Posted on 07/29/2014 5:34:43 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
I suppose it's natural that the average American believes that the Crash of 2008 was caused by greedy bankers and that the problem with health insurance is insurance company profits.
After all, most Americans work for big companies, and they know that at any moment corporate security could appear at their cubicle to escort them to the exit. Employees know the power their bosses have over them; why shouldn't the bosses have the same power to work their will over politicians?
Not only that, but politicians pose as the worker's friend. We'll protect you from the ravishings of your lascivious employer, they say. We'll regulate the bosses and carve out a share of their profits to return to you in benefits.
What is not to like about politicians? What's not to hate about corporate bosses?
How do you begin to persuade a rank-and-file American that business is their friend and government is their enemy? Good luck with persuading the 18,000 folks that just lost their jobs at Microsoft and are now wondering what government benefits they might qualify for.
But then, the private soldier always thinks worse of the sergeant that yells at him to get out of bed than the commissioned officer that asks kindly after his mother just before sending him to his death.
When your big corporate employer gives you the pink slip, who really rules: the corporation or the market?
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
the banking and housing collapse in the fall of 2008 was coordinated to gain the WH
as was the artificially high gas prices going into the election
some corporations may benefit from big govt, and they would naturally be involved. Microsoft wouldn’t be one of them.
Goldman sacks, fannie, freddie, gm, etc... definitely
I think a powerful motivator would be, if corporations were to stop hiring so many foreigners in foreign countries, and would bring back jobs to America.
Just saying.
Bring back jobs to America. Very very simple.
Yet neither party, is doing so at the moment. Republicans, get with it.
Don’t wait for dems to do this.
Bankers are not as smart as everyone thinks they are or brought to that conclusion by make believe Hollywood films....they are like car salesman...and don,t care what their clients do as long as they deposit their funds in their bank....
Sent from Android
.....Or so you claim!
“What is not to like about politicians? What’s not to hate about corporate bosses?”
Politicians: Don’t cater to the people like they are suppose to. They cater to whichever corporate boss pays them the most.
Corporate Bosses: Already have more more money than the next 4 generations of their decedents could spend, yet they’ll gladly lay off a few thousand people if it means earning an extra million per year. They rig the game (the economy) to work in their favor. And when there is a rule they don’t like, they just get a new politician to change it in their favor, regardless of what happens to the rest of the country.
We do not live in a capitalist economy...we live under corporatism. And they pull the strings of those they put into power. That is why we need SMALL government, term limits and a 5 year moratorium on pols to work for the corps that put them in power.
I think you are right.
Our concern with trade, goes beyond China or any single country.
But we have completely lost sight of what is most important:
AMERICA.
We need to support American jobs first. First and foremost.
Everything else is building up other countries. We need to focus on building up America now.
It appears more that whomever controls the Federal Reserve rules the country. We are more likely ruled by “big money” than “big business” now. We are no longer in the age of “what’s good for GM is good for the country.”
There is a reason our government is anti-SMALL business.
"They decide who governs and how, who serves on courts, what laws are enacted, and whether or not wars are waged."
Written by Stefania Vitali, James Glattfelder and Stefano Battiston, it’s titled “The network of global corporate control,” saying:
“We find that transnational corporations from a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic ‘super-entity’ that raises new important issues both for researches and policy makers.”
The study says 147 powerful companies control an inordinate amount of economic activity – about 40%. Among the top 50, 45 are financial firms. They include Barclays PLC (called most influential), JPMorgan Chase, UBS, and other familiar and less known names.
Twenty-four companies are US-based, followed by eight in Britain, five in France, four in Japan, and Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands with two each. Canada has one.
Moreover, “top ranked” companies “hold a control ten times bigger than what could be expected based on their wealth.”
As a result, they have enormous influence over political, financial, and economic activity.
In his book titled, “When Corporations Rule the World,” David Korten said they’re able to transfer enormous amounts of power, wealth and resources from public to private hands with government complicity. Money power and concentrated wealth in few hands especially harm humanity.
“These forces have transformed” financial institutions and other corporate predators “into instruments of a market tyranny that is extending its reach across the planet like a cancer, colonizing ever more of the planet’s living spaces, destroying livelihoods, displacing people, rendering democratic institutions impotent, and feeding on life in an insatiable quest for money” and profits as a be and end all.
Only bottom line priorities and market dominance matter, not human welfare, environmental sanity, peace, equity and justice.
Transnational giants are the dominant institution of our time – especially financial ones with money power control of everything.
They decide who governs and how, who serves on courts, what laws are enacted, and whether or not wars are waged. Corporate dominance, especially financial power, and democratic values are incompatible.
They operate ruthlessly as private tyrannies. They’re predators. We’re prey, and every day we’re eaten alive. They do it because they can, and in America by mandate.
Publicly owned US corporations, including financial ones, must serve shareholders by maximizing equity value through higher profits. They do it by exploiting nations, people and resources ruthlessly.
Social responsibility doesn’t matter. Neither does being worker-friendly, a good citizen, or friend of the earth. Bottom line priorities alone matter. Failure to pursue fiduciary responsibilities means possible dismissal or shareholder lawsuits.
Yet nothing in America’s Constitution or statute laws endow corporations with their rights. They usurped them by co-opting Washington, the nation’s courts, state capitals, and city halls.
As a result, over half the world’s largest economies are corporations. Financial ones controlling the power of money are most dominant.
Corporate personhood enhanced their power, yet imagine. Although corporations aren’t human, they can live forever, change their identity, reside in many places globally, can’t be imprisoned for wrongdoing, and can transform themselves into new entities for any reason.
They have the same rights and protections as people without the responsibilities. As a result, they operate freely unrestrained, especially financial giants controlling the power of money at the public’s expense.
Beginning in the late 1960s, financialization grew more dominant. Economic control began shifting from industry to finance. Corporations are now seen as bundles of assets, the more liquid the better. A new monopoly finance capitalism developed to exploit it.
FIRE sector (finance, insurance, and real estate) predators capitalized. Casino capitalism gained prominence. Today it thrives. Major players took advantage, profiting hugely from speculation, chicanery and fraud.
A burgeoning financial superstructure gained a life of its own. Today it’s omnipotent, especially in America and Europe. Their business model involves grabbing everything that smells money, no matter what harm is caused.
Money doesn’t buy everything, but it buys enough influence to matter. The smartest guys in the room take advantage, buying politicians like toothpaste. Democracy’s just a figure of speech.
Only wealth and power matter. Enough of them turned financial giants into monsters. Whatever they want, they get, including the right to operate freely outside the law, manipulate markets, bilk investors, strip-mine nations and people for profit, and get bailed out at public expense if overreach.
Under Obama and European leaders, the worst of bad practices flourish. Foxes guard the henhouse. Inmates run the asylum. Regulators don’t regulate. Investigations aren’t conducted. High-level criminal fraud gets wink and nod approval. Nothing is done to curb it.
Nor do public considerations matter nor is sustained low inflation long-term growth pursued as long as bankers get paid. Today, it’s issue one in America and troubled Eurozone countries.
Wall Street dominance matters most in America. In Europe, “Troika” power is omnipotent – the IMF, EU and European Central Bank (ECB). Nations trapped under euro straightjacket rules can’t devalue their currencies to be more competitive, monetize debt freely, or legislate fiscal policies to stimulate growth.
Instead, they’re entrapped by banker diktats demanding tribute. In other words, financial coup d’etat authority runs sovereign governments. They occupy them rapaciously, making rules, setting terms, issuing demands, and pressuring, bribing or otherwise forcing political leaders to acquiesce. If not, they’re replaced.
Working households bear the burden through layoffs, wage and benefit cuts, higher taxes, and other austerity measures to assure bankers are paid.
According to Michael Hudson, the system:
“shift(s) planning power into the hands of high finance on the claim that this is more efficient than public regulation. Government planning and taxation is accused of being ‘the road to serfdom,’ as if ‘free markets’ controlled by bankers given leeway to act recklessly is not planned by special interests in ways that are oligarchic, not democratic.”
“Governments are told to pay bailout debts taken on not to defend countries in military warfare as in times past, but to benefit the wealthiest layer of the population by shifting its losses onto taxpayers.”
As a result, social inequality proliferates. A new Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report discusses the damage over the last three decades among its 34 member states. They include America, Japan, Western Europe, and others.
www.globalresearch.ca/bankers-rule-the-world-the-network-of-global-corporate-control
They decide who governs and how, who serves on courts, what laws are enacted, and whether or not wars are waged.
Titled “Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising,” it discusses conditions from the early 1980s until the 2008 global economic crisis. Its impact alone left 200 million workers unemployed compounded by more imposed austerity.
Among OECD countries, the top 10% is nine times better off than the bottom 10%. America, Israel and Turkey are the most unequal industrialized nations at 14 to 1. In Britain, Japan, Italy, and South Korea, the gap is 10 to 1.
Rising inequality also affected “traditionally egalitarian countries” like Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. They went from 5 to 1 in the 1980s to 6 to 1 today. Mexico and Chile are worst off with gaps of 25 to one.
In America, the top 1% controls 20% of all income plus a far greater percent of total assets. Concentrated wealth extremes also affect European countries, following America’s pattern.
The report says income inequality “first started to increase in the late 1970s and early 1980s in some English-speaking countries, notably the United Kingdom and the United States, but also in Israel.”
Since the late 1980s, it’s grown more widespread. At the same time, labor rights were sacrificed to benefit corporate bottom line priorities. In addition, finance capital grew omnipotent. As a result, money power rules everything.
Imposed austerity greatly impacted working households in troubled Eurozone countries and others facing economic hard times. Greece has been especially hammered by repeated layoffs, wage and benefit cuts, as well as higher taxes.
In early December, unelected Prime Minister Lucas Papademos (a former Bank of Greece governor and ECB vice president) force-fed through parliament more austerity cuts. Receiving an eight billion euro loan was conditional on doing so.
As a result, imposed measures include another five billion euros in spending cuts, 3.6 billion in new taxes, pensions cut 15%, and wages slashed more than already. In addition, more ahead is planned.
Papademos said “(t)he financial crisis in our country is not a passing storm….It will take many years” of greater worker sacrifices to assure bankers are paid.
In fact, the more wage, benefit, pension, and other cuts ordinary people bear, the weaker Greece’s economy becomes from lost purchasing power with a working population heading toward serfdom in a nation no longer fit to live in.
Millions of Greeks are now impoverished. Unemployment approaches 20%. For youths between 15 and 24, it’s nearly 50%. Years more imposed pain is planned to assure bankers are paid. As a result, expect Greece sooner or later to explode.
In addition, the more debt Greece assumes, the less it’s able to service it, and faster it heads toward debt peonage. According to Michael Hudson, moreover, “(a) basic mathematical as well as political principle” explains that “(d)ebts that can’t be paid, won’t be.”
In early December, unelected Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti (former EU official installed by Goldman Sachs, known to some as “three-card Monte”) introduced his own austerity package.
To service Italy’s $1.6 trillion debt, it includes attacking its social security pension system. In retirement, families depend on it. Nonetheless, retirement age eligibility will be raised to 66 from 58 by 2018, inflation-adjusted increases will end, and to qualify fully, workers must contribute from wages for 42 years.
In addition, value-added taxes will increase by 2%, and firing workers will be easier than ever. As in Greece, more cuts are planned, targeting workers to benefit bankers, other corporate favorites, and Italy’s super-rich.
Portugal’s new austerity cuts will see take-home pay down 27% since 2010. Its 2012 budget reduces spending by 4.4% of GDP by cutting healthcare and other benefits.
It also raises value added and other taxes, extends working days by 30 minutes with no added pay, and eliminates bonuses equal to two months earnings.
These measures follow earlier ones. They included cutting public sector wages 10%, eliminating four holidays, slashing overtime pay 50%, reducing pay for shift work, imposing “time banks” for greater employer flexibility over when employees must work, making firings simpler and cheaper, imposing shorter fixed-term contracts, ending rest breaks, and lowering unemployment benefits.
A Final Comment
Financial tyranny runs America and Europe. As a result, public anger grows.
Can revolutionary sparks be far behind? Expect pain levels eventually to cross thresholds of no return. Anything after that is possible, good or bad.
Hopefully a better world will emerge, free from banker occupation. It’s our only chance!
This article presents a false choice: does the government or corporations rule America?
The truth is they have a symbiotic relationship with each other, and a parasitic relationship with the middle class.
Crony capitalism is the modus operandi. Bundlers get politicians elected. Politicians produce tax credits, tax breaks, tax loop-holes, and taxpayer-guaranteed loans for the bundlers. Rinse and repeat on both sides of the aisle.
Meanwhile, the middle class gets stuck with the growing bill even though our income has stagnated.
No. Washington, D.C. does.
Read your history. The rich and powerful have always had a major say in America. For example the railroads were not a government project but rather the work of powerful businessmen. If you don’t like big corporations than maybe you are a closet liberal/marxist.
A big ditto if you don’t like banks. It was the rise of banking in the italian city states that lifted europe out of the dark ages. Banks and corporations are not the problem but rather big government and out of control spending that is forcing the Federal Reserve to act as it is acting to mitigate the damage of running obscene deficits.
The truth is they have a symbiotic relationship with each other, and a parasitic relationship with the middle class.
Congratulations! You win the kewpie doll!The article concludes:
If you are a highly educated and evolved person, you know that there is another angle to idea of corporations as pet lapdogs. When humans domesticate dogs and appoint canines as “man's best friend” and make such a fuss over their lapdogs, allowing them liberties and giving them treats, who is really the boss, the owner or the dog?
The Fed creates money out of nothing—ex nihilo.
That fiat money is loaned to the Treasury, to spend on government programs.
The IRS farms middle-class workers to pay the Fed back.
What is "The Fed"? An ultra-elite group of bank owners.
Corporations, organized voter groups, unions, vote-fraud rings, and the like, all have influence, but not control. BO and his Marxist pigs demonstrated that they have the power to takeover any company, bank, group, and use it to their advantage. GM is a shining example where BO took the company, installed his buddy as CEO, stole 90% of bondholder equity and gave it to the unions. This is ultimate power and GM was powerless to stop it. Make no mistake, this was a huge message to any private entity: they are all slave to abusive government and just one step away from getting themselves exterminated.
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