Crooks & Liars posted this interview with economist Michael Hudson, a distinguished research professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City.
He had more good observations about what is going on in our economy than I could excerpt in four paragraphs.
In addition to the stuff about wages & taxes I have excerpted, he explained how the financial sector functions like a parasite on not just workers, but actual industry other than shifting money from one pocket to another. In particular, he mentioned Alan Greenspan praising the trend of most of our wages dropping.
The tick has realized that they have just about sucked this dog dead, so they are moving their money off-shore to rising BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) economies.
Unfortunately, he didn't mention any parasite removal therapies, so we just have to hope the dog is still clinging to life when the parasite detaches and moves fully to his next victim, and we can somehow recover.
I think the solution is for hacker groups like anonymous to mess with or even erase their off-shore accounts often enough that their wealth becomes meaningless and they can't pay their butlers, cooks, security guards, and ass-wipers, who will then give them the ass-kicking they so richly deserve.
they're (the deficit commission) essentially appointed by the banking interests. When the government runs into debt, it has to borrow from the banks. They want to scale down government debt in order to scale down government taxes. So it's part of a one-two punch against the economy, basically.
To the deficit commission, a depression is the solution to the problem, not a problem. That's what they're trying to bring about, because you need a depression if you're going to lower wages by 20 percent.JAY: And why do they want to do that?
HUDSON: Because they have the illusion that if you pay labor less, somehow you re going to make the economy more competitive, and the economy can earn its way out of debts --meaning their employers, the banks and the companies and make more profits and pay more bonuses and stock options, and somehow their constituency, Wall Street and the corporate economy, will become richer if they can only impoverish the economy....
{snip}
The parasite is basically the financial sector. That's the deficit commission. That's the largest financier of the Obama administration. Obama appointed Wall Street lobbyists for the deficit commission, and basically their mind is a one-track mind: reduce labor's wages. So what we have here is a dumb parasite, not a parasite. That's the problem that's facing the American economy today. The problem is that the parasite's not only taken over the brain of the economy, which was supposed to be the government, but it's taken over its own brain in the process. And it actually imagines that corporations can make larger profits and the industrial, the financial system can survive if they just bring on a depression. In fact, it'll be the exact opposite.
{snip}
From their point of view, let's look at how Wall Street and the large corporations view of the economy. They look at two cost functions. One is the cost of doing business --the cost of hiring labor and producing goods. But the other cost is that of taxes. The object is to reduce their taxes by shifting the tax burden off finance, off industry, onto labor. And the function of the deficit commission is to
change the tax system, to get rid of the taxes that fall on capital, and to make the taxes fall only on labor. That's going to at least free them from the government so that they can use all of the government's credit-creating power to bail themselves out.
So the second thing they want to do after cutting taxes is to cut social spending so that as much of the government spending power as possible is available to bail out the inevitable collapse when it comes financially and to give subsidies to companies...http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/shock-doctrine-break-economy-lower-wa
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