The Monopoly Men

[Scottty]

This is a recent "Grrr Graphics" cartoon.

The Monopoly Men

The Fed is set to lower their interest rate by another 25 basis points Wednesday, following two similar cuts. They are doing this ostensibly to stave off a recession. We’re not allowed to have those any more. There won’t be bear market for the Dow, either. After all, the 1 percent, including the...

grrrgraphics.com

Garrison has not much good to say about the American financial system

The Fed is set to lower their interest rate by another 25 basis points Wednesday, following two similar cuts.

They are doing this ostensibly to stave off a recession. We’re not allowed to have those any more. There won’t be bear market for the Dow, either. After all, the 1 percent, including the central bankers, own most of the stocks. It doesn’t matter that the valuations for many stocks have eclipsed all reason and sanity; the top of the pyramid must have more.

Besides, stocks going down might signal a recession. Can’t have that, so fresh money is constantly applied in the form of Quantitative Easing. The average Joe never sees any of this money. He’s the one who picks up the tab.

Oh sure, you might hear how the QEs ended years ago, but that’s not true. They never ended—they just don’t bother to tell us the truth any longer. Why should they? They are in charge, not Congress.

The Federal Reserve has a printing press and during their latest liquidity ‘crisis’ they created billions of dollars daily for member banks, which must be perpetually up-propped. The easy and guaranteed cash encourages them to make bad loans and gamble the money away on risky ventures and derivative schemes–but no worries. They have a big safety net called the Federal Reserve. Therefore the debt can gets kicked down the road to infinity. Their bubbles never pop—they only get bigger. They keep their profits while socializing their losses.

It’s an immoral system of debt money. The consequences are inflation and higher taxes, which hurt all of us who don’t have access to the printing press. To be sure, the Federal Reserve doesn’t really need our taxes. They can create debt currency at the flip of a switch—a book entry on a computer. No, the IRS is there to keep us living in fear. It’s also about draining hard-earned money from workers so they can’t spend it on themselves and their families. The removal of such cash helps the Fed keep inflation more in control. Funny how they create inflation and then punish paycheck earners for inflation! The IRS gets to know all about the Fed’s citizen slaves. People can be sent to prison for trying to hide anything. Yet the Fed can hide all they want. They remain unaudited. The Fed spends trillions of dollars to bail out needy international banks and We The People are not allowed to know how much and to whom. We can’t even know how much if any gold remains at Fort Knox. The gold supposedly belongs to the people, but we’re not allowed to know!

The Central Bankers and their vile creation, the Federal Reserve, own our politicians. They own the courts. Notice when you go to court you’ll see the American flag in gold fringe. That means ‘Admiralty Law,’ or global corporate law—not our Constitution. We are part of the globalist corporate system, not the Constitutional common law system. That’s why our names on birth certificates are in all caps. We are ushered into the world as already being owned by the central bankers. We are born to serve them. Our God-given rights are ignored. We are their slaves and when we’ve outlived our usefulness we’re encouraged to die before we can get anything back. They do this by feeding us fluoride, GMO foods, corn syrup and junk foods to make us fat as well as all sorts of cancer-causing material in endless vaccines (soon to become mandatory). They also use their destructive cultural Marxism, which teaches us that human beings are meaningless blobs of matter. That makes the idea of abortion easier to take—as well as eugenics. Their planet must be protected from us, hence the malarkey known as ‘climate change.’ They want us to feel guilty for breathing and existing!

Evil is firmly in control and guess what? The evil doers want more. More money and more power. They won’t be stopped and nobody seems able or willing to stop them. One of the few real journalists out there, Julian Assange, is in prison and under torture for heroically revealing to the world what kind of Satanic people are running this sorry show on Earth.

Some of what he says is obviously true, some debatable, some of it off into conspiracy-theory land.
But what is interesting to note, is that this sort of screed is something that in past decades would have come from the Left side of the political spectrum. But not anymore.
Now if you criticize the banks, or global "Capital" in general, it means you're a racist right-winger, or something.

Is the Left now just fine with Plutocracy? Is a small elite running everything for their own excessive enrichment, while driving everyone else into poverty, something they are now okay with?
Seems so.

 

[ShieldWife]

The left absolutely is fine with a plutocracy. Just about all of the big corporations are controlled by the left - especially those institutions that are more politically connected like banking, investing, media, entertainment, technology, information, and so on.

The left wants corporate media to be able to silence dissenters in the independent media. They want to be able to regulate small businesses into oblivion so that mega corporations can dominate, they want the ability to fund the right corporations and fine the wrong ones.

 

[Flintsteel]

So... ramblings of someone who obviously does not actually understand what money is, and believes out-and-out conspiracy theories. Given what is obviously wrong in that screed, I find little reason to trust what isn't obviously wrong.

 

[Terthna]

So... ramblings of someone who obviously does not actually understand what money is, and believes out-and-out conspiracy theories. Given what is obviously wrong in that screed, I find little reason to trust what isn't obviously wrong.

 

[Scottty]

So... ramblings of someone who obviously does not actually understand what money is, and believes out-and-out conspiracy theories. Given what is obviously wrong in that screed, I find little reason to trust what isn't obviously wrong.

I think you are missing the point.

 

[Cherico]

I fucking love the central bank.

They perform a very useful role in our society, they keep idiots from destroying the economy.

You know what happens with a fiat currency with out a central bank? Stupid people demand free money cause runaway inflation and fuck the economy. The central bank acts as a very useful scapegoat, when there is a demand for some thing that will fuck the economy because people refuse to do basic math the polititions can go. Hey its not our fault we cant do this its the evil central bank.

And then the idiots rage at the bank while our economy continues to function.

 

[Scottty]

I fucking love the central bank.

They perform a very useful role in our society, they keep idiots from destroying the economy.

You know what happens with a fiat currency with out a central bank? Stupid people demand free money cause runaway inflation and fuck the economy. The central bank acts as a very useful scapegoat, when there is a demand for some thing that will fuck the economy because people refuse to do basic math the polititions can go. Hey its not our fault we cant do this its the evil central bank.

And then the idiots rage at the bank while our economy continues to function.

Two points in response:

1) Many would say that fiat currency is itself at the root of the problem. Giving people the power to conjure funds out of thin air, what could go wrong?

2) Restricting that unnatural power to a small number of people may reduce the potential damage, but it doesn't eliminate it. It also gives that small number of people way too much power. Power that they, as mortal human beings, cannot be trusted to not abuse for their own benefit, at the expense of everyone else.

 

[Morphic Tide]

Many would say that fiat currency is itself at the root of the problem. Giving people the power to conjure funds out of thin air, what could go wrong?

The issue behind it is that the amount of resources the currency was being used for was balooning to the point that there was quite simply not enough valuable metal on the planet to back it. The dollar stopped being gold or silver backed when almost all of Europe, and many other countries around the world, backed their currencies by the dollar, and then tried to get that gold and silver. Which did not actually exist.

There's too much stuff in the world to denominate its value by a hard currency. Economies have abrupt explosions of productivity, and can just as suddenly collapse. We've had multiple large explosions of economic scale without going back down, and no similar explosion in the supply of any precious material. More importantly, the economic explosions have been sector-creating,

Backing it by very nearly anything with low enough scarcity to work runs into the brick wall of the government not being able to control the supply, and so we inevitably land back at fiat currency, where the currency has value because the government says it does, but with one particular thing having a price control, because the government is saying "This much currency is worth this much of this object" instead of a nebulous "This currency is legal for transactions."

Even with fiat currency, the scale of the economy still requires fractional reserve banking to run, where currency is generated by the people who keep track of it literally not holding on to what they've been given for savings.

TL: DR; The way modern economies work is incompatible with a backed currency, because they run on not only constant expansion, but explosive expansion into previously-nonexistent places. And as such there's nothing with a stable share of the overall market to back a currency with, nor anything with a stable-relative-to-market-scale supply.

 

[ShadowsOfParadox]

see... the problem is... there is no such thing as a non fiat currency.

Gold has value in the monetary sense because people agree it does. Because it's shiny and easy to work and doesn't tarnish. On the other hand there's a lake in South America where an entire culture went when they needed to crown a king, where they dumped literal tons of gold into the lake as part of the ceremony(btw, the lake is still there EDIT: so's most of the gold). To them, Gold was decorative, not money. So dumping it in the lake made perfect sense.

Meanwhile, the Spanish, deciding that since there WAS a Golden Man (literally, "El Dorado", the king wore golden glitter during the ceremony) and these people were dumping a whole heck of a lot of gold into the lake every other decade or so, they CLEARLY had massively more gold. Thus the search for the City of El Dorado continued because finding the Golden Man and his lake of gold wasn't enough gold.

Gold and Silver WERE fiat currencies. You just have to look at how the Spanish bankrupted themselves by having too much of it after finding the motherlode mine in South America to grasp that. Any actual currency is a fiat currency.

EDIT: well, ok, currency backed by "enough food to feed a person for X time on a reasonable diet" is arguably not actually fiat. ... ... You know... that might actually be a vaguely reasonable way to back currency right now if we REALLY had to... you need to be making a fairly stable in relation to market size amount of food anyway for everyone to not die, and there's only so much food a person can actually eat... hmmmmmm.

 

[Scottty]

EDIT: well, ok, currency backed by "enough food to feed a person for X time on a reasonable diet" is arguably not actually fiat. ... ... You know... that might actually be a vaguely reasonable way to back currency right now if we REALLY had to... you need to be making a fairly stable in relation to market size amount of food anyway for everyone to not die, and there's only so much food a person can actually eat... hmmmmmm.

In Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri the colonies on Chiron use energy as currency. Which the modern world is already close to doing, if one considers petrodollars. The dollar as an exchange medium for petroleum.
(How the US reacts to any country leaving the petrodollar and selling fossil fuels for euros or whatever else is also instructive.)

But all these explanations of why the modern economic system has to work the way it does in order to work the way it does miss the point: that system has over time become more and more blatantly one run by, and for the benefit of, a very small minority of the population. The Cost of Living is in practical terms getting higher and higher for ordinary people, while the super-rich elite live in their own bubble.

The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats

A memo for my fellow filthy rich who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.

www.politico.com

This article is from 2014. Well worth reading the whole thing.
Here are some excerpts:

Memo: From Nick Hanauer
To: My Fellow Zillionaires

You probably don’t know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than 30 companies across a range of industries—from itsy-bitsy ones like the night club I started in my 20s to giant ones like Amazon.com, for which I was the first nonfamily investor. Then I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I’m no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can’t even imagine. Multiple homes, my own plane, etc., etc. You know what I’m talking about.

But let’s speak frankly to each other. I’m not the smartest guy you’ve ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I’m not technical at all—I can’t write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now?

I see pitchforks.

But the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.
And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.
If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

 

[LordsFire]

Is the Left now just fine with Plutocracy? Is a small elite running everything for their own excessive enrichment, while driving everyone else into poverty, something they are now okay with?
Seems so.

The (leadership of the) left has always been fine with plutocracy. A small elite telling everyone else how to live their lives is the entire point.

It's the conservative movement in America that has always been ideologically grounded in personal autonomy, and that man's rights are God-given, not government-granted.

Part of the reason that the right favors small government, is because large governments inevitably end up stratifying society, as those who have influence with large regulatory agencies 'pull the ladder up behind them' to ensure their continued dominance in whatever field they work in.

In Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri the colonies on Chiron use energy as currency. Which the modern world is already close to doing, if one considers petrodollars. The dollar as an exchange medium for petroleum.
(How the US reacts to any country leaving the petrodollar and selling fossil fuels for euros or whatever else is also instructive.)

But all these explanations of why the modern economic system has to work the way it does in order to work the way it does miss the point: that system has over time become more and more blatantly one run by, and for the benefit of, a very small minority of the population. The Cost of Living is in practical terms getting higher and higher for ordinary people, while the super-rich elite live in their own bubble.

The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats

A memo for my fellow filthy rich who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.

www.politico.com

This article is from 2014. Well worth reading the whole thing.
Here are some excerpts:

The idea that cost of living is getting 'higher and higher' is also wrong. The cost of living in the same cities as the social elite is growing outrageously and wildly, but you go live in a mid-sized or small city?

Living's cheap. Luxuries are increasingly cheap.

The reason that some people have a 'torches and pitchforks' attitude isn't because of rising wealth inequality, it's because they've been taught, and chosen to believe, a doctrine of class envy. Very consistently over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, luxury goods have come onto the market that were first exclusively for the elite, then the general upper class, then the middle class, then finally much of the lower class too.

First it was cars.
Then it was television.
Then it was refrigerators. (this might be out of chronological order)
Then it was microwaves.
Then it was VCRs.
Then it was Personal Computers.
Then it was portable music players.
Then it was Cell Phones.
Then it was Smart Phones.
Around 2014, it was large-screen TVs, which now cost a couple hundred for ~40", and under a thousand for as much as 60". In the 90's that would have cost you five to ten times that much.

Very consistently, free market economics in America has raised the standard of living of every social class except those at the very bottom, who either because of disabilities or refusal to accept responsibility and actually do work, do not benefit. This is less than 1% of the population, last I checked.

Also, while the middle class is 'hollowing out' in America, that's not because people are turning into poor serfs again... it's because the middle class has been steadily moving into the upper class.

Here's some references to a couple things:

 

[ShadowsOfParadox]

Ty LordsFire. On phone but really wanted to reply to that cost of living BS

EDIT to not double post: BTW even that idea of "Petrodollar" and "energy currency" or even the "backed by enough food to feed a person for X time", all of those are STILL fiat. It's by fiat that you can exchange the medium for whatever it's "backed" by. ANYTHING that is not strict barter is going to, at some point, involve "I trust that X will give me Y for Z"

 

[Terthna]

The idea that cost of living is getting 'higher and higher' is also wrong. The cost of living in the same cities as the social elite is growing outrageously and wildly, but you go live in a mid-sized or small city?

Living's cheap. Luxuries are increasingly cheap.

The reason that some people have a 'torches and pitchforks' attitude isn't because of rising wealth inequality, it's because they've been taught, and chosen to believe, a doctrine of class envy. Very consistently over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, luxury goods have come onto the market that were first exclusively for the elite, then the general upper class, then the middle class, then finally much of the lower class too.

First it was cars.
Then it was television.
Then it was refrigerators. (this might be out of chronological order)
Then it was microwaves.
Then it was VCRs.
Then it was Personal Computers.
Then it was portable music players.
Then it was Cell Phones.
Then it was Smart Phones.
Around 2014, it was large-screen TVs, which now cost a couple hundred for ~40", and under a thousand for as much as 60". In the 90's that would have cost you five to ten times that much.

Very consistently, free market economics in America has raised the standard of living of every social class except those at the very bottom, who either because of disabilities or refusal to accept responsibility and actually do work, do not benefit. This is less than 1% of the population, last I checked.

Also, while the middle class is 'hollowing out' in America, that's not because people are turning into poor serfs again... it's because the middle class has been steadily moving into the upper class.

Here's some references to a couple things:

What about the massive increases in income inequality? Even assuming things are getting better, the people on the top are benefiting from that far more than everyone else. And they're not even paying their fair share; most of them exploit loopholes in the tax code to avoid paying any.

As for the middle class, while it is true that some of them have risen up, it is also true that others dropped down. Ideally, both the middle and upper classes should have grown over time, while the lower class shrunk; this has not happened, and instead it is the middle class that has shrunk while the other two grow.

While the data ends in 2016, so I don't know what changes Trump's presidency has made to the situation, a study from the Pew Research Center shows that the percentage of people in the middle class has gone down steadily since 1971 from 61%, to 52%. Meanwhile, the upper class has increased by 5%, and the lower class increased by 4%.

 

[ShadowsOfParadox]

And they're not even paying their fair share; most of them exploit loopholes in the tax code to avoid paying any.

and yet even with those loopholes something like 90% of all tax revenue is STILL from the upper quintiles. the lowest two are straight up not just not paying, they are getting paid.

I need to find that graphic again... once I'm done my research into nuclear power anyway.

Also worth noting, alot of the "wealthiest" people aren't making much more INCOME than very upper middle class people do. Which is one of the reasons the proposed wealth taxes from this round of Dem Presidential Candidates aren't going to happen even if those candidates get elected.

EDIT: you are confusing the inevitable result of global markets and international companies with individuals. CORPORATIONS can readily use loopholes created by having multiple corporations in different countries to dodge taxes entirely, the CEO? not so much.

 

[Terthna]

and yet even with those loopholes something like 90% of all tax revenue is STILL from the upper quintiles. the lowest two are straight up not just not paying, they are getting paid.

I need to find that graphic again... once I'm done my research into nuclear power anyway.

Also worth noting, alot of the "wealthiest" people aren't making much more INCOME than very upper middle class people do. Which is one of the reasons the proposed wealth taxes from this round of Dem Presidential Candidates aren't going to happen even if those candidates get elected.

For what it's worth, I'm not arguing that their taxes should be raised; I just want those loopholes closed.

 

[ShadowsOfParadox]

For what it's worth, I'm not arguing that their taxes should be raised; I just want those loopholes closed.

what loopholes? for individuals there aren't many and they are mostly tax deductible donations AFAIK. Again, I think you are confusing Corporations and Individuals. And I'm very not sure about the feasibility of closing loopholes created by companies existing in multiple countries with subsidiaries.

 

[Terthna]

what loopholes? for individuals there aren't many and they are mostly tax deductible donations AFAIK. Again, I think you are confusing Corporations and Individuals. And I'm very not sure about the feasibility of closing loopholes created by companies existing in multiple countries with subsidiaries.

Actually, one of the ways rich individuals avoid taxes is via incorporating; it lets them do things like pay themselves interest-free wages, claim expenses, and reduce their income taxes. And that's just one way; they can also send their money overseas to offshore tax havens, create a shell company to funnel money though, buy and later donate art pieces for a huge tax deduction (far more than what they originally paid for it), and all of this is before the more complicated methods available. Equity swaps, estate freeze trusts, deferred-compensation plans; the list of loopholes go on and on.

 

[Flintsteel]

I think you are missing the point.

If the point in a political cartoon isn't apparent, the fault likely lies with the cartoonist, not the reader.

Two points in response:

1) Many would say that fiat currency is itself at the root of the problem. Giving people the power to conjure funds out of thin air, what could go wrong?

Anyone who is against fiat currency has no idea what money is and how it works. Fiat currency has been one of the greatest drivers of economic growth and real-world standard of living rising in history.

No, we aren't perfect with it, but economics is nothing more than a series of experiements and emergency fixes to a running engine. It's messy, but it gets better over time, and it does work.

2) Restricting that unnatural power to a small number of people may reduce the potential damage, but it doesn't eliminate it. It also gives that small number of people way too much power. Power that they, as mortal human beings, cannot be trusted to not abuse for their own benefit, at the expense of everyone else.

By 'small number of people' I assume you're talking about the managers of a central bank.

Quite frankly, you need them. Control of the money supply is essential to the operation of fiat currency, and you need them to be experts. You also need them to not be beholden to the whim of regular politics. The Federal Reserve, like most of the patches to the massive thing of politics, is not perfect. But it is better than the alternatives.

 

[LordsFire]

What about the massive increases in income inequality? Even assuming things are getting better, the people on the top are benefiting from that far more than everyone else. And they're not even paying their fair share; most of them exploit loopholes in the tax code to avoid paying any.

Two things:

1. If overall everything is getting better, why is some people benefiting more than others a problem?

2. What would the 'fair share' for the rich be? How was this fair share determined? How do you know whether they're paying that or not?

 

[Terthna]

Two things:

1. If overall everything is getting better, why is some people benefiting more than others a problem?

That's not the question you should be asking. What you should be asking is "why are some people benefiting drastically more than others? Particularly ones at the top who, quite frankly, have done nothing to earn a paycheck worth over a hundred times more that someone in the same position would have earned several decades ago, when positions under them in the corporate hierarchy have not experienced such massive exponential growth in earnings?"

The pie has grown, but so has the portion taken by those on top; and expecting those who's slice keeps getting smaller and smaller comparatively to not become resentful, when it's also thanks to their efforts that the pie is bigger than it used to be, is utterly insane.

2. What would the 'fair share' for the rich be? How was this fair share determined? How do you know whether they're paying that or not?

I don't know. I just take issue with them taking advantage of ways to reduce the money they pay, that they only have access to because of how much money they have. And I know they do this, because we keep hearing about it; and I doubt you're delusional enough to insist that, say, tax havens are not a thing the rich constantly use to avoid paying taxes. I mean; the IRS specifically points out that this is a thing that actually happens, and is frequent enough to be a serious problem.