Showing posts with label American middle class. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American middle class. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Friday, May 27, 2011
America, I don’t want to work for you anymore
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| FDR Memorial Bread Line Wiki Image |
Probably by now, we’ve all seen this graph or one like it. Just one in a series of graphs that rub in our faces a fact that I have known for decades (yes, decades). The rich are stealing from you.
You can pretend that the rich people in this chart actually earn their extravagant livelihoods, but everything in the evidentiary world points to the opposite. They steal it. From endemic fraud, shady accounting practices and off-shore accounts to government bail-outs, regulatory cop-outs and refusal to prosecute the most egregious actions, the rich have gamed the system so entirely that most people, still to this day, have no idea what I am talking about. And it’s been going on for decades.
The top end of the income scale since the seventies have seen incredible increases while the bottom has remained flat. When I say the top, I mean the top ten percent, in particular the top one percent. The other ninety percent of us have flat-lined for over thirty years, despite tremendous advances in our productivity!
Thursday, December 9, 2010
How the Oligarchs Took America
Creating a Country of the Rich, by the Rich, and for the Rich
Andy Kroll
Toms Dispatch
There is a war underway. I'm not talking about Washington’s bloody misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, but a war within our own borders. It’s a war fought on the airwaves, on television and radio and over the Internet, a war of words and images, of half-truth, innuendo, and raging lies. I'm talking about a political war, pitting liberals against conservatives, Democrats against Republicans. I'm talking about a spending war, fueled by stealthy front groups and deep-pocketed anonymous donors. It’s a war that's poised to topple what's left of American democracy.
The right wing won the opening battle. In the 2010 midterm elections, shadowy outside organizations (who didn’t have to disclose their donors until well after Election Day, if at all) backing Republican candidatesdoled out $190 million, outspending their adversaries by a more than two-to-one margin, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. American Action Network, operated by Republican consultant Fred Malek and former Republican Senator Norm Coleman, spent $26 million; the U.S. Chamber of Commerce plunked down $33 million; and Karl Rove's American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS shelled out a combined $38.6 million. Their investments in conservative candidates across the country paid off: the 62 House seats and six Senate seats claimed by Republicans were the most in the postwar era -- literally, a historic victory.
Knocked out of their complacency, no longer basking in the glow of Barack Obama's 2008 victory, wealthy Democrats are now plotting their response. Left-wing media mogul David Brock plans to create an outside group dubbed American Bridge in response to Rove's Crossroads outfits that will fight in the trenches of 2012 campaign spending. Many more outfits like Brock's will surely follow, as liberal and centrist Democrats brace for a promised $500 million onslaught by the Chamber of Commerce and others of its ilk.
Even the Obama administration, which shunned outside groups in 2008, has opened the door to a covert spending war. The Democrats will now fight fire with fire. "Is small money better? You bet. But we're in a fucking fight," Democratic strategist and fundraiser Harold Ickes told me recently. "And if you're in a fistfight, then you're in a fistfight, and you use all legal means available."
The endgame here, of course, is non-stop war. No longer will outside groups come and go every two years. Now, such groups will be running attack ads, sending out mailers, and deploying robo-calls year-round in what is going to become a perpetual campaign to sway voters and elect friendly lawmakers. "We're definitely building a foundation," was how American Crossroads president Steven Law put it.
This is what nowadays passes for the heart and soul of American democracy. It used to be that citizens in large numbers, mobilized by labor unions or political parties or a single uniting cause, determined the course of American politics. After World War II, a swelling middle class was the most powerful voting bloc, while, in those same decades, the working and middle classes enjoyed comparatively greater economic prosperity than their wealthy counterparts. Kiss all that goodbye. We're now a country run by rich people.
Read Full Article
RELATED ARTICLE:
7 Mega-Cartels That Run America
Buy 1 Get 2 Free at Botanic Choice Buy 1 Bottle and Get 2 FREE (select items), plus Free Shipping on $25+ Expires 12/31/2010
Fresh food that lasts from eFoods Direct (Ad)
Live Superfoods
It is time to Wake Up! You too, can join the "Global Political Awakening"!
Print this page
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| Anthony Freda Illustration |
Toms Dispatch
There is a war underway. I'm not talking about Washington’s bloody misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, but a war within our own borders. It’s a war fought on the airwaves, on television and radio and over the Internet, a war of words and images, of half-truth, innuendo, and raging lies. I'm talking about a political war, pitting liberals against conservatives, Democrats against Republicans. I'm talking about a spending war, fueled by stealthy front groups and deep-pocketed anonymous donors. It’s a war that's poised to topple what's left of American democracy.
The right wing won the opening battle. In the 2010 midterm elections, shadowy outside organizations (who didn’t have to disclose their donors until well after Election Day, if at all) backing Republican candidatesdoled out $190 million, outspending their adversaries by a more than two-to-one margin, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. American Action Network, operated by Republican consultant Fred Malek and former Republican Senator Norm Coleman, spent $26 million; the U.S. Chamber of Commerce plunked down $33 million; and Karl Rove's American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS shelled out a combined $38.6 million. Their investments in conservative candidates across the country paid off: the 62 House seats and six Senate seats claimed by Republicans were the most in the postwar era -- literally, a historic victory.
Knocked out of their complacency, no longer basking in the glow of Barack Obama's 2008 victory, wealthy Democrats are now plotting their response. Left-wing media mogul David Brock plans to create an outside group dubbed American Bridge in response to Rove's Crossroads outfits that will fight in the trenches of 2012 campaign spending. Many more outfits like Brock's will surely follow, as liberal and centrist Democrats brace for a promised $500 million onslaught by the Chamber of Commerce and others of its ilk.
The endgame here, of course, is non-stop war. No longer will outside groups come and go every two years. Now, such groups will be running attack ads, sending out mailers, and deploying robo-calls year-round in what is going to become a perpetual campaign to sway voters and elect friendly lawmakers. "We're definitely building a foundation," was how American Crossroads president Steven Law put it.
This is what nowadays passes for the heart and soul of American democracy. It used to be that citizens in large numbers, mobilized by labor unions or political parties or a single uniting cause, determined the course of American politics. After World War II, a swelling middle class was the most powerful voting bloc, while, in those same decades, the working and middle classes enjoyed comparatively greater economic prosperity than their wealthy counterparts. Kiss all that goodbye. We're now a country run by rich people.
Read Full Article
RELATED ARTICLE:
7 Mega-Cartels That Run America
Buy 1 Get 2 Free at Botanic Choice Buy 1 Bottle and Get 2 FREE (select items), plus Free Shipping on $25+ Expires 12/31/2010
Fresh food that lasts from eFoods Direct (Ad)
Live Superfoods
It is time to Wake Up! You too, can join the "Global Political Awakening"!Print this page
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Understanding Stealth Economic Warfare
Rense
What is the connection between Wal Mart, the trade deficit, foreclosures and the end of domestic middle-class ownership of the means of production?
After careful economic survey of your town's economic environment one or more Wal Mart stores are built. Wal Mart with economies of scale, a surplus war chest for cut-throat competition and advantages in the import of foreign produced goods, Wal Mart focuses on driving each locally owned or domestically owned competitor out of business. People may not want to shop at Wal Mart but their own budgets and deflation which makes "making ends meet" progressively more difficult forces them to give in sooner or later. Only after the local competition is bankrupt will prices climb to monopoly pricing levels. What you don't know is that this is but one aspect of a grand strategy for conquest without war waged by an international elite against us.
In the days of regulated international trade what is being done would be called "dumping." Where one industrial country's monopoly corporations dump their unsold surplus on another. (The surplus is unsold because the workers of those countries are deprived of purchasing power, it being drained off in taxes and interest payments, and monopoly pricing.) Dumping undercuts what the local producers can profitably produce and so forces the replacement of self-sufficient local production with international dependency -- dependency on foreign supply. But there is more to what is happening today than that.
Read Full Article
RELATED ARTICLE:
US Debt Woes Expose Hidden Austerity and Looting
Fresh food that lasts from eFoods Direct (Ad)
Live Superfoods
It is time to Wake Up! You too, can join the "Global Political Awakening"!Print this page
Friday, November 5, 2010
Fed's Quantitative Easing to Starve Middle Class Americans
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| Dees Illustration |
The Federal Reserve today announced that they will be implementing $600 billion in additional quantitative easing by the end of June 2011. The Federal Reserve will maintain its current policy of reinvesting principal payments from its security holdings and will expand its balance sheet by an additional $75 billion per month. The total announced balance sheet expansion was $100 billion higher than the public consensus of $500 billion. The Federal Reserve will continue to hold interest rates at record low levels of 0% to 0.25%, where they have been for nearly two years.
Quantitative easing is nothing more than the Federal Reserve printing money and creating inflation. This quantitative easing steals from the purchasing power of the incomes and savings of all Americans. While Americans are distracted by the mainstream media with daily debates by the Democrats and Republicans about taxes, U.S. taxes have almost no where near the effect on the lives of middle class Americans as does the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy and quantitative easing. Instead of millions of Americans attending “tea party” events in Washington with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, they should be marching outside of the Federal Reserve building in New York chanting “End the Fed”.
As highlighted in NIA’s new documentary ‘End of Liberty’, which just surpassed 170,000 views in three days, prices of nearly all agricultural commodities have been spiraling out of control in recent months just in anticipation of today’s quantitative easing announcement. In the past 60 days alone, cotton prices are up 54%, corn prices are up 29%, soybean prices are up 22%, orange juice prices are up 17%, and sugar prices are up 51%. Meanwhile, the Dow Jones has only gained 9%.
Read Full Article
RELATED ARTICLE:
FAO food price index hits 27-month high
Fresh food that lasts from eFoods Direct (Ad)
Live Superfoods
It is time to Wake Up! You too, can join the "Global Political Awakening"!Print this page
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