Saturday, May 28, 2016
corporate america bought hillary clinton for $21million
By CNu at May 28, 2016 0 comments
Labels: banksterism , corporatism , Granny Goodness
Wednesday, August 07, 2013
enjoy the show and never become distracted...,
The Capitalist Network that Runs the World |
By CNu at August 07, 2013 0 comments
Labels: banksterism , global system of 1% supremacy , unspeakable
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
rule of law: applies only to you filthy and unprofitable little peasants...,
By CNu at September 30, 2014 2 comments
Labels: banksterism , Collapse Crime , Livestock Management , What IT DO Shawty...
Friday, June 26, 2015
transition, conversion, musical chairs among hegemons...,
By CNu at June 26, 2015 0 comments
Labels: chess-not checkers , Hanson's Peak Capitalism , hegemony , Irreplaceable Natural Material Resources , musical chairs
Thursday, July 08, 2021
Is Capitalism Succumbing to Techno Feudalism?
yanisvaroufakis | This is how capitalism ends: not with a revolutionary bang, but with an evolutionary whimper. Just as it displaced feudalism gradually, surreptitiously, until one day the bulk of human relations were market-based and feudalism was swept away, so capitalism today is being toppled by a new economic mode: techno-feudalism.
capitalism has undergone extreme makeovers at least twice since the late nineteenth century. Its first major transformation, from its competitive guise to oligopoly, occurred with the second industrial revolution, when electromagnetism ushered in the large networked corporations and the megabanks necessary to finance them. Ford, Edison, and Krupp replaced Adam Smith’s baker, brewer, and butcher as history’s prime movers. The ensuing boisterous cycle of mega-debts and mega-returns eventually led to the crash of 1929, the New Deal, and, after World War II, the Bretton Woods system – which, with all its constraints on finance, provided a rare period of stability.
The end of Bretton Woods in 1971 unleashed capitalism’s second transformation. As America’s growing trade deficit became the world’s provider of aggregate demand – sucking in the net exports of Germany, Japan, and, later, China – the US powered capitalism’s most energetic globalization phase, with a steady flow of German, Japanese, and, later, Chinese profits back into Wall Street financing it all.
To play their role, however, Wall Street functionaries demanded emancipation from all of the New Deal and Bretton Woods constraints. With deregulation, oligopolistic capitalism morphed into financialized capitalism. Just as Ford, Edison, and Krupp had replaced Smith’s baker, brewer, and butcher, capitalism’s new protagonists were Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Lehman Brothers.
While these radical transformations had momentous repercussions (the Great Depression, WWII, the Great Recession, and the post-2009 Long Stagnation), they did not alter capitalism’s main feature: a system driven by private profit and rents extracted through some market.
Yes, the transition from Smithian to oligopoly capitalism boosted profits inordinately and allowed conglomerates to use their massive market power (that is, their newfound freedom from competition) to extract large rents from consumers. Yes, Wall Street extracted rents from society by market-based forms of daylight robbery. Nevertheless, both oligopoly and financialized capitalism were driven by private profits boosted by rents extracted through some market – one cornered by, say, General Electric or Coca-Cola, or conjured up by Goldman Sachs.
Then, after 2008, everything changed. Ever since the G7’s central banks coalesced in April 2009 to use their money printing capacity to re-float global finance, a deep discontinuity emerged. Today, the global economy is powered by the constant generation of central bank money, not by private profit. Meanwhile, value extraction has increasingly shifted away from markets and onto digital platforms, like Facebook and Amazon, which no longer operate like oligopolistic firms, but rather like private fiefdoms or estates.
By CNu at July 08, 2021 0 comments
Labels: neofeudalism , What Now?
Friday, February 08, 2008
Why The Price of "Peak Oil" is Famine
Vulnerable regions of the world face the risk of famine over the next three years as rising energy costs spill over into a food crunch, according to US investment bank Goldman Sachs.
"We've never been at a point in commodities where we are today," said Jeff Currie, the bank's commodity chief and closely watched oil guru.
Global oil output has been stagnant for four years, failing to keep up with rampant demand from Asia and the Mid-East. China's imports rose 14pc last year. Biofuels from grain, oil seed and sugar are plugging the gap, but drawing away food supplies at a time when the world is adding more than 70m mouths to feed a year.
"Markets are as tight as a drum and now the US has hit the stimulus button," said Mr Currie in his 2008 outlook. "We have never seen this before when commodity prices were already at record highs. Over the next 18 to 36 months we are probably going into crisis mode across the commodity complex.
"The key is going to be agriculture. China is terrified of the current situation. It has real physical shortages," he said, referencing China still having memories of starvation in the 1960s seared in its collective mind.
While the US housing crash poses some threat to the price of metals and energy, the effect has largely occurred already. The slide in crude prices over the past month may have been caused by funds liquidating derivatives contracts to cover other demands rather than by recession fears. Goldman Sachs forecasts that oil will be priced at $105 a barrel by the end of 2008.
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The current "supercycle" is a break with history because energy and food have "converged" in price and can increasingly be switched from one use to another.
Corn can be used for ethanol in cars and power plants, for plastics, as well as in baking tortillas. Natural gas can be made into fertiliser for food output. "Peak Oil" is morphing into "Peak Food".
quoth Submariner;
meaningful change will occur as a response to a combination of imminent external threat and a mass domestic outcry.
To which I respond;
When all prior assumptions are rendered moot and a dizzying number of variables are in play - meaningful change can mean a lot of different things.
By CNu at February 08, 2008 0 comments
Labels: elite , establishment , eugenics
Sunday, February 05, 2012
the hon.bro.preznit predictably playing pattycakes with wall st.
By granting exemptions to laws and regulations that act as a deterrent to securities fraud, the S.E.C. has let financial giants like JPMorganChase, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America continue to have advantages reserved for the most dependable companies, making it easier for them to raise money from investors, for example, and to avoid liability from lawsuits if their financial forecasts turn out to be wrong.
An analysis by The New York Times of S.E.C. investigations over the last decade found nearly 350 instances where the agency has given big Wall Street institutions and other financial companies a pass on those or other sanctions. Those instances also include waivers permitting firms to underwrite certain stock and bond sales and manage mutual fund portfolios.
JPMorganChase, for example, has settled six fraud cases in the last 13 years, including one with a $228 million settlement last summer, but it has obtained at least 22 waivers, in part by arguing that it has “a strong record of compliance with securities laws.” Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, which merged in 2009, have settled 15 fraud cases and received at least 39 waivers.
Only about a dozen companies — Dell, General Electric and United Rentals among them — have felt the full force of the law after issuing misleading information about their businesses. Citigroup was the only major Wall Street bank among them. In 11 years, it settled six fraud cases and received 25 waivers before it lost most of its privileges in 2010.
By granting those waivers, the S.E.C. allowed Wall Street firms to have powerful advantages, securities experts and former regulators say. The institutions remained protected under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which makes it easier to avoid class-action shareholder lawsuits.
And the companies continue to use rules that let them instantly raise money publicly, without waiting weeks for government approvals. Without the waivers, the companies could not move as quickly as rivals that had not settled fraud charges to sell stocks or bonds when market conditions were most favorable.
Other waivers allowed Wall Street firms that had settled fraud or lesser charges to continue managing mutual funds and to help small, private companies raise money from investors — two types of business from which they otherwise would be excluded.
“The ramifications of losing those exemptions are enormous to these firms,” David S. Ruder, a former S.E.C. chairman, said in an interview. Without the waivers, agreeing to settle charges of securities fraud “might have vast repercussions affecting the ability of a firm to continue to stay in business,” he said.
S.E.C. officials say that they grant the waivers to keep stock and bond markets open to companies with legitimate capital-raising needs. Ensuring such access is as important to its mission as protecting investors, regulators said.
The agency usually revokes the privileges when a case involves false or misleading statements about a company’s own business. It does not do so when the commission has charged a Wall Street firm with lying about, say, a specific mortgage security that it created and is selling to investors, a charge Goldman Sachs settled in 2010. Different parts of the company — corporate officers versus a sales force, for example — are responsible for different types of statements, officials say.
“The purpose of taking away this simplified path to capital is to protect investors, not to punish a company,” said Meredith B. Cross, the S.E.C.’s corporation finance director, referring to the fast-track offering privilege. “You’re not seeing the times that waivers aren’t being granted, because the companies don’t ask when they know the answer will be no.”
Others, however, argue that the pattern is another example of the government being too soft on Wall Street as it has become a much larger part of the economy in recent decades.
By CNu at February 05, 2012 0 comments
Labels: Obamamandian Imperative
Friday, February 05, 2016
cain't buh-lieve you pissants kwestining Granny's fat gwap ....,
Secretary Clinton, it's addressed to you, and it's about this issue of the speeches, particularly to Goldman Sachs. This is what the questioner wrote verbatim.
"I am concerned with the abuses of Wall Street has taken with the American taxpayers money," and then she asks whether you would release the transcripts of your Goldman Sachs speeches, and then added, "Don't you think the voting public has a right to know what was said?"
But, let's make that bigger. Are you willing to release the transcripts of all your paid speeches? We do know through reporting that there were transcription services for all of those paid speeches. In full disclosure, would you release all of them?
CLINTON: I will look into it. I don't know the status, but I will certainly look into it. But, I can only repeat what is the fact that I spoke to a lot of different groups with a lot of different constituents, a lot of different kinds of members about issues that had to do with world affairs. I probably described more times than I can remember how stressful it was advising the President about going after Bin Laden.
"It's very hard for the average working person to believe that someone could make that much money from a speech and that there is nothing given in return if it's someone who just left government," Mitchell said.
"She's been claiming all along that I'm invited to speak to these investment banks because they want to know my world view -- what do I think of Russia, what do I think of China, I'm a former Secretary of State and all former Secretaries of State have done this in recent decades. And if the transcripts shows that they were talking about something that involves a conflict of interest, I mean, I have no idea. But just to settle it, reassure the public that they are being brought inside these secret board rooms and they know what's going on," Mitchell said.
By CNu at February 05, 2016 0 comments
Labels: banksterism , Collapse Crime , Granny Goodness , parasitic , professional and managerial frauds
Thursday, October 05, 2017
Trump Off-Script On Bankster Bondage of Puerto Rico
President Donald Trump said on Tuesday while on a trip to Puerto Rico to observe hurricane recovery efforts that the island’s massive debt will have to be wiped out.
“They owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street and we’re going to have to wipe that out. You’re going to say goodbye to that, I don’t know if it’s Goldman Sachs but whoever it is you can wave goodbye to that,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News.
Even before the storm brought Puerto Rico to a near standstill, the government there already struggled with an economy in shambles and a default on billions of dollars of public debt.
Today, the U.S. territory has nearly $70 billion in debt, an unemployment rate 2.5 times the U.S. average, a 45 percent poverty rate, nearly insolvent pension systems and a chronically underfunded Medicaid insurance program for the poor.
Puerto Rico’s job base continues to shrink, taking its economy along with it. Since the recession ended, a lack of job prospects has sent many Puerto Ricans fleeing to the mainland, where the job market is much stronger.
By CNu at October 05, 2017 0 comments
Labels: .45 , banksterism , debt slavery , global system of 1% supremacy , scott free
Saturday, January 02, 2016
Granny Goodness peddles political influence like Bubba and Cooter peddle meth...,
By CNu at January 02, 2016 0 comments
Labels: Clintonian Imperative , Granny Goodness
Sunday, November 13, 2011
how I stopped worrying and learned to love the OWS protests
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive
By CNu at November 13, 2011 19 comments
Labels: change , open source culture , paradigm
Friday, June 18, 2010
capitalism and corporate journalism
"... the uniformly superficial nature of the analysis of its causes presented by mainstream observers, whether government officials, academics or business representatives. Thus it is commonly stated that the crisis was caused by a combination of imprudent investment by bankers and others [...] and unduly lax official regulation and supervision of markets. Yet the obvious question begged by such explanations - of how or why such a dysfunctional climate came to be created - is never addressed in any serious fashion."Shutt continues:
"The inescapable conclusion [...] is that the crisis was the product of a conscious process of facilitating ever greater risk of massive systemic failure." (Harry Shutt, 'Beyond the Profits System: Possibilities for a Post-Capitalist Era', Zed Books, London, 2010, p.6)In several books and articles, David Harvey, a social theorist at the City University of New York, has cogently written of how capitalism has shaped western society, risking and even destroying nations, populations and ecosystems. Not only are periodic episodes of "meltdown" inevitable, but they are crucial to capitalism's very survival. The essence of capitalism is self-interest; and any talk of reforming it through regulation or by imposing morality - a kinder, gentler capitalism - is both irrational and deceitful.
The bankruptcy of investment bank Lehman Brothers in September 2008 triggered the latest crisis of capitalism. Drastic action was required to save the system. And so, observes Harvey, a few US Treasury officials and bankers including the Treasury Secretary himself, a past president of Goldman Sachs and the present Chief Executive of Goldman, "emerged from a conference room with a three-page document demanding a $700 billion bail-out of the banking system while threatening Armageddon in the markets."
Harvey continues:
"It seemed like Wall Street had launched a financial coup against the government and the people of the United States. A few weeks later, with caveats here and there and a lot of rhetoric, Congress and then President George Bush caved in and the money was sent flooding off, without any controls whatsoever, to all those financial institutions deemed 'too big to fail'." (David Harvey, 'The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism', Profile Books, London, 2010, p. 5)Shutt translates "too big to fail", that over-used defence employed by capitalists and their cheerleaders, as meaning that a tiny super-wealthy clique recognised that they risked losing vast fortunes if the markets were allowed to take their course free of intervention from the state. Wholesale nationalisation of insolvent banks would have posed an existential threat to elite power; or even led to the collapse of the capitalist profits system in its entirety. Rather than accept such a fate, rich investors tried to ensure that their toxic assets be "largely transferred to the state, thereby adding unimaginable sums - officially estimated at $18 trillion world-wide - to already excessive public debt." (Shutt, op. cit., p. 36)
As ever, the public were made to pay the price for private greed. In simple terms: it's socialism for the rich, and capitalism for the rest of us.
By CNu at June 18, 2010 0 comments
Labels: propaganda
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Trojan Horses in the Bailout Proposal
But the most duplicitous and frightening aspect of the plan, as always, was to found, buried in the back of the document, located there in the hopes everyone would have fallen asleep from the legalese before they made it that far. There’s the innocuous sounding Section 128, which was in both the original and amended versions, and says simply:
“Section 203 of the Financial Services Regulatory Relief Act of 2006 (12 U.S.C. 461 note) is amended by striking ‘October 1, 2011’ and inserting ‘October 1, 2008.’”
What would this effectively do? It was intended to speed up the enactment of this section of the law from 2011 to this week.
And what is the impact of the change in this law? (Take a moment to let this sink in.) This wonderful bipartisan bailout proposal, negotiated into the wee hours of the morning by sleep-deprived members of Congress was designed to come with a furtive Trojan Horse embedded by Wall Street lawyers. Banks already in trouble for lack of capital would get to hold as little as “zero” capital for transactions.
But it does solve one giant mystery. All of Wall Street has been attempting to understand why firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, who have concentrated on mergers, acquisitions, stock and bond underwriting for more a cumulative 212 years, decided in a heartbeat to enter the bean counter world of retail banking and transform into bank holding companies. (That’s like asking General Motors to retool overnight for washing machines.) Now we know. Effective this week, if this bailout proposal would have passed in its current form, these firms would have had a new best friend at the Fed that was going to let them hold zero reserves for transactions. No wonder the stock of both firms sold off yesterday when Congress rejected the plan: Goldman closed down 12 per cent; Morgan down 15 per cent.
The Trojan Horse in the bailout plan also solves the mystery of how loss-riddled, serially corrupt Citigroup, now run by the former head of a hedge fund, was allowed by the FDIC yesterday to buy $400 Billion in deposits from Wachovia, giving this crippled global tyrant 30 per cent of insured bank deposits in America.
By CNu at October 01, 2008 0 comments
Labels: Collapse Crime , elite , truth
Monday, June 07, 2010
wall street's war
The real shocker is a thing known among Senate insiders as "716." This section of an amendment would force America's banking giants to either forgo their access to the public teat they receive through the Federal Reserve's discount window, or give up the insanely risky, casino-style bets they've been making on derivatives. That means no more pawning off predatory interest-rate swaps on suckers in Greece, no more gathering balls of subprime shit into incomprehensible debt deals, no more getting idiot bookies like AIG to wrap the crappy mortgages in phony insurance. In short, 716 would take a chain saw to one of Wall Street's most lucrative profit centers: Five of America's biggest banks (Goldman, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup) raked in some $30 billion in over-the-counter derivatives last year. By some estimates, more than half of JP Morgan's trading revenue between 2006 and 2008 came from such derivatives. If 716 goes through, it would be a veritable Hiroshima to the era of greed.
Whatever the final outcome, the War for Finance Reform serves as a sweeping demonstration of how power in the Senate can be easily concentrated in the hands of just a few people. Senators in the majority party – Brown, Kaufman, Merkley, even a committee chairman like Lincoln – took a back seat to Reid and Dodd, who tinkered with amendments on all four fronts of the war just enough to keep many of them from having real teeth. "They're working to come up with a bill that Wall Street can live with, which by definition makes it a bad bill," one Democratic aide explained in the final, frantic days of negotiation.
On the plus side, the bill will rein in some forms of predatory lending, and contains a historic decision to audit the Fed. But the larger, more important stuff – breaking up banks that grow Too Big to Fail, requiring financial giants to pay upfront for their own bailouts, forcing the derivatives market into the light of day – probably won't happen in any meaningful way. The Senate is designed to function as a kind of ongoing negotiation between public sentiment and large financial interests, an endless tug of war in which senators maneuver to strike a delicate mathematical balance between votes and access to campaign cash. The problem is that sometimes, when things get really broken, the very concept of a middle ground between real people and corrupt special interests becomes a grotesque fallacy. In times like this, we need our politicians not to bridge a gap but to choose sides and fight. In this historic battle over finance reform, when we had a once-in-a-generation chance to halt the worst abuses on Wall Street, many senators made the right choice. In the end, however, the ones who mattered most picked wrong – and a war that once looked winnable will continue to drag on for years, creating more havoc and destroying more lives before it is over.
By CNu at June 07, 2010 0 comments
Labels: agenda , elite , establishment
Thursday, February 25, 2010
casino royale
Echoing the kind of trades that nearly toppled the American International Group, the increasingly popular insurance against the risk of a Greek default is making it harder for Athens to raise the money it needs to pay its bills, according to traders and money managers.
These contracts, known as credit-default swaps, effectively let banks and hedge funds wager on the financial equivalent of a four-alarm fire: a default by a company or, in the case of Greece, an entire country. If Greece reneges on its debts, traders who own these swaps stand to profit.
“It’s like buying fire insurance on your neighbor’s house — you create an incentive to burn down the house,” said Philip Gisdakis, head of credit strategy at UniCredit in Munich.
As Greece’s financial condition has worsened, undermining the euro, the role of Goldman Sachs and other major banks in masking the true extent of the country’s problems has drawn criticism from European leaders. But even before that issue became apparent, a little-known company backed by Goldman, JP Morgan Chase and about a dozen other banks had created an index that enabled market players to bet on whether Greece and other European nations would go bust.
Last September, the company, the Markit Group of London, introduced the iTraxx SovX Western Europe index, which is based on such swaps and let traders gamble on Greece shortly before the crisis. Such derivatives have assumed an outsize role in Europe’s debt crisis, as traders focus on their daily gyrations.
A result, some traders say, is a vicious circle. As banks and others rush into these swaps, the cost of insuring Greece’s debt rises. Alarmed by that bearish signal, bond investors then shun Greek bonds, making it harder for the country to borrow. That, in turn, adds to the anxiety — and the whole thing starts over again.
By CNu at February 25, 2010 0 comments
Labels: Deep State , Peak Capitalism
Sunday, January 31, 2016
granny and willie just amoral grifters bamboozling voters as a way of life...,
But Clinton’s priorities shifted drastically during the two-month interregnum between his November election and his inauguration in January 1993, as documented in compelling detail by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in his 1994 book The Agenda. As Woodward recounts, Clinton stated only weeks after winning the election that “we’re Eisenhower Republicans here…. We stand for lower deficits, free trade, and the bond market. Isn’t that great?” Clinton further conceded that with his new policy focus, “we help the bond market, and we hurt the people who voted us in.”
How could Clinton have undergone such a lightening-fast reversal? The answer is straightforward, and explained with candor by Robert Rubin, who had been co-chair of Goldman Sachs before becoming Clinton’s Treasury secretary. Even before the inauguration, Rubin explained to more populist members of the incoming administration that the rich “are running the economy and make the decisions about the economy.”
Wall Street certainly flourished under Clinton. By 1999, the average price of stocks had risen to 44 times these companies’ earnings. Historically, stock prices had averaged about 14 times more than earnings. Even during the 1920s bubble, stock prices rose only to 33 times earnings right before the 1929 crash.
A major driver here was Wall Street’s craze for Internet start-ups. In 1999, for example, AOL’s market value eclipsed that of Disney and Time Warner combined, and Priceline.com’s value was double that of United Airlines. The Clinton team created the environment that encouraged such absurd valuations. Throughout the bubble years, Clinton’s policy advisers, led by Rubin and his then protégé Larry Summers, maintained that regulating Wall Street was an outmoded relic from the 1930s. They used this argument to push through the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall financial regulatory system that had been operating since the New Deal. The Clinton team thus set the stage for the collapse of the Dot.com bubble and ensuing recession in March 2001, only two months after Clinton left office. They also created the conditions that enabled the even more severe bubble that produced the 2008 global financial crisis and Great Recession.
By CNu at January 31, 2016 0 comments
Labels: banksterism , Clintonian Imperative , Granny Goodness , What IT DO Shawty...
Monday, December 26, 2011
a christmas message from america's rich
True, they’re doing it from behind the ropeline, in front of friendly crowds at industry conferences and country clubs, meaning they don’t have to look the rest of America in the eye when they call us all imbeciles and complain that they shouldn’t have to apologize for being so successful.
But while they haven’t yet deigned to talk to protesting America face to face, they are willing to scribble out some complaints on notes and send them downstairs on silver trays. Courtesy of a remarkable story by Max Abelson at Bloomberg, we now get to hear some of those choice comments.
Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, for instance, is not worried about OWS:
“Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” Marcus said. “Are you kidding me?”
Former New York gurbernatorial candidate Tom Golisano, the billionaire owner of the billing firm Paychex, offered his wisdom while his half-his-age tennis champion girlfriend hung on his arm:
“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles.
Then there’s Leon Cooperman, the former chief of Goldman Sachs’s money-management unit, who said he was urged to speak out by his fellow golfers. His message was a version of Wall Street’s increasingly popular If-you-people-want-a-job, then-you’ll-shut-the-fuck-up rhetorical line:
Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can’t walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.
“You’ll get more out of me,” the billionaire said, “if you treat me with respect.”
Finally, there is this from Blackstone CEO Steven Schwartzman:
Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax.
“You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”
There are obviously a great many things that one could say about this remarkable collection of quotes. One could even, if one wanted, simply savor them alone, without commentary, like lumps of fresh caviar, or raw oysters.
But out of Abelson’s collection of doleful woe-is-us complaints from the offended rich, the one that deserves the most attention is Schwarzman’s line about lower-income folks lacking “skin in the game.” This incredible statement gets right to the heart of why these people suck.
Why? It's not because Schwarzman is factually wrong about lower-income people having no “skin in the game,” ignoring the fact that everyone pays sales taxes, and most everyone pays payroll taxes, and of course there are property taxes for even the lowliest subprime mortgage holders, and so on.
It’s not even because Schwarzman probably himself pays close to zero in income tax – as a private equity chief, he doesn’t pay income tax but tax on carried interest, which carries a maximum 15% tax rate, half the rate of a New York City firefighter.
The real issue has to do with the context of Schwarzman’s quote. The Blackstone billionaire, remember, is one of the more uniquely abhorrent, self-congratulating jerks in the entire world – a man who famously symbolized the excesses of the crisis era when, just as the rest of America was heading into a recession, he threw himself a $5 million birthday party, featuring private performances by Rod Stewart and Patti Labelle, to celebrate an IPO that made him $677 million in a matter of days (within a year, incidentally, the investors who bought that stock would lose three-fourths of their investments).
So that IPO birthday boy is now standing up and insisting, with a straight face, that America’s problem is that compared to taxpaying billionaires like himself, poor people are not invested enough in our society’s future. Apparently, we’d all be in much better shape if the poor were as motivated as Steven Schwarzman is to make America a better place.
But it seems to me that if you’re broke enough that you’re not paying any income tax, you’ve got nothing but skin in the game. You've got it all riding on how well America works.
By CNu at December 26, 2011 1 comments
Labels: agenda , elite , establishment
Saturday, October 27, 2012
bankster darwinism...,
By CNu at October 27, 2012 2 comments
Labels: global system of 1% supremacy
Wednesday, March 25, 2015
storm clouds approaching...
By Dale Asberry at March 25, 2015 0 comments
Labels: complications , Hanson's Peak Capitalism , weather report
Monday, October 12, 2009
simon johnson and rep. marcy kaptur
PBS | One year after the near-collapse of the U.S. financial system, the crisis seems to be over for the banks. No one expects any of the remaining huge banks to collapse, and a few large firms — JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group and Wells Fargo — are expected to post another quarter of billion dollar profits.
But according to guests on BILL MOYERS JOURNAL, ordinary Americans have little reason to celebrate the better fortunes on Wall Street. Simon Johnson, professor of Global Economics and Management at MIT's Sloan School of Management, and Representative Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), explain to Bill Moyers that the outlook for the rest of America isn't so rosy. Not only are many Americans still suffering the collapse of the housing market, they say, but Congress and the president haven't made the changes needed to prevent a much worse catastrophe sometime in the future.
To highlight the disparity between bailing out the banks and helping homeowners, Rep. Kaptur points to her district, where she sees one of the now-profitable banks not doing enough to help struggling borrowers:
Let me give you a reality from ground zero in Toledo, Ohio. Our foreclosures have gone up 94 percent. A few months ago, I met with our realtors. And I said, "What should I know?" They said, "Well, first of all, you should know the worst companies that are doing this to us." "Well, give me the top one." They said, "JPMorgan Chase."Johnson adds that even bailed-out banks have little incentive to help homeowners:
I'm afraid that it's pretty obvious, and it's very tragic, that they have no interest in helping the homeowners. They make money with what they're doing. They expected a lot of these mortgages they made to default, okay? It was in their models. A high default rate. Now, they didn't expect house prices to come down so much. That's where they got their losses. But they absolutely made these loans expecting they would have to foreclose on people. And figuring they would make money on that.Too late to reign in the banks?
The problem, Rep. Kaptur and Johnson agree, is that Congress and the Executive Branch didn't sufficiently reign in the banks because the banks have too much power in Washington. Responding to a recent ASSOCIATED PRESS report about Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's close ties to a few powerful bankers, Rep. Kaptur said, "Wall Street and Washington is a circuit. And because Mr. Geithner headed the New York Fed, that historic relationship, unfortunately, continues. And it gives them special access and special power to influence policy."
Johnson agrees, arguing that these links are especially beneficial in a time of crisis: "And in a crisis, when everything is up for grabs, you don't know what's going on, the people who will take your phone calls, right, in government and the people who are going to be standing in the oval office, making the key decisions — that's the heart of the system. That's the heart of how you get your agenda through, by changing their worldview."
By CNu at October 12, 2009 0 comments
Labels: elite , establishment , ethics
UCLA And The LAPD Allow Violent Counter Protestors To Attack A Pro-Palestinian Encampment
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Video - John Marco Allegro in an interview with Van Kooten & De Bie. TSMATC | Describing the growth of the mushroom ( boletos), P...
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Farmer Scrub | We've just completed one full year of weighing and recording everything we harvest from the yard. I've uploaded a s...