*
Records show that four out of Obama's
top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman
Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and
Citigroup ($358,054).
*
Please
support independent media by subscribing and/or donating to In These Times magazine: http://www.inthesetimes.com/subscribe/ | http://www.inthesetimes.com/donateThis article is permanently archived at: http://inthesetimes.com/main/article/12409
Anatomy of
the 1%
Who comprises the nation's
wealthiest—and most infamous—percentage?
By David
Moberg
|
December 27, 2011
|
As
Occupy Chicago sympathizers circled the monumental Board of Trade building in
the city's financial district in November, several demonstrators held aloft a
large red banner with the now-familiar message, "We Are the 99%."
Unlike
safe political pitches to the middle class, that inclusive appeal asserts a
common interest among workers of all wages, both the socially marginalized, and
the traditional middle class of small business owners and educated
professionals. And it posits a conflict between the interests of that super-majority
and the 1%--including some of the futures traders who work inside the Board of
Trade.
But
who comprises the "1%"? And what is the conflict?
The
Occupy Wall Street movement draws the line over income.
Since
the 1970s, a tiny elite has captured most of the nation's income growth, while
most Americans have seen their income grow slowly, if at all. Wealth and power,
linked loosely to income, are even more unequally distributed. In fact, the
concentration of income, wealth and power is so extreme that the line could
more properly have been drawn between the 0.1% and the 99.9%.
The super-sized elite
Income,
wealth and power are bound together in the mind of Occupy protesters like
Shirley Johnson, a middle-aged African-American tenants' rights organizer, who
defined the this way: "The bankers. The CEOs. The ones who make decisions.
Politicians who do their bidding. The rich."
Compared
to the tycoons in the last period of rapidly rising inequality before the Great
Depression, today's rich are more likely to get fat salaries, bonuses and stock
options as top executives or hedge fund operators rather than collecting
dividends and interest payments, according to University of California,
Berkeley economist Emanuel Saez. But in recent years, the Congressional Budget
Office (CBO) reports, capital gains--distinct both from salaries and from
dividends and interest--fueled the surge of the very rich.
Operating
in a newly globalized and financialized economy, the 1% nearly matched their
Jazz Age predecessors in taking a disproportionate share of national income.
From 1979 to 2007 (before the stock and housing markets crashed), the 1% more
than doubled their income share to take 23.5 percent of U.S. income. In other
words, the average income of the top percentile nearly quadrupled (up 275
percent), according to the CBO, while average household incomes rose only 37
percent for the three-fifths in the middle and 18 percent for the poorest 20
percent. The 1%'s piece of the pie grew so quickly because from 1993 to 2007 it
captured more than half of all income growth.
And
looking at the rich in terms of total wealth rather than income, a household
needed $9 million in assets to be among the wealthiest 1 percent in 2007,
according to New York University economist Edward Wolff.
The
most common occupation in the 1% is non-financial corporate executive (31
percent), followed by doctors (16 percent), financial executives (14 percent)
and lawyers (8.4 percent). Critics of the Occupy movement have used the
reported variety of occupations among the 1%--including farmers, scientists,
pilots, and, most widely publicized, arts and sports stars--to argue that the
focus on Wall Street is misplaced. But these occupations make up a small,
declining share of the 1%. Since 1979, the number of sports and entertainment
figures in the 1% has dropped by half.
By
contrast, the number of financial industry workers in the top 1 percent has
nearly doubled since 1979, and the biggest, fastest-growing paychecks went to
executives and bankers, according to researchers Jon Bakija of Williams
College, Adam Cole of the Treasury Department and Bradley T. Heim of Indiana
University. When they looked at the top tenth of the 1%, they found even
stronger evidence of the influence of the financial sector, which doubled in
size and accounted for nearly 40 percent of corporate profits in the bubble of
housing prices and derivatives. Executives and finance professionals
constituted 60 percent of the top 0.1 percent and 70 percent of that group's
increased share of national income. Yes occupations of the rich vary, but
corporate executives, and financial speculators and predators account for the
lion's share of rich people's rapidly growing wealth.
Is
any of this a problem? You bet. Here, briefly, are four reasons that super-sized
1% incomes are bad.
1. It's
not fair.
Even if you believe people should be rewarded according to their contributions
to increases in economic productivity, it's hard to argue that predatory
lenders, corporate raiders, hedge fund operators and other financial pirates
are responsible for the increases in productivity since 1980, and that workers
contributed nothing.
And
it's hard to argue America's inequality is an inevitable result of
globalization and new technology, when countries like Japan and Germany have
experienced similar influences yet not increased inequality significantly.
2. It's
bad for the health of individuals and social life. British researcher Richard
Wilkinson sums up the effects of higher inequality in The Spirit Level: Why
Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. Inequality is directly
correlated with more crime, violence and imprisonment; more obesity; more teen
births; more mental illness and drug abuse; less social trust and weaker
communities; poorer national educational performance; more disease relative to
the overall social development level; and higher mortality.
Poor
people suffer most, but Wilkinson's evidence fingers not just poverty, but
inequality (not only of income but also power over one's life and work) as the
cause of these stress-related social and medical ailments.
In
other words, middle-income people suffer, too. If a virus from some Asian
chicken threatened to cause half the harm that is the result of record American
levels of inequality, a major public-health offensive would be launched with
quarantines and vaccines.
3. It's
bad for the economy.
Despite some economists' core belief that inequality is a necessary price for
efficiency and growth, many researchers have found that greater inequality is linked
to slower growth. Even the International Monetary Fund has now found that
income distribution has a stronger influence on growth than free trade or
foreign investment.
Higher
inequality also leads to higher borrowing and indebtedness by households and
nations, which sows the seeds of financial crisis. IMF researchers Michael
Kumhof and Romain Ranciere report that citizens who fall behind as inequality
rises and wages don't increase borrow more to sustain their lifestyles. The
financial sector grows, and the rich invest there rather than in productive
assets. But without bargaining power to raise wages, the economy grows more
fragile and "there is no way to avoid addressing the income inequality
problem head on," write Kumhof and Ranciere.
Ultimately,
the solution requires deeper structural reform, a radically revised capitalism
or an alternative.
4. It
hurts democracy.
Huge disparities in income are turning democracy into plutocracy and
undermining many people's social trust and sense of power, thus weakening their
hopes for political action. Campaign and attack ad financing by the likes of
the billionaire Koch brothers--worsened by the Supreme Court's Citizens United
decision--egregiously show how the rich gain influence.
But
they also rule more indirectly, often through shaping popular ideas. As former
IMF chief economist Simon Johnson observed, the big financial institutions that
wrecked the economy not only captured their regulators, they also ideologically
captured both political parties.
The
Occupy movement helps cut though the prevailing ideological fog about
inequality, which over the last few decades has made it easier for the rich to
write the rules that make themselves ever richer.
*
THE
FED'S OLD BOY NETWORK
By
Attorney Jonathan Emord
Author of "The Rise of Tyranny" and
"Global Censorship of Health Information"
Author of "The Rise of Tyranny" and
"Global Censorship of Health Information"
December 19, 2011
NewsWithViews.com
Bloomberg
LP, parent of Bloomberg News, performed an enormous service for the American
public when it sued the Federal Reserve and the Clearing House Association LLC,
an institution created by several of the nation’s largest banks, to force
disclosure of secret loans made by the Federal Reserve principally to the six
largest U.S. banks but also to certain foreign banks. The treasure trove of
evidence ultimately obtained by Bloomberg reveals that while the public
Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bailed out leading Wall Street firms for
the whopping sum of $700 billion, the Fed at the same time doled out some $7.77
trillion (an astronomical sum equal to have the gross domestic product). To
make matters worse, the Fed expanded its emergency discount lending program,
giving tens of billions more to the same banks at an interest rate of 1%, while
the prime lending rate stood at over 3%. The banks getting these funds often
turned them into profit centers, lending out proceeds from them at higher
interest rates and pocketing the difference, profiting on federal largesse.
The
President and his top economic advisers bought the “too big to fail” concept,
the notion that regardless of how profligate, irresponsible, even criminal,
heads of the leading financial institutions in America had been, it would be
worse for the nation if those institutions were to collapse. Consequently,
while pushing a legislative agenda of public bail-outs, the Obama
Administration maintained a secret program of multi-trillion dollar loans,
including billions at below market interest rates. The principal recipients of
the funding were JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo
& Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley.
The General Accounting Office audit of the Federal Reserve
revealed that some $16 trillion was supplied in secret loans from the Federal
Reserve between December 1, 2007 and July 21, 2010. The largest single
recipients were Citigroup ($2.5 trillion); Morgan Stanley ($2 trillion);
Merrill Lynch ($2 trillion); Bank of America ($1.3 trillion); Barclays PLC
($868 billion); Bear Stearns ($853 billion); Goldman Sachs ($814 billion); the
Royal Bank of Scotland ($541 billion); JP Morgan Chase ($391 billion); and
Deutsche Bank ($354 billion).
Bloomberg discovered that while top banks were touting in
their press releases during the crisis that they had fiscal soundness, their
balance sheets were made up primarily of federal funds, most from the Federal
Reserve. Moreover, while many banks paid back the TARP funds, they most often
did so in reliance on the secret receipts of tens of billions of dollars in
Federal Reserve money (in other words, the pay back was in that sense a
charade: federal money paid back federal loans). In short, the Administration
was complicit in the orchestration of a massive fraud on the American public,
making it seem that the banks largely responsible for the financial crisis were
weathering the storm of their own accord when in fact they were on board the
good ship U.S. Taxpayer.
Meanwhile, the bad lending and financial dealing practices
that helped produce the financial crisis have been largely kept in place,
underwritten by the federal government. The top banks suddenly realized that
far from having to suffer ignominy and defeat for their abuses, they would be
kept alive by a seemingly endless flow of federal cash. Indeed, the feds
accepted as collateral for loans securities of virtually no worth and other
properties that would never support private commercial lending. By propping up
the major banks despite their irresponsible lending practices, the federal
government has given them a privileged financial status whereby private lenders
will give them terms far more favorable than their smaller competitors because
they understand the federal government will not let them fail. Economist call
this safety net a “moral hazard” (effective federal underwriting for heightened
risk taking that permits these lenders to profit at above market rates of
return in speculative investing without suffering financial liability for
loss). The amounts doled out by the federal government to the banks could have
paid off as much as one tenth of all of the delinquent mortgages, Bloomberg
determined.
Rather than be forced to take their losses on their enormous
junk portfolios and interbank lending practices, the top six banks were allowed
to keep the junk portfolios, maintain their dubious lending practices, and turn
to the Federal Reserve for money on demand whenever problems arose. Repeatedly
when the banks should have gone under due to poor lending practices and grossly
speculative profiteering, they were complimented by the Federal Reserve,
rescued, and then allowed to tout the falsehood that their success came from
sharp management rather than from secret loans. At the same time, these banks
and others have shut down commercial lending for small businesses nationwide.
The “too big to fail” justification for the massive federal
welfare dole to the top six United States banks was based on a faulty premise.
Without question the demise of the leading banks would entail hardship,
particularly for the employees of those institutions, but the long term
prognosis was good for a restructuring of the financial market through
bankruptcies and takeovers. The alternative to allowing the market to impose
its own swift and harsh corrective involves imposing a massive burden on every
American citizen for generations to come for the trillions spent to prop up a
few dozen Wall Street moguls. Rather than have the taxpayers pay an inflated
sum to keep the banks responsible for the financial crisis alive, the nation
could have spared itself an assumption of massive debt and witnessed the demise
of these banks and the rise of new competing financial institutions based on a
solid financial model.
The Bush and Obama Administration’s role as Santa Claus for
Wall Street has kept from Wall Street the needed lessons that would have
otherwise come from the collapse of the major lending institutions. Painful as
it may seem to some, it is far better to allow the market to experience a
correction for profligate lending practices than to force the American taxpayers for generations to come
to pay for the bad decisions made by a few and to let those few go without
suffering a single consequence beyond temporary embarrassment.
© 2011 Jonathan W. Emord - All Rights Reserved
*
OBAMAnomics…
*
*
Records show that
four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry
giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase
($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).
*
Obama has
done absolutely nothing about FORECLOSED ON AMERICA, after all the crisis was
caused by his criminal bankster donors, and they’re hauling in record profits
now. Obama has kept his promise of not punishing his banksters. Not even one
has gone to jail, or ever will be. Just as Bush 1 made sure his SAVINGS &
LOAN donors would escape by the statute of limitations, OBAMA will watch a
nation being foreclosed on as he fills his pockets with bankster pillage!
NO
PRESIDENT IN HISTORY HAS TAKEN MORE MONEY FROM BANKS THAN BARACK OBAMA.
Top subprime lenders included Wells
Fargo; Countrywide, purchased by Bank of America; Washington Mutual, now part
of JPMorgan Chase; Citi Mortgage, part of Citigroup; First Franklin (now
closed), purchased by Merrill Lynch, which was purchased by Bank of America;
ChaseHome Finance, JPMorgan Chase; Ownit, partly owned by Merrill Lynch, which
was later purchased by Bank of America; and EMC, part of Bear Stearns, which
was purchased by JPMorgan Chase. Most of the rest depended on massive loans
from Wall Street. Many of these lenders were sued by states for fraud and paid
billions in settlements.
According to Inside Mortgage
Finance, the top mortgage backed securities underwriters during 2005-2006, only
two of the subprime abuse years, included now defunct Lehman Brothers ($106
billion); RBS Greenwich Capital ($99 billion); Countrywide Securities, which is
now part of Bank of America ($74 billion); Morgan Stanley ($74 billion);Credit
Suisse First Boston ($73 billion); Merrill Lynch ($67 billion); Bear Stearns,
which is now part of JPMorgan Chase ($61 billion); and Goldman Sachs ($53
billion).
*
FROM CREOLE FOLKS
Obama Seeks Brother
of "Chicago Mob Boss" for Top White House Post
The
roaches and con-artist, fake journalist on cable news are all lying about
William Daley being all this and all that, this man is an open borders,
down with America, free trade globalist. MSNBC and Gretta "the
Scientology" Van Susteren from Fox News are knowingly deceiving the
public about D. Issa & his letter to "business owners"=which they
made into such a BIG DAM DEAL, but no one says anything when Barrack
Hussein Obama, comes around with all of these shady bankers, hedge fund
managers and Wall St. Tycoons, which he puts in his cabinet. All of
Obama's meeting with Wall Street asking, "What can I do for you?" is
never something covered by Keith Oberman or Rachel Maddow.
(Bloomberg)
-- President Barack Obama is considering naming William Daley, a JPMorgan
Chase & Co. executive and former U.S. Commerce secretary, to a
high-level administration post, possibly White House chief of staff, people
familiar with the matter said.
*
Obamanomics:
How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends,
Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses
BY TIMOTHY P
CARNEY
Editorial Reviews
Obama Is Making
You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?
Goldman
Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack
Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that
crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers. In Obamanomics,
investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media
ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and
Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming
he’s battling corporate America. It’s
corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics.
Congressman
Ron Paul says, “Every libertarian and free-market conservative needs to read Obamanomics.”
And Johan Goldberg, columnist and bestselling author says, “Obamanomics
is conservative muckraking at its best and an indispensable field guide to the
Obama years.”
If
you’ve wondered what’s happening to America, as the federal government swallows
up the financial sector, the auto industry, and healthcare, and enacts deficit
exploding “stimulus packages,” this book makes it all clear—it’s a big scam. Ultimately, Obamanomics
boils down to this: every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich,
and those somebodies are friends of Barack. This book names the
names—and it will make your blood boil.
*
Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?
Goldman
Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack
Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from
Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and
consumers.
Investigative
reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and
the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is
delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling
corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s
Obamanomics. In this explosive book, Carney reveals:
* The
Great Health Care Scam—Obama’s backroom deals with drug companies spell
corporate profits and more government control
* The Global Warming Hoax—Obama has bought off industries with a pork-filled bill that will drain your wallet for Al Gore’s agenda
* Obama and Wall Street—“Change” means more bailouts and a heavy Goldman Sachs presence in the West Wing (including Rahm Emanuel)
* Stimulating K Street—The largest spending bill in history gave pork to the well-connected and created a feeding frenzy for lobbyists
* How the GOP needs to change its tune—drastically—to battle Obamanomics
* The Global Warming Hoax—Obama has bought off industries with a pork-filled bill that will drain your wallet for Al Gore’s agenda
* Obama and Wall Street—“Change” means more bailouts and a heavy Goldman Sachs presence in the West Wing (including Rahm Emanuel)
* Stimulating K Street—The largest spending bill in history gave pork to the well-connected and created a feeding frenzy for lobbyists
* How the GOP needs to change its tune—drastically—to battle Obamanomics
If
you’ve wondered what’s happening to our country, as the federal government
swallows up the financial sector, the auto industry, and healthcare, and enacts
deficit exploding “stimulus packages” that create make-work government jobs,
this book makes it all clear—it’s a big scam. Ultimately, Obamanomics boils
down to this: every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich, and
those somebodies are friends of Barack. This book names the names—and it will
make your blood boil.
*
Praise for Obamanomics
Praise for Obamanomics
“The
notion that ‘big business’ is on the side of the free market is one of
progressivism’s most valuable myths. It allows them to demonize corporations by
day and get in bed with them by night. Obamanomics is conservative
muckraking at its best. It reveals how President Obama is exploiting the big
business mythology to undermine the free market and stick it to entrepreneurs,
taxpayers, and consumers. It’s an indispensable field guide to the Obama
years.”
—Jonha Goldberg, LA Times columnist and best-selling author
—Jonha Goldberg, LA Times columnist and best-selling author
“‘Every
time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich.’ With this astute
observation, Tim Carney begins his task of laying bare the Obama
administration’s corporatist governing strategy, hidden behind the president’s
populist veneer. This meticulously researched book is a must-read for anyone
who wants to understand how Washington really works.”
—David Freddoso, best-selling author of The Case Against Barack Obama
—David Freddoso, best-selling author of The Case Against Barack Obama
“Every
libertarian and free-market conservative who still believes that large
corporations are trusted allies in the battle for economic liberty needs to
read this book, as does every well-meaning liberal who believes that expansions
of the welfare-regulatory state are done to benefit the common people.”
—Congressman Ron Paul
—Congressman Ron Paul
“It’s
understandable for critics to condemn President Obama for his ‘socialism.’ But
as Tim Carney shows, the real situation is at once more subtle and more
sinister. Obamanomics favors big business while disproportionately punishing
everyone else. So-called progressives are too clueless to notice, as usual,
which is why we have Tim Carney and this book.”
—Thomas E. Woods, Jr., best-selling author of Meltdown and The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to American History
—Thomas E. Woods, Jr., best-selling author of Meltdown and The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to American History
*
·
Hardcover: 256 pages
·
Publisher: Regnery Press (November 30,
2009)
·
Language: English
·
ISBN-10: 1596986123
·
ISBN-13: 978-1596986121
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