American Government Taken Over By Wall St. - Larry Flynt

[elpuma]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-flynt/common-sense-2009_b_264706.html

Common Sense 2009

The American government -- which we once called our government -- has been taken over by Wall Street, the mega-corporations and the super-rich. They are the ones who decide our fate. It is this group of powerful elites, the people President Franklin D. Roosevelt called "economic royalists," who choose our elected officials -- indeed, our very form of government. Both Democrats and Republicans dance to the tune of their corporate masters. In America, corporations do not control the government. In America, corporations are the government.

This was never more obvious than with the Wall Street bailout, whereby the very corporations that caused the collapse of our economy were rewarded with taxpayer dollars. So arrogant, so smug were they that, without a moment's hesitation, they took our money -- yours and mine -- to pay their executives multimillion-dollar bonuses, something they continue doing to this very day. They have no shame. They don't care what you and I think about them. Henry Kissinger refers to us as "useless eaters."

But, you say, we have elected a candidate of change. To which I respond: Do these words of President Obama sound like change?

"A culture of irresponsibility took root, from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street."
There it is. Right there. We are Main Street. We must, according to our president, share the blame. He went on to say: "And a regulatory regime basically crafted in the wake of a 20th-century economic crisis -- the Great Depression -- was overwhelmed by the speed, scope and sophistication of a 21st-century global economy."

This is nonsense.

The reason Wall Street was able to game the system the way it did -- knowing that they would become rich at the expense of the American people (oh, yes, they most certainly knew that) -- was because the financial elite had bribed our legislators to roll back the protections enacted after the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

Congress gutted the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial lending banks from investment banks, and passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which allowed for self-regulation with no oversight. The Securities and Exchange Commission subsequently revised its rules to allow for even less oversight -- and we've all seen how well that worked out. To date, no serious legislation has been offered by the Obama administration to correct these problems.

Instead, Obama wants to increase the oversight power of the Federal Reserve. Never mind that it already had significant oversight power before our most recent economic meltdown, yet failed to take action. Never mind that the Fed is not a government agency but a cartel of private bankers that cannot be held accountable by Washington. Whatever the Fed does with these supposed new oversight powers will be behind closed doors.

Obama's failure to act sends one message loud and clear: He cannot stand up to the powerful Wall Street interests that supplied the bulk of his campaign money for the 2008 election. Nor, for that matter, can Congress, for much the same reason.

Consider what multibillionaire banker David Rockefeller wrote in his 2002 memoirs:

"Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure -- one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."


Read Rockefeller's words again. He actually admits to working against the "best interests of the United States."


Need more? Here's what Rockefeller said in 1994 at a U.N. dinner: "We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis, and the nations will accept the New World Order." They're gaming us. Our country has been stolen from us.

Journalist Matt Taibbi, writing in Rolling Stone, notes that esteemed economist John Kenneth Galbraith laid the 1929 crash at the feet of banking giant Goldman Sachs. Taibbi goes on to say that Goldman Sachs has been behind every other economic downturn as well, including the most recent one. As if that wasn't enough, Goldman Sachs even had a hand in pushing gas prices up to $4 a gallon.

The problem with bankers is longstanding. Here's what one of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, had to say about them:

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation, and then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their father's conquered."


We all know that the first American Revolution officially began in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence. Less well known is that the single strongest motivating factor for revolution was the colonists' attempt to free themselves from the Bank of England. But how many of you know about the second revolution, referred to by historians as Shays' Rebellion? It took place in 1786-87, and once again the banks were the cause. This time they were putting the screws to America's farmers.

Daniel Shays was a farmer in western Massachusetts. Like many other farmers of the day, he was being driven into bankruptcy by the banks' predatory lending practices. (Sound familiar?) Rallying other farmers to his side, Shays led his rebels in an attack on the courts and the local armory. The rebellion itself failed, but a message had been sent: The bankers (and the politicians who supported them) ultimately backed off. As Thomas Jefferson famously quipped in regard to the insurrection: "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Perhaps it's time to consider that option once again.

I'm calling for a national strike, one designed to close the country down for a day. The intent? Real campaign-finance reform and strong restrictions on lobbying. Because nothing will change until we take corporate money out of politics. Nothing will improve until our politicians are once again answerable to their constituents, not the rich and powerful.

Let's set a date. No one goes to work. No one buys anything. And if that isn't effective -- if the politicians ignore us -- we do it again. And again. And again.

The real war is not between the left and the right. It is between the average American and the ruling class. If we come together on this single issue, everything else will resolve itself. It's time we took back our government from those who would make us their slaves.

[barracuda]

Larry Flynt = Great American.

[josey wales]

Well, I say ‘welcome to the party, Larry”. It took you long enough to see the light but better late than never. I will give him credit for putting forth an actionable plan. Too bad he has so much ‘baggage’ but at least Morris Dees can’t accuse him of being in the militia!
Maybe if he had spent a little more time on serious subjects and less on finding Republicorps peccadilloes’ we might be somewhere.

[psynapz]

Larry Flynt = Great American.

Agreed!

...but that's a bad jacket you got on there, Larry.

Too bad he has so much ‘baggage’ but at least Morris Dees can’t accuse him of being in the militia!

Too bad Constitutionalists are all either gun-toting militiamen, or godless smut peddlers.

Or sometimes both...

[pepsified thinker]

Larry's been keeping us abreast of how various bodies--in and out of government--are involved in one or another kind of intercourse, for quite some time.

Or more frankly, if there's anyone who could tell you who's fu@*ing who, and how, it'd be Larry Flynt.

but seriously, yeah--time to clean the temples, and all that.

[elpuma]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/opinion/09rich.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Is Obama Punking Us?

By FRANK RICH

“AUGUST is a challenging time to be president,” said Andrew Card, the former Bush White House chief of staff, as he offered unsolicited advice to his successors in a television interview last week. “I think you have to expect the unexpected.”

He should know. Thursday was the eighth anniversary of “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” the President’s Daily Brief that his boss ignored while on vacation in Crawford. Aug. 29 marks the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s strike on the Louisiana coast, which his boss also ignored while on vacation in Crawford.

So do have a blast in Martha’s Vineyard, President Obama.

Even as we wait for some unexpected disaster to strike, Beltway omens for the current White House are grim. Obama’s poll numbers are approaching free fall, we are told. If he fails on health care, he’s toast. Indeed, many of the bloviators who spot a fatal swoon in the Obama presidency are the same doomsayers who in August 2008 were predicting his Election Day defeat because he couldn’t “close the deal” and clear the 50 percent mark in matchups with John McCain.

Here are two not very daring predictions: Obama will get some kind of health care reform done come fall. His poll numbers will not crater any time soon.

Yet there is real reason for longer-term worry in the form of a persistent, anecdotal drift toward disillusionment among some of the president’s supporters. And not merely those on the left. This concern was perhaps best articulated by an Obama voter, a real estate agent in Virginia, featured on the front page of The Washington Post last week. “Nothing’s changed for the common guy,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been punked.” She cited in particular the billions of dollars in bailouts given to banks that still “act like they’re broke.”

But this mood isn’t just about the banks, Public Enemy No. 1. What the Great Recession has crystallized is a larger syndrome that Obama tapped into during the campaign. It’s the sinking sensation that the American game is rigged — that, as the president typically put it a month after his inauguration, the system is in hock to “the interests of powerful lobbyists or the wealthiest few” who have “run Washington far too long.” He promised to smite them.

No president can do that alone, let alone in six months. To make Obama’s goal more quixotic, the ailment that he diagnosed is far bigger than Washington and often beyond politics’ domain. What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand, from commercial transactions as trivial as the sales of prime concert tickets to cultural forces as pervasive as the news media.

It’s a cynicism confirmed almost daily by events. Last week Brian Stelter of The Times reported that the corporate bosses of MSNBC and Fox News, Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric and Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation, had sanctioned their lieutenants to broker what a G.E. spokesman called a new “level of civility” between their brawling cable stars, Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly. A Fox spokesman later confirmed to Howard Kurtz of The Post that “there was an agreement” at least at the corporate level. Olbermann said he was a “party to no deal,” and in any event what looked like a temporary truce ended after The Times article was published. But the whole scrape only fed legitimate suspicions on the right and left alike that even their loudest public voices can be silenced if the business interests of the real American elite decree it.

You might wonder whether networks could some day cut out the middlemen — anchors — and just put covert lobbyists and publicists on the air to deliver the news. Actually, that has already happened. The most notorious example was the flock of retired military officers who served as television “news analysts” during the Iraq war while clandestinely lobbying for defense contractors eager to sell their costly wares to the Pentagon.

The revelation of that scandal did not end the practice. Last week MSNBC had to apologize for deploying the former Newsweek writer Richard Wolffe as a substitute host for Olbermann without mentioning his new career as a corporate flack. Wolffe might still be anchoring on MSNBC if the blogger Glenn Greenwald hadn’t called attention to his day job. MSNBC assured its viewers that there were no conflicts of interest, but we must take that on faith, since we still don’t know which clients Wolffe represents as a senior strategist for his firm, Public Strategies, whose chief executive is the former Bush White House spin artist, Dan Bartlett.

Let’s presume that Wolffe’s clients do not include the corporate interests with billions at stake in MSNBC and Washington’s Topic A, the health care debate. If so, he’s about the only player in the political-corporate culture who’s not riding that gravy train.

As Democrats have pointed out, the angry hecklers disrupting town-hall meetings convened by members of Congress are not always ordinary citizens engaging in spontaneous grass-roots protests or even G.O.P. operatives, but proxies for corporate lobbyists. One group facilitating the screamers is FreedomWorks, which is run by the former Congressman Dick Armey, now a lobbyist at the DLA Piper law firm. Medicines Company, a global pharmaceutical business, has paid DLA Piper more than $6 million in lobbying fees in the five years Armey has worked there.

But the Democratic members of Congress those hecklers assailed can hardly claim the moral high ground. Their ties to health care interests are merely more discreet and insidious. As Congressional Quarterly reported last week, industry groups contributed almost $1.8 million in the first six months of 2009 alone to the 18 House members of both parties supervising health care reform, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer among them.

Then there are the 52 conservative Blue Dog Democrats, who have balked at the public option for health insurance. Their cash intake from insurers and drug companies outpaces their Democratic peers by an average of 25 percent, according to The Post. And let’s not forget the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, which has raked in nearly $500,000 from a single doctor-owned hospital in McAllen, Tex. — the very one that Obama has cited as a symbol of runaway medical costs ever since it was profiled in The New Yorker this spring.

In this maze of powerful moneyed interests, it’s not clear who any American in either party should or could root for. The bipartisan nature of the beast can be encapsulated by the remarkable progress of Billy Tauzin, the former Louisiana congressman. Tauzin was a founding member of the Blue Dog Democrats in 1994. A year later, he bolted to the Republicans. Now he is chief of PhRMA, the biggest pharmaceutical trade group. In the 2008 campaign, Obama ran a television ad pillorying Tauzin for his role in preventing Medicare from negotiating for lower drug prices. Last week The Los Angeles Times reported — and The New York Times confirmed — that Tauzin, an active player in White House health care negotiations, had secured a behind-closed-doors flip-flop, enlisting the administration to push for continued protection of drug prices. Now we know why the president has ducked his campaign pledge to broadcast such negotiations on C-Span.

The making of legislative sausage is never pretty. The White House has to give to get. But the cynicism being whipped up among voters is justified. Unlike Hillary Clinton, whose chief presidential campaign strategist unapologetically did double duty as a high-powered corporate flack, Obama promised change we could actually believe in.

His first questionable post-victory step was to assemble an old boys’ club of Robert Rubin protégés and Goldman-Citi alumni as the White House economic team, including a Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, who failed in his watchdog role at the New York Fed as Wall Street’s latest bubble first inflated and then burst. The questions about Geithner’s role in adjudicating the subsequent bailouts aren’t going away, and neither is the angry public sense that the fix is still in. We just learned that nine of those bailed-out banks — which in total received $175 billion of taxpayers’ money, but as yet have repaid only $50 billion — are awarding a total of $32.6 billion in bonuses for 2009.

It’s in this context that Obama can’t afford a defeat on health care. A bill will pass in a Democrat-controlled Congress. What matters is what’s in it. The final result will be a CAT scan of those powerful Washington interests he campaigned against, revealing which have been removed from the body politic (or at least reduced) and which continue to metastasize. The Wall Street regulatory reform package Obama pushes through, or doesn’t, may render even more of a verdict on his success in changing the system he sought the White House to reform.

The best political news for the president remains the Republicans. It’s a measure of how out of touch G.O.P. leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are that they keep trying to scare voters by calling Obama a socialist. They have it backward. 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. If anything, the most unexpected — and challenging — event that could rock the White House this August would be if the opposition actually woke up.

[pepsified thinker]

<bump>

I like Frank Rich.

[Uncle $cam]

Lets talk about class, baby...*

Meet anarchist anthropologist, David Graeber.

David Graeber, was fired from Yale University. Of course, that wasn’t the official explanation. The official one reads that “his contract wasn’t renewed” because of his lack of “collegiality”. If you would allow me to translate this: the “lack of collegiality” that David had showed was when he was trying to defend his graduate students who were graduate union organizers.

Union organizers are regularly targeted at Yale. When one brilliant graduate student organizer was almost kicked out for clearly fabricated reasons, David Graeber was the only member of her committee with the courage to openly stand up for her at that committee meeting, and then later at a faculty meeting. On David Graeber’s behalf, Yale graduate students have initiated a petition which has been signed by almost all graduate and good number of undergraduate students of anthropology.

http://graebersolidarity.blogspot.com/
http://www.geocities.com/graebersolidarity/


That was then, this is now, We can't even talk about class or corporations in this country, can we talk now?

What follows is a fragment of a much larger project of research on debt and debt money in human history. The first and overwhelming conclusion of this project is that in studying economic history, we tend to systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call "the economy". What's more, origins matter. The violence may be invisible, but it remains inscribed in the very logic of our economic common sense, in the apparently self-evident nature of institutions that simply would never and could never exist outside of the monopoly of violence – but also, the systematic threat of violence – maintained by the contemporary state....

David Graeber: Debt: The first five thousand years
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-0 ... er-en.html


Also, 06. Malinowski Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics was presented by David Graeber, until recently an Associate Professor at Yale, entitled Beyond Power/Knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity. (PDF link) Although Yale declined to provide a reason for Mr. Graeber's recent dismissal, it's likely that his outspoken anarchism and activism, as well as his support for a union of graduate students, were influences in the decision. He explained some of his views on anarchism, "globalization", and, yes, hope for the future, on the Charlie Rose Show. (Youtube) Weekend reading assignment: Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.

http://www.metafilter.com/52233/Class-Dismissed


Anthropology speaks out...
http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/excerpts/ ... t.html#ex1
Every time intellectuals have the chance to speak yet do not speak, they join the forces that train men not to be able to think and imagine and feel in morally and politically adequate ways. When they do not demand that the secrecy that makes elite decisions absolute and unchallengeable be removed, they too are part of the passive conspiracy to kill off public scrutiny. When they do not speak, when they do not demand, when they do not think and feel and act as intellectuals ... they contribute to the moral paralysis, the intellectual rigidity, that now grip both leaders and led around the world.

—C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War III (1958)

It is time to divert at least some of our research energies away from the minutiae of diverse problems and to focus on their broader context. What has been missing is perspective ... Anthropology appears to be a discipline that can show us how we got where we are and suggest how we might get out.

—John Bodley, Anthropology and Contemporary Human Problems (1985)

"From top to bottom of the ladder, greed is aroused without knowing where to find ultimate foothold. Nothing can calm it, since its goal is far beyond all it can attain. Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned."

_Emile Durkheim

THE PEOPLE VS LARRY FLYNT
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw4jLsIdpOg

*Sung in the tune of Salt-N-Pepa'a 'Let's Talk About Sex' yeah, I went all eighties...lol

[elpuma]

http://webabuser.blogspot.com/2009/08/michael-hudson-parasitic-finance-sector.html

Michael Hudson: The Parasitic Finance Sector

Posted On August 8, 2009 at at 11:37 AM

Fred Harrison interviews Michael Hudson
RenegadeEconomist, London (February 27 2009)
Transcript by Peter Myers (July 30 2009)
See the video - Hudson at his best:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pwAFohWBL4

Fred Harrison: How do we solve the Debt problem today?
Michael Hudson: The only way to do it is to wipe out the debts that can't
be paid. If a mortgage is $500,000 on a $250,000 house, you've got to
write down the mortgage to the market price, and you've got to have the
creditors take a loss for their bad loans.
FH: Is the bailout of the banks going to solve this financial crisis?

MH: No, the bailout of the banks is only paying the creditors, and giving
the creditors the money for the bank loans, without giving a penny of debt
relief to the actual debtors. All it means is that the government is
taking over the creditor position, kicking out the homeowners and throwing
the homes on the market.

FH: But won't the taxpayers get their money back in the end?
MH: If the taxpayers could get their money back, you can be sure that
private enterprise would have come in and bought the mortgages. If you
have the marketplace NOT buying the mortgages, if you have the banks
saying, "These are junk mortgages, and this is toxic waste", how on earth
can taxpayers make money off this toxic waste? Is it really a good
investment for the taxpayers to come in and bail out the banks that say,
"We've made junk mortgages, and this is toxic waste, and we weren't able
to sell it, to find a greater fool". There's no way the taxpayers can make
money out of that. [And even if they COULD make money, is it a good idea
for them to do so by kicking defaulting mortgagees out of their homes?]

FH: Ok, now I know you've been an economist in Wall Street, you teach
economics in universities, all over the world, actually. You're a
consultant to governments around the world, and yet you think there are
lessons to be learned from the Ancient World ­ that somehow in the
Biblical times the debt cancellation was something that we can learn from
today. In what way?
MH: Well, for 3,000 years, from Sumer to Babylonia to
the Jewish lands with the Jubilee law, they had the same policy. When a
new ruler would take the throne for the second year in Babylonia and
Sumer, he had a three-pronged solution: He would liberate the
debt-bondsmen, he would return the lands to people who'd lost them for
foreclosure, for homes ­ the basic means of self-support - and he would
annul the personal debts. By wiping the bad debts off the books, he'd
create a clean slate. This was the policy that was taken over in Jewish
law, in Leviticus, by the Jubilee Year.

FH: So you're now saying that there is a way to translate that history
into modern economics, to solve the global financial crisis.
MH: Yes. Antiquity managed to last for 3,000 years, without a financial
bubble, without an economic bubble, and continually restoring order. And
Antiquity realized something that the modern economists don't: they
realized that debts tend to grow in excess of the ability to pay. And when
the debts did that in Antiquity, the ruler would cancel the debts. Now
that was very easy in Antiquity, because most debts were tax debts owed to
the Palace ­and it's easy to cancel debts when the debts are owed to you.
It's harder to cancel debts once you got to Greece and Rome, and the debts
were owed to private creditors; that's where the problem began.

FH: So, now, 2,000 years later, we can't just cancel the debts by rule of
the Government.
MH: Well, you actually can, because the debts are going to be written off
already they estimate they've said there are eight trillion dollars worth
of bad real estate debts. Now if the Government would have just left
market conditions to take their place, when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt
in September, Lehman Brothers mortgages were trading on the market at 22
cents on the dollar. Now at this point, buyers could have come in, bought
the mortgages at 22 cents on the dollar, and then gone to the home-owners
and the real-estate on this, and said, "OK, we're going to re-negotiate
your mortgage at 22 cents, maybe 24 cents on the dollar, or even 25 cents
on the dollar" - that would have given them a profit. They would have
marked down the debts to the ability to pay, or to the market price. And
one way or other the debts are going to have to be written down to the
ability to pay, otherwise they're not going to be paid. If people can't
pay more debt, they won't pay. The question is, "How won't they pay"?

FH: So why aren't Governments doing that, writing off the debts, or
allowing the debts to be cancelled today?
MH: Very good question. The reason is that the largest contributor to the
political campaigns is the Financial Sector, and the Governments have a
choice: they can save the economy, or they can save the creditors who made
the bad loans. They've said, "We don't care about the economy, we're
bailing out the creditors ­ that's our constituency". And that's what the
Governments are doing today. They're not saving the economy; they're
saving their constituency, the creditors: they're saving London City,
they're saving Wall Street, and they're saving the bourse, and the
economy's left to shrink. And until the Government saves the economy, and
writes down the debts to the ability to pay, there's not going to be a
recovery.

FH: You're saying, then, Governments are acting in bad faith.
MH: They're not acting democratically. What the Governments have done has
been to turn from a Democracy into an Oligarchy. And we're seeing an
Oligarchy, and in fact a Kleptocracy emerge here. And the Governments are
not doing what the people expected them to do ­ they're not representing
the interests of their constituents.

FH: But President Obama says he's going to effect a change, it's not
business as usual in Washington.
MH: When Obama talks about change, he's not talking about financial
change; he's not talking about economic change. He's talking about
workmen's laws, health reform, racial equality; he's not talking about any
economic change at all, because, in fact, he's re-appointed the Bush
administrators and the Clinton administrators. He's brought back the same
people who brought us the Russian crisis. And if you want to see what
their plans are for the United States, look what Obama's team did when
they had a free hand in Russia in the 1990s. They brought the biggest
inequality and kleptocracy in modern times.

FH: So, Michael, you're in London to address a conference here at the
University of London. What is it that you're going to tell them?
MH: Well, I'm going to tell them that the Finance sector, and the Real
Estate and the Insurance sector are not part of the real economy of
production and consumption. The asset and wealth sector is different from
the production sector. You can think of the financial sector as being
wrapped around the real economy, almost like a parasite, and that's why
it's been called parasitic for so long. The financial sector extracts
interest from the economy, the property sector extracts economic rent, as
do monopolies. Now the key thing about parasites, is that it's not simply
that they extract nourishment from the host. The parasite takes over the
host's brain, to make it think it's part of the economy, to make it think
it's part of the host's own body, and, in fact, that's it almost like a
child of the host, to be protected. And that's what the financial sector
has done today. You have Obama coming out and saying, "We have to save the
banks in order to save the real economy". The fact is, you can't serve
both the parasite and the host. Now the amazing thing is that we have the
economic training tablets from Babylonia, from 2000 BC, and the
mathematical models they had of the economy, in 2000 BC, are more
sophisticated than any of the mathematical models that they use today for
government planning. And the reason is that they calculated how long it
takes for a debt to double. Any interest-rate has a doubling time. They
knew in 2,000 BC that the debts double; they also knew that the economy
grew in an S-curve. They had mathematical models for the growth of herds
in an S-curve, for agricultural production, so they knew that the tendency
was for debts to grow faster than the economy can grow, and that's why,
when every new ruler took the throne, they cancelled the debts.

FH: But, look, we've had Nobel-prize-winning economists telling hedge
funds how to operate. Are you saying they are clueless on mathematics?
MH: Well, that's a very good question. You look at the fact that Long Term
Credit Management went broke using the Nobel-prize-winners. The
mathematical models that won the Nobel Prize have led to 450 trillion
dollars of Derivative contracts that are now junk. So, what they won the
Nobel Prize for, is junk mathematics that have led to junk derivatives and
junk mortgages. That's what's happened.

Also, excellent video interview with Dr. Hudson here:

http://renegadeeconomist.com/headline/renegade-economist-special-dr-michael-hudson.html

[xsicbastardx]

Bravo Larry Flynt.

[elpuma]

http://www.insidescience.org/research/study_says_world_s_stocks_controlled_by_select_few

Study Says World's Stocks Controlled by Select Few
Companies from US, UK and Australia have the most concentrated financial power.

A recent analysis of the 2007 financial markets of 48 countries has revealed that the world's finances are in the hands of just a few mutual funds, banks, and corporations. This is the first clear picture of the global concentration of financial power, and point out the worldwide financial system's vulnerability as it stood on the brink of the current economic crisis.

A pair of physicists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich did a physics-based analysis of the world economy as it looked in early 2007. Stefano Battiston and James Glattfelder extracted the information from the tangled yarn that links 24,877 stocks and 106,141 shareholding entities in 48 countries, revealing what they called the "backbone" of each country's financial market. These backbones represented the owners of 80 percent of a country's market capital, yet consisted of remarkably few shareholders.

"You start off with these huge national networks that are really big, quite dense," Glattfelder said. “From that you're able to ... unveil the important structure in this original big network. You then realize most of the network isn't at all important."

The most pared-down backbones exist in Anglo-Saxon countries, including the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. Paradoxically; these same countries are considered by economists to have the most widely-held stocks in the world, with ownership of companies tending to be spread out among many investors. But while each American company may link to many owners, Glattfelder and Battiston's analysis found that the owners varied little from stock to stock, meaning that comparatively few hands are holding the reins of the entire market.

“If you would look at this locally, it's always distributed,” Glattfelder said. “If you then look at who is at the end of these links, you find that it's the same guys, [which] is not something you'd expect from the local view.”

Matthew Jackson, an economist from Stanford University in Calif. who studies social and economic networks, said that Glattfelder and Battiston's approach could be used to answer more pointed questions about corporate control and how companies interact.

"It's clear, looking at financial contagion and recent crises, that understanding interrelations between companies and holdings is very important in the future,” he said. "Certainly people have some understanding of how large some of these financial institutions in the world are, there's some feeling of how intertwined they are, but there's a big difference between having an impression and actually having ... more explicit numbers to put behind it."

Based on their analysis, Glattfelder and Battiston identified the ten investment entities who are “big fish” in the most countries. The biggest fish was the Capital Group Companies, with major stakes in 36 of the 48 countries studied. In identifying these major players, the physicists accounted for secondary ownership -- owning stock in companies who then owned stock in another company -- in an attempt to quantify the potential control a given agent might have in a market.

The results raise questions of where and when a company could choose to exert this influence, but Glattfelder and Battiston are reluctant to speculate.

"In this kind of science, complex systems, you're not aiming at making predictions [like] ... where the tennis ball will be at given place in given time," Battiston said. “What you're trying to estimate is … the potential influence that [an investor] has."

Glattfelder added that the internationalism of these powerful companies makes it difficult to gauge their economic influence. "[With] new company structures which are so big and spanning the globe, it's hard to see what they're up to and what they're doing,” he said. Large, sparse networks dominated by a few major companies could also be more vulnerable, he said. "In network speak, if those nodes fail, that has a big effect on the network."

The results will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Physical Review E.

Backbone of complex networks of corporations: The flow of control can be downloaded at the following link:

http://arxiv.org/abs/0902.0878

[psynapz]

Larry Flynt = Great American.

Agreed!

...but that's a bad jacket you got on there, Larry.

Too bad he has so much ‘baggage’ but at least Morris Dees can’t accuse him of being in the militia!

Was my irony too terse?

You see, he's DISabled, he talks like he's brain damaged, and he swaddles himself in lavish licentiousness as a profession and a cause, all while promoting sadly-heretical Constitutionalist philosophy. That's a bad jacket, and I'm not just talkin bout that pimp-ass velvet ugliness around his shouldas, yo.

Dig?

[barracuda]

Is there some consideration here in which only upstanding Christian goody two-shoes can have legitimate opinions regarding the pathetic levels of fucked-uppedness ongoing in the United States of Goldman Sachs? Or are you implying that he is being used in some way to control public opinion by dint of his coloration of the "liberal" issues he champions among the vast group of votes he controls?

Remember, Larry Flint is the only man to ever have called a sitting Supreme Court Justice a "cunt" in open court.

During the proceedings, Flynt reportedly shouted "Fuck this court!" and called the justices "nothing but eight assholes and a token cunt" (referring to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor).[25] Chief Justice Warren E. Burger had him arrested for contempt of court, but the charge was later dismissed.

Whatever you think of his jacket (and it's pretty easy to discredit him, I guess, though his brand of porn seems remarkably lightweight in these days of internet gay octopus anal-cam mule fellating), he's been regularly publishing anti-war literature and supporting anti-war causes and first amendment cases and has been the bane of sexo-hypocritical politicians for the last twenty or thirty years. Somebody's got to do it, even if the guy happens to favor a pink shot now and again.

ON EDIT, also the only man to have published nude photos of a first lady. Ever. And a hot one, at that.

[OP ED]

Whatever you think of his jacket

i have one just like it, only mine is purple.

[MinM]

Not too smart, to announce your tactics about "drip, drip, drip."

This gives the fascists plenty of time to mount a counter PR campaign: "Partisan exploitation, blah blah blah." And it gives the known perpetrators plenty of time to line up their excuses.

Remember, Larry Flint is the only man to ever have called a sitting Supreme Court Justice a "cunt" in open court.

During the proceedings, Flynt reportedly shouted "Fuck this court!" and called the justices "nothing but eight assholes and a token cunt" (referring to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor).[25] Chief Justice Warren E. Burger had him arrested for contempt of court, but the charge was later dismissed.

Pretty good Flynt Timeline:

Ok, here's a quickie messy timeline of 70's-80's Flynt era events as I understand them (liberally plagiarizing anyone and everyone):

Early 70’s--The Realist magazine along with another hard hitting article linking the Symbionese Liberation Army to government/private mind control operations/MK Ultra. Lyndon Larouche's researchers also published a lot of frightening stuff in this early '70s period about these synthetic radical groups that very much coincides with Mae's research. Imagine who put up the significant amount of money for these articles to be researched and written by Mae and published in The Realist? John Lennon.

1972 to 1974--Watergate

November, 1975--1970's and the 1980's--Congressman Larry McDonald was the one who spearheaded the efforts against the Bush version of the New World Order. In 1976 he wrote the introduction to the "Rockefeller File", a book exposing the Rockefeller' financial holdings and secret intentions. The book supposedly revealed that the Rockefeller had as many as two hundred trusts and foundation type organizations, and that the actual number of such foundations controlled by the family might well number into the thousands. Such control IS possible because Rockefeller banks, such as Chase Manhattan, have become the trustees for many other U.S. foundations as well; possessing the right to invest and to vote the capital and common stock of these institutions--through the trust department of the bank.

McDonald did everything in his power to warn the American public. However, as usual, the attempt was to no avail. He stated unequivocally, that the Rockefeller intended to control "--first our own country, and then the world!" He went on to state. "Do I mean conspiracy? Yes, yes I do. I am convinced there is a plot, national and international." McDonald's warning was written on legal congressional letterhead and was dated November, 1975. During the ensuing years, frustrated by the media's refusal to report his findings, he began, like others, to take his message to the streets by speaking out against these forces publicly to anyone who would listen to him.

1978--The CIA was in a nervous state in 1978 because of the House Select Committee's investigations; all the spooks needed was some minor character in the conspiracy to surface and take Larry Flynt’s million dollar bait.

February 17, 1978--Enquirer had a large story about a Flynt press conference announcing his search for absolution to the JFK assassination. This article featured a photo of Flynt standing next to Robert Groden.

March 6, 1978—Larry Flynt and attorney shot, Flynt paralyzed

November 18, 1978--Leo Joseph Ryan, Jr., US Representative killed in Guyana shortly before the Jonestown Massacre. Famous for vocal criticism of the judicial excess of the CIA, authoring the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, which would have required extensive CIA notification of Congress about planned covert operations. Shortly after his death, the Amendment was quietly dropped. Ryan was also an early critic of L. Ron Hubbard and his Scientology movement and of the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon.

Note: Mark Lane barely escaped death in Guyana.

Dec 8, 1980—Peace activist and truth funder John Lennon murdered before war-profiteers Bush/Reagan were inaugurated. (Oh, happy anniversary John…)

Early 80’s--Larry Flynt's Hustler magazine began sporting hard hitting and serious investigative anti-conspiracy journalism in its pages. Larry Flynt came into orbit with researcher Mae Brussell after she contacted him and explained who the personnel involved in the failed assassination attempt against him were which put Flynt permanently in a wheelchair.

1983, Flynt offered Brussell her own magazine, The Rebel, so she could get exposure outside of Hustler

Nov 22/83--The Rebel debuted. Flynt was essentially exposing the Iran Contra players three years before such a phrase existed and the ties of the present White House to the global fascist cartels and the victors and plotters of the Kennedy assassination.

The Reagan-Bush Whitehouse team sized Flynt up as a real threat and so trusty assets G Gordon Liddy and Gordon Novel dispatched themselves upon Larry's empire.

How did Novel get an in with Flynt? Allegedly by supplying him with covertly taken photographs of Republican congressman Larry MacDonald having sex with a woman other than his wife. Flynt published them in Hustler along with a lewd variation on "Old MacDonald Had A Farm."

Now, back to Gordon Novel and G Gordon Liddy. Could you imagine that Flynt has these two hanging out with him at his house and eating with him while working with Mae Brussell who had been exposing Liddy and Novel for years as dangerous operatives on behalf of the military industrial complex she and Flynt were hoping to resist? Mae repeatedly warned Flynt to "get these people out of your house." Flynt, a self-made man, thought he could handle them. After it was all over he admitted: "Mae, you were right, I never should have let these guys in."

After Liddy and Novel departed, Larry Flynt was almost vegetable, his wife dead from AIDS, and Hustler purged of its investigative articles and writing team and Rebel eliminated from existence altogether.

August 31, 1983—Larry McDonald's courageous efforts came to an abrupt end when he was killed aboard the Korean Airliner 007 flight, which "accidentally" strayed over Soviet airspace and was "accidentally" shot down.

He was on his way to the World Anti-Communist League meeting in South Korea, Senator Jesse Helms and 34 others in the delegation took one flight to the meeting, Larry was placed all alone on another flight: KAL 007, which was blown up in mid air when it intentionally entered Soviet airspace for two and a half hours as the pilot was instructed to do and was subsequently blown up. The pilot's wife doubled his life insurance policy just before the flight after he warned her that he was doing a risky flight. "

By early '84, Rebel was no more.--Mae said they'd given Flynt painkillers that xxxxed his judgement up and made him want to jump from an airplane to his death to protest the New York Times' refusal to let him buy a full page carrying his view of the KAL 007 disaster. Advertisers naturally wouldn't touch Rebel.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... opic=22688

One could say Larry Flynt moved in circles where things knowable could be known. ~ John Dolva

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... 771&page=2

BTW that part about Sandra Day O'Connor was interesting. Especially in light of Scalia's demise and she's still around and kicking apparently. Yet 10-years ago she stepped aside so George W could make his mark on the bench. I've always wondered if they had something on her or threatened her in some way?

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