From Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/economy/weve-got-billionaire-bailout-society-and-99-may-never-recover-it-our-lifetimes
Our financial system is sucking up the wealth of the nation and using it to cover its losses.
By Les Leopold
September 12, 2013
The odds are that we in the bottom 99 percent may never see a recovery in our lifetimes. That’s because our nation has evolved into something entirely new: a billionaire bailout society.
We are entering a disastrous new era in which all the economic gains go to the top 1 percent, according to data from economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty. They report that, “Top 1% incomes grew by 31.4% while bottom 99% incomes grew only by 0.4% from 2009 to 2012. Hence, the top 1% captured 95% of the income gains in the first three years of the recovery…. In sum, top 1% incomes are close to full recovery while bottom 99% incomes have hardly started to recover.” (In 2012, $394,000 is the cutoff to make it into the top 1 percent.)
We see in vivid detail what the new American order looks like. The top 1 percent live in another economic universe of high finance that sucks the wealth from the rest of us. In their world, banks (owned by and for the top 1%) are able to grow larger and larger so there is no chance they will be allowed to fail, even after these same banks took down the economy. (In 1965 they had assets equal to 17% percent of the U.S. economy. Today it’s more than 65% percent.)
Free from any meaningful controls, financial gambling (called proprietary trading in polite circles) is now the dominant activity within our largest banks. In fact, in these too-big-to-fail banks, more money goes to financial gambling than to loans for businesses and consumers. These are not banks—they are rigged casinos for the rich. The upside from these corrupt pursuits are kept by the top fraction of the 1 percent, while the 99 percent hold the bag when those phony bets crash the economy.
Continue reading at: http://www.alternet.org/economy/weve-got-billionaire-bailout-society-and-99-may-never-recover-it-our-lifetimes
