The History of the Decline and Fall of the American Hegemony—Chapter 7 Excerpt—Wall Street

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Following is a Chapter 7 excerpt from the Complete Article, as the Complete Article is cited as a 40+ minute read. This excerpt is edited, updated, and has differences from the chapter as first published. This excerpt contemplates reference to the Complete Article to be understood as presented.

7. Wall Street Betrayal. Watching a pack of killer dogs, wolves, or lions hunting prey is a thing of natural beauty, unless of course, we’re the prey. But I digress.

Statistically, most or many Americans watch the news, such as CNN or FOX, where the pundits banter about social issues. The conversation is biased by media ownership and agenda [73] being mostly owned by only 15 billionaires and 6 corporations [74] and needing to keep viewer eyes entertained to meet advertising profit requirements with the relatively new time-vacuumed media profit animal called, “24 Hour News.[*7]

Walter Cronkite is long gone as is his esteem and integrity for the ideal of journalistic discipline of facts-only reporting. [*38] If there were a public interest federal disclosure disclaimer law whereby a yellow band was necessary, “This program contains perspectives and opinions beyond factual reporting,” the yellow band would never go away. (Sort of like a food ingredients disclosure notice, the information, better or worse, being “mind food.”)

Indeed, “news” tends now as an op-ed feature of opinionated characterizations. The once-virtuously disciplined Cronkitian integrity of “200 Killed in the War,” is now characterized, “200 Innocent Slaughtered,” or “200 Freedom Fighters Die Bravely,” often entwined with that easy pickings, go-to, low-hanging, propaganda fruit: non-objective, biased, delusive, selfish, religion. [*51] Propaganda sugar feeding ignorance [75], such as it is, depending upon the media channel profit agenda as a Wall Street public company, and with the poor American, who we have failed to educate in the tools of Aristotelian Rhetoric and Socratic Cardinal Virtues [*37, 32] being led by the nose into a base and mean form of candied slavery, and failing to perceive it. [76, 77, 78, 79]

But, if you’ve never done it, try watching a “money channel” like Bloomberg. Go ahead, like a mind exercise, for 7 minutes a day. It’s not for children or the weak. It’s serious business, with a mature tone, cadence and language of business is business. Monetary profit is a form of scientific truth, it does not care if you like it. The reason it’s so serious is because the result—that is, success or failure—is objective and measurable. The numbers land black or red. If a business is unprofitable, such as Amazon in the early years, the strategy must be rational, articulated, and persuasive enough to adduce confidence in the market. [80, 81]

The pundits on the money channels are killers, metaphorically speaking. While common people are bantering about whether sit-ups exercise the hip flexors, the money guys are debating cell mitochondria and fast-twitch fibers. These money guys are the organic chemists of the business world. They are brilliant, trained, and with essentially one objective on their mind—one preyprofit. [*17]

Don’t get me wrong, truth be told, after 35 years of practicing corporate law, some people might say that I am their ordnance manufacturer. “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it,” said Robert E. Lee. When these guys pack into a room, it is a brutal thing of beauty, in a way. [*80, *82]

But, behold, said Jesus, “a man cannot serve two masters, for he will love one and hate the other.[*24.7] And therein lies the issue. In working with clients raising capital, I have said countless times, “You may love your business, but the money-guys love the profit generated by your business. There is a difference.This concept is exposed over and over by those killer sharks, particularly often candidly by Mr. Wonderful, on Shark Tank. [82, 83, 84, 85]

If we ask a Wall Street guy about zygote gestation rights, the response might start as Jeffersonian, “It does me no injury if a woman never terminates a gestation or terminates gestation 20 times, it neither picks my pocket nor break my leg. It’s her business… Wait, ‘business’? Who’s paying for it? This might have systemic cost implications with a paradigmic shift. Let’s determine medical institution profitability by demographic metrics, and identify source of funds, with implications of equipment and impact on international imports.[*48]

If we reduce social prosperity to a function of competing economics within the field of money game-play, Wall Street is going to win. Money is power. It’s that simple. They have the tools, they know the game, and they stay hungry. They have these attributes of self-power, because, in the world of business, just like in the world of Mother Nature, only those fit to survive will survive. We might detest the rule of science, but it doesn’t care. [*1]

According to Motley Fool, the largest brokerage houses are only 4, and those 4 have 88% of the assets under management, and 6—only 6—have 99% of assets under management, that is, controlling 26,880,000,000,000, $26T. [86] $26T buys a lot of influence, and weaponry ordnance. $26T is pervasive social power, as much as it has a too-big-to-fail risk of catastrophic national failure.

Only 6 brokerage houses control that 99%, $26T, in monetary assets, and then with mostly 15 billionaires and 6 corporations controlling the media in America, and all of those are part of the Wall Street infrastructure as cause or effect. Anyone who thinks the oligarchical plutocrical perfect storm of money and media don’t own and control the American framework will not survive, being their prey. I can love and respect the predator lion, but it does not follow that I want it to eat me.

Human beings are wired to conquer, in their sentient [87] self-interest of survival and comfort, which is why we rule the Earth as a competitive species, and why we feed upon ourselves as individuals; that is, as a general rule. The exceptions are only two: selfless perfect love where it exists, and selfless disciplined duty where perfect love does not exist. (Perfect love does not need discipline. Where perfect love exists, duty gets a free ride.) [*55]

Notwithstanding that the money media pundits will say that more Americans are in the stock market than ever before, sources indicate that it’s not a whole truth. If managed retirement plans are excluded—that is, owned stocks directly—it is only 15% of the population [88], which generally comports with education and disposable income, without 85% of Americans, perhaps to correlate with 15% of top wealth. Therefore, Wall Street increasingly tends to the brilliant already wealthy money guys or motley fools. [89] The rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. [*63] America’s bailing-out financial messes and the rich keep getting richer. Distasteful, but “proof of the pudding is in the eating.

As a general rule, an investor needs some volume of discretionary money to invest, and the shrinking Middle Class is losing it, now deep in credit card debt, particularly because of the inflation resulting from the unteathered inflated vapor money and crippling national debt, and paying credit card rates in excess of 16%. Indeed, current average personal debt interest is 16.5% [*90] and the average rate of return on Wall Street is 10%. [91] Therefore, staid monetary prudence would suggest to pay all personal debt prior to investment in the stock market, which thereby leaves the rich.

That said, Wall Street is an excellent facility to broker a stable system of investment by the public into commercial enterprises; it is inherently a necessary structure in a capitalist economy.

To its credit, the SEC has gotten much better control over constraining the operation of human nature of non-disclosure. The patient is still dying, but that is not the fault of the SEC. The role of the SEC is to manage available information, not to prevent stupidity.

Preventing stupidity is the role of the education system, which (except for the private schools for the wealthy, of course) is funded by the government. But the government is broken, now bailing out infrastructural flaws, encumbered by inflated vapor money and crippling national debt, incurred in part to support the war machinery of religious wars, to create local military bases to protect the slavery by the source of the unholy fuel dependency. But, other than war killing a lot of people and keeping a country poor, the Wall Street investors can still make a lot of money. “Pfizer shares hit record high with COVID-19 vaccine stocks on a tear,” said Reuters [92]. The COVID vaccine was not “free,” as touted in the media, but about $30 per person that somebody had to pay, and anyone who does not understand the socialization of cost onto the backs of the American People with the profit into Wall Street wealth is a grave fool. [93]

I will suggest that failure of the political system is because of the influence of Wall Street corporate money and media to buy political influence. Some people claim in frustrated disbelief, Woe unto America, we have two bad presidential candidates, I can’t figure out how this happens. That darn two-party system…Well, I will suggest that it’s not per se the two political party system that is the problem. That’s only where everyone is directed to look. [94] I will suggest that it’s actually because of the other two parties, being corporate Wall Street money and corporate media, and their resultant influence on the self-governance democratic free-press eco-system.

Furthermore, as to the “corporations” which Wall Street rightly makes investment fungible, we can observe the decline of the paradigm that was originally intended to serve funding the entrepreneurship that served the common weal. In essence, the market was traditionally a substantive reflection of confidence in the entrepreneurship enterprise itself.

Indeed, some may remember the inefficiency of the equity markets before computerized trading, when there was a staid natural barrier of entry, requiring, as a general rule, research, actually talking to a broker, then a purchase of 100 share multiple “lots”, and natural resisting average longer-term hold. Computerization is a natural evolution, but the devolution of traditional investing into day-trading speculation does not serve the grander social purpose of per se investment in the capitalist commercial enterprises.

Let’s take a football game for example. Someone assesses the players, history, and considers probabilities, and then can wager for a profit on the preferred team winning. This is a bet-to-team wager.

But let us say that the wager is no longer regarding the team itself, but rather the wager is actually directed to the collective psychology of the people making the wager about the team. This is a bet-to-wager wager, or perhaps derivatively a bet-to-wager-to-team wager. That is, we are no longer assessing the substantive merit of the team, but we are assessing the human psychology of betting about the teams. It’s not the same thing.

Day trading and betting on the market trends is not the same as investing in a company. It is a one-off diluted speculative mirrored facade created by Wall Street for Wall Street, but not it is not capitalism in any manner of traditional essence. It is now a game of producing income without substantive traditional life value.

Trading in a market “index” is not investing in the capitalist entrepreneurship enterprise that serves the common weal. It is no longer love of the American capitalist entrepreneurial enterprise through investing, but rather love of money through gambling. Day trading and trading in an index is more gambling than gambling, and more poker than poker.

It creates no substantive life value benefits, but only self-interested paper wealth that is only vapor wealth. When the markets fail, it will occur as a computer blip of a needle to a balloon, because that’s the economic construct.

And, if we should think that failure of economic strength does not adduce social atrocities through out the world, then our education system has failed us, again. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 had a profound influence on the rise of Hitler. [95]

Wall Street is the engine for the American capitalist economy. The failures that exist today were predictable or known by Wall Street, but continue in betrayal by short-term profit motives, evidenced by resultant inflated vapor money, crippling national debt, costly wars driven by the predictable slavery of fuel dependency, all necessary only because Wall Street sold our American industrial might to foreign countries to make self-interested short-term profit and stock bonuses. It’s not working. Wall Street is not checked and balanced. Reform is required.

The pain is coming, either way. [*33] It is a matter of priorities, “for where your treasure is, there your heart will be.[24.12] And therein lies the issue.

American prosperity is now only a facade of substance. Indeed, the government is financially bailing out students, banks and businesses. [96, 97]. No government bailout is ever required, but for the implicit admission of systemic failure of a critical component of the social or economic eco-system.

Let us not be false to any man or more so to ourselves. More bailouts are coming, as sure as the night follows the day. But the buckets are growing smaller, and the holes are growing larger. And we sink blinded in folly.

“According to Gibbon, the Roman Empire succumbed to barbarian invasions in large part due to the gradual loss of civic virtue among its citizens.”

All’s well that ends well,” and this is not going to end well. [*98]

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Go To Complete Reference Citations Post

[20] https://www.zippia.com/advice/working-age-population; https://usafacts.org/articles/what-is-the-us-national-debt-and-how-has-it-grown-over-time/?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=ND-ElectionsGov&msclkid=902217b370f613d502bb7273af761b54 [$36,000,000,000,000, divided by 207,406,609 working age is $173,572 or at two third middle and upper class feeding the system debt of 136,888,362 $262,988]

[24] ONE®: The LinkedIn Reference Set [#GRZ_183] 24.1 ONE: 1022 [T11:19] (“Wisdom Vindicated By Works“); 24.2 ONE: 1325 [T15:14] (“Blind Lead Blind-Ditch“); 24.3 ONE: 296 [L4:23] (“Physician Heal Thyself“); 24.4 ONE: 1661 [T18:6, R9:42, L17:2] (“Millstone); 24.5 ONE: 1143 [T13:13, R4:12] (“Perceive“); 24.6 ONE: 1040: [L10:27] (“Love Neighbor As Self“); 24.7 ONE: 582 [T6:24] (“Serve Two Masters“); 24.8 ONE: 635 [T7:20, L6:44] (“Tree By Its Fruit“); 24.9 ONE: 921 [T10:10] (“Workman Worthy Meat“); 24.10 ONE: 2632 [T26:50, L22:48] (“Betray With A Kiss“); 24.11 ONE: 514 [T5:30, R9:43] (“Right Hand Cause to Sin“); 24.12 ONE: 577 [T6:21] (“Heart Treasure“); 24.13 ONE: 1661 [L10:33] (“You Are Gods”); 24.14 ONE 1747 [L17:20] (“Kingdom Within“); 24.15 ONE: 799 [T9:17, R2:22, L5:37] (“New Wineskins“); 24.16 ONE: 2121 [T22:20, R12:16, L20:24] (“Caesar Coin Tax”); 24.17 ONE: 373 [J2:25] (“Human Nature“); 24.18 ONE 2211 [T23:25, L11:39] (“Inside-Out Hypocrisy“)

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A Farmer had a Goose that began to lay golden eggs.

Each day one new golden egg would be laid by the Goose, and the Farmer grew very rich. However, the Farmer was impatient and tried to get the Goose to lay more than one golden egg each day.

In desperation for even more golden eggs, the Farmer cut the Goose open to get all of eggs at once! And, when he cut the Goose open, he got only the death of his Goose, and no more golden eggs.

Moral of the Story: Unsatisfied with some, we lose all. [99, *58]

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The statements or opinions made in this article are solely the author’s own and not representative of any institution regarding which the author is affiliated.

© 2024 Gregg Zegarelli, Esq. Gregg can be contacted through LinkedIn.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/history-decline-fall-american-hegemonychapter-7-gregg-zegarelli-esq–xgdge

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“Et nunc possum mori.”-grz

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