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Goldman, Other Welfare Queens Tell Us Forget Social Security-Medicare Until 70

Jan 22

Posted by Michael Collins in Austerity, Big Money, Corruption, Populism, Wall St | 4 Comments

Michael Collins

(Washington, DC 1/21)  A long standing  Money Party front, the Business Roundtable, wants you to wait until you’re 70 years old before you get Social Security and Medicare benefits.  This is just a reprise of the November 2012 dictate from the king of corporate cronyism, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.  (Image: DonkeyHotey)  (Greenspan statement)

The boss announced, “So there will be things that, you know, the retirement age has to be changed, maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised. But in general, entitlements have to be slowed down and contained.”  Lloyd Blankfein, CBS News, November 2012

That’s easy for Lloyd to say.  He makes tens of millions of dollars a year without so much as lifting a finger.  You can be sure that Blankfein has a deluxe health insurance and retirement plan. Read the rest of this entry »

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Real Unemployment at 23% – Dampening the Excitement

Sep 9

Posted by Michael Collins in Austerity, Big Money, Election 2012, Financial Crisis | Comments off

There was a shadow over the national conventions of both political parties.  The people know that the economy is much worse than anyone in the power structure will admit.  As usual, the people are right.  The real rate of unemployment is 23%, not the official figures we hear on a regular basis.  The 23% figure  represents all of those unemployed no matter how long, the involuntarily under employed (part time), and those who have given up looking, the discouraged, due to an chronically arid job market.   If either wing of The Money Party, Democratic or Republican, admits to the the real unemployment situation,  they would be forced to admit a complete system failure and compelled to act now.  There would be no choice but to drop the nonsense about austerity and balanced budgets.

Here is how the fantasy of the official unemployment figure works.

Official unemployment  includes those who are both unemployed during the week of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) survey and without a job for the prior four weeks.

The official unemployment number we see excludes those marginally attached to the labor force, discouraged workers, and those working part time due to the absence of full time work. The Alternative unemployment statistic is always higher than the official version. It includes most of the unemployed but excludes discouraged workers after twelve months without a job (See Appendix).  In the chart above, you will see the official government unemployment number (U-3), the alternative number (U-6), and the shadowstats.com figure, which includes U-3 and U-6 plus  all those unemployed who have given up. That represents 23% of the work force. (Graph Courtesy of Shadowstats.Com Shadow Government Statistics – John Williams)

How can citizens make responsible decisions when the official unemployment rate, 8.1%, is just 35% of the real unemployment rate, 23%?

Who benefits?

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Paul Craig Roberts: Collapse At Hand

Jun 7

Posted by Michael Collins in Big Money, Corruption, G-8 | Comments off

June 5, 2012

“US banks’ derivative bets of $230 trillion, concentrated in five banks, are 15.3 times larger than the US GDP. A failed political system that allows unregulated banks to place uncovered bets 15 times larger than the US economy is a system that is headed for catastrophic failure. As the word spreads of the fantastic lack of judgment in the American political and financial systems, the catastrophe in waiting will become a reality.”

By Paul Craig Roberts

Original Content at OpEdNewscom 

Unlike the US financial press, the foreigners who hold dollar assets look at the annual US budget and trade deficits, look at the sinking US economy, look at Wall Street’s uncovered gambling bets, look at the war plans of the delusional hegemon and conclude: “I’ve got to carefully get out of this.”

Ever since the beginning of the financial crisis and quantitative easing, the question has been before us: How can the Federal Reserve maintain zero interest rates for banks and negative real interest rates for savers and bond holders when the US government is adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt every year via its budget deficits? Not long ago the Fed announced that it was going to continue this policy for another 2 or 3 years. Indeed, the Fed is locked into the policy. Without the artificially low interest rates, the debt service on the national debt would be so large that it would raise questions about the US Treasury’s credit rating and the viability of the dollar, and the trillions of dollars in Interest Rate Swaps and other derivatives would come unglued.

In other words, financial deregulation leading to Wall Street’s gambles, the US government’s decision to bail out the banks and to keep them afloat, and the Federal Reserve’s zero interest rate policy have put the economic future of the US and its currency in an untenable and dangerous position. It will not be possible to continue to flood the bond markets with $1.5 trillion in new issues each year when the interest rate on the bonds is less than the rate of inflation. Everyone who purchases a Treasury bond is purchasing a depreciating asset. Moreover, the capital risk of investing in Treasuries is very high. The low interest rate means that the price paid for the bond is very high. A rise in interest rates, which must come sooner or later, will collapse the price of the bonds and inflict capital losses on bond holders, both domestic and foreign.

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Bilderberg Meeting a Wrap, Who Would Trust these People?

Jun 4

Posted by Michael Collins in Big Money, Corruption, Financial Crisis, Wall St | Comments off

By Michael Collins

(Chantilly, VA 6/3/2012) The Bilderberg Group completed its annual meeting today in Northern Virginia. The group was founded in 1954 by the financial, political, and military elites of Europe and the United States. Annual meetings provide for “regular, off-the-record discussions [to] help create a better understanding of the complex forces and major trends affecting Western nations in the difficult post-war period.” Bilderberg Meetings, Official Website

The inherent contradiction in this mission statement is glaringly obvious. These are the very same people who put in place and control the governments and programs that they’re meeting in private to “discuss.” Don’t they discuss these things before and during their masquerade of governance?

The group’s official meeting website says, “What is unique about Bilderberg as a forum is the privacy of the meetings, which has no purpose other than to allow participants to speak their minds openly and freely.”

When the world’s ultra-rich and powerful meet to address major sociopolitical problems in a forum based on privacy, it’s time to take a closer look.
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Obama embraces populist themes in Ohio

May 7

Posted by Michael Collins in Big Money, Election 2012, Populism | 1 Comment

By Michael Collins

When you take the right side, style trumps substance every time in politics. President Obama was on fire Saturday in Columbus, Ohio, hammering home populist themes that will define his campaign. This was his campaign kick-off. He couldn’t have done a better job of stating his case as the candidate of the people, while painting Romney as the darling of The Money Party (Wall Street, big banks).

PRESIDENT OBAMA: The problem with our economy isn’t that the American people aren’t productive enough — you’ve been working harder than ever.  The challenge we face right now — the challenge we faced for over a decade is that harder work hasn’t led to higher incomes.  It’s that bigger profits haven’t led to better jobs. President Obama (Full text of Obama’s remarks, Columbus, Ohio, May 5, 2012)

It’s not your fault the president tells us, which happens to be absolutely correct. Then he nailed Romney:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Governor Romney doesn’t seem to get that.  He doesn’t seem to understand that maximizing profits by whatever means necessary — whether through layoffs or outsourcing or tax avoidance or union-busting — might not always be good for the average American or for the American economy. Pres. Obama May 5

See the video from the Guardian. It will show you just how focused Obama is at this point.

This is classic populism and well done at that. Based on his record, I doubt this but that’s not the point here. Obama is showing that he’s an all-time big game player in the same league as Bob Gibson, Kenny Stabler, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird. This is when it counts and Obama is in outstanding form. Read the rest of this entry »

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No more wars – Obama, NATO and the oil dictators need to get real on Syria

Apr 12

Posted by Michael Collins in Big Money, Middle East, War (endless) | Comments off

Two sides of the same event, one promoting a war friendly narrative based on some human rights group, the other from Pepe Escobar in the Asia Times.

“Syrian forces fired across the border into a refugee camp in Turkey, wounding five people, authorities said. The soldiers were firing at rebels who tried to escape after ambushing a military checkpoint, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights [SOHR]. On the border with Lebanon, a cameraman for Lebanon’s Al Jadeed TV station was killed by shots fired from Syria, the station said.

“Turkey shelters thousands of refugees fleeing Assad’s military, which has killed 9,000 people since March 2011 in an attempt to put down an uprising, according to the United Nations.” USA Today, April 9

What is the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights? “SOHR is run out of a two-bedroom terraced home in Coventry by one man using the name Rami Abdulrahman (or Rami Abdul Rahman, or Rami Abdelrahman). He also runs a clothes shop.” Wikipedia  This source is a new low, even for McPaper, USA Today.

Here’s what Pepe Escobar says about the same situation.

“Turkey is sheltering the FSA right on the border, only a few meters – and not kilometers – away from Syrian territory. Way beyond hosting a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) command and control center in Iskenderun for months now – a fact already reported by Asia Times Online – Turkey has now advanced right to the border, enabling a back-and-forth by heavily weaponized guerrillas/mercenaries to attack a sovereign state.

“Imagine a similar scenario happening, say, at a Mexican-US border in Arizona or Texas.”
.Pepe Escobar – What’s goin’ on at the Turkish-Syrian border? April 11

Where did USA Today get the 9,000 figure, the guy in Coventry?  The Turks are certainly smart enough to move refugees away from the border and stop military incursions from occurring proximate to the refugees.  This is all war promotion.

An overwhelming majority of citizens who have the correct position on this – stay out!  But those who profit from war and their minions in the corporate media continue their relentless and endless death march.  For what?

And week end and week out we have to endure the arrogant, pathetically reasoned, myopic judgements out of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on this or that nation’s progress toward democracy.  She as become simply unbearable.  How did democracy work out in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya?

 

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This Beat Down is for Your Health – the Money Party Must Stop Occupy Movements

Nov 14

Posted by Michael Collins in Big Money, Constitution, Corruption, Criminal Justice, Wall St | Comments off

By Michael Collins


“The problems we are facing were not created by us, but we deign to shed light on them and so we are blamed for them. The truth is, every person at our protest is there because the system is broken.” Samuel Rutledge, Open Newswire, Portland Indymedia

The fascist financiers of the Money Party are growing restless. Occupy Wall Street began with a call to action from the activist online group Anonymous in August. It was barely featured in the mainstream or alternate media. Instead of a small crowd that could easily be ignored then disbursed, fifty thousand citizens showed up at the headquarters for the world financial system, Wall Street. Despite the best efforts of Mayor Bloomberg and NYPD, the Occupy Wall Street continues. The message went out to the country and the world. Now, there are over 100 occupy events in Oakland, Kansas City, Washington, DC, and elsewhere. (Image: K. Kendall)

Occupy Portland began on October 6, 2011. It has maintained a steady presence in downtown Portland, a major West Coast center of commerce. The participants refuse to leave until the government addresses their grievances. Police scare tactics, planted provocateurs, and the elements are no barrier. Read the rest of this entry »

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