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At base, the markets are a con game where the rich and powerful employ a raft of confidence men to lure suckers into the latest mania. In this game, the suckers are the general public who are left holding the bag as the market bubble bursts while the smart money swoops in to buy up the leftover assets at pennies on the dollar. In this week’s edition of The Corbett Report, James Corbett pulls back the curtain on the Wall Street casino and reveals how the house always wins the rigged games.
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TRANSCRIPT
In December of 2020, video game retailer GameStop reported an operating loss of $63 million in the previous quarter on the back of an 11% reduction in the store base. The story—just one of dozens of such reports flooding the financial newswires—meant little to the general public and went largely unnoticed.
Two groups did show an interest in the news, however: the Wall Street vultures who see every faltering company as an easy source of money in the futures markets and a small band of retail investors who saw the potential for the floundering gaming franchise to turn things around.
Within a matter of weeks, these two groups would clash in one of the most spectacular stock market face-offs in recent memory. Even the White House got drawn into the saga.
REPORTER: I was concerned about the stock market activity we’re seeing around GameStop and now with some other stocks as well, including the subsidiary or whatever—the company that was . . . Blockbuster?—and have there been any conversations with the SEC about how to proceed?
JEN PSAKI: Well, I’m also happy to repeat that we have the first female treasury secretary and a team that’s surrounding her and often questions about market we’ll send to them. But our team is of course—our economic team, including Secretary Yellen and others—are monitoring the situation.
SOURCE: Biden Team Is ‘Monitoring’ the Surge in GameStop Shares, Psaki Says
The human drama in the story made it easily recognizable as a David vs. Goliath narrative. Here was a ragtag band of mom-and-pop—or, in this case, millennial—investors going up against the hedge fund billionaires. And, just as it seemed they may actually have an effect, the full power of the financial and political system seemed to swoop in to suppress them.
But the “revelation” that retail investors are fighting a rigged game against the Wall Street hedge fund behemoths is hardly a revelation at all. In fact, it is merely the latest example in a long series of events showing that the stock market was never meant to bring riches and fortune to the average investor.
Instead, when the story is told in its full context, there is only one obvious conclusion to be drawn:
The Markets Are Rigged.
You’re tuned in to The Corbett Report.
The stock market is often portrayed in the financial media as a magical crystal ball that can not only tell us about what is happening in the economy but predict geopolitical events, forecast elections, or even reveal to us the inner workings of the minds of men.
BECKY QUICK: Alright, so polls are one way of trying to figure out who’s going to win. Watching the markets are another. They’re pretty good at predicting elections sometimes, too.
SOURCE: Here’s how markets may predict who will win the presidential election
LESLIE PICKER: Valuations on a price-to-earnings basis are below post-crisis averages, leading some to believe that decent fundamentals could—emphasis on “could”—jumpstart the shares higher.
DOMINIC CHU: You’re telling me you don’t have a crystal ball . . .
PICKER: I don’t.
CHU: . . . And I don’t blame you.
PICKER: I don’t. But even I did I couldn’t say it here.
CHU: Alright.
PICKER: (Laughs)
SOURCE: Worldwide Exchange CNBC October 12, 2018 5:00am-6:00am EDT
KRISTINA HOOPER: Well, we could very well see some gains, some pullbacks, more gains. Certainly animal spirits are alive and well, but I would argue it’s a very different spirit animal than last year. Since the start of February our spirit animal is probably the Chihuahua.
SOURCE: Bloomberg Markets Americas Bloomberg February 16, 2018 10:00am-11:00am EST
But this is a lie. In reality, the markets are driven not by underlying economic fundamentals, as the public is asked to believe, but by the actions of the central banks.
This is not even a controversial point.
In 2014, the Bank for International Settlements warned that central banks were causing “elevated” asset prices.
A report from the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum that same year warned that “Central banks around the world, including in Europe, are buying increasing volumes of equities” and “The same authorities that are responsible for maintaining financial stability are often the owners of the large funds that have the potential to cause problems.”
And in 2016—in the midst of the historic bull run that has seen the Dow Jones and S&P indexes reach all-time record high after all-time record high—economist Brian Barnier published a report documenting that between the beginning of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program in 2008 and the 1st quarter of 2015, the Fed was directly responsible for 93% of equity value growth in the US.
This modern era of central bank-dominated markets, however, is only the latest version of a game that is as old as the markets themselves. At base it’s a con game where the rich and powerful employ a raft of confidence men to lure suckers into the latest market mania. In this game, the “suckers” are the general public who are left holding the bag as the market bubble bursts while the “smart money” swoops in to buy up the leftover assets at pennies on the dollar.
The game was being played as far back as 1814, when a uniformed man posing as the aide-de-camp of Lord Cathcart landed in Dover spreading the false rumour that Napoleon had been killed by a detachment of Cossacks. When the rumours reached London later that day, three men dressed up as French officers in white Bourbon cockades were parading across Blackfriars bridge proclaiming the end of the Napoleonic empire and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. By the time the British government officially dispelled the rumour later that afternoon, an elaborate fraud had already played out in the London stock markets. The rumour had kicked off a buying frenzy and the perpetrators of what is now known as The Great Fraud of Cowley—the ones who had started the rumours and hired the actors to help spread them—had already sold 1.1 million pounds worth of government stock into the market peak.
Another bit of market manipulation centering around Napoleon’s military fortunes played out again the next year, in 1815. Nathan Rothschild of the infamous Rothschild banking dynasty used the smuggling network that he and his brothers had built to funnel gold and silver to Wellington’s army to get news of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo back to London 24 hours before the official word reached the British government. Although a fancified version of the story involving homing pigeons and Nathan’s acting abilities at the stock exchange are easily dismissed as anti-Semitic slurs by the mainstream press, even the official Rothschild Archive treatment of the incident admits that Nathan Rothschild did receive early warning of Wellington’s victory and he did profit from that foreknowledge in the stock market. Historian Niall Ferguson has written on the subject in detail in his authorized biography of the Rothschilds and even the BBC published a story in 1998 outlining how the conspiracy functioned and how the brothers communicated in secret by writing their letters in the Judendeutsch script they had learned in their childhood in the Frankfurt Jewish ghetto.
The stock market con game isn’t just an historical relic, though. Those with advance knowledge of world events continue to profit from their insider information, sometimes in the most macabre way imaginable.
ANTONIO MORA: What many Wall Street analysts believe is that the terrorists made bets that a number of stocks would see their prices fall. They did so by buying what they call ‘puts.’ If you bet right the rewards can be huge. The risks are also huge unless you know something bad is going to happen to the company you’re betting against.
DYLAN RATIGAN: This could very well be insider trading at the worst, most horrific, most evil use you’ve ever seen in your entire life.
SOURCE: 9/11 Wall Street Blames Put Option Inside Trading On Terrorists
In the wake of 9/11, researchers began to uncover a money trail that proved those with advance knowledge of the attack had indeed used their insider information to profit from the events of that day.
In addition to the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States, the governments of Italy, Germany, Belgium and other countries began their own investigations into a series of trades betting against companies that were hurt by 9/11—like Boeing, Merrill Lynch, United Airlines, Munich Re and others—and betting on companies that profited from the attacks—including a six-fold increase in call options on the stock of defense contractor Raytheon on September 10, 2001.
In subsequent years, not one, not two, but three separate, peer-reviewed papers concluded that the unusual trading in the weeks prior to 9/11 were “consistent with insiders anticipating the 9/11 attacks.” But incredibly, the SEC investigation into this money trail was abruptly terminated and the records of that investigation were subsequently destroyed.
Why? Because, as researchers like Kevin Ryan, Michael Ruppert and others later discovered, the trail led them to the doorstep not of Al Qaeda, but well-connected American businessmen and intelligence officials.
MICHAEL C. RUPPERT: So right after the attacks of 9/11 the name Buzzy Krongard surfaced. It was instant research that revealed that Buzzy Krongard had been allegedly recruited by CIA Director George Tenet to become the Executive Director at CIA, which is the number three position, right before the attacks.
And Alex Brown was one of the many subsidiaries of Deutsche Bank, one of the primary vehicles or instruments that handled all of these criminal trades by people who obviously knew that the attacks were going to take place, where, how and involving specific airlines.
SOURCE: Terror Trading 9/11
KEVIN RYAN: I came across this document that had been released: a memorandum for the record of the 9/11 Commission. It was prepared by a staff member of the 9/11 Commission. His name is Douglas Greenberg, and he reviewed simply the FBI’s meetings on their communications related to this. This document identified a couple of companies that were flagged by the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission), and one of them—this was September 21st just ten days after the attacks—one of these companies that was flagged was called Stratesec. And this is a very interesting company because it’s a security company that had contracts for the World Trade Center and Dulles Airport, where one of the planes took off on 9/11, as well as United Airlines, which owned two of the other three planes. So this security company, Stratesec, was a very central player in in the events of 9/11, you could say, because they ran security for these different areas in the years leading up to 9/11.
So for them this company stopped to be flagged by the SEC was very compelling, and when I looked at this document—prepared by the 9/11 Commission [but] which wasn’t released until 2007—I noticed that the names had been redacted of the stock traders, but I could make out who they were. In particular, one of them was a director of the company Stratesec. He was also a director of a company in Oklahoma, an aviation company. He was also a director of a Washington, DC-based financial organization. With just that information you could tell very clearly that this man was Wirt Dexter Walker. He was the Chief Executive Officer of Stratesec and also a director there. His wife, Sally Walker, was also named in the flagging by the SEC. So I began looking into that.
SOURCE: Terror Trading 9/11
JEREMY ROTHE-KUSHEL: . . . the last thing I want to leave you with is the National Reconnaissance Office was running a drill of a plane crashing into their building and you know they’re staffed by DoD and CIA . . .
ROBERT BAER: I know the guy that went into his broker in San Diego and said, “Cash me out, it’s going down tomorrow.”
JEREMY ROTHE KUSHEL: Really?
ROBERT BAER: Yeah.
STEWART HOWE: That tells us something.
ROBERT BAER: What?
STEWART HOWE: That tells us something.
ROBERT BAER: Well, his brother worked at the White House.
Horrific as these instances of insider trading are, an even deeper layer of the story lies in the fact that these trades—unlike the high-profile show trials of Martha Stewart and other stories-of-the-week—never result in prosecutions. The protection afforded the 9/11 inside traders speaks to an even deeper layer of the problem: the use of the markets to line the pockets of insiders and their political cronies is not a bug in the system, but a feature. In fact, the entire system has been designed to be manipulatable, ensuring that the little guys never have a chance against the billionaire bankers and hedge funds.
A clue to this story goes back to the most well-known event in stock market history: the Great Crash of 1929. Even there, in the midst of one of the most devastating financial collapses in human history, there was money to be made by insiders who knew what was coming.
One such insider was Albert Henry Wiggin, Chairman of the Chase National Bank and the man who had been instrumental in attracting the Rockefeller family to begin their century-long involvement in Chase. When the market began plummeting on Black Thursday 1929, Wiggin and his fellow banking associates were lauded as heroes for their actions to restore order to the market, which culminated in New York Stock Exchange Vice President Richard Whitney stepping out on the floor of the Exchange and making a great commotion by yelling out orders for key stocks at above-market prices.
What the public did not know, but what emerged three years later during congressional investigation, was that by the time chaos descended on Black Tuesday 1929, Wiggin had already positioned himself to profit handsomely from the financial havoc that he knew was coming. As Nomi Prins details in her book, All the President’s Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power:
Wiggin knew he was covered no matter what happened. Shortly before the Crash, he shorted shares in his own bank by borrowing shares from various brokers at prices he anticipated would fall, at which time he would buy the shares in the market at lower prices and return them to the brokers, making money on the difference. When the Dow stood at 359 on September 23, 1929 (the market had topped out twenty days earlier at 381), he placed what would be a hugely profitable bet that Chase’s stock would fall.
[. . .]
Before shorting those shares, Wiggin executed another profitable and shady strategy, using his bank’s funds to plump the shares up. He placed $200 million of his depositors’ money into trusts that speculated in Chase stock, thus participating in the very pool operations that artificially boosted its price during the run-up to the Crash. He pocketed $10.4 million from these trades, including $4 million from shorting the shares he drove up (after he drove them up) during the two-week period preceding the Crash. His justification for selling his own shares while Chase Securities was pushing customers to buy them was that the price was “ridiculously high.” He had, in effect, bet against all the other Chase shareholders who had trusted in his hype about the firm.
Another person who profited greatly from the financial crash was Joseph P. Kennedy, father of future president John F. Kennedy. The famous story, likely apocryphal but parroted by NPR, The Washington Post, PBS and any number of mainstream outlets, is that Kennedy, a savvy stock trader, knew the market was overheated when a random shoeshine boy gave him stock tips.
If this story is to be believed, Joe’s random interaction with a shoeshine boy in 1929 was one of the most profitable conversations of his life. Not only did Kennedy sell off most of his stock holdings shortly before the crash, he aggressively shorted the markets, meaning that while most of America—and much of the world—was plunged into one of the deepest and most prolonged financial crises in the history of the country, the Kennedy family flourished. In 1977, eight years after Joe’s death, The New York Times estimated the family fortune to be somewhere between $300 million and $500 million.
There are more than enough reasons to doubt that it was actually a brief chat with a shoeshine boy that led to Kennedy’s remarkable good fortune, however. The patriarch of the Kennedy dynasty had a reputation as an unscrupulous businessman, including the persistent allegations that he made his fortune in bootlegging during the Prohibition era. And so it was a shock to the nation when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed Kennedy to head the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934.
Even the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Historical Society struggles to explain the choice. “Kennedy had profited handsomely from financial manipulation,” their website frankly admits, “but he understood keenly the need to balance the interests of the people with the imperatives of the financial markets.” For his part, when asked why he had tapped a well-known scoundrel like Kennedy to head such an agency, President Roosevelt is said to have replied: “Takes one to catch one.”
That the SEC, the “independent federal agency” tasked with regulating the markets, should have an admitted market manipulator as its first chair should not be surprising when the agency’s track record is examined. Time and again, the SEC has not just allowed market manipulation to take place, but actively facilitated it.
When the largest Ponzi scheme in market history, Bernie Madoff’s unbelievable $64.8 billion investment fraud scam, came to a crashing halt with his arrest in December of 2008, attention turned to the SEC. How could the agency, which had investigated Madoff’s investment firm multiple times, not have halted the scam earlier?
A subsequent Inspector General report made the scope of this “failure” even more unbelievable, finding that “between June 1992 and December 2008 when Madoff confessed, the SEC received six substantive complaints that raised significant red flags concerning Madoff’s hedge fund operations and should have led to questions about whether Madoff was actually engaged in trading.” After excoriating the agency for its incompetence time and again over the course of two decades of failed opportunities, the report concludes:
As the foregoing demonstrates, despite numerous credible and detailed complaints, the SEC never properly examined or investigated Madofi’s trading and never took the necessary, but basic, steps to determine if Madoff was operating a Ponzi scheme. Had these efforts been made with appropriate follow-up at any time beginning in June of 1992 until December 2008, the SEC could have uncovered the Ponzi scheme well before Madoff confessed.
HARRY MARKOPOLOS: I gift-wrapped and delivered the largest Ponzi scheme in history to them and somehow they couldn’t be bothered to conduct a thorough and proper investigation because they were too busy on matters of higher priority. If a $50 billion Ponzi scheme doesn’t make the SEC’s priority list, then I want to know who sets their priorities.
SOURCE: Madoff tipster Markopolos calls SEC captive to Wall Street
Similarly, when Enron shook the markets in 2001 by declaring the then-largest bankruptcy in history after its systemic accounting fraud was exposed, the question of the SEC’s role in the scandal arose. Why had the agency not caught on to the scam? A subsequent Senate Committee report excoriated the commission, noting that the “watchdog” had only opened one (unrelated) investigation into Enron in the past decade, that it repeatedly missed warning signs of corporate misconduct, that it granted the company unusual leeway in using mark-to-market accounting for its transactions and did not even seek to validate the models employed by the energy giant. In the end, the committee concluded that the entire affair represented a “systemic and catastrophic failure” of the SEC.
But the SEC did not use the lessons learned in these “systemic and catastrophic failures” to stop such fraud from taking place in the future. In fact, the Commission responded to these “failures” not by stringently cracking down on these scams, but by helping to facilitate new kinds of untraceable accounting trickery.
In the wake of the signal “failures” of SEC and other regulators to prevent the scandalous accounting fraud and subsequent catastrophic failures of Enron, Worldcom and Tyco, the US Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a federal law intended to “protect investors by improving the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosures made pursuant to the securities laws, and for other purposes.” The nature of those “other purposes” soon became apparent as the devil emerged from the details of the software that promised to streamline the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance process for companies operating in the new regulatory environment.
One of these software solutions was EmailXtender, an email archiving program designed to help companies comply with Sarbanes-Oxley reporting requirements. The program was supposed to create a permanent record of emails so that auditors would be able to access all communications in the future, but, according to Richard Grove, who was working as a software salesman selling the program to prospective corporate clients, the program actually provided companies with a way to permanently and untraceably delete those records.
RICHARD GROVE: So a few weeks later, in August of 2003, I was at a client called the NASD— which later changed its name, so it’s now called the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority—and the NASD was looking at our product and they wanted to use it internally. And one of the guys across the table says to me, “Hey, wait a minute. This product has a back door! Because right here where you’re supposed to take this information and put it on the write-once-read-many storage, which is a type of permanent storage,” he said, “there’s this jar file, and you can delete the jar file, and then there’s no evidence of that transaction whatsoever.”
So he was showing me across a table that there’s a loophole, there’s a back door in a software that allows nefarious transactions to go on, and subsequently they didn’t buy the software. They’re like, “This is bullshit, this isn’t worth the money. This is not what it’s supposed to be, and you should do something about that.” Now, I had management from my side in the meeting, so I went to my managers afterwards and I’m like, “What’s this all about, and what’s going on with this?” and I was told not to talk about it.
Concerned with the possibility for mass financial fraud that was being enabled by this software, Grove took his concerns to the SEC. But instead of acting on this information to launch an investigation into the company and the software, the SEC not only dismissed Grove’s warning, but went out and bought that very software for their own use.
RICHARD GROVE: Right now the SEC reports to the President. So at the end of the day, when the SEC was telling me they’re not interested, they’re telling me they’re not interested because I’m tying the Bush administration in with billionaire Richard Egan and his company that’s helping these companies do this. Of course they don’t want to sponsor that getting out to the public.
I filed a lawsuit, I represented myself in court against a multi-billion-dollar international corporation, and after three years—and after proving my case in court, including the fact that the SEC acted with complicity to protect the perpetrators—my case was dismissed on a technicality, recognizing that the events I proved in court actually happened but were conveniently “outside the statute of limitations for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.”
And once I understood the purpose of Sarbanes-Oxley regulations was to keep these companies from deleting files and that the back door in the software allowed these companies to delete files—and more importantly the fact that someone outside of the company that’s not even associated with the company but has access to that software could launder money or steal money or just delete money from corporations and switch financial records all around without anyone, any investigator, any auditor being able to audit that—those things I thought were interesting. But when the SEC, after I told them, bought the software with the back door in it and started to use it for itself then I knew that the SEC was not there to regulate like I thought it was. They were also, “Hey, we can find a benefit from this back door in a software. We can delete files now. Now we’re above the law!”
But of all the various schemes for manipulating the markets, none have been quite so brazen as the Plunge Protection Team.
Formally known as the “Working Group on Financial Markets,” the Plunge Protection Team, or PPT, was born in the wake of another stock market crash: Black Monday of October 1987. Far from a “conspiracy theory” or “internet rumour,” the formation of the group was announced in the pages of the Federal Register on March 22, 1988, which contained, on page 9421, the text of Executive Order 12631, a seemingly mundane announcement signed by President Reagan on March 18, 1988.
The order, citing “the major issues raised by the numerous studies on the events in the financial markets surrounding October 19, 1987,” goes on to establish a working group of the treasury secretary, the Fed chair, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). It empowers the group to “consult, as appropriate, with representatives of the various exchanges, clearinghouses, self-regulatory bodies, and with major market participants to determine private sector solutions wherever possible” and to report back to the president.
Hidden behind this innocuous-sounding rhetoric is an organization that has been at work for the last three decades, quietly but documentably intervening to prop up the markets whenever they start plunging—or even sagging.
The name “Plunge Protection Team” comes from a Washington Post article that ran under that headline in February 1997. In that piece, staff writer Brett D. Fromson revealed how the Working Group on Financial Markets (like “defense planners in the Cold War period”) war-game various market cataclysms and their response to them. One scenario Fromson described involves a large sell-off on a Monday morning after a week of tanking markets.
“The chairman of the New York Stock Exchange has called the White House chief of staff and asked permission to close the world’s most important stock market. [. . .] In the Oval Office, the president confers with the members of his Working Group on Financial Markets—the secretary of the Treasury and the chairmen of the Federal Reserve Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The officials conclude that a presidential order to close the NYSE would only add to the market’s panic, so they decide to ride out the storm. The Working Group struggles to keep financial markets open so that trading can continue. By the closing bell, a modest rally is underway.”
The article acknowledged that each of the Plunge Protection Team’s constituent agencies (the Treasury, the Fed, the SEC and the CFTC) have a “confidential plan” on file to deal with a market meltdown. But aside from trivial details (the SEC’s plan is called the “red book,” for example, after the color of the document’s cover) nothing of substance is revealed. How, exactly, do the agencies plan to “keep financial markets open so that trading can continue”?
A major clue to the PPT manipulation puzzle came in the form of a 1989 Wall Street Journal op-ed by Robert Heller, who was at the time exiting a three-year stint as Federal Reserve System governor. Entitled “Have Fed Support Stock Market, Too,” Heller’s op-ed argued that the so-called “circuit breakers” set up after the Black Monday 1987 scare were not sufficient to prevent another recurrence of panic. “Instead,” he opined, “an appropriate institution should be charged with the job of preventing chaos in the market: the Federal Reserve.” In Heller’s vision, the Fed could prevent a market rout by stepping in to purchase stock futures contracts during sell-offs.
Rather than regarding Heller’s piece as a mere op-ed offering a proposal for something the Fed could do in the future, however, some reporters—like John Crudele, the man who drew attention to Heller’s “proposal” in the first place—have suggested that the Wall Street Journal piece was in fact a trial balloon, preparing the public for the eventual revelation that the Fed was already intervening in the markets.
If Heller’s op-ed was a trial balloon, the full truth was finally revealed to the public in the wake of “the day that changed everything.” After all, if the PPT was ever going to intervene to prop up the markets, the pandemonium of 9/11 and the ensuing market sell-off presented them with the perfect opportunity to do so.
And so it was that George Stephanopolous appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America on September 17, 2001, to blithely announce to the American public that their markets were a sham:
GEORGE STEPHANOPOLOUS: What I wanted to talk about for a few minutes is the various efforts that are going on in public and behind the scenes by the Fed and other government officials to guard against a free-fall in the markets. [. . .] The Fed in 1989 created what is called the ‘Plunge Protection Team’—which is the Federal Reserve, big major banks, representatives of the New York Stock Exchange and the other exchanges—and they have been meeting informally so far. And they have a kind of an informal agreement among major banks to come in and start to buy stock if there appears to be a problem. They have in the past acted more formally . . . I don’t know if you remember, but in 1998, there was a crisis called the Long-Term Capital Crisis. It was a major currency trader, and there was a global currency crisis. And they, with the guidance of the Fed, all of the banks got together when it started to collapse and propped up the currency markets. And they have plans in place to consider [doing] that [again] if the markets start to fall.
And, just like when it was calmly admitted in 2016 that the “record bull run” since 2008 had been a Federal Reserve-created mirage, the public was flat-out told in 2001 that the Fed would coordinate with the banks to interfere in the markets as needed. And in both cases, these revelations were promptly memory-holed and ignored in all future reporting of the market’s gyrations.
So what do the manipulations of the Plunge Protection Team actually look like?
On Monday, February 5, 2018, things were playing out on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange much like the “nightmare scenario” painted in the 1997 Washington Post article by Fromson. After a 666-point decline the previous Friday, the Dow Jones was down a further 1,600 points on the day, as big a decline as the index had ever seen. . . . And then, miraculously, late in the afternoon “[s]omeone arbitrarily and aggressively started buying stocks and halved the loss.”
As John Crudele, the journalist who has been covering the PPT and its machinations for decades now, observed at the time:
Nobody has ever proven that the Fed and its friends actually protect Wall Street against plunges. It is, you might say, the Loch Ness monster of the financial world — people get glimpses of something but never see a clear picture.
That’s what happened during the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. Telephone records I obtained showed numerous calls between then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and contacts on Wall Street on days when the stock market was tanking and the decline needed to be stopped.
The action in stocks on those days looked a lot like what happened on Monday, when the Dow was down nearly 1,600 points and was suddenly jerked back to a smaller loss.
For decades now, a similar scene has played out on days of dramatic market plunges. After an initial sell-off, a late afternoon rally by a mystery buyer would reassure the markets and claw back the loss. Sometimes, the manipulation was so obvious it left literal straight lines in the charts. But still, no official word ever came from the Plunge Protection Team itself.
. . . until December 2018, that is. Ten months after Crudele called out the PPT’s actions to prop up the Dow Jones after its 1600 point plunge, then-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin openly announced that he was calling on the Plunge Protection Team to “assure normal market operations” during a December stock slide that was on track to be the worst December in the US markets since 1930. As Forbes put it in their headline about the move: “Mnuchin Calls Plunge Protection Team; Stocks Soar One Day Later.” In the article, Forbes writer Adam Sarhan noted of the events following Mnuchin’s open call to the PPT:
“The market was closed on Tuesday for Christmas but stocks soared 1,000 points (the largest gain since the last bear market during the financial crisis) on Wednesday. Literally, the first day after that call was made. I can’t make this up.”
With a gift for understatement, Sarhan concludes that: “One important lesson investors can learn from the market action over the past decade is that the government plays a very important role.”
From crooked regulators to outright manipulation, from “failed” investigations to insider trading windfalls, the markets have been one big con job on the American public—and the people of the world—since their inception. In fact, there are many more examples of fraud, deception and manipulation that could be documented.
There is, for example, the testimony of Bill Murphy to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission during a hearing on suppression of precious metal prices.
BART CHILTON: But can you give the Commission some specific evidence, some specific examples of how you think that’s occurring, when you think that’s occurring?
BILL MURPHY: Yes, I can, and I had 11 years’ worth of evidence that all hangs together here. But somebody came to my attention two days ago of a whistleblower nature that we’re going to hand to the press afterwards and we think it’s very important for the American public and this hearing to have this information.
On March 23rd, 2010, GATA Director Adrian Douglas was contacted by a whistleblower by the name of Andrew Maguire. Mr. McGuire, formerly of Goldman Sachs, is a metal trader in London. He has been told firsthand by traders working for JPMorgan Chase that JPM manipulates the precious metals markets and they brag how they make money doing so.
In November 2009, he contacted the CFTC Enforcement Division to report this criminal activity. He described in detail the way JPM signals to the markets its intentions to take down the precious metals. Traders recognize these signals and make money shorting the metals alongside JPM. Maguire explained how there are routine market manipulations at the time of option expiry, nonfarm payroll data releases, and COMEX contract rollover, as well as ad hoc events.
On February 3 he gave two days’ advance warning by email to Eliud Ramirez, a senior investigator for the CFTC’s Enforcement Division, that the precious metals would be attacked upon the release of the nonfarm payroll data on February 5. Then on February 5, as it played out exactly as predicted, further emails were sent to Ramirez while the manipulation was in progress.
It would not be possible to predict such a market move unless the market was manipulated.
In an email on that day, Mr. Maguire wrote: “It is common knowledge here in London amongst the metals traders that it is JPM’s intent to flush out and cover as many shorts as possible prior to any discussion in March about position limits. I feel sorry for all those not in the loop. A serious amount of money was made and lost today and in my opinion as a result of the CFTC [allowing] by your own definition an illegal concentrated and manipulative position to continue.”
SOURCE: Bill Murphy of GATA Reveals Whistle-Blower in Gold Price Suppression
Or there was the 2010 Flash Crash, the harrowing 35-minute window from 2:32 PM to 3:07 PM on May 6, 2010, when the Dow plunged nearly 1,000 points . . . and then gained most of it back. The incredible and unprecedented swing left traders and financial talking heads completely stymied, but after five years of relentless investigation, the Department of Justice presented the man who they framed as the arch-mastermind who set off the most alarming collapse-and-recovery in the history of the markets: a day trader living in his parent’s house in Hounslow.
NARRATOR: 15 minutes of chaos that shook the world’s biggest markets.
NEWS ANCHOR: What the heck is going on down there?
REPORTER: I don’t know. There is fear. This is capitulation, really.
LIAM VAUGHN: On May 6th, 2010, without warning, the US stock market and futures markets just crashed.
REPORTER: It can’t be there. That is not a real price.
ANCHOR: The flash crash, which wiped a trillion dollars off the value of American companies in five minutes. . . .
LIAM VAUGHN: To look at a price chart, it looked like a kind of runaway elevator.
ANCHOR: It took authorities five years, guys, to track down this lone British trader, allegedly involved in a 2010 flash crash.
REPORTER: Navinder Singh Sarao, dubbed the Hound of Hounslow, has been accused of manipulating the market.
REPORTER: US regulators claim he made about $40 Million
Despite the fact that multiple professors, mainstream newspapers and even a former rogue trader himself all testified to the impossibility that the incredible rollercoaster of the Flash Crash was really caused by the “spoofing” antics of a lone trader, the story was effectively shelved and the underlying issue of the algorithmically driven High Frequency Trading—which involves bots performing large numbers of orders in fractions of a second and requires traders to pay millions of dollars to co-locate their servers with the exchanges’ computers to give them a head start on their competitors that is measured in milliseconds—was never addressed.
Or there was the insider trading scandal of 2020, when multiple senators were probed for insider trading after being briefed by the Senate’s Health and Foreign Affairs committees about the likely effects of the coronavirus scare in the US.
JESSICA SMITH: Yeah, Adam, several senators are facing criticism this morning after reports that they sold stock after being briefed about the coronavirus. But before the market started tanking, four senators are said to have made trades. But two in particular are facing a lot of criticism.
The first is Senator Richard Burr. ProPublica reports on February 13th he sold between $628,000 to $1.7 million dollars worth of stock in 33 separate transactions. He is the chairman of the Senate Intel committee and he was getting daily briefings about the coronavirus at that time according to Reuters. So there are a lot of questions about why he made those trades.
SOURCE: 4 US senators under scrutiny after dumping millions in stocks
The probe into Senator Burr—who was one of the only senators to vote against the legislation that made such insider trading illegal—and the other accused senators was later dropped with no charges filed.
In fact, there are many, many such examples of market rigging, insider trading and manipulation of stock and commodity prices for the benefit of the bankers and their political allies that could be detailed, not just in the US markets, but in markets around the world. But such an exhaustive list would be, by this point, unnecessary. The markets are rigged, and that rigging is pervasive and systemic.
So it should come as no surprise that the GameStop pandemonium began when it was observed that another common method of market manipulation was taking place on GameStop’s stock: naked shorting.
Naked shorting involves traders taking advantages of loopholes and discrepancies in paper and electronic trading systems to short shares that don’t even exist. In this case, hedge funds, convinced that the flailing gaming retailer was going to go the way of Blockbuster Video and seeing the December 2020 reports of operating losses, began aggressively shorting the stock. By the time the “wallstreetbets” community on reddit discovered the naked shorting operation, the hedge funds were already 140% short on shares of GameStop, meaning that 40% more stock was being sold short than even existed.
This led to the massive short squeeze in January, with redditors and other retail investors buying up shares in GameStop and running up the stock price, forcing the hedge funds to buy up stock to cover their shorts and exposing them to billions of dollars in losses.
But that was only the beginning of the revelations of market rigging in the GameStop saga. The remarkable squeeze was brought to an abrupt halt when Robinhood—the electronic trading platform that burst on the scene in 2014 promising to “democratize the stock market” with its zero-commission trading app—stopped trading on GameStop and other wallstreetbets-driven trades like AMC Entertainment, BlackBerry and Nokia. The official explanation for the trading halt—that Robinhood had to suspend trading in the stocks until it could increase its collateral with the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation—merely underlines the point that the average mom-and-pop investor will continue to be thwarted from trading while the massive hedge funds and market makers with direct access to the markets will always be able to cover their positions in the event of any popular, “democratic” market activity.
This point was further underlined when yet another aspect of the retail investing scam was revealed: payment for order flow, or PFOF, in which hedge funds pay retail brokerages for access to their customers’ trades. With this information, hedge funds can not only buy orders before they are processed and flip the trade back to the market, pocketing the spread between the buy and sell price, but they can front-run orders, effectively cutting in front of the brokerages’ clients to buy hot stocks before the retail investors. As it turns out, Robinhood made nearly $700 million selling their clients’ trade data to the big hedge funds in 2020 alone.
Nor was it a surprise when it was learned that Biden’s Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, was paid over $800,000 in speaking fees by Citadel LLC, which operates both Citadel—a hedge fund that provided a $2 billion emergency backstop for GameStop short seller Melvin Capital—and Citadel Securities—”a market maker that handles about 40% of U.S. retail stock order flow, including from brokerages like free-trading app Robinhood.” When asked whether Yellen would recuse herself from advising the president on the GameStop situation, White House press secretary Jen Psaki responded that she wouldn’t, saying that Yellen was an expert and that she deserved the money.
REPORTER: . . . And I had a follow-up on the markets and everything that’s happening with GameStop. You did mention, I believe yesterday, that the Treasury Secretary is monitoring the situation and she’s, kind of, on top of it. There have been some kind of concerns about her previous engagements with Citadel and speaking fees that she has received from Citadel. Are there any plans to have her recuse herself from advising the President on GameStop and the whole Robinhood situation?
PSAKI: Well, just to be clear, what I said was that we have—the Treasury Secretary is now confirmed. Obviously, we have a broad economic team. The SEC put out a statement yesterday that I referred to. But I don’t think I have anything more for you on it, other than to say, separate from the GameStop issue, the Secretary of Treasury is one of the world-renowned experts on markets, on the economy. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone she was paid to give her perspective and advice before she came into office.
SOURCE: Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jen Psaki (January 28, 2021)
The entire affair grew even more absurd when internet researchers discovered that Jen Psaki’s relative, Jeff Psaki, himself worked for Citadel. The “fact checkers” at Newsweek were quick to rule the story as false, however, not because Psaki’s relative did not in fact work for Citadel, but because “a source close to Jeff” told Newsweek that “Jen and Jeff Psaki are distant second cousins but have no relationship.”
Whatever further twists and turns the GameStop saga takes, the conclusion is foregone: the “little people” may be able to get one past the goalkeepers of the manipulated markets here and there, but those deviations from the standard will always return to the status quo. In the end, the hedge funds and their billions will be protected while the little guy will be misinformed, steered down blind alleys, panicked, tricked into investing in bubbles, and, ultimately, fleeced for the benefit of the financial vultures and their bought-and-paid-for politicians and regulatory friends.
At last the David and Goliath story that has been woven around the GameStop insurrection is revealed for what it is: a story, a fable, a convenient narrative to trick the public back into the phoney, manipulated markets to once again take their place at the casino table. It is designed to trick people into thinking that this time they’ll be able to win against the house. But that is not how a casino works. In the central-bank-inflated, derivatives-laden mystery markets of Wall Street, the games are rigged, the dice is loaded, and the house always wins in the end.
None of this is surprising to those who have known for decades that the markets are rigged. But every generation needs to see the deception play out in real time to understand just how deep and pervasive the systemic rot is. From this point on, those who have experienced the effects of this deception only have to answer one question: Are you going to continue to play Wall Street’s rigged game, or are you going to take your chips off the table and invest in local businesses and projects with the people on Main Street?
The choice is yours. It always has been.
And just who owns the New York Stock Exchange. Why, billionaires married to politicians.
BUSINESS LEADERS Published December 31
New York Stock Exchange owner, Kelly Loeffler’s husband, now a billionaire
Jeffrey Sprecher, husband of Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., is now a billionaire, according to Bloomberg, as his Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) saw its stock rise more than 22% in 2020.
Sprecher is the CEO of ICE, which owns the New York Stock Exchange, and he owns approximately 1% of the company.
The company’s market value is more than $63 billion (market capitalization or market value is a common method of measuring the size of a publicly-traded company and it is calculated by multiplying the current stock price by the number of shares outstanding).
Ticker Security Last Change Change %
ICE INTERCONTINENTAL EXCHANGE, INC. 113.17 +1.06 +0.95%
As a result of its rising value, ICE continues to grow. Earlier this year it purchased Ellie…..
Both are members of the Council on National Policy, a neo-fascist think tank made-up of the worst of the worst,like Frank Wisner II, son of Frank Wisner The First, CIA.
Just one example. CNP is a secret society
https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/new-york-stock-exchange-owner-loeffler-husband-billionaire
“The owner of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is Jeffrey Sprecher. Remember the position of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in regards to Senator Loeffler? Well, Mr. Sprecher is the husband of former Senator Kelly Loeffler.
Kelly Loeffler’s seat was purchased by their elite status and position. Why would a billionaire run for an elected office paying a few hundred thousand?
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell positioned Loeffler with committee assignments based on that status of influence and affluence.
Jeffrey Sprecher and Kelly Loeffler entered politics for their elite interests.
The ruse of the DecptiCons is always that a motive to the benefit of the republic lies behind their candidacy. This is the same ruse that lay behind Mitt Romney, another DeceptiCon. There are no purely altruistic motives behind these politicians, particularly in the Senate.
Their motives are all about status, power and greed. They are not representatives of the people; they are representative of their own elite fellowship and interests, and this crosses both parties. Everything else is chaff and countermeasures to ensure their position.
That is the brutal and uncomfortable reality to accept. The entire system is corrupt.”
Lest anyone would doubt this
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2021/01/28/decepticon-maneuvers-dont-forget-who-owns-the-new-york-stock-exchange/
weilunion,
I would venture to say that you are only about 95% correct when you say that the entire system is corrupt. The other Senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul, and perhaps as many as 5 other United States Inc. Senators are not knowingly a part of the corrupt system.
On the other hand, being paid by a Corporation posing as a Government for the well being of the People, and thus Pretending to “Represent” the People of a State or District while actually being a paid employee of this Central Corporation does seem like fraud, eh!
You think Rand Paul and his father are not part of the Washington establishment and capitalist system? They just go to Washington DC as Senators each day, but stand apart from the morass with principled positions?
I am afraid not. And though they say they embrace bankrupt libertarianism,they are not libertarians. They are American huckster and hustlers.
That is fine, libertarianism, in the market sense, not social libertarian sense, is bankrupt. But to pose as one and not be one??
Anyone connected with the US political system has gained their seats due to lobbyists and money. and as a result, this is who and what they represent.
Ron Paul has been a bigot, racist and a member of the Liberty Lobby since the 50’s. He has not accomplished anything but think tanks since the time he has been in office.
In fact,Ron Paul said he would not have voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act arguing that if people want to discriminate, good for them.
He is against same sex marriage, he thinks the federal government should stay out of it. He has publicly supported the Defense of Marriage Act. He is anti-abortion and favors an amendment to the constitution which says life begins at conception. This is not in line with the stated policies of the Libertarian Party or of the Cato Institute.:
“Libertarian Party chairman Nicholas Sarwark, who is stepping up criticism of Paul, echoing a common claim of party members stated that Ron Paul, according to Chairman Sarwark, is not a libertarian. He claims that the liberty leader has often been wrong and even anti-libertarian, then pointing to his support of states’ rights.
To libertarians, the states’ rights debate is more like a game of semantics. Technically, a state does not have rights — only individuals do. The state is still government and thus, the power for its existence is derived from the people themselves. Given this, only the people themselves have rights.”
This is a position that Paul supports.
https://libertyconservative.com/libertarian-party-believes-ron-paul-not-libertarian/
He is a fraud,republican light. And among all the psycho-frauds he tries to stand out as different, an anamolie when in fact he is one of ‘them’.
“Yet it irks me that, as far as most Americans are concerned, Ron Paul is the alpha and omega of the libertarian creed. If you were an evil genius determined to promote the idea that libertarianism is a morally dubious ideology of privilege poorly disguised as a doctrine of liberation, you’d be hard pressed to improve on Ron Paul.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/94477/ron-paul-distorted-libertarian-ideology
It gets even better, or best said, ‘worse’:
“There’s a single New Jersey deli doing $35,000 in sales valued at $100 million in the stock market
There’s a single New Jersey deli doing $35,000 in sales valued at $100 million in the stock market
PUBLISHED THU, APR 15 20213:37 PM EDTUPDATED FRI, APR 16 20218:08 AM EDT
Hedge fund manager David Einhorn warned of dangers for retail investors that he sees in the market, and one of his main examples was a tiny New Jersey deli with a market capitalization of more than $100 million.
The Paulsboro, New Jersey-based Your Hometown Deli is the sole location for Hometown International, which has an eye-popping market value despite totaling $35,748 in sales in the last two years combined, according to securities filings.
“Someone pointed us to Hometown International (HWIN), which owns a single deli in rural New Jersey … HWIN reached a market cap of $113 million on February 8. The largest shareholder is also the CEO/CFO/Treasurer and a Director, who also happens to be the wrestling coach of the high school next door to the deli. The pastrami must be amazing,” Einhorn said in a letter to clients published Thursday.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/15/theres-a-single-new-jersey-deli-doing-35000-in-sales-valued-at-100-million-in-the-stock-market.html
Elites are sacking the country with phony off shores accounts, phony business names and under-capitalized profits.
We are looking at collapse.
“..Elites are sacking the country with phony off shores accounts, phony business names and under-capitalized profits.
We are looking at collapse…”
Very True. But it will be controlled if possible… they want both sides controlled.
The elites funded the bolsheviks and the Neo_cons are pretty much re-branded Trotskyites and providing a conservative alternative to the “left wing” implementation of policies that serve the master class.
Yes, they want controlled demolition. But this might not be possible. It is three sheets to the wind now and the door can close at anytime.
The insane run the asylum
And never forget LIBOR. In 2012 I wrote the following:
“Criminal fraud with LIBOR works this way:
1. Local US government agencies were encouraged by investment and loan managers to enter into interest rate swap agreements to “save money.” This is buying insurance against rising interest rates for local government debt securities.
2. The terms of the swap cost billions more than falling interest rates: collective tens of billions were transferred from US local governments to almost exclusively JP Morgan, BofA, Citi, and Goldman Sachs.
3. Because the interest rates is now acknowledged as contrived, the swaps become fraudulent because these four banks sold a product without disclosing their own manipulation over interest rates.”
What is essential bank fraud, and how does it cost us trillions?
https://dailycensored.com/files/libor-lies-defraud-billions-yes-but-essential-bank-fraud-costs-99-trillions-every-year/
Crimogens. Like pathogens crimogens are to criminology what pathogens are to the body and mind.
The economy is crimogenic. Politics is simply a mere reflection of this reality.
Obviously the Gamestop debacle showed the fraudulent nature of the system, but the mainstream focus on “naked” shorting results from (and promotes) confusion regarding how shorting works. It’s possible and even common for more than 100% of a company’s shares to be shorted, and it doesn’t necessarily indicate illegal or unfair practices. Here’s how it works:
When someone shorts a stock, they borrow the shares and sell them. Those shares now belong to the new owner, who can loan them out if they want. The “borrowed” status of the shares has no effect on the new owner, who most likely doesn’t even know that they were borrowed. Thus the same shares can be loaned out and sold by short-sellers multiple times.
Hedge funds and other miscreants sometimes do “naked” short (selling stock without actually borrowing it) which is illegal, but the fact that more than 100% of a stock is short is not evidence of naked shorting.
Many think of regulation when it comes to banks. However, banks under capitalism have a very important and primary role: laundering cash, providing liquid capital, lending, creating debt servitude and controlling the international global capitalist system.
I will make this my last post, but I wish to share with readers how one such crimogen in London, what they call a ‘whale’ in banking and gambling circles, slipped away from the harpoon under Obama:
As I wrote in 2013:
“The “London Whale” escapes harpooning”
“The Wall Street Journal reports former JPMorgan Chase employee Bruno Iksil will not be prosecuted by the Justice Department under Eric Holder. Surprised?
In an article posted on the selective prosecution of Bradley Manning (http://www.dailycensored.com/bradley-manning-americas-1-political-prisoner/)we can add arch criminal Bruno Iksil to the list with the Isaias brother banksters out of Ecuador (http://www.dailycensored.com/robert-and-william-isaias-dassum-the-case-of-the-ecuadorian-banking-fugitives-that-live-and-invest-in-the-u-s/).
Too big to fail and too big to prosecute. Meanwhile 2.2 million poor and disenfranchsied Americans dwell in penitentiaries.
Iksil is the so-called “London Whale” at the center of the trading scandal that lost JPMorgan, the country’s biggest bank by assets, some $6.2 billion in 2012. You know, those banks you bailed out?
Justice Department head, Eric Holder made a statement that banks were too big to prosecute in a confession in testimony before the Senate Judiciary back in March of this year.
Holder said, according to The Hill:
“I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so
large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are
hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a
criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy,
perhaps even the world economy. And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large” (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/06/eric-holder-banks-too-big_n_2821741.html).”
Yep,that was the Obama administration. In the eight years since the article, 2013, the lascivious elites have garnered more and more wealth.
You can’t regulate a criminal enterprise.
https://dailycensored.com/files/the-london-whale-escapes-harpooning/
But then, what isn’t rigged 😉
There could be episodes about:
– rigged elections (I am curious about differences per country)
– rigged “science” (medical / tests /911 /climate /etc)
– rigged justice (how rich can avoid prison)
– the state as a rigged system
– rigged markets
– rigged banking
– rigged agriculture
How deep does it go?
We could start to do some open-source work.
It is the class struggle. So,it goes back to the economics of slavery. Slave societies worked well for the masters. Greece being the most recognized. Then African slaves. But African slaves were sold on the ‘market’, you know that Free Market, in the 1600’s Greek slaves were not shipped to the Americans via the free market?
Medievalism was a great time as well. Social and economic pressures turned slaves into serfs, after Rome fell. And serfs they remained under neo feudalism where they worked for themselves within the castle walls, three days or so for themselves to eat, grow food, and for the Lord, 2 days. Nice profit for the Lord.
But then came wage slavery as a result of incredible social and economic forces. Capitalism.
The serfs were now ‘free’, you know they didn’t have to sleep in the Lord’s barn and work the cattle they were free to sell their labor.
And pay their overhead, food, rent, needs from the wage slavery. Where before they had overhead, now the free market set them free.
To be exploited by capitalists. Easy. I give you ten dollars and hour to produce a widget and I then do the math and sell it for 12. Out of the 12, you got 10.
The other two is my profit minus costs.
The labor theory of value is simple: working people create value, not capital. And certainly not private capital. Coop capital sure. Communitarian capital, sure.
But not private.
From wage slavery we went to rentier capitalism or debt slavery. We now owe the Lords and Corporations, the slave masters and the State that emboldens them all.
We live in the epoch of a now predatory financial capitalism and the way forward is not to embrace capitalism,but to understand its failures and be roiled enough to get rid of it.
Revolution, plain and simple. We want to turn the whole thing upside down — we want a public commons, socialized means of production through democratized work and distribution based on need and ability.
Not neofeudalism
Feudalism was a time with a lot of wars.
Lords fighting other lords, and religions fighting religions.
Maybe we can setup the elite against each other?
I am certain that they are not Best Friends Forever.
Maybe,but the ‘we’ you speak of has to be a large organized mass of people with consciousness.
weilunion,
hahaha, you are again massaging people with leftism.
In a way it’s cool, not enough of left thought here.
But reading you reminds me on S. Žižek when he said: Left is utterly impotent today (not that he has a woody or is providing some viagra).
“The labor theory of value is simple: working people create value, not capital. And certainly not private capital. Coop capital sure. Communitarian capital, sure.But not private.”
That makes absolutely no sense.
“Revolution, plain and simple.”
Really????
What will bring today people to the streets, people that are scared to death because of virus and are ready to sell their asses.
“…large organized mass of people with consciousness.”
There is never been such a thing nor will be. Majority of people are followers, that’s not decry or denigration, it’s a fact.
And now some pure Hegelian dialectic:
thesis: capitalism
antithesis: marxism
synthesis: …..
We don’t know, but I believe anarchism.
“hahaha, you are again massaging people with leftism.
In a way it’s cool, not enough of left thought here.
But reading you reminds me on S. Žižek when he said: Left is utterly impotent today (not that he has a woody or is providing some viagra).”
First off, S. Žižek is not a leftist he is a postmodernist and a clown. And I do not massage people I give them information and assumptions they can correct, reject or hold close.
““The labor theory of value is simple: working people create value, not capital. And certainly not private capital. Coop capital sure. Communitarian capital, sure. But not private.”
That makes absolutely no sense.
Makes no sense if you do not take the time to investigate how wealth created by labor or the theory itself. We are taught self-made men create societies, when it is working people.
Look up the Labor theory of value and study it
No workers, no profits for capitalist. However if capital was owned, shared, directed by coops or communities of caring or sharing then we would not have capitalism, we would have libertarian socialism.
“Revolution, plain and simple.”
Really????
What will bring today people to the streets, people that are scared to death because of virus and are ready to sell their asses.
Revolution is inevitable it is the history of civilization. The history is how, wehn, material and subjective confitions.
“…large organized mass of people with consciousness.”
There is never been such a thing nor will be. Majority of people are followers, that’s not decry or denigration, it’s a fact.
OK, so the assumption is that people are stupid, the problem cannot be reckoned with and thus no chance, right? I do not hold a low opinion of my fellow travelers. I heard the same thing all my life and seen it proven wrong.
And now some pure Hegelian dialectic:
thesis: capitalism
antithesis: marxism
synthesis: …..
This is not Hegelian dialectic. Simply not. Hegel thought ideas change reality and Marx thought reality changes consciousness.
What you depict in the dialectic above is dialectical materialism, not Hegelian dialects.
We don’t know, but I believe anarchism.
When two opposing forces meet there will by a synthesis and produce something new but with parts of the old.
Social libertarianism, a very different animal than ‘market fundamentalist, super hperbolic individualism, is very different from the Racket they call market libertarianism on so many, many levels.
Any synthesis,dialectically will result in new forms of living. But there are no guantees.
If you don’t see nonsense in claim that private capital don’t produce wealth while coop capital do then even god cannot help you.
Žižek is primarily a philo-tainer. He was damn right regarding impotence of the left and you are a nice representation of this, regurgitating old ideas (revolution) in old fashion way that has no potency to move people…you know, narrative that inspire.
Aside that you are often just plainly wrong.
Labor theory of value is useful for explaining genesis of capital, otherwise not really.
Although I said my view of people being mostly followers should not be interpreted as denigration, you are not able to comprehend. Milgram and Asch experiments support my thesis.
Dialectic I proposed can is Hegelian, capitalism and marxism can be seen as ideas.
What I’m pretty sure about the Synthesis is, that it will bring a clear distinction between personal property and private property.
Property is a crux of the matter.
Ownership of property is the crux of the matter
“If you don’t (sic) see nonsense in claim that private capital don’t produce wealth while coop capital do then even god cannot help you.”
First off,I do not believe in any Gods, second you would not be able to define the labor theory of value.
You tried to associate a non Marxist with Marxism.
I have dealt with you before. You take the last word, I have little time for uncritical thinking.
Focusing on ownership is very superficial approach, it’s old style, attention is on the people-with-property and that is wrong. There is a question what can be done about it. Opponents can rightfully say “commies will come out of woods and take your stuff”.
If ownership is in the center, property as a concept stays untouched. Ownership is secondary, its meaning is defined by the concept of property.
It’s very obvious (not to believers in capitalism) that concept of property and consequences derived from it are detrimental for society hence for individual too.
Property is a social construct, it doesn’t exist outside society, that means we can redefine it. By redefinition of property problem is solved at its roots.
weilunion ,
“…I have little time for uncritical thinking.”
hahahahaha
Huge deficiency of critical thinking with you. Start for the beginning in your backyard.
Weilunion
Capitalism was an escape from serfdoom for the masses and subjection to Guilds for the skilled class- it also was the cause of the massive rise in food and goods production that allowed the European population to grow massively and live longer lives in far more comfort then the relative class equality of the middle ages when even the king lived in poverty compared to me today.
“..Revolution, plain and simple. We want to turn the whole thing upside down — we want a public commons, socialized means of production through democratized work and distribution based on need and ability….”
That will NEVER happen in a way thats good for common people… the reason that socialist agitation is funded by the rich is because when they combine their power with teh state power they can reduce everyone BACK to abject serfdom just as the wall street funded (Mostly jewish) Bolsheviks did in the USSR and the rockerfeller stooge Mao did in China.
Extending capitalism to the masses with co op’s and small business is the only thing that has ever improved the working mans lot which is why historically it has been attacked and subverted by revolutionaries who are often linked to the rich people they profess to hate.
Asto your analysis of capitalism of course, I disagree.
Yes, extending ownership, common ownership of basic utilities and developing a democracy AT the work place is what is needed.
This begins, me thinks, not at any national level but in ones’ own community
“..Yes, extending ownership, common ownership of basic utilities and developing a democracy AT the work place is what is needed…”
A Co op for power works…. very well for communities where everyone knows each other and trusts each other. A village where everyone is related by blood can probably do that very well
But even in planned experimental communities total common ownership of ALL means of production (thus source of a persons life) has always resulted in failure, and/or tyranny and violence.
Even Cults can not manage to do it for more then a decade, and the only successful commune I know, a monastery, attracts very few people 🙂
You might think “democracy” protects people in a commune but it does not… the few will always rule the many because most people are followers. A world state of common ownership will pretty quickly either fail or turn into totalitarian synarchism
First of all, you are factually incorrect.
Mondragon in Spain is one of the major producers of goods and services. It is the world’s largest worker cooperative, whose foundation was inspired in the 1940s by the Catholic priest José María Arizmendiarrieta. In 2002 the MCC contributed 3.7% to the total GDP of the Basque Country and 7.6% to the industrial GDP.
It is over sixty years old and serves as an exemplar and proof and evidence of the ability of cooperation and workers’ coops.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondrag%C3%B3n
US citizens know little about it and less about workers’ coops all over the world.
Americans really know very little,being Anglo-centric and xenophobic.
It is a shame for throughout history communities of caring and shared decision making have existed, only to be wiped from the cognitive forehead by propaganda that say only ‘free markets and rugged individualism’ work.
Of course the car crash of capitalism occurring right in front of us, destroying life, supplies the evidence that free markets and rugged,hyper-individualism does not work.
If you do not like shared decision making and think coops and communities of caring do not work, then you seem to propose the same hierarchical, head-of-household approach to social and economic issues. Autocracy
This is precisely what needs to be eliminated. The argument that somehow collectives and coops do not work and only private ownership of the means of production organized under a hierarchy, is both counterproductive, unimaginative and ahistorical.
This is what American culture,in particular teaches: the libertarian mind where only ‘blood ties’, like a clan can hope to settle the problems we face, and only the hyper individual makes hsitory.
I reject this wholeheartedly as I would suspect most Corbett Report listeners would.
As Mark Twain is said to have stated: “Get your facts first and then you can distort them as much as you want.”
Coops have existed throughout history and continue. They exist in the neighborhood coop, international relations and personal life.
The issue for many of us is to how to actually develop and expand the socialized coop approach to both work and life.
How am I incorrect ? Serious question
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
IS NOT a planned community built without private ownership or property .. its a workers co op that grew organically in a town of people who have lots in common.
I said that co op’s work fine on a small scale where people trust and know each other.
“..his is what American culture,in particular teaches: the libertarian mind where only ‘blood ties’,…”
WRONG… America was built on 2 principles that allowed lots of different kinds of people to live together 1)Plenty of decentralized LOCAL control (with LOTS of local co-op’s and clubs and organizations)
2)Having LOTS of resources so everyone could get a share
“..‘blood ties’, like a clan can hope to settle the problems we face, and only the hyper individual makes hsitory…”
Humans live in clans/tribes/villages/families/ ect. You CAN NOT reliably replace those bonds with abstract ideas like “Class” or “politics”
“..It is a shame for throughout history communities of caring and shared decision making have existed, …”
NONE multi racial or multi religious or multi political…
“..Americans really know very little,being Anglo-centric and xenophobic…”
Anglo americans going the way of the American Indian because they are NOT Xenophobic LOL… but since your talking Spain earlier How long were Basques of ETA killing people because they wanted an ethnostate???
Where is Yugoslavia now?? IS being white in South Africa or Palestinian in Israel healthy?
All peoples are Xenophobic to some degree… or they are replaced by people WHO ARE. Only religion can cross that divide, politics never will reliably do so
Bitcoin is under attack with Witney Webb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97ff0VQB1kE
The Banks and CIA want to create a digital money.
The AI and surveillance will be used to combat dissent.
After vax-passports, climate scare and ransomware will be used to
push for these policies.
I dont know much about bitcoin… but I believe that every transfer is logged (that being how it works..?) so its not anoymized unless you find a way to launder it out of the system?
Bitcoin is now said to take the equivalent of the Sweden and Denmark energy combined to produce it.
Bitcoin is a fraud. Really, it is a hobby for billionaires,collectors. They put them in their safe.
Valuing goods and services with Bitcoin in an internationally dominated world by the dollar is like buying old Andy Warhol prints and trying to use them as cash.
Working people have no bitcoin nor do they want it.
It is amyth, just like the stock market as people scramble like rats to avoid the historical carnage left for them by preceding generations.
James you have just made 99% of all mainstream books on economics obsolete with this one video. Congrats.
FreeThinker,
I also have a “feeling” that something Big is going to happen soon.
Given that real physical Silver is oversold by about 250 X and that real physical Gold is oversold by about 100 X, it stands to reason that at some point enough Paper Holders will demand Physical Delivery to crash the system.
A Person would almost have to be Blind (or Willfully Blind) not to see that the Stock Market continues to go up as the real Economy is going to hell.
I have recently gotten hit with the increase in Lumber prices which are well over 100% in a year. Yep, this can not last much longer, but I fear that the World Oligarchs, that Own the World Banks, have their Chess next move well planned.
What will the People do when the value of Federal Reserve Notes goes to zero? Perhaps James to attempt to answer this question in another Documentary.
The Markets are Rigged.
Yep, we knew that.
But the Philosopher’s Lesson from the Story (a well documented one at that) is perhaps not so well known, and that is:
“Don’t play in the Devil’s Game or you will get burned”.
People go to Las Vegas thinking they can win gambling. They do the same thing in the Casino economy. Vegas is the analogy for the Casino economy with its surveillance from above, its own banks and vaults, games people can move to and from, like stocks.
The house always wins. Capitalism is a criminal enterprise.
You work for food and die for oil.
Capitalism is not about Free Trade. This is not your flea market capitalism.
This is a ruthless, voracious nd lascivious system of thieves.
You cannot even now, freely trade among your friends or family. Are you going to freely trade corporate toilet paper?
Capitalism is a politicland economic system which takes time understanding. It is not about free trade, never was. The State, you hate so much, is the guiding hand of ‘capitalist free enterprise’ from Tarifs to taxes, from regulation to deregulation.
If it was not for the State, corporate capitalism could not exist.
So if you want to trade freely and honestly, best get rid of corporate capitalism and capitalism as a whole. It is a Racket.
As to Libertarianism, to agitate the unbridled out there:
“Libertarians have as some of their heroes some of the most deranged economists, philosophers, and politicians in recent history. At the top of that list of deplorables is sociopathic writer and godmother of modern libertarianism Ayn Rand. A critic of programs she deemed “socialist,” including President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Social Security system and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Medicare, she did not hesitate to avail herself of both “socialistic” federal programs in the 1970s. During the 1973 Israeli-Arab War, Rand said that the war involved “civilized men,” Israelis, fighting “savages,” the Arab nations. Rand also justified European colonialists seizing the land of the indigenous native peoples of the Western Hemisphere. Even though Rand was a supreme hypocrite and racist, her vile beliefs seeped into the Republican Party’s “libertarian” wing, partially represented by Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan, and which later developed into the Tea Party movement and Trumpism.”
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/01/24/scourge-of-anti-government-libertarianism/
More, it is the libertarian-market driven mindset and in face of failure all over the world is still embraced. Avoidance and denial and hyper exposure to capitalist ideology creates the ‘libertarian brain’.
And you ended with “Di you vote for Obama”.
How sad, it seems you do not even understand what the word ‘capitalism’ means. I would do some economic historical research.
You can begin here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-ZGdAi8Ji0
Philosophically Speaking,
I think we need a New System to replace this one built on Corporations (Dead Fictional Entities).
It seems to me that such a New System was created, or at least attempted to be, with a great degree of success, with the original agreements among thirteen Colonies under British Corporate rule which then became a Union of Free and Independent States (The United States of America).
Indeed, it was a New System, and was declared as an Experiment in “Rule by the People” by those who created it.
Indeed, British Rule (Roman Law/Law of the Sea/The law of Corporations) was thrown off, and held a bay for a time, however it did not last.
I think that most of the answers we seek in creating a New System to replace the Corporate one (Soon to be a One World Government) have already been answered by the Drafters of the Union of States (United States Constitution) and these answers can be found in the Federalists Papers.
I will also note that the Original Thirteen Amendment was likely the reason behind the British Invasion known as The War of 1812. The Original 13th Amendment declared that no one holding a title of Nobility (belonging to the Corporate System) could hold any Public Office. This would have excluded members of the Bar (Lawyers) from holding any Public Office. Indeed, it was clear that members of the British Corporate Legal System could not legitimately Represent the People. Had the Original 13th Amendment been allowed to stand, the British Bankers, and the Corporations that had been built up around them, would have lost their last foothold in corrupting this New Government for the People.
The Treaty signed in 1815 which ended the War of 1812, allowed British Corporate Courts (Law of the Sea) to exist within the States along side the Common law Courts (Law of the Land). This likely seemed like a reasonable Compromise given that 10,000 well seasoned British Troops who had just defeated Neapolitan at Waterloo were about to Invade New Orleans where they were likely to crush the 2500, or so, rag tag Individuals General Jackson had put together.
The Oligarchs knew that by having their Corporate Courts in the States they could eventually take control of the Government and rule over the People. They took control of the system by bankrupting the people’s government and replacing it with a Corporation of paid Actors holding “Titles of Nobility”.
Indeed, the Oligarchs found that people continued to believe that the Government was for the people and this made them easier to control.
Amen. A voice of reason. You cannot turn back the clock on cartels and transnational cobra corporations: this is the financial stage of capitalism. Capitalism, the private ownership of the means of production must be eliminated.
This is the issue. As long as 850 men in the world,and their corporations, own the means of production while half the world starves, we lose.
They ain’t giving it up.
We have to take it.
But first we have to understand it.
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/05/12/new-cold-war-super-imperialism-michael-hudson/
Check for Payment For Order Flow in transcription above, there is a link to FT article full of persuasions (obfuscations, deceptions, half-truths) how great the idea is. In essence it’s about trade data
“…are they front running your trade causing you a worse price?”
Yes.
Skimming for themselves.
HFT traders say for orders from pension funds and similar that they are: dumb money, low hanging fruit, dinner,…
Check this one at 29:00 (3min) and get it from horse’s mouth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFQJNeQDDHA
Order Flow method of trading gives sharks opportunity to make a strategy to skim as much as possible.
Is it legally possible to get data on pending trade orders?
There are many Beasts. When they get entangled in trading it’s not a surprise something like Flash Crash happens occasionally. I’m curious why they don’t say that AI is a technology behind HFT.
Beast has advantage if it’s the closest, but network latency is not the only thing that matters for HFT competitiveness. Some competitors might have better or faster algorithms, some might have information not available to the Beast. If other-beast has 1 km disadvantage (3usec for light) that might well be compensated with faster algorithm.
Simple minimal code can’t do the job, because it can’t encompass huge and complex problem like stock exchange. Decisions must not only be fast, quality also matters. AI is excellent for finding very deep hidden patterns, very good at crunching various data that seems completely unrelated. AI is slow when learning, but when it’s performing a job it is way faster, particularly when running on for purpose tailored hardware.
“…AI and HFT are not the biggest problem of the rigged markets. Bankster-govt-media complex is.”
agree
You are saying HFT is not a complex hard problem, I disagree.
Why are they employing tremendous computer and brain power if HFT is towards easy?
I keep finding reports that the then current lord Rothschilde sued a guy for writing a book with the waterloo story in it… there IS an article about Rothschilde in the cited days article list… does anyone have a subscription to take a look?
The oft cited source…
https://books.google.com/books?id=4NZvDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA67&lpg=PA67&dq=suit++Ignatius+Balla+book&source=bl&ots=2UeXdRa-Tg&sig=ACfU3U0IypIln_ewe6O1z8yoWj_G9Y2Pkw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi20_HLrM3wAhWMLs0KHWKwAKAQ6AEwEHoECBUQAw#v=onepage&q=suit%20%20Ignatius%20Balla%20book&f=false
The News paper
https://www.nytimes.com/sitemap/1915/04/01/
Excellent work, just outstanding you two. YouTube had close to 600 comments and a lot of praise for the production value.
Your assertion of the skinned returning to the slaughter house by memory failure, or just no functional reasoning left to them was affirmed by one of my chaps I know who told me
” we have a way to level the playing field on those crooks now. Democratic investing” All I could say was ” I have an insider line on some authentic Moon Rocks.”
“Their is no “free market” ….”
Free market is useful abstraction that can be used but most of the time is abused.
Now, market participants are ranged from absurdly wealthy to absurdly poor. One’s power-to-negotiate is proportionate to Wealth i.e. Power. Since absolute equality is only possible as an idea, the same goes for free market, too.
“I don’t subscribe on the basis that the .0001 percent that creates fiat money has all the capacity to implode the Crypto Currency Market…”
Agree to extent, still, crypto is vulnerable to fiat. Fiat/crypto is like ocean/pool. Fiat is pretty much inevitable for survival. Crypto is connected to fiat via exchange, it’s also valuated in fiat. Crypto needs lots of computer power that is under fiat control.
A very good new series on Cities is now available. The series starts off with an explanation of why NY has so many dead, open spaces an why FDI (foreign direct investment) has been buying empty condos, commercial buildings, high rises, and more.
Why are so many high scale high rises sitting empty while people face eviction?
What does this mean for the future of our cities, housing, investment and our lives?
https://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/9/7/7/977cbb3ad941708b/Cities_After_S1_Episode_01.m4a?c_id=101494823&cs_id=101494823&expiration=1621187600&hwt=3469671407e62f54b969bb109b8c42c7
Every single time I hear my dad talk about a new hot stock or crypto he just invested in to make a quick buck, I think of that Al Capone quote…
During the roaring twenties when asked by a reporter if he invested in the stock market, Capone replied, “it’s a racket, those stock market guys are crooks.” Now I’ve never actually looked into the validity of that quote. Regardless of whether or not it’s a real, it says a lot about about how the public views Wall Street…groups of shady investors vacuuming up all the money on Main Street through a phony, rigged, casino of a system we call the stock market. The fact that we view THAT system as more corrupt than organized crime is telling. The market was a fraud then, just as it’s a fraud today.
I wish I could convince him the entire system is one big scam, but like everything in the conspiracy world, people have to figure it out for themselves. “You can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink,”as they say. And that’s not to say you can’t earn some money in the markets, you can. But the comparison to a casino is not unfounded. Why would you want to contribute to a system that could potentially wipe you out financially overnight? Answer: they worship at the altar of the almighty dollar and the whole system that keeps this fiat fraud afloat!
Done with my rambling. Another great doc James! Probably my favorite since Precedent Trump! Prescient in a time when, state side at least, the economy appears to be overheating. The housing market is on fire(bubble), homes going for 40% above market value and you can barely even find one if you’re looking to buy(sooner or later I’ll do a deep dive as to why!), gas prices headed for $4 a gallon(shortages in the south as well), unprecedented lumber and building material costs…etc. Anyway, keep doing what you do best man!!!
Now if I could just get my ole man to give this a watch!
-JW
May 16th there were 599 YouTube comments.
They are really cool!
I like this one by JelqtronZero
“You are literally the best journalist i have ever witnessed.
The production quality feels like i should be paying for this, your script is poetic.
Thank you so much and i will be supporting you monetarily.”
It speaks volumes to the Broc-Corbett team.
AnimalsArentFood says:
“It is going to be very useful having all of this information so well presented in a single video.
A very powerful tool for waking up people who think it’s an unrigged free market.”
FANTASTIC DISSEMINATION TOOL !
I agree AnimalsArentFood that can be used for those who think it is an unrigged market, but ALSO there are many who think it is a rigged market and they will watch for “confirmation bias”.
The ones who already know the markets are rigged will be doubly impressed.
This film brought out so much stuff that I did not know.
For the Historical Record…
SUB-THREAD – “The GameStop Event” AMC – WallStreetBets – Silver Squeeze and more
https://www.corbettreport.com/thegreatreopening-solutionswatch/#comment-103392
Money and debt. How debt is used to create billionaires.
And debt is in the bible. Usury is bad. But this does not stop a society calling itself religious from allowing their most powerful institutions to charge 18%,sell mortgages at interest, and on and on.
For those who are religious we ask you why you support a system of capitalism where interest and debt is used to concentrate wealth. It has. Look at Blackrock or Carlyle. Are they in the bible too?
Michael Hudson, economist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCsxKy6Lbvg
Debt,tied to aid is another trick used by imperialism. IMF, World Bank.
You are right. Ancient systems were for complex.
Corporate capitalism is a monster
Have you read the book “Creature from Jekyll Island “? The central banking cartel furthers socialism which is what we actually have. This form of government leads to totalitarianism and genocide. A true free market which we don’t actually have is a way towards freedom.
I don’t want what they call capitalism neither do I want what they have in China. Look at how most of the so called socialist and communist governments treat there citizens. Are you advocating for this? Just wanted to clarify your position. If there comes a time when there is no more government then maybe people can form their own co ops but the form of socialism that exists now is equally bad as “capitalism “ the central banks don’t want a free market.
Yes, I have read the book and am an economist. The first thing that must be done for any conversation is to define terms. What you mean by socialism, what you have been told socialism is,might not be what I mean or what I have learned it to mean.
So, we cannot really begin a discussion without dfining essential concepts,terms.
Saying that, any understanding of a Central Bank, be it back in 1914 or now, one must understand that the bank is a privately owned instituttion, under control by capitalists, those who own the means of production.
Under socialism, if socialism means public onwership of the means of production, owned by people like you and me, there would be no private bank and thus no central bank.
Now, the ‘true free market’ which, as you say you do not have and I would add, never will.
All capitalists markets rely on the State. The big myth is the “No government control” crowd who cannot see how the role of the government, or State, actually is needed by capitalism to one, bail it out; to pass legislation favorable to it, and three deregulate and regulate to assure monopolies.
That is not socialism. That is private ownership of the means of production and distribution according to maximum profit. Monopolies hate competition.
Capitalism,like any system, grows. And so from the first ‘free’market,petty bourgoise shopkeepers, has arisen multiple industrial revolutions and the ownership of the world’s means of production, factories, etc., is in now fewer and fewer hands.
So is all the wealth. Capitalism is now in its rentier stage (extraction of profit through debt) and is certainly what Mussolini eventually tried to setup in Italy. A corporate state made up of 1. large transnational corporations, 2. unions beholden to the corporations, for those who work for corporations, 3. full banking and military control and profit.
In order to exit the rentier stage of capitalism one has to recognize how capitalism evolved and why it never worked but for a few. One also has to imagine another way of living, producing and reproducing lives.
More, one has to understand history and understand how corporate fascism was fought in Italy and here in the US.
Capitalism is a system whereby 85 people have the same wealth as half the population. It has nothing to do with competition. It has to do with control.
There were never any halcyon days of capitalism: it is a brutal form of domination,hierarchical control and wealth generation for the few.
It’s banks run the show,like the Casino Cage runs the money in a Casino and the military and police are capitalism’s servants.
I have experience in very niche areas of high finance. At the highest levels, the people involved have deep government connections, not just nationally but regionally and locally. They can easily influence public officials and get laws passed that benefit their particular interests, sometimes very slickly where no one even notices. This is another way the game is rigged for the markets indirectly. I won’t say what particular 2 stereotypical ethnic groups comprise these super wealthy investment capital groups, but I’ll leave it to your imagination. Laws in favor of big money are one of the biggest way people do not realize rig the market. This is also a way politicians get ‘insider information’ and make profits for themselves, 1 hand washes the other. Instead of quiet intervention, these are in your face laws where the masses get a crumb of taxes or profits in exchange for a windfall for the people who got the laws passed through their influence. Take a guess at what kind of influence got their laws passed.
Good read which also lets you see how everything always rarely were coincidences but rigged, even sure the 1929 “Great Depression”
https://archive.org/details/a-history-of-central-banking-and-the-enslavement-of-mankind-pdfdrive
“A History Of Central Banking And The Enslavement Of Mankind” by Stephen Mitford Goodson
But just as things are its easy to call you names or silence questions if you point out the history or the games are rigged, because its alwas the same families involved.
Another excellent report which should be part of every school curriculum.
There is a link to Richard Grove’s video ‘The Economy Lie – Part 2’. Is there a Part 1 anywhere? If so, where can it be found?
The following interview of James Corbett by Jim Goddard (Mainstream Radio “This Week in Money”) should go on this THREAD “The Markets are Rigged”.
5/19/2021
Interview 1639 – James Corbett on the Human Extinction Event
(one hour – Many topics are explored. Lots of links in show notes.)
https://www.corbettreport.com/interview-1639-james-corbett-on-the-human-extinction-event/
DESCRIPTION
In the latest edition of the ongoing “James Corbett redpills the normies” series (see, for example, this conversation with Thaddeus Russell and this conversation with Takota Coen), James talks to Jim Goddard of the mainstream “This Week in Money” radio program about the transhumanist “great reset” and the globalist plans to transform the human species. Buckle up and strap in for this data dump of information on the most important threats to humanity in the 21st century.
Dear James,
I know you must have put a huge amount of work into this, and it will be important for some people.
But, me? I just read the title and said “Tell me something new”. This is why I loved the recent hoohaa about GameStop. To me, it exposed the whole damn thing. I was ROFL through the whole thing.
Anyway, I love your work and the community you have built.
Peace.