Oligarchy

Welcome to the Recovery – McKinsey Survey Shows 40% of Americans Living Paycheck to Paycheck, Up From 31% in 2012

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Screen Shot 2014-12-09 at 11.22.38 AMNothing screams economic recovery like 2 out of every 5 Americans living paycheck to paycheck. Especially when that number has reportedly increased by 33% since 2012.

Perhaps someone should inform these destitute plebs that the stock market is up nearly 45% over the past two years, and after all, nothing says economic success like the 0.01% enriching themselves via fraud and financial engineering.

Here are two of the most sobering findings from the survery:

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Wall Street Moves to Put Taxpayers on the Hook for Derivatives Trades

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Screen Shot 2014-12-05 at 3.39.28 PMWall Street has for some time attempted to put taxpayers on the hook for its derivatives trades. I highlighted this a year ago in the post: Citigroup Written Legislation Moves Through the House of Representatives. Here’s an excerpt:

Five years after the Wall Street coup of 2008, it appears the U.S. House of Representatives is as bought and paid for as ever. We heard about the Citigroup crafted legislation currently being pushed through Congress back in May when Mother Jones reported on it. Fortunately, they included the following image in their article:

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Tensions Between the U.S. and Russia Are Worse Than You Realize – Remarks by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov

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Screen Shot 2014-12-01 at 12.39.13 PM“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.”

– Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

Despite an interest in geopolitics, I haven’t really written anything on the concerning and worsening tension between the government of the United States and the government of Russia. I intentionally wrote government twice in order to emphasize the fact that 99.9% of Americans do not have real grievances with actual Russian people, and vice versa. This is a high-level conflict between powerful “leaders” playing a game of Risk with average citizen as pawns. This is how it’s always been. As human beings, we should never lose sight of this so the mistakes we make in the future aren’t nearly as tragic as those made by our ancestors.

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Neo-Feudalism Has Officially Arrived – Congressman Suggests Building a Moat Around White House

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Screen Shot 2014-11-19 at 1.46.23 PMWhat has been occurring over the past several years is not a recovery, rather, it’s a painful transition of the U.S. into a neo-feudal society. Earlier this week in the post, Welcome to the Recovery – U.S. Child Homelessness Hits Record as Poverty in Mass. is Highest Since 1960, I wrote:

While the general population is aware something is seriously wrong, people remain extremely confused about the root of the problem. This is because what’s happening all around us isn’t socialism and it isn’t free market capitalism. It is actually a return to something much more ancient and much more oppressive. It is a return to serfdom, neo-fedualism and oligarchy.

Well now we have definitive proof. It can’t get any more in your face than this.

From MarketWatch:

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch)—Faced with an increasing number of White House intrusions that led to the resignation of a Secret Service director, a congressman on Wednesday suggested that maybe a moat should be erected around the president’s home.

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Welcome to the Recovery Part 2 – Washington D.C.’s Homeless Population Expected to Rise 16% in 2014

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Screen Shot 2014-11-19 at 11.47.36 AM

Earlier this week, I published a post titled: Welcome to the Recovery – U.S. Child Homelessness Hits Record as Poverty in Mass. is Highest Since 1960. That was actually the second in a recent series of pieces highlighting the real world impact of this so-called “economic recovery,” which is now supposedly in its fifth or sixth year, despite having provided little or no benefit to the average citizen. The first in the series was: Child Poverty Jumps by 2.6 Million in Developed World Since 2008, While Number of Global Billionaires Doubles.

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How the IRS and Department of Homeland Security are Expanding Undercover Work (IRS Agents Can Even Pose as Clergy)

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Screen Shot 2014-11-17 at 3.40.39 PMThose guidelines apply only to the law enforcement agencies overseen by the Justice Department. Within the Treasury Department, undercover agents at the I.R.S., for example, appear to have far more latitude than do those at many other agencies. I.R.S. rules say that, with prior approval, “an undercover employee or cooperating private individual may pose as an attorney, physician, clergyman or member of the news media.”

Across the federal government, undercover work has become common enough that undercover agents sometimes find themselves investigating a supposed criminal who turns out to be someone from a different agency, law enforcement officials said. In a few situations, agents have even drawn their weapons on each other before realizing that both worked for the federal government.

– From the New York Times article: More Federal Agencies Are Using Undercover Operations

If this article doesn’t prove to you without a shadow of a doubt what the prosecutorial priorities of the U.S. federal government are I don’t know what will. I have been railing for years on this site about how the rule of law is dead and buried in the USA. How the “justice” system is targeting average citizens for non crimes, while allowing the large financial criminals responsible for destroying the global economy to get off on DPAs, or deferred prosecution agreements originally crafted to deal with juveniles (see: The U.S. Department of Justice Handles Banker Criminals Like Juvenile Offenders…Literally).

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Chart of the Day – This is What Neo-Feudalism Looks Like

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I got this from Naked Capitalism. Before presenting the chart, here are some words to bear in mind from Yves Smith:

Short omits some key elements from his discussion. One is that until recently, a profit share of GDP of 6% was perceived to be a cyclical peak; no less than Warren Buffet deemed a higher level to be unsustainable. And in fact, we see an explosion of profit share from 6% to 10% of GDP in the runup to the crisis, roughly from 2003 to 2007. The “rescue the banks and financial markets” measures succeeded in bringing the profit share back to its pre-crisis levels, at the expense of workers.

Notice the inflection point in profit share is 1987, when Greenspan became Fed chairman. Correlation may not be causation, but the timing is almost exact.

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Ex-NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg on Dodd-Frank: “The Government Should Have Let the Industry Craft the Bill”

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Screen Shot 2014-11-12 at 10.35.10 AMThis week has been the week of the ill advised oligarch quote. It all started quietly enough, with Las Vegas Sands CEO and crony Republican godfather, Sheldon Adelson, expressing his disdain for both journalism and democracy, all in one quaint little conference in which participants debated how quickly and how severely Iran should be bombed into the stone age.

Then we had the architect of Obamacare, the consummate oligarch minion, Jonathan Gruber, admit that the law was deliberately crafted deceptively in order to fool the “stupid” American public.

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Child Poverty Jumps by 2.6 Million in Developed World Since 2008, While Number of Global Billionaires Doubles

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Screen Shot 2014-10-30 at 2.04.27 PMTwo headlines came across my screen today, which taken together pretty much sum up the effects of policy decisions made by Central Bankers and politicians since the financial crisis. The financial oligarchs got bailed out, and the rich got richer due to decisions made by “leaders” around the globe. As such, the entire planet has now been transformed into a neo-feudal tinderbox. Myself and countless others warned all the way back to 2008 that this is what would happen, and here you have it.

Let’s first examine the results from Oxfam’s report on the billionaire growth spurt. I hope all 1,645 of you have sent thank you notes to the patron saint of oligarchy: Ben Bernanke. From NBC:

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113 Federal Reserve Staff Members Make $250,000 Annually

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Screen Shot 2014-10-17 at 2.14.18 PMJust in case you need another reason to dislike the thieving Federal Reserve. From Reuters:

(Reuters) – The top 113 earners among staff at the Federal Reserve’s Washington headquarters make an average of $246,506 per year, excluding bonuses and other benefits – more than Fed Chair Janet Yellen and nearly double the normal top government rate.

Don’t worry Janet, once you leave, you can earn $250k per speech like your hero Banana Ben Bernanke.

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