About Chief Crazy Horse

Chris Hedges has written a new article on Chief Crazy Horse, titled "Time to Get Crazy." This is an excerpt from the beginning of the article:

The ideologues of rapacious capitalism, like members of a primitive cult, chant the false mantra that natural resources and expansion are infinite. They dismiss calls for equitable distribution as unnecessary. They say that all will soon share in the “expanding” wealth, which in fact is swiftly diminishing. And as the whole demented project unravels, the elites flee like roaches to their sanctuaries. At the very end, it all will come down like a house of cards. Civilizations in the final stages of decay are dominated by elites out of touch with reality. Societies strain harder and harder to sustain the decadent opulence of the ruling class, even as it destroys the foundations of productivity and wealth.
This sets the scene. What is the relevance of Chief Crazy Horse?
Native Americans’ resistance to the westward expansion of Europeans took two forms. One was violence. The other was accommodation. Neither worked. Their land was stolen, their communities were decimated, their women and children were gunned down and the environment was ravaged. There was no legal recourse. There was no justice.
We are now faced with a prospect of electing Mitt Romney, who has no credibility at all, or Barack Obama, whose campaign promises were largely a ruse to get elected:
How many more times do you want to be lied to by Barack Obama? What is this penchant for self-delusion that makes us unable to see that we are being sold into bondage? Why do we trust those who do not deserve our trust? Why are we repeatedly seduced? The promised closure of Guantanamo. The public option in health care. Reforming the Patriot Act. Environmental protection. Restoring habeas corpus. Regulating Wall Street. Ending the wars. Jobs. Defending labor rights. I could go on.
Hedges could have gone on. Obama has built up a Surveillance State that is surreal in scope. As part of that, he partnered with the telecoms, giving them free license to break the law as accomplices to the federal government. Net neutrality turned out not to be something worth fighting for, unlike the dozens of explicit promises he made in his campaign. Then we have Obama's drone wars and aggressive prosecution of whistle-blowers. We have seen a willingness to prosecute Julian Assange, whose crime is to do what the New York Times investigative reporters do to win awards as journalists, except he helped bring about government transparency faster and in even greater quantity than any newspaper. And what about the war on fossil fuel Obama promised, to be coupled with millions of new jobs centered on sustainable energy? What did Chief Crazy Horse do when neither accommodation nor resistance worked? According to Hedges, he stepped out of the system and fought, even when it appeared to be futile. Hedges is not advocating violence, but suggests that the Citizens are starting to see the system itself as illegitimate, which is a dangerous situation.

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Bernie Sanders channels the anger of the American People

Bernie Sanders continues his fight for ordinary Americans, and this is a dramatic speech in which he makes many important points. At 4:17 for example, he talks of the backdoor bailout, in which the Federal Reserve made $16 trillion in almost no-interest loans, in secret, to big financial enterprises worldwide. If they can do this, why can't the banks make loans to legitimate small businesses who are in desperate need of loans? In the meantime, the middle class is collapsing and those who are wealthy are doing better than ever. "What is going on in America?" he asks. What it seems to be is that we are "moving toward an oligarchic form of government where a handful of billionaires control the economic and political life of this nation." The economic disparity is so incredibly pronounced that the 400 wealthiest individuals in America own more wealth than the bottom half of America--150,000,000 people. The top 1% of Americans own 40% of the wealth of America, whereas the bottom 60% of Americans own less than 2% of the wealth of America (min 7:33). Between 2009 and 2010, 93% of all new income created went to the top 1%. Sanders reminds us that the people at the top no longer need to settle for owning private businesses. Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, those people can now own the entire United States government. (min 11:00). The six largest banks own the equivalent of 2/3 of the GDP of America, and they write half of the mortgages and underwrite 2/3 of the credit cards. The working families of America want Congress to start working for them, and not merely for those who make campaign contributions. Sanders characterizes this as a "radical idea." (min 13). What can we do? Rebuild the crumbling infrastructure, including roads, bridges, schools, railroads and many other aspects of the infrastructure. We spend $300M per year importing oil, but we need to move to energy independence, away from fossil fuels and toward wind, solar and other sustainable technologies. We shouldn't be laying off teachers, but should be hiring them. The debt is a big problem, but it was caused by unpaid wars and unwarranted tax cuts to the wealthiest people in the country. Then, the greed and recklessness of Wall Street exacerbated the problem. Now, a "solution" is suggested to be "social security reform," with is a code-word for "hold onto your wallet." At min 20, Sanders also discusses the "solution" being considered to cut Medicare. At Min 22, Sanders mentions some of America's billionaires who are threatening to leave the U.S. so that they won't pay taxes. He also mentions the 18,000 American corporations located in the Cayman Islands. Sanders urges that Americans are now saying "Enough is enough."

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JP Morgan continues to slurp at the public trough

According to Bloomberg:

JPMorgan receives a government subsidy worth about $14 billion a year, according to research published by the International Monetary Fund and our own analysis of bank balance sheets. The money helps the bank pay big salaries and bonuses. More important, it distorts markets, fueling crises such as the recent subprime-lending disaster and the sovereign-debt debacle that is now threatening to destroy the euro and sink the global economy . . . To estimate the dollar value of the subsidy in the U.S., we multiplied it by the debt and deposits of 18 of the country’s largest banks, including JPMorgan, Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. The result: about $76 billion a year. The number is roughly equivalent to the banks’ total profits over the past 12 months, or more than the federal government spends every year on education.
On his June 22, 2012 show, Bill Moyers discussed this insane state of affairs, and the rampant corruption and criminality of Wall Street with Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism. Yves Smith offers this as part of the solution to the ongoing problem with large Wall Street banks:
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean when you say banks should be more like a utility? YVES SMITH: Banks, more than any other business, more than military contractors, live off the government. They depend on government backstopping. They exist only by way of government issued licenses, which if you had open entry you'd see much lower fees. And they get some confidence from the public from the fact that they are regulated. Oh, and the most important thing is they have access to-- MATT TAIBBI: The Federal Reserve. YVES SMITH: --the Federal Reserve. MATT TAIBBI: They're getting huge amounts of free money. YVES SMITH: Well, not just the free money. The Federal Reserve basically guarantees the payment system. You know, that's the really critical architecture that banks control is that, you know, we write checks to each other. We have credit cards. They clear through banks. But the fact that banks can exchange money with each other confidently is because the Fed stands behind that. So there's a much-- there's another layer of Fed backstopping beyond what we think of the way they step in in a crisis or the way they're now intervening to help the banks. So the fact that these institutions really depend in a very fundamental way on government support means they don't have any right to the upside. I mean, they should really be paid like public servants. I mean, I'm not kidding. I mean, and if they had been, if the pay had been ratcheted down after the crisis, I would have had a lot more sympathy for them, even if they just behaved for a couple of years. You know, they were bailed out. And then in 2009 the industry went and paid itself record bonuses, higher than 2007 instead of rebuilding their balance sheets. I mean, this was just a slap in the face for the public. BILL MOYERS: And there's no shame. YVES SMITH: No.

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Who is buying the upcoming election for President?

Bill Moyers reports:

And that’s how the wealthy one percent does its dirty business. They are, by the way, as we were reminded by CNN’s Charles Riley in his report, “Can 46 Rich Dudes Buy an Election?” almost all men, mostly white, “and so far, the vast majority of their contributions have been made to conservative groups.” They want to own this election.

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Matt Taibbi analyzes Jamie Dimon’s appearance before the Senate Banking Committee

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone found it hard to watch all of the U.S. Senators giving homage to Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan Chase. You can read his detailed report here. And here's the lesson Dimon doesn't get:

You can either be a commercial bank, with all the federal support that entails, or you can be a high-risk gambler. But you shouldn't be allowed to be both. We could have Chase Commercial Bank, and Chase Investments Inc., and they can each be as big as they want, but those companies should be separate. Why do we need companies like Chase that are both things, under one tent? The real answer, from Jamie Dimon’s point of view, is simple – there’s no way he could have a $350 billion hedge fund if he didn’t have mountains of federally-insured money to play with, and a steady stream of low-interest loans from the Fed.

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi analyzes Jamie Dimon’s appearance before the Senate Banking Committee