In the News

The Obama administration announced two huge news items last week. One being Treasury Secretary Geithner wants the Treasury Department to have new power to seize financial firms like AIG, stating the failure of AIG proves the old regulations didn’t work so we need new regulations to keep the checks and balances of the economy in place.

We had rules in place that should have prevented companies like AIG from getting “too big to fail”, it was called the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). But the corporate crooks along with their crony politicians did away with the FTC having any real power to prevent corporations from getting “too big to fail”. Now the Treasury Secretary wants new powers to take over financial institutions before they get to the critical stage of failure. Don’t we already have that power? Doesn’t the American tax payer own 80 percent of AIG, is that not a takeover? Haven’t we pumped billions into the largest banks in the country already? How much more power does he need?

Geithner was head of the Federal Reserve in New York when that massive 700 billion bank bailout was being engineered which indicates to me he’s on the side of the bankers and not the citizens.

The other financial bomb shell is that the Treasury and the Obama administration have set up a government funded program to sell the trillion dollars of “toxic assets” of banks to investors through private and public partnership.

Paul Krugman 2008 Nobel prize winner for economics states “In a way, we'd like to make the whole story of these assets go away. The only reason that they're there, the only reason it's an issue is because the banks have lost so much money that they are not effective at their job of passing funds from one end of the economy to the other.”

The government is investing tax payer dollars in the same toxic assets that got us into this trouble in the first place.

To quote Krugman “it’s not the toxic assets that are the problem, it’s the toxic banks that are the problem.” We could take it a step further and say it’s not the regulations that were the problem, it’s the people who have failed to enforce the regulations who are the problem.

Will these companies who buy the toxic assets become too big to fail? And who are these investors? They only risk 15 percent of the loan and the tax payer takes on the other 85 percent of the loan’s risk. It’s a good deal for the investors, but a raw deal for the citizen.

And what’s in these toxic assets but homes loans? If the few investors were to buy these assets won’t a lot of our debt be in the hands of the few? Where’s the FTC when it’s needed?

Many in the country are concerned Obama is leading us into being a socialist nation. It is not socialism he is leading us into, we’re being led into Big Brother governance with the corporate crooks in control. Tim Geithner’s quest for more power and the federally guaranteed loans to sell these “toxic assets” are two more steps in the direction of Big Brother.

Bonus Betting

It’s maddening to hear of the bonuses being doled out to both current and former AIG employees, but don’t let them use this as a ruse to take the heat off the issues going on behind those bonuses. The amount of money in said bonuses is 465 million, which is one half of a billion, and we’re doling out billions upon billions to all kinds of banks, foreign and domestic and where is the media spot light? On half a billion. Where have all the other billions gone?

They won’t tell us, as Bob Kuttner economics writer for American Prospective stated “…Treasury was essentially saying, This is proprietary business information. We're not even going to require AIG to tell you who got all the money." Bob Kuttner said “You know, this is being run by the Treasury in the way that JPMorgan and Company were brought in after the bank panic of 1907. It's being run like a private bankers' club, instead of like a government agency that owes the taxpayer some transparency and some accountability.”

The huge risks AIG took are hidden away in the twisted language of credit default swaps, and now it’s become complicated to figure out who in our own government knew what and when.

One thing we do know is that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was in on that 750 billion dollar bank bail out bill because he was head of the New York Federal Reserve at that time, and now as Treasury Secretary, he won’t tell us where AIG spent our tax dollars.

Now it’s come out that 12 billion of the AIG bailout money went to Goldman Sachs a Wall Street banking firm, where former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was at one time CEO. And billions more are going to AIG’s counterparts, foreign banks.

Not only does AIG steal our money, they add insult to injury. According to a report on the News Hour “much of the bonus money went into a division that took huge losses linked to risky mortgages, but company officials have said they need those employees to help undo the damage.” With employees like those who needs enemies?

There’s a lot more going on with this AIG swindle than meets the eye, the bonuses are a diversion to take attention away from the greedy capitalists who stole 90% of the money and control our country with evermore success.

Return of the Robber Barons

For all those who are concerned about the redistribution of wealth, not to worry, the president can only dance around the fringes of addressing this issue. All us little people at the bottom of the distribution chain only get to redistribute our wealth from government agency to government agency and from corporation to corporation, the real power and wealth of our country has already been redistributed into the hands of the few, and it began decades ago.

We have gone back to the gilded age when the robber barons were in control with the resurrection of Standard Oil, the model of corporate concentration of wealth as designed by robber baron John D. Rockefeller. Standard Oil, took over the entire country’s oil production by buying or destroying those who were unwilling to sell and ended up controlling eighty percent of the world’s oil production during the late 1800’s and early1900’s.

Citizens pushed back against Standard Oil resulting with the Supreme Court in 1911 ordering Standard dissolved, but that all changed with the “merge or die” mantra during Reagan’s presidency.

As a result of Reagan’s FTC lax rules against monopolies, his FTC allowed the resurrection of Standard Oil so that we now have Exxon Mobil the descendents of Standard Oil of New Jersey and Standard Oil of New York, the largest and most profitable company ever in the history of the world. With globalization Exxon Mobil can do to the world what Standard Oil did to the country, take complete control while squeezing all others out, by whatever means necessary.

James Webb writes in his “A Time to Fight” “The take it all mentality of corporate America in these early years of the twenty first century has come to resemble in many ways the un-caring rapacity of a corporate America that Teddy Roosevelt chose to confront a hundred years ago.”

It remains to be seen if President Obama can live up to his promise of restoring equality of “economic opportunity”. To do that he needs to take on today’s global robber barons; until he does that, there will be no downwards redistribution of wealth.

You Decide

There isn’t a health care crisis in this country, paying for health insurance is the crisis. Our health insurance industry is plagued by the same problem as our financial system… greed !

The health insurance companies make up rules and refuse to pay the doctors, nurses and hospitals. Take for example the ninety day rule. If a claim is not billed within 90 days, the insurance company denies payment because it was billed later than the ninety day filing limit, even if it’s billed on the ninety-first day. Imagine all the millions of people paying premiums, and the insurance companies keep the money while denying payment. It amounts to legalized stealing.

For the past two decades the insurance companies have taken over medicine, resulting in doctors and hospitals having to hire legions of employees just to call insurance companies to ask them for permission to perform surgeries; diagnostic testing; and physician visits, along with seeking approval to prescribe certain medications. The insurance companies act like they know better than doctors what is best for us, so they control all medical decisions with a maze of regulations to determine if treatment is necessary. File clerks looking at paperwork submitted by those legions of employees are making our medical and health decisions for us.

Another trick up their sleeve is something called the disallowed amount. They deduct paying one third of the billed price and call that the disallowed amount. For instance, if the doctor visit is seventy five dollars, the insurance company says we’ll only allow fifty dollars, with a discount of twenty five dollars. But a patient without medical insurance goes to the same medical professional, they have to pay the entire bill without any deductions.

Why does the insurance company decide they deserve a deduction but not the average citizen? Because they are ‘Big Brother’ and they make the rules. Their rules say they are the warranty holders and we are their rented machines, which require fixing just like automobiles. Insurance companies decide how much and what type of repairs their ‘machines’ will receive.

It was recently reported the insurance industry actually came out and said if the federal government mandates that all citizens have health insurance, they’ll drop the pre-existing clause. A pre-existing clause is where coverage is denied if the medical condition was in effect prior to the purchase of the health insurance.

Every year the cost of health insurance premiums rises faster than any raises we may receive. In effect we’re giving the insurance company our raise while receiving less coverage. This has been going on for close to two decades, no wonder people can’t save money, we never get a raise in our pay. And if you don’t receive a raise, then your pay decreases because the health insurance premium increases and you take home less. Of course, maybe if we could start employing the disallowed theory, we could save a bundle on our health insurance premiums.

They’ve even changed what we call doctors, we now call them providers. What would the new degree for a doctor be, a PR for provider? Besides, I’d rather see a doctor for medicine than a provider for healthcare any day.

This is just a glimpse of how much power these insurance corporations have over our government, how much disdain they have for us and only a few of the myriad of reasons why we need leaders who are able to stand up to the insurance industry, because as it is now, health insurance companies decide who lives and who dies.

The president is promising us health care reform by the end of the year. He should take the medical decision making out of the hands of insurance companies, whose decisions are driven solely by profits, and place it back into the hands of the people along with their treating physicians. This is what America is all about, taking the power and decision making out of the hands of the few and putting it back into the hands of the people where it belongs.

True health care reform begins with regaining our right to make our own medical decisions and realizing it is the insurance companies who make medical care overly expensive.

Banking Challenges

President Obama told us we had to pass the 787 billion dollar economic stimulus on top of the 700 billion we’ve already given to the banks with little in return. But wait there’s more…

The Federal Reserve is going to lend out trillions in car loans, student loans and small business loans, which is kinda scary considering the Federal Reserve is a bunch of bankers who control our currency. The Federal Reserve Chairman controls inflation and deflation by setting the interest rate banks charge to one another called the Federal Funds Rate.

Thomas Jefferson said “I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our civil liberties than standing armies”. “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation then by deflation, the banks and the corporations will grow up around them, will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."

The president tells us we are entering uncharted financial territory which call for drastic changes to the entire economic system. Considering what Thomas Jefferson had to say about banks, how uncharted is today’s financial situation when greed is its lifeblood, no matter the century?

Our currency has been turned into credit, and because the Federal Reserve failed to control the dot com and housing bubbles with the proper interest rates, the banks and corporations parasitically grew up around our economy choking the life out of it, so that now we the tax payers now have to bail out the banks with many of us ending up without a home because the Money is now gone because the bankers stole it! These bankers have ruined our economy, and many people's lives, and have no remorse having done so.

The attitude of the greedy bankers is one of arrogance and entitlement, evidenced by CEO salaries, and AIG’s trips to resorts in Colorado and California after receiving government bail out money. Northern Bank received 1.6 billion in bail out money and still went on their golfing trips because they had already been planned. Many Americans had also made plans, like staying in their homes and investing in their retirement, their plans were curtailed by the arrogant greed of the financial industry.

This is the challenge, tackling the unfettered greed of the few, the rich the powerful, and only one of many challenges this president faces. During Jefferson’s time they had men who were willing to risk their lives and their fortunes to take on the bankers. Today our politicians owe their fortunes to the wealthy few and dare not risk their “elected positions” of power by taking on the bankers.