The top 1%, whose wealth & income continue to multiply, expects those of us who have lost jobs and homes, and watched our retirement nest eggs disappear, to ignore the fact that our gov't has unlimited resources available for them, the top 1% (including the banksters), but nothing for we the American people?! Sorry, but this ignorance is not gonna continue! Americans are waking up to what's been ever so cleverly done to them

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For years, Republicans and some Democrats have said that a strong government, careful regulation and progressive taxation are markers on the road to serfdom.   The politicians and neoliberal economists who spout this baloney say, "Let's take planning out of the hands of government and put it into the "free market.'"   What they don't understand is that every market is planned -- by someone or other.   And if governments step aside, then planning passes into the hands of the banksters.

 

The problem is that the banksters have not created credit to finance industrial investment and employment.   Instead, they extended credit and allocated credit for speculation on asset price and inflation, thereby encouraging millions of people to borrow, invest and gamble up their eyeballs.   By this means housing prices, stock and bond prices, and foreign exchange rates have been bid ever upward, thereby providing enormous profits and winnings for the few, at the ultimate, longterm expense of the many.  

Example:   Banksters convinced borrowers that they could get rich on ever-rising housing prices.   But this merely made new homebuyers go ever deeper into debt to buy a home.   And when banks say that rising stock and bond prices are good for the economy, in must be pointed out that these price rises lower the dividend or interest yield.   This in turn means that pension funds and individuals have to save much more for retirement.   So instead of improving their life, it makes them work harder and borrow more just to stay in place.   And when they are forced to work harder, for the same benefits, this makes banksters richer still.

The banking system's alternative to the alleged "road to serfdom" thus turns out to be a road to debt peonage.   Thus bankster-managed financial engineering turns out to be worse than government planning.

The banksters have taken over the Federal Reserve and Treasury and put their lobbyists in charge -- men such as Tim Geithner and the others with ties to Rubinomics (dating from the Clinton administration) and especially to Goldman Sachs and other giant Wall Street firms. Reference article

How hedge fund elites are surreptitiously raping Europe

In Greece and Italy, financial markets, banksters and their designated technocrats -- not the country's citizens or elected governments -- are determining who will run the country and what those countries will do financially.   To placate financial markets and increase "investor confidence," banksters have in each country replaced the country's leaders with economic technocrats who supposedly will "rise above politics" and "get each country's finances in order."  

Why is this happening?   The explanation is that those countries are being surreptitiously attacked by large hedge funds that are cleverly trying as hard as they can to create financial runs so as to be able to profit from them.   In their circles it's called a speculative attack.   Here's how it works.   Basically, these hedge funds try to start a stampede of selling, to drive down the value of bonds of a given country.   (Understand that when bond values decline, their interest rates go up.)   Hedge funds do this by finding ways to bet against those bonds.   To accomplish this, they can sell bonds they own, they can sell bonds that others own (shorting), and they can buy default insurance (swaps) to bet against the bonds.   And they create many toxic combinations of the above, using massive amounts of borrowed money to amplify their "negative' bets.  

If they do it right, all that selling drives down the price of the bonds, and that in turn scares other large investors (investors from mutual funds and banks) into selling their bonds as well, thereby further driving down the price of the bonds.   The more the price falls, the more the hedge funds earn.   And we're talking   about "earning" tens of billions from this kind of stampede.  

Meanwhile, the country involved sees the interest rates it must pay on new debt (i.e. the bonds that it must sell) go up and up.   At some point, that percentage hits a critically high level -- like 7 percent -- which means that in reality they will never be able to pay back all of their debt.   These high interest rates then cause an every larger stampede as bond holders see this, and rush to sell their bonds before they default (or as in the case of Greece before they "voluntarily" agree to a 50 percent cut in bond value -- the so-called "haircut.")

Therefor the jump in interest rates didn't come about because of new developments in Italy.   These jumps were caused by these hedge fund raids.  

If the hedge fund elites are really lucky, the stampede they cause can turn into what the press calls "contagion," which is the spread of the crisis to another country.   This happens because many of the Greek and Italian bonds are held by big banks in countries like France.   So if Italy is in danger of default, then so are the banks in France, which means that France will have to bail out its banks, which means that France's bonds will look weaker and then its bonds' interest rates will therefore have to rise as well, leading to yet another speculative hedge fund raid, this time on French bonds.   And so it goes, with each new crisis leading to ever more profits for the hedge funds who are triggering and arranging for the stampedes -- all at the expense of the people of each of these countries, the people from whom wealth is ever so cleverly and surreptitiously being systematically extracted by these extremely clever (and totally unethical) banksters.    

To stop these hedge fund attacks, countries are given only one choice -- do whatever high finance says.   And what high finance wants is very simple -- slash and burn all of your social programs so that you can pay back your loans -- you borrowed from us and now you have to pay us back even if it means impoverishing your people.   To get that done, financial elites want "regular" politicians replaced by technocrats as just happened in Italy and Greece.   But most of all they want to see those cuts in social programs.   The hedgesters look at it like vultures -- as a source of new revenue for themselves.  

Reference article

The Fed works for banksters, against the rest of us, and we are all gradually waking up to this fact

Congressman Kucinich has introduced The National Emergency Employment Defense (NEED) Act, HR 2990, which would incorporate the Federal Reserve into the United States Treasury and thereby make its operations completely transparent, under the guidance, management and authority of the U.S. Congress.   The bill would establish fiscal integrity, reassert Congressional sovereignty over the nation's money supply, and allow our federal government to immediately begin correcting our crippling national deficiencies in infrastructure and education by spending money on these things, and thereby into circulation -- without increasing the national debt or causing inflation!   The NEED Act would, for the sake of the American people, essentially end the Fed as an independent and privately owned banking cartel, and give its monetary authority back to Congress as stipulated in the U.S. Constitution and as the founding fathers intended (and as was the case until 1913).   This would allow millions of American homes to be given back to their rightful owners while also putting millions of our fellow citizens back to work (building infrastructure and educational institutions) and doing so at living, middle-class wages.  

The Fed has been working against the interests of the American people for a century

In recent years the Fed extended lavish support to the very financial institutions that then crashed the economy with reckless speculation and financial "wheeler-deals' that were fundamentally dishonest and of very questionable legality.   Using these borrowed trillions, essentially taken from US taxpayers without their knowledge or consent, many of these financial institutions made billions in profit and then paid unprecedented and obscene bonuses to their senior officers, from these unconscionable profits.  

The Fed asked for nothing from these financial institutions in return for all this largess that it had bestowed upon them -- nothing to benefit the American people who had been hurt by all this.   And that is because the Fed works first and foremost for the welfare of these private financial institutions, even when it's at the expense of the American economy and people.   This is called crony capitalism, and as play-along stooges, 99% of us have involuntarily paid through the nose to support it and promote it.  

The result is that:

*   an unprecedented percentage of Americans (and especially American children) now live below the poverty line,

*   millions of homes were taken away from their owners by the very banksters we bailed out,

*  a majority of new college graduates now have to move back in with their parents because they can't find a job that pays enough to let them rent an apartment of their own, and make payments on their average $24,000 in college loan indebtedness,

*   an ever smaller percentage of Americans can afford to own an automobile!  

This in the richest country in the world, which still has the highest per capita GDP by far?   How can this be tolerated?!

And now the top 1%, (whose wealth and income continue to multiply) expects those of us (who have lost our jobs, lost our homes, and watched our retirement nest eggs disappear)   to ignore the fact that our government has unlimited resources available for them, the top 1% (including the banksters), but nothing for we the American people?!   Sorry, but this ignor-ance is not gonna continue!   Americans are waking up to what's been ever so cleverly done to them, and they're not gonna accept this crap any longer.     Reference article

Authors Bio:

Several years after receiving my M.A. in social science (interdisciplinary studies) I was an instructor at S.F. State University for a year, but then went back to designing automated machinery, and then tech writing, in Silicon Valley. I've always been more interested in political economics and what's going on behind the scenes in politics, than in mechanical engineering, and because of that I've rarely worked more than 8 months a year, devoting much of the rest of the year to reading and writing about that which interests me most.