A new Lost Decade is leading to revolution

Original Link: http://www.marketwatch.com/Story/story/print?guid=A3598D6A-EDEF-11E0-9CD6-002128040CF6

By Paul B. Farrell

Memo to the Super Rich, your high-paid lobbyists and your no-compromise political puppets whose sole mission is destroying the presidency: Yes, you are succeeding. You’re also killing the economy.

Thanks to your self-destructive ideology, America is now in the second of back-to-back Lost Decades. A new one on the heels of the 2000-2010 Lost Decade where Wall Street lost more than 20% inflation-adjusted. Get it? You guys launched America’s second Lost Decade of 21st century.

Yes, two consecutive job-killing Lost Decades. The first created by Wall Street’s obsessive greed. The new one triggered by the widening wealth gap that’s feeding endless partisan political wars powered by Super Rich conservatives hell-bent on re-establishing the same free-market, trickle-down Reaganomics policies that have been sabotaging America for the last generation.

Unfortunately, the new one gets worse: Why? The coming Lost Decade is a backdrop for a wave of class warfare destined to trigger a historic revolution in American politics, bigger than the ‘29 Crash and Great Depression.

Initially inspired by the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street is a virus spreading rapidly as Occupy Everything, a reform movement that will overshadow the GOP/Tea Party as the voice of the people, leading to an Occupy America. Read more about the origins of Occupy Wall Street.

Read David Weidner’s Writing on the Wall: Occupy Wall Street is a tea party with brains.

Investors, listen closely: First, we’ll summarize five major signs of America’s new Lost Decade 2011-2021. Then, we summarize seven diverse examples of rebellions across the world adding fuel to America’s accelerating Occupy Wall Street revolution.

Why is this crucial for investors? Because these class wars are guaranteed to deepen America’s market and economic problems during the coming Lost Decade. So listen closely investors:

1. Decade of debt stagnation till 2021
Barron’s Gene Epstein warns that Obama’s latest is “Too Little, Too Late.” Even if the president “gets everything he asked for in his new proposals, it won’t reduce our growing public debt. And he won’t get it all.”

So America’s debt will remain around 80% of GDP for a decade, levels not seen since the 1940s. That’s right, debt will remain dangerously high at least through 2021. And it won’t matter who is president. Class warfare will accelerate this job-killing debt cycle.

2. Investors lose faith, bailing out
Over at the Wall Street Journal Tom Lauricella warns “Investors lose faith in stocks … in a historic retreat, investors world-wide during the three months through August pulled some $92 billion out of stock funds in the developed markets,” more than reversing the total “put into those funds since stocks bottomed in 2009.”

Worse, there’s a “widening belief that the mess left behind by the housing bubble and financial crisis will be a morass to contend with for years.” Yes, many years.

3. Fed surrenders, cannot fix economy
In a Cleveland speech last week Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke warned that with 45% of the unemployed out more than six months, long-term unemployment is now a “national crisis” the Fed cannot fix. “Unheard of … this has never happened in the post-war period.” They’re “losing the skills they had, they are losing their connections, their attachment to the labor force.” But a job-killing Congress won’t act.

4. Wall Street still doesn’t get it
In a recent Foreign Policy article, William Cohan, a former J. P. Morgan Chase managing director and author of “Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World,” warns Wall Street not only learned nothing after the 2008 meltdown, they’re aggressively lobbying to kill all reforms that might “break this dangerous cycle in which bankers and traders get very rich while the rest of us suffer from their mistakes.”

Wall Street is deaf, blind and myopic, wants no limits on “all manner of bets on the market,” even at the “risk of a U.S. recession.” Only a catastrophe will wake Wall Street.

5. Yes, America’s second Lost Decade just began
In a Money interview, “Are We the Next Japan?” Nomura Research economist Richard Koo sees “striking similarities between our current malaise” and Japan’s Lost Decade. Their stimulus did work, but then “the Japanese made a horrendous mistake in 1997.”

The IMF told Japan “you’re running a huge fiscal deficit with an aging population … reduce your deficit.” So Japan “cut spending and raised taxes” and “the whole economy came crashing down.” Sure sounds familiar.

Warning: to Wall Street CEOs, the Super Rich, the top 1% who think they own our government … the party’s over. No matter who gets elected in 2012 and 2016, the new Lost Decade 2011-2021 will make life miserable for the president and Congress, as with Japan earlier.

Worse, this Lost Decade will make life miserable for everybody: corporations, investors, consumers, workers, small businesses and all our families, with the kind of economic suffering experienced in the painfully long Great Depression era.

Yes, big shock dead ahead. The class wars like Arab Spring are accelerating across America. “Occupy Wall Street” is going viral, spreading through “Occupy Together,” expanding in dozens of cities across America and the world, growing bigger — in commitment, in mission, in boldness — a resistance movement waging war against our democracy-killing Super Rich.

Next, expect many more class wars, regional rebellions, uprisings against the wealthy — yes, this is the second American Revolution.

Yes, ‘the people’ have lost faith in voting … and in democracy
Wake up folks: The myopic media is trapped in 2012 “campaign mode,” in a time warp delivering mind-numbing reality shows featuring the latest soap-opera sound bites about Mitt, Rick, Chris, Newt, Michele and their endless games.

Meanwhile, off-camera something big is happening, in the real world, a historic, cultural shift exploding all across America and the world. Something the media, bankers and politicians still can’t grasp.

Get it? The people have lost faith in voting. Not just lost faith in the markets and economy. The public no longer has faith in democracy. They know voting is irrelevant, nothing ever changes. They now know their world is being manipulated by a powerful cabal of wealthy special interests, corporate bosses, bankers, lobbyists and self-serving politicians.

Voters know they’re being played for suckers. The game is rigged. And they’ve also figured out that change will come only after a revolution, one they’re triggering.

Warning: This revolutionary spirit is spreading across the world’s youth, the unemployed, disenfranchised and disillusioned, voices who’ve lost faith in voting democracies.

This historic wave is summarized here from Nicholas Kulish’s provocative New York Times piece, “As scorn for vote grows, protests surge around globe.” Forget the Tea Party, the new class wars will force America to change, as they’re changing the Arab world.

Seven powerful signs: You can feel the shift from democracy … to anarchy in the streets …to a revolution that demands overthrow of the establishment:

1. Global anger at economic inequality
“Hundreds of thousands of disillusioned Indians cheered a rural activist on a hunger strike. Israel reels before the largest street demonstrations in its history. Enraged young people in Spain and Greece take over public squares across their countries,”

Universal complaints: “Corruption … lack of affordable housing … joblessness … from South Asia to the heartland of Europe … to Wall Street … wariness, even contempt, toward traditional politicians and the democratic political process … they have little faith in the ballot box.”

2. Broken promises of voting democracies
Until recently a global consensus told us democracy was “the only path forward.” That faith was broken by an “endless succession of crises, the Asian financial collapse of 1997, the Internet bubble that burst in 2000, the subprime crisis of 2007-8 and the continuing European and American debt crisis.”

Worse, the “inability of policy makers to deal with them or cushion their people from the shocks.”

3. British youth: Nothing to lose
“Even when capitalism fell into its worst crisis since the 1920s there was no viable alternative vision,” said British author Owen Jones. Protests “exploded into lawlessness last month” when “rampaging youths smashed store windows and set fires in London and beyond.”

They no longer believe “the political system represented their interests.” Rioting youth “didn’t feel they had a future to risk.”

4. Young Spaniards: ‘Voting is worthless’
Spain has the developed world’s highest unemployment at 21%: “Many have lost confidence that politicians of any party can find a solution.” These “indignados, the outraged … block traffic, occupy squares and gather for teach-ins. ‘Our parents are grateful because they’re voting,’ said Marta Solanas, 27, an unemployed online journalist, referring to older Spaniards’ decades spent under the Franco dictatorship. ‘We’re the first generation to say that voting is worthless.’”

5. India’s massive government corruption
A New Delhi university student from a small village “wants to know why her parents go days without power: ‘Electricity is our basic need. Where is the money going?’” A rural “activist, starved himself publicly for 12 days until the Indian Parliament capitulated to” an “anticorruption measure to hold public officials accountable. ‘We elect the people’s representatives so they can solve our problems” but that’s not happening, “corruption is ruling our country.”

6. Israel’s politicians abandon citizens
Israel is “a market-driven high-tech powerhouse. But with wealth has come inequality.” The “same small class of people who profited from government privatizations also dominates the major political parties. … market forces produced … a feeling that the job of a citizen was limited to occasional trips to the polling places to vote.” The Israeli “political system has abandoned its citizens.”

7. Class warfare in European Union
“In many European countries the disappointment is twofold: in heavily indebted federal governments pulling back from social spending and in a European Union viewed as distant and undemocratic. Europeans leaders have dictated harsh austerity measures in the name of stability for the euro … rubber-stamped by captive and corrupt national politicians … ‘The biggest crisis is a crisis of legitimacy,’ says one activist … we don’t think they are doing anything for us.”

Warning: Inequalities are at the heart of all revolutions. Today, inequities are at 1929 levels. We’ve been watching this wealth gap widening for decades, since Reaganomics took over American politics a generation ago. Since then the income of the wealthiest 1% skyrocketed from 9% to 23%, while the other 99% of Americans stagnated.

Yes, Warren Buffett’s right: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and winning.” … But not for much longer. Why? Because the Arab Spring set the stage with class wars targeting dictators, scam-voting, pseudo-democracies.

Now Occupy Wall Street has emerged as the booster rocket accelerating a new American Revolution.