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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Little known Economic Facts About Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Part 1.

Comprehensive immigration reform may or may not happen. However, a legislative package has been created by eight members of the US senate. For how will this will impact the US economy, let’s take a look at the past.

After the Immigration Reform Act of December 1986, average real wage rates immediately dropped for six straight years in the USA. Wage rates had dropped during the Reagan years, but then they rebounded and were going up. That growth was stopped cold in December 1986. Then real wages began the big drop, and didn’t rebound to their December 1986 rate for eleven years. All of this information is available at the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov.

So it’s possible (and likely) that with comprehensive immigration reform, wage rates will once again be adversely impacted. Who will gain from this?

Wall Street wins and immigrants who move from the shadow economy to the taxed economy will improve their livelihoods. The rest of us will lose in this case.

Wall Street wins because average wages will go down, meaning corporate profits will go up further than would otherwise be the case. This will fuel dividends which pushes stock prices higher. It will also likely strengthen the corporate bond market. Most of those assets are owned by the 1 percent. So it stands to reason that income and wealth will be redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent with a reform package.

However, there is some good that will likely occur with reform. One will be the likely suicide of the Republican Party, the most viciously anti-middle class warriors of the political elite. Don’t get me wrong. About 80 percent of the Democrats in congress and the white house are anti-middle class warriors on behalf of the 1 percent. However, with the Republicans out of the way, perhaps the base of the Democrats will take a look at how important of a role most Democrats have played in the massive redistribution of income and wealth from the 99 to the 1 percent over the last thirty years.

Click below for the latest news about comprehensive immigration reform.

criticism-immigration-bill-left

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Wall Street Senator Orrin Hatch’s War Against America’s Middle Class High Tech Workers: The Weapon of Choice?

Wall Street Senator Orrin Hatch and three other senatorial conspirators are launching another military style campaign to redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent. These leisure class warrior have proposed letting more and more high tech workers into the USA via the H1B visa. Their reasoning, regardless of the lies they tell us, is simple. Flood the market with workers, the supply of workers will exceed the demand, wages and salaries of those workers will drop, and the difference between the old wages and the new goes into the pockets of the 1 percent via higher dividends, share prices and soaring earnings.

These senators tell us there is a shortage of high tech workers in the USA and that we’ll be able to attract the best and the brightest in the world. These are lies. First of all, don’t assume that your well-being is dependent on US corporations getting these workers. There’s no connection, no livability symbiosis, between the health of publicly traded corporations and members of the 99 percent. Just look at the second great lie of these senators; There is no shortage of high tech workers in the US, but there is high unemployment among them, partially due to the H1B visa. The reality is that the biggest users of H1B visas are “all in the business of outsourcing and offshoring high-tech American jobs. Many of the jobs that went to H-1B workers should have instead gone to U.S. workers, but employers are not required to recruit them before applying for an H-1B, and can even replace their U.S. workers with H-1Bs. The top 10 H-1B employers were granted an astonishing 40,170 visas; nearly half the total annual quota. The table also shows each firm’s immigration yield: the ratio of permanent residence applications to new H-1B petitions for these companies. It is evidence of the companies’ intention to hire and keep their H-1B workers in the country permanently.

There are two reasons these firms hire H-1Bs instead of Americans: 1) an H-1B worker can legally be paid less than a U.S. worker in the same occupation and locality; and 2) the H-1B worker learns the job and then rotates back to the home country and takes the work with him. That’s why the H-1B was dubbed the “Outsourcing Visa” by the former Commerce Minister of India, Kamal Nath.

Rather than keeping jobs from leaving our shores, the H-1B does the opposite, by facilitating offshoring and providing employers with cheap, temporary labor – while reducing job opportunities for American high-tech workers in the process. The I-Squared Act does nothing to protect against this, while vastly expanding the size of a deeply flawed program that accelerates the offshoring of American high-tech jobs and reduces America’s future capacity to innovate.”

That’s precisely what Senator Hatch, the least patriotic of Americans, wants and he knows it. He want’s to lower the wages and salaries of most American citizens. On behalf of his Wall Street masters, like a well trained attack dog ordered to take a bite out of middle America, Hatch is proposing offshoring and outsourcing US jobs on behalf of the 1 percent. This is another one of his many income redistribution plans that redistributes income from the 99 to the 1 percent.

Top 10 users of H-1B guest worker program are all offshore outsourcing firms -Economic Policy Institute

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Is President Obama the Great Con Artist?

Yes, Obama did: The president plugged the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a free income redistribution treaty, while touting ‘Middle Class’ growth. That’s an oxymoron. Those free trade treaties are job destroyers and redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent, and 53 percent of Americans know this.

The President was right on track last night about a lot of things, such as job creation, raising the minimum wage, rebuilding America with infrastructure improvements, addressing global climate change, improving education, and many other critical issues facing America. It boils down to this: America does well when the middle class does well. But the president’s support of the TPP suggest he’s lying about spurring middle class growth. We’ll see.

As the Guardian of the UK reports, “In reality, the deal (TPP) has almost nothing to do with trade: actual trade barriers between these countries are already very low. The TPP is an effort to use the holy grail of free trade to impose conditions and override domestic laws in a way that would be almost impossible if the proposed measures had to go through the normal legislative process. The expectation is that by lining up powerful corporate interests, the governments will be able to ram this new “free trade” pact through legislatures on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.’

Check out the link below.

Will Obama Continue to Offshore American Jobs? In These Times

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How Stupid Are Republicans That They Didn’t Get the Message? In particular about Immigration Reform?

Republican Party leaders are stupid enough to believe they don’t appeal to Hispanics because of the party’s position on illegal immigration and opposition to comprehensive immigration reform. Apparently, the Republican leadership believes that if they help to pass some form of immigration reform, Hispanics will vote for more jobs destroying, middle class exploding, tax breaks for the rich. They must believe that Hispanics will vote for more war, privatizing public schools, the military and other government services; that they will vote for destroying Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, shipping more jobs overseas and redistributing more income from the 99 to the 1 percent. Somehow, the Republican leadership believes Hispanics will vote for people who deny science if it happens to present bad news for corporate profits, like global warming; and that they’ll vote for nut jobs who believe in “legitimate rape.”

Here’s how stupid the Republican leadership is. Before the November 2012 election, a Fox Latino poll found that only 6 percent of Hispanics listed immigration reform as their number one priority, compared to 45 percent who listed the economy as their number one issue. A Latino Decisions election eve poll found 53 percent of the respondents thought the economy was their number one priority, compared to 35 percent who thought immigration reform should be number one. On a national level, Republicans tend to get between 17 and 35 percent of the Hispanic vote. Helping on immigration reform isn’t likely to change that.

In other words, the economy is the number one priority for most US Hispanics. They generally tend to vote Democratic, and there’s nothing the Republicans can do about this, since the positions espoused by the Republicans are aimed primarily at destroying the middle class.

In fairness to the vast majority of Republican politicians, the bulk of the national Democratic establishment has the middle class in their cross hairs, as well. Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden is classic example.

Maybe the Republicans should stop nominating far right, and ultra-right politicians for national offices. Maybe they should oppose the Democrats in their income redistribution plans, rather than aid and abet it. Maybe the Republicans should nominate people to national office with a platform for aiding the middle class, rather than redistributing middle class income to the rich. Maybe that would get more Hispanics to vote for the GOP.

Click below for more on this story from the Guardian of the UK.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/01/29/five-reasons-republicans-wont-win-over-latino-voters/

Click below for another lesson the Republicans didn’t learn from the election of 2012.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/01/26/maddow-republicans-taking-all-the-wrong-lessons-away-from-2012-drubbing/

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The Student Loan Income Redistribution Scam: Is the Student Loan Market the New Subprime Disaster?

Student loan recipients are defaulting on their student loans in increasing numbers.

Student loans are a scam. Here’s why. Thirty plus years ago the folks on Wall Street figured out they could purchase student loans, and then issue bonds to rich investors that were backed by the student loans. The 1 percent own the vast majority of those bonds. As the government or students make payments on the loans, much of the payments are redistributed to the 1 percent as payments on those bonds.

It was a nice scam since the government guaranteed the loans, which means there is no risk in being a bonds backed by student loans. Think about it. Rich investors are earning money with zero risk. Worse yet, depending on your view point, the students take all the risk, since they have to to pay and pay, with no chance of going bankrupt and getting rid of this burden. They have become indentured servants to the 1 percent.

Wall Street pressured then President Ronald Reagan, as well as Republican and Democratic law-makers, to cut the amount of federal grants the government gave out to its citizens. That forced more members of the 99 percent to take out even more student loans.

This is how political power works and the Bush tax cuts works. Give the rich more money, they buy more politicians of both parties, like Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden, and then their political servants enact legislation that redistributes income from the 99 to the 1 percent.

Are Student Loans the New Subprime Disaster?

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The Ponzi Scam: Why it Matters to Wall Street that the US added only 96,000 jobs in August 2012

That the economy added only 96,000 jobs in August is considered bad news, but nobody in politics, business or the media ever tells us why.

The answer is simple and would probably cause US citizens to get angry or at least wonder what the hell is going on. Some would wonder, “What kind of Ponzi Scam is Wall Street running?” Others might think, “What have we gotten ourselves into?” Or worse, at least from the point-of-view of the scam artists of Wall Street, average citizens in large numbers might suggest we do something about this scam.

To keep the Ponzi scam known as Wall Street from collapsing, the US population always needs to increase. That’s because corporate profits must always grow in the long run, because if they drop in the long run, corporate shares would nose-dive and corporate bond values would plummet. The shares of publicly traded limited liability corporations would then collapse to zero or nearly so, and this includes such heavyweights as Apple Inc. and Microsoft. The wealth of the 1 percent would vanish, and could evaporate nearly overnight. Wall Street would lay in ashes and the 99 percent of US citizens would be better off with the Wall Street parasite dead, but the plutocrats of the US government, like Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden, doesn’t like the idea of not worshiping and serving the interests of the almighty dollar.

One of the ways to keep the value of corporate shares constantly rising in the long-term is to keep the underlying population growing. More mouths to feed means more demand for goods and services, and this helps to keep corporate shares moving up, which keeps Wall Street in business. A decline in population would mean less mouths to feed and clothe and would send Wall Street reeling into a financial abyss until it became “valueless,” which is the same as saying “dead.”

That is why adding 96,000 jobs in August is considered bad. That number doesn’t keep up with population growth and it doesn’t help the current excess surplus of labor (the unemployed) obtain jobs already shipped away or destroyed by government income redistribution schemes. These scams redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent via federal legislation, such as free trade treaties, deregulation and privatization. (Those scams, by the way, are also intended to keep the values of stocks traded in the financial markets moving upward. But that’s a different story.) More importantly, from Wall Street’s point-of-view, people are less willing to immigrate to the USA if there are not enough jobs to support themselves. That idea sends chills up the spines of the parasites of Wall Street.

The US population continues to grow by tens of millions every decade. Does anybody think that’s a good thing? Endless population growth? The Chinese don’t, so they enacted policies more than a decade ago to limit population increases. But like a drug addict, Wall Street needs greater and greater population to sustain its Ponzi scam. The 99 percent doesn’t need the growth, not at all.

The US population pretty much leveled out a few decades ago, and so that’s why most of the US population increase since then (over 90 percent) has come from immigration. Immigration, both legal and illegal, serves corporate and Wall Street interests in two ways; immigration keeps the population and mouths to feed growing, thereby serving the needs of Wall Street; and it puts downward pressure on the wages, salaries and other compensation of US citizens, and the difference between the old US wages and the new goes into the pockets of the 1 percent via higher corporate profits, dividends and share prices.

In other words, the quest for ever rising corporate profits are what drive the need for population and GNP growth. Yes, it’s all about more and more money for the 1 percent; the necessary ingredient to keep the Ponzi scheme known as Wall Street afloat and prosperous. But it does so while driving more and more of the 99 percent onto the poverty rolls because it’s nothing more than an income redistribution scam.

See related story below.

Woe to the Democrats: The US Added Only 96,000 jobs in August–The Guardian UK</a

Thank you George W Bush for the Tax Cuts that Created the Lost Decade of the Middle Class — JohnHively.wordpress.com

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Why Wall Street Mitt is Wrong When He Says He’ll Cut Government Spending and That Will Solve All Our Economic Problems

The US economy is slowing and there’s a reason for it. This is lost on Wall Street Mitt Romney, a presidential candidate that wants to elevate the economic aristocrats of Wall Street by laying waste the American middle class.

So why is the economy slowing? Government spending is decreasing, thanks to Republicans in the House of Representatives who would rather starve middle class babies to death than follow the president’s lead and enact policies that might make President Obama re-electable.

So why is decreasing government spending a bad thing? Neither Republicans, Democrats or the corporate media want you to know the real reason.

Right now the 1 percent steal via corrupted government legislation about 26 percent of the total US income, that includes 93 percent of all income growth over the last two years. They’re getting more and more while the 99 percent is getting less and less. Thirty years ago, the 1 percent got around 8 percent of total US income. Three years ago it was 24 percent.

That means the 99 percent has less money to demand the goods and services necessary to keep the economy afloat.

What do the rich do with the cash? They invest it in sucking more cash out of the 99 percent. They buy stocks and bonds and push CEO’s to ship jobs overseas. The extra cash gives them additional funds to purchase more legislators, like Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden, and influence them to enact free trade treaties that enable corporations to ship the jobs of the 99 percent overseas, or make it easier to create them there, rather than here. The difference between the old, higher, wages here and the new lower wages there go into the pockets of the 1 percent via higher stock prices, rising dividends and greater corporate profits. The 1 percent also purchase deregulation, which helps to suck us dry, as well as other legislation that does the same thing.

So if the members of the 99 percent experience a reduction of income from 92 to 74 percent, that means they have less money to spend. The economy should collapse unless there’s something that makes up the difference of 18 percent. That difference took the form of a housing bubble to some degree. It took the form of a credit bubble and a tech bubble. The truth is that, ultimately, government spending has gradually taken up the slack.

Reduce government spending right now and the demand for goods and services slows and the economy contracts, which it appears to be doing. It’s possible the cutbacks are insufficient to send us over a cliff just yet, since the spending reductions in terms of percentage aren’t that huge.

On the other hand, if Wall Street Mitt becomes president he’ll put the petal to the metal, slash government spending, and send us barreling further into an economic catastrophe that may make the Great Depression look like great times. Actually, we’re already in a calamity brought about by Republican and Democratic Party income redistribution scams that suck money from the 99 to the 1 percent, but this can’t go on forever, unless most voters prefer the US become a banana republic.

In other words, a vote for Wall Street Mitt is a vote for a rapid expansion of unemployment that will likely enrich Wall Street titans by redistributing income from the 99 to the 1 percent.

As an aside, this redistribution scam has brought on every recession for as far back as statistics are available. Here’s a little known fact. Dividend payments soared during the first eighteen months of the Great Depression. The rich got richer as people were laid off and the wages from the lost jobs were diverted to profits and dividend payments.

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How the poor are made to pay for their poverty in the USA

It’s well known that private businesses soak the poor. What’s less well known is that the government does it as well.

“The trick is to rob them in ways that are systematic, impersonal, and almost impossible to trace to individual perpetrators. Employers, for example, can simply program their computers to shave a few dollars off each paycheck, or they can require workers to show up 30 minutes or more before the time clock starts ticking.

Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest. When supplemented with late fees (themselves subject to interest), the resulting effective interest rate can be as high as 600% a year, which is perfectly legal in many states.”

click here for the complete story

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