Forbes: United States Is a Plutocracy and Academic Economists Are the Vichy

Forbes?!

Interesting piece, but what was most interesting was that it is from Forbes, 'the Capitalist Tool' business magazine, and not Rolling Stone or Mother Jones.

As Bloomberg television, and Mayor Bloomberg's city administration I might add, go full bore plutocrat, Forbes is standing for genuine reform, or at least permitting it to be discussed? As Sheldon Cooper on Big Bang Theory might ask when chili and margaritas are served on pizza night, 'where are we, what is happening?'

The author, Lee Sheppard, is "a contributing editor of Tax Notes, a Washington-based weekly tax journal. Trained as a lawyer, she is a legal commentator on tax questions, and is well known for her trenchant observations. She covers all areas of tax law, including international taxation, corporate taxation, partnership taxation, bankruptcy tax questions, pensions and tax accounting questions."

Economics certainly is, as Jamie Galbraith said, a 'disgraced profession' that is largely in denial, but it has good company in politicians, accountants, big media spokesmodels, business CEOs, bankers, and regulators.

Forbes
Economists' Malign Influence on Taxes
By Lee Sheppard
May 3, 2012

If Occupy Wall Street supporters are looking for new places to protest, they might think about picketing the economics departments of the most prestigious American universities.

Not only would they find a more convivial place to camp than an ugly concrete slab in lower Manhattan, but protesting at universities would serve two purposes.

First, those who are unemployed and burdened with non-dischargeable student debt — which now exceeds U.S. consumer debt —could make a point about the inutility and expense of American higher education.

Second, and more important, protesters could confront another group of elites who are responsible for the financial meltdown and have yet to apologize: the nation’s academic economists.

Free market economic “literature” as economists call it — and their papers frequently are works of fiction — gave succor and intellectual respectability to the decades of deregulation and tax cuts that have bankrupted the country. Congress is compromised, to be sure, but lobbyists and members need economic studies as cover for what they are doing.

The United States is a plutocracy, with an income and wealth distribution that rivals South America’s worst cases, but economists refuse to acknowledge that these outcomes are attributable to ill-advised public policies on taxation, regulation, trade, and education spending over the last several decades.

Economists bleat about “globalization” as though it were inevitable rather than a set of deliberate policy choices. Markets are political creations, so results produced by them are not inviolable or free from question. And they don’t always produce equilibrium...

Read the rest at Forbes.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Pete 'n' Repeat - Fed Is the 'Vampire Squid of Squids'

A bit much perhaps, ahead of the Non-Farm Payrolls.

Let's see if those are inverse H&S bottoms forming up on the gold and silver charts, or something else.

ADDITIONAL STATEMENT BY BILL MURPHY, CHAIRMAN OF THE GOLD ANTI-TRUST ACTION COMMITTEE

HEARINGS ON THE METALS MARKETS, MARCH 25, 2010


On March 23, 2010 GATA Director Adrian Douglas was contacted by a whistleblower by the name of Andrew Maguire. Mr. Maguire, formerly of Goldman Sachs, is a metals trader in London. He has been told first hand by traders working for JPMorganChase that JPMorganChase manipulates the precious metals markets and they bragged how they make money doing so.

In November 2009 he contacted the CFTC enforcement division to report this criminal activity. He described in detail the way in which JPM signals to the market its intention to take down the precious metals. Traders recognize these signals and make money shorting the metals along side JPM.

He explained how there are routine market manipulations at the time of option expiry, Non-farm payroll data releases, and Comex contract rollover as well as other adhoc events…"

Jim Grant had an interesting interview on Bloomberg television this afternoon.

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Jitters In Front of the Non-Farm Payrolls

The Political Continuum and the Uncomfortable Center

It will be important to keep this model in mind as we go forward.

Turmoil and crisis favor polarization, and fear brings out the extremes of both sides who unfortunately tend to make the most noise, because they are often wrong but rarely in doubt.

It will be hard to maintain a centered approach if you are independent or moderate. The far right will see you as a leftist, and the far left will see you as on the right. This does not say much about you and your thinking, but more about them and their unbalanced approach to the serious problems facing the developed nations.

It is hard to talk reasonably to anyone holding a position that is not held in reason, by its very nature. And so we might find ourselves caught in the middle as it were when the histrionics start in earnest.

Even in matters of faith, there are conflicts with the distortions of the far right, who hold faith as a rationale for their own ends rather than an end in itself. I do not judge, but I can listen. And when someone holds forth about a God without compassion and love, and when they reject His own laws, they declare themselves for what they are, rather than anything about Him.

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

For a believer in one God, Jew, Moslem, or Christian,  everything else is commentary, a 'how-to' and important for the individual on their particular Way, but tragically far too often a snare and a temptation, a place where people wish to hide, to avoid and resist obeying His righteous commands, and to feed their own passions and desires for power and privilege and place.

As for the irreligious far left, they are simply given in to the opposite pursuit of the will to power and glorification of the State (themselves) over all, in the manner of fascists but with a different name. The only freedom they truly desire is the freedom to dominate and enforce their wills as superior beings. They despise the common people, and that permeates their words.   They view themselves apart, and most often don't want anything to do with them after the initial struggle is done and the people have bled for them.

This is why the so-called neo-conservatives were so easily able to shift from far left to far right. They still view the world in the same distorted ways, but with different labels. As Aristotle might have said, it is all a question of balance.

Neither side wants anything to do with the individual soul and spirit of genuine love. They are 'campaigners' fully engaged in expediency for their cause, and its end is power. This is why a period of reform is so often frought with danger of one extreme or the other.

This is all to say, remember, as uncomfortable as it may seem at times, as each side grows louder and more strident, you are not alone. Our calling is to stay the course, maintain the happy medium, and keep the fires burning, and the children fed and warm.