The purported work of Wall Street.

What do all of those people in the Wall Street towers actually do? You won't find them doing much of what most people think about when they hear the term "banking." The following description of the business of Wall Street is from Christopher Ketcham's "The Reign of One Percenters" at Orion Magazine:

At one time, the financial sector could be relied upon to allocate capital for the building of things that society needed—projects that also invariably created jobs. But productivity is no longer its purview. . . . Structured investment vehicles, credit default swaps, futures exchanges, hedge funds, complex securitization and derivative pools, the tranching of mortgages—these were shown to have “little or no long-term value,” according to [John Cassidy, a staff writer for The New Yorker]. The purpose was to “merely shift money around” without designing, building, or selling “a single tangible thing.” The One Percenter seeks only exchange value, as opposed to real value. Thus foreign exchange currency gambling has skyrocketed to seventy-three times the actual goods and services of the planet, up from eleven times in 1980. Thus the “value” of oil futures has risen from 20 percent of actual physical production in 1980 to 1,000 percent today. Thus interest rate derivatives have gone from nil in 1980 to $390 trillion in 2009. The trading schemes float disembodied above the real economy, related to it only because without the real economy there would be nothing to exploit. Behold, then, the One Percenter in his Wall Street tower. He creates “value” by tapping on keyboards and punching in algorithms. He makes money playing with money, manipulating abstractions. He manufactures and chases after financial bubbles and then pricks them. . . . A study from the New Economics Foundation in England found that for every pound made in financial services in the city of London, roughly seven pounds of social wealth is lost—meaning the wealth of those in society who do productive work.

Continue ReadingThe purported work of Wall Street.

Chris Hedges: No way within the system to vote against corporate capture of the United States

Chris Hedges asserts that Americans are seeing through the plutocratic mendacity that currently governs them, and that's why they are taking to the streets. The Occupy protests we are seeing are not at all like the Tea Party, which is "bankrolled by the most retrograde elements in American society." What we are now seeing on the streets is genuine, and we need it, given the "continuity" that is apparent from the Administrations of George W. Bush to that of Barack Obama. The commonality of interests against the corporate state is a "unifying force" and we will now see whether we can stand together to take back our country.

Continue ReadingChris Hedges: No way within the system to vote against corporate capture of the United States

Lawrence Lessig: Join Forces with different others who seek to reform government corruption

At Huffpo, Lawrence Lessig has eloquently encouraged all of us to reach out to all others who seek to return control of the government to the People rather than the 1%. We should especially do this regarding people with whom we disagree on many other issues:

[W]hen Ron Paul criticizes the "Wall Street bailouts," and attacks government support for "special businesses" with special access, we should say, "that's right, Congressman Paul." Bailouts for the rich is not the American way. And when Rick Santelli launches a Tea Party movement, by attacking the government's subsidies "to the losers," we should ask in reply, what about the subsidies "to the winners" -- to the banks who engineered the dumbest form of socialism ever invented by man: socialized risk with privatized benefits. What, we should ask Mr. Santelli, about that subsidy? Or when Republican Senator Richard Shelby tells NBC's Meet the Press that the message in bank reform "should be, unambiguously, that nothing's too big to fail," we should say that's right, Senator, and it's about time our Congress recognized it. Or when Sarah Palin calls GE the "poster child of crony capitalism," we should say "Amen, Mamma Grisly": For whether or not we are all believers in "capitalism," we should all be opponents of "crony capitalism," the form of capitalism that is increasingly dominating Washington, and that was partly responsible for the catastrophe on Wall Street in 2008, and hence the catastrophes throughout America since.

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Herman Cain is not a nitwit

Herman Cain is not a nitwit. Really.  He's not a nitwit, even though he claimed that people seeking to audit the Federal Reserve were ignorant.  Rather, Herman Cain, formerly a board member of the Federal Reserve, is thoroughly corrupt, as demonstrated by the fact that a recent partial audit of the Federal Reserve revealed $16 trillion in secret loans. Check out the following short video:

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Sixteen Trillion Dollars; Sixteen Tons

Sixteen is a number that rings a bell for me, because when I was a boy I used to listen to a song called "Sixteen Tons." It was a coal miner song expressing the pain and futility of endless work without the possibility of getting out of debt. The song was made famous by Tennessee Ernie Ford: Now I see that the number sixteen has come back into the news in the context of banks. This time, sixteen refers to a secret deal arranged by our government to prop up huge corrupt banks to the tune of $16 trillion dollars. We, the taxpayers would never have approved this deal if it had been made out in the open.  Nonetheless, we are now subsidizing these too-big-to-fail institutions for as long as any of us will live, and further, we've piled huge amounts of this debt onto the backs of our children. It's all part of a new spin on "family values": dumping unimaginable amounts of debt on our children, "justifying" this by the fact that the people who run corrupt banks bought Congress and asked for for this money.   Now our children will have to try to work off endless corporate debt.  My image is that we've just signed them up to work an old-fashioned coal-miner's job of the type described by Tennessee Ernie Ford. Alan Grayson recently included me in a mass emailing, where he puts the number sixteen into context:

Dear Erich: The Government Accountability Office (GAO) says that our Government has handed out $16 trillion to the banks. Let me repeat that, in case you didn’t hear me the first time. The GAO says that our Government HAS HANDED OUT $16 TRILLION TO THE BANKS. That little gem appears on Page 131 of GAO Report No. GAO-11-696. A report issued two months ago. A report that somehow seems to have eluded the attention of virtually every network, every major newspaper, and every news show. How much is $16 trillion? That is an amount equal to more than $50,000 for every man, woman and child in America. That’s more than every penny that every American earns in a year. That’s an amount equal to almost a third of our national net worth -- the value of every home, car, personal belonging, business, bank account, stock, bond, piece of land, book, tree, chandelier, and everything else anyone owns in America. That’s an amount greater than our entire national debt, accumulated over the course of two centuries. A $16 trillion stack of dollar bills would reach all the way to the Moon. And back. Twice. That’s enough to pay for Saturday mail delivery. For the next 5,000 years. All of that money went from you and me to the banks. And we got nothing. Not even a toaster. I have been patiently waiting to see whether this disclosure would provoke some kind of reaction. Answer: nope. Everyone seems much more interested in discussing whether or not they like the cut of Perry’s jib. Whatever a jib may be. In the next few weeks, I’m going to be writing more about this. But right now, I wanted to keep this really simple. Just give folks something to talk about when they’re standing next to the coffee maker. The Government gave $16 trillion to the banks. And nobody else is talking about it. Think about it. Think about what that means. Courage, Alan Grayson

Continue ReadingSixteen Trillion Dollars; Sixteen Tons