The Rich Have Stolen The Economy

[jesuitsdidit]

Bloomberg reports that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's closest aides earned millions of dollars a year working for Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and other Wall Street firms.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15735


The Rich Have Stolen The Economy

by Paul Craig Roberts

.
Global Research, October 18, 2009
OpEdNews - 2009-10-16

Bloomberg reports that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's closest aides earned millions of dollars a year working for Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and other Wall Street firms. Bloomberg reports that none of these aides faced Senate confirmation. Yet, they are overseeing the handout of hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds to their former employers.

The gifts of billions of dollars of taxpayers' money provided the banks with an abundance of low cost capital that has boosted the banks' profits, while the taxpayers who provided the capital are increasingly unemployed and homeless.

JPMorgan Chase announced that it has earned $3.6 billion in the third quarter of this year.

Goldman Sachs has made so much money during this year of economic crisis that enormous bonuses are in the works. London Evening Standard reports that Goldman Sachs' “5,500 London staff can look forward to record average payouts of around 500,000 pounds ($800,000) each. Senior executives will get bonuses of several million pounds each with the highest paid as much as 10 million pounds ($16 million).“

In the event the banksters can't figure out how to enjoy the riches, the Financial Times is offering a new magazine--”How To Spend It.” New York City's retailers are praying for some of it, suffering a 15.3% vacancy rate on Fifth Avenue. Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that retail sales adjusted for inflation have declined to the level of 10 years ago: “Virtually 10 years worth of real retail sales growth has been destroyed in the still unfolding depression.”

Meanwhile, New York City's homeless shelters have reached the all time high of 39,000, 16,000 of whom are children.

New York City government is so overwhelmed that it is paying $90 per night per apartment to rent unsold new apartments for the homeless. Desperate, the city government is offering one-way free airline tickets to the homeless if they will leave the city and charging rent to shelter residents who have jobs. A single mother earning $800 per month is paying $336 in shelter rent.

Long-term unemployment has become a serious problem across the country, doubling the unemployment rate from the reported 10% to 20%. Now hundreds of thousands more Americans are beginning to run out of extended unemployment benefits. High unemployment has made 2009 a banner year for military recruitment.

A record number of Americans, more than one in nine, are on food stamps. Mortgage delinquencies are rising as home prices fall. According to Jay Brinkmann of the Mortgage Bankers Association, job losses have spread the problem from subprime loans to prime fixed-rate loans. On a Wise, Virginia, fairgrounds, 2,000 people waited in lines for free dental and health care.

While the US speeds plans for the ultimate bunker buster bomb and President Obama prepares to send another 45,000 troops into Afghanistan, 44,789 Americans die every year from lack of medical treatment. National Guardsmen say they would rather face the Taliban than the US economy.

Little wonder. In the midst of the worst unemployment since the Great Depression, US corporations continue to offshore jobs and to replace their remaining US employees with lower paid foreigners on work visas.

The offshoring of jobs, the bailout of rich banksters, and war deficits are destroying the value of the US dollar. Since last spring the US dollar has been rapidly losing value. The currency of the hegemonic superpower has declined 14% against the Botswana pula, 22% against Brazil's real, and 11% against the Russian ruble. Once the dollar loses its reserve currency status, the US will be unable to pay for its imports or to finance its government budget deficits.

Offshoring has made Americans heavily dependent on imports, and the dollar's loss of purchasing power will further erode American incomes. As the Federal Reserve is forced to monetize Treasury debt issues, domestic inflation will break out. Except for the banksters and the offshoring CEOs, there is no source of consumer demand to drive the US economy.

The political system is unresponsive to the American people. It is monopolized by a few powerful interest groups that control campaign contributions. Interest groups have exercised their power to monopolize the economy for the benefit of themselves, the American people be damned.


Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has held numerous academic appointments. He has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades.

[rodin]

And own its people as slaves (even if they don't all know it yet)

[jesuitsdidit]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15730


Challenging the Banks

by Danny Schechter

.
Global Research, October 19, 2009

AS THE BIG BANKS POST RECORD PROFITS AND PAY OUT OBSCENE BONUSES,
WHAT SHOULD WE THE PEOPLE DO: STAND UP OR ROLL OVER?

On February 1, 1960, four students sat down at a lunch counter at
the former Woolworth’s store in Greensboro North Carolina.

4 students! Just four!

They were protesting racial segregation. They were denied,
service, harassed and arrested.

Greensboro was and still is a backwater, yet their courage and
commitment sparked and helped drive a national movement that
would, within a few years, transform this country.

Martin Luther King may have had the dream but they had a scheme—a
way of getting attention, a way of showing that if you want to
make change, you have to be willing to act.

Few us remember their names. I knew one, Joseph McNeil, because he
went to my high school in the Bronx before heading to AT&T, a
traditionally black college, later famous as the school at which
 Jesse Jackson played football.

Today there is a marker down the street from where the Woolworth’s
once stood. (At least there was when I was last there in the 80’s.)

Woolworths
had oncebeen one of the best-known brands in America for decades.

The chain went from fame to infamy to out of business. Lunch counters
were soon out, and so was Woolworths despite its skycraper in downtown Manhattan. It would later be bought up, broken up,
and sold off by an avaricious private equity firm, which,
in a mad search for profits, drove the company under. Some stores survived
in the UK and Australia but not in the USA. There used to be one across the street from where I live. It is now a GAP.

Sound familiar?

Formal segregation may be gone, even if an interracial couple
couldn’t get a marriage license recently in Louisiana, but class separation
and inequality in America has deepened sharply The middle class
that the Greensboro 4 hoped to join as college graduates is only a
memory for many.

Black communities across this country have been savaged by the
foreclosure crisis. Black unemployment is twice that of whites, a
figure that in real terms stands at 20% or more. That means 40%
for minorities!

Millions of families are going backwards to homelessness, and
insecurity. Downward mobility is now a mass phenomenon. If you
don’t believe me, look at your bank statement. Check out the added charges, look at your credit card

These large banks are run by the miscreants FDR called
“banksters. They” are reporting super profits and giving out obscene
bonuses. Their lobbyists are blocking new regulations and eroding
old ones while presiding over the largest transfer of wealth
in history from the working poor to the flamboyant superrich.

Racialization has been displaced by financialization. Now the
“action” in the Tar Heel State is down the road in Charlotte where
the Bank of America is based.

But can we still Bank On Banks Like The Bank Of America?
(You may not recall but the first bank to go in the great Depression 
was called the Bank of the United States.)

Banks R’Us. Today, there are bank branches in almost every neighborhood—except
the poorest ones where pay day lenders reign with their usury on
their mind and in their interest rates. When it comes to credit,
the poor pay more—and the banks know it and profit from it. There
are also mortgage brokers galore in every community.

Fraud is
their middle name. (I am not the only one saying this. The FBI denounces it as an “epidemic.” There are arrests every week.)

The many financial institutions and sleazy lenders are there to do business but they could also become
convenient targets for civic engagement.

Can they be challenged? So far, very few have been. While the Banks are
agressively lobbying; citizens groups are passively sending
e-mails. Never before have so many allowed so few to dominate this
discourse. The banks are clearly winning over the regulators and critics. Even Barney Frank’s committee has capitulated.

Nevertheless, protests against the big banks are beginning. There
will be one at the end of October at the American Banker’s
Association convention and greedfest in Chicago.

But you don’t have to go to “Sweet Home Chicago” to find targets
of outrage, or even trek down to Wall Street. You know where you
bank! True, many branches are just made up of ATM machines whio
want your money, not to hear from you. But the bigger branches are
not far away. They advertise. They are everywhere, doing
business as usual except lending to people who need it most.

Your money in; their profits out.

This could change or at least become “more challenging.” Think of the Greensboro 4, just a few people
then made enough noise to get things going.

Today, you don’t have to call them sit-ins, just polite but firm
and “protracted” conversations with the banksters. If a million
people called their 800 numbers at once, what would happen? Why
not informational picketing to advise consumers about how they are
getting ripped off with high rates and excessive fees? Why not
bring the pain of excessive debt and dispossession to the people
who are causing it and profiting from it? Student loan victims, are
you listening.

What if families who can’t afford day care turned their favorite
branches into day care centers? What if their profits and bonuses
were posted neatly on their windows? What if…. (You fill in the
blank!)

Lets say, concerned folks assembled at bank key bank branches
during the noon hour—Mondays at Chase, Tuesdays at BOA, Wednesdays
at Wells Fargo, Thursdays at Wachovia etc and then spent dress down
Fridays at Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley?

I am sure the bankers will welcome the opportunity to “dialogue”
with their enraged critics and customers. This can only work if it is
done regularly, week after week. One shots won’t work. They may make
protesters feel good but that’s all they will accomplish.

You will be surprised because the acts of a few can inspire action by the many.
Think of Brian Haw, camped out in front of the Parliament in London every day since the Iraq
war started in 2003. He knows we are in a marathon, not a sprint!

You get where I am going? I am not sure where Fred Douglass
banked, back in the days when companies like Lehman Brothers,
before its fall, were financing the slave trade, but his mantra
that without struggle, nothing changes still survives.

Nothing will change without making them uncomfortable. Anger, if
not ‘deployed” like an unguided missle, has its uses.

The Banksters are terrified of what they call “economic populism.”
I prefer to call it economic democracy. Even Barack Obama
understood that years ago when he worked as a community organizer.
I am not sure if he still does.

No one’s going to win a Nobel Prize in Economic Fairness for this
type of non-violent activity but it will bring this issue out of
the back pages of the business section where it is safely buried
and into the front lobes of people’s minds.

Where are the activists blocking foreclosures or rallying at unemployment
offices for extended benefits. Where is the push back against the health insurers? Why are you asleep?

It’s so simple. The Greensboro 4 understood it decades ago. If you
don’t stand up, you might as well lay down.

News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org. His new
film and book, THE CRIME OF OUR TIME is on the financial crisis as
a crime story. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org


For more on the banks, see Anewwayforward.org. Join the fight for financial reform and accountability.

[jesuitsdidit]

i see 'sum1' has been messing with the 'flow' of above article..