Index

The World’s Biggest (Legal) Ponzi Scheme

Anybody who thinks the stock market is anything else is just another mark.

Ever since a bunch of old cynics renamed The ERISA Act “The Stockbrokers’ Retirement Act” back in the Ronnie Raygun days, I have been well aware that the “Stock Market” is nothing but a monstrous Ponzi scheme. The “investors” are nothing but marks in the old con game sense.

From Investor.gov:

A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that pays existing investors with funds collected from new investors. Ponzi scheme organizers often promise to invest your money and generate high returns with little or no risk. But in many Ponzi schemes, the fraudsters do not invest the money. Instead, they use it to pay those who invested earlier and may keep some for themselves.

Do the arithmetic, and then try to tell me the stock market is anything BUT one of those. The fraudsters call themselves stockbrokers, money managers, and other stuff. The fact is they are nothing but con artists. That makes the “investors” in the stock market nothing but marks. The scam is so profitable that it can afford to buy politicians and lawyers to keep it “legal.”

I got a good lesson from my older relatives who lived through the depression. The only people who make money on the stock market are stockbrokers. My relatives learned the hard way when the stock market sucked in tons of cash and made it vanish in 1929.

Nothing I have seen since has changed that opinion. It is the same as Los Vegas, except located on the east coast. For every winner, there are ten or a hundred or a thousand losers, and the casino is called the “Stock Market.” The house and its employees are the only ones who always make money. Every time someone tries to make them play a straight game, they make a phone call to one of their tame politicos, and that idea vanishes.

Involuntary Marks

The reason I despise ERISA is that it made every “regular” person who ever plans to retire into another mark. The rich folks always have money to throw away, and they were the original stock players. ERISA forced the rest of us into the game with no guarantee of having a penny to retire on.

Wall Street paid for ERISA in “campaign contributions” and lobbyists. It has been paid back handsomely by the huge and continuing influx of regular people’s cash. To this day, “Wall Street” owns the entire former GOP and most of the Democratic party. The Mafia built Los Vegas, but the stock market refers to their backers by more socially acceptable names. I can’t tell the difference - they even go to the same tailors.

Legitimacy and Ethics

What prompted this little screed was a phone call from Tom, my “financial advisor.” At least I think that is what he calls himself. He is really just another scam artist in the stock market. This particular scammer controls a chunk of money that is supposedly “mine” - a 401k fund or something. I don’t return his voicemails - even thinking about him is enough to make me angry. I get angry enough that I do stupid things like waste time and energy writing screeds on my blog that almost nobody reads.

I am sure that Tom thinks he is a legitimate businessman. Like most of us, he can’t afford to consider the ethics of what he does for his dinner. He is among the great majority of us who works for members of the former GOP. We cannot afford to think about the ethics of our jobs. If we do that and actually care about those ethics, we end up wanting to put a bullet through our brains.

You cannot have functioning ethics and work for a corporation today. It is utterly impossible. Even companies that started out trying to be ethical ended up in the same slime pit. The ethos always ends up “profit über alles” complete with the Nazi goose step, even if it didn’t start that way. Try complaining, and you are out on the bricks with nothing to show fir it.

Solutions are scarce

There was a time when OSHA, NLRB and EPA meant good things for workers. The former GOP has worked diligently to pull their teeth and worse, almost making them irrelevant. “Wall Street” and “financialization” have wrecked middle America. Those things have destroyed the unions. What used to be the middle class is now on the edtge of poverty, the upper 1% has added lots of zeros to its riches. The former GOP has aligned itself with the worst of the worst. There is no help there.

The hopeful among us see the recent union victories at Amazon and Starbucks as good signs. The fact is that they are much too small to mean anything. The NLRB is still not backing union efforts in any useful sense, and the companies still abuse anyone who even mentions unions and get away with it. Like the lottery, for everyone that wins, thousands or millions lose.

The couple of active politicians with ideas that would at least mitigate this mess are marginalized and called names by Wall Street’s tame politicians. “Socialist” is a bad word, and “communist” is even worse. Those names represent ideas that scare the hell out of the “status quo”-dependent rich. The Democratic Party has marginalized its liberal wing even as they are the only people who are willing to talk about solutions that help the regular people.

While we can still vote, we have to - that is the only voice regular people have. The fascists of the former GOP are working hard and fast to prevent us from having even that voice. They conned the former middle class blue collar voters into believing that the fascists are doing them some good. The people they have fucked the hardest are their “base” now. The only barrier to the fascists is those of us who think, and we are where the solution will come from.