Greed Is Good? Where Will America’s Sick Obsession With Wealth And Money End? by Michael Snyder | Economic Collapse | June 6, 2014 Everywhere you look, Americans appear to be extremely obsessed with wealth and money Everywhere you look, Americans appear to be extremely obsessed with wealth and money. These days, networks such as CNN endlessly run “news stories” with titles such as “Best cars for the super rich“. We have television shows where people proudly show off how wealthy they are, and it seems like Hollywood is putting out an endless parade of movies that glorify the lifestyles of the elite. We have hordes of motivational speakers and “life coaches” that will teach you how to be “more successful” in life, and every small movement in the stock market is carefully monitored by the mainstream news media. Even in the world of faith, we have an entire class of ministers known as “prosperity preachers”, and many of those ministers wear that label quite proudly. Yes, those that grew up in the 1980s may have been the “greed is good” generation, but the truth is that they didn’t have anything on us. As a society we love money, and we are not ashamed to admit it. In fact, there are times we absolutely revel in it. For example, Time Magazine published an article this year entitled “Science Proves It: Greed Is Good” and hardly anyone even raised an eyebrow. But where will America’s sick obsession with wealth and money end? Could it end up destroying us? I got the idea for this article when I was browsing through CNN’s website. The following are eight “news stories” about wealth that were featured on CNN just on Thursday alone… #1 “The richest Americans in history” #2 “How much do you need to be happy?”
#3 “Where are the super rich?” #4 “From broke to billionaire” #5 “Homes: What $25 million buys around the world” #6 “Best cars for the super rich” #7 “America’s homes are bigger than ever” #8 “Mega yacht with a movie theater” This is what passes for news these days? It has been said that we tend to talk about the things that we are obsessed with. And CNN is clearly obsessed with wealth. Not that there is anything wrong with having money. If none of us had any money, we would all be homeless and starving. So the truth is that money can be very useful. But when it becomes an idol, that is when it becomes a problem. And because we have taught entire generations of Americans that becoming wealthy is one of the primary goals in life, it is creating a tremendous amount of envy, jealousy, frustration and anger among those that have not been able to become wealthy. In recent years, the level of bitterness and resentment that the rest of the nation has toward the very wealthy has risen to an unprecedented level. It has become exceedingly apparent that the system is designed to funnel wealth to the very top of the food chain, and many of those at the bottom of the food chain are starting to become extremely upset about this. Since the last financial crisis, almost all of the income gains have gone to the top one percent of all income earners. The following comes from a recent Huffington Post article… Economic statistics show that incomes for the top 1 percent of U.S. households soared 31 percent from 2009 through 2012, after adjusting for inflation, yet inched up an average of 0.4 percent for those making less. Many economists are sounding alarms that the income gap, greater now than at any time since the Depression, is hurting the economy by limiting growth in consumer spending. And income inequality has become such a hot topic that it has even produced a New York Times bestseller by a French economist named Thomas Piketty. This is what CBS News recently had to say about his book… His book has landed on that debate like a bomb. Piketty’s thesis: that the rate of return on capital, such as real estate, dividends and other financial assets, is racing away from the rate of growth required to maintain a healthy economy. If that trend continues for an extended period of time — if wealth becomes ever more concentrated in the hands of a few — then inequality is likely to get worse, says
Piketty, 43, who started his academic career as an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who now teaches at the Paris School of Economics. Another reason “Capital” has caught the public’s attention is that inequality is evident in what are by now a host of familiar symptoms. Stagnant pay, except among the super-rich. Soaring health care and education costs. The diminished expectations commonly found in young, especially those lacking college degrees, and old alike, as retirement becomes something to endure rather than to enjoy. It would be foolish to deny that the gap between the rich and the poor is growing. Even as the stock market reaches unprecedented heights, the middle class is dying and one out of every five children in Americais living in poverty. On a global scale, the wealthiest one percent now have 65 times more wealth than the entire poorest half of the global population does. That is an astounding figure. Most people don’t realize this, but the ultra-wealthy have approximately 32 trillion dollars (that we know about) stashed in offshore banks around the planet. That amount of money would almost be about enough to pay off the entire U.S. national debt and buy every good and service produced in the United States for an entire year. Meanwhile, the poorest half of the world’s population only owns about 1 percent of all global wealth, and about a billion people throughout the world go to bed hungry every night. If greed was going to save the world, it would have done it by now. At this point, the wealthy have accumulated more wealth than they ever have before. For example, according to Zero Hedge the total amount of wealth in the U.S. has just hit a brand new record high… Earlier today the Fed released its latest Flow of Funds report, which showed that in the first quarter household net worth rose from last quarter’s $80.3 trillion to a new record high of $81.8 trillion, driven by a $1.5 trillion increase in total assets while household liabilities were virtually unchanged in the quarter. And since the Fed is onboarding all the liabilities why should households bother with debt: that’s what the central bank balance sheet is for. As for the proceeds, they go to the mega rich: of the $81.8 trillion in net worth, 70.4% of the total amount or $67.2 trillion, was in financial assets: the higest it has ever been courtesy of just one person: Ben Bernanke, and to a far lesser extent Janet Yellen who however is tasked with picking up Bernanke’s pieces. But of course most people who are rich are only rich on paper. As noted above, 67.2 trillion dollars of the total of 81.8 trillion dollars of wealth in this nation is made up of financial assets. So what happens if there is a major financial crisis (such as the derivatives bubble bursting) which causes the total amount of financial wealth in the United States to drop by 50% or more? What would such an event do to our country?
We are so obsessed with wealth and money that it is truly frightening to think about how we would react as a society if it was taken away. But this current financial bubble will not last forever. At some point it will come to an end. When it does, will our society throw a massive temper tantrum?
The Greatest Generation: Sacrificed For The Bankers by Kurt Nimmo | Infowars.com | June 6, 2014
D-Day propaganda allows the state to glorify unjustifiable wars and carnage Obama traveled to France and read from a teleprompter at Omaha Beach where over 9,000 Americans died. Obama said “blood soaked the water (and) bombs broke the sky.” Later he accompanied France’s socialist president, Francois Hollande, as a wreath was placed at a colonnade near thousands of stone crosses on the graves of the fallen. June 6 in the 70th anniversary of D-Day. The media is out in full force and world leaders in full regalia as parachute drops are recreated, fireworks are displayed, and the IMAX film “D-Day Normandy 1944,” narrated by Tom Brokaw, is screened. Over 60 million people, or 2.5% of the world population, were killed during the Second World War. Responsibility for the staggering loss of life and property is uniformly placed on Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Excluded from the official history is the fact Hitler and the National Socialists would not have risen to power without the help of international bankers and American and German corporations.
Professor Antony C. Sutton’s Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler documents how key Wall Street financiers and other international bankers subsidized Hitler and the Nazis. Sutton documents how J.P. Morgan, T. W. Lamont, the Rockefeller interests, General Electric Company, Standard Oil, National City Bank, Chase and Manhattan banks, Kuhn, Loeb and Company, and dozens of other business interests supported and subsidized Hitler and the Nazis. “American companies associated with the MorganRockefeller international investment bankers,” Sutton writes, “were intimately related to the growth of Nazi industry.” General Motors, Ford, General Electric, DuPont and “the handful of U.S. companies intimately involved with the development of Nazi Germany were — except for the Ford Motor Company — controlled by the Wall Street elite — the J.P. Morgan firm, the Rockefeller Chase Bank and to a lesser extent the Warburg Manhattan bank.” The late Senator Prescott Bush, the grandfather of former president George W. Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies profiting from the Nazi war machine and its destruction of Europe. In 2004 The Guardian newspaper “obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism,” write Ben Aris in Berlin and Duncan Campbell. “Remarkably, little of Bush’s dealings with Germany has received public scrutiny, partly because of the secret status of the documentation involving him.” Remarkable or not, much of the information linking the bankers and corporations to the Nazis is ignored by the corporate media and academia. Instead of unvarnished truth – Hitler was funded by Wall Street and a clique of international bankers profited from unprecedented mass murder – we are fed a diet half truth and outright lies and fabrication about the second deadliest war in history (the first being Muslim conquest of the Indian subcontinent more than five hundred years ago). Obama honors fallen on D-Day's 70th anniversary VIDEO BELOW http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4HCqqsrFJc Antony C. Sutton: NWO Wall Street financed Nazis 1920s+30s & Communist Russian Revolution 1917 VIDEO BELOW http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3nDbJooPu0 Prescott Bush - How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to Power VIDEO BELOW http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnHnjmCYjy4
Obama’s War On Coal Is Going To Kill Jobs And Sent Electricity Rates ‘Skyrocketing’ by Michael Snyder | American Dream | June 6, 2014 When Barack Obama was running for president in 2008, he stated that under his plan “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket”. Well, now it looks like he is finally getting around to keeping his promise. New EPA rules that are designed to cripple the coal industry could send electricity rates soaring by up to 40 percent in many rural areas. And even though we have enough coal in the ground to provide hundreds of years of energy at current levels of consumption, Obama’s plan is going to force large numbers of coal plants to completely shut down because they are simply going to become too expensive to operate. If Americans living in rural communities didn’t care for Obama before, they really are not going to like him much when these new EPA regulations start kicking in. Most people don’t remember this, but Barack Obama was very clear about what he intended to do to the coal industry even before he was elected the first time. According to fact-checking site Politifact, Obama did tell the San Francisco Chronicle that “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” if he had his way… It didn’t take us long to find Barack Obama’s original quote, which came from a videotaped interview he did with the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board very early in the presidential campaign, January 2008. “Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket,” Obama told the Chronicle . “Coal-powered plants, you know, natural gas, you name it, whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.” Fortunately, political expediency and the Republicans in Congress have blocked a lot of what Obama intended to do up until now. But at this point Obama is a lame duck president that does not have another election to worry about. So now he can start pushing a lot of things that he may have been hesitant to do so before for political reasons.
Unfortunately, this little pet project of Obama’s is going to end up costing millions of U.S. consumers a lot of money. In fact, it is being projected that the new EPA rules could raise electricity rates in some rural areas by up to 40 percent… At least six electric cooperative utilities across the U.S. mid-and-southwest could raise electricity rates up to 40 percent if the Environmental Protection Agency imposes new permitting regulations on coal-fired power plants. The regulations would cost Deseret Power Electric Cooperative (DPEC) $200 million to install advanced equipment to qualify for a Clean Air Act Title V permit. DPEC is made up of six rural electrical cooperatives that serve more than 45,000 customers in Utah, Nevada, Wyoming and Colorado. Rural cooperatives have been heavily opposed to excessive EPA regulations targeting coal plants, which they say raise rates for their customers. Ouch. And it turns out that “Obamacare for the air” is going to be far more harsh than many of Obama’s toughest critics even anticipated… Administrator McCarthy’s draconian proposals are turning out to be even worse than many critics expected. In a May 30 commentary, the Cato Institute’s Dr. Patrick J. Michaels, who is past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and a research professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia for 30 years, speculated that the new regulations would most likely require a 20-percent reduction in allowable carbon dioxide emissions. “The only way this will be possible,” he said, “will be by upgrading almost all combustion units, and the ultimate cost of the upgrades will make coal noncompetitive with much-less-expensive natural gas–fired facilities.” But, lo and behold, when McCarthy released the new regulatory proposal it was far worse, mandating a 30-percent reduction in CO2 emissions. “Climate change, fueled by carbon pollution, supercharges risks to our health, our economy and our way of life,” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said, in announcing the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. “This plan will clean the air we breathe while helping slow climate change so we can leave a safe and healthy future for our kids.” But this is not just about cleaner air. The truth is that this is what Obama always intended – a war on coal. For example, back in 2008 candidate Obama made the following statement regarding coal…
“So, if somebody wants to build a coal plant, they can — it’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.” And a key environmental adviser to Obama, Professor Daniel Schrag, said the following during an interview with the New York Times… “Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having awar on coal. On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.” This is extremely unfortunate, because we have enough coal to help meet our energy needs for a very, very long time. According to an article by William F. Jasper, the federal government admits that we have enough coal to last us approximately 250 more years… According to the federal Energy Information Agency (EIA), 45 percent of the country’s annual four trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity are generated from coal. And, says the EIA, we have a Demonstrated Reserve Base of 496 billion short tons of coal, of which 272 billion tons are considered recoverable with current technology. With U.S. usage at 1.1 billion tons per year, we have about 250 years’ supply at the present rate of consumption. But instead, these new EPA regulations are going to force coal plants to shut down all over the nation, and the rest will be forced to raise rates substantially. According to a Reuters article from last year, it was being projected that more than 200 coal plants would be shut down in the United States over the next decade. And now that these new EPA regulations are much harsher than anticipated, it is inevitable that the number of coal plants that will end up closing will be much higher than that. At a time when the U.S. economy is already struggling, this is something that we do not need. In the end, thousands of good jobs will be lost and U.S. consumers will be shelling out millions of dollars more for electricity than they otherwise should have thanks to Obama’s war on coal. Hopefully someone out there will fight these regulations while there is still time to do so.
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