There were others: A toll highway in Indiana. The Chicago Skyway. A stretch of highway in Florida. Parking meters in Nashville, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and other cities. A port in Virginia. And a whole bevy of Californian public infrastructure projects, all either already leased or set to be leased for fifty or seventy-five years or more in exchange for one-off lump sum payments of a few billion bucks at best, usually just to help patch a hole or two in a single budget year.
America is quite literally for sale, at rock-bottom prices, and the buyers increasingly are the very people who scored big in the oil bubble. Thanks to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and the other investment banks that artificially jacked up the price of gasoline over the course of the last decade, Americans delivered a lot of their excess cash into the coffers of sovereign wealth funds like the Qatar Investment Authority, the Libyan Investment Authority, Saudi Arabia's SAMA Foreign Holdings, and the UAE's Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
Here's yet another diabolic cycle for ordinary Americans, engineered by the grifter class. A Pennsylvanian like Robert Lukens sees his business decline thanks to soaring oil prices that have been jacked up by a handful of banks that paid off a few politicians to hand them the right to manipulate the market. Lukens has no say in this; he pays what he has to pay. Some of that money of his goes into the pockets of the banks that disenfranchise him politically, and the rest of it goes increasingly into the pockets of Middle Eastern oil companies. And since he's making less money now, Lukens is paying less in taxes to the state of Pennsylvania, leaving the state in a budget shortfall. Next thing you know, Governor Ed Rendell is traveling to the Middle East, trying to sell the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the same oil states who've been pocketing Bob Lukens's gas dollars. It's an almost frictionless machine for stripping wealth out of the heart of the country, one that perfectly encapsulates where we are as a nation.
to get a job, perhaps.
ReplyDeletejust read GB is selling half it's forest acreage...why is it I feel america is part and parcel of the mother country GB and follows suit with what GB does..anyway we'll also get more camera's I'm sure
ReplyDeleteWhat’s with all this emphasis on “fairness ” and other socialist equality talk in these lefty articles ?
ReplyDeleteJust because the American constitution talks about all men being created equal ?
Only losers talk like that.
American democracy has evolved since the time the constitution was written into a truly vibrant Democracy.
There have been amendments to create corporate persons and laws have created a marvelous federal bank that can magically create money as debt ,a credit supply for all Americans out of fresh air.
In a corporate state of corporate persons everybody is truly equal today with real democracy and equal voting rights according to the share capital they own and has an equal say in the running of the country.
The corporate persons are free to lobby and donate to the politicians and political party of choice. Every company share gets an equal vote for paying lobbyists to create hope and change.
The Supreme court agrees and aproves all this as genuine kosher constitutional law.
This is the difference between fake socialist equality and its so called "constitutional" human rights and real capitalist democracy.
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ReplyDeletesaid:
"to get a job, perhaps".
Or, to sell treasury bills to the bondholders financing this ,thereby capturing the nations future tax revenues as a 'national debt?
This National Debt is the share of the national wealth and GDP that gets to be owned by the people.
Or perhaps ,they were granted student loans as a subsidy to support the selling of the higher education business?
As the great ponzi economy has now imploded, there is now a shortage of jobs ,now an excess of these over -educated ex-students overqualified for waiters, fingernail painters , burger-flipper and minimum wage jobs at Wal- Mart Etc.
Their debts hanging over their heads will drive them on to the minimum pay job market and the political demand willnaturaly arise to drive out all "illegals", so that they can get the low paid ,new third world style 'american" levels, wages job.
This competition on the labor market between workers will in the end create third world levels of pay for all unskilled labor.
On minimum wages they will never be able to pay off their debts to government .Not even bankruptct is allowed as a way out of these debts.Like unpaid federal back taxes ,its a forever bill , government must be paid.
They will join many of the middle class now debt peons to the banksters ,but as a special class of GOVERNMENT OWNED permanently indebted Debt Peons!
Debt peon slaves to the Treasury bondholders, with the government as the mafia enforcer of the interest/dividends supply for the bondholders.
try this out
ReplyDeletehttp://whatiscss.org/