Posted on 03/16/2011 10:50:11 AM PDT by mewykwistmas
New York Fed President William Dudley got an earful this week at town-hall style meeting in Queens earlier this week. When the former Goldman Sachs chief economist tried to explain why the Fed looks at "core" inflation, which excludes food and energy, he drew a hostile response, according to wire service reports.
"You have to look at the prices of all things," Dudley said. "Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful." ...... "The top 1% is cut off from the rest of society," he says in the accompanying video. "They don't know what's going on in America anymore. For them life couldn't be more booming [but] it's falling apart" for ordinary Americans.
"What we're seeing is the top [1%] is winning in international markets, winning in the bailouts, winning in government favors and winning in tax cuts," he says. "It's win-win-win."
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
Excellent article. What we have in America today is not free market capitalism, but a soft “fascism” that is enforced by large companies that buy government favor and is enforced by the liberal courts.
If people really and truly want to control the Feds, control your states. You can’t recall the politicians in Washington but you can recall your state, city and county politicians and put in those that will control Washington. The states control Washington DC.........if they want to.
It makes no sense to me why food and energy prices are omitted from the inflation measure. The article said Mr. Dudley was trying to explain, but the article did not give his explanation. Crummy article.
Very true...Like the destructive trade policies...They only made the super wealthy wealthier and only a hand full of people really benefited from these terrible policies....Now, most in America are having trouble simply finding a job and struggling to keep their homes...
Facism is a form of collectivism. Fascism is a form of socialism.
What we see, are very rich and powerful people using government bailouts and regulations in order to enrich themselves and control the means of production. We might think, "Oh, he's rich, he must be an evil capitalist who is exploiting the poor" but that would be wrong. People like Soros and or the guys at Goldman Sachs are socialists who are rich and exploiting the poor.
The problem is, the Left likes people like the Kennedy's or John Kerry or Nancy Pelosi (all Fascists who use the government and exploit the poor) and pretends that these stalwart warriors are fighting the evil capitalists (Buffett, Soros, Bill Gates). Well, everybody I named is a Leftist. They're all on the same team.
The top 1% is making out really well -- and they hate capitalism. Capitalism allows real competition by real people -- the folks who are already at the top of the heap don't like that idea. With Fascism, they all get to play the game with a stacked deck. They like that just fine.
I’ve been re-reading some old economics texts recently. What the heck, they’re great bedtime reading.
Anyway, Smith describes mercantilism pretty well. What I think we have today is a perverse form of mercantilism, where it is sort of turned inside-out.
The same people benefit, however, and they access the same levels of government to do their bidding as in Smith’s mercantile examples.
However, replacing crony capitalism with big union collective bargaining is not the answer.
The only side I care about is the taxpayers'.
“It makes no sense to me why food and energy prices are omitted from the inflation measure. The article said Mr. Dudley was trying to explain, but the article did not give his explanation. Crummy article.”
His explanation is stupid: I can do without an iPad for many years, but I need bread and gas for my car every day.
This guy brags that he's a professor and that teachers have been unfairly treated. Bulls$%t! I'm a retired professor, too, and the tenure system is a huge mistake. There's a lot of dead wood at all levels in education, teachers included, and to try and make us believe they are unfairly treated is a joke. Unions exist because people have different abilities and some workers should make more than others. The concept of wage equality is pure socialism and makes costs higher than it should be and it is you, the consumer, who foots the bill.
If you go back 3000 years or more, they had Palace Economies. Everything went to the palace. And the king decided who would receive the goods. Very centralized economy, all about controlling distribution.
Jump forward many centuries, you have Mercantilism. Sure, it's different, but perhaps not much. The government controls the playing field, and decides who gets the sweet deal and who does not.
Jump to the 20th century. Fascism and Socialism are basically Palace Economies/Mercantilist societies.
And on the other side, you can have decentralized economies where individuals own things and work for their own self-interest. It's different. You can trace this, in one form or another, back about 2500 years.
Collectism or Individualism. Each society makes a choice. And right now, our society is choosing badly. Who is John Galt?
The FED is BANKS.
I have been the Communist Manifesto (1848) The first part of which states the problems of the times child labor,slaves or debt slavery the rise of the factory problems of international trade etc. All very similar to our problems today.
“”””(9) Marx’s comments on the importance of the world market, developed further in passages here omitted, sounds very modern. He argued that the differences between countries would diminish as they adopted capitalism and increased their international trade, paving the way for a stateless world united in communism.
(10) Marx particularly has in mind the European revolutions of 1789-1848, in which the bourgeoisie, which had long before become the dominant economic force in society, asserted its claims to political power as well.
(11) In this famous comment, the modern democratic states are dismissed as mere tools of the bourgeoisie, since it is the wealthy who run them and set their agendas, despite their claims to popular representation.”””””
Our modern bourgeoisie today is probably the Goldman and JP morgue’s of the world as in the past they should pay a 90% Tax unless the money is invested energy production or manufacturing & leave the average millionaire who came by their money honestly alone.
ELSE.... they would change it..
The American people generally have been corrupted matching the government..
True that some States are not as fully corrupt.. but many are..
A brief look at the democrat party would show you that..
A look at whats happening in Wisconsin would show you that..
A cursory look at the Unions will show you that..
Whats a little harder to notice is all the contractors of the Federal, State and local governments..
Although they are PEOPLE as well they are fully corrupt..
Government workers, teachers, the police, firemen.. are corrupted and corrupt..
They care nothing about America, nothing.. Wisconsin has proven there is ZERO patriotism there..
Some States are worse some better but ALL are corrupt..
Admitting there IS THIS PROBLEM is step one else there will be NO STEP TWO..
That's only true of some of the top 1% (and is also true a lot of slime who are below that level but who also benefit from what economists call rent-seeking behavior). We need to break the Political Class and realign the rules of capitalism to ensure that those in top 1% deserve every penny.
Sachs is a moron. Raising taxes only strengthens the hold of the Political Class.
I fear we are very close to that point.
I may not agree with the substance of the protests - I’ll have to read further - but people are in a very worried, and angry, mood.
If the federal government were small and handled a lot less money, people would focus on the marketplace, and they would deserve the money they earn in the marketplace. But so long as the federal budget handles trillions of dollars, there will be no shortage of people trying to game the system.
Soft fascism, corporatism, crony capitalism, public-private ventures, it’s pretty much all meaning the same thing.
It’s just as bad as unions on the other end.
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