2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumEconomics -- New Democratic Style
Warfare via Banking
Milton Friedman and the Rise of Monetary Fascism
The Dark Age of Money
by JAMES C. KENNEDY
CounterPunch Oct. 24, 2012
EXCERPT...
Monetary Fascism was created and propagated through the Chicago School of Economics. Milton Friedmans collective works constitute the foundation of Monetary Fascism. Knowing that the term Fascism was universally unpopular; Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics masquerade these works as Capitalism and Free Market economics.
SNIP...
The fundamental difference between Adam Smiths free market capitalism and Friedmans free market capitalism is that Friedmans is a hyper extractive model, the kind that creates and maintains Third-World-Countries and Banana-Republics, without geo-political borders.
If you say that this is nothing new, you miss the point. Friedman does not differentiate between some third world country and his own. The ultimate difference is that Friedman has created a model that sanctions and promotes the exploitation of his own country, in fact every country, for the benefit of the investor, money the uber-wealthy. He dressed up this noxious ideology as free market capitalism and then convinced most of the world to embrace it as their economic salvation.
SNIP...
Monetary Fascism, as conceived by Friedman, uses the powers of the state to put the interest of money and the financial class above and beyond all other forms of industry (and other stake holders) and the state itself.
SNIP...
Money has become the state and the traditional state is forced to serve moneys interests. Everywhere the Financial Class is openly lording over sovereign nations. Ireland, Greece and Spain are subject to ultimatums and remember Hank Paulsons $700 billion extortion from the U.S. Congress. The $700 billion was just the wedge. Thanks to unlimited access to the Discount Window, Quantitative Easing and other taxpayer funded debt-swap bailouts the total transfers to the financial industry exceeded $16 trillion as of July 2010 according to a Federal Reserve Audit. All of this was dumped on the taxpayer and it is still growing.
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/24/the-dark-age-of-money/
Think this is history or something in far-off Faroffia? Think again.
President Clinton and the Chilean Model.
By José Piñera
Midnight at the House of Good and Evil
"It is 12:30 at night, and Bill Clinton asks me and Dottie: 'What do you know about the Chilean social-security system?' recounted Richard Lamm, the three-term former governor of Colorado. It was March 1995, and Lamm and his wife were staying that weekend in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House.
I read about this surprising midnight conversation in an article by Jonathan Alter (Newsweek, May 13, 1996), as I was waiting at Dulles International Airport for a flight to Europe. The article also said that early the next morning, before he left to go jogging, President Bill Clinton arranged for a special report about the Chilean reform produced by his staff to be slipped under Lamm's door.
That news piqued my interest, so as soon as I came back to the United States, I went to visit Richard Lamm. I wanted to know the exact circumstances in which the president of the worlds superpower engages a fellow former governor in a Saturday night exchange about the system I had implemented 15 years earlier.
Lamn and I shared a coffee on the terrace of his house in Denver. He not only was the most genial host to this curious Chilean, but he also proved to be deeply motivated by the issues surrounding aging and the future of America. So we had an engaging conversation. At the conclusion, I ventured to ask him for a copy of the report that Clinton had given him. He agreed to give it to me on the condition that I do not make it public while Clinton was president. He also gave me a copy of the handwritten note on White House stationery, dated 3-21-95, which accompanied the report slipped under his door. It read:
Dick,
Sorry I missed you this morning.
It was great to have you and Dottie here.
Here's the stuff on Chile I mentioned.
Best,
Bill.
Three months before that Clinton-Lamm conversation about the Chilean system, I had a long lunch in Santiago with journalist Joe Klein of Newsweek magazine. A few weeks afterwards, he wrote a compelling article entitled,[font color="green"] "If Chile can do it...couldn´t North America privatize its social-security system?" [/font color]He concluded by stating that "the Chilean system is perhaps the first significant social-policy idea to emanate from the Southern Hemisphere." (Newsweek, December 12, 1994).
I have reasons to think that probably this piece got Clintons attention and, given his passion for policy issues, he became a quasi expert on Chiles Social Security reform. Clinton was familiar with Klein, as the journalist covered the 1992 presidential race and went on anonymously to write the bestseller Primary Colors, a thinly-veiled account of Clintons campaign.
The mother of all reforms
While studying for a Masters and a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University, I became enamored with Americas unique experiment in liberty and limited government. In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote the first volume of Democracy in America hoping that many of the salutary aspects of American society might be exported to his native France. I dreamed with exporting them to my native Chile.
So, upon finishing my Ph.D. in 1974 and while fully enjoying my position as a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University and a professor at Boston University, I took on the most difficult decision in my life: to go back to help my country rebuild its destroyed economy and democracy along the lines of the principles and institutions created in America by the Founding Fathers. Soon after I became Secretary of Labor and Social Security, and in 1980 I was able to create a fully funded system of personal retirement accounts. Historian Niall Ferguson has stated that this reform was the most profound challenge to the welfare state in a generation. Thatcher and Reagan came later. The backlash against welfare started in Chile.
But while de Tocquevilles 1835 treatment contained largely effusive praise of American government, the second volume of Democracy in America, published five years later, strikes a more cautionary tone. He warned that the American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money. In fact at some point during the 20th century, the culture of self reliance and individual responsibility that had made America a great and free nation was diluted by the creation of [font color="green"] an Entitlement State,[/font color] reminiscent of the increasingly failed European welfare state. What America needed was a return to basics, to the founding tenets of limited government and personal responsibility.
[font color="green"]In a way, the principles America helped export so successfully to Chile through a group of free market economists needed to be reaffirmed through an emblematic reform. I felt that the Chilean solution to the impending Social Security crisis could be applied in the USA.[/font color]
CONTINUED...
http://www.josepinera.org/articles/articles_clinton_chilean_model.htm
The Future holds more of the Same, unless We the People can dosumpinaboudid.
5 WikiLeaks Revelations Exposing the Rapidly Growing Corporatism Dominating American Diplomacy Abroad
One of WikiLeaks' greatest achievements has been to expose the exorbitant amount of influence that multinational corporations have over Washington's diplomacy.
By Rania Khalek / AlterNet June 21, 2011
One of the most significant scourges paralyzing our democracy is the merger of corporate power with elected and appointed government officials at the highest levels of office. Influence has a steep price-tag in American politics where politicians are bought and paid for with ever increasing campaign contributions from big business, essentially drowning out any and all voices advocating on behalf of the public interest.
Millions of dollars in campaign funding flooding Washington's halls of power combined with tens of thousands of high-paid corporate lobbyists and a never-ending revolving door that allows corporate executives to shuffle between the public and private sectors has blurred the line between government agencies and private corporations.
This corporate dominance over government affairs helps to explain why we are plagued by a health-care system that lines the pockets of industry executives to the detriment of the sick; a war industry that causes insurmountable death and destruction to enrich weapons-makers and defense contractors; and a financial sector that violates the working class and poor to dole out billions of dollars in bonuses to Wall Street CEO's.
The implications of this rapidly growing corporatism reach far beyond our borders and into the realm of American diplomacy, as in one case where efforts by US diplomats forced the minimum wage for beleaguered Haitian workers to remain below sweatshop levels.
In this context of corporate government corruption, one of WikiLeaks' greatest achievements has been to expose the exorbitant amount of influence that multinational corporations have over Washington's diplomacy. Many of the WikiLeaks US embassy cables reveal the naked intervention by our ambassadorial staff in the business of foreign countries on behalf of US corporations. From mining companies in Peru to pharmaceutical companies in Ecuador, one WikiLeaks embassy cable after the next illuminates a pattern of US diplomats shilling for corporate interests abroad in the most underhanded and sleazy ways imaginable.
While the merger of corporate and government power isn't exactly breaking news, it is one of the most critical yet under-reported issues of our time. And WikiLeaks has given us an inside look at the inner-workings of this corporate-government collusion, often operating at the highest levels of power. It is crystal clear that it's standard operating procedure for US government officials to moonlight as corporate stooges. Thanks to WikiLeaks, here are five instances that display the lengths to which Washington is willing to go to protect and promote US corporations around the world.
CONTINUED...
http://www.alternet.org/story/151370/5_wikileaks_revelations_exposing_the_rapidly_growing_corporatism_dominating_american_diplomacy_abroad
Explains why rightwing asswipes hate DU. Also gives us a heads-up on why we need Libaral, Progressive Democratic Action.
mmonk
(52,589 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)Swiss bank UBS is enjoying good times, thanks to the US taxpayer and a number of key US political leaders.
Hillary Helps a Bankand Then It Funnels Millions to the Clintons
The Wall Street Journals eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.
by CONOR FRIEDERSDORF, The Atlantic, JUL 31, 2015
The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. The Wall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.
The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.
A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts, the newspaper reports. If the case proceeded, Switzerlands largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlementan unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.
Then reporters James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus lay out how UBS helped the Clintons. Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014, according to the foundation and the bank, they report. The bank also joined the Clinton Foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, through which it lent $32 million. And it paid former president Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House.
The article adds that there is no evidence of any link between Mrs. Clintons involvement in the case and the banks donations to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, or its hiring of Mr. Clinton. Maybe its all a mere coincidence, and when UBS agreed to pay Bill Clinton $1.5 million the relevant decision-maker wasnt even aware of the vast sum his wife may have saved the bank or the power that she will potentially wield after the 2016 presidential election.
SNIP...
As McClatchy noted last month in a more broadly focused article that also mentions UBS, Ten of the worlds biggest financial institutionsincluding UBS, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Goldman Sachshave hired Bill Clinton numerous times since 2004 to speak for fees totaling more than $6.4 million. Hillary Clinton also has accepted speaking fees from at least one bank. And along with an 11th bank, the French giant BNP Paribas, the financial goliaths also donated as much as $24.9 million to the Clinton Foundationthe familys global charity set up to tackle causes from the AIDS epidemic in Africa to climate change.
CONTINUED...
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/hillary-helps-a-bankand-then-it-pays-bill-15-million-in-speaking-fees/400067/
About UBS Wealth Management
It's Buy Partisan
After his exit from the US Senate, Phil Gramm found a job at Swiss bank UBS as vice chairman. He later brought on former President Bill Clinton. What a coincidence, they are the two key figures in repealing Glass-Steagal. Since the New Deal it was the financial regulation that protected the US taxpayer from the Wall Street casino. Oh well, what's a $16 trillion bailout among friends?
It's a Buy-Partisan Who's Who:
President William J. Clinton
President George W. Bush Heh heh heh.
Robert J. McCann
James Carville
John V. Miller
Paula D. Polito
Anthony Roth
Mike Ryan
John Savercool
SOURCE: http://financialservicesinc.ubs.com/revitalizingamerica/SenatorPhilGramm.html
One of my attorney chums doesn't like to see his name on any committees, event letterhead or political campaign literature. These folks, it seems to me, are past caring.
Some of why DUers and ALL voters should care about Phil Gramm.
DUers should know what nation's "news media" aren't reporting: the Buy Partisan connections between what's best for the few and what's best for the many.
Surprised I didn't blame Greenspan. Thanks, mmonk!
mmonk
(52,589 posts)one of my favorite people here.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Your friendship means the world to me. Whether our fellows know it or not, the USA needs to approach things a little differently if we want to get some different results:
Bill Clintons Dubious Economic Legacies
by Jack Rasmus, March 1, 2016
With every televised U.S. presidential debate, listeners are fed a line of bull by candidates about how great previous United States presidents were and how the country needs to return to their policies in order to make America great again!
All thats needed, the Republican candidates say, is to resurrect Reagan policies and todays U.S. problems will be solved. Vote for me, and Ill return to Reagan and restore U.S. greatness, were told.
With the Democrats, its a bit more subtle but the underlying message is the same. Under Hillarys hubby, Bill Clinton in the 1990s, the U.S. created a record number of jobs, incomes were rising, the healthcare crisis was contained, and the U.S. had achieved a new economy of prosperity that would only improve further in the 21st century. Under Bill, we were on the right track. George W. Bush screwed it up by reversing course. All we need then is to get back to that Clinton track and good times will return again.
But what are the facts? Were Clinton policies a diversion from Reagan? A continuation? Worse?
SNIP...
The Clinton campaigns frequent claims today that Bills two terms in office were days of exceptional economic good times for U.S. workers is just plain false. On several policy fronts, Bill Clinton was actually worse than Reagan especially with regard to free trade and benefits like health care and pensions. At best, Bill Clintons presidency and legacy therefore represents a continuation of Reagans not a shift from his predecessor.
CONTINUED...
https://jackrasmus.com/2016/03/01/bill-clintons-dubious-economic-legacies/
Otherwise, we'll be doing the very definition of insanity ascribed to everybody this side of a Bartlett's.
amborin
(16,631 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)The Almighty Dollar trumps Democracy, which seems to be the problem.
Like an opaque miasma of conflicting interests and individuals, all helping each other keep their heads-up above what looks like oily water.
Bill Clinton Speech in Malaysia Irks Investors
By DON VAN NATTA Jr. (From The New York Times of December 05, 2008)
Mr. Clinton spoke before nearly 3,000 people in Kuala Lumpur at the invitation of Vinod Sekhar, a Malaysian businessman whose foundation paid Mr. Clinton $200,000, according to several people with knowledge of the fee. The figure is on the lower end of the scale that Mr. Clinton usually commands for his speeches.
You should be proud of this man, Mr. Clinton told the audience, pointing at Mr. Sekhar, the 40-year-old chief executive of the Petra Group, a privately held rubber technology company.
SNIP...
Mr. Clinton often praises companies that pay him to speak. In 2001, he received $125,000 from an Illinois management consulting company called International Profit Associates. It was later revealed that the Illinois attorney general was investigating accusations of deceptive marketing tactics by the company.
After a start-up Web search site named Accoona donated $700,000 worth of stock to his foundation, Mr. Clinton praised the company at a corporate event in December 2004.
I hope you all get rich, he told Accoona executives, but, remember, you are doing something good for humanity as well.
SOURCE: http://pgoh13.com/clinton_onmalaysia.php
It feels hypocritical, pointing out what I might do were I making big bucks off the billionaire class, until I think of what's happening to the planet and my country. Thanks for the important heads-up, amborin!
Uncle Joe
(58,107 posts)Thanks for the thread, Octafish.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Operating on behalf of Nixon and Wall Street, the CIA and Milton Friedman & Friends perfected the art of turning the screws through austerity in Chile.
Too bad, so sad about all the little people who didn't go along with the big plan. Oh well. "Progress."
"The Chicago Boys in Chile: Economic Freedom's Awful Toll"
Orlando Letelier
August 28, 1976
EXCERPT...
The Economic Prescription and Chile's Reality
SNIP...
These are the basic principles of the economic model offered by Friedman and his followers and adopted by the Chilean junta: that the only possible framework for economic development is one within which the private sector can freely operate; that private enterprise is the most efficient form of economic organization and that, therefore, the private sector should be the predominant factor in the economy. Prices should fluctuate freely in accordance with the laws of competition. Inflation, the worst enemy of economic progress, is the direct result of monetary expansion and can be eliminated only by a drastic reduction of government spending.
Except in present-day Chile, no government in the world gives private enterprise an absolutely free hand. That is so because every economist (except Friedman and his followers) has known for decades that, in the real life of capitalism, there is no such thing as the perfect competition described by classical liberal economists. In March 1975, in Santiago, a newsman dared suggest to Friedman that even in more advanced capitalist countries, as for example the United States, the government applies various types of controls on the economy. Mr. Friedman answered: I have always been against it, I don't approve of them. I believe we should not apply them. I am against economic intervention by the government, in my own country, as well as in Chile or anywhere else (Que Pasa, Chilean weekly, April 3, 1975).
SNIP...
A Rationale tor Power
SNIP...
Until September 11, 1973, the date of the coup, Chilean society had been characterized by the increasing participation of the working class and its political parties in economic and social decision making. Since about 1900, employing the mechanisms of representative democracy, workers had steadily gained new economic, social and political power. The election of Salvador Allende as President of Chile was the culmination of this process. For the first time in history a society attempted to build socialism by peaceful means. During Allende's time in office, there was a marked improvement in the conditions of employment, health, housing, land tenure and education of the masses. And as this occurred, the privileged domestic groups and the dominant foreign interests perceived themselves to be seriously threatened.
Despite strong financial and political pressure from abroad and efforts to manipulate the attitudes of the middle class by propaganda, popular support for the Allende government increased significantly between 1970 and 1973. In March 1973, only five months before the military coup, there were Congressional elections in Chile. The political parties of the Popular Unity increased their share of the votes by more than 7 percentage points over their totals in the Presidential election of 1970. This was the first time in Chilean history that the political parties supporting the administration in power gained votes during a midterm election. The trend convinced the national bourgeoisie and its foreign supporters that they would be unable to recoup their privileges through the democratic process. That is why they resolved to destroy the democratic system and the institutions of the state, and, through an alliance with the military, to seize power by force.
In such a context, concentration of wealth is no accident, but a rule; it is not the marginal outcome of a difficult situation -- as they would like the world to believe -- but the base for a social project; it is not an economic liability but a temporary political success. Their real failure is not their apparent inability to redistribute wealth or to generate a more even path of development (these are not their priorities) but their inability to convince the majority of Chileans that their policies are reasonable and necessary. In short, they have failed to destroy the consciousness of the Chilean people. The economic plan has had to be enforced, and in the Chilean context that could be done only by the killing of thousands, the establishment of concentration camps all over the country, the jailing of more than 100,000 persons in three years, the closing of trade unions and neighbourhood organizations, and the prohibition of all political activities and all forms of free expression.
While the Chicago boys have provided an appearance of technical respectability to the laissez-faire dreams and political greed of the old landowning oligarchy and upper bourgeoisie of monopolists and financial speculators, the military has applied the brutal force required to achieve those goals. Repression for the majorities and economic freedom for small privileged groups are in Chile two sides of the same coin.
CONTINUED...
http://www.ditext.com/letelier/chicago.html
Three weeks after this was published in The Nation (Aug. 28, 1976), Orlando Letelier was assassinated by a car bomb in Washington, D.C.
FWIW: Then-CIA Director George Herbert Walker Bush knew all about Operation Condor and didn't stop them from killing Orlando Letelier and his American companion, Ronni Moffit.
DCI Bush even told then-Congressman Ed Koch (D-NY), threatened anonymously for his work uncovering Operation Condor and its associated evil at the time, "Nothing I can do."
Why does this matter today? What the CIA and Big Money Boys did in Chile in 1973, they're doing to Greece and the USA now.
Something else: They know if We the People are sufficiently worried about keeping a roof over the family and food on the table, We won't have much time to worry about little stuff like Democracy.
More on the subject: from the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
PS: You are most welcome Uncle Joe! Thank you for grokking!
mmonk
(52,589 posts)Unfortunately little resistance due to propaganda. When everyone wakes up, it will be too late.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)They've taken the fun out of Education.
Explains the defunding and the rest, including why America today is owned and operated by warmongers and traitors.
First, the guy made it OK to be a racist in America, again.
Just to make sure people got the message of where he was coming from, Reagan declared his candidacy in 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
President Obama would do well to learn, if not remember, the story from Terrel Bell, Prunefaces's shocked Secretary of Education, who heard White House staff refer to Dr. King as "Martin Lucifer Coon":
After he became one of the one-percent, Pruneface didn't care much for poor people or working people.
The Trickle Down crowd still holds sway in Washington, ask David Stockman or Penny Pritzker.
Then, the Prunefaced sumbitch made some kind of deal with the Ayatollah in order to hold the hostages until after the election.
Then, after the election, and after the Ayatollah blew up the US barracks in Beirut, Reagan did another deal with the Ayatollah to free another batch of hostages and used the profits to finance an illegal war in Central America.
Of course, Poppy Bush pardoned the various conspirators on behalf of the BFEE.
Poppy sort of took charge of things after Reagan, eh, slowed after that almost-assassin's bullet got him.
[font size="1"]In happier days, Detroit, July, 1980.[/font size]
mmonk
(52,589 posts)MisterP
(23,730 posts)requires tremendous violence to split the workers (and even the old owners) from their businesses and to crush the unrest caused by austerity; economics and social services are taken over by the military (Argentina's intel services even had a theological division, monitoring the pulpits and confessionals)
Octafish
(55,745 posts)By Washington's Blog
Washington's Blog 24 October 2013
The NSA not only spied on the leaders of Germany, Brazil and Mexico, but on at least 35 world leaders.
The Guardian reports:
One unnamed US official handed over 200 numbers, including those of the 35 world leaders, none of whom is named. These were immediately tasked for monitoring by the NSA.
SNIP...
And even the argument that 9/11 changed everything holds no water. Spying started before 9/11 and various excuses have been used to spy on Americans over the years. Even NSAs industrial espionage has been going on for many decades. And the NSA was already spying on American Senators more than 40 years ago.
Governments who spy on their own population always do it to crush dissent. (Why do you think that the NSA is doing exactly the same thing which King George did to the American colonists which led to the Revolutionary War?)
Of course, if even half of what a NSA whistleblower Russel Tice says that the NSA is spying on and blackmailing top American government officials and military officers (and see this) then things are really out of whack.
SOURCE with LINKS to details and sources:
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/10/proof-that-nsa-spying-is-not-really-focused-on-terrorism.html
Oh well. Did you that guy eat the thing on his lip during Jeopardy?
bobthedrummer
(26,083 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)Brazen! It's as if they think we're all under the influence of lead poisoning and can't notice.
On 3 April 2009, Politico bannered innocuously (and deceptively, given the shocking core that was buried here - Obama's statement), "Inside Obama's Bank CEOs Meeting." Eamon Javers reported Obama telling Wall Street's CEOs, inside the White House, "My administration ... is the only thing between you and the pitchforks." (This essentially secret meeting, and the comment itself, had occurred on 27 March 2009, but Javers failed to cite the date, which was indicated only under the accompanying AP wire photo of the CEOs coming out of this publicly unannounced event.) Obama's remark was implicitly analogizing here: he implied that he was protecting these people not from prosecutions for crimes (which he actually was), but instead from angry irrational mobs outside, who were driven by blind hatred (like the lynch mobs were in the Old South). Obama was metaphorically siding here with the plantation owners, not with the slaves; with the KKK, not with their victims. This elite Black was telling them that he would protect them from prosecution. He wasn't going to protect the public - which he here analogized to simply a hate-obsessed mob of bigots.
SOURCE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/obama-finally-lays-his-ca_b_3025743.html
Politico article referenced above: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0409/20871.html
"We're all in this together." -- Robert Gibbs, White House Press Secretary
Ken Chenault, American Express
Ken Lewis, Bank of America
Robert Kelly, Bank of New York Mellon
Vikram Pandit, Citigroup
John Koskinen, Freddie Mac
Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs
Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase
John Mack, Morgan Stanley
Rick Waddell, Northern Trust
James Rohr, PNC
Ronald Logue, State Street
Richard Davis, US Bank
John Stumpf, Wells Fargo
SOURCE: http://13bankers.com/title/
Why do I have a problem with that? We the People not only made the Banks whole, we paid those who stole it bonuses -- and our ELECTED officials went along.
As a Democrat -- in every election since my first, 1976 -- I believe all people are created equal and no one is above the law, including the rich and powerful. For some reason, since Jimmy Carter left office in 1981, they get bailouts and We the People get called to pick up their tab. That's not democracy, that's tyranny.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)The Rich Get Richer
by MIKE WHITNEY
CounterPunch, May 6, 2015
EXCERPT...
More borrowing, more risk taking, more financial instability. And its all the Feds doing. If rates were neutral, then prices would normalize and CEOs would not be engaged in this reckless game of Russian roulette. Instead, its caution to the wind; just keep piling on the debt until the whole market comes crashing down in a heap like it did six years ago. And thats the trajectory were on today, in fact, according to TrimTabs Investment Research, February saw buybacks in the amount of $104 billion, the largest monthly figure since these flows were first tracked 20 years ago.
So things are getting worse not better. Bottom line: The Fed has led the country to the cliff-edge once again where the slightest uptick in interest rates is going to send the economy into freefall.
But why? Why does the Fed keep steering the country from one financial catastrophe to the next?
Thats a question that economists Atif Mian and Amir Sufi answer persuasively with one small chart. Check it out:
Here is the distribution of financial asset holdings across the wealth distribution. This is from the 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances:
The top 20% of the wealth distribution holds over 85% of the financial assets in the economy. So it is clear that the direct income from capital goes to the wealthiest American households. (Capital Ownership and Inequality, House of Debt)
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/05/06/the-rich-get-richer/
Even when it fails the nation, "The System" works for those intended.
mmonk
(52,589 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)By Greg Palast
Reader Supported News, September 16, 2013
Joseph Stiglitz couldn't believe his ears. Here they were in the White House, with President Bill Clinton asking the chiefs of the US Treasury for guidance on the life and death of America's economy, when the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers turns to his boss, Secretary Robert Rubin, and says, "What would Goldman think of that?"
Huh?
Then, at another meeting, Summers said it again: What would Goldman think?
A shocked Stiglitz, then Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, told me he'd turned to Summers, and asked if Summers thought it appropriate to decide US economic policy based on "what Goldman thought." As opposed to say, the facts, or say, the needs of the American public, you know, all that stuff that we heard in Cabinet meetings on The West Wing.
Summers looked at Stiglitz like Stiglitz was some kind of naive fool who'd read too many civics books.
CONTINUED...
http://www.gregpalast.com/larry-summers-goldman-sacked/
raouldukelives
(5,178 posts)There is nobody in it, nobody, who isn't fundraising for republicans and straight up fascists.
Sure, talk about making things better. They are great at that. Actually making a difference? Reminds me of a Bob Dobbs line "I don't practice what I preach because I am not the kind of person I'm preaching to."
We aren't where we are by accident. There is cause and there is effect. Wars for profit, tangled blood soaked corpses, climate disasters, poisoned waters, mass extinctions, all a big yawn. The purchasing of more and more denial is what every dollar in it buys them, and by all measures, they show no signs of slowing the race to the cliff.
Which reminds me of a line my Mom would say "If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you too?" No, Ma. No.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Neil Barofsky, the former special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, has published a new book, Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street. It presents a damning indictment of the Obama administrations execution of the TARP program generally, and of HAMP in particular.
By delaying millions of foreclosures, HAMP gave bailed-out banks more time to absorb housing-related losses while other parts of Obamas bailout plan repaired holes in the banks balance sheets. [font color="green"]According to Barofsky, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner even had a term for it. HAMP borrowers would foam the runway for the distressed banks looking for a safe landing.[/font color] It is nice to know what Geithner really thinks of those Americans who were busy losing their homes in hard times.
CONTINUED w VIDEO and links and more letters...
http://washingtonexaminer.com/video-geithner-sacrificed-homeowners-to-foam-the-runway-for-the-banks/article/2502982
People in Detroit have foamed the runway for centuries, from volunteering to fight in the Civil War to striking for fair working conditions to busting their chops as the Arsenal of Democracy to showing the world people of all races, religions and creeds could live and work together.http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=greatest_threads
bobthedrummer
(26,083 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)and the Secret "End-Game" Memo
Thursday, August 22, 2013
By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine
EXCERPT...
The year was 1997. US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was pushing hard to de-regulate banks. That required, first, repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to dismantle the barrier between commercial banks and investment banks. It was like replacing bank vaults with roulette wheels.
Second, the banks wanted the right to play a new high-risk game: "derivatives trading." JP Morgan alone would soon carry $88 trillion of these pseudo-securities on its books as "assets."
Deputy Treasury Secretary Summers (soon to replace Rubin as Secretary) body-blocked any attempt to control derivatives.
But what was the use of turning US banks into derivatives casinos if money would flee to nations with safer banking laws?
[font color="green"]The answer conceived by the Big Bank Five: eliminate controls on banks in every nation on the planet in one single move. It was as brilliant as it was insanely dangerous. [/font color]
CONTINUED...
http://www.gregpalast.com/larry-summers-and-the-secret-end-game-memo/
Wish it weren't so. I'm in Detroit. My eyes aren't that bad.
kristopher
(29,798 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)Hillary Clinton was a Wal-Mart Director for 6 Years
Posted by Emine Dilek
The Progressive Press on Saturday, June 20, 2015 · 5 Comments
In 1986, Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, was under pressure to appoint a woman to the companys 15-member -all male- board of directors. So, Mr. Walton asked a young lawyer, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who just happened to be married to the governor of Arkansas at the time, where Wal-Mart is based, to be the sole female member of the board.
During six years (1986 -1992) as a member of the Wal-Mart board of directors, Hillary Clinton remained silent as the worlds largest retailer waged a major campaign against the labor unions seeking to represent store workers.
John Tate who was one of Clintons fellow board members, was leading Wal-Marts anti-union efforts. Tate was also Wal-Marts executive vice president and served on the board with Clinton for four of her six years. Tate favorite phrase was, as he admitted himself, Labor unions are nothing but blood-sucking parasites living off the productive labor of people who work for a living.
According to an ABC News report, published in 2008, Clinton appears in videotapes of the stockholder meetings where she never appears to defend the role of labor unions. On the contrary, the tapes show Clinton in the role of a loyal company woman. Im always proud of Wal-Mart and what we do and the way we do it better than anybody else, she said at a June 1990 stockholders meeting.
Clinton also worked at the Law Firm which represented Walmart. A 1994 New York Times story identified Clinton as the Rose Law firms lead lawyer for the company.
CONTINUED...
http://www.progressivepress.net/hillary-clinton-was-a-wal-mart-director-for-6-years/
PS: Thank you, kristopher! I feel like a bad person pointing these things out, but this is the kind of thing the nation's news media should point out BEFORE the election.
kristopher
(29,798 posts)Hey world!
Octafish
(55,745 posts)The editor said he was worried it might influence the coming election, so he sat on it for over a year.
I know people who died because of the Iraq war lies told -- both by W and Poppy.
SamKnause
(13,037 posts)bbgrunt
(5,281 posts)highprincipleswork
(3,111 posts)The world economy did so much better for the majority of people under earlier notions of economics.
Tierra_y_Libertad
(50,414 posts)Betty Karlson
(7,231 posts)Thanks for posting.