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Charlie Gilmour, son of Pink Floyd guitarist, given 16 months in jail for role in student riots
07.15.2011
01:21 pm
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Charlie Gilmour, the adopted son of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, admitted violent disorder in court today in London, after joining thousands of students demonstrating in London’s Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square last year.

During the riots, Gilmour was seen hanging from a Union Jack flag on the Cenotaph memorial for Britain’s war dead. He was also seen leaping on to the hood of a Jaguar that formed part of a royal escort convoy and throwing a garbage can at the car. Gilmour was one of approximately 100 students who attacked a convoy escorting the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall during last year’s student riots. The Prince and his wife were on their way to the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium theater when the mob surrounded their car shouting “off with their heads,” “Tory scum” and “give us some money.”

The Royal vehicle’s back window was smashed and lime green paint was thrown on the car, although there is no evidence that Gilmour had anything to do with that. He was, however, also photographed attempting to start a fire outside the Supreme Court by lighting a bunch of newspapers on fire.

Gilmour, a 21-year-old Cambridge University student, was told he must serve half of his 16-month jail term behind bars. From The Telegraph:

Shouting slogans such as “you broke the moral law, we are going to break all the laws”, the 21-year-old son of the multi-millionaire pop star went on the rampage during a day of extreme violence in central London.

Video captured by police officers outside the Houses of Parliament showed Gilmour, from Billingshurst, West Sussex, waving a red flag and shouting political slogans. The judge watched one clip in which he was shouted: “Let them eat cake, let them eat cake, they say. We won’t eat cake, we will eat fire, ice and destruction, because we are angry, very f———angry.”

As the clip was shown in court on Thursday, Gilmour sat in the dock giggling and covering his face with his hands in embarrassment.

On another occasion he could be seen urging the crowd to “storm Parliament” and shouting “arson”.

In addition to attacking the Royal cars, he was also part of a mob that smashed the windows at Oxford Street’s Top Shop as staff and customers cowered inside.

What most of the reporting on this matter wants to remind you is that young Mr. Gilmour is the son of a multi-millionaire pop star. Fair enough, we wouldn’t be reading about him if he wasn’t, but from reading this article and some of the others—his swinging from the Cenotaph aside—I couldn’t help feel that his actions a) took guts and b) the students were right.

I don’t think Gilmour should feel like he has to hang his head in shame at all. It’s the job of intelligent young people to behave this way from time to time, if you ask me!

Something that’s often getting left out of this story is that Gilmour’s biological father is none other than anarchist poet, actor, playwright and graffiti polemicist, Heathcote Williams. Williams, who once served as the anarchist “Albion free state” of Frestonia’s ambassador to the UK, is a rabble-rouser of the first rank. His grandmother was a Major in Mao’s Red Army. Rebellion is in this kid’s DNA. Although he and his son are supposed to be estranged, given his own past, surely Williams must feel some paternal pride in his son’s anti-establishment hijinks?

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.15.2011
01:21 pm
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Poverty in America, part 1
07.13.2011
07:42 pm
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A guest essay from our super-smart friend Charles Hugh Smith, cross-posted from his essential Of Two Minds blog. Charles is the author of Survival +: Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation.

Poverty is on the rise in America, and buying passivity with cheap bribes has limits when applied to a fraying middle class.

If jobs are not coming back, then we as a nation need a conversation about poverty in America. The Status Quo assumption is that this is just another garden-variety recession, and that employment will bounce back, along with the “animal spirits” that drive borrowing and spending.

As of August 2011, it will be three years since the global financial meltdown. In three years, the Savior State has borrowed and blown $6 trillion maintaining the Status Quo, and the Federal Reserve has printed almost $3 trillion and shoveled that vast sum into “risk assets” to keep housing on life support and the stock market rising. The Fed has also devalued and debased the dollar, stealing wealth from the citizenry and holders of U.S.-denominated debt in the process, to serve two goals: 1) spark inflation and thus avoid deflationary deleveraging of the nation’s fast-growing mountain of debt, and 2) to enable servicing that debt with cheaper dollars.

None of these grandiose manipulations has healed the economy or fixed the structural problems which made the meltdown inevitable. The irony here (among many) is that so many people believe the Power Elites controlling the nation have some sort of god-like ability to maintain their grip on the levers of power.

While it’s certainly true that the wealth of the Power Elites has increased as a result of the meltdown and Fed/Savior State response, ultimately the Financial and Political Elites’ power depends on the passivity and complicity of the citizens. This means the Power Elites must buy off or co-opt the majority of citizens to keep them politically neutered and mallable.

The Status Quo has two basic methods of buying the citizen’s complicity: a vibrant economy that supports a middle class that thus has a stake in maintaining the Status Quo, and cash bribes to everyone else to keep quiet, i.e. “social benefits” a.k.a. entitlements and welfare. This renders everyone either dependent on cash payments from the Savior State or a stakeholder in the Status Quo.

Corporate welfare is not a bribe but a mutually beneficial power grab. The Cartel Corporatocracy seeks to eliminate competition from below and guarantee low-risk profts via cartels and quasi-monopolies. It achieves these goals by purchasing the partnership of the Savior State, which smothers competition with thickets of regulations and greases the quasi-monopolies sought by the Corporatocracy. But it’s hardly a one-way exchange; in extending its control over the economy and society to serve the Corporatocracy’s interests, the Central State’s own Elites gain more power, too.

Some observers see the middle class as the natural enemy of the State and Corporatocracy, but this misses the essential relationship of the Power Elites to their citizenry: the need of the Elites to buy complicity and passivity by the cheapest methods available.

It’s certainly possible to use repression to keep a populace under control, but repression is expensive and it doesn’t encourage productive “buy-in”; rather, it encourages opting out and resentful compliance. This leaves less for the Elites to skim off.

Over time, it’s rather obvious that regimes that rely on heavy-handed repression tend to fall while those that offer a small, low-cost stake to citizens are much more profitable to the ruling Elites and also more stable.

The crumbling of the credit-bubble economy has mortally wounded the middle class, and this has created a serious problem for the Power Elites. In extending the credit-bubble economy—that is, “wealth” is created via exponential expansion of debt—to housing, the Power Elites undermined the multigenerational bedrock of middle class wealth.

With housing equity stripped away, the erosion of middle class income and non-housing wealth has now been exposed.

The Power Elites’ other wealth technique, globalization, has also gutted the middle class below the top 10% level of technocrats, and decimated the working class that had aspirations of joining the middle class, i.e. the lower middle class.

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Jobs (in the U.S.) (February 9, 2011) Global Corporate America has decoupled from the American middle class; its interests are now international rather than domestic.

The Power Elites’ response—borrow and blow trillions to prop up the engine of their own wealth, the banks, borrow trillions from future taxpayers to maintain the current Status Quo, and devalue the U.S. dollar—have all failed to reflate housing or middle class incomes. Rather, these actions only succeeded in enriching the top 10% who own the majority of stocks. The prop-job in stocks has yielded a propaganda coup, as the Status Quo has successfully identified a rising stock market as “proof the recovery is here,” but this propaganda is starting to wear thin as 90% of the populace are realizing they are still poorer than they were three years ago.

Buying Off Washington To Kill Financial “Reform.”

The Power Elites cannot understand why making credit cheap isn’t creating jobs. Like decrepit generals fighting the last war, they keep sending waves of credit into the system to overpower deflation and reignite “animal spirits,” but the waves of credit are being mowed down by deleveraging and the exhaustion of credit as a stimulus.

In other words, they are clueless to the reality that conventional economics has failed. They have no Plan B. Their only plan, such as it is, is to borrow more money and spend it propping up the current Status Quo. Unfortunately for them, the middle class is unraveling at the edges, and the surest evidence of that is the loss of middle class jobs.

Without good-paying jobs with benefits and rising housing equity, then the citizens have no stake left in the Status Quo.

That leaves entitlements and welfare as the cash bribes for keeping quiet. What’s remarkable about the current pastiche of social benefits is how cheap it is to the Power Elites; extended unemployment ($158 billion), food stamps ($68 billion), Section 8 housing ($20 billion), and Veterans Administration medical care for vets ($47 billion)—all together that’s $293 billion, a mere 7.7% of Federal spending.

(These statistics are drawn from:
Is the Recovery “Self-Sustaining”? Here’s a Test (March 22, 2011)
Social Welfare, Socialism and Healthcare (May 19, 2009)
Can We Please Stop Pretending the GDP Is “Growing”? (June 2, 2011)
.
And of course it’s the taxpayers who will foot the bill for the deficit spending, not the Elites

The ideological political-theater stages faux “combat” over welfare, but this is for show: outside the circus, cash bribes for complicity and silence work equally well for both flavors of the Status Quo political Elite.

The “Left’s” concern for the poor is transparently phony; the “Left’s” only concern is to keep the underclass fat, dumb and distracted while enriching its own private fiefdoms such as education: public school fiasco in Atlanta. What terrifies the “Left” is the same thing that terrifies the “Right”—that the citizenry might break free of the bonds of dependency on the Savior State and start demanding a real stake in the economy rather than just a cash bribe to keep quiet.

This is why welfare and middle class entitlements (in various flavors) have continued growing for decades, under both “Left” and “Right” regimes.

It’s been quite a scam: the Savior State borrows immense sums from future taxpayers to bribe the current crop of citizenry, and these same citizenry pay the rising interest on that growing debt via their taxes.

In other words, the debt-serfs pay for the bribes that keep them complicit.

The problem is that the Status Quo has overshot systemic equilibrium. To keep the game going, the debt load is rising at almost $2 trillion a year at the Federal Level, and the Fed’s manipulations are requiring a cool trillion a year in printed money shoveled into risk assets.

The interest on that skyrocketing debt will eventually crimp the borrowing binge, and the Fed’s games are igniting not job growth but inflation, which further saps what’s left of middle class purchasing power.

The Fed’s manic manipulations are losing their effectiveness. Like insulin in a pre-diabetic patient, the Fed’s massive injections of money are not stimulating jobs or productive investment; each new announcement of “easing” generates a smaller jolt of ever-shorter duration. At some point the economy will respond to the Fed’s “easing” injection by going straight into diabetic shock.

There are two cultural issues in play as well. One of the key characteristics of the middle class is high expectations for future power and prosperity. The poor have lower expectations and so it’s relatively easy to buy them off with small sums.

The middle class, however, is less satisfied with crumbs, and getting paid to stay home and watch TV does not appeal to their values or expectations of life in America.

The other issue is the destructive nature of dependence on the Savior State, a dynamic I explored in The Cycle of Dependency and the Atrophy of Self-Reliance (July 2, 2011).

Making people dependent on the Savior State is not “ending poverty”—it is creating a deeper, more pervasively destructive poverty of lost opportunity and shriveled enterprise. People naturally want to contribute to something meaningful and to be respected, and being paid to sit home watching TV does neither. What it does do is fuel a low-intensity resentment against dependency and a pathological incentive for victimhood, neither of which are healthy for the society or those reduced to dependency on the Savior State.

The Power Elites are slowly losing their grip on the middle class. Once people no longer have a stake in the Status Quo, then they might become dissatisifed with the cheap bribes to stay home and rot away, consuming Pringles and “entertainment” on the telly.

Those citizens who are paying the tab for the Power Elites’ debt excesses are also seeing their stake in the Status Quo slip in value: being reduced to a tax donkey does not fulfill their expectations.

The bottom line is poverty on several levels is rising in America, and cash bribes are not a stable “solution,” though they certainly are a cheap one to the Power Elites.

This is a guest essay from Charles Hugh Smith, cross-posted here from his essential Of Two Minds blog

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.13.2011
07:42 pm
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Slave labor in America: Union workers replaced by prisoners in Wisconsin


 
The highly controversial new law in Wisconsin gutting collective bargaining rights for state union workers is now in effect and already changes are afoot in the dairy state. Not good ones.

Via Think Progress:

As the Madison Capital Times reports, “Besides losing their right to negotiate over the percentage of their paycheck that will go toward health care and retirement, unions also lost the ability to claim work as a ‘union-only’ job, opening the door for private workers and evidently even inmates to step in and take their place.” Inmates are not paid for their work, but may receive time off of their sentences.

The law went into effect last week, and Racine County is already using inmates to do landscaping, painting, and another basic maintenance around the county that was previously done by county workers. The union had successfully sued to stop the country from using prison labor for these jobs last year, but with [Governor Scott] Walker’s new law, they have no recourse.

The use of free inmate labor to replace public sector workers is truly a disturbing trend. That’s right folks. Forget about the off-shore outsourcing of jobs. Forget about China’s cheap labor. India’s, too. And don’t blame the Mexicans and illegal immigrants for taking your job, either, bub.

Nope. We’ve got a bigger problem now: How are Americans going to compete in the jobs marketplace against slave labor?

Deeply unpopular Gov. Scott Walker promised to create 250,000 new jobs in Wisconsin during his term in office, but he didn’t say these jobs would be created in the county jails!

This is what you get when you vote Republican.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.08.2011
12:14 pm
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Michele Bachmann and Lou Engle pray to stop healthcare reform


 
Rep. Michele Bachmann delivers a kooky and meandering entreaty to the Lord her God during the Family Research Council’s 2009 “Prayercast” event to thwart passage of healthcare reform legislation. GOD DOESN’T WANT EVERYONE TO HAVE HEALTH INSURANCE, HIPPIE!

Towards the end, when Lou Engle starts talking it gets truly spooky. I wish they were all wearing hooded robes like monks in that part (in my mind, they were wearing them).

Engle, if his name doesn’t ring a bell, is the asshat who traveled to Uganda to help promote the so-called “Kill the Gays” law there. He’s been called “the unofficial prayer leader of the Republican Party,” a distinction I for one feel he richly deserves!
 

 
Via Right Wing Watch

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.07.2011
01:22 pm
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Let’s buy Congress back from the special interests who own it
06.30.2011
11:14 am
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Another guest essay from our super smart friend, Charles Hugh Smith, cross-posted from his essential Of Two Minds blog. If you like what he writes here, please share it on social media.

Here’s a thought: How much would it cost to buy congress back from special interests who now own it?

We all know special interests own the U.S. Congress and the Federal machinery of governance (i.e. regulatory capture). How much would it cost the American citizenry to buy back their Congress? The goal in buying our Congress back from the banking cartel et al. would not be to compete with the special interests for congressional favors—it would be to elect a Congress which would eradicate their power and influence altogether.

A tall order, perhaps, but certainly not impossible, if we’re willing to spend the money to not just match special interest contributions to campaigns but steamroll them.

A seat in the U.S. Senate is a pricey little lever of power, so we better be ready to spend $50 million per seat. Seats in smaller states will be less, but seats in the big states will cost more, but this is a pretty good average.

That’s $5 billion to buy the Senate.

A seat in the House of Representatives is a lot cheaper to buy: $10 million is still considered a lot of money in this playground of power. But the special interests—you know the usual suspects, the banks, Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Insurance, Big Tobacco, the military-industrial complex, Big Ag, public unions, the educrat complex, trial lawyers, foreign governments, and so on—will fight tooth and nail to maintain their control of the Federal machinery, so we better double that to $20 million per seat. Let’s see, $20 million times 435….

That’s $8.7 billion to buy the House of Representatives.

It seems we’re stuck with the corporate toadies on the Supreme Court, but the President could scotch the people’s plans to regain control of their government, so we better buy the office of the President, too.

It seems Obama’s purchase price was about $100 million, but the special interests will be desperate to have “their man or woman” with the veto power, so we better triple this to $300 million.

Add these up and it looks like we could buy back our government for the paltry sum of $14 billion. This is roughly .0037% of the Federal budget of $3.8 trillion, i.e. one-third of one percent. That is incredible leverage: $1 in campaign bribes controls $300 in annual spending—and a global empire.

Once we bought back our government, what would be the first items on the agenda? The first item would be to eradicate private bribes, a.k.a. private campaign contributions and lobbying.

If you allow $1 in campaign contributions, then you also allow $10 million. There is no way to finesse bribery, so it has to be cut and dried: no member of Congress can accept any gift or contribution of any nature, monetary or otherwise, and all campaigns will be publicly financed.

Is this system perfect? Of course not. There is no perfect system. But the point here is that a system which allows even a $1 private contribution to a campaign cannot be restricted; after the courts have their say, then all attempted limitations prove worthless.

So it’s really all or nothing: either we put our government up for auction to the highest bribe, or we ban all gifts and private campaign financing and go with public financing of all elections in the nation.

That is the only practical and sane solution. Any proposal that seeks to finesse bribery will fail, just like all previous attempts at campaign finance reform.

Any member of Congress who accepts a gift, trinket, meal, cash in an envelope, etc. will lose their seat upon conviction of accepting the gift. Once again, you can’t finesse bribery. It has to be all or nothing, and the only way to control bribery is to ban it outright.

As for lobbying, thanks to a Supreme Court dominated by corporate toadies, it will be difficult to ban lobbying outright. However, that doesn’t mean Congress shouldn’t try to force the toadies on the Supreme Court to make a distinction between a corporation with $100 billion in assets and billions to spend on bribes and a penniless citizen.

(Those two are not coincidental; in a nation run by and for corporations, the citizens all end up penniless unless they own or manage said corporations, or work for a Federal fiefdom which can stripmine the nation at will.)

Congress should pass a law banning paid-for lobbying. If a citizen wants to go to Congress and advocate a position, they are free to do so—but they can’t accept money to do so. If they receive any compensation from any agency, enterprise, foreign government, other citizen, you name it, from any source, then they will be sentenced to 10 years of fulltime community service in Washington D.C., picking up trash, etc.

If the Supreme Court toadies strike down that law, then here’s another approach:

Require all paid lobbyists to wear clown suits during their paid hours of work.

In addition, all lobbyists are required to wear three placards, each with text of at least two inches in height.

The first placard lists their total annual compensation as a lobbyist.

The second lists the special interest they work for.

The third lists the total amount of money that special interest spent the previous year on lobbying, regulatory capture, bribes to politicos and political parties, etc.

Every piece of paper issued by lobbyists must be stamped in large red letters, “This lobbying paid for by (special interest)”, and every video, Powerpoint presentation, etc. must also be stamped with the same message on every frame.

The second item on the agenda is a one-page tax form. The form looks like the current 1040 form except it stops at line 22: TOTAL INCOME. A progressive flat tax is then calculated from that line. Once again, you cannot finesse bribery or exemptions, exclusions, loopholes and exceptions. Once you allow exemptions, exclusions, loopholes and exceptions, then you’ve opened Pandora’s Box of gaming the system, and the financial Elites will soon plow holes in the tax code large enough to drive trucks through while John Q. Citizen will be paying full pop, just like now.

The entire charade of punishing and rewarding certain behaviors to pursue some policy has to end. Any deduction, such as interest on mortgages, ends up creating perverse incentives which can and will be gamed. It’s really that simple: you cannot finesse bribery or exemptions, exclusions and loopholes, because these are two sides of the same coin.

The tremendous inequality in income, wealth, power and opportunity which is distorting and destroying our nation all flow from the inequalities enabled by bribery and tax avoidance. The only way to fix the nation is to eliminate bribery (campaign contributions and lobbying) entirely, and eliminate tax avoidance entirely by eliminating all deductions, exemptions, loopholes, etc. State total income from all sources everywhere on the planet, calculate tax, done.

When you think about how tiny $14 billion is compared to the $3.8 trillion Federal budget and the $14.5 trillion U.S. economy, it makes you want to weep; how cheaply we have sold our government, and how much we suffer under the whip of those who bought it for a pittance.

Another guest essay from Charles Hugh Smith, cross-posted from his Of Two Minds blog. If you like what he writes here, please share it on social media.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.30.2011
11:14 am
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The U.S. Is a Kleptocracy
06.29.2011
01:04 pm
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A guest essay from Charles Hugh Smith, cross-posted from his Of Two Minds blog:

If we dare look at the plain facts of the matter, we have to conclude the U.S. is a kleptocracy not unlike Greece, only on a larger and slightly more sophisticated scale.

Yesterday, I noted that Greece Is a Kleptocracy; the U.S. is a kleptocracy, too. Before you object with a florid speech about the Bill of Rights and free enterprise, please consider the following evidence that the U.S. is now a kleptocracy worthy of comparison to Greece:

1. Neither party has any interest in limiting the banking/financial cartel. The original Glass-Steagal bill partitioning investment banking from commercial banking was a few pages long, and it was passed in a few days. Our present political oligrachy spends months passing thousands of pages of complex legislation that accomplishes essentially nothing.

As Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City President Thomas Hoenig recently noted (in a rare admission by an insider—I wonder how long it will be before he “resigns to pursue other opportunities,” i.e. is muzzled):

The problem with SIFIs (“systemically important financial institutions,” a.k.a. too big to fail banks) is they are fundamentally inconsistent with capitalism. They are inherently destabilizing to global markets and detrimental to world growth. So long as the concept of a SIFI exists, and there are institutions so powerful and considered so important that they require special support and different rules, the future of capitalism is at risk and our market economy is in peril.

Do you really think Dodd-Frank and all the other “fooled by complexity” legislation has accomplished anything? Hoenig cuts that fantasy off at the knees:

As late as 1980, the U.S. banking industry was relatively unconcentrated, with 14,000 commercial banks and the assets of the five largest amounting to 29 percent of total banking organization assets and 14 percent of GDP.

Today, we have a far more concentrated and less competitive banking system. There are fewer banks operating across the country, and the five largest institutions control more than half of the industry’s assets, which is equal to almost 60 percent of GDP. The largest 20 institutions control 80 percent of the industry’s assets, which amounts to about 86 percent of GDP.

In other words, nothing has really changed from 2008 except the domination of the political process and economy by the financial cartel has been masked by a welter of purposefully obfuscating legislation. This is of course the exact same trick Wall Street used to cloak the risk of the mortgage-backed derivatives it sold as “low risk” AAA rated securities: by design, the instruments were so complex that only the originators understood how they worked.

That is the current legislative process in a nutshell. Much of the 60,000 pages of tax code are arcane because they describe loopholes and exclusions written specifically to exempt a single corporation or cartel from Federal taxes.

The U.S. is truly a kleptocracy because its political leadership actually has no interest in limiting the banking/financial cartel. When questioned why their “reforms” are so toothless, legislators wring their hands and bleat, “Honest, I wanted to limit the banks but they’re too powerful.” Spoken like a true kleptocrat.

2. Our stock markets are dominated by insiders. It is estimated that some 70% of all shares traded are exchanged in private “dark pools” operated by the TBTF banks and Wall Street, and the majority of the remaining 30% of publicly traded shares are traded by high-frequency trading machines that hold the shares for a few seconds, or however long is needed to skim the advantages offered by proximity to the exchange and speed.

If that’s your idea of an “open market,” then you’re the ideal citizen for a kleptocracy.

3. The rule of law in the U.S. has been divided into two branches: one in name only for the financial Elites and corporate cartels, and one for the rest of us mere citizens. Between corporate toadies on the Supreme Court who have granted corporations rights to spend unlimited money lobbying and buying legislators as a form of “free speech”—ahem, how can something that costs billions of dollars be “free”?—and vast regulatory brueacracies that saw nothing wrong with MERS and the complete corruption of land and mortgage transfer rules, the U.S. legal system is now a perfection of kleptocracy.

As economist Hernando de Soto observed in The Destruction of Economic Facts, the ForeclosureGate mortgage mess is not just a series of petty paperwork mistakes—it is the destruction of the entire system of trustworthy transfer of property rights for non-Elites:

Knowing who owned and owed, and fixing that information in public records, made it possible for investors to infer value, take risks, and track results. The final product was a revolutionary form of knowledge: “economic facts.”

Over the past 20 years, Americans and Europeans have quietly gone about destroying these facts. The very systems that could have provided markets and governments with the means to understand the global financial crisis—and to prevent another one—are being eroded. Governments have allowed shadow markets to develop and reach a size beyond comprehension. Mortgages have been granted and recorded with such inattention that homeowners and banks often don’t know and can’t prove who owns their homes. In a few short decades the West undercut 150 years of legal reforms that made the global economy possible.

The results are hardly surprising. In the U.S., trust has broken down between banks and subprime mortgage holders; between foreclosing agents and courts; between banks and their investors—even between banks and other banks.

Frequent contributor Harun I. summarized the reality of this political and financial coup by kleptocrats:

As described by Georgetown University bankruptcy expert Adam Levitin, in testimony to subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee, “If mortgages were not properly transferred in the securitization process, then mortgage-backed securities would in fact not be backed by any mortgages whatsoever, [and] could cloud title to nearly every property in the United States.” It would also raise the question of the legality of the resulting millions of foreclosures on American homeowners, since the banks cannot prove “ownership” of the foreclosed property.

The statement above gets to the elemental issue that apparently is lost on many otherwise intelligent people. This is not about frivolous claims based on technicalities. This is about securities fraud (theft) on a ludicrously massive scale. These so-called securities were sold to governments, pension funds and other financial institutions globally. Trillions were made by banks selling what is becoming clearly understood to be worthless pieces of paper and when the jig was up, which ultimately led to the destruction of economies globally, they made ordinary citizens the losers by sliding their worthless pieces of paper to the balance sheet of taxpayers worldwide.

And while some are quibbling over whether someone should get a free house, those who have perpetrated the greatest swindle in the history of mankind are about to get away with it, because they are “systemically important”, code for TBTF (too big to fail).

You think money laundering and tax evasion is a specialty only of Caribbean island “banking centers”? Think again; we have corporate oversight equivalent to that of Somalia. U.S.A. a haven for corporate money laundering: A little house of secrets on the Great Plains:

Among the firm’s offerings is a variety of shell known as a “shelf” company, which comes with years of regulatory filings behind it, lending a greater feeling of solidity. “A corporation is a legal person created by state statute that can be used as a fall guy, a servant, a good friend or a decoy,” the company’s website boasts. “A person you control… yet cannot be held accountable for its actions. Imagine the possibilities!”

“In the U.S., (business incorporation) is completely unregulated,” says Jason Sharman, a professor at Griffith University in Nathan, Australia, who is preparing a study for the World Bank on corporate formation worldwide. “Somalia has slightly higher standards than Wyoming and Nevada.”

The U.S. was declared “non-compliant” in four out of 40 categories monitored by the Financial Action Task Force, an international group fighting money laundering and terrorism finance, in a 2006 evaluation report, its most recent. Two of those ratings relate to scant information collected on the owners of corporations. The task force named Wyoming, Nevada and Delaware as secrecy havens. Only three states - Alaska, Arizona and Montana - require regular disclosure of corporate shareholders in some form.

4. Just as in Greece, taxes are optional for the nation’s financial Elites. In Greece, you don’t mention your swimming pool to avoid the “swimming pool tax.” Here in the U.S., that sort of tax avoidance is against the law (smirk). Here, you hire a Panzer division of sharp tax attorneys and escape taxation legally (well, mostly legally—whatever it takes to win).

If you are unfortunate enough to be a successful small entrepreneur who nets $100,000 a year, you pay 15.3% self-employment and 25% Federal tax on the bulk of your income, a combined rate of 40.3%, and a combined rate of 43.3% on all income above $82,400.

Those who net millions pay less than half that amount, somewhere between 17% for the top 1/10th of 1% and 21% for the top 1%: Citizens for Tax Justice, which looks at all taxes paid including federal, state and local taxes, said that in 2010 the top 1 percent of earners will pay 21.5 percent of taxes.

Note that the 21.5% paid by the top 1% includes all state and local taxes. Here in California, the small businessperson earning $100,000 pays between 5% and 9% state tax, so their combined state and Federal tax burden on their highest earnings is a whopping 50%. Then there are property taxes and the 9.5% sales tax, and endless junk fees skimmed from small business. Add all that together and the total taxes paid rises to the 60% level, or roughly triple what the top 1% pay.

(Bitter note from a tax donkey: To all those tax-and-spenders who whine that California has “low taxes,” please pay my “low” property tax bill, will you? It’s “only” $11,000 a year.)

Super Rich See Federal Taxes Drop Dramatically:

The Internal Revenue Service tracks the tax returns with the 400 highest adjusted gross incomes each year. The average income on those returns in 2007, the latest year for IRS data, was nearly $345 million. Their average federal income tax rate was 17 percent, down from 26 percent in 1992.

Eric Schoenberg says to sign him up for paying higher taxes. Schoenberg, who inherited money and has a healthy portfolio from his days as an investment banker, has joined a group of other wealthy Americans called United for a Fair Economy. Their goal: Raise taxes on rich people like themselves.

Schoenberg, who now teaches a business class at Columbia University, said his income is usually “north of half a million a year.” But 2009 was a bad year for investments, so his income dropped to a little over $200,000. His federal income tax bill was a little more than $2,000.

“I simply point out to people, ‘Do you think this is reasonable, that somebody in my circumstances should only be paying 1 percent of their income in tax?’” Schoenberg said.

Do you really think you don’t live in a kleptocracy? Why? Because the truth hurts?

A guest essay from Charles Hugh Smith, cross-posted from his Of Two Minds blog:

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.29.2011
01:04 pm
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Village Voice set to strike? Looming walkout at America’s oldest alt weekly
06.28.2011
05:12 pm
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This cover seemed the most appropriate, under the circumstances…
 
Anticipating a near certain strike, Village Voice journos have set-up an online alt-weekly to their alt-weekly at The Real Voice:

The current three-year contract between Village Voice Media and UAW Local 2110, representing the workers of The Village Voice, expires midnight June 30. The membership has unanimously passed a strike authorization vote.

Over the past three years, the Voice staff has been cut by an estimated 60%, and average annual salaries have markedly diminished. Management has so far played hardball with the union, refusing to make an offer, while demanding extensive concessions from the newspaper’s staff, including a substantial, ever-increasing contribution to an inferior health plan, as well as the elimination of management’s own contribution to employees’ retirement accounts. The union membership sees the quality of their medical coverage as the critical issue. “That’s why I came to work here,” said one staff writer. “The health insurance is the one thing that made low wages bearable.”

In the event of a work stoppage, writers, bloggers, photographers, editors, designers, and sales staff—as well as former Voice staff members and other supporters—will be publishing an alternate website, TheRealVoice.org, where readers will find the same high-quality writing there that they currently enjoy in the paper and on Voice blogs.

A strike benefit will be held on Wednesday, June 29, beginning at 8 p.m. at Public Assembly (70 North 6th Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 718-384-4586), featuring the bands Fort Lean, K-Holes, and Alan Watts. The suggested $10 donation will go to the Village Voice Strike Fund. Voice alumni, including many distinguished writers and editors, are expected to attend.

The Village Voice is the nation’s oldest and largest alternative newsweekly and the recipient of numerous journalism awards, including three Pulitzers. It was founded in 1955 by Ed Fancher, Dan Wolf, and Norman Mailer. The Voice, along with the rest of its six-newspaper chain, was acquired in 2006 by Phoenix-based New Times Media, since renamed Village Voice Media. The Village Voice is the only unionized newspaper in the now 13-weekly VVM chain. The shop includes workers from all parts of the paper, including Production, Editorial, and Sales.

More information at The Real Voice

This clip seemed the most appropriate, under the circumstances…
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.28.2011
05:12 pm
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The End of the American Dream?
06.22.2011
08:30 pm
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As seen at last week’s Netroots Nation convention. You can find out more at Change To Win’s website.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.22.2011
08:30 pm
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THIS is what America has become, a cruel, cruel society


 
We can no longer hide from who we are. Not anymore. Not when things like this happen. I see something historic in this, don’t you?

We live in a cruel, cruel society. A land where the game is rigged for straight up misery for the common man and the winners have been taking all that they can get away with for decades. I was deflated when I read about this story. I just wanted to put my head down on my desk and cry.

From ABC News:

A 59-year-old man has been jailed in Gastonia, N.C., on charges of larceny after allegedly robbing an RBC Bank for $1 so he could get health care in prison. Richard James Verone handed a female teller a note demanding the money and claiming that he had a gun, according to the police report.

He then sat down and waited for police to arrive. “… I say, ‘I’ll be sitting right over here, on the chair, waiting for the police,’” Verone told reporters, recalling the June 9 robbery in an interview from Gaston County Jail.

And wait for the police, he did.

“He’s sitting on the sofa as you walk in the front door,” the bank teller said in a 911 call.

Police arrested Verone where he sat. He was unarmed.

Verone said he asked for $1 to show that his motives were medical, not monetary, according to news reports. With a growth in his chest, two ruptured disks and no job, Verone hoped a three-year stint in prison would afford him the health care he needed.

“I’m sort of a logical person and that was my logic, what I came up with,” Verone told reporters. “If it is called manipulation, then out of necessity because I need medical care, then I guess I am manipulating the courts to get medical care.”

But the charge of larceny, not armed robbery, is unlikely to keep Verone behind bars for more than 12 months. He is being held in Gaston County Jail on a $2,000 bond, according to a spokesman for the jail, and is scheduled to appear in court June 28.

Read a more detailed story of what led an American citizen to chose prison over his “freedom” at the Gaston Gazette. It’s enough to make you want to puke.

What he did took guts. I see this as a principled stand. I sincerely hope this gentleman gets the medical treatment he needs and that one day statues are erected of him across this land…

And now, if you really want to weep yourself senseless, watch this clip of FDR discussing a Second Bill of Rights in 1944. This footage, long thought lost, was found by Michael Moore’s researchers and used so brilliantly in Capitalism: A Love Story (a film I urge you all to see if you haven’t. On Netflix VOD). Imagine if the country had realized these goals 70 years ago?
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.21.2011
01:01 pm
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Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur schools heartless Republicans on the poor


 

“There is a heartlessness for people who take everything for themselves and turn their backs on the rest of the American people.”

Heroic Ohio Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, known to many of us for her role in Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story and for speaking her mind to evil Republicans, gave this great speech on the House floor last week and told it like it T. I. is about the poor in America and cruel GOP policies.

“They hurt the Republic. They hurt our country. And they have not been held accountable…

... I don’t have enough power to hold them accountable, but I hope God does. Because what they’ve done is unforgivable. Their rugged individualism is unpatriotic, it’s un-Christian and it hurts this country.”

The whole speech is good, but she get really cooking just before the five minute mark:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.20.2011
09:19 pm
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