"The problem of the last three decades is not the 'vicissitudes of the marketplace,' but rather deliberate actions by the government to redistribute income from the rest of us to the one percent. This pattern of government action shows up in all areas of government policy."Dean Baker"Most of them became wealthy by being well connected and crooked. And they are creating a society in which they can commit hugely damaging economic crimes with impunity, and in which only children of the wealthy have the opportunity to become successful. That’s what I have a problem with. And I think most people agree with me."Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation"No lie can live forever."Thomas Carlyle
There is a currency war ongoing. It's objective is the subjugation of whole peoples, including the domestic public. In a very real sense it is nationless.
There is an 'audacious oligarchy' of self-defined rulers who move freely between private industry and government, whose primary objective is preserving and furthering their own power and self-interest.
Sheldon Wolin called this 'inverted totalitarianism.' Economist Robert Johnson has called it an 'audacious oligarchy.' And so have many other responsible economists from Simon Johnson to Jeffrey Sachs.
I do not think that warnings or lessons from history will be sufficient to provoke change. Hubris makes people deaf and blind to consequences. They will not learn, nor be informed by anything outside their own small circles.
This implies that there will be another financial crisis, a 'hard stop' in the Western markets. How and when that will occur I do not yet know.
Have a pleasant evening.
BILL MOYERS: And you say that these this oligarchy consists of six megabanks. What are the six banks?JAMES KWAK: They are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo.BILL MOYERS: And you write that they control 60 percent of our gross national product?JAMES KWAK: They have assets equivalent to 60 percent of our gross national product. And to put this in perspective, in the mid-1990s, these six banks or their predecessors, since there have been a lot of mergers, had less than 20 percent. Their assets were less than 20 percent of the gross national product.BILL MOYERS: And what's the threat from an oligarchy of this size and scale?SIMON JOHNSON: They can distort the system, Bill. They can change the rules of the game to favor themselves. And unfortunately, the way it works in modern finance is when the rules favor you, you go out and you take a lot of risk. And you blow up from time to time, because it's not your problem. When it blows up, it's the taxpayer and it's the government that has to sort it out.BILL MOYERS: So, you're not kidding when you say it's an oligarchy?JAMES KWAK: Exactly. I think that in particular, we can see how the oligarchy has actually become more powerful in the last since the financial crisis. If we look at the way they've behaved in Washington. For example, they've been spending more than $1 million per day lobbying Congress and fighting financial reform. I think that's for some time, the financial sector got its way in Washington through the power of ideology, through the power of persuasion. And in the last year and a half, we've seen the gloves come off. They are fighting as hard as they can to stop reform.
The Financial Oligarcy in the US - Bill Moyer's Journal
