If the presidency of Barack Obama teaches us anything, it should be that presidents are nothing but tools of the elite to concentrate wealth and power. It should teach us that the words Democrat and Republican are absolutely meaningless.

Columnist and editor for the NY Post, Michael Gray has a phrase to describe the time period of 2008 through 2015—The Great Fleecing. It was the continuation of a great game that has played out since the rise of consumerism, a collusion of corporations and government that has squeezed the Middle Class for everything it was worth.

The vast majority toils through cycles of boom and bust, while the 1% steadily reaps the benefits of a shadow economy that siphons wealth upward. The Great Recession never hurt the elite, and the supposed recovery never helped the rest of us.

"During [The Great Fleecing], the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the world occurred. Some $4.5 trillion was given to Wall Street banks through its Quantitative Easing program, with the American people picking up the IOU."

Instead of all that money going into real, tangible things like desperately needed infrastructure improvements, those trillions were sequestered in a crony system of banks and Wall St. investors, overseen by a cartel called the Federal Reserve.

It's not difficult to believe that the Great Recession didn't just happen by coincidence at the end of one president's term when everyone was distracted by phony political debates. It would follow that the next president picked right up on the game.

After the 2008 election, Obamacare became the next massive distraction, keeping everyone in a state of phony debate while the Fed was doling out trillions to Wall St. banks and putting American taxpayers on the hook. And it just so happened that Obamacare became a windfall for another power player in the corporatocracy—the health insurance industry.

As Gray points out,

"the Obama administration is the first two-term presidency that has not posted a 3% GDP growth on an annualized basis for 8 years. Even Franklin Delano Roosevelt posted 3% growth year during the Great Depression."

Jobs, wages, and the GDP took a back seat to the "too big to fail" Wall St. banks, because they couldn't trust the plebes with all that money for fear of inflation. As a result, the various schemes these banks engaged in with the free money—including mortgage-backed securities, company mergers, company debt offerings, stock buybacks—did nothing but secure that wealth for the 1%.

"These actions are the reasons the American middle class has been decimated and no longer makes up the majority of the population…

The middle class has seen the wholesale export of good-paying jobs, while on the hook for crushing mortgages and higher taxes to pay down the growing US debt to fund the banks."