The United States is a Dictatorship of the Billionaires

Divide and conquer; nobody has done it better than the billionaires who have controlled the United States via their two major political parties and their Supreme Court for the last forty years. But first a few comments.

I wonder if the downturn of the stock market on June 9-11, 2020 was just a correction, although I am suspicious it marks an increase in market volatility on its way toward the intersection where the real downtrodden economy meets the robust Wall Street market. In which case, we could be looking at a rapid or slow and long-term decline in share prices.

I do not think a lot of people understand that we are at the beginning of a recession and not at the end. I suspect that many people were buying the stocks of corporations for the last two weeks that are going bankrupt (think Hertz) because of desperation of their financial situations since 40 percent of US adults do not have $400 to cover an emergency, not in savings, not in credit cards or other assets, if I remember correctly.

I have read and listened to many experts on the rise of the stock market since March while the economy has tanked, but I have not heard how income and wealth inequality has driven the stock markets to record highs by redistributing trillions of dollars from the 99 to the 1 percent over the last forty years, nor do I hear how financially desperate many people are; not even those who are buying bankrupt Hertz and J.C. Penny shares. Those subjects are not allowed by the billionaires who own all the major news sources.

I have a good neighbor and he just got laid off from his job and fears losing his house. I see desperation written all over his face and in the tone of his voice when I speak with him. I see the middle class families in nice cars and wearing nice clothes rummaging through the recycle bins the night before the trucks pick that stuff up. Most, but not all of these folks, did not begin their rummaging pilgrimages until March. I watched videos a few days ago of the first food lines for the middle class since the Great Depression of 1929-40, a line of 600+ cars deep, people in their new Toyota Lexus’s, and other high end newer cars, who needed to gather free food in order to feed themselves. 20 to 40 million people are unemployed and all the congress would do was save the billionaires. See The CARES Act; the Rich get $4.75 Trillion and We Get the Crumbs.

We are at the beginning of a recession that will be severe because 40 years of the greed of sociopathic rich folks who control both major political parties and the Supreme Court, and who can never get enough money, and far more than they could ever spend, and who derive almost, and in many cases, all, of their income and wealth from the ownership of corporate shares, either through capital gains, dividends or corporate bonds.

Then you have the gullible grassroots on the political right who have been led to think the communists are controlling things; and then you have the gullible on the left who think the Democratic Party leaders actually give a rat’s ass about them; for the grassroots of both the left and right, the reality is unhidden and staring straight into their eyes.

All you need to do is look at Nancy Pelosi’s Heroes Act, the fifth stimulus since coronavirus shut down the U.S.; this legislation extends the government’s extra $600 unemployment insurance per week through the end of the year, and provides other income to the 99 percent too, although much of the money in the proposed legislation will still go to the rich. Pelosi waited to push the Heroes Act through the Democratic controlled House after both Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and President Trump said they were not interested in a fifth stimulus. Pelosi knew the Heroes Act was grand theatre for the blind faithful even though she could have easily negotiated more money for the 99 percent with McConnell and Trump during the first, second, and third bailouts, when McConnell and Trump were desperate to save the billionaires who pull their strings, which happen to be the same strings they use to pull Nancy Pelosi with. She did not negotiate for us little folks. Did she?

The billionaires pulled the strings of Pelosi, McConnell and Trump to come up with the notorious CARES Act, which bailed out the rich and their corporations to the tune of $4.75 trillion while throwing crumbs at the masses, which made for good theatrical effect. The billionaire’s corporate news media did their duty and only reported on the crumbs and how great they were.

As for the grassroots on the right, the CARES ACT alone should tell them how insanely wrong they are to assume Democratic Party politicians are controlled by communists, and the CARES Act should tell them that Republican politicians would not give a snail’s fart to help them out during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And you would think the blind followers of the Democrats could figure out that the Democratic Party politicians have not cared about them since Jimmy Carter was president.

The voters of both sides, you would think, would by now figure out that both Democratic and Republican Party politicians threw them overboard forty years ago. It only takes one thing: using your brains to put two and two together.

Billionaires own this nation, both political parties, they have at least five United States Supreme Court judges in their back pockets, along with a lot of other judges; they own the media and only tell you what they want you to believe, and most of you believe the propaganda and the lies used to turn the grassroots of the right and the left against each other.

No, this economic crisis will not be over soon. This is going to be a long economic nightmare. The rich have gotten richer while the rest of us have been drained financially dryer during the last few months alone.

We have to figure out how, as a people and as a nation, we want to come out of this crisis. Lurching forward into another economic wasteland like Argentina is for the vast majority of its people; or with a strong political change that reins in the obvious corruption at all levels of the U.S. government, and ensuring a government of, by and for the people, rather than just continuing to impoverish ourselves under the dictatorship of the billionaires.

We have a collective choice to make and the time has come to cast aside our petty differences and organize. The 1 percent were taking at least 37 percent of the income produced in this nation in 2019, up from 8 percent in 1980. They are probably raking in over 40 percent so far this year. Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates owned more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of Americans, and that was before the crisis began. They are richer now.

If our situation continues on this path, the rich will steal even more income and wealth than is currently the case. Then we will be a nation like Argentina, once boasting a prosperous middle class on a level with the best European nations, and now with a population of mostly desperate people.

In the USA, the dictatorship of the billionaires will continue and become stronger unless the grassroots of both sides come together and realize they have economic issues that bind them. Until that day, the dictatorship of the billionaires will continue to impoverish us all even more so than today.

The billionaires will continue to use their corporate media to divide us and make permanent their conquest and subversion of our democracy, our Constitution, and our governments at all levels, local, state and federal.

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How does the unemployment rate go down when the number of unemployed grows larger?

The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a few days ago that the U.S. economy added 2.5 million jobs in May 2020. This hardly seems likely. As you can see from the graph above, over 8 million people filed for unemployment insurance during the four weeks of May. If the U.S. economy added a total of 2.5 million workers, that means more than 10.5+ million of the unemployed returned to their jobs since you would need to add the 8+ million to the 2.5 million to get 10.5+ million. 10.5 million people would have needed to get back to their jobs after the last 1.8 million filed for unemployment insurance during the last week of May. It looks like the government is saying roughly 10.5 million people returned to work on May 30th and May 31, which is possible, but hardly likely.

The official unemployment rate is 13.3 percent when the majority of economists expected it to be closer to 20 percent.

You got to wonder about the corruption going on in government to come out with these numbers, which look like a lie. Some experts wondered what could have caused this increase in jobs.

Bloomberg news reported that, “Michelle Meyer, head of U.S. economics at Bank of America Corp., pointed to the 1.4 million jobs added in the restaurant industry and said, “maybe this is an indication that PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) is working and it’s being distributed to small businesses — restaurants — and they’re using it to bring workers back.”

And maybe not.

“Another issue is that some workers are being counted on payrolls even if their hours or pay are minimal, said Betsey Stevenson, a University of Michigan economist who was the U.S. Labor Department’s chief economist in the wake of the 2007-2009 recession.

“The problem is that Wall Street is used to predicting job loss due to a typical recession, not one in which people are temporarily sent home en masse,” Stevenson said.”

While millions of people are heading back to work in the coming weeks, the damage to the economy is likely to last a while. Sometime in the late summer or early Autumn, we will have a real idea of how badly this recession is. Unemployment should go down from here, but it will still be abnormally high since we will be in a recession that began in March.

Expect the stock markets to continue upward as the economy stays mired in recession since the government authorized the Federal Reserve to give away (officially loan) some $6.6 trillion to the rich via their major corporations. Don’t expect the Fed to carry a lot of these loans on their books. (See The CoronaVirus Stimulus Bill: The Rich Get 5 Trillion, We Get Crumbs.)

It used to be that corporate profits drove the stock markets up, but for the last ten years it has largely been the Federal Reserve and the U.S. government and corruption that has done this. The Fed printed up and handed out $26 trillion to twelve banks to cover the losses the billionaires suffered in 2008-09 (See The $26 Trillion Bailout). The bankers withheld millions of houses off the market in a clear act of conspiracy in restraint of trade that the Obama Administration turned a blind eye to since their Wall Street benefactors were cashing in on the corruption (Click here for that story). Meanwhile, corporate profits peaked in 2014 and therefore clearly have not been pushing the stock market up during the last six years; corruption has been pushing the market up.

The United States continues to see government corruption at all levels rise. The U.S. saw it drop out of the top twenty least corrupt nations for 2019, and that most likely understates how corrupt the U.S. has become. This corruption is caused by income and wealth inequality. The rich want more for themselves and less for you and corruption is part of the cost of doing business and achieving their goals.

 

 

 

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