Tag Archives: Wall Street Fraud

For the Elite, The Ability to Buy Government Institutions is the Mark of a Free Country

01 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Wall Street Fraud

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Democracy Now had an interesting little run-in with David Koch at the RNC that the corporate-laden media tried to sweep under the rug. With all the dittoheads in the audience chanting “USA! USA! USA!” as the Romneybot of the billionaires mouthed his platitudes, it was refreshing to see an actual journalist at work:


 
While oil and gas giant David Koch was protected from questioning by his ‘survivaball’ of humans that sprang upright around him, Amy Goodman was able to direct the same question to Edward Cox who answered in the following manner:

AMY GOODMAN: Are you concerned about, especially young people, looking at what’s happening in the country, where a handful of multi-millionaires and billionaires are so disproportionately determining the democratic process?

EDWARD COX: That’s a statement that isn’t true. This country is governed by the people. That’s what it’s always been based on.

RNC SECURITY 1: Will you keep this moving? One deep.

AMY GOODMAN: Yeah, I will. I will.

RNC SECURITY 1: OK, thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: OK, one deep, I got you. Mr. Cox answered a question. Why can’t—why can’t Mr. Koch answer a question? I only have one question.

KOCH HANDLER 2: He’s not going to answer. Get out of here.

If you really want to know how David Koch would have answered Amy’s question, a similar inquiry was put to him by Politicker “about the controversial level of influence major contributors have on American elections.” Here was his answer:

We have a free society and people are free to do what they want, you know, as long as they don’t hurt others and they obey the law,” Mr. Koch said. “So, I believe in free speech and if people want to spend money in politics or something else, it’s their right, nothing wrong with that. So, I endorse that.

So you see, as far as the elite are concerned, we live in a free society in which there should be no constraints on the corrupting influence that wealth has on government institutions and public policy. For them, freedom includes the ability to buy the instruments of government so that the interests of the elite may be best served rather than the common good of the citizenry who failed to rise to the ranks of the 0.001% in the game of capitalism. As Noam Chomsky explains in “Plutonomy and the Precariat: On the History of the U.S. Economy in Decline“:

For the general population, the 99% in the imagery of the Occupy movement, it’s been pretty harsh — and it could get worse. This could be a period of irreversible decline. For the 1% and even less — the .1% — it’s just fine. They are richer than ever, more powerful than ever, controlling the political system, disregarding the public. And if it can continue, as far as they’re concerned, sure, why not?

 
Going back to Chomsky’s article, the interests of the elite do not include facing up to the reality of climate change because it’s a direct threat to their power and the wealth they have hoarded. Capitalism must be defended at all costs, even if that means denying that this system is causing our own extinction:

…Practically every country in the world is taking at least halting steps towards trying to do something about it. The United States is also taking steps, mainly to accelerate the threat. It is the only major country that is not only not doing something constructive to protect the environment, it’s not even climbing on the train. In some ways, it’s pulling it backwards.

And this is connected to a huge propaganda system, proudly and openly declared by the business world, to try to convince people that climate change is just a liberal hoax. “Why pay attention to these scientists?”

We’re really regressing back to the dark ages. It’s not a joke. And if that’s happening in the most powerful, richest country in history, then this catastrophe isn’t going to be averted — and in a generation or two, everything else we’re talking about won’t matter…

In the minds of the elite, if they can’t keep a stranglehold on the world, then they’ll be damned if anyone else is going to be allowed to live on a habitable planet.


King Romney’s Dream for America: Slave Labor in Barb-Wired Factories & a Double Down on Fossil Fuels

26 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Corporate State, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Peak Oil, Wall Street Fraud

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On the Labor front….

I came across the above video yesterday evening. It’s a recording of Mitt Romney recounting his days at Bain Capital when he was off-shoring U.S. manufacturing to slave labor camps in China. From the video I’m assuming that America’s gift to the world, as Romney refers to it, is neoliberal capitalism and the privilege that economic system brings to the masses who can enjoy working for pennies per hour in a sweatshop factory complete with dormitories holding “12 girls per room”, all of which is enclosed by barb-wired fencing. And as Romney relates, the fences are to keep the hoards of people out who are dying to fill a position in the factory as soon as someone falls over. For Romney and the typical vulture capitalist, this is a wet dream: endless numbers of cheap laborers ready to fill assembly-line positions which are unencumbered by unions, safety regulations, and basic rights for workers. In such factories humans are reduced to cattle in order to extract the maximum profit. A Foxconn executive expressed the general sentiment of corporate capitalists when he referred to his workers as “animals” earlier this year. Despite recent reports by the Fair Labor Association (FLA) on the heels of an eye-opening report on labor conditions, the reality on the ground, as Romney can attest to from his days at Bain, is the same as it ever was:

As reported here, China Labour Watch is claiming that bribery is undermining the audit system. China Labour Watch founder Li Qiang has not minced his words: “Although the working hours at Foxconn have been reduced to less than 60 hours per week, the intensity of the hourly work has been increased. According to our follow-up investigation, the workers have to complete the workload of 66 hours before within 60 hours now per week. As a result, the workers get lower wages but have to work much harder and they are not satisfied with the current situation. The harsh working conditions are by no means isolated to just Foxconn but exist throughout Apple’s supply chain. However, that report only focused on Foxconn factories. It is Apple’s entire supply chain system that should be responsible for the squeezing of workers.”

On the Energy Front:

King Romney is going to double down on fossil fuels in America, further dismantling regulations and awarding more tax breaks for Big Oil:

Romney unveiled his energy plan, which makes no mention of climate change and focuses on reaching energy independence by 2020 through increased extraction and use of oil, gas and coal, accompanied by reduced regulation for these industries.

The plan underlines the fact that the Republican Party and the oil, gas and coal industries, long in agreement on policy and ideology, have grown closer than ever before. Romney, whose top energy adviser is the wealthiest oilman in the country, is on pace to raise more money from these industries than either George W. Bush or Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) did when he ran for president. The industries are also pumping millions into the new unlimited money vehicles, super PACs and dark money nonprofits, that are spending tens of millions of dollars per month to influence the election…

…A central part of the plan is taking the power to permit and license new onshore drilling on federal lands out of the hands of the federal government and putting it into the hands of the states. That means that states like Alaska or North Dakota, which is enjoying a massive oil boom under the current regulatory regime, would be able to allow drilling on federal lands with no oversight from Washington.

North Dakota stands out, in particular, as it is where Romney’s top energy adviser, oil billionaire Harold Hamm, is making his fortune. Hamm, whose stump speech is only three words, “Beat Barack Obama,” has given $985,000 to Restore Our Future and raised money for the Romney campaign. He would profit greatly from this change in policy as his company, Continental Resources, would be freed to drill beyond the Bakken fields in North Dakota using techniques including hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling….

…Among many other policies supporting the industry, Romney calls for a repeal of regulations limiting the amount of mercury, a hazardous pollutant, that can be emitted from coal and oil power plants…

Overlooking the catastrophic externality of climate change, notice that Romney is heralding America’s energy independence through his plan of ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ of fossil fuels. If you look at the following graph, you’ll see that there is no amount of drilling we could do within America to achieve fossil fuel energy independence:

As you can see, America hit peak oil around 1970 at 9.637 mbpd (million barrels per day), as predicted by Hubbert, and then in 1993 America’s domestic oil production was surpassed by consumption, a point from which we have never recovered. Even with the recent drastic drop in consumption due to an anemic economy, we are still importing around 10 to 11 MBPD while domestic production is somewhere between 7 to 8 MBPD. Domestic production would have to double from the current rate or total consumption, which sits currently at roughly 18 to 19 MBPD, would have to be halved while allowing for the requisite economic growth that we worship. That’s not going to happen. As Loren Steffy explains, “U.S. oil production gains are like water pumps on the Titanic“:

…The much-ballyhooed increase in U.S. production simply isn’t enough to have a meaningful effect on global oil prices, which doubled from 2005 to 2011. That ultimately is the biggest factor in setting prices for retail gasoline.

U.S. production gains look impressive, but much of it offsets declines earlier in the decade because of major hurricanes that disrupted offshore and Gulf Coast facilities. Domestic production was 7.5 million barrels a day in 2010, according to the Energy Information Administration, and that number probably increased to about 7.7 million barrels last year, estimates Jeffrey Brown, an independent petroleum geologist in Fort Worth who writes frequently on oil issues.

In 2004, before the spate of hurricanes, production was 7.2 million barrels. That means domestic production hasn’t increased more than about 500,000 barrels a day despite the fracking binge and other efforts to encourage drilling. During the same period, net exports for all countries in North America — including Canada, Mexico and Venezuela, some of our biggest suppliers — fell by 1.4 million barrels, or 23 percent, according to Brown’s analysis.

Brown compares the situation to water flowing into the Titanic after it hit the iceberg.

“Let’s assume that water is pouring into the ship 10 times faster than than water is being pumped out,” he said. “The water being pumped out is analogous to the slow increase in U.S. crude oil production. The water flowing in is analogous to declining annual net exports. Guess which metric most people seem to be focused on?”

That doesn’t even account for China, India and other rapidly developing countries, whose oil imports are rising sharply, increasing the competition for oil with countries like the U.S.

“So, while slowly increasing U.S. crude oil production is very important, the dominant trend we are seeing is that developed oil importing countries like the U.S. are being gradually priced out of the global market for exported oil,” Brown said…

King Romney, nevertheless, will use the rallying call of his energy plan to increase domestic oil production, with its attached gifts of even more environmentally destructive deregulation and kleptocratic giveaways to Big Oil from the taxpayer, as a reason for voters to put him into the White House. But as pointed out at Fair.org, this is all a smokescreen manipulating public perception:

In a New York Times story (8/24/12) about Mitt Romney’s energy proposals, reporters Eric Lipton and Clifford Krauss make this observation:

With gasoline prices again approaching $4 a gallon, Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, is also trying to merge energy and economic policy in a way that will make voters see increased energy production as a pocketbook issue.

Note that Lipton and Krauss don’t say that increased U.S. energy production will actually affect the $4-a-gallon price of gas and hence the voters’ pocketbooks; that would be inaccurate, since oil is a global commodity and it’s impossible for the U.S. to increase its production enough to change it substantially. In fact, with the formulation “in a way that will make voters see,” the Times  reporters suggest that they are well aware that increased oil drilling will not actually alter gas prices–that this is a matter of changing public perceptions, not economic realities.

But then, Lipton and Krass don’t do anything in their piece to let the reader know that the implied connection between increased drilling and lower gas prices is fraudulent…

The doublespeak used by politicians of all stripes to bend reality is the same as it ever was.

The System Has Reached Entropy

24 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

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Getting It Wrong on Natural Gas

21 Tuesday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Corporate State, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

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This guy Friedman sparked my interest from the last post on America’s corporate talking heads, so I looked to see what Tom has been writing about recently (Get It Right on Gas) and thought I’d dispel Tom’s delusional corporate-funded views about natural gas in America. But before I do that, I little history on Tom:

Thomas L. Friedman won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, his third Pulitzer for The New York Times. He became the paper’s foreign-affairs Op-Ed columnist in 1995. Previously, he served as chief economic correspondent in the Washington bureau and before that he was the chief White House correspondent. In 2005, Mr. Friedman was elected as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board.

In a recent essay, Glenn Greenwald, who by the way is now writing for the UK Guardian, described Friedman in the following manner:

If I had to pick just a single fact that most powerfully reflects the nature of America’s political and media class in order to explain the cause of the nation’s imperial decline, it would be that, in those classes, Tom Friedman is the country’s most influential and most decorated “foreign policy expert.”

Now on to Friedman’s misinformed article about natural gas in America, Get It Right on Gas, which gets it totally wrong on natural gas. In the article, Friedman calls America’s natural gas deposits a “potential game changer” and that it “may soon be powering cars, trucks and ships as well.” It’s the usual spiel we’ve been hearing for several years now. The reality is that the supposed natural gas boom is indeed a financial Ponzi scheme on a grand scale based on false claims of economically recoverable reserves. Remember last year the news story about internal documents from financial insiders and experts of gas drillers that surfaced? Various internal memos said the following:

An August 2009 memo from the firm IHS Drilling Data says, “The word in the world of independents is that the shale plays are just giant Ponzi schemes and the economics just do not work.” Earlier this year, an analyst at PNC Wealth Management compared natural gas projects to the dot-com boom, saying, “money is pouring in” even though drilling is “inherently unprofitable.” In another memo, a retired geologist for a major oil giant writes, “These corporate giants are having an Enron moment… They want to bend light to hide the truth.”

Off the back of that news story from last year comes the following revelation from business insider Wolf Richter, as quoted in an Automatic Earth article:

…thanks to the Feds zero-interest-rate policy and the trillions it has handed over to its cronies since late 2008, the sweeps of creative destruction have broken down. Instead, boundless sums of money have been searching for a place to go, and they’re chasing yield when there is none, and so they’re taking risks, any kind of risks, in their vain battle to come out ahead…

…But the money has dried up. And drilling for natural gas is collapsing. Last week, there were only 562 rigs drilling for dry natural gas, the lowest number since September 1999…

…At $2.53 per million Btu at the Henry Hub, the price of natural gas is up 33% from the April low of $1.90 per million Btu, a number not seen in a decade.

…even if it doubled, it would still be below the cost of production. And if it tripled, it might still be below the cost of production for most producers. That’s how mispriced the commodity has become.

The economics of fracking are horrid. All wells have decline rates where production drops over time. But instead of decades for traditional wells, decline rates in horizontal fracking are measured in weeks and months: production falls off a cliff from day one and continues for a year or so until it levels out at about 10% of initial production. To be in the black over its life under these circumstances, a well in the Barnett Shale would have to sell its production for about $8 per million Btu, pricing models have shown….

…Drilling is destroying capital at an astonishing rate, and drillers are left with a mountain of debt just when decline rates are starting to wreak their havoc. To keep the decline rates from mucking up income statements, companies had to drill more and more, with new wells making up for the declining production of old wells. Alas, the scheme hit a wall, namely reality…

It’s interesting to note that the Russian gas company, Gazprom, hired an American consulting firm just 20 miles from the White House in Fairfax, Virginia to analyze the economic viability of the natural gas “boom” in America. With the data collected by Pace Global Energy Services, Gazprom concluded the following:

“We think the current US gas market model is unsustainable in the medium and long term,” Komlev told Platts via email. “We forecast that soon, the disparity between the shale gas costs and sales price will disappear. When it happens, it will make the US plans to become a major gas exporter economically unviable.”

…Based largely on Pace’s review of quarterly earnings reports and other financial data from US gas companies, Gazprom says the true costs of shale-gas production are upwards of 150% higher than the revenues its practitioners have been reaping in the last few years. But companies are continuing to use the approach for now, Komlev says, because they are also producing some higher-priced gas liquids in the process.

Gazprom also believes that shale-gas drillers will incur additional costs to ensure that the chemicals they use in the fracking process will not contaminate underground sources of drinking water.

In a May 2012 article, Dmitry Orlov quotes Gazprom’s chairman, Alexei Miller:

“Shale gas is a well-organized global PR-campaign. There are many of them: global cooling, biofuels.” He pointed out that the technology for producing gas from shale is many decades old, and suggested the US turned to it out of desperation.

In addition to the poor or nonexistent EROEI and short life of shale gas wells in the U.S., Orlov also brings up a problem I was not aware of with Marcellus Shale, and that is its radioactivity:

Thanks to Marcellus shale gas, radioactive radon gas is being delivered directly to your kitchen, via the burners of your stove, or to a power plant smokestack upwind from where you live. This is expected to result in increased lung cancer rates in the coming years.

Michael Miller, writing an article for the Anton News of New York, had this to say about the natural gas bubble:

Last week, three Bradford County families reached a $1.6 million settlement with Chesapeake Energy of Oklahoma City (“America’s Champion of Natural Gas”), compensation for the ruination of their water wells by methane gas migrations from nearby high volume hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) operations. This is the first time ever that details of a Marcellus Shale settlement have been revealed to the public, at the insistence of the families…

…Gas companies sold large chunks of futures last year at more than $5 per million BTU. Even if they’re still doing well on paper, these prices are far below the cost of production. Chesapeake Energy now leases drilling rights on over 15 million acres of land (more than eight times the area of Nassau and Suffolk Counties) and makes its profits mostly by flipping properties. In 2010, the company sold land it had purchased in Texas for $2,000 an acre to a large Chinese oil company for $11,000 an acre, making a profit of $2.2 billion…

…Natural gas wells can’t compete for investment capital with oil wells, which have a much higher “Energy Returned On Energy Invested” ratio (after only several months, sometimes only several weeks, production from fracked wells falls off the table and levels off at about 10 percent of initial production). That’s why gas companies are flooding daytime television and the halls of the State Capitol in Albany with millions of dollars in advertising and lobbying power, trolling for small investors and warning off politicians who might be tempted to meddle. And this has been working.

Many of us, exposed to the incessant propaganda, think that America is poised to become the energy-exporting powerhouse it once was, if only the government would get out of the way. In fact, the natural gas industry as we know it wouldn’t exist without massive subsidies and tax breaks. Last week, it was reported that since its founding 23 years ago, Chesapeake Energy has paid only $53 million on its $5.5 billion in profits.

The U.S. Department of Energy has cut its estimate of gas available in the Marcellus Shale by nearly 70 percent. A Colorado School of Mines report estimates that the U.S. has a recoverable gas supply of 23 years, not the “near 100-year supply” that President Obama still talks about as a centerpiece of his energy plan.

Recently, a coalition of 55 institutional investors with over $1 trillion in assets called on companies involved with shale gas fracking to police themselves and reign in the tactics that are turning off America and putting everybody’s money at risk. T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire who toured the country promoting natural gas as the answer to our country’s energy problems, announced in May that he was “out of the natural gas stocks…We didn’t like natural gas.”

The money is talking.

There are no easy answers to our energy, climate and fiscal situations, and fossil fuels are made mostly of carbon, not magic.

I contacted Michael Miller by email and asked for his sources which he emailed me, also telling me other sources included personal contacts of “people in government, particularly Albany.” So there you have it. The natural gas boom is pretty much a bust egged on by low-interest loans by the Fed, financial shenanigans of energy corporation executives, and America’s desperation for energy in the age of peak oil. I did not get into the other major environmental disasters of gas fracking in this post, but I have talked about them in Profiting Off Acts of Desperation, and I posted the mini-documentary “The Sky is Pink” here. I noticed that Josh Fox, producer of the aforementioned documentary, made a comment on Tom Friedman’s article:

Recently, politicians and publications have conditionally endorsed so-called “safe fracking” as a part of the nation’s energy mix. But safe fracking is an impossibility, and the industry’s claims for it are knowingly based on false premises.

Chief among them is the notion that a “leakproof well” is possible. We’ve heard time again that strict regulation is the key to moving forward on fracking, and that new regulations should make sure that industry constructs leakproof wells that do not pollute the water table. There is no such thing as a leakproof gas well. The gas industry knows this; in fact, it has known it for decades.

I recently made a short film addressing the well casing failure issue called THE SKY IS PINK and you can watch it here: www.pinkskyny.com.

A 2003 joint industry publication from Schlumberger, the world’s No. 1 fracking company, cites astronomical failure rates of 60 percent over a 30-year span. To imagine gas companies voluntarily committing to an eternity of costly maintenance on wells failing at ever-increasing rates is beyond credulity. “Safe fracking” is a contradiction in terms.

Leaking gas wells at these rates mean thousands across the nation have enough contaminants in their water and land to render them unfit for residential use.

It’s not only the gas wells that have integrity problems; it is the oil and gas industry itself. We can believe in their self-interested assertions of leakproof wells about as much as we can expect pigs to fly.

In addition to what Josh mentioned above, a 2009 Cornell University study suggests that Shale Gas may be worse than coal as far as greenhouse gas emissions are concerned, with substantial levels of methane leaks traced back to underground Shale Gas operations. Will America’s natural gas reserves make it energy independent? I’ll believe that when pigs fly.

Post Script: I just noticed that the other major corporate mouthpiece, Fareed Zakaria, is also singing the praises of America’s wondrous bounty of natural gas…

As long as there’s sheople to fleece, you’ll have people like Thomas Friedman and Fareed Zakaria filling the corporate airways.

Also see:

Is Fracking DOA in NYS? 

America’s Two-Headed Corporate Hydra Monster of Politics & the Abandonment of the People

16 Thursday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality, Wall Street Fraud

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Jeffrey Sachs’ op ed piece entitled “America Has Lost the battle Over Government” in the Financial Times explains how the budget plans of our two corporate candidate stooges are strikingly similar and offer no real choice for the American citizen. With the modern-day instruments of mass media manipulation being the most sophisticated tool for mind control in the history of man, you are made to think that the current election is an epic struggle between the forces of good and evil, but the American’s fate of joblessness, dwindling social assistance programs, a permanently growing underclass, and the slide into an oligarchic Third World country has already been written in stone by the transnational capitalist forces and its corporate state. Crime will surely go up, lifespan expectancy will go down for the underclass, and the infrastructure of the nation will continue its trajectory into dilapidation and decay. Sacrificing your body in the Empire’s foreign resource wars and geopolitical games will be one of the only jobs available for our debt-ridden youth:

…Mr Ryan’s plan calls for federal revenues of 18.4 per cent of gross domestic product in 2016 and 18.5 per cent in 2020 (though his lower tax rates would probably put those targets out of reach). His budget outlays come in at 19.7 per cent and 19.5 per cent in 2016 and 2020, respectively. Of the total outlays in 2016, Mr Ryan targets “discretionary” programmes at 5.9 per cent of GDP; social security, 5 per cent; Medicare, 3.2 per cent; other mandatory spending, 3.7 per cent; and interest payments, 1.9 per cent.

Now consider Mr Obama’s budget unveiled in February. Federal revenues are targeted at 19.1 per cent of GDP in 2016 and 19.7 per cent of GDP in 2020, only about 1 percentage point above Mr Ryan’s revenue targets. In Mr Obama’s 2016 budget targets, discretionary spending is set at 5.9 per cent of GDP; social security, 5 per cent; Medicare, 3.2 per cent; other mandatory spending, 5.8 per cent; and interest payments, 2.5 per cent.

In fact, Mr Obama’s overall discretionary spending targets are essentially the same as Mr Ryan’s. Whether Mr Obama or Mr Romney wins, the “non-security” discretionary budget – for education, job skills, infrastructure, science and technology, space, environmental protection, alternative energy and climate change adaptation – is on the chopping block. Mr Obama’s budget would shrink non-security discretionary programmes from an already insufficient 3.1 per cent of GDP in 2011 to 1.8 per cent in 2020. That is the “liberal” alternative.

In bemoaning Mr Obama’s budget, I do not mean to equate it with Mr Ryan’s. Mr Ryan’s budget is nothing short of heartless in the face of the dire crisis facing America’s poor. It is also reckless, guaranteed to leave millions of children without the quality of education and skills they will need as adults. Yet the sad truth is that the Democrats offer no progressive alternative. Both parties are accomplices to the premeditated asphyxiation of the state. Viewed from an international perspective, the constricted range of the US fiscal debate is striking. Total US government revenues (combining federal, state and local governments) in 2011 came in at about 32 per cent of GDP. This compares with an average of 44 per cent in the EU and 50 per cent in northern Europe.

Many Americans will say that they are dodging the European curse by keeping taxation so low but they should look again. Northern Europe (Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) gets great value for its tax revenues: lower budget deficits, lower unemployment rates, lower public debt-to-GDP ratios, lower poverty rates, greater social mobility, better job training, longer life expectancy, lower greenhouse gas emissions, higher reported life satisfaction and greater macroeconomic stability.

America’s two political parties depend on wealthy contributors to finance their presidential campaigns. These donors want and expect their taxes to stay low. As a result, social divisions, broken infrastructure, laggard educational attainments, high carbon emissions and chronic budget deficits are likely to continue no matter who is elected, even though the public supports higher taxes on corporations and the rich…

Chris Hedges was back in court over the government’s appeal of Judge Forrest’s earlier injunction of the NDAA. As a matter of fact, the government has refused to comply with the injunction. Hedges states he and the other plaintiffs “will most likely have to continue this fight in an appellate court and perhaps the Supreme Court.” He also notes that no matter the results of the rigged U.S. elections, no meaningful change will come to the deteriorating lives of ordinary Americans:

…The corporate state has convinced the masses, in essence, to clamor for their own enslavement. There is, in reality, no daylight between Mitt Romney and Obama about the inner workings of the corporate state. They each support this section within the NDAA and the widespread extinguishing of civil liberties. They each will continue to funnel hundreds of billions of wasted dollars to defense contractors, intelligence agencies and the military. They each intend to let Wall Street loot the U.S. Treasury with impunity. Neither will lift a finger to help the long-term unemployed and underemployed, those losing their homes to foreclosures or bank repossessions, those filing for bankruptcy because of medical bills or college students burdened by crippling debt. Listen to the anguished cries of partisans on either side of the election divide and you would think this was a battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. You would think voting in the rigged political theater of the corporate state actually makes a difference. The charade of junk politics is there not to offer a choice but to divert the crowd while our corporate masters move relentlessly forward, unimpeded by either party, to turn all dissent into a crime…

A lot of Americans buy into this “cult of individualism” and anti-government sentiment which the elites of the corporate state artfully peddle in order to dismantle any remnants of a functioning government that might serve the common good of its citizenry. In this way, the corporate state has convinced the masses to cheer the destruction of government and its beneficial roles. But of course we cannot call our lobbyist-infested, corporate-controlled government an actual representation of the people’s interests. Just as our two-partied presidential election is an orchestrated illusion of democracy, so is the false dichotomy of government and corporations which are merely separated by a revolving door. The government has become, for the most part, a tool for wealth extraction by multinational corporations. During a period of multiple civilization-ending crises when leadership is in dire need, the degeneration of government from a socially beneficial entity into a puppet of Wall Street’s rapacious greed is the greatest tragedy of our time.

The Political Circus and the Approaching Post-Human Era

13 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality, Wall Street Fraud

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Here is a nice little skewering of King Romney by Cliff Schecter entitled Mitt Romney: The aristocrat. Some excerpts:

…if you knew you were running for president, wouldn’t you perhaps spend at least five years before running making your taxes look as clean as a whistle? I’m saying no Grand Caymans, no Switzerland, no stashing bullion in the cargo bay of Curiosity to reach the low-tax surface of Mars (ok, one of these might be an exaggeration).

Not Romney, though. He apparently had to use every manoeuvre known to man and man’s most deceitful accountant to ensure he paid low-to-no taxes. So how has he handled the fallout? Stonewalling, uncomfortable denials, and lashing out at those who attack him for his hidden returns, such as Senator Harry Reid – thereby keeping the whole story in the news that much longer (genius!).

He’s even got porn star Jenna Jameson saying she is going to vote for him because “when you’re rich, you want a Republican in office.” (Of course, other porn actors interviewed by The Daily Beast are pro-Obama, showing that even in the world of X-rated entertainment, Mitt can find a way to divide the top 1 per cent from everyone else)…

Amazingly, if you look at the polls, a large percentage of American’s(aka the clueless, MSM spoon-fed plebs) would still vote for someone who is part of the cosseted 0.001% responsible for hiding 20 to 30 trillion in off-shore tax havens and who boldly regurgitate the lie that corporations in America have the highest tax rate in the world (the nominal rate is meaningless; it’s the effective rate produced from all the tax loopholes that counts). But as they say, the propaganda-ridden minds of the American public are mere putty in the hands of the corporate-owned media machine. Mind you, I know there is no real measurable difference between Obama and Romney when it comes to our self-inflicted trajectory toward a post-human era, but voting for Romney, a financier of the criminal class on Wall Street, takes ‘voting against your own interests’ to a whole new level. I mean this guy financed Bain Capital with blood money from death squad oligarchs in South America. I understand the utter failure Obama has been for the masses who bought into the “Hope” slogan, but voting for King Romney is like saying, “I give up; please rape me and then throw me to the lions.”

In a comment section of Schecter’s piece, a reader sumarizes perfectly what King Romney is about:

Let us focus that the issue is not Rommey or the VP RP, the issue is what is behind Rommey. Rommey is the representative of global capitalism; he is not interested in the American people as a nation, but as consumers; for him the solvency of the middle class is of no importance. It is the maintenance of corporate America and global capital that matters for him. He advocates trickle down economics and the emancipation of corporations over people. [In] the end Rommey, like any other warmonger, will use war [as] an economic incentive.

– ’nuff said. So how are the American plebs doing? For starters, a recent study found that nearly half the population in the U.S. dies penniless and dependent on Social Security. Basically we are now a nation of the grotesquely wealthy, the ‘just-getting-by’, and the crumb scrapers. The ‘just-getting-by’ segment is always in danger of falling into the ranks of the crumb scrapers. And the elite 1%, as we have discussed in prior posts, have built up a security and surveillance state as well as the prison industrial complex in order to deal with those who have any funny ideas of changing that status quo.

…now back to our two corporate stooges who are vying for the coveted PR position of the corporatocracy. Matt Taibbi has a new article out which shows how our tax system favors the wealthy and how Big Money from Wall Street perverts our political system:

…We’ve known for seven months now, for instance, that Romney paid $3 million in federal taxes in 2010 on $21.7 million in taxable revenue, an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent. Which, as most people know, is less than half the rate most people pay on their income tax.

When Romney released these numbers, he said they were “entirely legal and fair,” and added, “I’m proud of the fact that I pay a lot of taxes.”

The Romney tax returns are a prime example of our increasingly two-tiered bureaucratic system, in which there is one set of rules for poor and middle-class people, and another set of rules for people like Mitt Romney. …

<snip>

In Mitt’s case, the money you and I make to support ourselves is called income and is taxed up to 35 percent, but the money Mitt makes raiding companies with borrowed money and extracting draconian management fees from captive companies that have no choice but to pay them is called “Carried Interest,” and taxed at a top rate of 15%.

The ostensible excuse for this outrageous difference is based upon a built-in cultural value judgment, which says that the work Mitt Romney does raiding companies with borrowed money is more valuable than the work ordinary people do laying asphalt or teaching autistic children. Here’s what one private equity spokesperson said by way of explanation for this difference:

Steve Judge, the president of the Private Equity Growth Capital Council, a trade group for private equity funds, said carried interest is a way to reward risk takers in a way that tax havens do not. “They don’t have the purpose of incentivizing risk taking,” Judge said. “That makes it inappropriate to blend carried interest with them.”

So the carried interest tax break is a way to “incentivize” the kind of work Mitt Romney does. One wonders then if the relatively higher tax rates paid by teachers and librarians and cops is … what? A disincentive? Anyway, it’s this skewed set of obligations that Mitt Romney thinks is “fair.”

The Obama administration, if it wanted to, could make a lot of hay over this. It could say, “Mitt Romney doesn’t want to release his tax returns for years and years during the last decade. But the years for which he did release returns, he paid a rate that’s less than half of what most ordinary American professionals make – and he thinks that’s ‘fair.’”

Now, Obama has gone after Mitt’s tax returns – a little. He’s released a few ads here and there, including one called “Makes You Wonder” that called Mitt’s use of carried interest in his tax return a “trick,” a semantic move for which Obama was criticized, since it was actually nothing of the sort. Mitt Romney’s ability to pay a top rate of 15% for his work was no trick at all but a fully-legal expression of the values of our current political system, a system, again, that Mitt Romney is “proud of” and thinks is “fair.”

The reason the Obama administration hasn’t gone after this aggressively is probably the same reason it hasn’t fought harder to repeal that carried interest tax break (which Obama incidentally promised to do four years ago), and the same reason that everyone from Corey Booker to Bill Clinton has urged Obama to lay off the theme of private equity thuggery in his campaign against Romney. Big-time politicians are still afraid to explain to the American people how exactly it is that many Wall Street firms make their money, because they’re afraid to lose access to the crumbs those firms sometimes toss their way.

In the case of Romney, what we’ve mostly heard is that he’s a turnover specialist who sometimes creates jobs and sometimes eliminates them – a kind of ideologically-neutral efficiency consultant who takes a cut when poorly-run companies cut out the fat. The Obama ads about Bain have been emotionally effective, but they’re still frustratingly vague about the actual mechanics of these takeovers. We learn from these ads that a bunch of rich guys took over plants and fired workers, but what we don’t learn is how companies like Bain raise the money for those takeovers, why the plants subsequently become cash-poor, how this industry works generally, and not just at Bain.

In fact the takeover method espoused by Bain and many other private equity firms is a lot closer to the Tony Soprano-takes-over-Davey-Scatino’s-sporting-goods-store “Bust Out” model (and we’ll be getting into this more in the magazine in upcoming weeks) than it is to anything like legitimate consulting.

Barack Obama is one of the few politicians with the communication skills to explain this to middle America, but he’s refusing to go there, probably because he’s still hoping for a post-election rapprochement with Wall Street. He wants to go after Bain Capital, but not private equity in general; he wants to go after Mitt Romney’s missing tax returns, but not the tax returns of all people like Mitt Romney.

So there you have it. Both sock-puppet politicians continue to protect the monied interests, skirt the real issues, and bamboozle the sheeple. But as I said, in a post-human era of the not-too-distant future, you can’t get too riled up about such trivialities.

They Hate Us for Our (Fictitious) Freedoms???

11 Saturday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Corporate State, Wall Street Fraud

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I noticed today that our Department of (In)Justice will allow the crimes of their corporate masters, i.e. Goldman Sachs, to stand. The Department of (In)Justice has bigger fish to fry like the poor guy in this recent story:

A protester belonging to an Occupy Wall Street group in rural Pennsylvania is being charged with felony attempted bank robbery and a terrorism-related charge for holding signs up during a demonstration at a local Wells Fargo branch.

David C. Gorczynski, 22, was charged on Tuesday with attempted bank robbery and terroristic threatening, both felonies, as well as one misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct. Police detained him after he walked into an Easton, PA Wells Fargo branch with a sign that read “You’re being robbed” and another that said “Give a man a gun, he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank, and he can rob a country.”

Gorczynski was at the Wells Fargo bank as part of a demonstration led by Occupy Easton, the small Pennsylvania town’s OWS offshoot…

“He is not the criminal. If the police were truly there to protect and serve the taxpayers, the banksters would be arrested and this man would be called a hero,” the Occupy Easton group responds on Facebook.

Gorczynski was released on $10,000 bond after a defense and bail fund established online helped bring in enough money to buy his freedom after his arrest.

Remember what little man Bush said: “They hate us for our freedoms.” So Bush, the Neocons, and the Faux Democrats proceeded to dismantle the very freedoms that were purported to be the reason for why the terrorists hated us. We should be thankful our dear leaders were wise enough to know how to get at the root of the problem, our freedoms, in order to prevent further animosity toward America.

So as to not incur the wrath of future terrorist attacks, our every movement, thought, and expressed opinion must be tracked to ensure we are not exercising any freedoms believed to be so inflammatory to the terrorists amongst us:

…So what is TrapWire, and why has its leak created such a commotion? According to reporting at RT, TrapWire is a detailed surveillance system that “can collect information about people and vehicles that is more accurate than facial recognition, draw[s] patterns, and do[es] threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists.” Anything suspect gets input into the system to be “analyzed and compared with data entered from other areas within a network for the purpose of identifying patterns of behavior that are indicative of pre-attack planning.”

According to the article, this system has been secretly installed in most major cities and around landmarks across the United States, in Canada, and in the UK. Most local police forces are installing their own monitoring software that works in conjunction with TrapWire. Private properties, including casinos, are now signing up to TrapWire. Essentially, it sounds like Big Brother identifying you, watching you, assessing your every move for abnormalities, then indexing your behavior.

…

Last year, while the occupy movement peacefully protested in cities across the country, a new-militarized police force presented itself, and moved to brutalize protesters exercising their rights to freedom of speech and assembly. It was as if these long-cherished American values had suddenly become viewed by our government as threats to its power. The scores of video footage capturing these egregious acts of brutality — from city to city, in a seemingly coordinated effort — resemble scenes carried out in faraway lands by despotic regimes.

Here is the reality about freedom: you may have a bill of rights, but if you are brutalized anytime you attempt to exercise those rights, you eventually become intimidated from ever doing so. And that appears to be the new order in America.

The brutality against occupy protesters became such an issue for human rights groups, as well as media groups whose reporters were being assaulted (including NY Times, The Associated Press, The New York Post, The Daily News, Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones & Company, etc.), that even the U.N. felt compelled to intervene. Two U.N. human rights envoys petitioned the Obama Administration to “protect Occupy protesters against excessive force by law enforcement officials.” The White House completely ignored their petition, and did absolutely nothing to reign in, much less condemn, the brutality.

Legal experts from NYU and Fordham University filed complaints with the NYPD, the U.S. Department of Justice and the United Nations, accompanied by a 132 page report entitled Suppressing Protest: Human Rights Violations in the U.S. Response to Occupy Wall Street. The document “catalogs 130 specific alleged incidents of excessive police force, and hundreds of additional violations, including unjustified arrests, abuse of journalists, unlawful closure of sidewalks and parks to protesters, and pervasive surveillance of peaceful activists.” This document barely scratches the surface, since its scope is limited just to the police response in NYC. The group plans to release similar publications for Boston, Charlotte, Oakland, and San Francisco.

For those of you who believe that our nation’s dramatic shift towards a police-state is justifiable, in light of 9-11, you should know that nearly every police-state throughout history became so under the guise of national security threats. Most despotic regimes faced real, perceived, or sometimes manufactured threats to their national security. And most of them could point historians back to their own 9-11-like ‘turning point’.

For example, Adolph Hitler would surely point historians to the burning of the Reichstag building on February 27, 1933 as Germany’s ‘turning point’. He blamed the arson on the Communists (Note: some prominent historians believed the Nazis themselves were responsible for the arson). But regardless of who actually burned Reichstag, the Nazis capitalized on that crucial moment in a way that would forever change the course of history.

They used the shock and fear generated by that event as justification for the Reichstag Fire Decree. This new law suspended basic rights of all Germans and allowed detention without trial. Sound familiar? That was Hitler’s very first step in consolidating his power, and transforming Germany into a despotic regime.

A government shifting towards despotism always works to capitalize on a nation’s fear. It uses that fear as the impetus to strip its citizens of their inalienable rights. And unfortunately, once those rights have been fleeced, it often takes a full-scale revolution or war just to restore them.

America, land of the free feeble and home of the brave bamboozled…

Agent Orange

07 Tuesday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Consumerism

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mozilo

Dateline 1981, Orange County, CA and what was to become ground zero for global mortgage fraud, perpetrated by the likes of Angelo Mozilla, nicknamed by the media Agent Orange for his decadent fake (and very nearly orange) tan of the criminal overclass, we begin with the nascent dawn of Reagan’s “Morning in America” on the cusp of the soon to break Savings and Loan Crisis.

The scene was a 2 ½ hour drive to a nondescript 3 bedroom tract home in Huntington Beach, about a mile or two from the ocean. It was the parent’s home of a fellow college student who was taking advantage of their parent’s vacation to host a party, replete with backyard keg and the requisite single light bulb lamp nearby to prevent spills.

With all the irony of the two working parent hierarchy of the times, the homeowners were so busy with their jobs that neither had time to go to the beach, the dreary patina of tract home living had quietly subsumed the idealism of living near the beach.

This was not lost on the college aged son, who upon learning that the house would be vacant, promptly released word of the party. We arrived to the house after the considerable drive, and found amplifiers and a drum set already assembled in the living room, with microphone stand at the ready. After mingling aimlessly for an hour or two amongst the preppy college students with Izod shirt logos and sweaters with arms carefully folded around their necks, the cacophony of Bob Seger and the “Silver Bullet Band” began to grate on our nerves.

There is only so much you can take, but we knew something they did not-there was to be a special guest.

Indeed, after another stultifying hour, a beat up van pulled up out front, and three guys wearing surfer shorts and tee shirts came inside and plugged in their guitars. They played but three songs, and this was one of them:

Afterwards, they abruptly left. In the vacuum left behind, there was a palatable unease, sweaters were nervously adjusted, no one really said anything. Someone put the Bob Seger album back on, which thankfully was put out of its misery with the elliptical trajectory of an angry beer bottle.

Forward to 2008, high rise office towers with names like “Dieco”, “Countrywide”, and “Indy Mac” prominently displayed, which housed platoons of tens of thousands of mortgage workers who filled these towers every day. Their “products” were mortgages and refi’s, doling out money to whoever had a pulse and a desire to own a piece of the American dream, then securitizing these phony loans to sell off to pension funds and other unsuspecting investors.
The well publicized financing arm of the mortgage crisis gets all the attention, but behind the scenes we have something much more interesting occurring. To illustrate, we again go to the epicenter of all that went wrong in the mortgage cum real estate biz, Orange County, CA.

To enable the construction of vast numbers of new homes that will serve as the collateralization of these new dollars to be leant, we need institutional infrastructure designed to encourage inventor participation and insure equity growth. In other words, we need giveaways.
With infrastructure too big a charter for small independent developers and investors, a new entity emerged, that of the Master Planned Community. Usually dominated by large regional landowners with significant political connections already in place, they began in earnest to create circumstances favorable to large scale tract development, a process that was prototyped with the first large scale master planned community in the ‘70’s (Irvine, CA), and then rapidly ported to other states and counties.

In California, Prop 13 limits the amount of YOY property tax that can be assessed. But to grow and develop hundreds of thousands of new homes, this requires infrastructure, such as schools, utilities and roads. In the first major attempt to privatize large swaths of the public domain, a bond mechanism legislation called “Mello-Roos” was enacted, enabling developers to externalize all of the infrastructure costs onto the homeowners in the form of a tax supplement, which is not governed by Prop 13. It is very nearly impossible to buy new construction in CA without falling under this forced bond payment. It is often very near 100% of the standard (mandatory) State property tax. The bonds are nominally for 20 years, but most homeowners will tell you they never go away, constantly renewed with no redress for residents.

This privatization sets in motion the walling off of entire communities, and in so doing, of course some type of privatized governance must be constructed and imposed on the new homeowners so as to “protect their investment”. This is done in the form of an H.O.A, or homeowners association, who govern and regulate the homeowners under a privatized army of volunteers, enforcing a Byzantine set of rules and regulations. They do so by collecting the H.O.A dues, which can range up to $800-900/month in some communities, paid monthly by each homeowner, and it should be noted that failure to pay will result in forfeiture of your property.

The bylaws and regulations that are administered by the H.O.A are published in a lengthy document (usually several hundred pages) listing all the infractions that can result in a penalty being assessed. They govern what color you can paint your house, what contractor you must use for painting your house, how neat your yard must be (mandatory landscaping) strict architectural rules (no changes allowed) and incredibly, how long your garage door may remain open during the day, how long your trash cans may remain on the street after pickup, and strict “lifestyle” provisions.
If you violate any one of the hundreds of regulations, you will be assessed a fine, and if you fail to pay the fine, you will forfeit your property. To enforce this, a group of volunteers usually “walks” the neighborhood, clipboards in hand, to note any and all infractions that can result in fines being assessed.

Hell hath no fury like a HOA privatized government volunteer with clipboard in hand and hard hat jauntily worn, the stern gaze of compliance ready to stare down errant homeowners foolhardy enough to think their carbon copy “Plan B” faux Mediterranean air conditioned nightmare is their castle. The lender has collateralized 30 years of any and all possible equity appreciation in the form of a mortgage, the HOA has established a privatized, regulation filled “government” that under the guise of mutual contractual consent has put in place rules and regulations that no public government on earth would get away with, sublimely forfeiting many constitutional protections (such as due process), including specifically forfeiting the ability to file homestead claims on your own property (protection for the primary residence from creditors in the event of a personal bankruptcy), the authoritarian noose of end stage capitalism begins to tighten the slipnot of compliance around the necks of the middle class homeowners, who almost universally wave their tiny flags and shout liberty, down with government, and up with free markets, blissfully unaware just how far down the river they have been sold.

Home ownership was originally advocated at the national level in the late ‘40’s just after WWII as a means to give the middle class a “stake” in their future, but mostly to discourage civil unrest under the principle that property ownership was an impediment to middle class organization of anti-establishment activities.

My, look how far we’ve come.

Rest in Peace, Gore Vidal, for the Empire is Not Far Behind You

06 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality, Wall Street Fraud

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Growing up in the seat of American power gave Gore Vidal, historian and scathing critic of the Empire, a front row seat to its inner workings. He was raised in Washington, D.C. at the home of his grandfather, Oklahoma Senator Thomas P. Gore. Being related to Jacqueline Kennedy, he held close ties to the Kennedy clan. He was also distantly related to Al Gore and Jimmy Carter. Gore Vidal himself ran for public office twice, once for Congress in 1960 in New York and once for the U.S. Senate in California in 1982. He knew his subject well enough to speak of the skeletons in its closet and the truth behind the glossy facade. In fact, he once said, “You know, I’ve been around the ruling class all my life, and I’ve been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.”

 
My belated tribute to Gore Vidal will simply be to present twelve quotes from him and let his words speak for themselves. You could do much worse with your time than to spend it studying the writings of Gore Vidal:

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.

~~~~~~~

…fifty years ago, Harry Truman replaced the old republic with a national-security state whose sole purpose is to wage perpetual wars, hot, cold, and tepid. Exact date of replacement? February 27, 1947. Place: The White House Cabinet Room. Cast: Truman, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, a handful of congressional leaders. Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg told Truman that he could have his militarized economy only IF he first “scared the hell out of the American people” that the Russians were coming. Truman obliged. The perpetual war began. Representative government of, by, and for the people is now a faded memory. Only corporate America enjoys representation by the Congress and presidents that it pays for in an arrangement where no one is entirely accountable because those who have bought the government also own the media. Now, with the revolt of the Praetorian Guard at the Pentagon, we are entering a new and dangerous phase. Although we regularly stigmatize other societies as rogue states, we ourselves have become the largest rogue state of all. We honor no treaties. We spurn international courts. We strike unilaterally wherever we choose. We give orders to the United Nations but do not pay our dues…we bomb, invade, subvert other states. Although We the People of the United States are the sole source of legitimate authority in this land, we are no longer represented in Congress Assembled. Our Congress has been hijacked by corporate America and its enforcer, the imperial military machine…

~~~~~~~

We should stop going around babbling about how we’re the greatest democracy on earth, when we’re not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic.

~~~~~~~

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

~~~~~~~

Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.

~~~~~~~

…I think it is tragic that the poor man has almost no chance to rise unless he is willing to put himself in thrall to moneyed interests.

~~~~~~~

Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.

~~~~~~~

We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.

~~~~~~~

We must always remember that the police are recruited from the criminal classes.

~~~~~~~

The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government is an act against nature.

~~~~~~~

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

~~~~~~~

Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won’t be. Any individual who is able to raise $25 million to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent oil, or aerospace, or banking, or whatever moneyed entities are paying for him. Certainly he will never represent the people of the country, and they know it. Hence, the sense of despair throughout the land as incomes fall, businesses fail and there is no redress.

 at the FDL Dissenter Blog has a nice post remembering the perceptive brilliance of the now-deceased author entitled, Gore Vidal on the ‘National Security State’ of America. Here are a couple choice quotes from the video-taped speech by Gore Vidal:

…In the State Department we used to discuss how much time that mythical average American citizen put in each day listening, reading, and arguing about the world outside his country. It seemed to us that ten minutes a day would be a high average.” So why bore the people? Secret bipartisan government is best for what, after all, is or should be a society of docile workers, enthusiastic consumers, obedient soldiers who will believe just about anything for at least ten minutes…

…Of course, there were elections during the crucial time, but Truman-Dewey, Eisenhower-Stevenson, Kennedy-Nixon were of a single mind as to the desirability of inventing first a many-tentacled enemy–communism, the star of the chamber of horrors–then, to combat so much evil, install a permanent wartime state at home, with loyalty oaths, the national peacetime draft, and secret police to keep watch over homegrown traitors, as the few enemies of the national security state were known.

Then followed forty years of mindless wars, which created a debt of $5 trillion that hugely benefited aerospace companies and firms like General Electric, whose longtime TV spokesman, Ronald Reagan, eventually retired to the White House…

Mr. Vidal, you told the truth with wit and wisdom and may you now rest in peace for that valuable legacy.

At Least $21 Trillion Hidden in Tax Havens While the 99% are Forced to Foot the Bill

22 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by in Capitalism, Corporate State, Wall Street Fraud

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Wealth doesn’t trickle down – it just floods offshore. 

Now the following story should lay to rest the question of who is really waging this class war and laying waste to the rest of humanity. While the Über Rich hide their wealth in tax havens to the tune of at least $21 trillion, the Working Class lose their jobs due to the criminal acts of white-collar crooks, sacrifice their children in foreign wars, cope with cutbacks on social services and shoulder the burden of increased taxes to pay for the roads, bridges, and infrastructure required for society to function, resort to food stamps in an attempt to feed their families, and in some cases commit suicide to escape the hell they have been thrown into by the protected thieving class of the upper 1%.

And a recent example that shows the aloof, above-the-law mentality of these elitist pricks is illustrated in the following video:

 
This is reality: The elite feel they are above paying the taxes needed to run a functioning society while the rest of humanity is expected and forced to pay those government taxes as well as corporate bailouts. It’s called accumulation by dispossession.

Super–rich stash $21 tn in offshore havens 

Wealthy tax evaders, aided by private banks have exploited loopholes in tax legislation and stashed over $21 tn in offshore funds, says a report. The capital drained from some developing countries since 1970 would be enough to pay off national debts.

The findings show the gap between the haves and the have-nots is much larger than previously thought.

The document, entitled The Price of Offshore Revisited, was commissioned by The Tax Justice Network campaign group and leaked to the Guardian. The report provides the most detailed valuation of the offshore economy to date.

“The problem here is that the assets of these countries are held by a small number of wealthy individuals while the debts are shouldered by the ordinary people of these countries through their governments,” wrote James Henry, expert on tax havens and former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey in his report.

The document cites the world’s leading private banks as cherry-picking from the ranks of the uber-rich and siphoning their fortunes into tax-free havens such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.

The wealth of the super-rich is “protected by a highly paid, industrious bevy of professional enablers in the private banking, legal, accounting and investment industries taking advantage of the increasingly borderless, frictionless global economy.”

Henry writes that a large part of the trillion dollar hoard belongs to around 92,000 individuals, an elite class of super-rich who make up 0.001 percent of the global population.

“These estimates reveal a staggering failure: inequality is much, much worse than official statistics show, but politicians are still relying on trickle-down to transfer wealth to poorer people,” said John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network.

The report records the flow of capital from countries into offshores over the past few decades. Saudi Arabia saw almost $300 billion drained from their economy since the 1970s, while Russia saw almost $800 billion leave its economy in hidden assets since the fall of the Soviet Union. Nigeria issued a loss of $300 billion since the mid-1970s.
Henry points the finger at the world’s top ten private banks, among them UBS and Credit Suisse, for aiding wealthy clients to dodge taxes.

According to Henry’s figures, the top financial leaders processed more than $6 trillion in funds in 2010, more than double the previous year.

Banking system – rotten to the core

Last week the US Senate released a report damning the actions of the UK bank HSBC. The report highlighted evidence of the bank’s law security policies leading to money laundering cases.

It referenced $7 billion in cash that had crossed the Mexican border into the US and been deposited in HSBC from 2007 to 2008. The report suggests that the billions of dollars could have come from drug sales in Mexico.

The probe also shed light on a number of other instances when the bank bypassed US safeguards, potentially bankrolling terrorists and drug lords in the process.

The bank had previously had to pay out $1bn to US authorities for money laundering offenses committed between 2004 and 2010.

The G20 has repeatedly made calls to end tax-free havens since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008, but these plans have not yet come to fruition.