aquascoot wrote on Jun 30^th, 2014 at 12:31pm:

We can't all run a business: the nature of business means that is impossible!

Most bail anyway as it's not worth it: easier getting a paycheck with no stress and less hours!

Most are happy with one house- intelligence can never be equated with wealth as the very existence of intelligence makes the accumulation of wealth an unworthy goal.

In short, wealth to most people is a home: end of!

Serious coin counters set up companies!

BatteriesNotIncluded wrote on Jun 30^th, 2014 at 12:47pm:



quite right, we are the system, this system has created wealth inequality.
it always seems to be the people at the bottom end of the wealth scale  who are bitching.

If you play AFL and someone else is bigger and more athletic then you, bad luck, you lose, that's the football system. go to the gym , bulk up , train harder.

If you play "the current economic system, the only game in town" and theres someone more successful then you, bad luck, you lose, educate yourself, train harder, work harder.

What you don't do is have the whimpy little guys look at the AFL players and say

"boo hoo, theres athletic ability inequality, how dare they be so superior to me"
if you do, you be a sore loser and not much of a realist

Yellen Janet and the Infinite Inflation

21st June, 2014

Method Leadership

So the real question now is: how is it that the currency issued by the US Federal Reserve has lost 98% of its purchasing power since the Fed began operations?  And, as long as we’re on the subject, where did that purchasing power go?

The sad truth is that the devaluation of the dollar has been concomitant to the transfer of purchasing power from the people who created the wealth, (that money was supposed to store), to the issuers of the fiat currency, their cronies, and sundry hangers-on; – the share-holders in the federal reserve banking system and their buddies in “well-connected” businesses, the recipients of “government benefits”, the multitude of beneficiaries of government-mandated “easy credit”, and a succession of government administrations and their army of bureaucrats, – all of whom have, over the last century or so, padded their nests nicely with wealth created by others.

The theft, which is what it is, is perpetrated via support from the trick of inflation. Contrary to popular belief, inflation is not “rising prices”.  And contrary to a slightly more sophisticated view, inflation is not “an increase in the money supply”.  No, inflation, the reduction in purchasing power of the dollars in your pocket, is the result of an increase in counterfeit credit, which is what US Dollars (and every other fiat currency in the world), ultimately is.  Every US Dollar is an IOU, backed not by unconsumed wealth, as it should be, but by the US Government’s ability to borrow endlessly.  Its a Ponzi Scheme on the grandest of scales.  The notes of the Federal Reserve are created more or less out of thin air, and each new note issued takes a little of your purchasing power away.

So, when Janet Yellen says that “A high degree of monetary accommodation remains warranted…”, meaning that the US will continue to inflate its currency to a target of 2% per annum, remember what that means:  your dollars will buy you a little bit less every year.  Every dollar you possess, by its very nature, is slowly, but very surely, eroding your wealth.  You might also keep in mind that Ponzi Schemes, by their nature, sooner or later run out of suckers and collapse.

The Daily Beast
06.28.14



When our current President was elected, many progressives saw the dawning of a new epoch, a more egalitarian and more just Age of Obama. Instead we have witnessed the emergence of the Age of Oligarchy.

The outlines of this new epoch are clear in numerous ways. There is the diminished role for small business, greater concentration of financial assets, and a troubling decline in home ownership. On a cultural level, there is a general malaise about the prospect for upward mobility for future generations.

Not everyone is suffering in this new age. For the entitled few, these have been the best of times. With ever more concentration of key industries, ever greater advantage of capital over labor, and soaring real estate values in swanky places such as Manhattan or San Francisco which , as one journalist put it, constitute “vast gated communities where the one percent reproduces itself." The top hundred firms on the Fortune 500 list has revenues, in adjusted dollars, eight times those during the supposed big-business heyday of the 1960s.   

This shift towards oligarchy well precedes President Obama’s tenure. It was born from a confluence of forces: globalization, the financialization of the economy, and the shift towards digital technology. Obama is not entirely to blame, it is more than a bit ironic that these measurements have worsened under an Administration that has proclaimed income inequality abhorrent.

Obama’s Oligarchs

Despite this administration’s occasional rhetorical flourishes against oligarchy, we have seen a rapid concentration of wealth and depressed conditions for the middle class under Obama. The stimulus, with its emphasis on public sector jobs, did little for Main Street. And under the banner of environmentalism, green cronyism has helped fatten the bank accounts of investment bankers and tech moguls at great public expense.

Wall Street grandees, many of whom should have spent the past years studying the inside of jail cells for their misbehavior, are only bothered by how to spend their ill-gotten earnings, and how not to pay taxes on it. The Obama Administration in concert with the Congress , have consented to allow  the oligarchy to continue paying capital gains taxes well below the income tax rate paid by poor schmuck professionals, small business owners and high-skilled technical types.

In this, both political parties are to blame. Republican fealty to the interests of the investor class has been long-standing. But Obama and the Democrats are also increasingly backed in their “progressive” causes by the very people -- Wall Street traders, venture capitalists and tech executives -- who benefit most from the federal bailouts, cheap money, low interest rates, and low capital gains tax rates.   

Large financial institutions also have benefited greatly from regulations that guaranteed their survival while allowing for increased concentration of financial assets. Indeed in the first five years of the Obama Administration the share of financial assets held by the top six “too big to fail” banks soared 37%, and now account for two-thirds of all bank assets. 

“Quantitative easing,” the government’s purchase of financial assets from commercial banks, essentially constituted a “too big to fail” windfall to the largest Wall Street firms, notes one former high-level official. By 2011, pay for executives at the largest banking firms    hit new records, just three years after the financial “wizards” left the world economy on the brink of economic catastrophe. Meanwhile, as “too big to fail” banks received huge bailouts, the ranks of  community banks continues dropping to the lowest number since the 1930s, hurting, in particular, small businesspeople that depend on loans from these institutions.

This tilt towards of the financial elites, as Elizabeth Warren has noted, occurred during both the Bush and Obama Administrations. “The government’s most important job,” she remarks, “was to provide a soft landing for the tender fannies of the banks.”

For the most part, the oligarchs have lined up with Obama from the start. Indeed, at his first inaugural, notes one sympathetic chronicler, the biggest problem for donors was to find sufficient parking space for their private jets. As an observer at the left-leaning Huffington Post put it, “the rising tide has lifted fewer boats during the Obama years -and the ones it's lifted have been mostly yachts.”      

The War Against Small Business

If Obama has proven a god-send for the oligarchs, he has been less solicitous of small business. Long a key source of new jobs, small business start-ups have declined as a portion of all business growth from 50 percent in the early 1980s to 35% in 2010. Indeed, a 2014 Brookings report, revealed small business “dynamism,” measured by the growth of new firms compared with the closing of older ones, has declined significantly over the past decade, with more firms closing than starting for the first time in a quarter century.

There are many explanations for this decline, including the impact of offshoring, globalization and technology. But much can be traced to the expansion of regulatory power. Small firms, according to a 2010 report by the Small Business Administration, spend one-third more per employee than larger firms on staff  who can help them meet with federal dictats. The biggest hit to small business comes from environmental regulations, which cost 364% per employee more for small firms than large ones. Small business owners and self-employed professionals also have also been among those most impacted, through the cancellations of their health care policies, by the Affordable Care Act.

The Politics of Oligarchy

Many, if not most Americans, recognize that our political economy is not working for the majority of the country. The vast majority recognize the reality of crony capitalism and understand that government contracts go to the politically connected. More troubling still, less than one third believe the country even operates under a free market system. Most suspect that the American dream is falling increasingly out of reach. By margins of more than two to one, Americans say they enjoy fewer economic opportunities than their parents, and that their offspring will have far less job security and disposable income.    

Today, Americans increasingly see the same threat Brandeis saw. American politics has ceased to function as a rising democracy and come to resemble an emerging plutocracy. These days, political choice is fought over by dueling groups of billionaires appealing to right and left to see who will best look after their interests. This can be seen in the emergence of conservative oligarchs like the energy billionaire Koch Brothers or the heirs to the Wal-mart fortune, who have emerged as the ultimate bêtes  noires for Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Yet Reid and other Democrats have less problem with their own oligarchs. Among the .01 percent wealthiest Americans who increasingly dominate political giving, the largest contributions besides the conservative Club for Growth went to Democrat aligned groups such as Emily’s list, Act Blue and Moveon.org. Seven of the ten Congressional candidates most dependent on the money of the ultra-rich were Democrats. In 2012, President Obama won eight of the country’s ten wealthiest counties, sometimes by margins of two-to-one or better. He also triumphed easily in virtually all the top counties with the highest concentrations of millionaires and among wealthy hedge fund managers. 

—Joel Kotkin, Dawn of the Age of Oligarchy: the Alliance between Government and the 1%. The Daily Beast, 06.28.14.

Why this intense hatred of the super rich.

Karrie webb becomes the first australian number 1 world golfer....i feel pride in my heart.
Sam stossur wins the US open...i feel pride in my heart.
Its quite likely Gina Rhinehardt will be crowned the worlds richest woman...i feel pride in my heart.
Proud of her success , on behalf of all i australians , i say, i admire your achievements.

The median pay for CEOs at large U.S. corporations rose 9% to $13.9 million in 2013. By comparison, the CEO of Toyota pocketed just $1.9 million in 2012. The head of Swedbank, one of the largest banks in Scandinavia, took home just $1.1 million in 2012. Suppose that by shopping around the world for top talent, U.S. corporations could get away with paying their CEOs $3 million a year. But since they didn’t, the top 200 largest companies were effectively ripped off by their CEOs for more than $2 billion last year. That doesn’t even count the excessive payments to other top executives who share some of the benefits of CEO-pay bloat.

A Cure for Bloated CEO Pay | Dean Baker | Fortune, June 24, 2014

Our current brand of capitalism is an ersatz capitalism.

For proof of this go back to our response to the Great Recession, where we socialized losses, even as we privatized gains. Perfect competition should drive profits to zero, at least theoretically, but

we have monopolies and oligopolies making persistently high profits. C.E.O.s enjoy incomes that are on average 295 times that of the typical worker, a much higher ratio than in the past, without any evidence of a proportionate increase in productivity.

If it is not the inexorable laws of economics that have led to America’s great divide, what is it? The straightforward answer: our policies and our politics.

So why has America chosen these inequality-enhancing policies? Part of the answer is that as World War II faded into memory, so too did the solidarity it had engendered. As America triumphed in the Cold War, there didn’t seem to be a viable competitor to our economic model. Without this international competition, we no longer had to show that our system could deliver for most of our citizens.

Ideology and interests combined nefariously. Some drew the wrong lesson from the collapse of the Soviet system. The pendulum swung from much too much government there to much too little here. Corporate interests argued for getting rid of regulations, even when those regulations had done so much to protect and improve our environment, our safety, our health and the economy itself.

But this ideology was hypocritical. The bankers, among the strongest advocates of laissez-faire economics, were only too willing to accept hundreds of billions of dollars from the government in the bailouts that have been a recurring feature of the global economy since the beginning of the Thatcher-Reagan era of “free” markets and deregulation.

The American political system is overrun by money. Economic inequality translates into political inequality, and political inequality yields increasing economic inequality.

In fact, as he recognizes, Mr. Piketty’s argument rests on the ability of wealth-holders to keep their after-tax rate of return high relative to economic growth. How do they do this? By designing the rules of the game to ensure this outcome; that is, through politics.

So corporate welfare increases as we curtail welfare for the poor. Congress maintains subsidies for rich farmers as we cut back on nutritional support for the needy. Drug companies have been given hundreds of billions of dollars as we limit Medicaid benefits. The banks that brought on the global financial crisis got billions while a pittance went to the homeowners and victims of the same banks’ predatory lending practices. This last decision was particularly foolish. There were alternatives to throwing money at the banks and hoping it would circulate through increased lending. We could have helped underwater homeowners and the victims of predatory behavior directly. This would not only have helped the economy, it would have put us on the path to robust recovery.

OUR divisions are deep. Economic and geographic segregation have immunized those at the top from the problems of those down below. Like the kings of yore, they have come to perceive their privileged positions essentially as a natural right. How else to explain the recent comments of the venture capitalist Tom Perkins, who suggested that criticism of the 1 percent was akin to Nazi fascism, or those coming from the private equity titan Stephen A. Schwarzman, who compared asking financiers to pay taxes at the same rate as those who work for a living to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/27/inequality-is-not-inevitable/?rref=opinion&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&pgtype=article