The First 1 Billion is always Suspect!

Speaking Truth To Power.

If there is one common enemy among a divided American public, it's Wall Street.

All these corrupt banks involved in money laundering, price-rigging etc.? They're all regulated by the Federal Reserve. Do you get it now?

We want stricter regulations of financial institutions on Wall Street. Since 2008 Americans HATE financial institutions especially the Banksters. To big to Fail to Big to Jail Banks should be dismantled.

The #1 Fact we know from studying history is that we never learn anything from history - we just repeat it over and over again. And the power in this case is not any of the usual suspects, but the public. And the way you speak truth to the public is through your art, your book and your website,  You lead with facts. This is an alternative source since the literary critics have a very very very long history of supporting classism. The role of journalists, and to whom they owe their primary loyalty: Sources or readers -  they were in fact founded by the 1% so what would you expect?

Again, this work has value as an acceptable source in relation to class. We the underclass do not "own" the lawmakers. There are political consequences of actually punishing financial crime. Huge political contributions make that difficult. Harry Marcopolis as detailed in His book ” Nobody would listen” for over a decade detailed wrongdoing to the SEC over Bernie Madoff and still did nothing. Crime, in cases of financial industry crime, does pay.

Anything that is produced by the "folk" has a major PR problem, when it doesn't recieve a good critique from the "1% ". Some of the media, academic community, and banks have made a caricature out of good work, even dismissing the entire approach as politically incorrect. And creating useful ideas for doing good work is a lot more challenging than simply writing a critique.

MUTHAFUGGAZ - THE ROBBER BARON CLASS

"The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth," ~ Andrew Carnegie 1889.

In social criticism and economic literature, "robber baron" became a derogatory term applied to wealthy and powerful 19th-century American businessmen that appeared in North American periodical literature as early as the August 1870 issue of The Atlantic Monthly magazine. By the late 1800s, the term was typically applied to businessmen who used what were considered to be exploitative practices to amass their wealth. These practices included exerting control over national resources, accruing high levels of government influence, paying extremely low wages, squashing competition by acquiring competitors in order to create monopolies and eventually raise prices, and schemes to sell stock at inflated prices to unsuspecting investors in a manner which would eventually destroy the company for which the stock was issued and impoverish investors. The term combines the sense of criminal ("robber") and illegitimate aristocracy (a baron is an illegitimate role in a republic).

2016 Matt Damon's MIT Commencement Speech

[ ..."It was theft, and you knew it.
It was fraud, and you knew it.
And you know what else? We know that you knew it," the actor said.
"So yeah, you sort of got away with it. You got that house in the Hamptons that other people paid for as their own mortgages went underwater. And you might have their money, but you don't have our respect. And just so you know, when we pass you on the street and look you in the eye, that's what we're thinking.” ...]

BANKSTERS CRASH
WALL STREET  

Greenspan Destroys Deregulation in 16 Seconds 
Greenspan 1986 - 2007: admits credit default swaps have problems. Bail Out. 

I WAS WRONG SPEECH - " I DIDN'T KNOW "  BULL SHIT  
STUPIDEST COLLEGE EDUCATED PERSON DOESN'T HAVE ENOUGH COMMON SENSE TO ACKNOWLEDGE HUMAN NATURE! OR  . . . HE IS A TOOL!

The Law is an extension of Politics and it is used to separate you from your property, money, and privacy.

2015 Study: Yes, American Presidents Are Guided By Wealthy Elites

The idea that U.S. presidents look out for the wealthy and powerful over the mass of ordinary Americans is nothing new. But a new study claims to confirm that assumption with hard data while seeking to spur a conversation over the flagging health of American democracy.  Echoing a much-discussed paper out of Princeton last year that argued the U.S. is no longer a proper representative democracy, the book, "Who Governs?" is an exploration of presidents, public opinion, and manipulation.  James N. Druckman from Northwesten University and Lawrence R. Jacobs from University of Minnesota make the case that presidents from both Republican and Democratic parties mainly serve and are guided by the wishes of the wealthy and political elites and exploit public opinion in order to serve those ends.  The duo turn to previously confidential documents from presidential archives, interviews with White House officials, and previously unquantified data to argue that "elites do most of the deciding," since presidents purposefully aim to "shirk citizen control."  "Presidents claim to speak for 'the people' and to serve the 'public good,' but we reveal the impact of narrow political and economic interests," they write in the introduction.  Surveying the Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan administrations, the authors found evidence "that presidents — Reagan, in particular — were highly attentive to the demands of privileged segments of the electorate with high incomes and other politically valued resources." (Druckman and Jacobs note that additional research on more recent presidents meshed with their general findings.)  Sticking with Reagan as an example:  When the general public's opinions shift from 10 percent below to 10 percent above the average [in a conservative direction], Reagan became 3.5 percent more conservative, compared to a whopping 20 percent more conservative for an analogous move among the affluent ... Put simply, these results demonstrate that Reagan clearly paid dramatic attention to the views of the wealthy on economic issues. It gets worse, according to Druckman and Jacobs: not only is the White House pursuing the interests and goals of elites at the expense of the public, it is also dedicated to "shaping public opinion to advance its interests and those of its narrow group of supporters." Polling is a chance to exert further influence on the majority, rather than to learn what they want.

Some Perspective

Did you make $34,000 last year?
If so, you're now part of the richest 1% in the world.

Remember that the Pitchforks are the Source of the Force! 

The true global middle class, falls far short of owning a home, having a car in a driveway, saving for retirement and sending their kids to college. In fact, people at the world's true middle -- as defined by median income -- live on just $1,225 a year. In the grand scheme of things, even the poorest 5% of Americans are better off financially than two thirds of the entire world. ~ Economist Branko Milanovic

1928 The chasm between rich and poor in the U.S. reached its peak with 23.9% of all pretax income channeled to the top 1%.

2015 NOW The Richest 1% own more than rest of world, Oxfam says

We hear now on all sides the term "Robber Barons" applied to some of the great capitalists....
The old robber barons of the Middle Ages who plundered sword in hand and lance in rest were more honest than this new aristocracy of swindling millionaires. ~ Lida F. Baldwin,
August 1870 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, writing in 1907 about how little business had changed in 35 years.

INSTITUTIONALIZED
CORRUPTION

"We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob."  ~ President Franklin DELENO Roosevelt

Question: Why isn’t Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon building, handling, injecting ......

- Apple, with almost $200 billion in cash at its disposal, building out a full-fledged financial institution?
- Google handling loans and making credit decisions based on its trove of user data?
- Why hasn’t Facebook more thoroughly interjected itself into the middle of all the commerce taking place on it’s platform?
- Why has Amazon singularly spared the banks amidst all of the other industries they’ve turned upside down?

Answer: Regulation. If you’re a banking executive, it’s time to stop complaining about the only thing preventing the onslaught. It’s time to start looking at capital requirements and multiple points of oversight as what they really are: The last barriers of entry.

THE BEGINNINGs OF 
u.s. ELITE
bOSTON bRAHMIN MONEY
WAS CHINA OPIUM DRUG SMUGGLERS 

The Opium Trade "If the trade is ever legalized, it will cease to be profitable from that time. The more difficulties that attend it, the better for you and us." -- Directors of Jardine-Matheson

Map of The Price of Weed in Each State shows the states where the price for an ounce of high quality marijuana are the least expensive are also the same states where recreational marijuana is LEGAL!

Warren Delano Jr., Chief of RUSSELL TRUST had operations in Canton, CHINA.
Delano was the grandfather of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, cousin of Teddy Roosevelt and  Bush. Other Russell partners were John Cleve Green, whose opium fortunes financed Princeton University, Abiel Abbott Low's opium fortune financed the construction of Columbia University. Captain Warren Delano, was engaged in the opium trade, and his son Frederic A. Delano, was born in Hong Kong. Astor's great-granddaughter, Helen Schermerhorn Astor married James “Rosy” Roosevelt, the half-brother of President FDR Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Incidentally, F.D.R's maternal grandfather, Warren Delano, Jr., also made his fortune in opium, working for the leading American opium trader – Russell and Co. Throughout the 19th century the British families of Matheson, Keswick, Swire, Dent, Inchcape, Baring and Rothschild controlled the Chinese heroin traffic.  

The Inchcape’s and Baring’s Peninsular & Orient Steam Navigation Company (PONC) transported the dope around the world.  When a British subject named Mohandas Ghandi spoke out against the opium trade in 1921, he was jailed by India’s British rulers for “undermining the revenue”. Long before the Vietnam War, the British elite had made a healthy living smuggling opium from the region.  Lord Shelbourne launched the Chinese opium trade in 1783 with Scottish merchants from the East India Company and members of the House of Windsor-allied Knights of St. John Jerusalem.

Russell & Company

Russell & Company (Chinese: 旗昌洋行; pinyin: Qíchāng Yángháng) was the largest and most important American trading house in Qing dynasty China from 1842 to its closing in 1891. Samuel Russell founded Russell & Company in Canton, China, in 1824. Dealing mostly in silks, teas and opium, Russell & Company prospered, and by 1842, it had become the largest American trading house in China. It kept its dominance until its closing in 1891. Russell withdrew from the company in 1836 and returned to the United States.

Notable people of Russell & Company

• Warren Delano, Jr., the grandfather of Franklin Roosevelt (32nd President of the United States) served as the Chief of Operations of Russell and Company in Canton.
• Robert Bennet Forbes (1804–1889) was the head of Russell and Company.
• John Murray Forbes (1813-1898), brother of Robert Bennet Forbes and the great-granduncle of 2004 presidential candidate John Forbes Kerry.
• Abiel Abbot Low, founder of trading company A. A. Low & Brothers, served as a partner.
• William Henry Low, Abiel Abbot Low's uncle, senior partner of the firm.
• William Henry Low, Abiel Abbot Low's brother.
• Augustine Heard, who later founded Augustine Heard & Company, a large trading house in China.
• John Cleve Green (1800-1875) Philanthropist - benefactor of Princeton.

Perkins & Co. was established in 1803 as a branch of the Boston based merchant trading firm J. & T.H. Perkins & Co., owned by merchant brothers James and Thomas Handasyd Perkins. Perkins & Co. was the premier American firm in China trading silk, tea, and opium.

KA CHING 
Illegal = Profit$

Cushing / aka Ku-Shing was  the name of a Boston opium smuggler.

John Perkins Cushing (April 22, 1787 – 1862), called "Ku-Shing" by the Chinese, was a wealthy Boston sea merchant, opium smuggler.  His sixty-foot pilot schooner, the Sylph, won the first recorded American yacht race in 1832, and the town of Belmont, Massachusetts is named after his estate. 

Opium seemed the ideal commodity. By the 1820s Cushing was known as the most influential of all the foreigners in Canton, and had struck up a close relationship with the hong merchant Houqua, who at his death in 1843 was said to be the richest man in the world. In 1820 Cushing brought on his cousin Thomas Tunno Forbes to train for the business. 

John Perkins Cushing a Perkins nephew, was partner and head of the China branch until 1827 when he retired leaving Thomas Tunno Forbes, his protege, in charge. Samuel Wadsworth Russell, a native of Middletown, Connecticut also had established himself in China trading silk, tea, and opium.
Samuel Wadsworth Russell and Philip Ammidon were partners in the firm Samuel Russell & Co., and while prosperous they did not share the close business association that Cushing had with the powerful Hong merchant Houqua.
The untimely death of Forbes in 1829, uncovered a reference in his papers that if anything should happen to him the affairs of Perkins & Co. and Bryant & Sturgis should be looked after by Russell & Co. Cushing was in England at the time of Forbes' death and quickly returned to China to reorganize the business.
In 1830 Bryant & Sturgis and Perkins & Co. were merged with Russell & Co. with Augustine Heard as partner and John Murray Forbes as a clerk in the Canton office.

Lecture 5 RUSSELL STURGIS 

Russell Sturgis, who later became head of Baring Brothers in London.
Another American firm, with ties to Boston, operating in China at the time, Russell, Sturgis, & Company, a branch of Russell & Sturgis of Manila, was headed by Warren Delano and Russell Sturgis, later head of the London banking firm Baring, Brothers.

HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL
Russell & Co. records, 1820-1891
Quantity: 4 linear ft. (25 vols., 3 boxes, 7 mapcase folders)
Abstract: The Russell & Co./Perkins & Co. collection contains letter books, order and purchase books, invoices, shipping orders and other financial material relating to the China trade merchant
https://web.archive.org/save/http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/deepLink?_collection=oasis&uniqueId=bak00140

​Harvard's endowment provides billions of dollars.

Harvard's in-house fund managers get 70 percent pay hike. 

Harvard, the world's richest university, pays its six in-house money managers a combined $49.3 million in 2013, up more than 70 percent from the previous year, citing the team's "outperformance" in growing its endowment fund. The team oversaw an investment return of 15.4 percent for the Ivy League school's endowment during the fiscal year ended June 30, 2014, bringing it to $36.4 billion, or roughly the size of an average country's annual gross domestic product.  Harvard Management Company runs the fund, " Paul Finnegan is Harvard's treasurer.
Stephen Blyth was the top-paid manager with $11.5 million in compensation, more than double the $5.3 he earned in 2012. Blyth was head of public markets, where stocks rose again last year, before taking over the role of CEO and president from Jane Mendillo in January 2015.  Mendillo, the first woman to lead the school's investment arm, was second-highest-paid with $9.56 million in 2013, up from $4.8 million in 2012, while natural resources portfolio manager Alvaro Aguirre-Simunovic took third place with a $9.55 million payout, up from $6.6 million, according to Harvard.  The combined pay for the endowment's six managers was more than 70 percent higher than in 2012, when five managers took home $28.8 million.  While many alumni complain about Harvard managers' high payouts, they generally pale in comparison to hedge fund managers. Harvard alumnus Kenneth Griffin, who manages the Citadel hedge fund, for example, earned $1.3 billion to rank as the industry's best-paid manager in 2014.  Harvard began tying senior investment manager pay to the performance of its portfolio in 2010 after it lost billions of dollars during the 2008-2009 financial crisis.  Unlike many other universities, Harvard manages a bulk of its money in-house and relies on outside managers, including hedge funds, to invest the rest.

BANKSTERS 

HIDE AND LAUNDER

THE MONEY

THE NSA CAN SPY ALL IT WANTS BUT STILL SOMEHOW MISSES ALL THE BANKS THAT LAUNDER THE DRUG MONEY

HSBC Bank: Secret Origins To Laundering The World's Drug Money

HSBC, which is headquartered in London and has offices in 74 nations and territories on six continents, initially insisted that ICIJ destroy the data. How the offshore banking industry shelters money and hides secrets has enormous implications for societies across the globe. Academics conservatively estimate that $7.6 trillion is held in overseas tax havens, costing government treasuries at least $200 billion a year. Throughout the 19th century the British families of Matheson, Keswick, Swire, Dent, Inchcape, Baring and Rothschild controlled the Chinese heroin traffic.  The Inchcape’s and Baring’s Peninsular & Orient Steam Navigation Company (PONC) transported the dope around the world.

1/17/15 The sun never goes down on her empire and all glory in being her subjects,” said Chief Letsie of Basutoland in the golden jubilee in 1887. Still often interventionist, convinced of our importance in the world, even those of us born long after 1900 live in a country that is much more Victorian than we think. ETHEL LANG  was 114 and the last person left in Britain born in the reign of Queen Victoria Victoria died in the year after Ethel’s birth. Britain was then ruled by Edward VII.

The network of global corporate control PDF by Vitali, J.B. Glattfelder, and S. Battiston
"The earth-shattering findings of a trio of Swiss researchers:  In detail, nearly 4/10 of the control over the economic value of [all transnational corporations] in the world is held, via a complicated web of ownership relations, by a group of 147 [transnational corporations] in the core, which has almost full control over itself. The top holders within the core can thus be thought of as an economic “super-entity” in the global network of corporations. A relevant additional fact at this point is that ¾ of the core are financial intermediaries. This is a single “super-entity” with 40% control of everything.  Of course when these researchers coined their term “super-entity”, they had no need of inventing new terminology. The word they were searching for was “monopoly”: a single monopoly with 40% control over the entire global economy. This giant monopoly are banks and bank holding-companies. The One Monopoly is one, big bank. The Justice Department openly refusing to prosecute banksters means simply one thing: being above the law. And the only possible context where white-collar criminals could/can be above the law is if they are part of a monopoly (or oligopoly)." ~ Jeff Nielson

2015 0.01% Richest in the world that the public knows about - the rest are secret. 

The bottom earners in the top one-thousandth of the 1% "only make" more than $62 million a year.  Sixty-two million dollars per year is what it takes to be a top one-thousandth one percenter— and those are the poorest of the richest households; on average the top earners make more than $160 million a year.  That's 160 times richer than the average one percenter who only makes about $1.5 million.
The highest tax rate on income taxes in 2014 was 39.6 percent for households earning more than $439,000 dollars - and the majority of US households paid an income tax rate of between 15 percent and 28 percent.  Those are households of plumbers, bus drivers, doctors and engineers— the average working Americans who create real wealth for the economy.
This started with the memo Lewis Powell wrote in 1971, just a few months before Nixon nominated him to the Supreme Court.  Powell wrote: "Business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups. This is the lesson that political power is necessary; that such power must be cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination - without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business." See K Street Lobbys Write the Law

The 85 (or 67) number is easy: you just start at the top of the Forbes billionaires list, and start counting up the combined wealth until you reach $1.7 trillion. The harder question is: where does the $1.7 trillion number come from?
The answer is that it comes from a pair of tables in Credit Suisse’s 2013 Global Wealth Databook. First of all, you have to find the total wealth in the world, which you can find at the bottom of the fourth column on page 89: it’s $241 trillion. Then, you flick forwards to page 146, where you find the proportion of all global wealth held by each of the world’s income deciles. The top 10% have 86% of the wealth; the next 10% have 7.8%, and so on. Add up the bottom five deciles, and you get 0.7% (not 0.71%, which is the number in the Oxfam report; I have no idea where that extra basis point came from). And if you multiply $241 trillion by 0.7%, you get $1.7 trillion.
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/04/04/stop-adding-up-the-wealth-of-the-poor/

Princeton Study: US No Longer A Democracy-changed from democracy to oligarchy. Wealthy elites wield most power
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9354310
4/16/2014 A new study from Princeton spells bad news for American democracy—namely, that it no longer exists.  Asking "who really rules?" researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page argue that over the past few decades America's political system has slowly transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where wealthy elites wield most power. "The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy," they write, "while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence."
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/princeton-experts-say-us-no-longer-democracy
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/princeton-scholar-demise-of-democracy-america-tpm-interview

In "RICH AS HELL" the online companion resource you'll see the facts for yourself.
The links found these pages will open and show you the truth of what they did.

Please share the book "RICH AS HELL" and this online reference resource with Teens, Tweens, and Friends.
There's the fiction swirling around out there that there are two reasonable sides to every story when there isn't. Many Americans believe we still live in a democracy but this has been less and less the case in the last few decades, notably since bankers gained even more control of government during this time period, intensifying the gap between the rich and the poor, and notably between the 1% and everyone else.

"RICH AS HELL"  explores the American 1% outlaw culture and the corrupt ways in which this group has made their wealth throughout history. 

This site has designed this reference material to make it clear to the reader or  teacher, that the wealth gap has been steadily increasing between the rich and the poor, especially in the last few decades. And it allows the learner to gain the critical thinking skills needed to tease out truth from the propaganda. 

The reference material  reveals how they were always corrupt and out to extort money from everyone else. Another important takeaway is that the 1% has always worked with other powerful institutions in order to make this happen, including the government so that it makes it seem like the status quo.

It was also designed in response to the other  financial literacy programs that are being created in this country that provide misleading information because they are being created by the banks and by the Federal Reserve who have every reason to hide why the rich are truly rich.

It's not just about understanding the basics of finance, but  a story about people, of understanding how finance works in an interdisciplinary way within the context of history and especially politics. It's not just theoretical but also practical. It's essentially a way of showing how your money works and how to make and protect yourself and your money within this current climate.