The 1% are ripping us off to an astonishing extent. [View all]

Last edited Sat Aug 24, 2013, 07:03 PM - Edit history (1)

Cross-posted from GD. Haha.

Because some days it is so very hard to get through to some DUers that all is not well, all is not as it seems; the richest rich are acting behind the curtain of mainstream knowledge and perception to rig the entire game to their favor, as you would imagine capitalism run rampant to its final extent would truly do. This is barely the tip of the iceberg. Let's hope it smashes through the denial or misinformed status of any who require it.


The world economic circuit:

Larry Summers and the 'End Game' memo
THE CONFIDENTIAL MEMO AT THE HEART OF THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023513088

"The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak’s fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3 percent unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears.

The Treasury official playing the bankers’ secret End Game was Larry Summers. Today, Summers is Barack Obama’s leading choice for Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, the world’s central bank. If the confidential memo is authentic, then Summers shouldn’t be serving on the Fed, he should be serving hard time in some dungeon reserved for the criminally insane of the finance world."

Globalization is a prime driver of Plutonomy, according to the third leaked Citigroup Plutonomy memo (linked at the end).

Alan Grayson: TPP Secret Treaty “This Hands Sovereignty of Our Country Over to Corp Interests"
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/06/first-congress-member-allowed-to-read-secret-treaty-says-there-is-no-national-security-purpose-in-keeping-this-text-secret-this-agreement-hands-the-sovereignty-of-our-country-over-t.html

"An international treaty being negotiated in secret which would not only crack down on Internet privacy much more than SOPA or ACTA, but would actually destroy the sovereignty of the U.S. and all other signatories."


Energy and physical resources:

Water privatization by the richest rich is happening now ("hydraulic empire&quot incl. the Bush family
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023406830

"A Citigroup economist gushed, 'Water as an asset class will, in my view, become eventually the single most important physical-commodity based asset class, dwarfing oil, copper, agricultural commodities and precious metals.'"

Goldman bankers get rich betting on food prices as millions starve
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/goldman-bankers-get-rich-betting-on-food-prices-as-millions-starve-8459207.html

Goldman Sachs Took $5 Billion From Consumers By Moving Metal Around
http://gawker.com/goldman-sachs-took-5-billion-from-consumers-by-moving-861862148

The Koch bros. could save $2 billion a year via the Keystone XL pipeline -Greg Palast
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022420517

Roll call for representatives with financial investment in the tarsands and TransCanada's KeystoneXL
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023364369


Plutonmists installing themselves in world-wide government and banking positions:

Voila! Greek Gov't Appoints Ex-Goldman Exec As New Debt Chief
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/02/19/838682/-Voila-Greek-Gov-t-Appoints-Ex-Goldman-Exec-As-New-Debt-Chief#

Arrest the Criminals at Goldman Sachs and in the Greek Government (video: Greg Palast)
http://www.v2load.com/videos/aQp22WN0cpg/

Also Italy's Prime Minister; the former attorney general of Ireland during the bailout; the head of the European Central Bank; and more:
http://acampadabcninternacional.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/what-price-the-new-democracy-goldman-sachs-conquers-europe-acampadabcn-takethesquare-acampadasol-15m-occupy/

Obama's defense of Summers not tied to Fed decision -White House
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/31/usa-obama-fed-summers-idUSL1N0G11HI20130731

Citi Offered Jack Lew A Big Bonus To Secure A 'High-Level' Government Position
http://www.businessinsider.com/citis-government-job-bonus-for-jack-lew-2013-2#ixzz2cvh5ASng

Senate Confirms (Billionaire) Penny Pritzker to Be Commerce Secretary, 97 to 1
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/06/senate-confirms-penny-pritzker-be-commerce-secretary-97-1/66589/


Housing theft:

The third leaked Plutonomy memo (linked at the end of this post) states the the main asset of the bottom 80% of American earners is their home.

It’s Not a Housing Boom. It’s a Land Grab
http://colorlines.com/archives/2013/05/the_dangerous_new_housing_boom.html

"Just in the last 12 months, Wall Street’s Blackstone Group has raised $8 billlion to buy up homes on Main Street. Following suit, according to The New Republic, JP Morgan Chase—the nation’s largest bank—has organized a fund to purchase 5,000 single-family homes in states with some of the most depressed real estate prices. As I wrote last year, a former Morgan Stanley housing strategist left that bank, organized a billion dollars, and is purchasing up to 10,000 homes with these new resources."

Your mortgage documents are fake!
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023461675

"Georgetown Law professor Adam Levitin spelled this out in testimony before Congress in 2010: 'If mortgages were not properly transferred in the securitization process, then mortgage-backed securities would in fact not be backed by any mortgages whatsoever.'

Szymoniak stated in her lawsuit that, 'Defendants used fraudulent mortgage assignments to conceal that over 1400 MBS trusts, each with mortgages valued at over $1 billion, are missing critical documents,' meaning that at least $1.4 trillion in mortgage-backed securities are, in fact, non-mortgage-backed securities. Because of the strict laws governing of these kinds of securitizations, there’s no way to make the assignments after the fact. Activists have a name for this: 'securitization FAIL.'”

The 1 Percent Is Buying Up All Of The Low End Real Estate
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-1-percent-is-buying-up-all-the-real-estate-beware-of-tom-lee-of-jpm-2012-5#ixzz2cvaZEb5y

BANK OF AMERICA'S SENIOR LOAN COLLECTOR ADMITS TO LYING BECAUSE HE WAS TOLD TO LIE
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023019762


Social Security theft:

Plutocrats' New Pitch: Let Us Rob You Now So You Can Plan Ahead for Poverty
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023527276


College loan debt and rising tution rate scams:

Matt Taibbi: Ripping Off Young America: The College-Loan Scandal
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023466523

8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance
http://www.filmsforaction.org/news/8_reasons_young_americans_dont_fight_back_how_the_us_crushed_youth_resistance/#.UhZ1YsMTgSA.twitter …

1. Student-Loan Debt. Large debt—and the fear it creates—is a pacifying force. There was no tuition at the City University of New York when I attended one of its colleges in the 1970s, a time when tuition at many U.S. public universities was so affordable that it was easy to get a B.A. and even a graduate degree without accruing any student-loan debt. While those days are gone in the United States, public universities continue to be free in the Arab world and are either free or with very low fees in many countries throughout the world. The millions of young Iranians who risked getting shot to protest their disputed 2009 presidential election, the millions of young Egyptians who risked their lives earlier this year to eliminate Mubarak, and the millions of young Americans who demonstrated against the Vietnam War all had in common the absence of pacifying huge student-loan debt.


The for-profit private prison industry, created by the for-profit "war on drugs":

Chris Hedges: The Business of Mass Incarceration
http://sync.democraticunderground.com/10023368819

"Poor people, especially those of color, are worth nothing to corporations and private contractors if they are on the street. In jails and prisons, however, they each can generate corporate revenues of $30,000 to $40,000 a year."

Government guarantees 90% occupancy rate in private prisons.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-03-01/buying-prisons-require-high-occupancy/53402894/1

"Ohio's deal requires the state to maintain a 90% occupancy rate, but Janes said that provision remains in effect for 18 months — not 20 years — before it can be renegotiated. As part of the deal, Ohio pays the company a monthly fee, totaling $3.8 million per year."

Prison Labor Booms As Unemployment Remains High; Companies Reap Benefits
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/10/prison-labor_n_2272036.html


The for-profit surveillance state, created by the for-profit "war on terror":

All your money and privacy are belong to BushCo
http://sync.democraticunderground.com/12528536

The Bush disaster family recently enjoyed a $2 billion dollar payment from their 2/3s share of Booz Allen through their Carlyle Group.

5 Companies That Make Money By Keeping Americans Terrified of Terror Attacks
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/5-companies-make-money-keeping-americans-terrified-terror-attacks?paging=off

Meet the Contractors Turning America's Police Into a Paramilitary Force
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12525281

The surveillance state has an annual budget of $1 trillion, going mostly to unknown contractors.

Spying is local too......look no further than the Los Angeles Police Department
http://www.laactivist.com/2013/06/21/bringing-the-argument-home-about-domestic-spying

"Another technology employed by the LAPD is a suitcase-sized device called StingRay. It mimics a cell phone tower, tricking every cell phone in a neighborhood into connecting to it. Once connected, police can grab information from everyone’s phone in the area, not just the suspects.

StingRay was purchased with Dept. of Homeland Security Funds. It was meant for counterterrorism, but according to documents obtained by LA Weekly, in 2012, the LAPD used StingRay 21 times within four-months in burglary, drug and murder investigations."

Lawmakers Who Upheld NSA Phone Spying Received Double the Defense Industry Cash
http://deepthought.newsvine.com/_news/2013/07/30/19773586-lawmakers-who-upheld-nsa-phone-spying-received-double-the-defense-industry-cash-slashdot


Mainstream media in the United States are owned by six corporations.

These 6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media In America
http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6


Want to protest any of this? This is what happens, thanks directly to the 1% who run the whole thing:







In their own frank words to each other, the three leaked Citigroup Plutonomy memos:

Download three “secret” Citigroup “Plutonomy” reports
http://our99angrypercent.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/download-citigroup-plutonomy-memos/
“Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances”
“Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Getting Richer”
"The Plutonomy Symposium: Rising Tides Lifting Yachts"

Where is Plutonomy occurring? Page 8 of the third memo:

“Figure 1 shows...the top 1% of the population of income has grown substantially in countries such as the US, UK, and Canada. The countries, which apparently tolerate income inequality, are what we call Plutonomy countries: economies powered by a relatively small number of rich people.”

What sort of people would put their own interests so ahead of the rest of us?

"The source of the term is a quotation in an October 17, 2004, The New York Times Magazine article by writer Ron Suskind, quoting an unnamed aide to George W. Bush (later attributed to Karl Rove):

The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' ... 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

Basically, they're marching in and doing whatever they want whenever they want, and rigging the game where it does not already serve them.


Do you truly wish to know where Obama stands on all of this? Several important links found herein:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=3526698



For further reading, analysis from the third leaked Citigroup Plutonomy memo:

Page 17, “The Risks to Plutonomy”.

-Inflation
-Financial collapse
-Ending technological revolution
-Political pressure to end the increase in income and wealth inequality
-Destroy globalisation
-Destroy right-wing, anti-immigration political parties which support the rise in profit share/fall in wage share
Page 18
-Call for relaxing immigration controls/deportation
-”The political process is the greatest threat to Plutonomy.”
-Page 21 lists equity strategies. “Equities are the main asset of the rich.” -Page 12 of the memo. So, attack equities.
Of course, it says that the rich actually drive the economy, and the economy mainly serves the rich. So live outside the economy and destroy the economy.

"The risks to Plutonomy: Finally, political pressure to end the increase in income and wealth inequality."

"Perhaps the most immediate challenge to Plutonomy comes from the political process. Ultimately, the rise in income and wealth inequality to some extent is an economic disenfrachisement of the masses to the benefit of the few. However in democracies this is rarely tolerated forever."

“We see the biggest threat to Plutonomy as coming from a rise in political demands to reduce income inequality, spread the wealth more evenly, and challenge forces such as globalization which have benefited profit and wealth growth.”

Page 18:

"So is Plutonomy under threat politically? We are keeping an eye on this one. At the moment it is too early to make this call. ...does not resonate as a population determined to destroy wealth inequality."

"While there are challenges to this, not least through populations/the political process demanding a more 'equitable' share of the wealth, in the short term we think the trend of the rich getting richer is likely to persist."

From one of the other memos:

“At some point it is likely that labor will fight back against the rising profit share of the rich and there will be a political backlash against the rising wealth of the rich. This could be felt through higher taxation on the rich (or indirectly though higher corporate taxes/regulation) or through trying to protect indigenous [home-grown] laborers, in a push-back on globalization -- either anti-mmigration, or protectionism. We don’t see this happening yet, though there are signs of rising political tensions.”




America faces more than a dozen deadlines, all caused by billionaires and wealth transfer

"I’ve had an article in draft for some time — 'The 16 Deadlines Facing America' — that details each deadline, describes the dangers, and states why each faces an end-point rather than just a periodic fluctuation... I’ve identified 16 of these game-over situations facing America today, situations from which there is the possibility of no recovery — not the certainty, but the possibility. As I was working on that article though, looking especially what it would take to reverse each trend, I realized it’s really only one story writ 16 times on 16 separate canvasses.

That story? The song of the predator class, the rich and the rest — “All your money are belong to us.”
Here they are, numbered in no particular order, but grouped:

1. Accelerating transfer of wealth to the .001% (“the billionaires”)
2. Accelerating transfer of manufacturing out of the country
3. Marginalization or destruction of effective labor unions
4. Destruction of the middle class (i.e., the consumer class)
5. Capture of government by billionaires of both parties
6. Capture of the Republican Party by anti-Constitutional billionaires via Tea Party-financed candidates
7. Constitutional changes, including changes in practice to rule of law and an ever-widening circle of elites with immunity from prosecution
8. Creation via trade agreements of a transnational state that enshrines corporate sovereignty
9. Permanent war and a permanently expanding military
10. Permanently expanding national security state, including militarization of police, widespread spying and punishment for political crimes
11. The ticking time bomb of increasing numbers of returning untreated war-damaged battle-trained veterans
12. Oil dependence without recognition of oil as a soon-to-be-depleted energy source
13. Deterioration of the environment, largely due to oil and carbon dependence, among other causes
14. Destruction of the integrity of our food supply
15. Destruction of public education
16. Climate catastrophe and the collapse of human populations and level of civilization

My bottom line, and the surprise discovery, is that every single one is driven by one common cause — internationalist billionaires."

http://americablog.com/2013/02/america-faces-more-than-a-dozen-deadlines-all-caused-by-billionaires-and-wealth-transfer.html