Wall Street bankers have rewarded themselves for their brilliance in destroying the middle class by reaping multi-million dollar bonus packages.
James Quinn
Readers of my articles will recall that I have warned as far back as December 2006, that the global banks will collapse when the Financial Tsunami hits the global economy in 2007. And as they say, the rest is history.
When the ball hits the ceiling fan, sometime early 2011 at the earliest, there will be massive bank runs.
I expect that the FED and other central banks will pre-empt such a run and will do the following:
1) Disallow cash withdrawals from banks beyond a certain amount, say US$1,000 per day; 2) Disallow cash transactions up to a certain amount, say US$10,000 for certain transactions; 3) Transactions (investments) for metals (gold and silver) will be restricted; 4) Worst-case scenario – the confiscation of gold AS HAPPENED IN WORLD WAR II. 5) Imposition of capital controls etc.; 6) Legislations that will compel most daily commercial transactions to be conducted through Debit and or Credit Cards; 7) Legislations to make it a criminal offence for any contraventions of the above. More...
History is being made. The American public has never been no nervous, perhaps fearful of something dreadful and imminent. The global monetary system is crumbling. The typical stimulus has failed to jumpstart the USEconomy. The 20 months of near 0% short-term official interest rate has failed to revive the moribund US housing market.
Let me make a paradoxical point: THE UNITED STATES WILL BEGIN A RECOVERY WHEN THE TOO BIG TO FAIL BANKS ARE PLOWED UNDER. They are blocking remedy and restructure. They are resisting liquidation of badly impaired assets. They do not lend money, as their credit engines are broken, since they are dead entities that occupy space in the US financial sector. They cast large long shadows. Their removal from the scene of the crime would surely light a fuse of credit derivative accidents, the likes of which the world has never seen. Let's try THAT experiment!! Why the leading economists cannot see that credit is down since the big banks are dead is beyond me. More...
New York–Spending on state Supreme Court elections has more than doubled in the past decade, from $83.3 million in 1990-1999 to $206.9 million in 2000-2009, and deep-pocketed special interests play a dominant role in choosing state jurists, according to a report released today.
For more than a decade, partisans and special interests of all stripes have grown more organized in their efforts to tilt the scales of justice their way. This surge in spending—much of it funneled through secret channels—has fundamentally transformed state Supreme Court elections.
In a foreword, Sandra Day O'Connor, retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice, warned that elected judges are widely seen by the public as beholden to campaign benefactors who sometimes spend millions to sway court races. More...
Arianna Huffington's new book, Third World America: How Our Politicians are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream, paints a grim picture of the State of the Union:
"Every day, Americans, faced with layoffs and tough economic times, are forced to use their credit cards to pay for essentials such as food, housing, and medical care -- the costs of which continue to escalate. But, as their debt rises, they find it harder to keep up with their payments. When they don't, banks, trying to offset losses in other areas, turn around, hike interest rates, and impose all manner of fees and penalties..." Third World America, (P. 77)
Our mediocre grammar school and high school educational system continues its downward slide. The Great Recession is squeezing school budgets. We are failing our children, our most important resource of all. More...
Official spokesperson for the wealthy Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle who "earned" $146 billion over the last decade while shareholders received a negative 45% return on their investment, has announced a dramatic cutback in his lifestyle. He has voluntarily agreed to reduce his compensation to $145.5 billion over the next decade while cutting back on his yacht racing from 4 days per week to 3 days per week. The impact on the San Jose economy could be devastating.
There are multiple reports of the wealthy making dramatic cutbacks such as:
Cutting their staffs of butlers, cooks, house cleaners, gardeners, and piss boys from 45 to 43.
They are only sending their personal shoppers to Tiffanies 4 days per week rather than 5 and they have reduced the daily spend from $5,000 to $4,800.
Using the small helicopter to fly the 15 minutes from their gated 45 acre estate to JP Morgan's headquarters.
Many of the rich are only filling their Olympic size pools to 4/5 of capacity to save on water.
John Kerry is reportedly considering downsizing from his 76 foot yacht called Isabel to a 75 foot yacht named Bourgeoisie in order to send a message to the "little people", that he feels our pain.
Many of the Wall Street ruling class are only eating out six days per week and have purposely restricted themselves to Le Bernardin and Masa only for lunch.
The ruling elite have scaled back their month long vacations in the Hamptons to only 3 1/2 weeks.
More...
IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation's public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That's a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation's wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.
More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell's stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes. More...
Another article on the same subject by Paul B. Farrell of MarketWatch
Pouring money into the private banking system has only fixed the economy for bankers and the wealthy; it has not done much to address either the fundamental problem of unemployment or the debt trap so many Americans find themselves in.
President Obama's $787 billion stimulus plan has so far failed to halt the growth of unemployment: 2.7 million jobs have been lost since the stimulus plan began. California has lost 336,400 jobs. Arizona has lost 77,300. Michigan has lost 137,300. A total of 49 states and the District of Columbia have all reported net job losses.
In this dark firmament, however, one bright star shines. The sole state to actually gain jobs is an unlikely candidate for the distinction: More...
As horrific as the gulf environmental catastrophe is, an even more intractable and cataclysmic disaster may be looming. The yet unknowable costs associated with clean-up, litigation and compensation damages due to arguably the world's worst environmental tragedy, may be in the process of triggering a credit event by British Petroleum (BP) that will be equally devastating to global over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. The potential contagion may eventually show that Lehman Bros. and Bear Stearns were simply early warning signals of the devastation lurking and continuing to grow unchecked in the $615T OTC Derivatives market.
Now credit has been cut to BP. Counter-parties will not accept their name beyond one year in duration. This is unheard of. A giant is on the ropes. If he falls, the very earth may shake as he hits the ground. As we are beginning to see, the Western pension structure, financial trading and global credit are all inter-twined. BP is central to this, as a massive supplier of what many believe(d) to be AAA credit. So while we see banks roll over and die, and sovereign entities begin to falter… we now have a major oil company on the verge of going under. Another leg of the global economic "chair" is being viciously kicked out from under us." More...
What is the invisible force that's suddenly gutting the housing market, driving consumer confidence into a sinkhole, and killing the recovery that Washington was so avidly touting just a few months ago?
Bernanke won't say. But the answer is clear: The recovery had very little substance to begin with. Rather, it was, in essence, a mirage — a dead cat bounce bought and paid for by Washington's massive bailouts, stimulus programs, and money printing.
Put another way, the recession never really ended. Yes, we saw some growth in GDP. And yes, thanks to that growth, some companies are still reporting better earnings — the news that spurred a rally in the stock market last week. But at the core of the economy, the fires that started the recession are still burning intensely. More...
How does one decrease the cost of labor in America?
Well first, you have to bust the unions. Check.
Then you have to create a pressing need for people to work - perhaps give them easy access to credit and then get them to go so deeply into debt that they will have to work until they die to pay them off. Check.
It also helps if you push up the cost of living by manipulating commodity prices. Check.
Then, take away people’s retirement savings. Check.
Lower interest rates to make savings futile and interest income inadequate. Check.
And finally, threaten to take away the 12% a year that people have been saving for retirement by labeling Social Security an "entitlement" program - as if it wasn’t money Americans worked their whole lives to save and gave to the government in good faith. Check. More...
Ominous reports are leaking past the BP Gulf salvage operation news blackout that the disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico may be about to reach biblical proportions.
Northwestern University's Gregory Ryskin, a bio-chemical engineer, has a theory: The oceans periodically produce massive eruptions of explosive methane gas. He has documented the scientific evidence that such an event was directly responsible for the mass extinctions that occurred 55 million years ago. [4]
Many geologists concur: "The consequences of a methane-driven oceanic eruption for marine and terrestrial life are likely to be catastrophic. Figuratively speaking, the erupting region "boils over," ejecting a large amount of methane and other gases (e.g., CO2, H2S) into the atmosphere, and flooding large areas of land. Whereas pure methane is lighter than air, methane loaded with water droplets is much heavier, and thus spreads over the land, mixing with air in the process (and losing water as rain). The air-methane mixture is explosive at methane concentrations between 5% and 15%; as such mixtures form in different locations near the ground and are ignited by lightning, explosions and conflagrations destroy most of the terrestrial life, and also produce great amounts of smoke and of carbon dioxide..." [5] More...
As much as one million times the normal level of methane is showing up near the Gulf of Mexico oil gusher, enough potentially to create dead zones in the water. "These are higher levels than we have ever seen at any other location in the ocean itself," according to sources cited by Reuters. The "flow team" of the US Geological Survey estimates that 2,900 cubic feet of natural gas, which primarily contains methane, is being released into the Gulf waters with every barrel of oil.
Like-for-like, methane is 23 times more potent than Carbon Dioxide or CO2 at trapping solar radiation, as recognised within the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. Methane is far more reflective and calculated over a period of 20 years, as opposed to 100 years, its radiative force is 72 times that of CO2 emissions. This makes vast releases of methane very powerful "positive feedback" loops that accelerate global warming.
Scientists have been discussing a number of scenarios of methane escaping from the ocean floor for some time. The sudden release of large amounts of natural gas -- primarily methane -- could be a cause of past, present and future climate chaos. It is believed that the release of trapped methane is a main factor in the global warming of 6°C that happened during the end-Permian extinction. "Methane Driven Oceanic Eruption" also predicts this will greatly affect available oxygen content of the atmosphere. As temperature rises, the permafrost is likely to melt. The methane released from beneath the permafrost could increase temperatures further, melting the permafrost faster, releasing even more methane, and so on. It is feared that such a scenario would accelerate Global Warming to the point where nothing humankind could do would reverse the problem. More...
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national median wage was only $32,390 per year in 2008, and median household income fell by 3.6% while the unemployment rate was 5.8%. With the unemployment rate now at 10%, median income has been falling at a 5% rate and is expected to continue its decline. Not surprisingly, Americans’ job satisfaction level is now at an all time low.
There are also a growing number of employed people who, despite having a job, are still living in poverty. There are at least 15 million workers who now fall into this rapidly growing category. $32,390 a year is not going to get you far in today’s economy, and half of the country is making less than that. This is why many Americans are now forced to work two jobs to provide for their family to hopefully make ends meet.
The mainstream news media will numb us to this horrifying reality by endlessly talking about the latest numbers, but they never piece them together to show you the whole devastating picture, and they rarely show you all the immense individual suffering behind them. This is how they “normalize the unthinkable” and make us become passive in the face of such a high casualty count. More...
This video shows how financial class insiders in One West Bank use the assets of IndyBank (which the FDIC sold to One West) and loss guarantees by the FDIC to make hundreds of thousands of dollars on every home they foreclose on. No one wonder these banks are not interested in modifying loan terms. These greedy people are making millions throwing people out into the streets.
Well, we had another flash Crash yesterday, just like the one on May 6, 2010. The only difference is, this time the stocks in question went up instead of down.
In case you missed it, Washington Post’s stock went from $458 to $900 per share in the blink of an eye. All the orders at $900 were cancelled and the market authorities did the usual, “move along folks, nothing to see here,” bit.
The culprits in both incidents (May 6 and yesterday) were High Frequency Trading Programs (HFTPs).
The HFTP industry (and lobbying efforts), always defend their actions by stating that they provide liquidity or make sure the markets are efficient or other nonsensical arguments that fall apart the minute you spend more than 10 seconds thinking about them. More...
The appearance of progress on some issues overshadowed the underlying deterioration of societal institutions and practices. Social Security was “saved” by Alan Greenspan and his commission. Essentially he manipulated the CPI calculation downward, screwing future generations of seniors out of their rightful payouts. Politically difficult decisions regarding Medicare and Medicaid were deferred to sometime in the distant future. With oil prices averaging $20 per barrel through the 1980s and 1990s, a coherent long-term energy strategy seemed unnecessary to the next election cycle politicians who control this country. The deregulation of the Savings & Loan Industry gave them many of the capabilities of banks, without the same regulations as banks. Imprudent real estate lending, fraud and insider transactions by S&L executives, protected by high powered Washington politicians, led to the first financial crisis. The failure of 747 thrifts and losses of $160 billion to the taxpayer can be attributed to lax oversight and fraud.
The United States has experienced a three decade long “expenditure cascade”. An expenditure cascade occurs when the rapid income growth of top earners fuels additional spending by the lower earners. The cascade begins among top earners, which encourages the middle class to spend more which, in turn, encourages the lower class to spend more. Ultimately, these expenditure cascades reduce the amount that each family saves, as there is less money available to save due to extra spending. Expenditure cascades are triggered by consumption. The consumption of the wealthy triggers increased spending in the class directly below them and the chain continues down to the bottom. This is a dangerous reaction for those at the bottom who have little disposable income originally and even less after they attempt to keep up with others spending habits. The personal savings rate was 12% in the early 1980s and declined to negative 1% by 2005. The expenditure cascade couldn’t have occurred without easy access to debt. The question that must be asked is, who benefits from debt and who pays? More...
This video shows how the nation and the world have been enslaved in the web of the central banks including our own, the Federal Reserve. These criminals were directly responsible for the wars, assassinations and attempted assassinations of presidents and other world leaders.
Eisenhower and Kennedy both warned us of them and yet the nation chose to ignore their warnings. Double-click on the video icon to view full size.
We write this letter concerning the worst man-made, and ongoing, environmental catastrophe of the modern era, and perhaps the worst calamity the entire hemisphere has ever seen.
We are truly perplexed why the US Federal Government has not taken complete command and control of the disaster area known as the Gulf of Mexico. It is, after all, full of oil and dispersants and corpses of every sort and kind. A foreign multi-national corporation (BP) was allowed to conduct the most risky and highly experimental deep-sea drilling for oil and gas without proper permits, federal oversight and regulatory regimes that would have prevented this avoidable event.
We all know the facts surrounding this event. (i.) BP was given the green light to conduct extremely dangerous drilling techniques in order to supply the fuel necessary to run the US military. (ii.) That the Military-Industrial Complex empowered BP, as it has other US Oil & Gas Companies, to drill and drain every reservoir of oil and gas discovered in the Gulf of Mexico. (iii.) That the Departments of Interior, Energy, Homeland Security and EPA collaborated at the very highest levels of government to see to it that federal laws, state statutes and departmental rules and regulations were conveniently suspended or broken in order to facilitate this oil and gas exploration and extraction. Basically, we are stating that treason was committed against these United States of America by the very entities that are tasked to protect it. More...
You really have to hand it to the banksters. As was painstakingly detailed in the book Creature from Jekyll Island, the banking elite devised a brilliant plan in November of 1910 on Jekyll Island in which to take over control of the United States, steal the wealth from the taxpayers and the resources from the country.
It was at this meeting that the Federal Reserve was conceived by the banking cartel, as they devised a plan to protect its member banks from competition and convince Congress and the American public that this cartel was an agency of the United States government.
The creation of the Federal Reserve will undoubtedly go down as one of the biggest tragedies in American history. After all, the government handed over the right to print the nation’s currency AND charge interest to a private, for-profit corporation with foreign stockholders. The Federal Reserve was given the right to simply print massive sums of money out of thin air and then charge the American taxpayer interest on that money. More...
Do you remember swaps, those frequently risky and opaque derivatives that nearly brought down the global economy in 2008? They're used for insurance and for gambling, but despite having a notional value estimated at $450 trillion, some of the most dangerous swaps remain totally unregulated, even two years after the financial crisis.
But first, it's important for us to recognize just how crazy and dangerous the swaps market currently is. For example:
No one has any idea what they are worth. Imagine if there were no stock exchanges, and the vast majority of stocks traded over the counter. Five banks -- Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM), Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS), Citigroup (NYSE: C), and Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) -- cornered the market, and only they had access to stock prices.
So in order to buy shares of Microsoft, instead of just looking up its $26 price, you would have to call up Goldman Sachs and ask how much Microsoft will cost you. Goldman offers to sell you Microsoft at $30 per share, offers to buy shares from another customer at $20 per share, and pockets $10 for every share of Microsoft traded. That's basically how the anti-competitive swaps market works. It's an economically inefficient system that benefits too-big-to-fail banks by allowing them to rip off their customers. More...
We have less than a month to go before the Congress votes on financial reform. Ironically, the deadline seems to be July 4th, our independence day, an occasion that will likely usher in ever more dependence on Wall Street despite appearances.
Matt Taibbi reports real reform is a goner, “The financial-services industry has reportedly flooded the Capitol with more than 2,000 paid lobbyists; even veteran members are stunned by the intensity of the blitz. "They're trying everything," says Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio. Wall Street's army is especially imposing given that the main (really, the only) progressive coalition working the other side of the aisle, Americans for Financial Reform, has been in existence less than a year – and has just 60 unpaid "volunteer" lobbyists working the Senate halls.”
Not only are scammers getting off free; they are being overpaid in the process--- allowed to keep their gargantuan bonuses and obscene salaries. More...
Our government has committed $12,200 Billion in bailouts, guarantees, and backstops to the very same people who created this economic mess. Most of this money has not found its way to Main Street but instead has lined the pockets of the Wall Street types. Part of this was the $700 Billion TARP program. This video explains how instead of TARP, we could have used this money to LEVERAGE productive endeavors on Main Street that would have both employed our people and helped to reduce the federal deficits. Video...
Recent Headlines:
$140 billion! Record Payday for Wall Street
Goldman Sachs 2009 Bonuses Could Buy Insurance for 1.7 Million Families
50 Million Americans Live in Poverty
Paraphrasing a very insightful quote: ‘The amount of poverty and suffering required for the emergence of a Goldman Sachs, and the amount of depravity that the accumulation of a fortune of such a magnitude entails is left out of the mainstream media, and it is not always possible to make the people in general see this.
Think about the fact that your paycheck should be significantly higher, as it would be if CEOs weren’t taking an astonishing record of $500 for every one dollar you make. Due to unregulated greed the US now has the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world, no other country is even close.Every time you skip a trip to the doctor, to the dentist, to the food store, even to a social event that could bring you a little stress relief, you should think about these thieves on Wall Street. Every time you skip something that you need, think about the billionaires on Wall Street… because they have YOUR MONEY!
The facts are that $30,000 per person is unaccounted for - that’s $30,000 for every man, woman and child in the US - which means if you have a family of five, your family has lost $150,000 to Goldman Sachs. While you stress out and struggle, they have your money, and it’s sitting in their banks, sitting in their vaults, flipping in their markets, collecting interest… and dust. More...
Day after day, bankers have been paraded before Congressional committees regarding their role in the financial crisis which brought the financial system to the edge of the abyss on September 18,2008. Every one has claimed that they were not responsible in any way for the disaster. They blame once in a lifetime circumstances that no one could have anticipated. It was a perfect storm and they had no way of knowing. These Harvard MBA Wall Street geniuses, who collected compensation in excess of $100 million each before the collapse, had no idea what was going on within their own firms. Ignorance and stupidity is no excuse for losing a trillion dollars.
The truth is that the CEO’s of all the Wall Street banks encouraged a casino culture of greed and gambling. The generation of fees became the sole driving incentive for every firm. It started with collateralizing subprime mortgages into packages of mortgage backed securities. Then they created Credit Default Swaps as insurance on these mortgages. When they ran out of chumps to put into houses, they created side bets with Credit Default Obligations that didn’t require an actual homeowner. More...
Hats off to the Wall Street financial syndicate. They arranged a 1000-point stock market descent precisely on the day (May 6th) the Financial Regulatory bill had a key provision being scripted for auditing the US Federal Reserve. The US Senators blinked, watered down the provision, and will force an audit but only for certain TARP-related events. At least it is a foot in the door to the corrupted halls. The Flash Crash, as it is known, has turned the US stock market even more into a round robin competitive backyard for Wall Street firms, where 73% of the NYSE trading volume used to be derived from their computer program trades. Figure even more now. The US stock market has become the butt of jokes. Miraculous recoveries after 3:30pm are standard these days, like Tuesday.
The most striking and predictable aspects of the Fin-Reg Bill are how the USFed has even more power than before. The original plan was to limit its power. So again, hats off to the syndicate. They took the honorable motive to limit syndicate powers and to audit the USFed, and turned it into even more USFed powers, like the rod to dissolve any financial firm that endangers the US financial system. Or should it be said endangers the syndicate? Goldman Sachs bribery to the US Congressional members must have played a prominent role. That is the capitalism at work in the United States. More...
To view previous articles, select a topic from the links below or from the menu bar at the top of this page.
Disclaimer: Nothing contained anywhere on this site constitutes advice or recommendations on any type of investments. This information is provided for people to read and be aware of our economic, social, political, media, and judicial environment. Any actions taken or purchases of any type investment are at the sole discretion of the reader.
Readers of my articles will recall that I have warned as far back as December 2006, that the global banks will collapse when the Financial Tsunami hits the global economy in 2007. And as they say, the rest is history.
History is being made. The American public has never been no nervous, perhaps fearful of something dreadful and imminent. The global monetary system is crumbling. The typical stimulus has failed to jumpstart the USEconomy. The 20 months of near 0% short-term official interest rate has failed to revive the moribund US housing market.
New York–Spending on state Supreme Court elections has more than doubled in the past decade, from $83.3 million in 1990-1999 to $206.9 million in 2000-2009, and deep-pocketed special interests play a dominant role in choosing state jurists, according to a report released today.
Official spokesperson for the wealthy Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle who "earned" $146 billion over the last decade while shareholders received a negative 45% return on their investment, has announced a dramatic cutback in his lifestyle. He has voluntarily agreed to reduce his compensation to $145.5 billion over the next decade while cutting back on his yacht racing from 4 days per week to 3 days per week. The impact on the San Jose economy could be devastating.
IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation's public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That's a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation's wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase. 
Pouring money into the private banking system has only fixed the economy for bankers and the wealthy; it has not done much to address either the fundamental problem of unemployment or the debt trap so many Americans find themselves in. 
As horrific as the gulf environmental catastrophe is, an even more intractable and cataclysmic disaster may be looming. The yet unknowable costs associated with clean-up, litigation and compensation damages due to arguably the world's worst environmental tragedy, may be in the process of triggering a credit event by British Petroleum (BP) that will be equally devastating to global over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. The potential contagion may eventually show that Lehman Bros. and Bear Stearns were simply early warning signals of the devastation lurking and continuing to grow unchecked in the $615T OTC Derivatives market.
What is the invisible force that's suddenly gutting the housing market, driving consumer confidence into a sinkhole, and killing the recovery that Washington was so avidly touting just a few months ago? 
How does one decrease the cost of labor in America? 
Ominous reports are leaking past the BP Gulf salvage operation news blackout that the disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico may be about to reach biblical proportions.
As much as one million times the normal level of methane is showing up near the Gulf of Mexico oil gusher, enough potentially to create dead zones in the water. "These are higher levels than we have ever seen at any other location in the ocean itself," according to sources cited by Reuters. The "flow team" of the US Geological Survey estimates that 2,900 cubic feet of natural gas, which primarily contains methane, is being released into the Gulf waters with every barrel of oil. 
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national median wage was only $32,390 per year in 2008, and median household income fell by 3.6% while the unemployment rate was 5.8%. With the unemployment rate now at 10%, median income has been falling at a 5% rate and is expected to continue its decline. Not surprisingly, Americans’ job satisfaction level is now at an all time low. 
Well, we had another flash Crash yesterday, just like the one on May 6, 2010. The only difference is, this time the stocks in question went up instead of down.
The appearance of progress on some issues overshadowed the underlying deterioration of societal institutions and practices. Social Security was “saved” by Alan Greenspan and his commission. Essentially he manipulated the CPI calculation downward, screwing future generations of seniors out of their rightful payouts. Politically difficult decisions regarding Medicare and Medicaid were deferred to sometime in the distant future. With oil prices averaging $20 per barrel through the 1980s and 1990s, a coherent long-term energy strategy seemed unnecessary to the next election cycle politicians who control this country. The deregulation of the Savings & Loan Industry gave them many of the capabilities of banks, without the same regulations as banks. Imprudent real estate lending, fraud and insider transactions by S&L executives, protected by high powered Washington politicians, led to the first financial crisis. The failure of 747 thrifts and losses of $160 billion to the taxpayer can be attributed to lax oversight and fraud. 
We write this letter concerning the worst man-made, and ongoing, environmental catastrophe of the modern era, and perhaps the worst calamity the entire hemisphere has ever seen. 
You really have to hand it to the banksters. As was painstakingly detailed in the book Creature from Jekyll Island, the banking elite devised a brilliant plan in November of 1910 on Jekyll Island in which to take over control of the United States, steal the wealth from the taxpayers and the resources from the country. 
Do you remember swaps, those frequently risky and opaque derivatives that nearly brought down the global economy in 2008? They're used for insurance and for gambling, but despite having a notional value estimated at $450 trillion, some of the most dangerous swaps remain totally unregulated, even two years after the financial crisis.
Recent Headlines:
Day after day, bankers have been paraded before Congressional committees regarding their role in the financial crisis which brought the financial system to the edge of the abyss on September 18,2008. Every one has claimed that they were not responsible in any way for the disaster. They blame once in a lifetime circumstances that no one could have anticipated. It was a perfect storm and they had no way of knowing. These Harvard MBA Wall Street geniuses, who collected compensation in excess of $100 million each before the collapse, had no idea what was going on within their own firms. Ignorance and stupidity is no excuse for losing a trillion dollars. 
Hats off to the Wall Street financial syndicate. They arranged a 1000-point stock market descent precisely on the day (May 6th) the Financial Regulatory bill had a key provision being scripted for auditing the US Federal Reserve. The US Senators blinked, watered down the provision, and will force an audit but only for certain TARP-related events. At least it is a foot in the door to the corrupted halls. The Flash Crash, as it is known, has turned the US stock market even more into a round robin competitive backyard for Wall Street firms, where 73% of the NYSE trading volume used to be derived from their computer program trades. Figure even more now. The US stock market has become the butt of jokes. Miraculous recoveries after 3:30pm are standard these days, like Tuesday.