Saturday, July 25, 2015

CASE STUDY OF JEFF BEZO'S AMAZON: AMERICA'S PHONY SMOKE AND MIRRORS ECONOMY AND THE COMING OBAMA DEPRESSION - How to make $7 billion in 45 minutes

"Employees in Amazon’s fulfillment centers are paid $11-12 per hour. They are subject to grueling and humiliating conditions. They are regularly searched and foremen record how many times they use the restroom."


OBAMA-CLINTONomics:

CEO PAY 300 TIMES GREATER THAN WORKERS…. AMNESTY WILL MAKE THOSE FIGURES SOAR HIGHER!




“Historically speaking, the rise in CEO compensation is tied to the global decline of American capitalism and the increasing financialization of the economy. In 1965 the ratio of CEO to worker pay was 20 to 1. By 1978 the ratio had only grown to 30 to 1. It was only in the 90s that CEO pay reached absurd heights, rising from 59 to 1 in 1989 to 376 to 1 in 2000.”


“In 2014 the Russell Sage Foundation found that between 2003 and 2013, the median household net worth of those in the United States fell from $87,992 to $56,335—a drop of 36 percent. …While the rich also saw their wealth drop during the recession, they are more than making that money back. Between 2009 and 2012, 95 percent of all the income gains in the US went to the top 1 percent. This is the most distorted post-recession income gain on record.”

*

OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS: The rich loot and look for the Obama depression around the bend.

"During the month, some 432,000 people in the US gave up looking for a job."


"The American phenomenon of record stock values fueling an ever greater concentration of wealth at the very top of society, while the economy is starved of productive investment, the social infrastructure crumbles, and working class living standards are driven down by entrenched unemployment, wage-cutting and government austerity policies, is part of a broader global process."


"A 2011 report in a Pennsylvania newspaper noted that the company would not open the doors to ventilate one of its warehouses even when temperatures reached 110 degrees, for fear of theft. When workers started passing out, the company stationed ambulances outside for them."

June numbers showed a 5.3% unemployment rate, which sounds good until you look at how many Americans are working part-time and how many have dropped out altogether.  Obama is the first president in postwar history under whom full-time employment has failed to reach new highs.

Sorry to disappoint my liberal friends, such as they are, but this is not George Bush’s fault.  Under Obama, the labor participation rate fell to 37-year lows, and it remains below what it was when he took office – as of March 2015, it was 62.8% vs. 65.7% in January 2009.

 
How to make $7 billion in 45 minutes

The signs are mounting—the stock panic in China, extreme volatility on US markets—that the disconnect between a stagnant real economy and a booming stock market, which has prevailed in the US since the beginning of the stock market recovery in the spring of 2009, may well be setting the stage for a new financial meltdown even greater than that of 2008.

In the meantime, multibillionaires such as Amazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos continue to milk the economy. For Bezos, Thursday’s trading was, to put it mildly, lucrative. He made $7 billion in 45 minutes.

How to make $7 billion in 45 minutes

25 July 2015
On Thursday, Amazon, the online retail giant, announced that, contrary to analysts’ predictions and after months of financial losses, it had turned a profit in the second quarter.

The stock market responded with euphoria. Amazon’s share price surged by 18 percent in a single day, adding $40 billion to the company’s market capitalization. With 154,000 employees, Amazon overnight became the world’s largest retailer by market capitalization, surpassing Wal-Mart, with 2.2 million employees.

The market response was conditioned by the fact that stocks have been registering significant losses in the US in the past week, with earnings reports of major companies falling short of expectations amidst growing signs of slump in the United States and internationally.

These include a continuing sharp fall in the prices of commodities such as oil and iron ore, along with declining growth rates in China and a number of emerging markets, and ongoing stagnation in Europe. The International Monetary Fund earlier this month predicted the worst year for global growth since 2009, and last week the US Federal Reserve Board, in its semiannual Monetary Policy Report, painted a grim picture of the state of the US economy.

The signs are mounting—the stock panic in China, extreme volatility on US markets—that the disconnect between a stagnant real economy and a booming stock market, which has prevailed in the US since the beginning of the stock market recovery in the spring of 2009, may well be setting the stage for a new financial meltdown even greater than that of 2008.

In the meantime, multibillionaires such as Amazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos continue to milk the economy. For Bezos, Thursday’s trading was, to put it mildly, lucrative. He made $7 billion in 45 minutes.
Now the seventh-richest man in the world, Bezos saw his wealth surge to $43 billion. For all the hype surrounding the company he founded 20 years ago, Bezos got his billions by sweating his workers, monopolizing the market and capitalizing on a decades-long financial bubble.

Employees in Amazon’s fulfillment centers are paid $11-12 per hour. They are subject to grueling and humiliating conditions. They are regularly searched and foremen record how many times they use the restroom.

A 2011 report in a Pennsylvania newspaper noted that the company would not open the doors to ventilate one of its warehouses even when temperatures reached 110 degrees, for fear of theft. When workers started passing out, the company stationed ambulances outside for them.

Amazon now accounts for a bigger share of online sales than the next dozen competitors. It has used its enormous market power to strong-arm small publishers and authors, recently announcing unilaterally that it will start paying authors of e-books by the page view, instead of by the download, resulting in sharply reduced commissions. Bezos purchased the Washington Post with $250 million of his personal funds in 2013.

It is worth making some comparisons. The amount of money Bezos made Thursday is:

* Equivalent to what 300,000 US workers earning the median income earn in an entire year.

* Forty-seven times larger than the annual budget for the National Endowment for the Arts.

* Three hundred and eighteen times the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department’s deficit, which is being addressed by shutting off water to tens of thousands of households.

* More than two-thirds of the annual funding of America’s free and reduced-price school lunch program.

* Enough to provide every one of America’s 15.8 million hungry children $450 per year in food assistance.

The accumulation of such personal wealth amid the vast social misery that prevails in the United States can only be called obscene. But such an assessment would be news to the US media, which salutes every milestone hit by the Dow or NASDAQ with rapture and depicts the members of America’s billionaire oligarchy as geniuses and innovators.

There is something deeply dysfunctional about an economic system in which the announcement of a $92 million profit—the first-ever quarterly profit reported by Amazon—triggers $40 billion in share purchases in a matter of minutes.

The continual diversion of vast amounts of money into the stock market is a symptom of an underlying economic crisis of immense proportions. Every dollar that goes into speculating on a stock like Amazon, with a price-to-earnings ratio of nearly 1,000, is a dollar not used for productive investment.

While the real economy in the US has grown by only 13 percent since the depth of the recession in 2009, all three major American stock indexes have more than tripled. This year, NASDAQ for the first time surpassed the heights it reached just before the collapse of the dot.com bubble in 2000.

Meanwhile, the US economy shrank at an annual rate of 0.2 percent in the first quarter of this year. The falloff in economic activity was led by a collapse in business fixed investment, which fell by 2 percent. Investment in nonresidential structures fell by 18 percent.

The sharp fall in investment came despite the fact that US corporations are hoarding some $1.4 trillion in cash and similar assets, the largest such figure on record, amassed as a result of years of record profits amid falling wages and an influx of cheap money from the world’s central banks.

Instead of using this cash to hire workers and build factories, corporations are diverting it to raise dividends, buy back shares, hike executive pay and carry out mergers and acquisitions, all at record levels. Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that major US corporations in 2013 spent 36 percent of their operating cash to buy back their own shares, more than double the rate a decade before.

This speculative frenzy has been driven by six years of near-zero interest rates and money printing by the Federal Reserve, whose policies underlie the enormous overvaluation of companies such as Amazon.

The performance of the US stock market has decoupled from economic growth to such an extent that any indication of genuine recovery in the real economy generally prompts a market sell-off, while signs of economic slump tend to send the markets higher.

This state of affairs is an expression of the crisis and decline of American capitalism, which has for nearly four decades responded to declining profit margins in manufacturing by turning ever more decisively to financial parasitism.

The US ruling class and the capitalist system over which it presides have no answers to the social crisis in America. For every problem, they have the same solution: impoverish workers and use the money to gamble on the stock market. If workers don’t like it, there are always the police to keep them in line.

Andre Damon


A NATION RULED AND LOOTED FROM
WALL STREET


On the Democratic side, the same essential reality prevails, albeit masked by the pretense that the Democratic Party is the party of working people, and the populist rhetoric of some of the Democratic challengers to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

NATIONAL DEBT

CRONY OBAMANOMICS – HOW OBAMA SQUANDERED AMERICA FOR HIS LOOTING WALL STREET BANKSTERS!



http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-reality-of-obamas-crony-capitalism.html


$3.39T Quantitative Explosion: Fed Owns More Treasuries and MBSs Than Publicly Held Debt Amassed From Washington Through Clinton.


 

OBAMA-CLINTONomics: the final death of the American middle-class

THE MAN THAT CALLED HIS HOAX “HOPE & CHANGE”
'Incompetent' and 'liar' among most frequently used words to describe the president: Pew Research Center
“The larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy.”

OBAMA: SERVANT OF THE 1%

Richest one percent controls nearly half of global wealth

The richest one percent of the world’s population now controls 48.2 percent of global wealth, up from 46 percent last year.
 
The report found that the growth of global inequality has accelerated sharply since the 2008 financial crisis, as the values of financial assets have soared while wages have stagnated and declined.
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS DESTROY
THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
OBAMANOMICS: The escalation of global financial parasitism
In fact, the US government’s response to the 2008 crash has been dedicated to inflating the wealth of the super-rich while driving down incomes for the vast majority of the population. The White House has protected Wall Street executives from legal prosecution, while the Federal Reserve has handed out trillions of dollars in cheap money through “quantitative easing” programs, leading share values to triple on major US exchanges.
OBAMAnomics: OBAMA AND HIS WALL STREET CRONIES
LOOTING AMERICA!
These are only the most striking of a barrage of numbers reported in recent weeks, demonstrating that for the US financial aristocracy, the Crash of 2008 has been used to engineer a historic redistribution of wealth.
 
AMERICAN BANKS and the CATASTROPHIC DEATH OF AMERICA
The 2008 crash and subsequent developments have revealed certain fundamental realities about American society. All of the official institutions, including the presidency, the courts, Congress and the financial regulators, have worked single-mindedly to shield the banks and the financial elite and enable them to grow even richer.
*
THE OBAMA ASSAULT ON OUR PENSIONS
BIGGER PROFITS FOR HIS WALL STREET DONORS IF PENSIONS ARE SLASHED
“Feinberg, who as the Obama administration’s “pay tsar” rubber-  stamped multimillion-dollar executive bonuses to Wall Street  banks bailed out with taxpayer funds, will now be given power to slash workers’ benefits at his discretion.”
OBAMA-CLINTONomics: the never end war on the American middle-class. But we still get the tax bills for the looting of their Wall Street cronies and their bailouts and billions for Mexico’s welfare state in our borders.
While the wealth of the rich is growing at a breakneck pace, there is a stratification of growth within the super wealthy, skewed towards the very top.
                                                                                                    
In 2014, those with over $100 million in private wealth saw their wealth increase 11 percent in one year alone. Collectively, these households owned $10 trillion in 2014, 6 percent of the world’s private wealth. According to the report, “This top segment is expected to be the fastest growing, in both the number of households and total wealth.” They are expected to see 12 percent compound growth on their wealth in the next five years.
In 2014 the Russell Sage Foundation found that between 2003 and 2013, the median household net worth of those in the United States fell from $87,992 to $56,335—a drop of 36 percent. While the rich also saw their wealth drop during the recession, they are more than making that money back. Between 2009 and 2012, 95 percent of all the income gains in the US went to the top 1 percent. This is the most distorted post-recession income gain on record.

OBAMA: SERVANT OF THE 1%

Richest one percent controls nearly half of global wealth

The richest one percent of the world’s population now controls 48.2 percent of global wealth, up from 46 percent last year.
 
The report found that the growth of global inequality has accelerated sharply since the 2008 financial crisis, as the values of financial assets have soared while wages have stagnated and declined.

JUDICIAL WATCH:

OBAMA RANKS AS THE MOST CORRUPT PRESIDENT IN MODERN AMERICAN HISTORY

BARACK OBAMA and the DEATH of the AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS.


WITH THE MIDDLE-CLASS DEAD AND BURIED, WILL THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA “The Race” HELP OBAMA BUILD HIS DICTATORSHIP? Do a search for Obama and La Raza Fascism!

 

RASMUSSEN POLL: Hillary Clinton is a bad clone of Barack Obama owned by the same bankster paymasters as Obama




HILLARY CLINTON: DEDICATED SERVANT TO THE 1%, OBAMA’S

CRIMINAL CRONY BANKSTERS and DISCIPLE of OBAMA-

CLINTONOMICS for the super-rich.
The central aim of Clinton’s speech was to reassure the American financial oligarchy that, despite her occasional lukewarm denunciations of corporate criminality and social inequality, she is a right-wing, pro-business defender of Wall Street.
The speech makes clear that a Clinton presidency will pursue the same pro-Wall Street policies of the Obama administration, seeking to expand the fortunes of the super-rich at the expense of the great majority of society, while invoking “fairness” and “equality” as window dressing.
Hillary bellies up to Obama’s banksters – She reeks of the smell of BRIBES and BAILOUTS
Hillary and Obama’s crony criminal banksters…. their looting has just begun!
OBAMA'S CRIMINAL BANKSTERS DESTROYED MORE THAN A TRILLION DOLLARS IN THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS' HOME EQUITY. THEY WERE REWARDED WITH MASSIVE BAILOUTS WHICH THEY USED TO BUY COMPETITORS. NOT ONE BANKSTER WENT TO PRISON!
Hillary Clinton has vowed to take the banksters to new heights of looting!
 
 
THE ULTIMATE LOOTING of AMERICA BY BIG BANKSTERS STARTED UNDER BILLARY CLINTON. THEY’VE PULLED IN HUGE BRIBES FROM BANKSTERS SINCE THEN.
“President Bill Clinton repealed the law in 1999. Glass-Steagall has long been popular with liberals, who argue the repeal was part of the deregulation they say led to the 2008 financial collapse.”
 
WE CAN’T AFFORD MORE OBAMA-
 
CLINTONomics serving the super-rich!

 
CRONY CAPITALISM and the FALL  of A DEMOCRATIC NATION

OBAMA’S LOOTING BANKSTERS AGREE TO FUND HIS DICTATORSHIP…. They owned him from day one!


“The vast sums of money pocketed by bank executives are bound up with activities that range from borderline legal to flagrantly illegal. Nearly all of the CEOs included on the list head banks that have been the subject of multiple investigations and fines related to the rigging of global interest and foreign exchange rates, mortgage fraud, money laundering, tax evasion and other crimes.”

 
OBAMA TO CUT MEDICARE and SOCIAL
 
SECURITY TO PAY FOR THE BILLIONS
 
ILLEGALS COST US… AND THEY STILL
 
GET OUR JOBS!
 
 

No comments: