Financial Terrorists

Stunning Quote – Larry Summers to Elizabeth Warren in 2009: “Insiders Don’t Criticize Other Insiders”

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A couple of weeks ago, Princeton and Northwestern released a very important study that proved statistically what many of us already knew about the American political process. It is nothing more than an oligarchy.  It’s one thing to read an academic study showing how cancerous the political system is, it’s quite another to hear a … Read more

Working Age Americans are the Majority of People on Food Stamps for the First Time

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When people ask me to describe the state of the U.S. economy, what I always say is that it can best characterized as an ongoing state-sanctioned theft. This theft consists of the 0.01% oligarch class intentionally leveraging a corrupt monetary and political system in order to funnel all of the wealth of the non-oligarch rich and middle-class upward to them. The underclasses are kept quiet and in-line via food stamps and other forms of so-called “welfare.”

In reality, I have frequently maintained that food stamps are actually corporate welfare and that the stock market represents food stamps for the 1%. The entire economy is a gigantic bait and switch in which a handful of people rape and pillage everyone else.

With unemployment and GDP statistics hopelessly manipulated, we must look at other data points in order to gain an understanding of how things really stand. Data related to food stamp rolls is one way to gain real insight into the true state of the U.S. economy.

In an excellent article from the Associate Press, we learn several things.

  • For the first time ever, working-age people now make up the majority in U.S. households that rely on food stamps.
  • Food stamp participation since 1980 has grown the fastest among workers with some college training.
  • By education, about 28 percent of food stamp households are headed by a person with at least some college training, up from 8 percent in 1980.

More from the AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a first, working-age people now make up the majority in U.S. households that rely on food stamps — a switch from a few years ago, when children and the elderly were the main recipients. 

Some of the change is due to demographics, such as the trend toward having fewer children. But a slow economic recovery with high unemployment, stagnant wages and an increasing gulf between low-wage and high-skill jobs also plays a big role. It suggests that government spending on the $80 billion-a-year food stamp program — twice what it cost five years ago — may not subside significantly anytime soon.

“High employment, stagnant wages.” Huh? Don’t these people realize we’ve been in a recovery for almost five years now!

Food stamp participation since 1980 has grown the fastest among workers with some college training, a sign that the safety net has stretched further to cover America’s former middle class, according to an analysis of government data for The Associated Press by economists at the University of Kentucky. Formally called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, or SNAP, the program now covers 1 in 7 Americans.

Notice the statement, “America’s former middle class.” At least they are honest. The middle class is gone.

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London’s Mayor Says We Should “Thank the Super Rich” – Calls Them “Tax Heroes” and Compares Them to the “Homeless and Irish Travelers”

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If you thought you had seen it all when it comes to sob stories of the “super rich” following the comparison of the criticisms of banker bonuses to the lynching of black people in the south by AIG’s CEO in September, think again. The latest groveling, inane defense of the “super rich” comes from none other than the gatekeeper of the largest oligarch whorehouse on planet earth. The Mayor of London, Mr. Boris Johnson.

Now I warn you, do not read the following Op-Ed on a full stomach. The vapid, nonsensical, Onion-like prose may very well induce fits of nausea and uncontrolled regurgitation. This is quite frankly one of the worst things I have ever read in my life. It echoes like a sort of grandiose ass-kissing ritual one would have encountered in a Middle Age court from an aspiring manservant of the realm, desperately trying to rapidly advance a coupe of notches up the social strata of some decadent feudal kingdom. Simply put, Boris Johnson should be ashamed to show his face in public after writing such disingenuous garbage.

Now for some excerpts from the UK Telegraph:

The great thing about being Mayor of London is you get to meet all sorts. It is my duty to stick up for every put-upon minority in the city – from the homeless to Irish travellers to ex-gang members to disgraced former MPs. After five years of slog, I have a fair idea where everyone is coming from.

But there is one minority that I still behold with a benign bewilderment, and that is the very, very rich. I mean people who have so much money they can fly by private jet, and who have gin palaces moored in Puerto Banus, and who give their kids McLaren supercars for their 18th birthdays and scour the pages of the FT’s “How to Spend It” magazine for jewel-encrusted Cartier collars for their dogs.

I suspect that the answer, as Solon pointed out to Croesus, is not really, frankly; or no happier than the man with just enough to live on. If that is the case, and it really is true that having stupendous sums of money is very far from the same as being happy, then surely we should stop bashing the rich.

So he starts off right away with complete idiocy. Sure, I genuinely agree that having that much money is more of a curse than a blessing, but that doesn’t mean we should stop bashing oligarchs. Not all (but most) oligarch wealth has been created or maintained and coddled via Central Bank policies that favor their class, bailouts and crony capitalist deals. That’s why the rest of us aren’t benefiting from this phantom “economic recovery.” Perhaps he forgot the saying by Honore de Balzac:

“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.”

Now back to bumbling Boris.

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How Washington D.C. is Sucking the Life Out of America

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The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.
– Tacitus

Ever since I started writing about what is happening in the world around me, my primary theme has been that the root cancer at the core of the U.S., and indeed global economy, is cronyism and an absence of the rule of law when it comes to oligarchs. In the U.S., this cronyism is best described as an insidious relationship between large multi-national corporations and big government to funnel all of the wealth and resources of the nation to themselves at the expense of everyone else. In a genuine free market defined by heightened competition and governed by an equal application of the rule of law to all, the 0.1% does not aggregate all of a nation’s wealth. This sort of thing only happens in crony capitalism, which is basically nothing more than complete and total insider deals to aggregate newly created money into the hands of the few.

The following profile of Washington D.C.’s so-called “boom” from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch pretty much tells you all you need to know. While I think the tone of the article is absurd considering this is no “economic boom,” but merely parasitic wealth extraction on a unprecedented scale, it is still quite telling. It is no coincidence that as D.C. has grown wealthier, the nation has become much, much poorer. Key excerpts below:

The avalanche of cash that made Washington rich in the last decade has transformed the culture of a once staid capital and created a new wave of well-heeled insiders.

The winners in the new Washington are not just the former senators, party consiglieri and four-star generals who have always profited from their connections. Now they are also the former bureaucrats, accountants and staff officers for whom unimagined riches are suddenly possible. They are the entrepreneurs attracted to the capital by its aura of prosperity and its super-educated workforce. They are the lawyers, lobbyists and executives who work for companies that barely had a presence in Washington before the boom.

At the same time, big companies realized that a few million spent shaping legislation could produce windfall profits. They nearly doubled the cash they poured into the capital.

Sorry these aren’t “entrepreneurs,” they are parasitic opportunists.

At Cafe Joe, a greasy spoon near the National Security Agency in suburban Maryland, software engineers with top-secret clearances merely have to look at the place mats under their fried eggs to find federal contractors trying to entice them away from their government jobs with six-figure salaries and stock options. The place-mat ads cost $250 a week. They are sold out through 2014.

During the past decade, the region added 21,000 households in the nation’s top 1 percent. No other metro area came close.

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Bitcoin: A Way to Fight Back Against the Financial Terrorists?

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Although I have followed Bitcoin over the years a bit, I am admittedly pretty ignorant on the subject.  What really caught my eye in the last couple of days was an article in Forbes detailing the fact that when the big financial institutions initiated a blockade on Wikileaks, the whistleblowing organization was still able to … Read more