Wall Street As a Negative Economic Force: Looting Will Continue Until Exhaustion or Collapse

“My hunch is that no one talks about the birth and death rates of American business because Wall Street and the White House, no matter which party occupies the latter, are two gigantic institutions of persuasion. The White House needs to keep you in the game because their political party needs your vote. Wall Street needs the stock market to boom, even if that boom is fueled by illusion.”

Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, American Entrepreneurship, Dead or Alive?

As Pam and Russ Martens note in their recent article below, "Wall Street’s overarching function today is that of an institutionalized wealth transfer mechanism, propped up by compromised regulators and a dysfunctional Congress."

This is a terrific article, right on point, getting the bigger picture that almost all economic writers are missing, or failing to state in a clear and direct manner without mincing words.    The moneyed interests are not beneficent wealth creators doing God's work and creating jobs and value.  These are more like white collar criminals who are able to bend the law to their will, acting like parasites on the real economy.

THEY are 'too big to fail,' and you are 'too little to matter,' except as a convenient source of their income.

The financial sector is a utility function in a healthy, sustainable, and productive economy.   But in our misdirected mania to establish and maintain the global dollar supremacy in our pride and power, we have turned a utility function into a top priority and the central focus of the economy, to our own ultimate misfortune. 

Our society is out of balance and distorted as a result.  Corporations take precedence over people, and money directs the course of public policy and foreign entanglements, to its own ends.  And the people are left to suffer.

And you need to read it here.  A short excerpt is below.

The decline and stagnation of America coincides with the rise of an outsized and increasingly corrupt financial sector, that is misdirecting resources and gaming the savings and efforts of the great mass of the people, reallocating money to it own wasteful purposes.

As such, the Fed is not only being wasteful with their QE programs, they are actually being counterproductive by propping up a corrupt and harmful financial system that is a major impediment to economic recovery and progress.   This is the lesson of the lost decades of Japan, and we are not only repeating them here, but are strongly influencing and urging their adoption in Europe.

 

And shame on the liberal economists, who will promote stimulus of any sort in their ideological fervor, and cheerlead the results along with the White House, without being mindful that stimulus in itself is not a good thing, if it stimulates the wrong things.   QE is not an effective means of stimulus for the real economy, but it is a windfall and a sinecure for the financial sector and the one percent.

 

People and the real economy need jobs and higher real wages, but not increasingly powerful Banks for which they are prey.  Aggregate demand will stimulate jobs and wages, but not government handouts to the wealthy, who will chase hot money scams and monopolies before sharing their wealth with employees and productive investments.

The privileged and fortunate have an age old model of feudalism in mind:  lords and serfs.  And if the financial elite have their way, the looting, surveillance, and repression will continue, until exhaustion or collapse. 

 

Their greed knows no bounds, and is never satisfied.   Power and pride have their own imperatives: better to be a lord in a kind of hell, than just another servant, even in heaven.

 

History has shown, again and again, how pernicious the corruption can become once the abuse of power takes root in a system.  And how hard it finally falls.

People cannot work harder and save faster than the financiers and their politicians can steal their capital, misdirecting it into scams, frivolous 'innovations,'  unjust taxes and subsidies, and ultimately into their own financial machine where it enables even more scams, corruption, and malinvestments.

And reform cannot happen in a system where the moneyed interests vet the presidential candidates in advance, for whom they will allow you the privilege of voting, whipped up into an enthusiasm by the emotional directed messages of their corporate media.  Vote for Red!  No, you fool, vote for Blue!

The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustainable recovery.

Evidence Grows Showing Wall Street as a Negative Economic Force

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

January 27, 2015

Wall Street’s overarching function today is that of an institutionalized wealth transfer mechanism, propped up by compromised regulators and a dysfunctional Congress. As the PBS program Frontline reported in 2013, if your work career spans 50 years and you receive the historic return of 7 percent on stocks in your 401(k) plan, the 2 percent typical fee charged by Wall Street mutual funds will gobble up almost two-thirds of your account.

The Frontline program was called The Retirement Gamble. Wall Street On Parade checked the math and found this was not a gamble but a certainty: 'under a 2 percent 401(k) fee structure, almost two-thirds of your working life will go toward paying obscene compensation to Wall Street; a little over one-third will benefit your family – and that’s before paying taxes on withdrawals to Uncle Sam.'"

This is a very short excerpt from a larger and more data packed article you may read for free here.

Related: Wall Street's Threat to the Middle Class - Reich

It's A Wonderful Life: Bedford Falls or Pottersville?

"These men are springs without water and mists driven by a storm. Blackest darkness is reserved for them. For they mouth empty, boastful words and, by appealing to the desires of sinful nature, they entice people who think they avoid error.

They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves, for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him."

Where Are We Heading — Bedford Falls or Pottersville?
By Robert Reich
December 22, 2012

It’s easy to feel discouraged about the bullying by right-wing Republicans and their patrons over everything from gun control to taxes and social safety nets to trade unions and jobs.

Every year about now I watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” again to remind myself what Frank Capra understood about America — its essential decency and common sense.

In many ways the nation is better than it was in 1946 when the movie first appeared. Women have gained economic power and reproductive rights; we enacted Civil Rights and Voting Rights and, through Medicare and Medicaid, dramatically reduced poverty among the elderly; we began to tackle environmental devastation; we stopped treating gays as criminals and have even started to recognize equal marriage rights. We elected and then re-elected the first black president of the United States. We have enacted the bare beginnings of universal healthcare.

But we are still in danger of the “Pottersville” Capra saw as the consequence of what happens when Americans fail to join together and forget the meaning of the public good.

If Lionel Barrymore’s “Mr. Potter” were alive today he’d call himself a “job creator” and condemn George Bailey as a socialist. He’d be financing a fleet of lobbyists to get lower taxes on multi-millionaires like himself, overturn environmental laws, trample on workers’ rights, and shred social safety nets. He’d fight any form of gun control. He’d want the citizens of Pottersville to be economically insecure – living paycheck to paycheck and worried about losing their jobs – so they’d be dependent on his good graces.

The Mr. Potters are still alive and well in America, threatening our democracy with their money and our common morality with their greed.

Call me naive or sentimental but I still believe the George Baileys will continue to win this contest. They know we’re all in it together, and that if we succumb to the bullying selfishness of the Potters we lose America and relinquish the future.

Jon Stewart: Chaos On Bullshit Mountain

Out of the mouths of comedians...

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Chaos on Bulls**t Mountain - The Entitlement Society
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

What kind of a people could delight in machine-gunning the lifeboats of those who are attempting to escape, not to thrive but to merely survive, the mayhem and chaos that these same sociopaths have created through their selfish and criminal actions? And what sort of gullible fools will listen to them, and assist them in their work even if passively by saying nothing?

"The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people.

What is called 'fellow traveling' (collaboration) was primarily business interest: one pursues one’s own advantage before all else and, simply not to endanger oneself, does not talk too much. That is a general law of the status quo."

Theodor Adorno

Have we truly learned nothing? Must we make the same mistakes over and over again?

These 49 percent include for the most part the elderly, students, the working poor, soldiers and their families, and the disabled.

These 'handouts' include Social Security and unemployment insurance which people have paid for when times were good. The ranks of the working poor have swelled for sure, because of a financial collapse brought on by unfettered greed and fraud of Wall Street, and a stagnant real median wage for the past 20 years in the face of rising costs, often driven by monopolies, fraud, and cartels.

A kleptocracy is sucking the life out of working men and women by force and fraud. A group of sociopaths, who have committed one of the great crimes in history, not only blithely walk away with their loot unpunished, but come back to rob their victims once again, to finish the job. And they gorge themselves on the public trust even while begrudging the widow her pittance, or trying to steal it.

They pervert and corrupt so many, filling their hearts with their passionate lies, appealing to what is the very worst in them. They are truly a den of vipers and thieves.

You can believe what you will, but you will be held responsible for your beliefs, and your actions, what you do and do not do.

And finally, it takes a comedian to stand up and say it. "Shame."

Source: Reuters

Here Comes the 'Freedom to Invest Act'

As a general rule of thumb, any law in America that contains the word 'Freedom' or 'Patriot' in its title is brazenly promoting a crime, or a fraud, or some self serving corruption of the common good.

I suppose that this indirect level of freedom will just have to do until a bipartisan committee can come up with a plan to more directly 'free up' your IRA and 401k for the use of corporate America.

At least you are still free to vote, although the corporations get to pick the candidates and count the votes.

Some animals are more equal than others.

Rolling Stone
Evil Corporate Tax Holiday Deal Still Alive
By Matt Taibbi
August 4, 9:29 AM ET

There was some talk that a corporate tax holiday might be rolled up somehow into the debt-ceiling deal. I heard that from a few quarters in DC in the weeks leading up to Obama’s Bighornesque debt/supercommittee massacre.

However, the tax holiday turned out to not be part of that deal. That does not mean, however, that the proposal is dead. In fact, calling around in the last few days, I’m hearing that it is very much alive.

The action revolves around a bill sponsored in May by Texas Republican Kevin Brady (and co-sponsored by Utah Democrat Jim Matheson) called the Freedom To Invest Act, which would “temporarily” lower the effective corporate tax rate to 5.25 percent for all profits being repatriated.

Essentially, this is a one-time tax holiday rewarding companies for systematically offshoring their profits since 2004 – the last time they did this “one-time” deal...