Tag Archives: plutocracy

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Moral Hazard

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View From the Top – Part 1, January 29 2009:

Mort Zuckerman, co-founder and chairman of Boston Properties, talks to Chrystia Freeland, US managing editor, and the economic crisis, the credit crunch and what government intervention should look like.

At about 3:20:

Zuckerman: …some how or another the federal govt is going to have to join in some way with guaranteeing bank loans. Not the full amount but let’s just say that commercial banks would make loans for 10 or 15 or 20…

Freeland: Guarantee new loans?

Z: New loans, not old loans. Because we must find a way to start credit flowing in the economy again or else we stand a chance of a real bust. So some how or another we have to get the government involved.

F: Wouldn’t that impose a risk of moral hazard? Isn’t that sort of Fanny Freddization all over again…

Z: Moral hazard, ideology, these are the things we can no longer think about – when you’re talking about saving the system. I wouldn’t care if we save the system by violating concerns about moral hazard or ideology.

F: If the govt has to intervene even more deeply in the financial system how much extra money do you think it’s going to end up spending on that?

Z: Well I saw where Larry Summers estimated that it would take somewhere between a trillion and a half dollars and three trillion dollars just in a sense to refloat the financial system. I think that’s a very good range. If anything I would come out near the top end of the range.

F: Of government money?

Z: Or government credit.

F: And do you think the American people, the American political system, is prepared to sign off on that amount of money?

Z: I think when they see what the alternatives are I think they’ll be prepared to do that.

At about 6:45:

Z: …because without that confidence nothing will work. No matter what this is a consumer led economy. 72% of our economy is based on consumption. If the consumer holds back and pulls back – which he or she can do – people can live very well with alot of what they already have other than food and drink and fuel.

F: No one needs to buy a new a car this year, no one needs to buy a new TV set.

Z: Right. A lot of people can live – it’s the TV programming that needs to be changed not the TV set. And I’ll tell ya, this is going to be an extraordinary year in American public life no matter who is in the Congress and who is in the White House.

View From the Top – Part 2, January 29 2009 begins:

F: You’re also a publisher. How is the print publishing business doing?

Z: Well the print publishing business is an oxymoron. It is no longer a business. It is an advertising driven business and the advertisers have driven elsewhere.

Zuckerman goes on to claim that almost every major newspaper is losing money, but that he didn’t get into the business to make money, he’s just addicted to journalism.

At about 8:05:

F: Has the Madoff affair had a particular impact on the American jewish community?

Z: Well I suppose on some level it is, the fact is that what he did was completely against jewish values, against not only the way jews contribute to a community in human terms but in financial terms – he robbed alot of charities of the funds which they are contributing to…

F: Specifically actually jewish charities that he was involved in.

Z: Yeah, alot of jewish charities, yes. My charity isn’t specifically a jewish charity – I mean I support cancer research, and scholarships, and things like that, but having said that, but you know as I said Ponzi, last time I checked, was an Italian and he was the person who gave the name to this kind of thing and it doesn’t mean that all Italians are involved in this. So the fact that he happens to be jewish, he’s also a sociopath, and that was the dominant feature of this man, who was willing to damage all sorts of people almost without remorse.

Freeland would seem to disagree. She’s concerned about the particular impact on jews, and specifically actually jewish charities.

It’s easy to imagine Madoff, at least up until December 2008, was thinking about his private pyramid scheme along the same lines Zuckerman is still thinking about the larger consumer-based economy: moral hazard, ideology, these are the things we can no longer think about – when you’re talking about saving the system.

Jewish charities. Keep people spending. Save the system. This is how jews really contribute to a community in financial terms.

Ponzi, last time I checked, was a piker compared to Madoff. From here on Madoff should be the person who gives the name to this kind of thing. As Zuckerman should readily agree, nobody will think that means all jews are involved.

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The Jewish Bond

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We start with some facts as recovered from many sources sprinkled across the philo-semitic media. My emphasis.

‘All Just One Big Lie’
Bernard Madoff was a Wall Street whiz with a golden reputation. Investors, including Jewish charities, entrusted him with billions. It’s gone.

It may be the largest fraud in the history of Wall Street, authorities said. Madoff is charged with stealing as much as $50 billion, in part to cover a pattern of massive losses, even as he cultivated a reputation as a financial mastermind and prominent philanthropist.

Madoff’s investors included a number of prominent hedge funds and the firm of Fred Wilpon, the owner of the New York Mets. Several may have sustained billions of dollars in losses.

But the damage appears to be deepest in the small world of Jewish philanthropy, where Madoff was a leading figure. The North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System said it lost $5 million. The Julian J. Levitt Foundation, based in Texas and focused on Jewish causes, lost about $6 million. Yeshiva University, a New York institution where Madoff served on the board, said it was examining how much money it invested with his firm.

Madoff’s own $19 million foundation, which gave to a range of New York and Jewish causes, also was wiped out.

Madoff’s alleged $50 billion fraud hits other investors

“Madoff’s investors included captains of industry, corporations — some of which are publicly traded — that used Madoff almost as a high-yielding cash management account, endowments, universities, foundations and, importantly, many high-profile funds of funds,” said Douglas Kass, who heads hedge fund Seabreeze Partners Management.

“It appears that at least $15 billion of wealth, much of which was concentrated in southern Florida and New York City, has gone to ‘money heaven,'” he said.

Federal agents arrested Madoff at his apartment on Thursday after prosecutors said he told senior employees that his money management operations were “all just one big lie” and “basically, a giant Ponzi scheme.”

One woman said that when she called the firm’s offices on Thursday she was told it was “business as usual.”

Another investor groused, “Business as usual? Of course it’s business as usual. We’re getting screwed left and right.”

“I expect to get back zero,” said Floridian Susan Leavitt, who invested through Madoff. “When he tells the feds he has $200 million to $300 million left out of billions, what can you expect?”

Madoff said “there is no innocent explanation” for his activities, and that he “paid investors with money that wasn’t there,” according to the federal complaint.

Prosecutors also accused Madoff of wanting to distribute as much as $300 million to employees, family members and friends before turning himself in.

Charged with one count of securities fraud, he faces up to 20 years in prison and a $5 million fine. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed separate civil charges.

Madoff is a member of Nasdaq OMX Group Inc’s nominating committee. His firm has said it is a market-maker for about 350 Nasdaq stocks.

He is also chairman of London-based Madoff Securities International Ltd, whose chief executive, Stephen Raven, said the firm was “not in any way part of” the New York-based market-maker.

Fund Fraud Hits Big Names

Details emerged Friday of how Mr. Madoff ran the alleged scam, fostering a veneer of exclusivity and creating an A-list of investors that became his most powerful marketing tool. From New York and Florida to Minnesota and Texas, the money manager became an insider’s choice among well-heeled investors seeking steady returns. By hiring unofficial agents, tapping into elite country clubs and creating “invitation only” policies for investors, he recruited a steady stream of new clients.

During golf-course and cocktail-party banter, Mr. Madoff’s name frequently surfaced as a money manager who could consistently deliver high returns. Older, Jewish investors called Mr. Madoff ” ‘the Jewish bond,’ ” says Ken Phillips, head of a Boulder, Colo., investment firm. “It paid 8% to 12%, every year, no matter what.”

One of the largest clusters of Madoff investors was in Florida, where losses could be substantial. Mr. Madoff relied on a network of friends, family and business colleagues to attract investors. According to investors and agents, some of these agents were paid commissions for harvesting investors. Others had separate, lucrative business relationships with Mr. Madoff.

“If you were eating lunch at the club or golfing, everyone was always talking about how Madoff was making them all this money,” one investor says. “Everyone wanted to sign up.”

Jeff Fischer, a top divorce attorney in Palm Beach, says many of his clients were also Mr. Madoff’s clients. “Every big divorce that came through my office had portfolio positions with Madoff,” he says.

Two of his investors said that among his clients, Mr. Madoff was considered a money-management legend; they would joke that if Mr. Madoff was a fraud, he’d take down half the world with him.

Mr. Madoff’s main go-between in Palm Beach was Robert Jaffe, say several investors. Mr. Jaffe is the son-in-law of Carl Shapiro, the founder and former chairman of apparel company Kay Windsor Inc. and an early investor and close friend of Mr. Madoff’s. Mr. Jaffe, a philanthropist in Palm Beach, attracted many investors from the Palm Beach Country Club in Palm Beach, Fla.

“He was a low-key guy,” Ms. Manzke says. “He would say, ‘Look, I’m a market-maker, and I don’t want anyone to know I’m running money.’ It was always for select people. He was always closed, he wasn’t taking new money.”

The federal complaints against Mr. Madoff allege his fraudulent activities came through a secretive private wealth-management wing of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, the investment firm he founded in 1960. On Wall Street, his company was perhaps better known for its operations in market-making — the business of serving as a middleman between buyers and sellers — and proprietary trading.

Through those higher-profile parts of his operation, Mr. Madoff was a pioneer in trading New York Stock Exchange shares away from the exchange. He is a past chairman of the board of directors of the Nasdaq Stock Market as well as a member of the board of governors of the National Association of Securities Dealers and a member of numerous committees of the organization, according to his firm’s Web site.

Mr. Madoff owns a home in Roslyn, N.Y., records show, and an elaborate beachfront home and grounds in Montauk on Long Island.

Mr. Madoff and his wife live in an apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side where property records list individual apartments valued at more than $5 million. One property database estimated the 2008 market value of Mr. Madoff’s two-floor unit to be roughly $9 million. For years he has served as president of the building’s co-op board, according to a tenant.

Madoff’s arrest in billion-dollar fraud case shocks Palm Beach investors

Bernard Madoff didn’t accept money from just anyone. Clients ideally had to have at least $10 million to open an account with his New York investment firm.

While such wealthy people don’t turn up just anywhere, the Palm Beach Country Club provided enough to make Madoff’s membership in the predominantly Jewish club worthwhile.

Investing with Madoff also was attractive because the returns were so high, Rampell said. Even in recent years, when other securities tanked, returns were as high as 11 percent to 15 percent, he said.

“There is no innocent explanation,” Madoff told FBI agents, according to court documents. He told the agents he “paid investors with money that wasn’t there,” that he was “broke” and that he expected to go to jail.

The only bright spot for investors is that they may be able to get tax refunds if the investment returns were bogus, Rampell said. But, he acknowledged, that would be little compensation, either financially or psychologically, for those who knew him at the country club.

The auto industry may have to grovel for government money, but “bright spots” magically appear for the members of Madoff’s network.

Madoff Investors May Be Protected By Government
Judge Says Those Duped Need Aid Under The Securites Investor Protection Act

Meanwhile, a federal judge on Monday threw a lifesaver to investors who may have been duped, saying they need the protection of a special government reserve fund set up to help investors at failed brokerage firms.

U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton ordered that clients of Madoff’s private investment business seek relief under a federal statute created to rescue cheated investors. Stanton also ordered that business be liquidated under the jurisdiction of a bankruptcy court and named attorney Irvin H. Picard as trustee to oversee that process.

Stanton signed the order after the Securities Investor Protection Corporation asked that steps be taken to protect investors in the scheme, which has ensnared several major banks and prominent figures as victims and could result in as much as $50 billion in losses.

Congress created the SIPC in 1970 to protect investors when a brokerage firm fails and cash and securities are missing from accounts. Funds can be used to satisfy the remaining claims of each customer up to a maximum of $500,000. The figure includes a maximum of up to $100,000 on claims for cash.

SIPC President Stephen Harbeck said in a statement that the fund’s task will be harder than in other bankruptcies because of the size of the misappropriation and the condition of the defunct firm’s records.

Harbeck said it would be unlikely that the trustee can transfer the firm’s customer accounts to a solvent brokerage firm. He added that it was impossible at this point to determine what share each investor might hold in any remaining assets.

From its inception through December 2007, the SIPC has advanced $507 million and made possible the recovery of $15.7 billion in assets for an estimated 626,000 investors, the fund said on its web site.

If the SIPC bails out the Madoff scheme “investors” it will amount to roughly the sum total the SIPC has paid out over its entire 38 year lifetime. Sure, that’s reasonable. Ben Bernanke will just have to print another $15B.

Sailer’s Bernie Madoff as an “affinity scam” is noteworthy mainly for its comments, including:

up yours new yawk said…

What’s interesting about this Madoff scandal is the growing list of liberals and neoconservatives who felt that involvement with charities that work to keep the Jewish bloodlines clean are respectable enterprises to be involved with.

How many Jews are castigating whites for the slightest hint of racial identity and then at the same time funding various “keep it Jewish” charities?

And links in the comments, including I Knew Bernie Madoff Was Cheating, That’s Why I Invested with Him:

So why did these smart and skeptical investors keep investing? They, like many Madoff investors, assumed Madoff was somehow illegally trading on information from his market-making business for their benefit.

Auster writes in Catalog of believers:

Here is a story from today’s New York Post that names many of Bernard Madoff’s clients along with how much they lost. It seems that virtually 100 percent of his believers/followers/marks were Jews and Jewish organizations, and many of them believed in him so much that they had given 100 percent of their investment capital to him.

And from Madoff discussion:

Mark P. writes:

I’m still amazed that a handful of Jews managed to amass $50 billion…

It’s like some kind of…overclass…

(wink) (wink)

He links a video of a round table discussion featuring Madoff discussing his business in October 2007, Bernie Madoff on the modern stock market. Watch this video and note the similarity to the financial bullshit shoveled on your TV every evening. The jargon. The confidence. “We make money by taking risks.” Risk? What risk? When these brainiacs get in trouble their cronies in government put taxpayers on the hook to bail them out.

One thing that could be revealed by this scandal, but probably won’t be, is just how much wealthy jewish “philanthropy” actually goes to exclusively jewish causes. Sailer commenter “up your new yawk” notes the double standard. For jews it is considered perfectly normal to support jewish causes, but the idea of Whites contributing to or participating in or even saying nice things about exclusively White causes is grounds for an accusation that you want to load all the non-Whites onto boxcars and gas them.

A theme that is coming through, loud and clear in what I’ve heard from the MSM, Auster, and Michael Savage, is sympathy for the “investors”. It’s disgusting. The people who participated in this scam, whining now that they’ve lost everything, don’t deserve any sympathy. They’re like the border-running aliens packed in a van that veers off a cliff trying to escape the police. They’re like the bank robbing accomplices who get cheated out of their share by their crooked ringleader.

For years these “investors” thought they were golden, wringing their soft greedy hands with glee over the returns from their invite-only too-good-to-be-legal “jewish bond”. It paid them far more than the lowly nobody putzes, ie. the rest of us, could make via honest means, and they knew it. We nobodies must accept a return that is stable but doesn’t even beat inflation, or we play 401K roulette and take on real risk. Hands up, how many of you lost big money in your 401K this year and can expect the government to bail you out? Hands up, how many don’t have any savings?

This Madoff scheme is being described as the “biggest fraud in history”. No, that would be the September bailout as a whole. Madoff is but a small window into finance capitalism’s corruption and insolvency. Even so, Madoff’s collapse exposes a few major lies upon which the thoroughly judaized progressivist-globalist regime is based: “we’re all equal, but some of us are more equal”, “we deserve these big profits because we take big risks”, and “trust us, we’re really smart and know what we’re doing”.

The white-collar criminals have been running amok for some time. The rest of us have only recently been informed that we and our children will be paying the bill, and though we don’t know what the total is we can be sure it’s enormous. The brainiacs told us we needed millions of aliens to build homes for millions of aliens. Now we have too many homes and the next thing they’ll be telling us we have to legalize all the aliens, right away, and import even more in order to save the Holy Economy – that mother of all pyramid schemes.

Now come these poor jewish millionaire “investors” – “getting screwed left and right”. It’s perfectly natural for us to wonder, how did a handful of jews manage to amass so many billions? And it’s perfectly natural to conclude that it involved screwing the rest of us left and right.

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The Greatest Ripoff in History

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It has been difficult to compose a reaction to the past few weeks worth of economic news. Each time it seems the totality of this monstrous putsch is finally in view yet another grasping tentacle flops out. One inconceivably brazen move has followed another, each pushing farther past precedent and revealing a new, previously unimaginable depth of avarice. The taxpaying cattle have been informed, drip by drip, that we are on the hook for whatever the bankers and their agents in “our” government demand of us. Tens of billions here. Hundreds there. A trillion should fix it. Maybe.

The massive fraud now unfolding demonstrates how financiers hold the real power in this country. Not Bush – nor Obama or McCain after him. And not Congress. The only role for these political figureheads is to point fingers for a while, scream that the sky will fall if they don’t act immediately, and finally to join together and rustle the cattle into capitulating to the banker blackmail.

We are witnessing a transfer of wealth unprecedented in size and rate. It is the mother of all liquidity events. The details change on a daily basis, but this much is clear: This is not a constitutional republic. It is not democracy. We live under a plutocracy.

Takuan Seiyo’s The Case Of The “Disappeared” Subprime Minority Borrower identifies the most recent roots of this transformation (original links and emphasis):

The financial debacle of a $1.4 trillion pool of subprime mortgages of which at least half are unpayable and 25% are irrecoverable did not start in a political vacuum. For years, the American political Establishment badgered the banking industry about the “racism” implied in its loan portfolio. The denial of mortgage loans to “minorities” at a greater percentage than denial to whites has been deemed a prima facie evidence of racial discrimination.

Finally, with further pushing by different government branches and agencies, mortgage lenders found a solution to inconvenient reality. It was the subprime loan, with sub-viable variations such as “interest-only” and “no-money-down.”

No forces were available to combat the American economy’s unbalancing by cultural Marxists, socialists, noisy “minority” chieftains and power-hungry opportunists. Instead of leading a counteroffensive, the federal government (mostly under Republicans) pushed toward the fall. And the bankers went along—even though it was their depositors’ capital they were converting to cotton candy.

Banks started dishing out mortgages as though they were consolation prizes for the poorly educated of shaky employability, or achievement awards for the undisciplined and uneducable with no collateral.

Overwhelmingly, these prize-winners have been “people of color.”

In trampling on rules of sound banking going back at least to medieval Italy, our financial wizards discovered the eternal quest of alchemy—how to convert lead into gold, for a while at least, before it turns into garbage. Employing PhD’s in high mathematics, they diced and mixed financial offal, stuffed it into sausage skins, gave this dubious bologna properly pinstriped labels such as “Mortgage-backed Securities” and “Collateralized Debt Obligations”, and sold it off by the slice to equally greedy and heedless financial institutions down the line.

Seiyo’s analysis is good so far as it goes. He mentions the other prize-winners, the financial wizards, but fails to note the disproportionate participation of the most noisy, self-interested minority of all – jews. Not only are jews disproportionately represented in the concocting of the financial “innovations” whose astoundingly fraudulent scope is now laid bare, they are also disproportionately represented amongst those who got the ball rolling by demonizing “discrimination”, and amongst those negotiating the terms of the ripoff-“bail out”, and amongst those being “bailed out”, and amongst the 24/7 parade of pundits shamelessly shilling for “bail out” via the disproportionately jewish-owned media.

If our nominal leaders insist on pointing at the disproportion of black and latino home ownership as a problem, then it’s only right that they also acknowledge these same groups were disproportionate benefactors of loosened lending practices. And as long as group disproportions are worthy of discussion, let’s not forget to notice the “contribution” of the US’s most wealthy and favored minority group of all. Jews.

“The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men.” – Samuel Adams

Sorry Sam. We failed.

UPDATE 26 Sep 2008: One trillion, five trillion, who’s counting? According to a Bloomberg analyst:

So now they try to solve the problem by having this credit bubble actually extended and I think the $700 billion will be like a drop in the bucket because the total credit market in the U.S. is something close to $60 trillion, then you have the CDS market – credit default swap – of around $62 trillion. Then you have the whole derivatives worldwide worth about a notional $1,300 trillion. So the $700 billion is really nothing and the Treasury is just giving out this figure when actually the end figure may be $5 trillion.

He also says that last year total Wall Street compensation amounted to $68B, and of that, executive bonuses were $39B.

Tonight Juan and Hussein bickered over $18B in “earmarks” and $300B in tax cuts. Five and a half years of war in Iraq has cost almost $600B. Imagine how the big boys in the $1300T derivatives market (some 100 times the size of the US GDP, or 2000+ Iraqs) must view these trifling amounts. Think how precious their magically-derived pile of funny money is to them and how it would evaporate if middle class taxpayers got the gumption to revolt en masse. Imagine the gold-plated diaper changes even one month’s worth of widespread late mortgage payments would cause. The media pundits have been trying to guilt-trip us for being over-leveraged. Seems to me the big boys are far more leveraged than even the most irresponsible Mr and Mrs Sixpack.

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Profit, Pretense, Partying

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I’m on a brief fact-finding visit to Appalachia. It feels good to be amongst my people – even those who are down and out, and whose English I can’t always understand. Maybe I’ll write more about it when I get back.

In these tumultuous times, “Big Wall Street investment companies are taking advantage of the Federal Reserve’s unprecedented offer” to avail themselves to unprecedented amounts of taxpayer money. We can only hope some heads will roll. We can be certain none of any consequence will.

Meanwhile the freshest progressivist-globalist bigbrains are hard at work on the next boondoggle, green energy:

NECKER ISLAND,British Virgin Islands: Richard Branson was lounging under the starry midnight sky on this palm-dappled speck of an island recently when he popped a sobering question.

“So, do we really think the world is on fire?” Branson, the British magnate and adventurer, asked several guests, as a manservant scurried off to fetch him another glass of pinot grigio.

What he wanted to know was whether his high-powered visitors, among them Larry Page of Google, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, thought global warming threatened the planet.

Branson does – and so did most of his guests. So on this recent weekend on his private hideaway in the crystalline waters between the islands of Tortola and Anegada, they tried to figure out what to do about it and perhaps get richer in the process.

Something tells me that these hard-charging save-the-planet types never considered the simplest solution: stop the progressivist-globalist pyramid scheme. In other words, stop fueling turd world overpopulation with food and technology, and stop allowing overpopulating turd worlders to immigrate and overwhelm those of us, specifically the White folk, whose population has already stablized or is declining.

Hands up, how many think “global warming threatened the planet” is more important than how to “get richer in the process”? Branson didn’t need to pop that question.

“In James Bond movies, evil-doers meet in exotic settings to plot the destruction of the planet,” [chief executive of Ecology Coatings Richard] Stromback said, puffing on a cigar before dinner one night. But the people here, he said, were plotting to save the planet.

So far, however, the hopes and dreams of alternative energy have far outstripped reality. But for Stromback and many of the other participants, a confluence of two powerful forces – soaring oil prices and growing concern over global warming – means the era of economically viable green power is finally at hand.

Many executives and financiers, including some in attendance at the retreat, have a lot of money riding on global warming. Branson, for example, has invested in a host of alternative energy enterprises, including existing businesses within his sprawling Virgin Group.

Khosla, the founding chief executive of Sun Microsystems and one of the most successful venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, has at least 33 investments in “clean tech,” including new fermentation technology to make fuel-grade ethanol.

The world-managers already have alot of money riding on green energy. Uh-oh. Hold on to your wallet.

But the big question that hung over the meeting was whether the nations or the world could ever work together to tackle climate change and emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.

“We have an agreement that there should be an agreement,” said [former British prime minister and senior adviser to Bear Stearns-gobbling JPMorgan Chase Tony] Blair, who was dressed in a white polo shirt, blue cargo shorts and sneakers. “But there’s no agreement on what that agreement should be.”

Plutocrat tools can be so droll when performing for their next paycheck.

Everyone, it seemed, had some project in the works. Elon Musk, the co-founder of PayPal, talked about his latest project, Tesla Motors, a Silicon Valley company that makes sexy electric sports cars retailing for $100,000. Page has ordered one.

Brilliant! Now if only we can convince all the smog belching pickup truck driving invaders to use their tax rebates as a down payment on sexy electric sports cars.

Their poverty problem solved once again, who could begrudge these world-class egos some world-class debauchery?

There was plenty of time for fun and games, of course. After lunch one afternoon, Branson suggested that the entire gang sail off to Mosquito, a nearby island he also owns, aboard a dozen catamarans. He said there was a party over there.

Page, an avid kite surfer, struck out alone. One of Blair’s security personal trailed behind in a motorboat. As the catamarans beached up on Mosquito, music was blaring and bikini-clad women were dancing. Branson deadpanned, “Normally the girls would be naked, but the prime minister is here.”

Profit, pretense, and partying. Simple recipe for a non-solution.

UPDATE 21 Mar 2008: If your brain is big enough you don’t need to rob banks. You invent fraudulent schemes so massive they are “too big to fail”. In other words you manipulate government into collecting taxes for you:

Central banks on both sides of the Atlantic are actively engaged in discussions about the feasibility of mass purchases of mortgage-backed securities as a possible solution to the credit crisis.

Such a move would involve the use of public funds to shore up the market in a key financial instrument and restore confidence by ending the current vicious circle of forced sales, falling prices and weakening balance sheets.

Of course the financiers can think of lots of ways to get paid. That is the only real “service” they provide.

Look at the bright side. They’ll blow at least some of the money on “green” gigayachts.

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Keeping the World Safe for Plutocracy

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The evolution of evil
By Joel S. Hirschhorn
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Feb 4, 2008, 01:47

Activists and dissidents should understand that evil forces and tyrannical governments have evolved. Just as human knowledge and science expand, so do the strategies and instruments used by rulers, elites and plutocrats. By learning from history and using new technology, they have smarter tools of tyranny. The best ones prevent uprisings, revolutions and political reforms. Rather than violently destroy rebellious movements, they let them survive as marginalized and ineffective efforts that divert and sap the energy of nonconformist and rebellious thinkers. Real revolution remains an energy-draining dream, as evil forces thrive.

Most corrupt and legally sanctioned forms of tyranny hide in plain sight as democracies with free elections. The toughest lesson is that ALL elections are distractions. Nothing conceals tyranny better than elections. Few Americans accept that their government has become a two-party plutocracy run by a rich and powerful ruling class. The steady erosion of the rule of law is masked by everyday consumer freedoms. Because people want to be happy and hopeful, we have an epidemic of denial, especially in the present presidential campaign. But to believe that any change-selling politician or shift in party control will overturn the ruling class is the epitome of self-delusion and false hope. In the end, such wishful thinking perpetuates plutocracy. Proof is that plutocracy has flourished despite repeated change agents, promises of reform and partisan shifts.

The tools of real rebellion are weak. Activists and dissidents look back and see successful rebellions and revolutions and think that when today’s victims of tyranny experience enough pain and see enough political stink they too will revolt. This is wrong. They think that the Internet spreads information and inspiration to the masses, motivating them to revolt. This is wrong. They await catastrophic economic or environmental collapse to spur rebellion. This too is wrong.

Why are these beliefs wrong? Power elites have an arsenal of weapons to control and manipulate social, political and economic systems globally: corruption of public officials that make elections a sham; corporate mainstream media that turn news into propaganda; manipulation of financial markets that create fear for the public and profits for the privileged; false free trade globalization that destroys the middle class; rising economic inequality that keep the masses time-poor and financially insecure; intense marketing of pharmaceuticals that keep people passive; and addictive consumerism, entertainment and gambling that keep people distracted and pacified.

The biggest challenge for dissidents and rebels is to avoid feel-good therapeutic activism having virtually no chance of removing evil and tyranny. Idealism without practicality tactics without lofty goals, and symbolic protests pose no threat to power elites. Anger and outrage require great strategic thinking from leaders seeking revolution, not mere change. And social entrepreneurs that use business and management skills to tackle genuine social problems do nothing to achieve political reforms. To the extent they achieve results, they end up removing interest in overthrowing political establishments that have allowed the problems to fester.

What is the new tool of tyranny? Technological connectivity achieved through advanced communications and computer systems, especially the rise of wireless connectivity. The global message to the masses is simple: Buy electronic products to stay plugged in. Connectivity may give pleasure, but it gives even more power to elites, rulers and plutocrats. It allows them to coordinate their efforts through invisible cabals, to closely monitor everything that ordinary people and dissidents do, and to cooperatively and clandestinely adjust social, financial and political systems to maintain stability and dominance.

In this dystopian world, all systems are integrated to serve upper class elites and the corporate state, not ordinary people. When ordinary people spend their money to be more shackled to connectivity products, they become unwitting victims of largely invisible governmental and corporate oppressive forces. They are oblivious that their technological seduction exacerbates their political and economic exploitation. Though some 70 percent believe the country is on the wrong track, they fail to see the deeper causes of the trend. And if Americans were really happy and content with their consumer culture, then why are they stuffing themselves with so many antidepressants, sleeping pills and totally unhealthy foods? In truth, the vast majority of people are in denial about the rotten system they are trapped in (a.k.a. The Matrix). They are manipulated to keep hope alive through voting, despite the inability of past elections to stop the slide into economic serfdom.

Increasingly, the little-discussed phenomenon of economic apartheid ensures that elites live their lavish lives safely in physically separated ways. Concurrently, economic inequality rises, as the rich extract unusually high fractions of global wealth. When the rich get richer, the powerful get stronger. Does some economic prosperity trickles down to the poorest people? Perversely, the middle class is moved into the lower class. In this new physics of evil, wealth transfer is not from the rich to the poor, but from the middle class in wealthier countries to the poor in developing nations, where a few new billionaires join the global plutocracy.

Some data on economic inequality: The after-tax income of the top 1 percent of Americans rose 228 percent from 1979 through 2005, while middle class income remained flat over the last four decades. The richest 0.01 percent of earners made 5.1 percent of all income in 2005, up more than 300 percent from just 1.2 percent in 1960. Bad economic times like the present just exacerbate inequality. Even as most Wall Street companies lost billions in the subprime mortgage debacle after they had already made billions, they gave obscene bonuses to their employees: the average topped $180,000 for 2007, tripling the $61,000 in 2002. Scholars used to predict that high levels of economic inequality like we have today would lead to rebellion. But there are now insufficient tools and paths for rebellion, because the plutocracy has eliminated them. Instead, citizens are offered elections whose outcomes can be controlled and subverted by the ruling class.

The New World Order is getting what it wants: a stable two-class system, with the lower class serving the elitist upper class. The paradox is that along with rising economic inequality and apartheid is mounting consumerism and materialism that is used to pacify, distract and control the masses. That’s where easy credit and cheap products from low-wage nations are critical. The poor can have cell phones, 24-7 Internet access and increasingly cars, while the bejeweled upper class travel in private jets and yachts, vacation on private islands, and have several gated mansions maintained by servants and guarded by private police. We have a technologically advanced form of medieval society. It is working in the US and China and most other places. Elections just mask economic tyranny and slavery.

The ruling class knows how to maintain stability. Keep the masses distracted, fearful, brainwashed, insecure, and dependent on government and business sectors for survival. Train people to see themselves as relatively free consumers. Maintain the myth that ordinary people can become wealthy and join the ruling class, which theoretically is not impossible, but of no statistical significance for the masses.

Via News From The West.