PAUL BUCHHEIT, - Common Dreams
Stephan: Here is more about how the inequity is created. Few even know it is happening. They just know their lives are getting harder and more brutal. This is why I think social instability is inevitable.
Examples of extreme inequality are becoming easier to find. Progressive leaders have us thinking about revolution. If a revolution is to take place, Americans – especially young Americans- need to know the facts, and they need to know how they’re getting cheated, and they need to get angry. The following should help.
1. $1,000,000,000,000,000 in Sales. Not One Cent for Sales Tax
The trading volume on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) reached an incomprehensible $1 quadrillion in notional value in 2012. That’s a thousand trillion dollars. In comparison, the entire U.S. GDP is $17 trillion.
On that quadrillion dollars of sales CME imposes transfer fees, contract fees, brokerage fees, Globex fees, clearing fees, and contract surcharges, many of them on both the buyer’s and seller’s side. As a result, the company had a profit margin higher than any of the top 100 companies in the nation from 2008 to 2010, and it’s gotten even higher since then.
But not a penny in sales tax for the taxpayers who provide publicly-funded infrastructure, technology, systems of law, and security to help them process billions of financial transactions.
Instead – incredibly – CME complained that its taxes were too high, and they demanded and received an $85 million […]
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DEREK THOMPSON, - The Atlantic
Stephan: Here is what I think is a correct assessment of the new global aristocracy that owns a growing percentage of the world's wealth, and wants more. We think of peasants as agricultural workers. But that is the past. In the present day it is increasingly ordinary workers -- both blue and white collar. The wealth differential now is even greater than it was in the 14th century.
Click through to see the very useful graphs.
For years, I’ve been making the same embarrassing mistake about U.S. economic inequality. Sorry.
I’ve written, over and over, that the most important divide in our wealth disparity was between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. For example, when I compared the evolution in investment income since the late 1970s, I often imagined a graph like this from the Economic Policy Institute, showing the 1 percent flying away from the rest of the country.
It turns out that that graph is somewhat misleading. It makes it look like the 1 percent is a group of similar households accelerating from the rest of the economy, holding hands, in unison. Nothing could be further from the truth.
A few weeks ago, I shared this graph (from the World Top Incomes Database) showing how the top 0.01 percent-that’s the one percent of the 1 percent-was leaving the rest of the top percentile behind.
It’s even more egregious than that. An amazing chart from economist Amir Sufi, based on the work of Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, shows that when you look inside the 1 percent, you see clearly that most of them aren’t growing their share of wealth at all. In fact, the gain in wealth […]
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ELLEN BROWN, - Center for Research on Globilization
Stephan: I am trying in SR to give my readers a sense of what is really going on in history's greatest transfer of wealth from the many to the few. It is an interlocking series of trends so vast, so comprehensive, that it is almost invisible, it simply is. And, of course, corporate media does not cover this story well because their masters don't like attention focused on what is happening.
Finance is the new form of warfare – without the expense of a military overhead and an occupation against unwilling hosts. It is a competition in credit creation to buy foreign resources, real estate, public and privatized infrastructure, bonds and corporate stock ownership. Who needs an army when you can obtain the usual objective (monetary wealth and asset appropriation) simply by financial means? Dr. Michael Hudson, Counterpunch, October 2010
When the US Federal Reserve bought an 80% stake in American International Group (AIG) in September 2008, the unprecedented $85 billion outlay was justified as necessary to bail out the world’s largest insurance company. Today, however, central banks are on a global corporate buying spree not to bail out bankrupt corporations but simply as an investment, to compensate for the loss of bond income due to record-low interest rates. Indeed, central banks have become some of the world’s largest stock investors.
This is a rather alarming development. Central banks have the power to create national currencies with accounting entries, and they are traditionally very secretive. We are not allowed to peer into their books. It took a major lawsuit by Reuters and a congressional investigation to get the Fed to reveal the […]
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Stephan: Today's issue is devoted to what I see as the grossly under-reported reality about the most extraordinary transfer of wealth in history from the poor and the middle class to a tiny uber rich class who, thanks to our ethically corrupt activist Supreme Court, have now bought our government. I think this explains why there are so many morons in Congress. This is why it is becoming a hollow shell of what the Founders' intended. The 2014 and 2016 elections will, I believe, set the pattern for the future. It is up to us to protect ourselves while the vote still matters. That is the only way we can peacefully reverse these trends.
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ANGELO YOUNG, - Reader Supported News/International Business Times
Stephan: As if Dick Cheney were not vile enough this little known story really adds another dimension.
he accounting of the financial cost of the nearly decade-long Iraq War will go on for years, but a recent analysis has shed light on the companies that made money off the war by providing support services as the privatization of what were former U.S. military operations rose to unprecedented levels.
Private or publicly listed firms received at least $138 billion of U.S. taxpayer money for government contracts for services that included providing private security, building infrastructure and feeding the troops.
Ten contractors received 52 percent of the funds, according to an analysis by the Financial Times that was published Tuesday.
The No. 1 recipient?
Houston-based energy-focused engineering and construction firm KBR, Inc. (NYSE:KBR), which was spun off from its parent, oilfield services provider Halliburton Co. (NYSE:HAL), in 2007.
The company was given $39.5 billion in Iraq-related contracts over the past decade, with many of the deals given without any bidding from competing firms, such as a $568-million contract renewal in 2010 to provide housing, meals, water and bathroom services to soldiers, a deal that led to a Justice Department lawsuit over alleged kickbacks, as reported by Bloomberg.
Who were Nos. 2 and 3?
Agility Logistics (KSE:AGLTY) of Kuwait and the state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corp. Together, these […]
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