How Freddie Mac is Subsidizing the Real Estate Transactions of Billionaires

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Once the American oligarchs saw the ease with which they were able to loot the U.S. taxpayer via the banker bailouts and get away with it, they knew it was the perfect opportunity to declare open season on the general public. As such, the last several years has been little more than an ongoing crime scene in which the rich and powerful have relentlessly preyed on the poor, weak and ignorant with no remorse whatsoever.

Today’s piece is just the latest in an almost endless series of incidents demonstrating how the entire economy is systematically rigged to benefit very small group of people at the expense of everyone.

Bloomberg reports:

Who do billionaires turn to when they want to buy apartment complexes? The U.S. taxpayer.

Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Capital Group and Stephen Schwarzman’s Blackstone Group LP are in talks with Freddie Mac to finance two transactions totaling more than $10 billion, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations. Those discussions come after the government-owned mortgage giant already agreed to back Lone Star Funds’ $7.6 billion deal to buyHome Properties Inc. and Brookfield Asset Management Inc.’s $2.5 billion takeover of Associated Estates Realty Corp.

“They wield a very big stick,” said John Levy, a principal at a real estate investment banking firm in Richmond, Virginia, that bears his name. “It takes more time and it’s going to be more expensive” to get transactions done without the two companies, which can lend at rock-bottom rates because their deals have implicit government backing.

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Disabled Middle Aged Woman Living Well Below Poverty Line is Ordered by Judge to Pay $37,400 in Student Loans

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Poverty demoralizes. A man in debt is so far a slave; and Wall-street thinks it easy for a millionaire to be a man of his word, a man of honor, but, that, in failing circumstances, no man can be relied on to keep his integrity.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wealth

Most of you will be aware that it’s almost impossible to discharge of student loan debt once you have it. It stays with you for the rest of your life almost no matter what, even if you file for personal bankruptcy.

Why does this matter? Well, we’ve all seen charts depicting the disturbing surge in student loans outstanding over the past decade or so. Charts such as these:

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So what do you produce when you encourage an explosion of debt that can never be repaid and can never be defaulted on? Debt serfs. Millions upon millions of hopeless debt serfs.

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The Stock Market: Food Stamps for the 1%

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
– Henry David Thoreau

Society is like a stew. If you don’t stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.
– Edward Abbey

When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.
– Jean-Paul Sartre

The Stock Market:  Food Stamps for the 1%
For most of the past four or five years, I have spent the majority of my time studying the dominant forces that fuel the power structure that exists in these United States today, and indeed throughout the world.  My education began quite suddenly and unexpectedly in the middle of the last decade when I started understanding fiat money, Central Banking and the global monetary system.  Since then, I have expanded my understanding to mainstream media brainwashing, the military-industrial complex, the role of the political oligarchs in Washington D.C., the corruption of the food industry under the complicity of the FDA itself and much more.  The more I peered under the curtain, no matter what the industry, the clearer it became that the system had no chance of survival under its current form.  What’s worse, it became obvious that the very small 0.01% of the population that I call oligarchs (financial and political), who are actively gaming the system for their own pleasure, are well aware of the system’s terminal nature.  That’s why they are rapidly putting in place the police state grid.

That said, this article is not about the implementation of the surveillance state.  I cover that pretty much daily these days.  This post is more of a philosophical stream of consciousness; a guilty pleasure that I have not engaged in as of late.

I have mentioned many times in the past that food stamps are just a payoff to the poor.  While I think a permanent and expanding welfare state is completely and utterly destructive to an economy and culture, I do not demonize these folks.  The vast majority of them would like to work and be productive.  They are victims and this is being done to them quite intentionally.  It creates dependency.  It keeps them off the streets.  It’s an unspoken bribe plain and simple.  The oligarchs do not want angry, roving, hungry masses on the streets while they strip mine what’s left of the economy.  Food stamps, disability and all sorts of other freebies take care of this segment of the population as the oligarchs continue on with their crimes and prepare for the day of reckoning (hence the surveillance grid).

However, the oligarchs have another problem to deal with.  This problem is the huge group of people that resides in between them and the poor.  Ideally, they would like to shove all of them into the poverty category and keep them barely alive and on dole of the government.  That way, the politically connected large corporations that do not pay taxes and receive bailouts can continue to pay them peasant wages while the government takes care of the rest.  It’s a win-win.  The situation I just described is exactly what is happening as we speak and has been occurring at an ever frequent pace since the coup of 2008.  This is exactly why people are buying guns, gold and are extremely negative on the economy and the future of the United States.  I recently discussed this in my post Gallup Poll: Americans Most Negative on the Nation and Economy in 30 Years.  If you read the Gallup data in detail you will see that this level of negative readings only occur during very bad economic times.  The average person can feel themselves getting poorer despite the nonsense spewed by the mainstream media.  Their standards of living don’t lie and no amount of false statistics can change that.  As John Adams famously said:  Facts are stubborn things.

Stubborn indeed; and this is where the stock market comes into play.  Banana Ben Bernanke has not made it a secret that he is directly targeting a higher stock market with his purchasing power destroying money printing.  He has made that clear from pretty much the beginning.  The idea is that a higher market will improve the balance sheets of pensions, individual retirement accounts and also create a psychological impact that will make people feel confident and thus boost the economy.  It is the last point that is of course most important. If the latter does not happen then the boost in stock prices is merely an unsustainable bubble that will burst and all the “good” that was done to balance sheets will be undone with a vengeance at some point in the future.  The latter did not happen.

As much as people like to talk about the 1% versus the 99%, the real winners since 2008 have been the oligarchs.  The 0.01% have benefited much more than any other class in terms of both money and power.  It’s the 0.01% versus everyone else and the quicker we recognize that, stop fighting amongst ourselves, and push them aside the better it will be for our species.

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