The Congressional Budget Office released a report yesterday looking at the changes in the distribution of household income from 1979 to 2007. The graph on the very first page tells the whole story: The top 20% has increased its share of the national income at the expense of the other 80%, whose shares have all gone down.

Jared Bernstein of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities digs deeper into the report:

Between 1979 and 2007, incomes grew by 275 percent for the wealthiest 1 percent of households, 37 percent for the middle 60 percent of households, and 18 percent for the poorest 20 percent of households. These figures adjust for inflation and account for the impact of taxes and government transfer payments such as Social Security and unemployment benefits.

In media coverage of this report, I have heard phrases like incomes of the top 1% have ‘doubled’ or ‘almost tripled’. This is wrong. A 275% increase means that they increased by a factor of 3.75, i.e., almost quadrupled!

Kevin Drum comments that what has happened is that “For all practical purposes, every year about $700 billion in income is being sucked directly out of the hands of the poor and the middle class and shoveled into the hands of the rich.”

Matt Taibbi, in a must-read article with the above title says that what drives the Occupy Wall Street protests is not envy of the rich but the fact that the system is corrupt and unfair.

Americans for the most part love the rich, even the obnoxious rich. And in recent years, the harder things got, the more we’ve obsessed over the wealth dream. As unemployment skyrocketed, people tuned in in droves to gawk at Evrémonde-heiresses like Paris Hilton, or watch bullies like Donald Trump fire people on TV.
…
Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners. But that’s just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning – they’re cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more.

In this country, we cheer for people who hit their own home runs – not shortcut-chasing juicers like Bonds and McGwire, Blankfein and Dimon.

That’s why it’s so obnoxious when people say the protesters are just sore losers who are jealous of these smart guys in suits who beat them at the game of life. This isn’t disappointment at having lost. It’s anger because those other guys didn’t really win. And people now want the score overturned.

He lists all the swindles that are currently going on in favor of the rich banks and against ordinary banking customers, and ends, “These inequities are what drive the OWS protests. People don’t want handouts. It’s not a class uprising and they don’t want civil war — they want just the opposite. They want everyone to live in the same country, and live by the same rules. It’s amazing that some people think that that’s asking a lot.”

Thanks to reader Mark, I came across this report by US Senator Bernie Sanders about a GAO audit of the Federal Reserve that reveals that it secretly loaned out over $16 trillion dollars to American banks and businesses all over the world. The audit also revealed that there were people on the board of the Fed who seemed to be benefiting from the Fed’s actions.

Such audits of the Fed are a new thing this year, thanks to legislation sponsored by Sanders. It is ridiculous that such secrecy has been allowed for so long to institutions that are publicly funded and use public money.

Herman Cain took a beating for the fact that his 9-9-9 tax plan would raise taxes on low and middle income people while giving rich people a huge tax break.

So he has tweaked it and now says that for the poor it will be a 9-0-9 plan. You can be sure that such ad-hoc lurches due to pressure has produced another half-baked plan that will also be roundly attacked. So what’s next?

This gives me an excuse to cue up the Beatles.

Sarah Jaffe and Joshua Holland list them (Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs) and explain why they are so bad and how they get their way.

Currently, Bank of America is engaged in yet another effort to swindle the taxpayers. When it took over Merrill Lynch it also acquired all the toxic derivatives the latter owned. Bank of America is an FDIC-insured institution, which means that its deposits are taxpayer-insured, while Merrill Lynch is not. Now Bank of America is apparently trying to quietly shift the Merrill Lynch liabilities over to Bank of America so that the taxpayers will bear whatever loss occurs,

Of course the Federal Reserve, which has already used enormous amounts of taxpayer funds to bail out the banks, supports the move but the FDIC is balking, fearing getting stuck with a huge bill.

Jon Stewart interviews Ellen Schultz, an editor at the Wall Street Journal and author of Retirement Heist, who explains how corporations, with the connivance of the government that was willing to provide them with the necessary loopholes, looted the pension funds of 44 million of its workers to enrich their top executives, thus transforming pension fund surpluses of $250 billion into deficits.

The behavior of the oligarchy and their total lack of scruples in destroying the lives of ordinary hard-working people go well beyond greed. They are sociopaths.

The Wall Street Journal has a handy calculator that lets you know.

The median household income is $43,000 while the top 1% consists of those earning over $506,600.

Herman Cain has been getting a lot of mileage about his ‘simple’ 9-9-9 tax plan. Jared Bernstein says that it will result in a big tax increase on the middle class and a huge tax cut for the very wealthy. I have seen similar conclusions reached by other analysts.

While this is a goal of the oligarchy, they would like to achieve their goal in more subtle ways. The very transparency of Cain’s scheme is likely to be the thing that pricks his bubble and sends him back into the ranks of the stragglers for the Republican nomination.

If you were paying close attention, you may have noticed that yesterday Congress, which is supposed to be locked in partisan gridlock that has paralyzed it, managed in a bipartisan manner to pass quite easily and with little fanfare major free-trade agreements with Panama, Colombia, and South Korea. The House passed the South Korea agreement by a vote of 278 to 151, Panama by 300 to 129 and Colombia by 262-167. In the Senate, the South Korean plan passed by a vote of 83 to 15, Panama by 77 to 22 and Colombia by 66 to 33.

Whether one thinks such agreements are good for everyone or not, the oligarchy definitely favors them because anything that enables them to move goods, money, and manufacturing capacity more easily and cheaply across borders enables them to make more money.

These agreements had been negotiated by George W. Bush but had stalled in Congress because of opposition from the labor movement that they would cost jobs here. This time they passed easily, thanks to the support of president Obama, which illustrates once again that the oligarchy can sometimes get more of what it wants under a Democratic administration than under a Republican one. It also illustrates once again how noisy partisan gridlock only comes into play when it comes to doing things that benefit ordinary people, and miraculously melts away when the oligarchy’s interests are involved.

This timeline shows how we arrived at the situation where we now have just a few big banks controlling almost the entire financial sector.

(Via Balloon Juice.)