The Face Of The Great Depression

You are allowed to call it a recession. You are allowed to call this a recovery. You may want to even call this prosperity. Maybe a “buying opportunity” would be your cup of tea. But for tens of millions of Americans and hundreds of millions worldwide this is a Depression. NO Jobs and crushing prices of essentials like food and medical services are beginning to take their toll. I realize that you don’t want to hear doom and gloom but this is the reality of bad choices made decades ago for the benefit of a few…….the “job creators”. You know which ones I am talking about. The people that are in charge of small businesses…….hehehe. Right…….sure. This entire crises has NOTHING to do with small businesses and EVERYTHING to do with the preservation of control by the Large corporate oligarchy. It has been a sytematic plundering of this country’s treasury and future by a handful of corporations for the benefit of a few. When its over and it is over…..we will no longer be the empire of the world with 800 military bases in over 125 countries. We will no longer be the enforcing arm that runs the world for the international cartel. They will have moved on to a group of governments where less emphasis is placed on and aging small population like the United States. We will be relagated to the proverbial scrap heap of ex-empires like Greece, Rome, Spain, France, and England.

I remember watching the transformation of this country in the 80s as we shifted into this last phase of the Grand Supercycle. Suddenly I began to notice incredible shifts in the balance of compensation in our large corporation CEOs. We had always had the creation of incredible wealth with idividual creativity and innovation. But in the 80s a new breed began to come to the fore…the corporate pirate …and they were quite public in accepting their laurels. They would gain control of a corporation had been in existence for generations. There were actual playbooks created with consultants that were hired to assist the CEOs. Their compensations climbed exponentially from about 20:1 to their average company worker to a peak in the mid 2005 of about 350:1. Some companies obviously were well over 2000:1.

In the late 80s I remember watching the financial media applaud the compensation of Michael Eisner’s compensation at Disney. I was stunned that in the 80s after coming out of the pain of the 70s and early 80s a man that had taken over a beacon of entertainment and creativity that had started in the Great Depression of the 30s could be taking that much capital out of a company that he had nothing to do with for most of the company’s existence. I remember the avuncular Walt Disney’s soothing voice on Sunday nights introducing his latest show and/or development. I was now looking at a different breed of animal. The corporate carnivore. A natural evolution? Perhaps. But it was telling me that a storm was on the horizon. It wouldn’t be long either. Soon this playbook of systematic corporate raiding spread across the entire corporate structure. All of the boardrooms were stacked…….and the game was over for the stockholders.

The late 90s and 2000s were just a matter of creating enough liquidity to keep the game going. They did this through the creation of derivatives and almost wholly ran them off of real estate. It provided the last gasp for a dying economy with jobs and fast cash for a collapsing manufacturing infrastructure that was being sold overseas…mostly to China. Once the plundering of the factory base was accompliched and 5000 mergers and aquisitions had been completed…..the ponzi was through and thousands of Michael Eisners had been created. Our three branches of government had been totally coopeted and the game was over.

Now the structural disaster created is apparent in all of its splendor. NO jobs….NO factories…No educational system….just DEBT. The party is over and now the bill comes. The five active wars we are fighting right now that continue to drain your treasury aren’t even on the table right now with the “press” or the politicians. So you see…..this Depression is in its infancy. The five steps of dying by Kubler Ross are still in step 1………DENIAL. gl I hope Walt Disney is rolling over in his grave.

Read more at Great Depression 2