Archive for the ‘Robber Barons’ Category
The MF Global Magical Mystery Tour
It is impossible to make up a fantasy tale that rivals the manifestations of the outlandish MF Global scandal. The evaporation of customer’s monies into an intentional off shore stash is tragic enough, but the indignity of allowing “no consequences” for a horrific crime against all investors is inexcusable. Jon S. Corzine is a fraudster that screams out for the gallows of justice. The manner of fleecing the public by Wall Street crooks has a clear distinction. Corzine walks while Madoff serves time. The original “Magical Mystery Tour” was a precursor of today’s reality TV shows. Corzine’s version is more a “House of Horrors.” http://www.batr.org/negotium/082212.html
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Romney the Businessman?
Mitt Romney has focused his run for the presidency on the superior skills he developed as a successful businessman, asserting that he alone has the knowledge, the experience, and the personal grit needed to repair the U.S. economy. Let us accept for a moment that Romney’s preferred narrative is true, i.e., that he actually was a respectable and honorable businessman, not just a predatory capitalist who bought up failing companies so he could enrich himself by stripping them of their assets and putting their employees out of work. If Mitt is the real thing, one should expect a president who will be a careful and cautious manager, making rational decisions based on available information, because whether businesses succeed or fail frequently depends on making the right judgments at the right time. http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2012/08/15/romney-the-businessman/
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Banana Republic Watch: 2,362 Millionaires Got Unemployment Benefits
In addition to the 2,362 people with adjusted gross incomes of $1 million or more who got unemployment benefits in 2009, there were also 8,335 people with incomes between $500,000 and $1 million who received benefits and 120,227 with incomes between $200,000 and $500,000 who received benefits. http://cnsnews.com/news/article/2362-millionaires-got-unemployment-benefits
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Super Rich Hide $21 Trillion Offshore
A new report finds that around the world the extremely wealthy have accumulated at least $21 trillion in secretive offshore accounts. That’s a sum equal to the gross domestic products of the United States and Japan added together. http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2012/07/23/super-rich-hide-21-trillion-offshore-study-says/
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Casino Capitalists Playing With Fire
With the “Robber Barons,” one could see a connection between the wealth of the Rockefellers, Harrimans, Carnegies and Henry Ford, and their contributions. Railroads were tying America together. Oil was fueling industry. America was surpassing Britain in steel production. Ford was putting the nation on wheels. When J.P. Morgan took to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in 1907 to issue a buy order, he stopped a panic. There was perceived to be a connection between the wealth of these men and their achievements. They were helping make America the most awesome industrial nation known to man. But as scholar William Quirk writes in his essay “Saving the Big Casino,” our big banks now seem to rise and fall on profits and losses from the trading of “derivatives,” “credit default swaps” and “exotic securities” that not one man in a thousand understands. Fortunes are lost and made overnight. Names appear on the list of richest Americans no one has ever heard of. Cheating and corner-cutting are constantly being unearthed. Broker- and banker-gamblers in their 30s amass and flaunt nine-figure fortunes. Were the rest of America doing well, this might not matter. But America is not doing well. And Americans are coming to believe that a system where high-rollers rake in tens of millions playing Monopoly while workers who build things and make things never see a pay raise is rigged and wrong. http://www.wnd.com/2012/07/casino-capitalists-playing-with-fire/
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Eight Ways America is Headed Back to the Robber Baron Era
We are recreating the Gilded Age, the period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when corporations ruled this nation, buying politicians, using violence against unions, and engaging in open corruption. During the Gilded Age, many Americans lived in stark poverty, in crowded tenement housing, without safe workplaces, and lacked any safety net to help lift them out of hard times. http://www.alternet.org/labor/156111
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Corporate Profits at All-Time High; Wages at All-Time Low
The middle class is being hollowed out; increasingly, there are the super-super-rich, and there are the rest of us. http://www.alternet.org/news/156042
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How the Super Rich Avoid Taxes Even as They Demand That the Rest of Us Pay More
The way that we tax people in the United States is fundamentally broken and should be completely discarded. The U.S. tax code is absolutely riddled with loopholes that allow the super rich to legally avoid taxes while many of the rest of us are being taxed into oblivion. In our system of taxation, middle class families that work hard and try to play by the rules are deeply penalized while those that are willing to abuse the system make out like bandits. There is something fundamentally wrong with a system that enables wealthy politicians such as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to pay a smaller percentage of their incomes in taxes than millions of middle class families. http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/how-the-super-rich-avoid-taxes-even-as-they-demand-that-the-rest-of-us-pay-more
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Terrorist (Noun): Anyone Who Disagrees With the Government
There are two key social control myths in America: one, that everyone is equal before the law, and two, that similar fundamental opportunities are available to all. Using the Socratic method, let’s see if these hypotheses are true or false. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-social-fractals-and-corruption-america
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International Business — Davos Style
The first lesson of international business is that the monopolies that drive the commercial trading system only hold loyalty to the god of capital. Making money means retaining a profit on trading transactions of business companies. The notion of MAKING MONEY means something very different to the financial empires that speculate on currencies, commodities, bonds and equities. When the two worlds come together to celebrate the common interest of their pirate culture, the Davos port of call, is a necessary winter holiday. http://www.batr.org/negotium/020112.html
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Everything You Need to Know About Wall Street, in One Brief Tale
If there was ever a news story that crystalized the moral dementia of modern Wall Street in one little vignette, this is it. Newspapers in Colorado today are reporting that the elegant Hotel Jerome in Aspen, Colorado, will be closed to the public from today through Monday at noon. Why? Because a local squire has apparently decided to rent out all 94 rooms of the hotel for three-plus days for his daughter’s Bat Mitzvah. The hotel’s general manager, Tony DiLucia, would say only that the party was being thrown by a “nice family,” but newspapers are now reporting that the Daddy of the lucky little gal is one Jeffrey Verschleiser, currently an executive with Goldman, Sachs. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-wall-street-in-one-brief-tale-20120113
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Class War Coming to America
Never mind the budding war between America and Iran. A skirmish could be coming a lot closer to home and it might even be as centrally located as your own city. In only two years, tensions have grown greatly between the upper and lower classes. http://rt.com/usa/news/class-war-america-inequality-645/
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The Equality Racket
Our mainstream media have discovered a new issue: inequality in America. The gap between the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of the nation is wide and growing wider. http://www.vdare.com/articles/the-equality-racket
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The Second Gilded Age
Writer Mark Twain coined the phrase “the Gilded Age” to describe that period of rapid growth, a time when the dazzling exterior of American life actually concealed mass unemployment, poverty and a society ripped in two. Economists and political scientists believe the US has entered a new Gilded Age, a period of systematic inequality dominated by a new class of super-rich. The only difference is that, this time around, the super-rich are hedge fund managers and financial magnates instead of oil and rail barons. http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,793896,00.html
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A Conspiracy of Counterfeiters
Schooled economists such as Rogoff, Krugman and Bernanke know how to shelter their wealth from the ravages of inflation – and even to get rich. But what about widows whose husbands leave a nest egg of savings in cash and bonds? What are they supposed to do as the value of their savings is wiped out at 4, 5 or 6 percent a year – or whatever annual rate of ruin the Rogoffs and the Krugmans decide upon? This is not only an economic issue but a moral issue. To inflate a currency is to steal the money citizens have earned and saved and entrusted their government to protect. Any government that betrays that trust and steals that wealth is not only unworthy of support. It is worthy of being overthrown. http://lewrockwell.com/buchanan/buchanan183.html
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Real People Say “Screw You” to the Markets
Don’t even try to “invest” in this market folks, and if you decide to trade, realize that you’re playing in a rigged casino and the entire force of the government is not only behind rigging the casino but explicitly endorses and permits the rigging to go on and continue, despite being fully-aware of it. Remember, “Wall Street is Main Street” to them – and if that means your retirement and investments get destroyed that’s just fine provided that big buildings in downtown Manhatten continue to be infested by the thieves guild that pumps tithes into campaign coffers. Oh, if you think that liquidity was bad, you should have seen it on the release of the speech. There were double-digit bid and offers up and down the stack, and the collapse of about 1% you saw was a direct consequence of an illiquid market. So was the subsequent ramp job, roughly 2% in minutes. This chainsaw is more than happy to cut your arms and legs off with both sides of the bar. Make sure you thank Congress and our wonderful “President”, all of whom are far more interested in making sure that the banksters simply rob you blind than anything else when it comes to the economy. http://www.market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=193037
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Illegal Foreclosure Epidemic: Until We Put A CEO In Jail Bankers Will Never Learn Their Lesson
To foreclose on someone’s home, an authorized bank employee must sign the foreclosure document, swearing that the facts in it are true. But that requires hiring people to review each case. To avoid that cost, they take an illegal shortcut by signing the name of someone who has not read the document and might not even exist. http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2011/08/16/illegal-foreclosure-epidemic-put-ceo-jail-bankers-learn-lesson-57591/
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The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
The United States Government and its presstitute media have wasted time and energy creating hysteria over a non-existent “debt ceiling crisis.” After reading the “news” in the Ministry of Propaganda and witnessing the stupidity of the U.S. government, the rest of the world is struck dumbfounded by the immaturity of the “world’s only superpower.” What kind of superpower is it, the world wonders, that is willing to go to the eleventh hour to convince the world, which holds its banking reserves in U.S. Treasury debt, that the U.S. government will default on the debt? Every country in the world now worries about the judgment and sanity of the country with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28730.htm
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$230,000 For a Guard Dog: Why the Wealthy Are Afraid Of Violence From Below
As inequality in the U.S. grows, the ultra-rich are pouring their spare cash not just into private jets, but into private security. Think there’s a connection? http://www.alternet.org/economy/151837
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The Ultimate Goal of the Bankster-Led Political-Economic Warfare Being Waged Against Us
What these banksters and their cohorts are really trying to do is to roll back the Enlightenment, roll back the moral philosophy and social values of classical political economy and its culmination in Progressive Era legislation, as well as the New Deal institutions that embody such legislation. They’re not trying to make the economy more equal, and they’re not trying to share power — just the opposite: Their aim is to implement a kind of pre-industrial and even feudal socioeconomic system. What this means is that our economy is being pushed back and put on the road to debt peonage. Hence forth, most manufacturing will be done in Asia and Europe. http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Ultimate-Goal-of-the-B-by-Richard-Clark-110714-667.html
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Former Fox News Executive: Americans’ Phones Were Hacked
Roger Ailes (left) and zionist robber baron Rupert Murdoch
Former Fox News executive Dan Cooper has claimed that a special bunker, requiring security clearance for access was created at the company’s headquarters to conduct “counterintelligence” including snooping on phone records. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/07/17/995568/-Fmr-Fox-News-Executive:-Americans-Phones-Were-Hacked?via=tag
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Greed, Excess and America’s Gaping Class Divide
It also works the other way — the poor have no idea what real rich people are like. They apparently never see them, which is why the political champions of middle America are at this very minute campaigning in congress to extract more revenue from elderly retirees and broke-ass students while simultaneously fighting to preserve a slew of tax loopholes for the rich, including the carried-interest tax break that allows hedge fund billionaires to pay about half the tax rate of most Americans. This is also going on because both parties are betraying the desires of the actual voters, who by and large actually do favor taxing the wealthy (they favor it intellectually anyway, when asked by pollsters). But we don’t see mobs on the street demanding Stevie Cohen and John Paulson and George Soros give up their special 15 percent tax rate, because no actual people have ever seen Stevie Cohen, John Paulson or George Soros in the wild. http://www.readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/83-83/6598-greed-excess-and-americas-gaping-class-divide
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Robber Baron Watch: Over The Past Four Years Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Generated $10.4 Billion In Profits And Received $4.8 Billion In ‘Taxes’ From The IRS
Call it the gift that keeps on giving (if one is a corporation that is): the U.S. tax system, so effective at extracting income tax from America’s working class, is just as “effective” at redistributing said income tax at the corporate level. Case in point: News Corp, which after generating $10.4 billion in profits over the past 4 years, and which would have been expected to pay the IRS $3.6 billion at the statutory corporate tax rate, instead received $4.6 billion back from Uncle Sam. Bottom line: Murdoch’s corporation had a cash paid tax rate of -46% between 2007 and 2010. http://www.zerohedge.com/article/over-past-4-years-news-corp-generated-104-billion-profits-and-received-48-billion-taxes-irs
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The Corporate Royalists and Right-Wing Groups Propelling the GOP’s Assault on the Middle Class
A handful of rich, right-wing families and corporate chieftains are dedicated to returning America to the days when robber barons ruled. http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/151213
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It is impossible to make up a fantasy tale that rivals the manifestations of the outlandish MF Global scandal. The evaporation of customer’s monies into an intentional off shore stash is tragic enough, but the indignity of allowing “no consequences” for a horrific crime against all investors is inexcusable. Jon S. Corzine is a fraudster that screams out for the gallows of justice. The manner of fleecing the public by Wall Street crooks has a clear distinction. Corzine walks while Madoff serves time. The original “Magical Mystery Tour” was a precursor of today’s reality TV shows. Corzine’s version is more a “House of Horrors.” http://www.batr.org/negotium/082212.html
