The Selling of American Democracy: The Perfect Storm) Who’s buying our democracy? Wall Street financiers, the Koch brothers, and casino magnates Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn. And they’re doing much of it in secret. It’s a perfect storm: The greatest concentration of wealth in more than a century — courtesy “trickle-down” economics, Reagan and Bush tax cuts, and the demise of organized labor. Combined with… Unlimited political contributions — courtesy of Republican-appointed Justices Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Kennedy, in one of the dumbest decisions in Supreme Court history, “Citizens United vs. Complete secrecy about who’s contributing how much to whom — courtesy of a loophole in the tax laws that allows so-called non-profit “social welfare” organizations to accept the unlimited contributions for hard-hitting political ads.
Put them all together and our democracy is being sold down the drain. With a more equitable and traditional distribution of wealth, far more Americans would have a fair chance of influencing politics.
The revolving door. The Defining Issue: Not Government's Size, but Who It's For) The defining political issue of 2012 won’t be the government’s size. It will be who government is for. Americans have never much liked government. After all, the nation was conceived in a revolution against government. But the surge of cynicism now engulfing America isn’t about government’s size. The cynicism comes from a growing perception that government isn’t working for average people. It’s for big business, Wall Street, and the very rich instead. In a recent Pew Foundation poll, 77 percent of respondents said too much power is in the hands of a few rich people and corporations.
That’s understandable. Wall Street got bailed out but homeowners caught in the fierce downdraft caused by the Street’s excesses have got almost nothing. Big agribusiness continues to rake in hundreds of billions in price supports and ethanol subsidies. American Airlines uses bankruptcy to ward off debtors and renegotiate labor contracts. Not a day goes by without Republicans decrying the budget deficit. Get it? Would Obama Declare 3 Days of Peace to Pay for Food for Starving Afghans? The most little-understood fact of war, in my opinion, is the sheer, mind-boggling, nearly incomprehensible magnitude of the money which is spent on a daily basis to keep the occupation and boom-and-zoom operations going.
Former General Barry McCaffrey put the "burn rate" of US taxpayer dollars in Afghanistan at $9 billion per month, which is fully one-half the average yearly state budget for the 50 states. Two months of this kind of spending is the entire Pell Grant appropriation for 2010. More than one-third of that "burn rate" (and you have to hand it to McCaffrey for not caring how this sounds to the public, literally burning taxpayer money) is fuel costs, both aviation and ground. Time reports that: ...international accounting firm Deloitte puts the cost of fuel for the additional troops at nearly $1,000 a day per soldier — more than $350,000 per year. That's $350,000 per year, per soldier, each of the 100,000 or so of them.
BBC reports: 2.5 million are in imminent danger. A Predator State – the worst bits of Capitalism, Communism and Feudalism « forensicstatistician. We live in a Capitalist country, right? We believe in the power of markets, don’t we? That’s what seperates us from the spectre of Communism that haunted us from the 1950s to end of the 1980s, isn’t it. And we understand the theory: a Capitalist country achieves the most efficient allocation of resources by facilitating trade & commerce by the practice of prices, and price only.
No plans, no dictates, no sentiment. The market connects buyers and sellers, and the price mechanism is what determines appropriate supply and demand to achieve the economic nirvana of equilibrium. But, just to soften the edges, we have a bit of a heart too. Sounds plausible doesn’t it. In the face of bank collapse our politicians ennacted sizeable bailouts. The consequence has been Austerity and Inflation. Yes we have a mixed economy, but one that is instead the worst of both worlds; privatised profits and yet socialised losses. “What did the new class… set out to do in political terms? Predator State Like this: US State Department not for internet freedom.
San Francisco, California: The US State Department is once again undermining its own Internet Freedom Initiative - this time by giving the green light to a copyright bill that will adversely affect online free speech around the world. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was introduced in the House of Representatives two weeks ago, and while it does very little to stop piracy, it gives corporations unprecedented power to censor almost any site on the internet. And more vitally, it threatens the very sites and human rights activists that the State Department has previously pledged to protect.
In a letter to Rep Howard Bernman, a co-sponsor of the bill, Secretary Hillary Clinton tacitly endorsed the proposed legislation, stating, "There is no contradiction between intellectual property rights protection and enforcement and ensuring freedom of expression on the internet". Prominent supporters of the bill are now distributing the letter as a sign the State Department is behind their bill. Top All-Time Donors, 1989-2010. This list includes the organizations that have historically qualified as "heavy hitters" — groups that lobby and spend big, with large sums sent to candidates, parties and leadership PACs.
Individuals and organizations have been able to make extremely large donations to outside spending groups in the last few years. While contributions to outside groups like super PACs do not factor into an organization's designation as a "heavy hitter" (a listing of about 150 groups), those numbers are included for the roster below. For example, this list does not include casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. He and his wife Miriam donated nearly $93 million in 2012 alone to conservative super PACs — enough to put him at No. 2 on this list. It is also worth noting that certain organizations, such as ActBlue and Club for Growth, are included although they function for the most part as pass-through entities: individual donors give to them with the contributions earmarked for specific candidates. Partisan tilt: Bill McKibben, Buying Congress in 2012. OpenSecrets.org: Money in Politics.
Rootstrikers - Fighting the corrupting influence of money in politics. U.S. Congress Campaign Contributions and Voting Database | MAPLight.org - Money and Politics. National Institute on Money in State Politics. Influence Explorer. Finance Lobby - Capital City. Illustration: Bill MayerTHIS STORY IS NOT ABOUT THE origins of 2008’s financial meltdown. You’ve probably read more than enough of those already. To make a long story short, it was a perfect storm. Reckless lending enabled a historic housing bubble; an overseas savings glut and an unprecedented Fed policy of easy money enabled skyrocketing debt; excessive leverage made the global banking system so fragile that it couldn’t withstand a tremor, let alone the Big One; the financial system squirreled away trainloads of risk via byzantine credit derivatives and other devices; and banks grew so towering and so interconnected that they became too big to be allowed to fail.
With all that in place, it took only a small nudge to bring the entire house of cards crashing to the ground. But that’s a story about finance and economics. But it’s also about something even bigger. The Warning At the time it was founded, LTCM was the biggest, most prestigious hedge fund ever created. It’s easy to see why. 6 Shocking Revelations About Wall Street's "Secret Government" Photo Credit: john flanigan November 30, 2011 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. We now have concrete evidence that Wall Street and Washington are running a secret government far removed from the democratic process. These documents show how top government officials willfully concealed from Congress and the public the true extent of the 2008-'09 bailouts that enriched the few and enhanced the interests of giant Wall Streets firms.
The secret Wall Street bailouts totaled $7.77 trillion, 10 times more than the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) passed by Congress in 2008. So what does this all mean? 1. As many of us suspected, all the big banks were on their knees begging for help – secretly – while telling their investors, the public and Congress that all was well. 2. 3. Freud puts capitalism on the couch - macrobusiness.com.au | macrobusiness.com.au. A fascinating article has been written by Eliot Spitzer for The Slate which details the massive lying that went on during the GFC. It raises an intriguing question. What functions do lying and truthfulness play in financial systems? The assumption commonly made is that lying and deception are “bad” and truth telling is “good”. This is certainly true in a personal moral sense (with qualifications), but I do not think it readily translates into the corollary — that lying is a social “bad” and truth telling is a social “good”.
Especially when it comes to dealing with finance. Various forms of deception are so common in finance that they cannot be separated out. Yet at the same time the system relies utterly on trust. Spitzer starts his critique by personalising the banks’ deception, a telling way of conveying moral outrage. Imagine you walked into a bank, applied for a personal line of credit, and filled out all the paperwork claiming to have no debts and an income of $200,000 per year.
Corporate Watch. American society / economy / politics. Investment theory of party competition. Overview[edit] However, this is different from a corporatist system, in which elite interests come together and bargain to create policy. In the investment theory, political parties act as the political arms of these business groups and therefore don't typically try to reconcile for policy. Labor-intensive investors[edit] A study by Larry Bartels found a positive correlation between Senate votes and opinions of high income groups similar to the conclusions in the investment theory.[4] Labor-intensive investors made up much of the early political systems in the 18th and 19th centuries. These industries are also heavily against labor unions, since unionization increases the price of their goods. Capital-intensive investors[edit] Due to industrialization and new markets in the 20th century, capital-intensive investors became the new economic order after the realignment of the Great Depression.
Comparison to other election theories[edit] See also[edit] References[edit] External links[edit] Thomas Ferguson. Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems, Ferguson.