Emma Berry

Posts Tagged ‘Wall Street’

The primary organization who supply the millions of dollars for buses, training speakers, pamphlets, organizing events is an organization called AMERICANS FOR PROSPERITY.  Over the past two years I’ve written numerous articles about this group. The two men who bankroll Americans for Prosperity are David and Charles Koch–the 16th richest men in the world.

“Americans for Prosperity” is anything but a group that supports prosperity for the majority of Americans. For example, when the USA lost their bid in 2009 to bring the next  World Olympics to Chicago, members of this group are on tape for cheering!  Yes cheering–in spite of the fact that winning this bid would have brought thousands of jobs and billions of dollars to the American economy. They are not about prosperity for our nation.  And they are not about Christianity.  They are more about an ideology of hatred that is designed to further the wealth of the top 1% of the richest in our nation.

Ironically, the inherited wealth on which the Koch brothers live was made by their father who made his money in the 20’s and 30’s by helping Joseph Stalin build the oil infrastructure for communist Russia.

Yasha Levine has recently published a devastating article on the Koch brother that appeared in the New York Observer on 7 ways the Kochs make their money that really doesn’t’ jibe with the the ideology that they pour tens of millions into every year.  In other words, the Koch brothers are conservative hypocrites. The Kochs make a fortune through state government welfare — American and Venezuelan — in all kinds of ways.   Instead of being puppets for the Koch brothers, the Tea Party anarchists should work to cut off the Kochs’ access to our money, common wealth and private property, which they in turn use to fund an ideology that makes it harder for normal people to get their own fair share and enjoy on some kind of human, as opposed to billionaire-inhuman, scale.

Here are the four most outrageous activities associated with the Koch brothers include:

1.“In 1998, Koch Industries entered into a lucrative partnership with two state-owned companies-one Venezuelan, the other Italian-to open a massive $1 billion nitrogen-based fertilizer plant in Venezuela called Fertinitro. … For Koch Industries, whose role in the partnership is to unload half of the 6 million tons of fertilizer produced by Fertinitro every year on the American market, that equals up to $123.6 million in subsidies every year.” Get that? A billion-dollar double partnership with two state-owned companies.

2. “Two years before founding the influential Cato Institute, Charles Koch bought a supertanker from a communist regime.”

3. “For the past fifty years, through its Matador Cattle Company subsidiary, Koch Industries has been quietly milking a New Deal program that allows ranchers to use federal land basically for free. Matador … has something in the neighborhood of 300,000 acres of grazing land for its cows—two-thirds of which belong to American taxpayers, who will never see a penny of profit.”

4. “In 2006, Koch Industries acquired pulp and paper giant Georgia-Pacific for a $21-billion cash payment, allowing the Koch brothers to tap into a whole new area of government largess: the ability to log public forests for private gain and have taxpayers cover the operating costs.”

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Links to a few other articles that I’ve posted on the Koch Brothers over the past year:

Maybe someday ordinary Americans will wise up to the frauds that the rich perpetrate against them such as the Tea Party Movement(August 3, 2010)

Koch Brothers: Bus your Tea Party People down to the Gulf to Clean Up the Oil Spill (June 15, 2010)

The Republican Leadership and Shadow Men Behind the Tea Party Movement are literally  using propaganda tactics that Adolf Hitler promoted (April 25, 2010)

Tea Party members don’t even know what they are talking about.  They yell socialism and yet they want Medicare, government job creation and for government to rein in Wall Street. (March 27, 2010)

In the USA and in fact most of the world we make poverty the fault of the poor. (November 5, 2009)

Our Battle should be with the people who fund the hate groups (Oct. 28,2009)

Tom Phillips, “Mr.Americans for Prosperity” appeared on Rachel Maddow (Oct 15, 2009)

This is the violence that Chuck Grassley and David Koch incite with their rhetoric (August 25, 2009)

Look at the vile propaganda that David Koch helps to fund and promote (August 20, 2009)

Meet one of the Architects of the Corporate Nation: David Koch (August 20, 2009)

Learn about a Group who Sponsor anti-health care reform: “Americans for Prosperity“ (August 20, 2009)

Photo from National Archives

The Newsboys Strike of 1899 was led by the children to force change in the way that Joseph Pulitzer’s and William Randolph Hearst’s   newspapers compensated their child labor force. The Evening World and Evening Journal started charging newsboys 60 cents for a hundred copies of their papers, a hike from 50 cents. Angry, thousands of newsboys went on strike. They held protests all over Manhattan and got into fights with men and boys hired by the papers as replacement workers.  The strike lasted two weeks, causing Pulitzer’s New York World to reduce its circulation from 360,000 to 125,000. The strike was successful and the price was reduced back to the original 50 cents.  But honestly can you imagine the raw greed of wealthy men such as Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst taking advantage of homeless urchins? That was the world of Wall Street then and that is the world of Wall Street today.  Little has changed.

Newspaper boys were the main distributors of newspapers to the general public from the mid-19th to the early 20th century. They were among the poorest classes of society, often seen sleeping on the streets. The newsboys were not employees of the newspapers.  They  purchased the papers from the publishers and sold them as independent agents. They were not allowed to return unsold papers and these children typically earned around less than a dollar a dollar a day even though they often worked until very late at night.

In 1875 a writer of the period wrote, “There are 10,000 children living on the streets of New York….The newsboys constitute an important division of this army of homeless children. You see them everywhere….  They surround you on the sidewalk and almost force you to buy their papers. They are ragged and dirty. Some have no coats, no shoes, and no hat.”  [Source: WIKI].

The 17th Annual Executive Excess Study finds that the CEOs who laid off the most employees are also the ones who were paid the highest salaries.

There is little correlation between Wall Street and Main Street–a reality that the majority of our elected officials in Washington appear to be determined to ignore.  Anything for the bottom line.  Anything for making sure that the shareholders are paid the highest quarterly dividends possible.

Please remember that 85% of the American people do not own one dime of Wall Street stock.  Please keep in mind that 85% of us live on Main Street.  Please connect the dots and start voting accordingly.

Not only do Wall Street corporations fire employees right and left, they will shut down entire factories that may even be making a profit and fire all of those employees, sell off all the assets and reinvest that money elsewhere–often not even in this country.  Thus communities–often communities that bent over and touched their toes for these greedy pigs by raising property taxes on the citizen of their own communities so these corporate pigs could enjoy tax-free land–are left holding the bag of high unemployment and property values that fall through the floor.  Gee thanks Chamber of Commerce for your collusion with these crooks.  And we can thank a lot of city council members along with the Chamber of commerce for selling out their communities to Wall Street.  Of course, some states like Texas, with incompetent idiots like Rick Perry driving the bus, do it on a state wide basis.  Gee thanks Rick for robbing the citizens unemployment insurance coffers so you can get campaign funds by buying off Wall Street corporations like Bank of America.

Michael Duke of Wal-Mart
Total Compensation 2009: $19,234,269
Announced Annual Layoffs (11/1/08-4/1/10): 13,350

Randall Stephenson AT&T
Total Compensation 2009: $20,244,312
Announced Annual Layoffs (11/1/08-4/1/10): 12,300

TO SEE THE TOP TEN

The answer is quite simple:  Wall Street and the rich are not at all interested in job creation in the USA because they can make a lot more money by investing in job creation in other countries such as Brazil, India and China where slave labor is available and they don’t have to worry about the ruination of our planet.

It’s a familiar story told again and again all over the world:  Multinational corporations obtain trade agreements with the collusion of our elected officials and the elected officials of other nations and wealthy individuals  via trade agreements such as NAFTA and then they abuse the workers and the environment in the name of their unholy profits.

In Brazil, sugarcane workers are not entitled to eat anything but cornmeal with water.  Their wages are insufficient to buy anything else. Men are often held on these plantations like slaves.

The Ethanol boom may be good for Brazilian and Multinational corporations, but it is devastating for the people.  Sugar cane is grown in large monoculture tracts in Brazil to satisfy a global demand for ethanol. According to human rights workers, this ethanol industry is being built on the backs of Brazilian workers who are ruled over by “gangs” and who live and die like slaves.

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AND PLEASE REMEMBER:  THE RICH ARE FEELING NO PAIN

All you need to do is look at the Dow Jones index.  The rich are back in the saddle again.  Their dividends are flowing once more.  They feel no pain.

The rich have recovered because they have robbed the poor and the middle class.

This is EXACTLY what has happened and all with the approval of CONGRESS.

Wall Street and the rich DO NOT get rich by “earning it” or by creating jobs–that’s been the lie we’ve been told since the beginning of the Reagan administration with their LIE OF TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMY:  “It’s ok that the rich pay a smaller percentage of tax on the income they earn than the rest of us do.  It’s ok that corporations get such huge tax breaks. [In 2008 Goldman Sachs paid 1% of their income in taxes AND  yet they got billions of dollars in handouts from US taxpayers AND they fired 1/3 of their workers.]  WHY, ACCORDING TO THE LIE, WAS IT SUPPOSEDLY OK–because these people create jobs.

The rich don’t create jobs or build the US economy–THEY DESTROY IT! You need look no further than the example of Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs or Henry Kravis and his private equity company.  The rich are literally, with the assistance of Congress, shredding the American economy.

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SO UNTIL MORE AMERICANS UNDERSTAND THAT OUR PROBLEMS ARE NOT DUE TO THE PARTY THAT IS LEADING THE NATION AT THE MOMENT–LITTLE WILL CHANGE BUT THE CHANGING OF THE GUARD.

Until we have a Congress that is more economically representative of the majority of the people in our nation, little will change.  Instead of 263 multimillionaires (almost half of all our elected officials in DC) we have one or two (thus representative of the majority of Americans–then you are a fool to think that changing parties will change anything and you will soon be disappointed with the results of the new regime because if you don’t know by now, it will look a lot like the one that came before it.)

Funds for Social Security are not allocated by the national budget. They come directly out of most of our paychecks before we ever see them.   Therefore they have NOTHING whatsoever to do with the National Debt and therefore certainly nothing to do with deficits (annual amounts spent over the revenue taken in each year).

Therefore, these jackasses that President Obama has appointed to be on his “Deficit Commission” are outside the scope of their duties when they are discussing making ANY changes to Social Security as Social Security has NOTHING to do with the national deficit.

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BUT PLEASE!  DON’T MAKE THIS A REPUBLICAN OR A DEMOCRAT THING!  THIS IS A RICH THING AND IT HAS LITTLE TO DO WITH PARTY.  The rich are in charge right now and there is little difference between a rich Democrat and a Rich Republican.  Yes there are exception but by and large that is the overwhelming rule that Americans need to understand.

The rich don’t need Social Security at least not today,  but they forget that live in a Democracy where the majority are supposed to rule.  The majority of Americans do rely on Social Security for a huge chunk of their retirement savings.  And it is the needs of the MAJORITY that should take precedence here.

The rich are in control of the Deficit Commission and that is why they have introduced this red herring that has nothing to do whatsoever with the deficit.  NOTHING!  But they have seen the opportunity to trick bag the American people and that is what they are doing.  SHAME ON THEM ALL AND SHAME ON OBAMA FOR APPOINTING THESE RICH THUGS.

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WHAT ELSE DOES THIS RED HERRING DO FOR THE RICH?  It prevents the focus on what is important which is job creation.

The majority of the Wall Street rich don’t give a damn about job creation in the USA and that is why instead of focusing on that as a way to reduce the deficit, they focus on entitlement programs such as Social Security that have NOTHING to do with the nation debt or deficits.

Wall Street and the rich are poised, because of their globalization scheme, to invest their money in markets in India, Brazil and China:  NOT THE USA.  They don’t give a damn about creating jobs here because they can still get slave labor elsewhere in the word and thus keep those dividend high paid back to the investors.

THE RICH DO NOT WANT TO RE-ESTABLISH MANUFACTURING JOBS IN THE USA–not until the workers get a lot more desperate than they currently are, not until workers are willing to work under any conditions for any amount of pay.  Not until communities are willing to allow them to pollute with total impunity.The rich have de-stabilized the economy and the security of our nation with their tax cuts for the rich, their trickle-down economy myths and their privatization schemes. AND THEY CONTINUED TO DO SO AND TO TAKE FROM THE MAJORITY.

No finer example than this “Deficit Commission”.  MORE SMOKE AND MIRRORS AND BS FROM THE RICH!

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#1   SOCIAL SECURITY IS NONE OF THE BUSINESS OF THE DEFICIT COMMISSION

#2   SOCIAL SECURITY IS NOT BROKEN -  Social Security can continue to fund at 100% for 27 years!  until 2037.  After that, even if nothing is done Social Security can still fund at 75% indefinitely.

#3 SOCIAL SECURITY FUNDING FOR THE FUTURE COULD BE FIXED IN A MATTER OF HOURS AND WOULD BE IF THE MINORITY WERE NOT IN CONTROL OF OUR GOVERNMENT.

Currently, the majority of Americans pay Social Security taxes on 100% of our income, but that is not true for the rich.

Any person who earns over $106,000 a year does not have to pay Social Security taxes on any amount above $106,000.  So the rich only pay on a portion of their income.

Social Security is a system that working like any other insurance program.  Not everyone collects or gets back the premiums that they pay in.  That is a fact of life with any insurance program.  The money is pooled so that it is there for those who may need it.

None of us know what the future holds.  Those who are rich today may not be so tomorrow–just ask Bernie Madoff’s investors or those who worked at lower levels in Enron.  I’ll bet there are more than a few of them who are damn glad for Social Security who may have thought at one time that they would never need it–who had no idea that one day they would become part of the group that Alan Simpson refers to as “the lessors.”

BEGINNING IN 2037 ALL AMERICANS SHOULD BE TAXED FOR SOCIAL SECURITY ON ALL THEIR INCOME.  AND THAT IS A REAL SOLUTION THAT WORKS FOR THE MAJORITY–EVEN IF IT MAY NOT WORK FOR THE UPPER 2%.

We have the money for job creation right now in tax money that Americans are already paying in. The video below is a few years old and does not tell the whole story of the give-away to the rich of our farm subsidy program.

First of all it begins by saying that our Farm Subsidy program costs Americans $14 billion a year. That was then. This is now and it costs of $19 billion according to the latest government figures. This video only tells you of the rich individuals who are making off like bandits with our tax dollars. But the ones who are making off with the larger share are actually large multinational corporations–particularly agribusinesses like Archer Daniel Midland who were convicted of price fixing (a serious crime) in the mid-1990’s. These large corporations rake in millions each year in farm subsidies.

$19 billion dollars every year to subsidize the rich and Wall Street corporations with American tax dollars. All but $350 million of this $19 billion go to the rich. American farmers who still live on the land that they farm and who were the intended recipients of this money get a tiny part of the billion dollar pie–$350 million.

Using Wall Street Corporations as contractors to carry out the duties of PUBLIC institutions also breeds worker abuse and abuse of the wards who are to be taken care of by the privatized organization.

Privatization of public institutions in one of the many failed cornerstones of conservative ideology.

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WHY DOES PRIVATIZATION MOST OFTEN  BREED MORE EXPENSE, CORRUPTION AND ABUSE?

MORE EXPENSE

Whenever our government hires a Wall Street Corporation for any job there is always a middle man to pay off–the wealthy investors who own stock in the company. They will always add an unnecessary layer of expense that you do not have in a civil servant model. Furthermore, according to the Wall Street model, the goal of all corporations is not to first deliver  the best products at the best prices for the consumers.  The goal of Wall Street corporations is to deliver the highest dividends possible to their wealthy investors at any cost (including worker safety and livable wages) .  Wall Street is a corrupt system.

Wall Street and the rich, led by the Republicans and the Corporate Centrist Democrats demonize a civil servant system.  They have all their jokes about bureaucrats.  For example we hear jokes about the Post Office and the bureaucracy of Medicare.  But Americans need to realize that there are no Wall Street corporations that can deliver the mail as efficiently and as cheaply and as reliably as the US Mail. The U.S. Post Office is one of the few government agencies explicitly authorized by the United States Constitution.

THE FACT IS THAT THE US POST OFFICE IS IN TROUBLE TODAY  DUE IN PART TO THE EFFORTS OF REAGAN AND THE REPUBLICANS TO PRIVATIZE IT IN 1983.  Since that time the Post Office has been going down hill.  Since its reorganization into an independent organization, the USPS has become self-sufficient and has not directly received taxpayer-dollars since the early 1980s with the minor exception of subsidies for costs associated with the disabled and overseas voters. [So those of you who are belly-aching about "your tax dollar at work" when you speak of the Post Office can shut your pie holes. ] The decline of mail volume due to increased usage of e-mail has forced the postal service to look to other sources of revenue while cutting costs to maintain this financial balance.

Ezra Klein told of a personal experience that points out why we the people should work to restore our Post Office to its constitutional status. He went to a Fed-Ex/Kinkos.  explained that his parcel  wasn’t time sensitive. The clerk  steered Klein directly towards “Express Saver” shipping. “Saver,” huh? That sounded good. He’d even give me the envelope for free, he promised. A deal! He rang me up. A shade over $15.  However, it turned out that FED EX has a ground shipping for only $8 that the clerk didn’t mention. As Klein said:  But I’m not shipping things to help him make a profit, and don’t want to pay $15, or even $8. Good thing I have a public option to choose in the future.  The same parcel shipped from the Post Office, even in its current state of not as cheap as before, would have been less than $5.

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MORE CORRUPTION
Examples of corrupt Wall Street organizations cheating the” government” [in other words, you and me, the American people] abound.  They are the rule and not the exception. Volumes have been written on this topic.  Corruption occurs in many forms but it all has its basis in trying to cut corners and shave off cost–not to deliver cheaper products to the consumer, but to deliver larger dividends to the wealthy investors and the CEO and executive officers of the corporation.

We have the example of Massey Mining and BP just this year.  Both of these Wall Street corporations have long records of safety violations and they are allowed to pay the fines and continue to have their doors open for business in spite of the fact that their disregard for the law results in the injury of hundreds of workers every year and many years even their death.

HERE IS A GRAPH OF THEIR CORRUPTION.  Notice where ACORN is–yet our Congress voted to defund ACORN while these other far more corrupt examples continue to take taxpayer money.  That is what our multimillionaire Congress does: makes scape goats of the poor.  Instead of cutting off some of the murdering private security contractors we have in Afghanistan, they cut food stamps to the poor.

HERE, ON A SLIDING SCALE REGARDING SEVERITY OF CRIMES AGAINST THE PEOPLE ARE THE REAL CORPORATE CRIMINALS.  Now what do you hear the Republicans or Corporate Centrist Democrats saying about shutting down Lockheed Martin–the biggest crook of all?

These people actually calculate the loss of human life against their ability to make a higher profit

Looks like the middle class are deciding that they don’t want to be suckers for the rich any more.

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:

“Investors withdrew a staggering $33.12 billion from domestic stock market mutual funds in the first seven months of this year, according to the Investment Company Institute, the mutual fund industry trade group. Now many are choosing investments they deem safer, like bonds.

If that pace continues, more money will be pulled out of these mutual funds in 2010 than in any year since the 1980s, with the exception of 2008, when the global financial crisis peaked.

Small investors are “losing their appetite for risk,” a Credit Suisse analyst, Doug Cliggott, said in a report to investors on Friday.”

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Perhaps by 2012 the American public will fully realize that this is a class war.  The top 5% are doing just fine.  It’s the other 95% of us who are sinking.

AND JOB CREATION?

WHAT ONE CONCRETE PLAN HAVE YOU HEARD FROM ANY POLITICIAN FOR CREATING JOBS?

All we get from the Republicans are the standard cliches about lower taxes (which most should know by know only makes things worse for the majority of us) and tort reform  (which most economists admit would help our economy perhaps 1/2 of 1% but in the offing would remove recourse of ordinary Americans to redress for wrongs perpetuated on them by the rich.)

Not all cultures are as easily manipulated by the  buy buy buy messages of Madison Avenue as are Americans.

Looks to me like the globalization scheme may be unraveling.

Other cultures do not have that “there’s more where that came from” optimism that permeates the American culture.   Other cultures have for generations had to make do with limited resources.  We have a history of using up the resources of one area and then moving on to a new frontier.

“.  .   .  Wall Street corporation  are increasingly counting on China to deliver growth not available elsewhere, but the country’s consumers remain reluctant to boost their domestic spending, according to a survey of consumer attitudes published by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

“Chinese consumers, both urban and rural, although optimistic about the future, remain big savers and cautious spenders, despite their government’s concerted effort to stimulate domestic demand,” the EIU said on Friday.

In spite of a Rmb4,000bn ($589bn) stimulus package, targeted tax breaks and other incentives to boost sales of cars and appliances in rural areas last year, “concerns about healthcare, education and retirement continue to restrain consumption”.Rural Chinese remain frugal when it comes to spending on items from white goods to cars, because they are focused on providing their own safety net for health costs and retirement, the survey found. .  .  ”    More in FINANCIAL TIMES.

BECAUSE THEY HAVE BEEN TOO BUSY CREATING JOBS OVERSEAS–THAT’S WHY!

Unfortunately, new data out from the Commerce Dept. is no surprise.

Corporations that are moaning about being unable to help out with the unemployment crisis in this nation–in which more than 26 million of America’s workers are unemployed or underemployed–can sure find ways to create jobs overseas.

In 2008 Parent companies cut a total of 445,500 jobs here in the good ole USA, while their foreign affiliates added 111,700 jobs.

Another 131,000 jobs were lost in July, and the U.S. unemployment rate remained at 9.5 percent, as in June. The new data out this morning from the Department of Labor reflects a lack of private-sector hiring and large numbers of jobless workers returning to the market.

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DON’T YOU THINK IT’S ABOUT TIME THAT WE TAKE BACK OUR GOVERNMENT HANDOUT TO THESE PIGS AND START USING IT TO CREATE JOBS HERE IN THE USA? AND TO SOLVE SOME OF OUR SOCIO-ECONOMIC PROBLEMS LIKE ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION!

We can start by taking back $18.5 billion of our annual give-away of “farm subsidies” to Wall Street agribusiness crooks like Archer Daniel Midland.  We’ll leave a billion in that fund for real American farmers who still live on the land they farm.