The Largest Export Product From the US Is What? Four Graphs That Will Make Your Blood Boil

What is the largest export product in the United States since NAFTA? The answer is simple: Jobs and with them, the US tax base that supports government services, such as roads, police and schools. These exported jobs are also what is fueling the recent gains in the stock market because the difference between the old wages and the new lower wages goes into the pockets of the 1 percent via higher corporate earnings, rising dividends and surging share prices. Coincidentally, the graph only shows job losses via export until 2010. This trend has had increase since then.

The United States is importing more manufactured goods, primarily from jobs that have been exported, or created overseas, by US corporations. In other words, the imports we purchase from overseas are from jobs that used to be, or would’ve been, in the US, in the absence of the free trade treaties that have paved the way. The difference between the old wages and the new lower wages overseas goes into the pockets of the 1 percent via higher corporate earnings, rising dividends and surging share prices.

Some of the jobs have been lost to automation, but most have been exported.

Manufacturing gone south since and because of Nafta and other trade agreements

Free Trade Agreements Mean Jobs Are Evaporating All Over the World

Cumulative Jobs Exported Since Nafta became law. These figures are from the Federal Reserve. Notice, Fed officials don’t suggest these jobs have been lost to automation.

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Video: US Senator Elizabeth Warren Introduces the the Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act

US Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced the Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act on May 10, 2013. She made several good points about student loans, the most depressing one being that interest rates for new subsidized student loans will increase from 3.4 to 6.8 percent on July 1, unless congress does something about it.

She noted that banks get to borrow from the Federal Reserve at 0.75 percent, the same banks that destroyed the economy. The Federal Reserve has also lent and or given out tens of trillions of dollars to the banks on behalf of rich investors, so yes we can afford to push interest rates down on student loans.

However, the banks have investors who want more and more profits, while students only invest in themselves. Student loans are purchased by Wall Street investment banks, who then slice and dice them, and sell bonds backed by the loans to rich investors. Much of the monthly loan payments made by students go directly into the pockets of investors.

Consequently, the current purpose of student loans are to redistribute income from the borrowers to rich investors. As they examine the bill, everybody in congress and on Wall Street will look at it and wonder, why would any investor buy bonds backed by such low interest rates?

So don’t expect congress to vote yes on the bill without sizable pressure from voters calling them to support it. And, of course, the corporate press will be sure to never mention that the bill exists, except perhaps in the least obvious way, like in small print on page 57, or with a five second clip on the 2am news. That way they won’t alarm the general population to act on federal legislation to their benefit and people won’t call Wall Street’s congressional representatives, such as Senator Ron Wyden and Congressman Earl Blumenauer. That way Wall Street hacks won’t complain to the editors.

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Elizabeth Warren Introduces First Bill: Students Should Get Educational Loans at Same Low Rate as Big Banks, 0.75 Percent

Senator Elizabeth Warren has introduced a bill in which student loans will be offered at the same rate banks pay the Federal Reserve. They pay 0.75 percent, less than one percent.

“In her Senate remarks introducing The Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act, Warren bluntly states her rationale: “‘If the Federal Reserve can float trillions of dollars to large financial institution, surely they can float the Department of Education the money to fund our students, keep us competitive, and grow our middle class.’”

Naturally, the entire Republican Party and 80 percent of Democrats will oppose this bill because it’s what they do; wage war against the middle class.

Click on the link below for the full story.

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The Scam of the 1 Percent: How the Dow Jones Industrials Blew Past 15,000

Yes, are we getting ripped off. From 2009 to 2011, the richest 8 million families (the top 7%) on average saw their wealth rise from $1.7 million to $2.5 million each. Wealth is what you own, income is money coming in. Income is what makes wealth grow, outside of say, the growth in value of an asset.

The Dow Jones just blew past 15,000, a record. How’d that happen? Easy. Income is being massively, and in many cases illegally, redistributed from the 93 percent to the 1 percent. See your-retirement-bottle-champagne-how-wall-street-fraudsters-ripped-you-again and breakdown-of-the-26-trillion-the-federal-reserve-handed-out-to-save-rich-incompetent-investors-but-who-purchase-political-power. The extra money the 1 percent receive in their rip-off scam is invested in the stock and bond markets, and it is precisely this redistribution scheme that is fueling the Dow Jones Industrials.

That’s why the rest of us, that’s 111 million families, suffered on average a decline of $6,000 each. It’s been redistributed to the 1 percent. Free trade treaties also play a role in this scam. Every year, one to three million jobs are exported from the United States to lower wage nations, according to the Federal Reserve. The difference between the old higher wages and the new lower wages are thrust into the pockets of the 1 percent via higher corporate earnings, rising dividends and soaring stock prices.

Do the math and you’ll discover that the top 7% gained a whopping $5.6 trillion in net worth (assets minus liabilities) while the rest of lost $669 billion. Their wealth went up by 28% while ours went down by 4 percent.

It’s as if the entire economic recovery is going into the pockets of the rich because it is. It’s no accident, it’s been carefully planned, whether it’s shipping jobs overseas, or giving bailouts to the 1 percent via the government and the Federal Reserve.

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The Republican Party Continues to Wage War Against the United States

The US added 165,000 jobs in April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This was followed by upwardly revised gains of 332,000 in February and 138,000 in March. The three-month average pace of job gains of 211,000 was slightly above the average pace of 173,000 jobs over the last twelve months. The unemployment rate slid down a little to 7.5 percent. Here’s what the news reports won’t necessarily tell you.

The unemployment rate has now dropped 0.6 percentage point since April, 2012, but much of this is because of declining rates of labor-market participation rather than increases in employment. Worse yet, dropping so little makes this the worse job creation economic expansion probably in the history of the US, including during the Great Depression.

There are two factors at hand that make this so. The corporate media doesn’t like to report either, but sometimes they report that US government austerity is sinking America’s economic ship.

“While the Federal Reserve warned that “‘fiscal policy is restraining economic growth,’” the Republican National Committee released an ad crowing that “‘the sequester is here to stay.’” In other words, by sabotaging the US economy, the Republicans hope to reclaim the presidency and maybe even the senate.

So the public sector, especially, has been a drag on the economy in recent months. While the private sector has added roughly 2.2 million jobs over the past year, employment in state, local, and federal governments has declined by 89,000, including significant losses to teachers and emergency responders. In this challenging economic climate, there is growing concern about how sequestration—the across-the-board budget cuts to discretionary spending that took effect on March 1—may negatively impact the recovery even more. Indeed, forecasters at the Congressional Budget Office project that the sequestration could reduce overall GDP growth in the United States by 0.6 percentage point and cost the economy 750,000 jobs by the end of 2013.

Now here’s the part the press doesn’t want you to know. The redistribution of income and wealth over the last thirty-three years from the 99 to the 1 percent has played a much greater role in why the US economy sucks big time for working people. One percent of the population now takes in over 30 percent of the total income produced in the US, compared to 8 percent back then. That leaves less and less money for the rest of us to demand goods and services. That’s why the economy is so weak. The rich are sucking us dryer and dryer. Worse yet, they buy things like stocks, bonds and derivatives, rather than goods and services. So they don’t help the economy at all. In fact, the purchases of the rich suck us dry, but that’s another story.

Austerity, in other words, isn’t the primary culprit in why the American economy is so historically weak, although it plays a role. It’s almost all about income redistribution.

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A massive redistribution of income from the bottom results in a massive redistribution of income and wealth to the top

The rich are getting richer under President Obama, and this is partly true because of his policies, such as the South Korea Free Trade Agreement.

According to a report out of the Pew Research Center, “During the first two years of the nation’s economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7% of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28%, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93% dropped by 4%.”

There’s are several reasons for this trend. One of the worst is that one to two plus million jobs are exported every year from the US, according to the Federal Reserve. The difference between the old wages and the new lower wages over there are redistributed from the job losers to rich shareholders via higher corporate earnings, increased dividends and rising share prices.

And that is precisely what has occurred, a massive redistribution of income, which has fueled a rise in share and bond prices (wealth). BTW, income is money coming in, such as weekly pay checks and corporate dividends, while wealth is composed of assets.

The people in the top 7 percent saw their total wealth increase $5.6 trillion, mostly in the form of stocks and bonds. The 93 percent and lower saw their wealth decrease by $0.6 trillion. Their wealth is mostly in their houses.

What happens when job get shipped overseas? Many people lose their houses. If enough jobs are shipped overseas, then local tax bases begin to shrink. Teachers, fire fighters, government lawyers and accountants; they lose their jobs, they lose their houses. But corporate share prices rise because labor costs are reduced. In other words, a massive redistribution of income results in a massive redistribution of wealth.

The 1 percent have stolen virtually all income growth during the last five years. They now steal over 30 percent of all yearly US income, up from about 8 percent thirty-three years ago. Free trade treaties have played a massive role in this.

According to Pew, “During the period under study, the S&P 500 rose by 34% (and has since risen by an additional 26%), while the S&P/Case-Shiller home price index fell by 5%, continuing a steep slide that began with the crash of the housing market in 2006. (Housing prices have slowly started to rebound in the past year but remain 29% below their 2006 peak.)”

The reason for the results of this study is massive corruption in the US government. Money is the reason why many congress persons and senators vote to redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent. All of this was easily predictable, and I did so in The Rigged Game.

Click the link for more on this story.

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Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke lies under oath again

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke lies under oath again

And all of those billions of dollars of federal reserve subsidies, which is money that is simply printed on demand, are redistributed to the 1 percent via higher profits, dividends and share prices than would otherwise be the case, making it easier for them to buy and control politicians of the federal government, as well as state and local governments. They use that power via their subsidies to redistribute income and wealth from the 99 to the 1 percent via legislation such as free trade treaties and privatization scams.

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Book Review: The End of the Free Market by Ian Bremmer

This is an incredibly dumb book and it’s very boring. It lacks clarity and decent research to back up it’s point, whatever it is. For example, the author implies that the Smoot-Hawley Act was responsible for the depth of the Great Depression, yet all academic studies show that the act had little impact on the severity of the Great depression. On top of that, Bremmer argues that modern nations don’t attack each other much, but “In 2010, the US troops are still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they’re struggling to overcome militants and insurgents, not foreign military powers.”

How brain dead can one get? The United States was not invited by the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan to help them against militants and insurgents. Apparently, Ian Bremmer doesn’t know the United States invaded and occupied those nations. That’s how profoundly stupid this book is.

The central argument of the book is that Wall Street is good, although he doesn’t say for what, and that free trade is good, although he doesn’t say for what. All Wall Street needs is more regulation. As if Wall Street would want that.

An accompanying argument is that foreign governments own corporations that compete with private US corporations. And they do this for political purposes. Duh! But the author’s ignorance is so enormous that he cannot comprehend that US corporations own the US government, lock, stock and barrel. For example, agents of the Monsanto corporation wrote the recently passed Monsanto Protection Act that congress passed and President Obama signed. Wall Street investment banks don’t want more regulation, and so the government of which they are the primary shareholders via their investments in politicians, such as Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden, isn’t going to regulate them.

Bremmer is woefully ignorant on too many levels to be taken seriously. He doesn’t comprehend how free trade treaties, for example, redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent and wreck the economy in the process. According the Federal Reserve, over 27 million US jobs have been off shored since Nafta. The difference between the old higher wages and the new lower wages gets redistributed into the pockets of the rich via higher corporate earnings, rising share prices and more dividends.

This book doesn’t even deserve one star because it reads like a apology and justification for Wall Street and the many crimes committed by its CEO’s, lawyers, traders and others. It’s pure pointless propaganda with a weak central argument.

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Video: Real Wealth Distribution in the USA

It shouldn’t surprise anybody who has been paying attention that 1 percent of the US population owns more than 40 percent of the roughly $54 trillion in wealth that exists. That was true in 2009, which the above film used as a starting point for its figures.

However, that figure has surely grown. The 1 percent own 50 percent of all stocks, bonds and mutual bonds. The value of those have grown since 2009. The Dow Jones Industrial hit a record high today, March 5, 2013. That’s because massive transfers of income have allowed them to bid up the price of these assets.

These income transfer scams are created by a government that was purchased by the 1 percent a long time ago. These scams include free trade treaties, privatization schemes, bonds backed by student loans, home mortgages, credit card debt and auto loans, as well as credit default swaps (insurance on derivatives like bonds backed by home mortgages, etc….

The Federal Reserve is a mechanism to insure that rich investors are too big to fail. That’s why the Fed has given $26 trillion away to the rich, as well buying up somewhere in the vicinity of $2+ trillion in completely worthless home mortgage backed bonds on their face value. No doubt much of the $26 trillion went to making good on those credit default swaps when the housing market collapsed and the credit default swaps became worthless.

BTW, apparently the author of the film didn’t bother to consider credit default swaps as assets because this market is more than $60 trillion in value, which is greater in value than all the assets in the USA. And the 1 percent and their corporations such as Goldman Sachs own all of it.

Check out the link below for more on this issue.

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Who Owns the Federal Government?

Who owns the Federal Government? Hint. It’s not the voters.

Think about this. The Federal Reserve bails out rich investors even as these investors are sucking the middle class financially dry. See Breakdown of the $26 Trillion the Federal Reserve Handed Out to Save Incompetent, but Rich Investors. Also, the Federal government has gone out of its way to bail out the one percent, while the rest of America wilts.

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