1 The Wealth Divide: The Growing Gap in the United States Between the Rich and the Rest - An Interview with Edward Wolff
2 “One of the biggest pieces of bunkum shoved down the American throat was the story of the 1929 Italian election. For this I cannot blame my colleagues. Forbidden to write anything critical of the Fascist regime, they could only report what the hierarchy wanted them to report. The clever and honest American and British journalists, however, did insinuate startling facts in their stories; these insinuations, unfortunately, were between the lines and not for those who read as they run, and the American public is mostly a running reading public.” George Seldes
--Can These Things Be! (1931)
The economy is the means by which our survival and our lives are supported. The result of the neoliberal Chicago School theory is the economic betrayal of the majority. That’s denied by the perpetrators of the crime against Humanity [the existence of the rich] that we must know, if we’re to save ourselves from our leader’s stupidity and greed. The results that must come of the blind pursuit of profit through cheap labor, which led to outsourcing, debt fueled economy and the destruction of the dollar exacerbated by Wall Street and real estate pyramid scams was part of my awareness, though vaguely, forty years ago. I saw what must result from “Right to Work” laws and the movement of industry to low skill, low wage environments in the South. Low quality products and high profits started to reverse the New Deal era progress by the majority and return US to the pre 1929 direction of debt and pyramid scam of finance which concentrates wealth. But Friedman’s Chicago School, which still dominates economic thought with the neoliberal free trade pyramid scam promotion, still hasn’t seen the results of their self serving theories. Their denial that the reality, the truth, which their greed and personal net worth and that of a dwindling small percentage of US occludes, is the destruction of the real economy that supports our lives. They’ve literally unbolted the machines that produce our wealth and moved them to China. We can no longer produce the material goods we need to live, much less to trade. Witness the trade deficit and the fall of the mighty dollar. That self destructive path has been taken for their personal benefit, by the fraud of investment and trade. The free market capitalist neoliberal debt slavery economy is dysfunctional for eighty percent+ of US. Why do we, the growing majority, tolerate this evil?
Impending Destruction of the US Economy - By Paul Craig Roberts
We are a credulous society. Few see the truth and less will contradict authority. We pay little attention to loss of freedom and attacks on the constitution that guarantees it. See Naomi Wolff’s “The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot.” - Democracy Now 11/28/07. When the corporatist [fascist] state is completely manifest, they’ll disappear, torture, imprison or kill you for speaking out against their treachery. Until then, they’ll deny a connection between outsourcing, the loss of assets, the falling dollar, sky high oil prices, sub prime and other debt and an ongoing pyramid scam that keeps US in bondage to the rich. They’ll fire you. They’ll blackball you. Then they’ll tell you you’re free and that democracy hasn’t been undermined by the purchase of politicians. Lobbyists are expressing freedom and are good for America. They’ll tell you that your inability to be rich like them has nothing to do with the private monopolistic ownership of capital and power, or the mathematical impossibility that everyone can have more than average. It’s your own fault because you’re incompetent. That lie would be easier to believe if the free market unregulated competition was between me and Joe, whoever he is. But imagine yourself up against Exxon or Citigroup. Are we schizophrenic that we can’t see the corporatist state we’ve evolved into in the past decades for what it is? It is fascism in all but name. An economy that works for less than 20% of the population doesn’t work!
While they’ve still got theirs, the export of our manufacturing ability and trade imports of goods must leave US facing high prices for the goods we need to live and can no longer make at home. That will kill US. It will kill them too, unless they convert their looted and stashed Cayman Island dollars into Euros or Yuan, if they can find takers at ten cents on the dollar in the near future. They probably have enough excess pillaged from US by their obscene profits to have a decent life even after the collapse of the pyramid scam economy. Do you? The motion of abstract money shuffling economy doesn’t have to be perpetual for them. It only has to keep going a few months or years longer. If we want to save ourselves from disaster, we must see the signs of the inevitable end of the fraud we call an economy. They are growing more obvious every day.
The purchase of 7.5G of Citigroup stock by Abu Dhabi 11/29/07 Citiweb: "Abu Dhabi Becomes Largest Citigroup Shareholder with $7.5B Investment, Bailout Comes Amidst Subprime Mortgage Crisis, Record-High Oil Prices" - is the continuation of the purchase of America by the foreign interests who have all our money, because we don’t make any products here to trade with them for what we buy from them. “Asians understand that what is important is not who consumes the apples, but who owns the orchard.” Sinking Currency, Sinking Country - By Patrick J. Buchanan. Other countries have the factories. They can make the goods they need to live. Our brilliant economists and CEOs have overseen the transfer of our wealth of manufacturing ability capital to them, in exchange for paper profits that must diminish as the dollar must fall. We can only borrow our money back. China has already been purchasing the overvalued bundled mortgages that serve as assets backing the subprime and other loans. In the end the Arabs and the Asians, along with some Nuevo Riche South American countries like Venezuela will not only own our shaky financial pyramid but whatever real assets, infrastructure, property and other real capital America hasn’t yet sent to China in exchange for paper beans. Some are catching on. A vanishing number of US know that much of the money loaned to US, to keep the debt kite flying, is created in our name by the FED. They don’t see that all of insurance, banking and finance are frauds who’s perpetrators should be incarcerated and their ill gotten gains seized for our common well being.
Citigroup talks of sub prime losses, “write downs” etc. Think about what that really means? All their profit is usurious. Their service is imaginary. It adds to the cost of real property and material goods. It’s useless activity produces nothing and adds value to nothing. But finance costs take a cut of virtually every economic activity, real or imaginary. It’s like the racketeering extortions of gangsters that parasitize communities on a smaller scale. Everything they do is dissipative to the economy. Their gains are ill-gotten to begin with. And they’ll tie up the money they still have, fearing even to lend it to other banks. They’ll foreclose on homes rather than forgo the increase in income from the upwardly adjusting predatory loans. They’ll sit on empty houses while people go homeless, and freeze the economy for fear of losing what they still have, while they wait for the depression their greedy pyramid schemes caused to go away and the prices to increase again, so they can recover the money they pretended to have tied up in their paper assets. It is worse than stupid and greedy. It’s self destructive avarice and it will take US all with it. FDR had some choice words for these useless parasites in his first inaugural address. “Primarily this is because rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. . . . Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt: March 4, 1933.
Is the loss they suffer even an actual decline in the value of their assets, which we also count as our assets when we make the mortgage payments on our homes, or is it future value losses? That is loss of the profit they expected to make. [The inflation of house prices was not, as the fool Bernanke has stated, an increase of wealth. Wealth is material and its value is not necessarily related to its price.] Or is it the loss of money that they expect not to recover by foreclosure and sale of our homes? Part of what they’ve loaned US was that which they’d borrowed from US [the FED] or foreign financiers like Arab oil magnates or the China National Bank. And when they sell our homes to recover their “losses” who will they sell them to? Will they repackage the assets as collateral for an other round of debt kite insanity, with which they’ve caused the problem in the first place. The most unnecessary parts of this idiot’s formula are the capitalists who ever profit by our misery and take a cut of all that we do. Bankers, financiers, brokers, insurance companies and the feudal lords who raised them up are nothing but racketeers and con artists. They’re the criminals who write the laws that legitimize their evil parasitic existence.
Wed Nov 28, 2007 11:54am EST Reuters Citigroup Abu Dhabi deal signals trouble ahead
Not to worry say the Neo Cons! We’re the world’s only superpower. They tell US they’re for small government and low taxes but both Reagan and The Bushes grew the government with unnecessary departments. Income, capital gains and inheritance taxes that less than one in five of US pay much of are cut while the local taxes grow to make up the difference. Then they borrow money from China to give to Halliburton, Blackwater and other contractors and say, “Hey, Wall Street is hanging in there. We’re OK.” If they keep the imaginary economy going by another dissipative of real goods war in Iran, will they find that an alliance of China, Russia, India, Pakistan and the aforementioned Iranians prove a superer power? I don’t think we’ll ever find out. The Chinese will make Bush abandon the effort by a refusal to fund the destruction of the pipeline they’re building across the Stans. When the Chinese tell Bush to jump he’ll only want to know how high. This is what comes of economists interfering in politics and social engineering. Thank you Milton for transcending to sociology and psychology to enrich our economy with the means of our demise. But it sure looks good to the CEOs, MBAs and the rest of the sellouts in the short term.
The minority in America, who by any stretch of imagination can be called successful, who have benefitted from our economic paradigm, far from being held back by the burden of their delusional economic model on the rest of US, are grown fat by our work. They’ve downtrodden US and they threaten our survival [and their own] but delude themselves that we are the problem. They’re like the English Aristocracy before the American Revolution. They couldn’t live without poor people to do everything but wipe their asses for them. Their existence, their greed is the cause of most of the pain and suffering on the Planet Earth.
It’s not the one really big lie. There is not just one. Among the really big lies is that the twenty percent who own eighty percent of everything and the one percent who own most of that have what they have by their own individual effort or hard work. That’s bullshit! You can’t have much more than average unless others, the community, works for you. That means, if you’re rich or a sellout who ministers to them, that others do your work. That means your slaves create your wealth. No matter how you describe the social order, your morality and principles are false. They are rationalizations for greed. Your lifestyle depends on the abomination of slavery. You corrupt and are a corruption [read dead and putrefied] of social instinct and civil society.
We must see the needs of the many vs the desires of the few. The cons and libertarians frame the issue as government inefficiency and control vs the free individual. That’s totally distorted. It completely ignores the reality of a population cast in the corporate mold of consumerism. The majority fail to see [in their almost schizophrenic support for the corporatist empire] that their individuality, not to mention our common well being and survivability, is sacrificed for the benefit of a few rich investors and the middle class professional sellouts who minister to them. In defense of the [neoliberal] right of an ever shrinking fraction of US to own the entire country, we’ve lost sight of the meaning and purpose of community.
Meanwhile the few fools with the most money and power are dismantling and looting the economy for short term [imaginary and inflationary] profit. They are impoverishing and enslaving with debt the very consumers they programmed to buy the products on which their profit is made and have outsourced the ability to make products at home to trade for those we import. The Chicago School Model is not a functional economic paradigm. It’s the blind pursuit of corporate profit and it’s killing the economy that produces it. The moron economists, CEOs investors and their puppet politicians can’t see it. They’ve made US debt slaves and created the trade imbalance that makes our country a debtor nation. But they’ve stashed their cash in the Cayman Islands. They’ve got theirs. Screw the rest of US. Free Market Capitalistic principles of greed and idiot moral strictures of private enterprise restrain US from doing anything to save our lives. And if you think they’re stupid . . . !
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