When plunder becomes a way of life

moyers & co...

Here’s what we’re up against. Read it and weep: “America’s Plutocrats Play the Political Ponies.” That’s a headline in “Too Much,” an Internet publication from the Institute for Policy Studies that describes itself as “an online weekly on excess and inequality.”

Yes, the results are in and our elections have replaced horse racing as the sport of kings. Only these kings aren’t your everyday poobahs and potentates. These kings are multi-billionaires, corporate moguls who by the divine right, not of God, but the United States Supreme Court and its Citizens United decision, are now buying politicians like so much pricey horseflesh. All that money pouring into super PACs, much of it from secret sources: merely an investment, should their horse pay off in November, in the best government money can buy.

They’re shelling out fortunes' worth of contributions. Look at just a few of them: Mitt Romney’s hedge fund pals Robert Mercer, John Paulson, Julian Robertson and Paul Singer – each of whom has ponied up a million or more for the super PAC called “Restore Our Future” -- as in, "Give us back the go-go days, when predators ruled Wall Street like it was Jurassic Park.”

[...]

When all is said and done, this race for the White House may cost more than two billion dollars. What’s getting trampled into dust are the voices of people who aren't rich, not to mention what's left of our democracy. As Democratic pollster Peter Hart told The New Yorker magazine’s Jane Mayer, “It’s become a situation where the contest is how much you can destroy the system, rather than how much you can make it work. It makes no difference if you have a ‘D’ or an ‘R’ after your name. There’s no sense that this is about democracy, and after the election you have to work together, and knit the country together.”

These gargantuan super PAC contributions are not an end in themselves. They are the means to gain control of government – and the nation state -- for a reason. The French writer and economist Frederic Bastiat said it plainly: "When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." That’s what the super PACs are bidding on. For the rest of us, the ship may already have sailed.

rape, pillage and plunder...

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Greece's death sentence

mike whitney... here's a teaser...

It’s just corporate pillaging gone haywire. Greece is a big pinata that’s just been cracked open and everyone is pushing and shoving to grab their fistful of candy.

by all means, go read it all, but stay close to the toilet in case of retching...

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The wealthy continue to prosper while plundering the assets of the masses

in greece as in the u.s. as in the uk as in the rest of the world...

from spiegel...

Greece is tightening its belt -- and the number of people living in poverty is surging as a result. Thousands line up in front of food banks and resort to rifling through rubbish bins. The country's financial crisis is rapidly turning into a social one -- while wealthy tax evaders manage to get off scot-free.

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In 2010, the number of jobless in Greece rose by 230,000, to reach 14.8 percent. Given Greece's weak social safety net, unemployment is more or less tantamount to social bankruptcy. For example, unemployment benefits are only available for a year at a monthly rate of less than €500. After that, the state offers practically no assistance. Officials estimate that only about 280,000 of the 800,000 peoplhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gife without jobs are still eligible to claim unemployment benefits. This has resulted in a dramatic rise in the number of homeless people -- by up to 25 percent in Athens alone.

According to official data, unemployment is expected to climb to between 17 percent and 18 percent by the end of 2011, but the true figure could be as high as 23 percent. "That would be 1.2 million jobless people," Robolis says [professor of economics and social policy at Athens' Panteion University and director of the Labor Institute of the General Confederation of Greek Workers]. The last time Greece saw something like this was in 1961, when the introduction of modern farming technology put thousands of agricultural laborers out of work.

what isn't mentioned in the article is the massive privatization scheme that accompanies the greek eu bailout... basically, greece is being forced to divest of all of its principal assets in order to satisfy the terms of the eu loans, effectively resulting in wiping out greek sovereignty and putting the ownership of the country in the hands of our already super-rich elites...

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Yeah, boomers (like me) aren't going to sit still for Social Security and Medicare rape and pillage

Madison a Foretaste of Things to Come: the Next Big Occupation Could be Boomers Taking Over the Capitol Buildingra

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Nobody goes to jail ... because the entire system set up to monitor and regulate Wall Street is fucked up

yeah... something finally grabbed me...

matt taibbi in rolling stone...

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

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To understand the significance of this, one has to think carefully about the efficacy of fines as a punishment for a defendant pool that includes the richest people on earth — people who simply get their companies to pay their fines for them. Conversely, one has to consider the powerful deterrent to further wrongdoing that the state is missing by not introducing this particular class of people to the experience of incarceration. "You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street," says a former congressional aide. "That's all it would take. Just once."

But that hasn't happened. Because the entire system set up to monitor and regulate Wall Street is fucked up.

and there ya have it...

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Will the bankster, super-rich, elite rape and plunder of the U.S. never cease...?

more on how the banksters are feathering their nests at the expense of homeowners...

With foreclosure looming and powerless to do little else, troubled homeowners trying to hang onto their home are being advised to just stay in their homes despite foreclosure proceedings.

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More pandering to the corporatocracy, this time Big Sugar

one of the little known stories of corporate rape and pillage in the u.s. involves "big sugar," a virtual monopoly that has kept almost all of the government of florida, city, county and state, as well as a large chunk of the federal government in its pocket for generations... doesn't look like that's about to change any time soon...

When Gov. Charlie Crist announced Florida’s $1.75 billion plan to save the Everglades by buying out a major landowner, United States Sugar, he declared that the deal would be remembered as a public acquisition “as monumental as the creation of the nation’s first national park, Yellowstone.”

[...]

Nearly two years later, the governor’s ambitious plan to reclaim the river of grass, as the famed wetlands are known, is instead on track to rescue the fortunes of United States Sugar.

The proposal was downsized only five months after it was announced. By April 2009, amid the deepening recession, the state said it could afford to purchase only 72,800 acres of United States Sugar’s land, for $536 million. The company would stay in business and the state would retain the option of buying the remaining 107,000 acres at a future date.

United States Sugar dictated many of the terms of the deal as state officials repeatedly made decisions against the immediate needs of the Everglades and the interests of taxpayers, an examination of thousands of state e-mail messages and records and more than 60 interviews showed.

[...]

Negotiations favored United States Sugar from the start, when the state accepted two outside firms’ appraisals of the company’s land that used figures from the height of the real estate market, according to documents.

When a “fairness opinion” commissioned by the state found that those appraisals had overvalued the land by $400 million, Florida officials orchestrated a public relations campaign to discredit the findings, internal e-mail showed. Appraisers from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, which was required to sign off on the deal, were also cut out of the process after raising concerns, e-mail messages showed.

When it came time to decide which land to buy, state officials acknowledged that United States Sugar was, as one official put it during an interview, “pretty much in the driver’s seat.” The water district overseeing the restoration will end up with six large disconnected parcels under the current deal, including all of United States Sugar’s citrus groves.

florida has always been for sale and you can be sure that the pockets of many florida politicos were well-lined courtesy of this deal...

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