreclosures continues to muddle and underwhelm. Only 300,000 homeowners received a mortgage modification in the first six months of 2011, while 600,000 houses fell into foreclosure.

The political and economical leadership of the US has chosen to cartel profits and transformed the US economy to serve the colluding and unlawful oligarchy.   The US banks are borrowing money at near zero interest from the US government, then lending it to the US government at even mere fractions higher interest than they are paying. The net interest margin made by the US banks by lending the money back to the US government in the first 6 months of 2011 is $211 billion.

The financial crisis was created by the Zionists owned biggest US banks to consolidate power. The top 6 US banks had assets of less than one fifth of US GDP in 1995. Now they have two third of US GDP. The Zionists owned big banks became stronger as a result of the bailout. They’re turning that increased economic clout into more political power.

Due to oligarchs’ rapacious looting and their purchase of a politically protected luxurious lifestyle, the US citizens are on the road to permanent serfdom under a police state. The financial situation of states including California, Illinois, Nevada, Arizona, Florida, New Jersey and Michigan is now more dire than ever.  Inevitably in very near future the US government will have to order police or military to martial law which may lead to a second American revolution.

The economic problems in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy are very precarious. The bailout phenomenon is not working in Greece which is on the brink of defaulting on its debt. It is impossible for the EU to bailout Italy which is the third largest economy in Europe. Klaus Regling, the head of the European rescue fund, recently said: “the EU could issue bonds in Chinese renminbi(yuan) and not in euro”.

India, 4th largest GDP and populous democracy in the world has joined with  China and Russia questioning US$ as reserve currency. India’s famed white marble monument to love “Taj Mahal” had charged US$15 or 750 Indian rupees as entry fee for each tourist, has been not accepting US$ anymore.

Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) are buying each other’s bonds and swapping currencies to lessen dependence on the US$. These four countries are among the biggest holders of US Treasuries and have combined reserves of almost 3,000 billion US$.

The value of the US$ declined significantly during the last 70 years.  The value of the US$ in 1940 was worth 17 times more than the value of the US$ now. The day OPEC stops pricing oil in fiat dollars, is the day the USA will collapse completely. The reason the fiat dollar game has gone on as long as it has the US$ as the global reserve currency.

In 2011 Russia began selling its oil to China in rubles. The US debt crisis adds new urgency to the China’s efforts to promote its currency renminbi as an alternative reserve currency. China has already signed bilateral currency swap agreements with several countries ranging from Indonesia to Belarus and Argentina to promote its currency renminbi as a means of settlement in international trade.

China’s growing trade and financial links with the rest of the world will make the renminbi more acceptable. To compound matters further Japan and the China have decided to trade in their respective currencies giving a smack to the not so almighty US$.

Now we are experiencing a major global paradigm shift and it is still unfolding. If countries continue to lose their willingness to hold the US$ the impact to the US$ and the collapse of the US$ could be very  dramatic.

US Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776, states:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long-established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpation of rights, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government…”

Napoleon Bonaparte said in 1815: “Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.” 


“There is no calamity greater than lavish desires, no greater guilt than discontent and no greater disaster than greed” Laozi

“Greedy desire is endless and therefore can never be satisfied” Buddha

(This article and so many others claim that “Financial Zionism” is leading the US…I beg to differ: It is the US that comprehended the influence of Zionism early on and used it to further its dominion on world finance. Zionism is glad to oblige, doing what it does best, at a the grandest of scales…)

Note 1: Since Nalliah Thayabharan article is pretty lengthy, I decided to relegate large sections, PetroDollar stories to another posts, and a few sections to footnotes such as note 2. 

Note 2: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has accused the USA of using HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) based weapons to create earthquakes. HAARP is an ionosphere research program that is jointly funded by the US Air Force, the US Navy, the University of Alaska and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The HAARP program operates a major Arctic facility, known as the HAARP Research Station, located on an US Air Force owned site near Gakona, Alaska.

HAARP has the ability to manipulate weather and produce earthquakes, since it is capable of directing almost 4 Mega Watts powerful radio waves in the 3 to 10 MHz region of the HF band up into the ionosphere. This energy can be bounced off of the ionosphere and permeate the earth and subsequently cause strong intense oscillations along fault lines of targeted areas to produce earthquakes.  Using HAARP, depending on the frequency, focusing, wave shape, adversaries can induce at a distant aiming point, a variety anomalous weather phenomena such as hurricanes, flooding, or drought.

Note 3: Benjamin Franklin opened the eyes of the Rothschild family in England on the benefits of issuing more money as the internal market in the US grows. the Rothschild family managed to be the exclusive money printer for the US in 1804. The massive printing of worthless dollars is not the case in current US, but a blatant mean to dominate world finance…

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What! Forced to Keep working? For whom?

Posted by: on: October 15, 2010

The French mathematician Pascal wrote: “All afflictions of mankind is his feeling restless in a room:  He never learns to be at rest.  Man sincerely thinks that he is seeking rest and repose periods, but in fact he is after agitation.”  It is like life abhors the void; it is as keeping in restful position is tantamount to worthlessness.

Maybe idleness is mother of all vices; but it is certainly that idleness is mother of all virtues:  How else could you meditate, voluntarily inhale deeply, exhale slowly, reflect on your past achievement and plans, comprehend your limitations, capabilities, and potentials, setting up future action plans, revisit serious talks that passed you by, regain courage and the will to go forward?

Forced work and unhappy and unsafe workplace are excellent excuses to running away from pressing responsibilities at home, to delegating important responsibilities, to faking being too busy to listen and deliver on promises.  Is working for salary an excellent way out to earning some money to be freer in taking better decisions for better quality products, services, and taking longer leisure quality time?

Let me clarify how I comprehend class structure in capitalist system in order to drive my point through.  The lowest class is represented by 20% of the downtrodden or daily workers.  When a government claims that unemployment has reached say 10% it means that the lowest middle class is suffering most of the unemployment rate. 

For example, if we say that at least 70% of the “working people” are from the middle class (divided among the lower, middle, and upper) middle classes and that 70% of the middle class are represented in the lower middle class section then, about 4.9% of the unemployed are from the lower middle class (for example: 70%*70%*10%).  The other 5.1% of the unemployed are constituted from all the other classes (excepting the 10% of the richest class that hoard 50% of the wealth of the nation:  Its amassed wealth works for the richest class)

When a government starts drastic cut in the budget (except the military: It goes without sayin) it affects primarily the lower middle class, since the 20% of downtrodden are already suffering at the bare minimum and cannot contribute to taxes.  Actually, the class of the downtrodden feels helpless and waits for the middle class to begins marching revolts to join it and scare the richest class and their political, security forces, legal, and law institutions for a short while.  When unemployment jumps to 20% that affects 10% of the lower middle class then, serious problems await the power-to-be in capitalist systems:  This number of 10% of unemployed lower middle class is a critial turning point for serious revolts. 

It is to the advantage of most of the citizens in capitalist society that unemployment increases to beyond 20% for serious reforms to be considered and enacted in forms of laws and financial institutions control, restrictions, and constraints.

Are you being pressured to forced labor?  If you are not a teenager and think that you have skills then, would you work for McDonald and invite your kids to eat deadly food?  If you hate to lie and scam people then, would you work for Wall Street?  If you cannot suffer selling products and services that you don’t believe in because they are of low quality or unsafe to use then, would you work as a salesman for such a company?

First, do you know what kinds of moral values and ethical conducts that best represent your spirit and would make you happy to noticing their applications  around you and in your neighborhood?  Would you take sometime to learn and select the work you enjoy doing and stop this harassing fleeing exercises?  Would you mind getting organized around clear laws that equalize opportunities and fairness in employment?

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US government forging the dollar

Posted by: on: July 26, 2010

International financial institutions, backed by the US government, created vast operations of fraudulent mortgage schemes as witnessed since 1990.  First, the Saving and Loans banks were “saved” by Bush Sr. infusing $500 billions with tax payers money.  The mortgages were estimated to have 100% probability of losing their entire values.  The federal government and the Saving and Loans banks knew what they were doing. The two powers knew that homeowners would never be able to pay the interest.  Then, a new scheme was invented called “re-financing”

Those junk mortgages were re-sold on the world market and packaged “as sure as treasury bonds”.  This re-packaging scheme was called “derivatives” (as drifting money operations).  James Kenneth Galbraith, professor at the university of Texas, labeled these schemes as “identical to forging money, no more no less”

First, the tax payers (the honest hard-working citizens) paid for the saving and Loans banks in 1990, then they re-paid these fraudulent “faked money” mortgages in 1997, and then, after the Big Financial Crash.  Over one trillion dollars covered the fraudulent operation under the knowledge and ascent of the successive US Administrations.

The US government have been forging dollars since Nixon uncovered the dollars that was seemingly supported by gold reserves. It is not over.  The forging of dollars is going strong and private investors are being scammed every day.

Every time, the US Treasury states that the US economy is strong; when the federal Reserve governor states that the financial state is stable; when the president states during the State of the Union that the US status is strong and secure then, you may say that the government is still forging dollars.

The dollars is disseminated by political pressures; because the US Administration controls the “World bank” and the “International Monetary Fund”; because the US aircrafts carriers roams all oceans and seas.

Wall Street is going strong and hiring.  Over new 160,000 jobs were opened by Wall Street that covers 20% of the budget of the State of New York and 12% of the City of New York.

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Obama-metrics: What to expect?

Posted by: on: January 27, 2010

Obama-metrics: What to expect?

In the previous two posts I enumerated the promises of Barack Obama campaign promises and how to rebound. Bill Adair (Pulitzer Prize) published the Obama program that included 510 promises. Promises being executed are 240 promises, 86 promises were kept, 26 were compromised, and 62 were blocked by the oppositions.

            Russell Banks reported the restrictions of the US political systems on the initiatives of President Barack Obama campaign program.  The US system is Not democratic for two reasons: First, in a democratic system the leader of the winning party is the leader of the nation and it is the way around in the US except when the President is running for a second term: Once a President is elected then his party appoint him leader of the party. Thus, the President is controlled by the heavy weight politicians and administrators of his party.  Actually, the President is not elected by the majority of popular votes but by the delegates of the States.  There are many instances when the majority of the popular vote was defeated (Bush Junior is the most recent example)

            Second, even if the winning party has majority in the Senate, any text of law needs 60 out of 100 Senators to agree on reading a text.  A Senator from Nebraska has as much power as the one representing New York State. Thus, the President is constantly managing the heavy weight politicians and Senators of his party to passing any law before even negotiating with the opposing party.  Anything in the US to get moving needs frequent popular active pressures on the Senators of the States of both parties to reaching a law favorable to the neediest: a Senator has to realize that financial backing by lobbyists cannot counter balance the angry voters.

            The US is a Republic trying for a century to becoming a plutocracy (run by the heavy weight politicians and lobbyists); the US political system might get there if Obama fails to capitalize on his landslide victory. We can understand why for a century the successive Administrations did their best to alienate people from getting involved in politics by making the political process more complex and by extending activities that shun people away from politics such as sports and entertainments.

            In a bipartite system it is the center that is the determining factors; mainly the economic and internal policies. Obama shifted the center a bit to the left by moving from total privatization concept that began 40 years ago to involving the Federal government.  Obama re-appointed the culprits of the financial disaster such as Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Peter Orszag, and Ben Bernanke; all of whom coming from Wall Street related institutions. For example, the Administration refrained from selecting among the syndicate leaders, militant associations, intellectuals and university professors. It seems that Obama started with a high dose of confidence in the authority of the richest class in matter of financial and economic management.

                        Obama managed to bring public opinion around the classes that need more attention and care or what is more likely, it is the American people that opened Obama eyes to new realities and he grabbed the opportunity. If the public was not convinced that banks, lobbyists, and multinational financial institutions are pure robbers of their public wealth then Obama could not have won with such a landslide.

            So far, Obama was successful in forging ahead and putting in execution many promised reforms of his program announced during his campaign trail by shear momentum: The public that supported him failed to get on the move; thus, Obama had to relent and bend before the opposition public activities before launching new “controversial” initiatives. The new public health program added 30 million more citizens but it is to kick in by 2013.  More citizens are demanding and expecting to witness a Presidential will for stringer regulations and control on the banks and multinational financial institutions.

            Unfortunately, in foreign policies Obama is playing the traditional and exhausting Washington provincial game that requires internal consensus: Obama is resuming the traditional strategy save in his rhetorical ability in the selection of words, tones, and style.

            Obama did not prove to the public that he exercised good imaginative alternatives to redressing the financial and economic crisis.  Obama has to remind the public that he is the victor so that the public may extend him voluntary rights to guide the nation against the many political restrictions that are erected against public opinion pressures.  For the time being, if you inhale deeply then you realize that US policies didn’t make a qualitative dent for long-term reforms.

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China: the main Capitalist partner to the US

Posted by: on: January 12, 2009

China: the main Capitalist partner to the US (January 11, 2009)

 

            “Communist” China is the largest accumulator of dollars with a reserve of two trillions or two third of its GNP. With such a reserve China is currently the main capitalist partner to the USA; China has interest that the dollar does not devalue, that its currency the Yuan does not increase in value which would make Chinese products less competitive, and that the financial system does not break down.  “Communist” China is catching up quickly on Japan for the purchase of Treasury Bonds, a way of lending the US the needed cash to resume a Capitalist financial policy.  China is not only the factory of the world but also the prime banker to the US.

 

            The Chinese Wen Jiabao PM stated after the financial crash of Wall Street: “We have got to unite. In these difficult times, China has joined the USA.  We believe that our financial rescue will aid at stabilizing the economy and world financial system and thus, preventing a major chaos.  I believe that cooperation is indispensable”.   China is expecting full cooperation of the US in erecting a new Capitalist system and it has more muscles than the European Union in enforcing the re-structuring of the financial system that would guarantee its investments in the USA that amount by the trillions of dollars.

 

            Many of Chinese investments in the USA are in the red after the crash.  The US multinationals that China invested heavily in have been saved with Chinese influx; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were saved too.  Lehman Brothers was not spared for reasons.  The Bush Junior Administration had selected Lehman Brothers to artificially increase oil prices to $150 through speculation in order to hurt the ever voracious China in oil demands.  China reacted vigorously.  The world financial system was rotten and China demanded to cooperate in the timing of the crash if the US wanted China to stabilize the financial system after the crash.  Lehman Brothers was the sacrificial messenger of the impending financial crash.

 

            The financial strength of the US was based on the dollars as the universal currency in world economical exchange.  Bretton Woods (in New Hampshire) agreements in 1944 on the financial rules consecrated the pivotal power of the dollars; the British economist John Maynard Keynes tried hard during this conference to create a new world currency the “Bancor” but the US imposed its hegemony. Since then “the US administrators could decide what they wanted and it was up to the rest of the world to pay up the deficit”; Treasury Secretary John Connally stated it clearly “The dollar is our currency, but it is your problem”. 

 

            In 1960, the French President De Gaulle denounced the “exorbitant privilege of the dollars”.  Since the 1980’s investment capitals have been going into the USA and then the US multinationals would re-invest the borrowed capitals wherever they desired; 90% of US Treasury Bonds are purchased by foreign States. Nixon was very comfortable de-linking the dollars from the value of gold and the world had to go along with whatever the US Administrations thought was beneficial to the US regardless of the ultimate danger that exposed the world financial system.

 

            Consequently, States opted to save the surpluses of their dollar in “Sovereign Funds” meant to purchase foreign companies and enhance the flux of technology and know how and the latest management and financial methods.  In one decade, the weight of the dollars in the reserve of world exchange has decreased from 71% to less than 61%. Still, the currencies of the EU, China, and Japan are not that widely used and adopted to counterweight the power of the dollar in trade exchange; but the center of gravity is clearly shifting toward China.

 

            President Elect Barak Obama wants to re-invigorate US economy with major State investment (with Chinese cash); he must be closely cooperating with the Chinese on the amount and ways of re-launching the US economy.

 

Note: The Chinese regime was mute on the atrocities committed in Gaza; apparently, China is not hot on matter of human rights and crimes of wars and does not want to open the Pandora Box of its own horror stories.

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The largest and best planned scheme in history

Posted by: on: December 21, 2008

The largest and best planned scheme in history: executed by the worst cowards of all (December 22, 2008)

 

The USA Administrations knew for three decades that they were no longer producing any real value-added economy and the US politicians had no guts to tell the American people the hard facts; that getting back to work harder on producing stuff that people need to buy is a must. The FED, the Treasury and all the US multinational financial institutions knew the theory of Money Trade Cycle; that when the trend of inflation is continuously on the rise then the outcome is a financial crisis.  The theory established that businesses and economy follow a pattern of upswings and downturns, and if the government refrains from meddling with the normal interest rates of doing business then the market economy based on real value-added economy will adjust to the changes but there was no real economy in the first place. 

The FED knowingly, through political pressures, kept lowering the interest rates below the healthy level of a normal market economy which generated inflation rates that could no longer be controlled or stabilized. The FED, the Treasury and the cartel of multinational financial institutions overextended credits through traditional fiduciary media and then through new financial gimmicks (secondary and tertiary worthless paper money) to resume world financial market hegemony that could not lead but to crisis. 

What you hear from the talking heads that the real problem was lack of financial monitoring and control by the Federal government and the financial institutions is pure lies; all the financial institutions knew about the real problem and the inevitable financial crash. The Bush Junior Administration, in cooperation with the financial multinationals and the Financial Times, decided unilaterally and without a UN resolution, for a pre-emptive war on Iraq. The rationale for that catastrophic decision was that the military expense will generate many folds in profit through the control of oil distribution and blackmailing the neighboring Arab rich sovereign funds of the potential threat of Iran.  The Arab rich States were no fouls of that strategy but they went along as mere small oligarchic and monarchic States with no national identity.

By the summer of 2006, the US was losing the war in Iraq and in Afghanistan and its prestige was bottoming worldwide.  The US needed one last gamble to iron out its image and give the illusion of a force to be reckoned with and the power to reconstruct the world.  The hasty invasion of Israel of Lebanon in July 2006 was meant to claim total victory over Hezbollah and make Iran cower in order not to face direct confrontation with the US.  A victory was to announce to the world that the “Greater Middle East Strategy” was successful.  The July War turned out to be a total disaster and a debacle to Israel, even after extending the war for 33 days against the will of the world community.

In August 2006, the normal scheme of siphoning in the sovereign funds of the oil rich States and the small stock investors had reached a plateau. It reached a plateau because the investors realized that a crisis is in the offing and the scheme could not function normally unless the same level of increase in junk paper investment is maintained.

The US Administration and the financial multinationals realized that all is lost and it was time to decide on the timing for the financial crash.  It was normal to leave the timing to the final stages of the Presidential election campaign.  If the Democrat were favored by the US citizens then a psychological shock might decide them to shift to the Republican Party at Election Day.

In the meantime, oil prices were fictitiously raised to unprecedented level for two purposes: first, the highest consumers of oil such as China, Japan, and the European Union States would refrain from purchasing at such a high price and second, the US would be accumulating oil reserve for the imminent period, since the US is not paying in hard currencies but in worthless paper transactions with Saudi Arabia.

 

The FED, the Treasury and the cartel of multinational financial institutions purposely engineered the crisis and they triggered the timing.  The timing was perfect: since no more foreign financial rescue is coming in then the financial rescue will happen under duress from all rich States.  The motto was: either you caught up under duress or you will all have to suffer a global economic recession.

The code name for the precise timing of the financial crisis was: artificial oil price reaching $120 per barrel; the messenger was the multinational financial brokerage firm Lehman Brothers.  All the members in the cartel of the financial multinationals received the order to activate the countdown for the Wall Street crash; they sold out their shares to invest in anything that has real value.  The little people who invested their life savings in stocks paid the price.

  The US consumers were enjoying low priced items imported from China and the manufacturing bases were exported overseas to benefit from cheap manpower and limited legal constraints. Trillions of dollars were injected to extend the illusion for the US citizens to resume their lavish spending on consumerism, new gas guzzling cars, stocks, and overvalued Real Estates. The world had already experienced a vivid advance taste of financial crisis in 1989 in the south-east Asian markets, Japan and Latin America. The fundamental problem was tackled by the Asian States and they worked harder to producing value-added economy. The successive US Administrations and politicians had no guts to tell the American people the hard facts, that a recession is as sure as the sun rises, and that getting back to work harder on producing what people need to buy is a must. 

  

The world lauded the US for its timely energetic reaction of rounding up 700 billion dollars to rescue the failing commercial banks.  Wrong; the package was already decided upon before the crash and the bold figure of 700 billions dollars was psychologically marketed as covering the 60% of the unsolvable Real Estates: the US people would gladly preserve its homes and pay for it.  The trick is this package is a first installment and other packages are waiting in the queue pending the appropriate political conditions.

Well, financial rescue came from everywhere but this didn’t stop recession anyway. How can you stop recession when the USA is not producing any value that people are ready to purchase?  The worst part is that President Obama is not willing to challenge the US citizens with the hash facts, at least not for a long time to come.

The US people has preferred the lax attitude since the Reagan Administrations; most of the US citizens wanted to believe in an illusory wealth assuming that the worldwide acceptance of the dollars as the currency of choice is more than sufficient to keeping the illusion. The hard facts are in; tackling decades of myopia and dependence on the hard work of the other people has to be grabbed by the horns.  The world recession is the making of the lazy, faint hearted US people who failed, in their cockiness, to recall what made them a great nation! 

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Blood all over the floor in Latin America

Posted by: on: December 8, 2008

Blood all over the floor (December 8, 2008)

It is 1952 and General Douglas Mac Arthur was saying “Our relative decline, our incapacity to conserve our resources, the vertiginous growth of our national debt, and the weight of our financial engagements are putting our next generations at risk”.

It is 1972 and the inflation was rampant; the Midwest farmers were in high debt and Latin America was in acute debt. President Carter order the FED chairman Paul Volcker to contain inflation.

Volcker invited the Wall Street Journal executives for lunch and asked them “When blood is all over the floor, would you guys support my policy?” 

The executives did not hesitate and they were affirmative.

The US returned to a strong dollar policy.

The Midwest farmers sold their farms at peanut prices and Latin America experienced blood shed for half a century, such as genocides, dictatorship, military coups, facilitating the investment of the US multinationals, destroying the equatorial forests, and barbarically excavating raw material mines in Chili and Peru and so on.

The US has been indebted for over half a century at the expense of over two billion people living under the survival level. I have a simple question:

And the question remains|:”why the US should not experience blood on the floor?”

In the nineties, many books were published warning that the premises and practices of “mondialization, or globalization” are volatile and highly flammable.

For example, Danny Roderick (1997), in his “Has globalization gone too far in its way?”, stated that

1. First, eliminating regulations on commerce and investment was premature;

2.  Second, that there was lack of fairness in the practices among the developed and under-developed States.

3. Third, that the US and European quality standards were being forced on States that cannot produce according to the satisfaction of the western nations; that was an excellent excuse for outsourcing and relocating factories in countries with cheaper manpower; the consequence was that all these products could not be exported but into States with the same quality standards.

What would happen if these markets stopped importing?

All the products that are not fit for inner commerce would have to be sold as scrap.

4. Fourth, the coverage of social guarantees was exhausted in the under-developed States and the population left to mend for themselves. The Establishments in the US mocked these warnings since “History has reached an end” and the US economic model was in for ever.

The unemployed in the US have no where to go to die within their family members.

In China, millions of the little people are being forced back into their remote villages. To do what?

Most probably the Chinese out of work in sweat shop factories would die away from urban eyes and far from the media.

The US people have been in debt for a decade to cover all kind of charges because their earnings in the last two decades were lowered constantly while 1% owns one fifth of the US wealth.

I have a simple question “why those blood sucker billionaire capitalists should not have their blood spattering on the floor?”

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Let us beat Wall Street priorities

Posted by: on: November 30, 2008

Revised economic fundamentals for enterprises (November 29, 2008)

Revisiting the essential criteria in financial sheets for stock evaluation

Within a month of the Wall Street financial crash, major EU industries (excluding the financial, real estates, and insurance institutions) have laid off over 62, 000 jobs and the USA over 77, 000 jobs.

There is no end in the forthcoming months and the jobless rate has broken all record high.  The communication, auto, computer hardware, retail stores, airline, and chemical companies are the hardest hit so far.

As the jobless rate increases then society would drift into unstable climate of insecurity in individual health and safety and retention of their properties.

Without a climate of security no influx of investment can repair the long-term malaise in the slow moving society to recovery. It is a definite pattern that in any downturn the workers, elderly and new employees, are the first to be laid off. 

As if it is the manpower was the culprit and not the management.  Consequently, a revised understanding of what constitute the worst case impact on a society should be evaluated.

Economical models for the productivity of enterprises need to be revised to include the sustainability of enterprises under fluctuating and cyclical financial crisis that is fast becoming the norm.

The working capital should be able to remain intact for the demand cycle and the value added in manpower quality of the main industry units unaffected by the flux of capitals.  Consequently, I suggest tackling two fundamental concepts.

First, the working capital should be managed differently from the general acceptable accounting procedures to resist fluctuation in central rate and money devaluation.

It is very reasonable that the retirement funds of the manpower and the stocks purchased in the company by the manpower be within the working capital management.  The manpower should then feel highly active to evaluating and discussing how the working capital is allocated and invested.

Second, we need to start a new field for defining added-values and how to measure it concretely instead of rationalizing it as a proxy ratio.

Added values should be measured accurately because it is intrinsically related to the quality of manpower.

Added-value is what makes an industry viable economically to the workers, stakeholders, and society in general.  It would not be a piece of cake to operation value-adding parameters; otherwise I would not be suggesting a new economic field for the characterization of what we mean by value-adding economy.

Every industry would have to define its value adding element such as in the service industry, hardware products, software products, chemical, car, heavy duty machineries, tourism industry, commercial banking, and financial investment banking, and so on.

Every industry has it proper cyclical market demands and its competitors, localized or multinational, dependent or not on cyclical supplies of raw materials or manpower.

I am afraid that the first criterion that would jump to mind is for the concept of value-added economy to be represented in monetary terms, which is not the proper criterion.

Value-added economy is the investment in the manpower; for example, programs in continuing education, acquiring new skills, versatility and flexibility to fill vacancies, knowledge of the competition, the products, the tools, and the equipment.

Value-added economy is raising the quality of the manpower so that a large company would aid in subsidizing private complementary companies, from among its qualified personnel, when the tough gets going.

Value-added economy is elevating the knowledge of the personnel and assisting them to find new jobs during harsh downturns.  The only monetary value or ratio associated with added value would be the expense (value added capital) invested for manpower quality relative to working capital (VAC/ WC) for raising the quality and professionalism of the manpower.

When this ratio diminishes then a company has gotten lax and is turning away from the new fundamentals.  Obviously, an independent team should be hired to prepare, control, manage, and evaluate the effective progress in manpower quality at all levels of skills.

Quantifying the quality of workers and employees is the main task in measuring value-added industries; it is feasible and its time has finally come and it should be the optimizing factor in equations instead of rates in profit, shareholders equity, return on capital and so forth.

Inevitably most of the variables used in current optimizing model of financial and economic problems would still be effective, many with significant re-definitions, but when the re-orientation is based on the added value of manpower then a new picture would emerge and standard financial analysis re-discovered. 

The quality level of the manpower can be defined as the potential added value (PAV) in time of crisis and the working added value (WAV) in normal business cycles.

WAV is the criterion that stocks in the market are valuated in addition to other financial criteria; PAV would have critical significance in times of hardships, especially, if the company recorded the events when this potential was managed and directed in previous situations to overcome serious market or natural conditions.

As armies conduct maneuvers to test the readiness of its effective so companies have the duty to conduct maneuvering re-organizations of potentials to test and evaluate its field readiness and re-evaluate its programs for value adding quality in manpower. 

I think that the more credible and frequent the organizational maneuverings the higher the market value of the company.  The more frequent the maneuverings the more evident would be the needs for downsizing and decentralizing and retaining coherent and manageable number in work force.

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