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Posts Tagged ‘Wall Street’

80 percent of Democrats and 100 percent of Republicans in congress and in the white house represent only the interests of their factions of the 1 percent, corporations and Wall Street. That’s why both parties exclusively create and enact legislation on the federal level that redistributes income from the 99 to the 1 percent, such as free trade treaties.

To divide us against our common enemies, which is both major political parties, they play a game. It’s called divide and conquer via social issues, such as gun control, gay marriage, abortion, flag burning, race, ethnicity, illegal immigration, legal immigration, and everything else you can think of.

The golden rule dictates why this has happened in Washington D.C.; he who has the gold makes the rules. Restore democracy and end dictatorship of the rich by getting money out of politics.

And by the way, it has become quite obvious, that on pretty much all legislation that redistributes income from the 99 to the 1 percent, and any other piece of legislation that helps to sustain this, such as the NSA domestic spying program, the US Supreme Court will always side with big money regardless of what the US Constitution or any US laws say. That’s why we’re playing in a rigged game.  That’s why President Obama sides with Monsanto against the health of the American people, that’s why the government coordinated the attacks on Occupy Wall Street…..etc….

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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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Money and Democracy

There’s something wrong with the poster below. It’s simple. Dark money already took over our democracy. Now the federal government is as rotten to the core with corruption as is its master; the banksters of Wall Street.

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According to President Dwight Eisenhower, in the quote below, the stupid crackpots of the Republican Party have taken over the party. They’ve helped to drive the US precariously close to an economic cliff on behalf of a small minority of rich people, and to the detriment of the 99 percent. No doubt, the photos and quotes below are accurate and many Democrats happily smile and laugh when they compare that Socialist Republican Party of the 1950s with what’s going on with the Party nowadays. But where do the Democrats stand on the issues?

Wall Street Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, for example, has proposed to effectively demolish Medicare by privatizing it. And President Obama is happy to reduce social security payments in order to give tax breaks to the 1 percent. Social Security, by the way, has a $2.7 trillion surplus that collects $120 billion in interest every year, so there really is no reason to reduce payments. There are plenty of Democrats who have voiced the same sentiment when it comes to both of these programs.

Senator Wyden is set to become chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and, well, Obama is president. These are just two of many like-minded Democrats in the Federal government. In other words, the stupid people Eisenhower spoke of are not only the vast majority of the elected people of the Republican Party in congress, but they’re also in charge of most of the Democratic Party.

And these people from both parties are driving the rest of us into poverty by redistributing our income to the 1 percent via Federal legislation.

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It’s official. The market for homes is being fixed like a corrupt poker game. The banksters are playing with a loaded hand, playing the 99 percent for fools, playing the news media like they’re a well tuned piano, and they’re doing this by rigging the housing market; they’re artificially pushing home prices up. That’s the only way home prices can be rising, because home buyers aren’t buying.

The number of 30-year fixed mortgage applications hit a record low on December 9, 2012, well after the housing market began to heat up a few months earlier. Since December 9, the number of mortgage applications have inched up a bare fraction, and they’re at near record lows. Roughly 80 percent of all home mortgages are 30-year fixed mortgages.

Remember the bad old days back in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 when the values of homes were in a virtual free fall? The number of mortgage applications was significantly higher then than they are now. In other words, given the weakness of demand, housing prices should still be dropping.

A quick look at all home mortgage applications called the price index, which includes 15-year flexible and 30-year fixed, shows almost the same pattern. The number of total mortgage applications have remained the same for the last three years.

The evidence is clear. The demand for mortgages remains at or near record lows. So demand is not pushing up home prices.

That means the supply is artificially drying up. Nearly a million homes have been taken off the market since 2009 by the big banks. They’re just sitting there. Several banks, such as Citigroup and Wells Fargo, are no longer foreclosing on home owners who are behind on their payments because that expands the supply of available housing. The job of the banksters is to get home prices to go up by shrinking the supply.

This is called a collusion in restraint of trade. It is a violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Don’t expect Wall Street President Barack Obama to order his Wall Street attorney general, Eric Holder, to do anything about these criminal acts either. Obama’s biggest campaign contributions have been from members of the Wall Street gang, such as Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.

All of this market manipulation redounds to the benefit of Wall Street. Trillions of dollars of mortgage backed bonds held by hedge funds, mutual funds, investment banks, governments, and the 1 percent are worthless because of the decline of the housing market. The Federal Reserve has been bailing out these incompetent investors for years with $26 trillion dollars of so-called loans that have never been paid back, and it’s unlikely they will ever need to be paid back since the Fed has already claimed they were paid back when it was impossible to have occurred. (See The $26 Trillion Bailout). The Fed has also purchased trillions of dollars of these bonds at their face value, rather than at their worthless value.

Now that the housing market is moving up in value through manipulation, those bonds will begin to regain value. Wall Street will be better off. Hedge Funds will be better off. The 1 percent will be better off, and all because the 99 percent are paying higher prices for homes because of market manipulation, and because mortgage rates are also being manipulated upward.

In other words, on all levels, income is being massively shifted from the 99 to the 1 percent through market manipulation, something Wall Street President Barack Obama and Wall Street US Attorney General Eric Holder apparently approve of. Otherwise, they’d do something about the newest criminal activities of the banksters.

The banksters and Obama are creating another housing bubble that will improve Obama’s economic numbers, but it’s simply another illegal income redistribution scam.

This shows how rotted to the core the US government has become, and how insane it is for people believe that markets operate in some text book way featuring a market of buyers and suppliers determining prices through supply and demand.

Click on the link below to see the graphs of 30-year fixed mortgages and the Purchase Index yourself. By the way, “the Purchase Index includes all mortgage applications for the purchase of a single-family home. It covers the entire market, both conventional and government loans, and all products. The Purchase Index has proven to be a reliable indicator of impending home sales.” Click the link below and see for yourself.

The fix is In! The Banksters are Manipulating the rise in housing prices: Mortgage applications are down for home sales!

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The housing recovery seems to be just another stage of the foreclosure crisis. Or is it?

Note that the areas where house prices have risen the most – Arizona, Las Vegas and California – are all areas that were hurt most deeply by the housing crash. So pry between the boards of the housing recovery and the termites start crawling out. Here, you’ll find some old villains of the last housing bubble, crawling on the same properties. There are the house-flippers and the financial institutions, the foreclosure players that regenerate whenever there is a boom.

In this case, they may be creating the boom themselves. House-flipping in California has reached levels not seen since 2005, according to the Wall Street Journal. This rise in price is, by all accounts, artificial. Housing, like all products, responds to the laws of supply and demand. When supply decreases – when there are fewer homes on the market – then prices will rise. This is what is happening now.

There is evidence that lenders are controlling the housing supply by reducing the number of houses for sale. Last year, AOL Real Estate’s reporting suggested that as many as 90% of available properties were not even really on the market, but just polished for sale and being held back to keep supply low.

Then, last month, three major banks, including Citigroup and Wells Fargo, halted all their sales of homes in foreclosure; this also reduced the supply of homes on the market. The reduction in housing supply, then, is largely artificial, designed by the banks and institutions that hold thousands of houses and thus have the most to gain from higher house prices.

The result is what looks like a housing recovery to the rest of us, but is, in fact, something of a trap. Fitch, the ratings firm, issued a warning that the alleged recovery in housing is moving too fast and could reverse.

This means one thing; conspiracy in restraint of trade in order to jack up the prices of houses, not to mention interest rates. When demand is static while supply decreases, prices rise, and profits per home rise, as well. The price of mortgages, interest rates, also rise. The result is a redistribution of income and wealth from the 99 to the 1 percent, which, in this case, is mostly the banksters and their shareholders.

Don’t expect the Obama man and Wall Street’s US Attorney General Eric Holder to go after the illegal price fixers. They’ve been on the financial and or ideological payroll of the big banks since day one, and so there will be no investigation in these violations of US law.

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There is a reason, plain and simple, for why the 1 percent have seen their income grow nearly 12 percent since the beginning of this so-called economic recovery, while the 99 percent has seen their income drop. Income is being redistributed from the 99 percent to the 1 percent. Alas, oh liberals, under the Obama administration, that process is accelerating via Obama supported legislation, such as the South Korea Free Trade Treaty, the Monsanto Protection Act and the Affordable Care Act. They all distribute income or health or both from the 99 to the 1 percent. And these are just a few of the things the Obama administration has done, and what it will do.

Currently, the Obama regime, with the support of the Republican Party and 80 percent of the Democratic Party, is negotiating the Trans Pacific Partnership, a free trade treaty that is one of the biggest income redistribution scams in US history. It also redistributes political power from the 99 percent to the 1 percent.

The Guardian Newspaper of the UK calls it “Nafta on Steroids,” and an “end around the US constitution.”

So expect that the figures in the graph above will grow for the 1 percent, while declining for the 99 percent. The income redistribution scam will continue to get bigger, eventually driving the US economy into another and bigger crisis than the last.

Thank you President Obama!

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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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