Farewell…For Now

Remember: Matter. How tiny your share of it.
Time. How brief and fleeting your allotment of it.
Fate. How small a role you play in it.

– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

For the past ten years, I’ve spent most of my waking hours learning how the systems we live under function and how wealth and power operate and consolidate in the U.S. as well as globally. I’ve learned a lot and I’ve shared a lot. If I could go back and do it all over again, I would.

I dedicated all that time and energy to writing and engaging on the big issues of our era for two main reasons. First, I felt there was a window of opportunity to turn the ship around and reform the system to avoid needless additional widespread suffering and upheaval, which to me was guaranteed given the destructive path to which our ruling class was obstinately committed. Second, my decade on Wall Street offered some valuable insight into the inner workings of financial feudalism and how it systematically and intentionally enriches certain small segments of the populace while enslaving the masses via perpetual colossal debt issuance coupled with reoccurring central bank bailouts for the creditor and financial asset speculator class. This wasn’t widely appreciated when I first started writing about it, so it became a personal mission to inform as many people as possible.

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American Serfdom – Companies Are Offering Loans for Living Expenses to Their Destitute Employees

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Bernanke and the Federal Reserve are nothing but criminal butlers for the oligarchy. The proof is undeniable at this point. While this unaccountable banking cartel promised us that 0% rates would help the economy, America’s growing underclasses are paying 100% rates for loans to buy sofas and pay for food, more than five years into this so-called “recovery. Meanwhile, the only segment of society with access to low interest rates are the very wealthy financial oligarchs who leverage this cheap money to speculate on financial assets and real estate. So yes, the Fed (Central Banking in general) is completely to blame for the world’s growing inequality, as are their submissive, compliant defenders in academia, “journalism” and within the halls of power in Washington D.C.

From the post: Another Tale from the Oligarch Recovery – How a $1,500 Sofa Costs $4,150 When You’re Poor

There is no recovery. The only thing we’ve experienced over the past eight years of Obama is a historic plundering and strip mining of the U.S. economy by a handful of oligarchs and their political and bureaucratic minions.

The evidence has been clear for years. Fully employed Americans have been borrowing from payday lenders at egregious rates in order to pay for normal everyday living expenses, while a small group of executives grab as much as possible for themselves. You can see this in corporate profits margins at historically high levels and in the use of cash to buyback shares as opposed to paying employees a living wage. To see just how grotesquely out of whack the economy has become under the crony policies of Obama and the Federal Reserve, let’s revisit what I like to call the “Serfdom Chart.”

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More Americans Living With Parents Than With a Romantic Partner For First Time Since 1880

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The impact of America’s putrid and corrupt oligarchy continues to make its destructive presence felt across the land. As we learned earlier this month in the post, Pew Research Study – The American Middle Class Declined in 90% of Metro Areas From 2000-2014:

The Pew Research Center recently released a fascinating study which showed what many of us already suspected, that the U.S. middle class has declined in 90% of metropolitan areas from 2000-2014, or in 203 of 229 areas studied.

It’s what I like to call the Hunger Games economy. You’re thrown into the woods with a diminishing capacity to work hard and earn a middle income, and if you fail to enter the upper echelons you’ll be reduced to poverty. The result is insecurity, stress and ultimately resentment, which before too long bubbles to the surface in all sorts of unwelcome ways. A strong and vibrant middle class has always provided a buffer to truly nasty civil unrest and revolution in these United States. As it goes extinct, the probability of those things rises exponentially.

Yesterday, the Pew Research Center returned to the headlines, with a detailed analysis of another disturbing trend. You know something big is happening when you start breaking records going back to the 19th century.

Pew reports:

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Texas Judge Orders DOJ Attorneys to Take Ethics Classes

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This is simply priceless.

The Hill reports:

A federal judge in Texas on Thursday tore into Justice Department lawyers who argued the immigration case involving the Obama administration, ordering them to take ethics classes.

In a blistering court order, U.S. District Court Just Andrew S. Hanen said he was “disappointed” about having to address the subject of lawyer behavior, calling it “at best, a distraction.”

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The Status Quo Plan – Convince the American Public to Accept Serfdom

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Earlier today I came across a fantastic article published at Naked Capitalism by a writer known as Gaius Publius.

Yves Smith introduces the piece with the following poignant passage:

Let us not forget that the “things are going to get worse for you” story also conveniently diverts attention from the degree of rent extraction and looting that is taking place. US corporate profit share of GDP has been at record levels, depending on how you compute if, of 10% of 12% of GDP, when no less than Warren Buffett deemed a profit share of over 6% of GDP as unsustainably high as of the early 2000s. That higher profit share is the direct result of workers getting a far lower share of GDP growth than in any post-war expansion. So the increased hardships that ordinary people face is not inevitable, but is to a significant degree due to the ruling classes taking vastly more than their historical share out of greed and short-sightedness.

Now here are some excerpts from the Gaius Publicis piece:

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Democratic Presidential Candidate Jim Webb Says He Won’t Vote for Clinton, Might Vote Trump

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By nominating Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party is handing over the presidency to Donald Trump.

This is a sentiment I’ve been repeating consistently over the past several weeks, and one that has yet to be truly appreciated by most people. There continues to be extreme denial amongst those who want “anyone but Trump” in recognizing that Trump is exactly what you’ll get by nominating a corrupt, Wall Street puppet under FBI investigation with more baggage than American Airlines. It’s obvious to those of us who have a sense of the national mood why this is the case, but remains beyond the grasp of those who are either a part of the status quo or depend on it for their financial survival.

Up to this point, I’ve been going on personal interactions with friends as well as interviews with voters to conclude that a significant number of Sanders supporters will simply not “fall in line” and vote for Hillary in November. While this is interesting in its own right, what has really surprised me is the number of people who have maintained they might vote for Trump if Sanders doesn’t get the nomination. Conventional wisdom would say this is impossible, but what many voters seem to want more than anything else in 2016 is to burn the status quo to the ground.

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Welcome to the Recovery – 1 Out of 7 Americans (45.5 Million) Remain on Food Stamps

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The following article from the New York Times is shameful in many ways. While the paper is forced to cover the undeniable fact that real wages for the lowest income Americans have plunged during the so-called “economic recovery” over the past six years, it fails to actually pin blame on the undemocratic, oligarch institution most responsible for this humanitarian crisis: The Federal Reserve.

Of course, I and many others have been saying this for years, but now more than half a decade into what is supposed to be a recovery, people are finally being forced to admit what this really is —  large scale theft.

In fact, Ben Bernanke and his crew of upward wealth distributing academics have pulled off the greatest wealth heist in American history. In its wake we have been left with a hollowed out, asset striped Banana Republic. Thanks for playin’ Main Street. Or more accurately, thanks for being played.

– From the post: The Oligarch Recovery – Study Shows Real Wages Have Plunged for Low Income Workers During the “Recovery”

More than six years into Dear Leader’s glorious economic recovery, 45.5 million Americans, or one in seven, remain on food stamps.

I’d say that’s a problem, but I don’t want to be accused of “peddling economic fiction.”

From Bloomberg:

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The Plutocrats Are Winning

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The following is an impassioned and powerful article written by Bill Moyers last week titled, The Plutocrats Are Winning. Don’t Let Them!

Enjoy.

Dear Readers:

In the fall of 2001, in the aftermath of 9/11, as families grieved and the nation mourned, Washington swarmed with locusts of the human kind: wartime opportunists, lobbyists, lawyers, ex-members of Congress, bagmen for big donors: all of them determined to grab what they could for their corporate clients and rich donors while no one was looking.

Across the land, the faces of Americans of every stripe were stained with tears. Here in New York, we still were attending memorial services for our firemen and police. But in the nation’s capital, within sight of a smoldering Pentagon that had been struck by one of the hijacked planes, the predator class was hard at work pursuing private plunder at public expense, gold-diggers in the ashes of tragedy exploiting our fear, sorrow, and loss.

What did they want? The usual: tax cuts for the wealthy and big breaks for corporations. They even made an effort to repeal the alternative minimum tax that for fifteen years had prevented companies from taking so many credits and deductions that they owed little if any taxes. And it wasn’t only repeal the mercenaries sought; they wanted those corporations to get back all the minimum tax they had ever been assessed.

They sought a special tax break for mighty General Electric, although you would never have heard about it if you were watching GE’s news divisions — NBC News, CNBC, or MSNBC, all made sure to look the other way.

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Sheldon Adelson Revealed as Mystery Buyer of the Las Vegas Review-Journal

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Just yesterday, we published a post titled, Largest Newspaper in Nevada Was Just Purchased Anonymously for $140 Million, which speculated that multi-billioniare, oligarch Sheldon Adelson was behind the purchase. We now have confirmation that it was indeed him.

From Fortune:

For nearly a week, the media and political worlds have been wondering who paid $140 million to purchase Nevada’s largest daily newspaper, The Las Vegas Review-Journal. The primary buyer had taken great pains to remain anonymous, but Fortune has learned from multiple sources familiar with the situation that it is Sheldon Adelson, chairman and CEO of casino operator Las Vegas Sands Corp.

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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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