“The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an endorsement of self-interest,” Goldman’s Griffiths said Oct. 20, his voice echoing around the gold-mosaic walls of St. Paul’s Cathedral, whose 365-feet-high dome towers over the City, London’s financial district. “We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieving greater prosperity and opportunity for all.” via Profit `Not Satanic,’ Barclays Says, After Goldman Invokes Jesus – Bloomberg.com. I didn’t believe this story was true at first — thought it had to be a spoof. But it turns out to be true. The great banks of the world have gone on a p.r. counteroffensive in Europe, and are sending spokescrooks in shiny suits into churches to persuade the masses that Christ would have approved of the latest round of obscene bonuses. Goldman Sachs international adviser Brian Griffiths explains it this way: that Christ’s famous injunction to love others as one would love oneself actually means that one should love oneself as one would love oneself. This seemingly baffling outburst by a Goldman executive in what appears to have been a prepared speech — someone actually wrote this, and thought about it, before saying it out loud — gets even weirder when one tries to figure out what could possibly have motivated this person, and by extension his employer Goldman Sachs, to make such statements in such a place as St. Paul’s Cathedral.

The value of top executives's pensions rose an average of 19 percent last year even as their companies' share prices dropped, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. Over 200 executives saw pensions jump over 50 percent. The spike, the Journal said, was due in part to "generous" pension formulas based on executive pay and to "arcane" techniques that trigger the increases. Executive pensions grew even though the share prices at the firms dropped an average of 37 percent in 2008, while many companies froze employee pensions and suspended contributions to retirement plans, noted the newspaper.

"(G)rowing income inequality is a cancer that is attacking both the economy, and the social and political fabric of our society. A look at economic history makes several things clear. ... The creation of a democratic society, built on egalitarian principles, is the only real systematic means of assuring that the interests of the entire society are not sacrificed to those of powerful elites."

Even better than the real thing? A nation suffering from affluenza turns increasingly to science fiction, fantasy and the supernatural because EVERYTHING isn't enough anymore. Where do we go from here?

Today is Labor Day, when we celebrate the wealth destroyers – at least if the libertarian right is to be believed. According to many free-market conservatives, economic growth is almost exclusively the result of investment decisions by a small number of rich individuals – the "wealth creators." The wealth creators, according to the conservative press, are constantly being threatened from above by government, which seeks to destroy wealth by taxation, and from below by workers, particularly those organized into unions, who threaten to destroy wealth by insisting that capitalists share a decent amount of their profits with employees. The entire basis of conservative "trickle-down" economics is the idea that the economy will grow faster if the supposed wealth creators keep more of the profits of private enterprise, with less going to taxes and worker compensation.

As shares of bailed-out banks bottomed out earlier this year, stock options were awarded to their top executives, setting them up for millions of dollars in profit as prices rebounded, according to a report released on Wednesday. The top five executives at 10 financial institutions that took some of the biggest taxpayer bailouts have seen a combined increase in the value of their stock options of nearly $90 million, the report by the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies said. "Not only are these executives not hurting very much from the crisis, but they might get big windfalls because of the surge in the value of some of their shares," said Sarah Anderson, lead author of the report, "America's Bailout Barons," the 16th in an annual series on executive excess.

The numbers of poor and uninsured Americans are likely rising – with more than 38.8 million believed to be in poverty. Rebecca Blank, the Commerce Department's undersecretary of economic affairs, spoke to The Associated Press in advance of next month's closely watched release of 2008 census data. Noting the figures are not yet final, Blank said the numbers will likely show a "statistically significant" increase in the poverty rate, to at least 12.7 percent. That would represent a jump of more than 1.5 million poor people last year.

Goldman Sachs has taken out a huge neon sign shining over the whole country that says "no way suckers". Goldman's CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, has publicly said that Goldman has not changed its ways and in fact has no intention of changing its ways. By one measure, it is actually taking on more risky investments this year than it did at the same time last year. Goldman admits that it is taking big trading risks. It announced that it is putting aside $9bn in bonuses. There is no need for any conspiracies in this picture. Goldman has said that it's ripping off the taxpayers and getting rich in the process. And, there is nothing anyone can do about it because they own the people in power.

Where we do have information, it is not encouraging. At the peak of the financial crisis in October, Goldman Sachs converted itself from an investment bank into a bank holding company, in part so that it could tap an FDIC loan guarantee programme. Remarkably, Bernanke allowed Goldman to continue to act as an investment bank, taking highly speculative positions even after it had borrowed $28bn with the FDIC's guarantee. This totally obliterated the separation between commercial banking and investment banking. Even supporters of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act claimed to recognise the need for such a separation. The lack of concern for such issues raises more concerns about the secret $2tn that the Fed has lent out.

As president of the Bank, the world's premier channel for multilateral aid, McNamara did quadruple the institution's lending portfolio to $12 billion. The key beneficiaries, however, were authoritarian dictatorships. Indeed, the rise to hegemony of authoritarian regimes in the developing world cannot be separated from the massive funding that the World Bank under McNamara provided them. By the late 1970s, five of the top seven recipients of World Bank aid were military, presidential-military, or military-controlled regimes: Indonesia, Brazil, South Korea, Turkey, and the Philippines.

Intrpid Liberal Journal has another smashing interview. Here is something from his intro: "It seems no matter which political party in America holds the majority, a Washington/Wall Street corporate centric axis dominates policy making. Indeed, Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin recently observed that banks, "Frankly Own the Place." Among liberal-progressive activists like myself, this condition has facilitated a confrontational mindset. ... Veteran activist Wade Rathke has been steadily climbing that wall on behalf of working people for forty-years. As the founder of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform ("ACORN"), Rathke has a unique perspective about what community organizing strategies work best to empower working people that are struggling to save and accumulate wealth. Rathke is also an assertive advocate for welfare benefits on behalf of people out of work. He's both won and lost more than his share of battles. Both he and ACORN have the battle scars of scrutiny liberals typically receive from standing up for America's poor and disenfranchised. In Citizen Wealth: Winning the Campaign To Save Working Families, (Berrett-Koehler),

Thom Hartmann proves to Dan Gainor - it's not good for the economy to have disparities in income and wealth

RALs are short-term loans borrowed against a consumer’s tax refund. They’re often advertised as “quick cash,” because they allow people to get their tax refund in days instead of waiting for the IRS, which can take at least 10 days. Historically, poor communities have been targeted for these loans. According to the IRS, 85 percent of the people who took RALs in 2006 had incomes of $37,300 or less, and nearly two-thirds were recipients of the Earned Income Tax Credit. On average, a person pays between $200 and $500 in fees for a RAL. This tax season, it’s expected that low-income taxpayers will pay more than $1 billion in fees and triple-digit interest rates associated with RALs. While refund anticipation loans can be classified as abusive, predatory loans, they escape government regulation because they are bank loans, Wu said. National banks are immune to state consumer protection laws. Other than requiring full disclosure about RALs, all most states can do is sue for the fraud frequently associated with these loans.

In 1970 the gap between the top 100 CEOs' average pay and the pay of average workers was 45 to 1 ($296,170 to $6,542), reflecting the restraints of lingering New Deal financial controls and mores. As those controls weakened, the gap increased to 127 to 1 by 1980. As deregulation, tax cuts, and the union bashing of the Reagan era took hold, the gap jumped to 321 to 1 by 1990. In 2000, as "financial innovation" pumped up fantasy finance, the ratio of CEO pay to the average workers' pay hit an obscene level of 1,510 to 1. And then by 2006, at the height of the fantasy finance boom, it climbed to a whopping 1,723 to 1 ($50,877,450 to $29,529). The financial sector soaked up trillions of dollars of wealth accumulated by the very rich, while average real wages remained stagnant.

If you feel that you are not receiving your share of America’s treasure, then you are not alone. Data on income and wealth from the US show that as the American economy develops, both income and wealth become increasingly concentrated into the hands of the richest Americans.

"A movement aimed at shifting the nation's tax policy by raising taxes for the wealthiest is taking off across the country. Such a shift in policy would mean reversing 30 years worth of federal tax and budget policy that has primarily favored the rich...In order to promote economic recovery, federal and local governments will need to expand their sources of revenue to provide for investments in healthcare, environment, and infrastructure. A truly "progressive taxation" system -- one where people are taxed according to their ability to pay -- is the best way to raise the funds needed to pay for the bold initiatives in Obama's stimulus and budget plans, advocates say." An interesting review of facts and projections included in the plans developed by three different putlic-interest economic groups (IPF, UFE, PSN).

There is a wealthy elite in charge and the public sees it and is sick of it.

I cannot reach any other conclusion than that put forth on various occasions by professors Carlos Fernández Liria and Luis Alegre: throughout history, democracy was understood as the period in which the country’s government was in the hands of the rightwing and, when the real left came to power, it was toppled by any unlawful means necessary (coup d’etat, civil war, assassination, blockade, destabilization) in order to begin a dictatorial period in which the left was dismantled in order to return later to an “adequate democracy” with the rightwing in power. Venezuela represents one of the few cases in which this mechanism has not succeeded; hence, the desperation.

NOTE: While this article references UK circumstances, it is easy enough to replace a few words and know that these observations are equally true on this side of the pond. "Perhaps it really is that much more important to have a functioning banking system than it is to have a economic system that is socially inclusive and provides working people with an income that even modestly reflects the cost of living. But what I, and many people see, is a financial system that collapsed precisely because it did not wish to embrace such encumbrances as mutually beneficial transactions between humans."

New IRS data show that under Bush, the 400 richest Americans saw their tax rates plummet and their income double. As noted conservative TV pundit Stephen Colbert has noted, facts, reality, and even information itself have a well-known liberal bias.