Showing posts with label Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Show all posts

Friday, February 14, 2014

Detroit Is the Future


One thing for certain, is that in politics, ethics and morality is a sign of cowardice.  They are the dead weights of any autocratic disposition when it comes to profits and financial gain, in particular when buttressed on the backs and hard work of those whom anyone seeking and securing the highest office in these United States of America – the presidency, need to obtain power.

Thus it should come as no surprise, as was the case with presidents before him, that Barack Obama has learned this lesson well.  Since he has taken office, while implementing the same policies of Bush and Clinton before him, U.S. businesses have never had it so good. As we speak, the masses are working harder than ever before, that is if they have a job or if under employed.  The global banking houses and large multi-national corporations have more loot than they can ever use and continue to add more and more each day, whether we are speaking in terms of cash on balance sheets or in terms of their proportion of ownership of the U.S. economy.

I start with Clinton because it was in the 1990s when our service industry began to bloom and our manufacturing base declined, and it may have had its signature moment when he signed into law, with Republican approval, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (welfare reform) in 1996. Yes, this was the start of the rapid growth of the so-called 1 percent, which Obama has increased more dramatically in economic prosperity in five years than the sixteen combined years of both Bush and Clinton.  It continued when Clinton ended Glass-Stegall, Signed GATT and NAFTA into law and implemented the Commodities Futures Modernization act which not only gave way to new fancy smancy accounting methods but also the mass proliferation of various complex papers based on selling debt.  And with a debt based economy come the obvious, less jobs, less employment, less value in the dollar, a decline in available jobs and an increase in overall poverty.

You see, it isn’t particle physics, but rather the natural result of Keynesian political/economic philosophy that results in what we see in places like Detroit. In simple terms, from this perspective, growth in corporate profits is directly correlated to people being paid less and less. This means that if profits continue to grow for the few, wages will continue to decline for the majority. And as wages continue to decline the US labor market will never ever be able to reach full employment – ever. Namely because companies make their profits by employing as few workers as possible and by transporting what jobs are available abroad to places like India and China.

This is not by accident. As I pen this, we are in a time in which working-age people now make up the majority in U.S. households that rely on food stamps. It used to be the elderly and children. All because government polices produced within the beltway are nothing more that state supported economic theft and terrorism. Policies that over leverage economic gain singularly toward the direction of corrupt plutocrats in the form of capital misallocation courtesy of the Federal Reserve Bank in the form this time of what is called Quantative Easing. In 2012 alone, more than 200 people became billionaires which when added to the more than 1400 billionaires in the US, gives them an estimated $5.4 trillion in combined net worth.

President Obama’s focus on deficit spending doesn’t and will never help the folk who may or may not have voted for him but it does help those whom he appoints to political positions and his other large campaign contributors. The people on Wall Street have access to funding, at a cheap price too given the Federal Reserve Bank’s penchant for hold down interest rates near zero while people who are the heart of America see their rent and food and gas cost steadily rise.  Many call this outcome “internal devaluation,” and is what we have seen abroad in Europe especially in nations like Italy, Greece, Spain  and more recently the Ukraine.

Now if you watch TV or even listened to the President’s State of The Union Address, you probably think it is all good, but that is only because of “newspeak” and selectively telling you what they want you to know.  For example, the only reason they can report that American competitiveness increased by over 10%, is because folks are getting paid less and due to all the benefits and wealth that is counted is what is on the books of big corporations.  They will tell you that  in December that that employment grew by 74,000 jobs and that as a consequence, the unemployment rate went from 7.0% to 6.7%.  But what they won’t say is that to keep up with the new folk entering the work force (which are not counted as unemployed) the nation needs 250,000 jobs just to maintain pace for this group of available workers alone. Or that the same month, the net number of folk with jobs (full-time and part-time) fell by 400,000 to a 35 year low. Then to add insult to injury, they will say that American economic productivity has grown in the area of about 7 percent since 2007, as if that is a good thing, but won’t say that during the same period in China it grew 90 percent.

 These are dire times in America and unfortunately, President Obama and his economic team are not making things any better for the majority of US citizens. What they are doing is developing the middle class in China at the expense of the middle class here for all the jobs that were once middle class (like in Detroit) are now in China. And this is their game, to artificially promote fake progress, while lowering the wages of Americans and growing unemployment, while the rich get richer, because they want a global market place with a global labor pool that they can pick and choose who to pay what.  By doing this, American job seekers will by default have to take lower wages, meaning the middle class is gone and that Detroit, is the future of America.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

the fat lady aint started singin' yet

For the record, tonight I am writing this without the assistance of Tequila and hot sauce – I know a shame. So If I make too much sense or not enough forgive me, for I left my wallet at the shop and I am eating black olives, brie cheese and drinking blueberry/pomegranate juice (dick hard food as I like to say). But for me it is a state of Emergency, especially since folk like Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson seems to always act ex post facto and put shit in place to deal with problems but not prevent them.

Now I will be the first to say I aint no investment banker nor am I an economist, but I read and don’t consider myself to be a stupid mother fucker. There are several things about the economy I want to point out. First, all of this shit has happened under the watch of republicans and all these chump bitch ass folk wanna do is put a band-aid on an amputated leg. And hate to say it, But Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG is only the beginning of what is to come. I remember recently how Paulson said that the problem that we have is because “We have an archaic financial regulatory structure that came in place a long time ago, after the Depression. It really needs to be rebuilt."

From my understanding of history, the problem during the depression was stocks. Yep stocks, for back then they were not regulated as they are today. In the current economic picture, we got to deal with some other thangs, namely hedge funds and derivatives, which are a lot more complex and no where close in resemblance to the classic stock or bond. But like in the depression era when stocks went unregulated, today derivatives and hedge funds and what they call credit default swaps, can be bought and sold and packaged without ANY federal or state regulation (yawl economist and investment genius correct this layman if I am wrong).

No regulation, nada. And we came to this like I have said in many post before, due to many folks, but one I have yet to mention is Former Senator Phil Gramm. Yea, yawl know Jones, he said that Americans were whinning over the economy. He currently is McCain’s economic advisor and I must say with him at the helm, I can only see the economy getting worse. A few post ago I wrote about how he led efforts to pass the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, which served to reduce government regulations in that separated banking, insurance and brokerage activities that had been in place since the Great Depression. But more importantly to jones here was his role in getting the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 passed.

Now let me tell yawl about this. True, he is the VP of USB, a Swiss bank and one should expect such, but this was some sneaky and scandalous shit folk pulled mane because it made specific provisions that products offered by banking institutions would not be regulated as futures contracts – no regulations by feds or state governments, like stocks before great depression.

That’s another reason I say McCain is stupid, for picking a man who is the VP of a bank with 12 billion in losses last year as his top economic advisor and because McCain himself say he is learning economics by reading Alan Greenspan’s book – LMBAO. Not to mention Gramm aint write it but rather it was drafted by Wall Street lawyers. They do this shit via what are called structured investment vehicles and this shit aint even on the balanced sheets.

With the aforementioned and they way they keep they books, via Gramm’s help, we will never know what the actual losses are or will be. Add to that the way they cover this stuff is through another shady side bet called credit default swaps which are “expressly” deregulated via the Act mentioned above. Credit default swaps are the most widely traded form of credit derivative. They aint nothing but bets between folk on whether or not a company will default on its bonds. This is easy to do cause all the banks been doing is giving out mortgages for homes, bundling them up as securities and selling them to others

All I am saying is what we are seeing with Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and AIG is only the beginning because these are based on faulty MBS. Next its gonna be credit cards, student loans and all loans – even private equity loans (corporations). Yep the fat lady aint even started to sing yet and we the tax payer got to pay for this and get the shaft with no Vaseline because the feds will bail these folk out and let the CEOs leaves with 100 millions and even pay for big company but not folk who loose their homes.

All I am saying is handle yours because it WILL get worse. But yawl don’t hear me though, but I bet you getting your toes done, smelling the microwave pop corn and talking about what you eating and dranking at some fancy retro chic Bar. Not me mane. Not me. Like I said, the fat lady aint even started singing, so I would advise you to stuff your mattress, at least a little at a time. vote