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News & ArtsMonday, December 26, 2011
Occupy / Money The Big Lie
Posted by Goldy on Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 9:19 PM
In the international edition of Newsweek, and posted to the Daily Beast, author Michael Thomas writes about Wall Street's "Big Lie," and the coming firestorm of retribution:
The Street and its ministries of propaganda have fallen back on a Big Lie as old as capitalism itself: that all that has gone wrong has been government’s fault. This time, however, I don’t think the argument that “Washington ate my homework” is going to work. This time, a firestorm is going to explode about the Street’s head—and about time, too.
[...] Over the next year, I expect the “what” will give way to the “how” in the broad electorate’s comprehension of the financial situation. The 99 percent must learn to differentiate the bloodsuckers and rent-extractors from those in the 1 percent who make the world a better, more just place to live. Once people realize how Wall Street made its pile, understand how financiers get rich, what it is that they actually do, the time will become ripe for someone to gather the spreading ripples of anger and perplexity into a focused tsunami of retribution. To make the bastards pay, properly, for the grief and woe they have caused. Perhaps not to the extent proposed by H. L. Mencken, who wrote that when a bank fails, the first order of business should be to hang its board of directors, but in a manner in which the pain is proportionate to the collateral damage. Possibly an excess-profits tax retroactive to 2007, or some form of “Tobin tax” on transactions, or a wealth tax. The era of money for nothing will be over.
But it won’t just end with taxes. When the great day comes, Wall Street will pray for another Pecora, because compared with the rough beast now beginning to strain at the leash, Pecora will look like Phil Gramm. Humiliation and ridicule, even financial penalties, will be the least of the Street’s tribulations. There will be prosecutions and show trials. There will be violence, mark my words. Houses burnt, property defaced. I just hope that this time the mob targets the right people in Wall Street and in Washington. (How does a right-thinking Christian go about asking Santa for Mitch McConnell’s head under the Christmas tree?) There will be kleptocrats who threaten to take themselves elsewhere if their demands on jurisdictions and tax breaks aren’t met, and I say let ’em go!
And no, Thomas is not some dirty, fucking, hippie commie. He's a former partner at Lehman Brothers. Read the whole damn thing.
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Let's all have a guess at what the target demographic looks like, shall we? My guess is "upper middle class Europeans killing time in hotel lobbies."
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Is there anything, anything, anything, Goldy can post that isn't just someone's daydream? At least give us a daydream propped up by SOME empirical evidence. Fucking ad hominem, argument from authority, ..., there's smoke and more smoke.
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Why do the infantilized types, like Goldy (who probably means well, though) always cite jackholes as if that somehow lends credence to the obvious?????
All people need to fully realize, is the truth and the history behind it.
1913: In that year, the year know as Rockefeller's Year, four pieces of fraud legislation were passed.
(1) The Aldrich Act, latter to be renamed the Federal Reserve Act (Sen. Aldrich had married into the Rockefeller family and was John D. Rockefeller's son-in-law) which set up 12 credit monopolies, the Federal Reserve System -- who created the money, then lent it to the US Treasury, thusly putting the American government and people in debt to the private banksters. The private banks which own the Fed receive a guaranteed 6% dividend.***
(2) The 16th Amendment, creating the federal income tax, which was created to pay the Federal Reserve the interest owed on the money they lent the US government. (Originally, the federal income tax went directly to the Federal Reserve Bank.)
(3) The oil depletion allowance, which subsidized the oil companies, chiefly Rockefeller's Standard Oil. (But also Morgan, Harriman and Mellon's businesses.)
(4) Tax exemptions for foundations and churches. Foundations, although probably used somewhat for this reason previously, were highly structured through this legislation to be the principal source to hide both wealth and ownership, while avoiding taxation, of the senior plutocrats (supposed to have been structured by Rockefeller's law firm which originally created the holding company structure).
***Thusly, the banksters were subsidized, their oil companies were subsidized, they avoided taxation while hiding the true amount of their wealth and vast holdings. William Jennings Bryan, who was against such a move, was fooled into believing the government would print the money (which it does and pays for, via the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing) without being shown the entire legislation. Robert Owens, the coauthor of this legislation, was connected to the plutocrats as his father was president of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad.
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"Arguably, it WAS the government's fault:.."
Negative, sonny, it was the government, specifically elected officials and those they appointed, who aided and abetted, and were accessories --- it was the Wall Streeters (Goldman Sachs -- whose alumnus makes up the entire managment of the Treasury, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, the PE leveraged buyout thieves, Blackstone Group, Carlyle, Citadel, etc., et al.) who bought and paid for those elected accessories.
This isn't a technicality, but simply how it was and is done.....
" Nobody gives two craps about what you think." (The history of responses speaks against you, Discovery Institute stooge.)
And here is what your brethren, the 1% of the job destroyers and job offshorers are up to:
(Latest astroturf firm)
http://jobcreatorsalliance.org/About.asp…
http://jobcreatorsalliance.org/Leaders.a…
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I'd offer you some advice, but I wouldn't know where to begin.
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