What Does the Federal Reserve Do?

I don’t completely agree with those who claim that inflation is created when the Federal Reserve prints massive amounts of money. The only time inflation significantly happens because of this action by the Fed is when it prints excess money and somehow the cash trickles down to the 99 percent in a big way. In which case, inflation and hyper-inflation can occur, which is what happened in Germany during the 1920s.

However, the Fed’s actions in printing money do help to redistribute income and wealth from the 99 to the 1 percent in the form on inflation.

The primary and perhaps only purpose of the Federal Reserve is to save Wall Street and its investors from their really bad investment decisions. So when Wall Street’s Ponzi schemes, mortgage backed bonds and credit default swaps on mortgage backed bonds, went bad, the Fed printed up trillions of dollars and simply gave it out to the investors that had made dumb, losing, investment decisions to buy these things. The Fed purchased these worthless investments at their face value. If an investor bought a bond for $1000, for example, the Fed bought it from the investor for $1,000, even though its value had plummeted to zero. See, Breakdown of the $26 Trillion the Federal Reserve Handed Out to Save Incompetent, but Rich Investors and The Federal Reserve Lost $9 Trillion? What Liars! They gave that money away!

In this way, no matter how bad the  investment decisions at, say, Goldman Sachs, are, the Fed will always step in to save the fools. Mechanisms to ensure modestly good investment decisions don’t exist in the investment markets since the big boys know the Fed will always save them. That’s why they have incentives to make really risky decisions.

The 1 percent have taken the reimbursements from the Fed and then invested them elsewhere, such as in the futures markets. A futures market is an “auction market in which participants buy and sell commodity/future contracts for delivery on a specified future date.” Trading is carried on through open yelling and hand signals in a trading pit. We’re not talking pennies here. We’re talking billions of dollars of investments. When you get a large number of investors bidding up the price of goods in the futures market, they’re hoping to create profits for themselves by creating inflation for the 99 percent.

The futures market includes such commodities as oil, natural gas, wheat, soybeans, corn, coffee, lumber, sugar, gold, and many other things. When the prices of these commodities are bid up in the futures market, they cost more for us on the market shelves, or in the lumber yard, or at the gas station.

The Fed handed out tens of trillions of dollars to reimburse investor losses in the mortgage backed bond and credit default swap markets. If it hadn’t done so, if the investors had simply been real men and accepted the losses, the real inflation rate would be much lower than it is today; those same investors are taking their billions and probably trillions of dollars in reimbursements that the Fed gave them to bid up the price of commodities in the futures markets. If the Fed hadn’t saved their asses, they wouldn’t have had the money to bid up the prices of commodities.

That’s why we’re paying higher prices for goods during a time of slack demand. And it’s all thanks to the Federal Reserve’s welfare program for the 1 percent. It redistributes income from the 99 to the 1 percent via inflation.

As you can see from the graph below, real inflation is about 8.5 percent per year. That’s the price we’re paying for the Fed’s welfare program for the 1 percent. It’s a tax to support a parasitic and unproductive class, the 1 percent. By the way, the Federal government has changed the way it measures inflation 20 times since 1982 in order to understate inflation, which is simply another way to help cover up the income being redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent via inflation.

And that’s what happens to the

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President Obama, the Republicans, and Their War Against America’s Senior Citizens

In his recent budget proposal, President Obama proposed using something called a “Chained CPI” to calculate cost of living increases for Social Security recipients. This would understate the way the federal government currently understates inflation on which it bases cost of living adjustments (COLAs) for retirees.

Republicans are quite happy with the president’s proposal since it massively redistributes income from senior citizens on fixed incomes to the 1 percent. See How Corporations Create Profits: inflation, tax-breaks, and-free-trade. Many Democrats are opposed to this scam, but, of course, some corporate Democrats back the president on this issue, even if they won’t publicly say so.

The way the government measures inflation has been changed twenty times since 1982, and each change has made the official inflation rate smaller (See graph below). The losers are the 99 percent, especially Social Security recipients, and the winners are the price fixers and price hikers, whose price collusion is largely hidden by an understated inflation rate. Check out the link above for an explanation.

“Chained CPI is shorthand for the “Chained Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers.” It’s an inflation measure that essentially ties tax rates and entitlement spending to the rise in prices over time.

The government currently uses a different inflation measure to calculate Social Security benefits, applying the CPI-W, or “Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers” to its formula.

Using Chained CPI instead of CPI-W would slow the rate of growth for entitlement benefits and cause people to enter higher tax brackets more quickly — because the income parameters for each bracket would rise more slowly.

Chained CPI would reduce entitlement benefits by about 0.3 percentage points per year. That’s a small amount, but it results in big savings for the government over time. On the other hand, the relatively minute cuts can build up for recipients.”

That doesn’t seem like much, but a senior receiving $1000 a month in Social Security payments today would lose $48.53 five years later if a Chained CPI is used. Worst yet, you can tell from the graph above that the real inflation rate is understated by 5 to 10 percent per year. After five years, using the real inflation rate, the real spending power of that $1000 drops to a range of $595 to $765. Then on top of that, using the Chained CPI, seniors would lose another $48.53, which means their real spending power would drop to a range of $547 to $617. That’s why so many seniors are living in poverty.

A new report from the Economic Policy Institute shows that “…19.9 million (48 percent) of America’s seniors are economically vulnerable—meaning they are either in poverty or just one bad economic shock away from significant material hardship. This share rises to 63.5 percent among elderly blacks and 70.1 percent among elderly Hispanics. For these seniors, and even for those with greater means, Social Security and Medicare are the bedrock of their financial security. As illustrated in the infographic accompanying the report (which is below), an additional 3.5 million seniors would become economically vulnerable if medical out-of-pocket expenses doubled (under proposed changes to Medicare).”

“After working hard their entire lives, millions of our elderly are struggling to pay for basic needs like food, medicine, and housing, even with Social Security and Medicare,” said report coauthor Elise Gould.

“Almost half of seniors are either in poverty or close to it,” added coauthor David Cooper. “We shouldn’t be cutting the benefits that are barely adequate as is, effectively legislating more of them into poverty.”

But that is precisely what President Obama is proposing, which is something congressional Republicans are overjoyed with. Think about this. The average senior citizen survives on less than $20,000 a year, with $15,000 coming from Social Security.

Now the president and Republicans want to reduce that miniscule figure even more. And think about this. If inflation was measured the way it was in 1980 to provide raises for Social Security recipients, that $1000 a month example I used above would be in the range of $1276 to $1610. These are the kind of Social Security raises seniors would need to keep up with our corporate driven, income redistributing, price increases. Obama knows this. So do the Republicans.

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How Corporations Create Profits: Inflation, Tax breaks and Free Trade

There are many ways that corporations earn money. They manufacture goods and services, for example. However, there are other ways, as well. For example, they use their political clout to redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent.

Notice from the graph above that corporate profits as a percentage of GNP dropped from the mid 1960′s to the early 1980s. So did the taxes they paid. After the 1 percent began to take complete control of the US government in 1980, which was called the Reagan Revolution and rightly so, the off shoring of American jobs accelerated. Corporations increased profits because of the difference between the old US wages and the new lower wages overseas, as well as the differences in salaries, benefits and environmental costs.

That’s one of the major reasons corporate profits are rising higher and higher, during this time of weak demand, breaking record after record. Every year, one to three million jobs are exported. Because free trade treaties pave the way, millions of other potential American jobs are created by US companies in foreign nations. Without those treaties, it wouldn’t be possible for corporations to do this. Those jobs would be created in the US in the absence of those treaties.

As those jobs are shipped or created overseas, our roads, bridges, schools and social safety nets have been in a slow motion thirty-year collapse because much of our tax base has been shipped or created overseas.

Under President Ronald Reagan, the 1 percent and their tools known as corporations began to receive tax cuts and more and more tax loop holes with which to avoid the payment of taxes. New overseas tax havens allowed the rich and corporations to avoid paying bazillions of dollars in US taxes. That’s another one of the reasons why our roads, bridges and schools are crumbling. Our tax base has been weakened.

Pushing corporate after-tax profits higher and higher is one of the primary goals of Wall Street. This keeps stock and corporate bond prices rising. If profits sink, especially in the long-term, rich investors (such as hedge funds) are likely to sell their stocks and bonds, which sinks the price of corporate shares and weakens the ability of corporations to issue bonds.

Corporations also create profits by jacking up prices. We’ve been brainwashed to believe that only an increase in the supply of money creates inflation. To some degree, that’s true. Post-World War I Germany is a prime example. However, in that case, the excess printed money made its way down to the people, who bid up the price of goods. That’s not happening now. The Federal Reserve has been printing up tens of trillions dollars for several years now and inflation is relatively in check because that money has gone to rich investors, hedge funds and banks, rather than to the people.

However, that hasn’t stopped US corporations from simply jacking up prices for working folks. Look at the graph below. Notice how closely the real inflation rate has mirrored the rise in corporate profits. This suggests that market after market is largely controlled by a few major corporations that control their prices.

Typically, a major corporate player in any market will jack up prices, which will be announced in the corporate press. If its rivals follow, then the increased prices will stick. If the so-called rivals refuse to jack up their prices, the company that jacked up its prices will retract the price increase. This phenomenon was first noticed by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith in his book Economics and the Public Purpose. I studied it and noticed how correct he was.

Here’s the real bitter part of this truth. The US government has changed how it measures inflation twenty times since 1980. This allows corporations to jack-up prices in hundreds of markets without anybody knowing. Sure, people notice price increases in the number of products and services they purchase. However, most people don’t have any idea how pervasive this income redistribution scam is. The US government is a partner is this coverup.

Simply raising prices allows corporations to increase profits. So the money you pay for something goes into the pockets of the rich via higher corporate earnings, dividends and share prices.

The graph below measures inflation the way it used to be measured by the government and shows how the modern and official government statistics for inflation differ from what they would’ve been had the government continued to measure inflation the way it did back in 1980.

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Why the Corporate and Political Elite Insist Population Growth Is Good; or Is the US Getting Set to Enter a Great Depression?

The answer to the title above is simple; constant population growth equals constantly growing corporate profits. That’s not necessarily a good thing for the 99 percent.

The US economy is dominated by a Ponzi Scheme known as Wall Street. As corporate earnings rise, stock prices generally rise. If aggregate corporate profits go down, as they always must in time, then that 15,000+ value we see today with the Dow Jones Industrials can drop to 8,000 or less, as it did during the Great Recession.

Now imagine what would happen if the economy never came out of the Great Recession, like during the Great Depression. In October 1929, the Dow Jones was close to 400, up from less than 100 in 1921. The Depression hit that month, the economy entered into a sustained decline, the Dow dropped and dropped until it was less than 50 in October 1932. That’s a lot of speculative profits that were wiped out. The Dow began climbing with the election of FDR on November 8, 1932. But what if FDR didn’t win and the US continued down the same path? There’s a good chance the Dow would’ve dropped to a value of zero.

One way to avert such a calamity is to have constantly increasing population. As population grows, there are more people to feed, which means constantly growing demand for goods and services, which helps corporate profits rise, which keeps the Dow growing. The government will even feed and house tens of millions of people in order to keep demand up.

If, however, the US population was to decline, especially in the long-run, so too would the demand for goods and services. That means corporate profits would begin a long term drop. The financial markets would plummet in the long run. Paper profits that have grown over decades would vanish like smoke.

The birth rates of US citizens began to slow a few decades ago, and to compensate, your government opened the floodgates of immigration to compensate for that. Of course, there were other factors for doing this, as well. More immigrants meant a downward push on wage growth. The difference between what wages would’ve been in the absence of higher immigration and what they became with greater immigration went into the already fat wallets of the super rich via higher corporate profits, share prices and rising dividends.

This is not to suggest that immigration is always a bad thing, especially if there is a rising tide of prosperity for all. However, immigration during a time when there has been a massive redistribution of income and wealth flowing from the 99 to the 1 percent probably isn’t a good thing for the 99 percent. But it is good for Wall Street and the 1 percent, and for the reasons cited above.

If population growth continues to slow, and last year it grew only 0.7 percent, and middle class income continues to stagnate, then the current record rise in the Dow Jones Industrials suggests it is a bubble caused by redistributing income from the 99 to the 1 percent.

In other words, it is possible the current pathetic economic expansion is ambling down a road that ends at a very steep cliff. This brings us to a question.

Was the Great Recession just a blip on the road to an even greater Depression somewhere down the road a few years from now?

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Little known Economic Facts About Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Part 2.

Undocumented immigrants in the USA will need to pay back taxes under the new comprehensive immigration reform plan. There’s something that stinks about this. It’s simple. Why aren’t the employers who hired undocumented immigrants under the table going to be compelled to pay a fine and pay back taxes if undocumented workers are going to be forced to? At the very least, these employers should be forced to pay back the social security taxes they didn’t pay in the first place. This is a double standard that probably violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution. Of course, there’s a reason for the double standard.

Many people in high places have likely hired the undocumented as maids, janitors, kitchen help, gardeners, etc…. Because some are members of the 1 percent, the government will not go after them. On the other hand, there’s billions to be had bilking undocumented immigrants.

Credit card companies, banks and Wall Street are the suspects in question. You know those folks; Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citibank, and the usual Wall Street crime family, the same criminals that tanked the economy and committed such crimes as fraud and money laundering, and not a single person was charged with a crime because they’re so politically powerful. But why are these folks dictating many of the terms of comprehensive immigration reform? What’s the link? Money, and lots of it. Here’s how and why Wall Street’s scam will work.

According to Pew Hispanic Research, up to 90 percent of all undocumented workers earn their living under the table, which means they haven’t paid federal and state income taxes, as well as social security taxes. The government says there are 11-12 million undocumented immigrants in the US. However, the 2010 US Census claimed there were 13 million undocumented Hispanics in the US. Assuming that Hispanics make up roughly 60 percent of the undocumented, the total number could be 24 to 26 million people. So let’s say that there are 11-26 million undocumented immigrants. A high percentage work for a living. Most of these folks have worked under the table for multiple years and even decades. That means some of these people owe tens of thousands of dollars in back taxes. Millions of wage earners multiplied by thousands and tens of thousands dollars in back taxes is a ton of money.

How are these folks going to get the money to pay back taxes since most don’t earn very much? They’re going to need to apply for credit, unless the government plans to carry their load, which is unlikely. So these folks will need to use credit cards or home equity loans. Interest rates will likely be high.

The credit card lenders, such as Citibank, will reap tons of interest and late fees. On top of that, they’ll bundle the loans and sell them to Wall Street investment banks, such as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. Those folks will issue bonds backed by the credit card balances and payments. They’ll turn around and sell the bonds to rich investors. There’s billions of dollars to be scammed through all of these transactions. The newly indebted, but now, documented will make their payments and pay their late fees with much of the proceeds going to the investors, as well as to those who service the loans–members of the 1 percent.

In other words, comprehensive immigration reform is simply another way to redistribute income from the 99 percent to the 1 percent. The victims are the undocumented, who, admittedly, put themselves into this position of indebted servitude to Wall Street for decades to come by illegally migrating to the US. But that doesn’t mean they should be used as financial cannon fodder for the rich in their war against the middle class.

Wall Street is also why a Dream Act doesn’t seem to part of the package. The Dream Act is a concept that undocumented immigrants who were smuggled into the US as children by their parents shouldn’t be made to pay for the violations of US law done by their parents. Instead, they should immediately be given a path toward citizenship. Who can argue with that? Not me. But Wall Street and other credit card companies can because there’s no profit in immediate amnesty for these kids. And that’s the sorry state of the worst congress and worst white house that money can buy. The political philosophy is simple enough. Doing the right thing isn’t the right thing to do if it’s not profitable to Wall Street, which is the main conduit through which income is redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent.

One more point needs to be made. If undocumented persons have worked in the US for years, many might have had several employers, and in different states. Some of these employers might be out of business. If they worked under the table, how is the government going to determine who owes what in back taxes? The answer seems to be obvious. The government isn’t going to make that determination. Wall Street will and it likely will be part of the package. That suggests the back tax issue is going to onerous for the undocumented. That’s part of Part 3 of this series.

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President Obama, the Republicans, and the Proposed Unnecessary Cuts to Social Security, and the lies and myths about Social Security

The Social Security Trust Fund has grown every year since 1983, thanks to President Ronald Reagan and the adjustments to funding that he initiated. It even grew last year and the year before despite the cut in payroll taxes from 6 to 4 percent.

However, the corporate press will only let you know about about the Social Security Trust Fund deficit between the taxes it takes in and the money it pays out even though the system is sitting on a $2.7 trillion surplus that collects about $120 billion in interest per year. When you count the interest, there has always been a surplus, at least since 1983.

Take a look at part of the report from the trustees of the Social Security Trust Fund from 2012. Italics and bold are mine.

“Social Security’s expenditures exceeded non-interest income in 2010 and 2011, the first such occurrences since 1983, and the Trustees estimate that these expenditures will remain greater than non-interest income throughout the 75-year projection period. The deficit of non-interest income relative to expenditures was about $49 billion in 2010 and $45 billion in 2011, and the Trustees project that it will average about $66 billion between 2012 and 2018 before rising steeply as the economy slows after the recovery is complete and the number of beneficiaries continues to grow at a substantially faster rate than the number of covered workers. Redemption of trust fund assets from the General Fund of the Treasury will provide the resources needed to offset the annual cash-flow deficits. Since these redemption’s will be less than interest earnings through 2020, nominal trust fund balances will continue to grow. The trust fund ratio, which indicates the number of years of program cost that could be financed solely with current trust fund reserves, peaked in 2008, declined through 2011, and is expected to decline further in future years. After 2020, Treasury will redeem trust fund assets in amounts that exceed interest earnings until exhaustion of trust fund reserves in 2033, three years earlier than projected last year. Thereafter, tax income would be sufficient to pay only about three-quarters of scheduled benefits through 2086.

A temporary reduction in the Social Security payroll tax rate reduced payroll tax revenues by $103 billion in 2011 and by a projected $112 billion in 2012. The legislation establishing the payroll tax reduction also provided for transfers of revenues from the general fund to the trust funds in order to “replicate to the extent possible” payments that would have occurred if the payroll tax reduction had not been enacted. Those general fund reimbursements comprise about 15 percent of the program’s non-interest income in 2011 and 2012.”

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Does the Federal Reserve Manipulate the Stock Market?

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Is Obama Responsible for the Slow Recovery?

Is this poster correct?

The poster is correct, but only to a certain degree. Obama bears some responsibility for the slow creation of jobs. First of all, Charlie Brown was dumb enough to get fooled by Lucy time and time again. Likewise, President Obama was stupid enough to get fooled by his own economic advisers over and over again, notably by the Wall Street toadie, Lawrence Summers.

For example, Obama’s original stimulus package was about three times too small to engineer an economic recovery, and there were plenty of worthwhile economists who said so, such as Nobel prize winners Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz.

Second of all, Obama continues federal policies that redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent, his masters, such as the Crown Brothers of General Dynamics. Those policies began under Ronald Reagan, and include such legislation as free income redistribution trade treaties. Obama has already signed three of these treaties into law knowing they would cost the 99 percent jobs, and the difference between the old higher wages here and the new lower wages there are going into the pockets of the 1 percent via higher corporate profits, rising dividends and surging share prices. Obama knows this. He isn’t stupid, like Charlie Brown. Now the Obama man is negotiating the biggest free income redistribution treaty in USA history, the Trans Pacific Partnership. This scam will redistribute even more income from the 99 to the 1 percent than Nafta. The Guardian calls it “Nafta on Steroids.”

Sure Republicans obstructed Obama’s agenda for the last four years, but Obama’s agenda included sucking the middle class dry and shifting their former income into the already fat wallets of the 1 percent. So he bears quite a bit of the responsibility for our slow economic recovery.

Obama also failed to recognize that the redistribution of income from the 99 to the 1 percent over the previous 26 years has stifled the demand for goods and services from the 99 percent because they earn less money than they used to. That stifles job growth and has lead to the anemic recovery. Not only that, Obama’s agenda has invigorated America’s economic slow motion collapse.

As for the 1 percent, they usually invest their money in things that destroy rather than create jobs, such as derivatives, buying politicians and legislation, and free income redistribution treaties.

Worse yet, the 1 percent now steal about 31 percent of all US income, compared to 8 percent 31 years ago. That means the 99 percent earn 69 percent compared to 92 percent in 1980.

That’s why President Jimmy Carter looks like such a genius compared to the president’s that have followed him. The deficit was historically small under his watch compared to when Obama, Bush and Reagan have been president, but 208,000 jobs a month were created under Carter, and with rising wage rates. That was with an economy with 60 percent of the GNP and population as we have today. It was because the 99 percent had way more money to spend then, making job growth far more robust compared with now. Obama knows this as surely as I do. But he dare not do much to alleviate the burdens of the middle class for fear of angering his corporate backers. Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden is very much the same as Obama, in this regard.

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The Fiscal Cliff: Just Another Lie in the Grand Strategy?

We’ve been told a ton of bull shit about the deficit and the looming fiscal cliff, which is a combination of tax increases and spending cuts that will kick in shortly after the end of 2012. We’re told by our corporate leaders, like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Ron Wyden, Mitt Romney, John Boehner and others that the deficit is too great! They tell us there must be spending cuts and tax increases to solve the problem. This is a total load of bull shit in a grand farce being played out in the halls of congress and the white house to fool the American people. There is no great problem too big to solve. The short term answer to the so-called deficit problems can be found in the words and actions of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

Back in 2008 or so, the Federal Reserve (the Fed) printed up $26 trillion and loaned it to several banks. According to Bernanke, the banks paid most of the money back by 2011. That means the Federal Reserve has somewhat short of $26 trillion it can simply give the US government. It’s money that’s just sitting there, hopefully collecting interest.

Think about it. The Fed was willing to bail out rich investors, but Obama, the Democrats and the Republicans are unwilling to ask the Fed to do the same thing for the rest of the American people, even though the Fed is sitting on stacks and stacks of cash. Their attitude is simple; what’s good for the 1 percent is way too good for the lower class 99 percent.

Political grand theater is occurring right before our eyes. It’s a great way to get us emotionally involved in an argument with an easy solution other than tax increases and spending cuts.

Yes I know. There are people who will say that it is not possible to use the $26 trillion to save the American people, although it was okay use it to save rich investors from their own stupidity. And these people would be right, but for all the wrong reasons.

Here’s the real reason why it can’t happen. Bernanke lied. The recipients of the $26 trillion never paid it back (Check out the story below). The Fed cooked it’s books, the recipients cooked theirs, to make it appear they paid it back, which was mathematically impossible.

But that doesn’t mean the Fed couldn’t simply print up a trillion or so dollars and help out the other 99 percent of the American people. It should because it can, but it can’t because to do so would change the hidden rules of the grand charade being played out by the 1 percent and their representatives in government, in order to mislead the 99 percent again.

Related stories

Breakdown-of-the-26-trillion-the-federal-reserve-handed-out-to-save-rich-incompetent-investors-but-who-purchase-political-power–JohnHively.wordpress.com

Obama Willing to Compromise on the Fiscal Cliff–Guardian.UK

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Video: The Lost Decade of the Middle Class; Thank You George W. Bush and Those Tax Cuts for the Rich

Notice from the chart that the era of Republican Party government has brought about the greatest income redistribution scam in the history of the nation. The Democrats have gone out of their way to help their alleged Republican rivals to financially disenfranchise the middle class.

Ever since the election of the “Great Liar,” President Ronald Reagan, tax cuts for the rich have been destroying the middle class. There is not a shred of evidence that tax cuts for the rich have ever created a single job. That’s because they destroy jobs. The evidence is all around us and in the video below.

The money the rich receive from their tax cuts are used to put greater pressure on CEOs and politicians of both major political parties to redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent. And why wouldn’t they do that?

In the long run (about a year or somewhat less) if the values of corporate assets, such as stocks and bonds, don’t go up, then they must go down. There is no middle ground. Rather than see their assets decline in value, the rich prefer to redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent so that the affluent can continue to purchase these assets and bid up their prices. It’s a never ending process until the point at which the economy must collapse when the parasite (the 1 percent) weakens the host (the 99 percent) too much.

This occurred during the 1920s and resulted in the Great Depression. It’s also happening now. The affluent have used politicians such as Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden to steal from the 99 percent using free trade treaties and deregulation legislation, or to pass weak Wall Street regulations. There are a variety of other legislative and governmental actions that can achieve the same results, but not as effectively as free income redistribution trade treaties and deregulation. That is why the Trans Pacific Free Income Redistribution Treaty is sought by the forces of the 1 percent.

Only the New Deal, the Great Society Programs and the federal deficit are holding the economy up. They keep putting money in the hands of the declining middle and lower classes, thereby increasing the demand for goods and services. Still, the economy is getting worse. Our situation will continue to deteriorate regardless of whom is elected president in November 2012.

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