Inside Job Criminal 1% Screwing the 99% PT.1.
Uploaded by gothgod on Feb 1, 2012
Clips of documentary Inside Job which details how de-regulation of the finance and securities industry led to the current economic crisis. From the Reagan Era to Bill Clinton ,George Bush and President Obama those in power have abused that power by making the 1% wealthier than ever at the expense of the average American citizen. They get richer and are bailed out while everyone else loses or to put it crudely everyone else gets screwed or shafted as it were.
Inside Job Criminal 1% Screwing the 99% PT. 2
This crisis was not inevitable if regulators the government the media and politicians had their job which is to protect the average citizen from the predatory greed of the criminal class of the 1%.
This crisis began with the Reagan deregulation era which was built upon by Bill Clinton and George W. Bush Under the George W. Bush the bail outs began to protect the criminals of the Investment Banking Industry and Obama jumped in with more money for these crooks rather than criminal investigations and massive fines and criminal charges leading to imprisonment.
So Obama goes after whistleblowers such as Julian Assange, Wikileaks and Bradley Manning and vigorously expands upon the War on Drugs arresting tens of thousands of Americans while rewarding the Wall Street Criminals .
Obama also managed to expand on the Global War On Terror and is now planning to attack Syria and /or Iran based upon lies and half-truths and an on going feeding frenzy of propaganda dating back to at least 2003 when Iran was included in the Bush/Cheney Regime's bogus Trinity of / or Axis of Evil.
America has had a chip on its shoulder about Iran since 1980 when the Iranian people united to over throw the corrupt and brutal Shah of Iran . The shah like America's other notorious friends such as Pinochet, Saddam and others had led a ruthless dictatorial regime supported by the U.S.
The Shah of Iran was supported by the United States since he was put in power by a military coup engineered by the CIA and British government which ousted the popular and legally elected President Mossadeq of Iran because Mossadeq wanted better terms for Iran's oil so that workers would receive better pay and the country could prosper as a whole rather than just a tiny elite.
American corporations and the corrupt political establishment and government are only for free trade and the freedom of the market place when it is in their favor otherwise they use whatever means necessary to get at another countries natural resources or its labor force.
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CEOs, Business Schools, economic conservatives argue that the inflated salaries and bonuses for CEOs is not a matter of human greed but are somehow the natural result of primeval or darker underlying forces of the market place . Does this mean that CEOs given theses undelying mystical forces at work can not turn down these over inflated salariesa and bonuses because it will upset the Universes natural forces and then there would be hell to pay???
These elitist economic gurus and experts have been telling the public and the mainstream media and politicians that the economic system under which we serve is beyond their comprehension and is therefore preposterous and impudent of them or the average citizen to attempt to analyse or criticize the present economic system.
But those of us who are not part of this economic elite can in fact make judgments about the system based upon unemployment statistics or by observing real wages being reduced in general or by observing hard fought for benefits for workers being gutted by corporations or by governments we can also take note of the statistics on citizens applying for bankruptcy and noting the number of foreclosures on the homes of average citizens . In the united States most citizens can see the results of this upheaval on a daily bases in their own lives and those of their family, friends and co-workers that in the end they are getting shafted while the top 1% rakes in even higher incomes with each passing year. It does not take someone with a PHD in Economics to see the growing disparity between the top 1% and the rest of us in the 99%. President Obama can try to dress it up as if the crisis were over but the reality where most other people have to function things are not that rosy. And besides the government has already spent trillions bailing out those corporations, banks and investment firms because they supposedly were too big to fail. These bail-outs are a prime example of the corruption within the current economic model in which the individual citizen is allowed to fail but not the Big corporations so we wonder in what sense is this all a matter of the free market place unfettered . Shouldn't those corporations and banks be allowed to fail to discharge itself of the economic dead wood .
Unfortunately president Obama and other leaders and notables are at the end of the day working for the top 1% and not the 99% let alone those at the bottom of the economy . Their rhetoric does not match their actions as they continue to support a corrupted economic system which owes its existence and endurance not to the free market place but to the largesse of governments who use the taxes received from the average citizen to bail-out these corporations, banks and investment firms . And what is galling is that the CEOs of even companies bailed out by the government receive increases in the millions in their salaries and bonuses while telling the rest of us to tighten our belts and stop whining .
The problem with this pro-capitalist pro-free market place is that firstly the ideology is not based upon free market place principles but is really just a rationalization for Greed.
This greedy and self-interest of rapacious capitalism may have benefits for those at the top of the pyramid but has little or no benefit for the 99% and nor is it beneficial to the various nations as such. The notion of the Trickle Down economic theory may sound good and reasonable but it just does not work in the way its proponents claim.
It is this form of rapacious unfettered de-regulated capitalism which has been adhered to over the last 30 years from Reagan era to the present which has led to a financial crisis in the the United States and the West.
When self-interest and greed are the guiding principles of the economic system the result has been disastrous as is evident in the current crisis largely in part because those engaged in Wall Street and the markets in general and in complicated investment schemes which are no different in the end from Ponzi Schemes or scams their trading and investments etc. are not tethered to economic reality. So what we get is a recurrence of various bubbles which tend to burst and come crashing down when reality comes a knocking.
UK Panel: Executive Compensation Is a "Market Failure"
Monday 30 January 2012 by: Salvatore Babones, Truthout January 30,2012
Rising inequality is in the news. Occupiers from Wall Street to Winnipeg have made rising inequality a cornerstone of their campaign. Labels like "the 1 percent" and "the other 99 percent" are in the news and on politicians' agendas.
This new attention to inequality goes all the way to the top. In his State of the Union address, President Obama warned that America was becoming "a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by.
...Business executives and business school economists are fond of tracing rising inequality to deep historical trends. If you believe that markets are always rational, then high pay merely reflects a person's true economic value.
Historical trends, so the story goes, are making highly intelligent, highly skilled people more valuable - and thus more highly paid - than ever before. Resistance is futile. Inequality is rising due to deep forces beyond human control.
Economists call this line of reasoning the "skills premium" argument. Economists and executives, of course, tend to be highly intelligent and highly skilled. It's just a coincidence that they believe that their own high salaries are the inevitable result.
The main problem with the skills premium argument is that it is wrong.
The skills premium argument implies that inequality should be rising everywhere in the world. In fact, major increases in income inequality have only occurred in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
It's a strange global historical trend that only shows up in three English-speaking countries and nowhere else.
While an economic commission studying the issue released its results which undermine the skills premium explanation:
The UK High Pay Commission concluded that "top pay is a symptom of market failure based on a misunderstanding of how markets work at their best."
The commission traced rapidly escalating income inequality back to a way of thinking that views "human nature, aspiration and endeavour ... through a prism of self interest."
"It is through looking at executive remuneration that we see the classic problems of corporate governance laid bare," the commission said. In other words, the commission found that people - not deep historical forces - are responsible for rising income inequality.
British politicians from all shades of the political spectrum have rushed to endorse the report's conclusions. In fact, the Conservative-led British government announced on Monday, January 23, that it would propose legislation to rein in executive pay.
Meanwhile as the economic crisis and meltdown is a disaster for millions of average citizens President Obama attempts to co-opt the Occupy Wall Street Movement while ignoring the part he himself played in this Capitalist Ponzi Scheme redistributing the wealth even further into the hands of the 1% while his empty rhetoric claims otherwise.
Out of the trillions spent to give aid to the 1% why couldn't he put aside a trillion or so to help out the average American citizen.
And as we see since President Obama's State of the Union Address there is even a greater effort on the part of municipalities possibly aided in some fashion by federal agencies such as the FBI, CIA, the US military and Homeland security to crush the Occupy Movement in America and also in Canada and Great Britain Greece and other European nations and in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and Egypt.
What is somewhat encouraging in these crack downs is that it illustrates to what extent the ruling class/ the 1% fears the Occupy Movement across the globe.
Who REALLY Pays Taxes by: Richard D Wolff, Truthout, january 30, 2012
As US capitalism suffers from a crisis now in its fifth year with no end in sight, the Republican presidential candidates and Obama endlessly repeat cheerleading for the system as if it were, as usual, beyond question or criticism. Obama's State of the Union Speech at least found campaign fodder in referring to income inequality.
He tried to make political use of what the Occupy movement inserted onto the mass public consciousness so powerfully last autumn.
Obama even suggested a 30 percent minimum tax on those earning $1 million or more annually.The details of that suggestion remain murky with little chance that the kinds of Congresses recently elected would pass it. In any case, Obama's suggested 30 percent minimum tax would still remain far, far below the much higher individual income tax rates that the richest Americans had to pay in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
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