Video: Mitch McConnell, Sabotage, and The Story Behind The Republican Party’s Number One Priority, “End the Presidency of Barack Obama”

Read Full Post »

Unlike Everyone Else, Some Big Political Donors Know What’s in the Trans-Pacific Partnership | Money & Politics, What Matters Today | BillMoyers.com

There are 600 corporate lobbyists helping to craft the latest income redistribution scam, called a free trade treaty. It’s called the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). The only US Senator ever called a “useful idiot” by a Nobel Prize winning economist once again shows that he’s Wall Street’s senator. The name of this useful idiot is Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden. Wyden has a 100 percent voting record when it comes to redistributing income from the 99 to the 1 percent. That’s what the TPP is all about. So, naturally, Wall Street’s useful idiot of a senator supports the treaty. The TPP is another rigged game, and like the politics in Washington DC, and in Wall Street Senator Useful Idiot’s office, it’s all about massive amounts of corruption that might make some third world dictators look downright honest.

If you want to discover what corporations are in on this scam, click the link below.

Unlike Everyone Else, Some Big Political Donors Know What’s in the Trans-Pacific Partnership | Money & Politics, What Matters Today | BillMoyers.com.

Advertisement

Read Full Post »

A Call to Action: Urgent Update on Fast Track and TPP: Congress Getting Ready to Land the Knockout Punch to the Middle Class via a Vote on Fast Track

From Oregon Fair Trade

The economic game in the war against the middle class is about to become more rigged than is currently the case, and the game has been increasingly rigged over the last thirty years. The latest and most vicious assault against the American people is being led by Wall Street President Barack Obama, Wall Street Republican House Speaker John Boehner, and Wall Street Senators Ron Wyden and Mitch McConnell. All of these folks are veteran class warriors that wage war against the middle class on behalf of Wall Street’s investor class. The 1 percent has used the tax cuts they’ve received over the last thirty years to turn the Federal government and the US Supreme Court into cesspools of corruption. The people above exemplify this corruption.

According the Citizen’s Trade Campaign,

“This month marked the four-year anniversary of the Obama administration’s closed-door attempts to complete the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Free Trade Agreement. Please tell Congress four years of secretive negotiations is more than enough.

The administration missed yet another self-imposed deadline for completing the negotiations in Singapore in the beginning of December because it has been pushing the wrong agenda from the start.

Leaked TPP documents first published by Citizens Trade Campaign (CTC) two years ago — and more recent documents published by WikiLeaks and the HuffingtonPost — reveal that the administration is demanding TPP provisions that threaten family-wage jobs, a healthy environment, financial stability, access to life-saving medications, consumer safety and family farms at home and abroad. And now the administration is even urging Congress to pass “Fast Track” legislation that would enable the TPP to circumvent ordinary Congressional review, amendment and debate procedures.

Fast Track Is Coming in Early January — Action Needed Now Over the Holiday Congressional Recess

Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus and House Ways & Means Committee Chair David Camp are expected to introduce their Fast Track bill as soon as Congress reconvenes in early January. The White House recently had a full cabinet meeting to discuss how the entire administration will be pushing the bill, and corporate lobbyists are not taking the holidays off either. They’ve already begun their full court press.

It is critical that we take advantage of the week and a half before the bill’s introduction to continue pressing members of the U.S. House of Representatives especially to oppose Fast Track. If you live in Rep. DeFazio or Rep. Schrader’s district, now is the time to thank them for speaking out against Fast Track. If you live in Rep. Blumenauer or Rep. Bonamici’s district, please call their D.C. office and thank them for expressing concern over Fast Track and urge them to go further by publicly opposing Fast Track. Call Now! U.S. Capitol switchboard at 1-202-224-3121.”

——————————————————————————–

Read Full Post »

Saving the US Economy From Disaster: The Economic Case for the $20 Per Hour Minimum Wage in the United States

The financial markets are soaring, and this has pushed the US economy into a prolonged slump, what Nobel Prize Economist Paul Krugman calls a “low-grade Depression.” Our low grade Depression has been going on since December 2007, while the financial markets have been soaring since 2009, and this is a simple case of cause and effect.

Jobs are being exported year after year, and the difference between the old US wages and the new lower overseas wages go into the pockets of the rich via higher corporate profits, rising dividends and soaring share prices. The unemployed may get unemployment insurance if they’re lucky. It’s a simple case of income redistribution.

Nearly 2 million jobs were exported from the US in 2013. Jobs are the biggest export product produced in the USA. Between 0.9 and 3 million jobs are exported year after year, according to the Federal Reserve, since just before NAFTA.

That doesn’t count the massive numbers of jobs that are created by US companies overseas, that would normally be created in the USA, and performed by US citizens, in the absence of corporate trade treaties, which are specifically negotiated to redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent in exactly this way.

Where the jobs have gone–Thingprogress.org

The combined job losses have depleted our tax base for schools, other public services, and the US social safety net. Where has the money gone? Directly into the pockets of the rich, which is why the financial markets are soaring.

The 1 percent have taken their ill-gotten gains and invested much of this newly available cash in the financial markets. The result has been the creation of massive financial market bubbles in the US (and perhaps throughout the world, but that’s beyond the scope of this story).

The Dow Jones Industrial average closed at 15,680.35 on December 26 2013, up from 6547.05 in 2009, a rise of almost 240 percent. Meanwhile, the NASDAQ shot up from 1293.85 on March 2, 2009 to 4156.59 on December 26, 2013, an increase of over 320 percent. Other US financial markets have posted similar gains.

Since these advances in the values of corporate share prices have been caused by income being redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent via federal legislation, such as corporate trade treaties, the result has been a slacking of demand for goods and services in an already weak economy. That’s because the super rich invest their money with an eye toward redistributing more money from the 99 percent into their pockets, while the 99 percent buy stuff, creating demand for goods and services. That’s how the 1 percent weaken the economy and destroy jobs when they redistribute income to themselves from the 1 percent.

All of this is continually made worse by Republican and Democratic Party hacks, such as President Obama, Republican House Leader John Boehner, and Wall Street Senators such as Ron Wyden and Mitch McConnell. 100 percent of the Republican members of the US congress, and 80 to 90 percent of the Democrats elected to congress and the presidency, as well as the corporate toadies of the insanely corrupt US Supreme Court, are doing the bidding of Wall Street and other billionaires (such as the Koch Brothers) at the expense of Main Street and the nation as a whole.

The financial market bubbles will burst sooner than later, in one to five years. When this occurs, our low-grade Great Depression will become a fully ignited Great Depression. This Depression will make the current US economy look really good, although it is historically awful. The official and deliberately understated unemployment rate will rise beyond 20 percent, and perhaps approach 30 percent. The real unemployment rate, as measured during the original Great Depression, will be between 25 and 40 percent. Interest rates will plummet lower than they are now. Housing prices will collapse. The US ranks right up there with Romania when it comes to child poverty, but we will be challenging Haiti and a few African nations for first place when the financial markets burst. The number of people on food stamps will at least double compared to today.

After the bursting, the Federal Reserve will give out trillions of dollars to rich investors, hedge funds, and investment banks, in order to save the day, and their investments. Of course, Fed officials will say they loaned the money out, although it really will be a permanent loan, like last time. See breakdown-of-the-26-trillion-the-federal-reserve-handed-out-to-save-rich-incompetent-investors-but-who-purchase-political-power–Johnhively.wordpress.com.

However, the Fed’s actions will only make things worse because massive investors already know they are protected from losses by the Fed, and so there are no consequences for their insanely bad investment decisions. That’s precisely why the actions of the Fed will only prolong the  misery of the bursting bubble.

The super rich will get bailed out while Main Street will have to suck it up. This means more jobs will be shipped overseas, more cities and towns will go bankrupt due to the exporting of jobs, the excess unemployed and illegal labor will continue to drive wages and salaries down.

However, the Federal Reserve bailout will also mean corporate profits will rise, dividends will shoot up, share prices will expand, and the Ponzi scheme known as the financial markets will continue or stabilize their bubbles. In other words, for 99 percent of Americans, the situation will be quite dire.

One way to cut off the bursting of the bubble at the pass is simply to raise the federal minimum wage from its current pathetic $7.25 per hour to $15 in early or mid 2014, and to $20 by early 2015. The economy can absorb this as easily as it absorbs record corporate profits, year after year, during our low-grade Great Depression, with all of its slack demand for goods and services.

This alone should tell you that prices are not connected to any laws of supply and demand. Instead, prices are largely manipulated by the large corporations, otherwise, prices would be going down with the historically lukewarm demand during these tough times, but prices keep going up, up, and up in defiance of the illegally broken laws of supply and demand.

Some people will foolishly argue that an increase in the minimum wage to $20 will mean increased prices. No, it won’t, at least, no more than is currently the case with manipulated prices. However, even today’s manipulative corporations cannot jack-up prices continuously, although they seem to be able to all the time, whenever they want.

To pay the new minimum wage, most US publicly traded corporations will be forced to dig into their record profits, or their trillions of dollars of retained earnings (estimates are $10-14 trillion worldwide for US companies, and this also tells you how uncompetitive and bloated they are. In other words, they are not competitive at all), in order to pay their employees the higher wages.

From a purely conservative point-of-view, which is the purely conceptualized reality that the US has a competitive, free market economic system despite all the evidence to the contrary, corporate management teams will want to be competitive, just as conservatives want to believe, even in the face of such an overdue rise of the minimum wage.

Therefore, under our current conservative point-of-view, any Neanderthal management team that is dumb enough to increase their prices while their more competent rivals pay their employees the higher minimum wage out of their historically high profits and retained earnings, will go the way of the Neanderthals. It’s that simple. The companies that use their bloated, pent up financial resources in this way will live to fight another day as their Neanderthal rivals go out of business.

Investors, of course, may suffer. They may see their share prices drop temporarily, especially, as competition heats up, as corporations use up their record retained earnings, and have to contend with lower profit margins, like in any competitive economic model. However, this will bring the financial markets down much more gently than compared to a bursting bubble that awaits us in the absence of any federal intervention.

Since the bubbles have been created by redistributing money from the 99 percent to the 1 percent, it stands to reason the best antidote to such an approaching disaster is for corporate royalists to give the money back to those to whom it really belongs; the 99 percent. This can most easily and prudently be done by raising the federal minimum wage to $20 per hour over the next year and a half.

That $10 to $14 trillion US corporations are sitting on can be used to pay US citizens, which will then increase the demand for goods and services, and send the US economy into its first long-term non-bubble economic expansion since the 1960s.

Recent studies show increasing the minimum wage beefs up demand, increases employment, and that there are no negative consequences as is claimed, like job losses. Besides, an increased minimum wage is what our weak economy needs right now. And given record corporate retained earnings and record profits, the economy can easily absorb the higher wage. Enhanced demand will create good paying jobs, flood local tax bases with more income for schools and the social safety nets, safely deflate the financial market bubbles, and in the process perhaps head off the coming Great Depression, and likely even end our current low grade Depression. Furthermore, the 1 percent will have less money with which to corrupt government at all levels, and, by the way, the political markets are another area in which the 1 percent use their ill-gotten gains to invest in legislation against the 99 percent. That does create jobs for corporate lobbyists. So the 1 percent will have less money to do that little thing. So let’s do the obvious thing; raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour.

The legal and logical difference between an owner operated business and a business structured on “organized money” (a limited liability corporation) is as obvious as the difference between a single worker and a large labor union.

Therefore, one last thing needs to be mentioned. There is always somebody who will say raising the minimum wage to $20 an hour will kill small mom and pop businesses. Conceded, those are mostly businesses that operate in something that kind of resembles a competitive business environment. Those businesses should be allowed to operate with a minimum wage of say, $$12-15 an hour. However, since limited liability corporations are nothing more than “organized money,” as FDR accurately put it, and since they operate in a more collusive environment, those corporations are a totally different animal from owner operated companies, and should be made to pay the $20 minimum wage, which should also be indexed to inflation.

pFrom StoctCharts.com. History of the Dow Jones Industrials

Read Full Post »

The Trans Atlantic Free Trade Agreement: Another New Income and Political Power Redistribution Scam from the Obama Administration

U.S. and EU officials are working on the Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA), also known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). They’re meeting in Washington, D.C. right now for their next round of negotiations.

“This agreement has been touted as a way to “’raise standards’” and strengthen the ties between the EU and the U.S. However, there are concerns that TAFTA could be used to undermine public interest laws and safeguards on both sides of the Atlantic by giving corporations new rights to challenge local laws and requiring domestic policies to conform to the provisions of a “trade” deal that would never survive the scrutiny of regular, democratic legislative procedures. The basic question about TAFTA is whether it will strengthen or undermine the laws, rules and regulations that protect labor, food, drugs, consumers, the environment and democratic processes.”

However, if TAFTA is like all the previous trade scams before it, the goal of the governments involved is to weaken public input into to political decisions being made by the 1 percent, which is typically to pass legislation to redistribute income and political power from the 99 to the 1 percent.

In Europe, in say, England and France, labor union leaders can marshal millions of people into a strike on short notice, paralyzing the economies of those nations, forcing their governments into quick negotiations. This is one way they can stand up against corporate power successfully. Corporations are nothing more than “organized money,” and that money is used to purchase politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, and that includes virtually every congressman and senator and every white house administration since Ronald Reagan in the US, and probably half the politicians in the federal governments of France and Germany.

TAFTA would undermine laws that protect the 99 percent from the depravations and political games of the parasites of the 1 percent.

If the history of these investor trade treaties are any indication, TAFTA will limit the financial regulation of Wall Street, which means that if another Franklin Roosevelt becomes president, i.e. an honest politician, which includes somebody such as Senator Elizabeth Warren, that person’s ability to push legislation that curbs the financial power of investment firms (such as Goldman Sachs and various hedge funds) to commit fraud against US citizens and wreck the economy in the process will be limited by these treaties, especially since the prospects are that TAFTA will include investor-state dispute resolution in secret tribunals presided over by corporate lawyers.

TAFTA, like NAFTA and the looming Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), should provoke consumer concerns on data, privacy and health, as well as limit “localization” laws such as “Buy America” and Green Jobs programs. In particular, the primary goal of the TPP is to safe guard investor profits and push the prices of goods higher for the 99 percent, which is nothing more than an income redistribution treaty since the enhanced profits will go into the pockets of the 1 percent, while the higher prices will be paid for by the 99 percent. This is called market manipulation by corporate treaty, and has nothing to do with free trade, free men and women, or free markets. It’s much more feudal than that.

The TPP and TAFTA treaties, like NAFTA, are going to include provisions limiting environmental, health, and safety laws. They will likely include provisions that if any state or local law is passed which might save lives by limiting poisons that foreign corporations can sell in the US, the corporations whose sales of such products are reduced by such laws will be able to seek compensation for the loss of supposed future profits against any government that passes such laws, and in secret tribunals presided over by corporate attorneys.

These treaties are an example of how corrupt the US government is, totally rotted to the core by the 1 percent, and against the interests of the 99 percent.

Read Full Post »

Controversial Trade Pact Text Leaked, Shows U.S. Trade Officials Have Agreed to Terms That Undermine Obama Domestic Agenda

After Two Years of Closed-Door Negotiations, Trans-Pacific Partnership Text Replicates Alarming Bush Trade Pact Terms That Obama Opposed as Candidate, and Worse

President Obama is preparing a speech on income disparities in the USA that he plans to give on television, while at the same time planning on doing something about it: his administration is negotiating to make income maldistribution worse than it already is. The TPP will redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent, which seems to have been the job of every president and nearly every major player in the Democratic and Republican Parties since Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. Obama, of course, is doing precisely what he’s been doing in regard to this matter for the last five years. Obama’s hypocrisy is truly Orwellian.

Although the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) has been branded a “trade” agreement, the leaked text of the pact’s Investment Chapter shows that the TPP would:

1.  limit how U.S. federal and state officials could regulate foreign firms operating within U.S. boundaries, with requirements to provide them greater rights than domestic firms;
2.  extend the incentives for U.S. firms to offshore investment and jobs to lower-wage countries; the difference between the old higher US wages and the new lower wages overseas will go directly into the pockets of the 1 percent via higher corporate profits, dividends and share prices while robbing people of their jobs and weakening funding for public programs
3. establish a two-track legal system that gives foreign firms new rights to skirt U.S. courts and laws, directly sue the U.S. government before foreign tribunals and demand compensation for financial, health, environmental, land use and other laws they claim undermine their TPP privileges; and
4. allow foreign firms to demand compensation for the costs of complying with U.S. financial or environmental regulations that apply equally to domestic and foreign firms.”

The primary purpose of the TPP seems to be to raise prices, which redistributes income from the 99 to the 1 percent. It’s a corrupt, rigged game, folks.

Check out the link below.

Public Citizen

Read Full Post »

Illegal NSA Spying Massive and Widespread More so Than Previously Thought

They may know your password to your checking account, because the folks at the NSA and its private contractors have broken the encryption codes for banks, blogs, emails, hospitals, medical records, and lots more.

NSA files shed light on one of Edward Snowden’s most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian newspaper on June 10. The interview is published below.

“I, sitting at my desk,” said Snowden, could “wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email”.

US officials vehemently denied this specific claim, which means they lied. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said of Snowden’s assertion: “He’s lying. It’s impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do.” In other words, Congressman Mike Rogers is lying to the American people on behalf of the NSA and private contractors. Perhaps Rogers receives too much money in the form of campaign donations, as well as numerous favors, from those private contractors.

The training materials for XKeyscore, the top secret NSA program, detail how analysts can use it and other systems to mine enormous agency databases by filling in a simple on-screen form giving only a broad justification for the search. The request is not reviewed by a court or any NSA personnel before it is processed.

Here’s how it can work. Say the government or any member of the government, doesn’t like what somebody writes about him or her on a blog. The NSA and its contractors can go into the blog and change things, like postings or even more detailed information, such as the number of followers. There is at least one blogger that this has happened to, and there’s likely more. The only folks capable of doing this might very well be the NSA and its private contractors.

The Obama regime needs to get rid of this corporate police state, and that’s precisely what the United States has become. Everyone the government wants to spy on is being spied on without warrants.

This is violation of the fourth amendment of the US Constitution, which is no longer in effect, and hasn’t been since the George W. Bush regime reduced it to a worthless “scrap of paper.”

The Fourth Amendment reads:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

It’s obvious a warrant needs to be issued before the government can spy on anybody. The stunning thing is that the corporate wing of the US Supreme will likely uphold the legality of this obvious breach of the law. That’s because justices John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and their sometimes ally Anthony Kennedy find it profitable for the spy industry. Their obvious motto is, “Profits over people, profits over the Constitution, especially if it relates to our buddies, the Koch Brothers.”

This means that Edward Snowden is an American hero, who rightly fears for his life. This situation also shows that privatizing national security has been a disaster. It’s just an income redistribution scam that has rendered the US Constitution valueless.

Read Full Post »

Graphs: Income Redistribution from the 99 to the 1 Percent; It’s about inequality stupid

The 1 percent, or rather the top 0.25 percent, of the US population have received the vast bulk of income growth in the US since 1979.

That’s because they’ve held, and continue to hold, all of the mechanisms of legislative power, in the congress and in the white house. They’ve purchased the legislative favors of politicians, such as the corrupt Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden. He’s the face of corruption in government, but the same is true of the US Supreme Court, 100 percent of Republicans in congress, 80 percent of Democrats in congress, and all of the Democrats whose power resides in the white house, such as the president and the attorney general .

Wyden always sides with big money in their war against the middle class. And so he votes to redistribute income from the middle class to the 1 percent via free trade treaties, privatization scams, and deregulation crap. Free trade is really corporate trade, which means lowering wages and reducing standards of living in the process. That’s because free trade treaties are an income redistribution scam, pure and simple, and Wyden knows this. He’s not a stupid boy. These treaties legally pave the way for shipping US jobs overseas to lower wage nations, as well as creating jobs overseas rather than here.

The difference between the old, higher, US wages and the new, lower, wages overseas goes into the pockets of the 0.1 percent via higher corporate profits, rising dividends and surging share prices. The citizens who’ve lost their jobs are lucky to get unemployment insurance, and they might not get a job for years. Wyden and every member of congress and every politician in the white house for the last thirty years know all of this, and yet they still continue to vote with the 1 percent.

From Mother Jones

Wyden’s free trade income redistribution scams have nearly destroyed the US economy by weakening the demand for goods and services. Nowadays, thanks to Wyden and his corrupt political friends such as Republicans Paul Ryan and John Boehner, the 99 percent receive roughly 68 percent of the total income of the US, compared to 92 percent in 1979. We don’t have the income to demand more than we can, and so job growth is historically weak under President Barack Obama, another servant of Wall Street. Look at the graph below and you’ll see exactly what Wyden has done to the 99 percent. And he plans to wreck more of the middle class on behalf of his Wall Street masters.

Remember, the figures in the above graph are from 1979-2005. Vastly more income has been redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent since then, thanks to George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Scheming Ron Wyden, and a ton of other corrupt officials in Washington D.C.

Under Wyden’s free trade scams, massive amounts of income have been redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent since 1979. Wyden’s scams are destroying the middle class, as well as the nation. He’s not going to change, he’ll always be a Wall Street warrior against the middle class. The graph above shows how much income Wyden has redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent on a yearly basis via legislation in the right column. The left column shows how much his policies have redistributed income from the 99 to the 1 percent in total since 1979. However, the left column underestimates the total.

When a job is shipped overseas, or created there instead of here, income is redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent for as long as that job exists, year after year after year. In other words, the income Wyden redistributes to his corporate buddies is a continuous financial bonanza, or financial loop, for so long as the job exists. Wyden, like the rest of congress and the president, steals jobs from somebody who produces something, and gives it to somebody who produces nothing, except the financial strings they use to manipulate Wyden and his congressional cronies like puppets.

So if Wyden redistributes Joe US’s $60,000 a year job and gives it to Wu Chung in China for $4500 a year, Wyden is redistributing the difference of $55,000 a year to rich shareholders. So long as that job remains outside of the US, the rich continue to receive that money year after year after year. Joe US might get unemployment insurance out of the deal, and Wu Chung gets a life time of slave labor.

Read Full Post »

Tax the Super Pacs

When the traitorous and corrupt Koch Brothers wing of the US Supreme court ruled in favor of personhood for corporations, allowing unlimited spending on political campaigns in its anti-constitutional ruling in the Citizens United Case, it destroyed the remains of honest government. Now Super Political Action Committees rule the political landscape. People don’t. Now somebody has come up with a novel method for dealing with these Super Pacs. Tax them.

Click here for the complete story

Read Full Post »

Bill Maher Suggests Liberals are Living in a Bubble About Obama

Bill Maher says President Barack Obama could lose the election to any one of the Republican presidential candidates, however unlikely that may seem. Obama is behind in polls of swing states against the Republican candidates, so it isn’t just possible, it’s likely Obama would lose.

Click here for the video and story

Read Full Post »