How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War
216
How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War
216Paperback
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Overview
Thereafter, powerful bankers used their control over money, credit and debt for private self-enrichment, bankrolling and colluding with Congress and administrations to implement laws favoring them.
As a result, decades of deregulation, outsourcing, economic financialization, and casino capitalism followed, producing asset bubbles, record budget and national debt levels, and depression-sized unemployment far higher than reported numbers, albeit manipulated to look better.
After the financial crisis erupted in late 2007, even harder times have left Main Street in the early stages of a depression, with recovery pure illusion. Today's contagion has spread out of control, globally. Wall Street got trillions of dollars in a desperate attempt to socialize losses, privatize profits, and pump life back into the corpses by blowing public wealth into a moribund financial sector, failing corporate favorites, and America's aristocracy. While Wall Street boasts it has recovered, industrial America keeps imploding. High-paying jobs are exported. Economic prospects are eroding. Austerity is being imposed, with no one sure how to revive stable, sustainable long-term growth.
This book provides a powerful tool for showing angry Americans how they've been fleeced, and includes a plan for constructive change. Incisive chapters include:
— Dirty Secrets of the Temple: how privatized money control lurches the economy from one crisis to another;
— Capitalism and Freedom Unmasked;
— Greenspan's Dark Legacy;
— A Short History of Government Handouts to bankers and other corporate favorites;
— Quantitative Easing: Elixir or Poison?
— Systematic Washington-Sanctioned Fraud;
— Obama's Anti-Populist Budget;
— The Recession Is Over, the Depression Just Beginning;
— Manipulation: How Markets Really Work;
— Waging War on America's Workers;
— Permanent Debt Bondage from America's Student Loan Racket;
— On the Chopping Block: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid;
— Banking in Venezuela: An Alternative Banking System favoring citizens and the country;
— Ending Today's Economic Crisis Simply and Easily, in America and Globally; and
— Public Banking: An Idea Whose Time Has Come.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780983353942 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Clarity Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 08/07/2011 |
| Pages: | 216 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
The Price of Imperial Arrogance.He holds a BA from Harvard and an MBA from Wharton..
Read an Excerpt
from "Permanent Debt Bondage from America's Student Loan Racket”
In the past decade, student loan debt ballooned over fourfold. In 1977, students borrowed about $1.8 billion. By 1989, borrowing had escalated to $12 billion, and in 1996, $30 billion. According to the Student Loan Debt Clock, student borrowing's cumulative principal and interest exceeds $877 billion, surpassing credit card debt for the first time in June 2010. It will exceed $1 trillion in early 2012.
At its present rate, student borrowing increases at the rate of $2,854 per second, entrapping most borrowers and forcing others to default. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) last September, "The percentage of borrowers defaulting on their student loans (rose) for a third year in a row, reaching an 11-year high of 7 percent,” based on US Education Department data-again grossly understated to hide a serious problem for millions.
The data is based on the number of graduates defaulting within two years of graduation so it only captures "a sliver of the defaults that occur over the life of a loan,” according to a CHE analysis. It estimates that one in five government loans entering repayment in 1995 defaulted. For community college graduates, it's 31% and at for-profit schools, 40%.
Yet little is reported on the scope of the student loan racket.
The web site Student Loan Justice explains it (http://studentloanjustice.org/argument.htm), saying:
The federal student loan system has become predatory due to the Congressional removal of standard consumer protections and....sanctioned collection powers that are stronger than those for all other loan instruments in our nation's history.
As a result, student borrowers are greatly harmed by unmanageable loan demands. Along with inflation and annual tuition/fee hikes, most graduates face an enormous burden, with no consumer protections, even in default. Once entrapped, escape is impossible. Debt bondage is permanent, and future lives and careers are impaired.
Congress ended bankruptcy protections, refinancing rights, statutes of limitations, truth in lending requirements, fair debt collection ones, and state usury laws when applied to federally guaranteed student loans. As a result, lenders may freely garnish wages, income tax refunds, earned income tax credits, and Social Security and disability income to assure defaulted loan payments. In addition, defaulting may cause loss of professional licenses, making repayment even harder...