Wicked Leak, Wicked Truth or Wicked Set-up

Both Democrats and Republicans are perpetuating the myth that WikiLeaks is a threat to our security, and Attorney General Holder wants to try founder Julian Assange on espionage charges.

Not one government official paid the price when it was leaked that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent while she was actively engaged in searching for WMD. These actions ruined her career with the CIA. Just how many careers has WikiLeaks ruined? None!

The Valerie Plame incident was just a blip in regards to national security and yet WikiLeaks has been turned into a worldwide manhunt and scandal.

Former national security advisor under President Carter, Zbigniew Brzesinski, has a different take on WikiLeaks stating: “It's, rather, a question of whether WikiLeaks is being manipulated by interested parties that want to either complicate our relationship with other governments or want to undermine some governments, because some of these items that are being emphasized and have surfaced are very pointed.”

“And I wonder whether, in fact, there aren't some operations internationally, intelligence services, that are feeding stuff to WikiLeaks, because it is a unique opportunity to embarrass us, to embarrass our position, but also to undermine our relations with particular governments.”

Perhaps there is some merit to this, who would know better than Brzesinski who helped goad the Soviets into Afghanistan so the US could win the Cold War.

The editor of Wired.com said WikiLeaks set up the US when it chose Amazon.com. Now that Amazon is shutting them down, and even though many citizens may disagree with WikiLeaks, they do agree with freedom of speech, and subsequently will get behind and support WikiLeaks.

This is the second time WikiLeaks has released confidential documents about US foreign policy and we’re supposed to believe it was due to one low level intelligence soldier, Bradley Manning.

There’s more to it than the black and white story we’re being told, but we’ll never know, all information will remain hidden, never to be released by WikiLeaks or even reported by our own journalists who sadly, have dropped the ball and drank the Kool-Aid. They’ve left us with no one of integrity to peer under the rocks to expose the corruption and shadows that have developed and enveloped this nation.

Who’s setting up whom, that’s the real question.

Tightening the Noose

Right out of the gate the politicians tell us whose side they’re on: the rich minority, not the majority. The Republicans will block all legislative activity, including extending unemployment benefits until tax cuts for the wealthy are passed, and rather than fight back, the Democrats will lie down and take it.

Between the 27 billion JP and Chase handed out in bonuses and the 4 billion corporations spent on this past election, (with 2 billion of that going to TV stations owned by a handful of Fortune 500 companies), that’s 31 billion of our tax dollars into the pockets of the few. This is an example of how the wealth is being concentrated at the top.

The government with the support of Democrats and Republicans, have been cutting taxes on the rich ever since Reagan implemented his “trickle down” theory. Cut taxes at the top, and the increased income for the wealthy will trickle down to the little guy. And they’re using the same false trick with tax cuts for the rich. Cut taxes at the top and this increased earnings for the wealthy will trickle down and create jobs. It hasn’t worked yet and it never will.

The Republicans actually threaten the voters: if we don’t pass the tax cuts for the rich, taxes will go up on all Americans. Taxes on us will continue to rise, no matter if we pass the tax cuts or not. In addressing the deficit, a new national sales tax of 6.5 percent has been suggested and of course they’ll have to cut back on benefits. Gee, that sounds familiar.

Ireland was forced to do the same thing-investors in Ireland were threatening to pull their money out due to the banking crisis, so the government of Ireland had to promise to raise taxes on the people, and cut back on their benefits to get a bailout by the European Union. Austerity measures are being implemented in Greece, Spain and Portugal. France raised their retirement age and England saw violent protests over cutbacks in student aid.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve the bank, who prints our money, was bailing out banks both here and abroad to the tune of three trillions dollars of our tax money. Yet we don’t have the money to extend unemployment benefits here while people are loosing their homes, because of the backroom scams the banks enacted to cause the problem in the first place.

So yeah, let’s cut taxes and our throats by giving more money to the minority; the bankers, CEO’s and billionaire hedge fund managers, along with their lobbyists and political puppets. They’ll use this increased wealth to tighten the noose around our necks and the economy through propaganda, lies and threats.

Flat Wages or Increased Spending

On Wednesday November 24 the government released the finding which said Americans earned more and spent more in the month of October.

Of course Americans spent more, the price of everything constantly goes up.The price of gas has risen and according to the oil companies it is due to increased demand. A local news station reported the price of a Thanksgiving dinner is up from last year and a local grocery store owned by a company in the Netherlands reported increased profits due to more people shopping. Ha, profits are up because the price of food goes up weekly. Is that due to increased demand as well?

Electricity and heating is on the rise not to mention the impending health insurance hikes in January. Added all together, we continually make less as prices rise.

So who’s making more? From an article by Robert Reich -”The top one percent of Americans, by income, is now taking home almost a quarter of all income and accounting for forty percent of all wealth”. And in early 2010 JP Morgan paid out $27 billion in bonuses to executives, traders and “valued” employees.

People at the top are making more but for the rest of us, corporations have been slashing benefits and wages since the 1980’s. Robert Reich states: “With hefty campaign contributions, and platoons of lobbyists and public relations flacks, the rich helped push through legal changes that enabled them to accumulate even more income and wealth-including tacit permission to bust unions, slash corporate payrolls, and reduce benefits…”

In his book ‘Aftershock” Robert Reich sums it up: “The fundamental problem is that Americans no longer have the purchasing power to buy what the US economy is capable of producing. The reason is that a larger and larger portion of total income has been going to the top.”

Spending has increased at the top while requests from food pantries has increased at the bottom; with one out of four children living in a household which runs out of food.

Poverty has increased and wages remain flat, so who are they kidding saying Americans earned more and spent more?

Certainty for the Few

Representative John Boehner wants to make the Bush tax cuts permanent to reduce uncertainty in America saying, “ you can't invest when you don't know what the rules are, when you don't know what the tax rates are going to be next year. And that's why making these permanent would be the most important thing we could do to create jobs in the country.”

While it is admirable that Representative Boehner wants to reduce uncertainty, how many millions of Americans are facing uncertainty when it comes to keeping their homes, their pensions, or are facing the uncertainty of staying alive in Iraq or Afghanistan?

Is Representative Boehner concerned about relieving their uncertainty? Let’s face it, how many Americans make over $200,000 per year? It certainly isn’t the majority, it’s the minority.

A retired member of Congress leaves his job in government and then goes to work as a lobbyist for a bank or corporation with the starting salary of $500,000, and that’s on the low end. How is cutting this person’s taxes going to create jobs?

Since the taxes were enacted in 2001 and over eight million jobs have been lost, how is keeping the tax cuts permanent going to create more jobs? If those tax cuts worked, we’d have those jobs now.

The founders understood a good credit system is necessary to promote prosperity. Our credit system is broken, tilting towards growth for banks only, who have trillions parked at the federal reserve earning interest while refusing to lend. Tax cuts aren’t going to make them lend this money to create jobs.

Reducing uncertainty is a luxury many of us won’t be afforded, but one thing is for certain, those who are able to donate large sums of money end up with the rules in their favor; like tax cuts for lobbyists, politicians and the banking billionaires who pay them.　

Reaping Obamacare Rewards

Republican leader John Boehner said they have to repeal the health care bill or else it’ll bankrupt the country. Meanwhile, on November 3^rd, the Federal Reserve announced they’re going to print 600 billion dollars to buy US Treasury Bonds. They’re doing this to entice banks to lend money by making interest on US Treasuries come down, so investors won’t buy them so much. They call this “quantitative easing”.

The fed stated they are doing this to spur the economy and create jobs. In reality, it helps the banks (the same ones who brought us this depression), more than it helps the economy.

Understand, we owe interest on every dollar the federal reserve, a bank, prints. Therefore, we now owe the interest on 600 billion more dollars. How much debt will these interest payments leave to future generations?

The fed announced this back door bailout the day after the elections; which Republicans won by saying “no more bailouts”. Yeah, right.

The AP reports “stocks indexes reached new highs a day after the Federal Reserve announced a $600 billion plan to boost the economy“, “investors like gridlock”, and a “stalemate between the White House and the new Congress will mean less regulation of business.”

With no one watching, self inflicted gridlock means banks will continue to reap unfettered profits at our expense by printing money, and insurance companies will continue to monopolize health care while raising premiums.

By focusing on repealing Obamacare along with Mitch McConnell’s pledge to insure Obama is a one term president, they’re only focusing on the easy targets, they’re not focusing on tough targets like banks who are ”too big to fail“, or insurance monopolies.

Besides, it’s not like the president’s health bill or the financial bills did anything to address real issues, they only took out some of the most reprehensible business practices, like denying sick kids insurance or reaching a benefit maximum. New credit card laws prevent only a few banking abuses while leaving mechanisms in place to guarantee another recession/depression.

Catchy campaign slogans ring hollow when compared to the reality that in one year banks contributed 88 million to Democrats and 67 million to Republicans. Obamacare isn’t the only monster in the closet.

Undue Influence

Political contenders, tea partiers and free market enthusiasts are echoing what a banker said in the 1939 movie “Stagecoach”. The banker complained that the government wanted to examine his books and said rather than examine his books the government should reduce the deficit and cut taxes.

Back then, at least the government had the guts to examine the books of the banks; now, we have stress tests administered by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, a loyal friend to the banks. The results were predictable, they all passed with flying colors and are on sound footing.

What they should be examining is how the banks hijacked our economy by creating this new financial industry engineered by Wall Street and founded on sub prime loans. Mathematical wizards devised complex equations to over value our homes, then transferred the trillions in these over valuations into the hands of the few mega banks. (Which we have due to the banking deregulation of the seventies, which led to the public bail out of the Savings and Loans in the ‘80’s which then led to banks too big to fail, and another tax payer bailout).

The government has been cutting taxes on the wealthy for decades, and we see where it’s gotten us; trillion dollar deficits. According to Robert Reich, the government “halved the top income tax rate from the range of 70 to 90 percent to 25 to 39 percent; allowed many of the nation‘s rich to treat their income as capital gains subject to no more than 15 percent tax; and shrank inheritance taxes that affected only the topmost 1.5 percent.” Imagine, paying only 15 percent on profits made in the government sanctioned and bank hidden derivatives market, while the pay of common workers is reported to the government and taxed at over 30 percent.

Anyone who is against keeping the Bush tax cuts is called a socialist. Yet while the sub prime loan market was exploding, bankers were denying reality by insisting prices of houses would never come down, or if they did, they wouldn’t come down across the country all at once. Contrary to their idealistic free market beliefs, housing prices did fall and when they did it brought us this ongoing Recession.

We need a return to the realism of Marriner Eccles, former federal reserve Chairman from 1934 to 1948, who said in the 1920’s, that people with the concentrated wealth had “great economic power” and “ had an undue influence in the making of the rules of the economic game.”

This concentrated wealth and the “undue influence” it buys, caused the Great Depression. Concentrated wealth and its “undue influence” has once again caused financial catastrophe for many Americans. And just like the first time, it will be years before we get out of it.

Reforming the Entitlement Mentality

Tea Party candidates say we need entitlement reform. We need reform alright, but sadly, there isn’t much agreement on which ones should be addressed.

For instance, banks are now entitled to be bailed out. In March 2009 Paul Volcker said, “What all this amounts to is an unintended and unanticipated extension of the official “safety net”…the obvious danger is that with the passage of time, risk-taking will be encouraged and efforts at prudential restraint will be resisted. Ultimately, the possibility of further crises-even greater crises-will increase.”

There’s not much Tea Party coverage of this entitlement danger, but when it’s a social safety net like Social Security, that’s an entitlement they say we just can’t afford.

In 2009, after the tax payer bailed them out, Goldman Sachs set aside 14 billion in bonuses for their employees, which works out to 750,000 per employee. Not only are they entitled to tax payer bonuses, the banks don’t even think they should pay taxes on any of it.

In his review on the book Casualty Gap, about poorer and less educated citizens being more likely to die in America’s wars, former West Point instructor Andrew Bacevich, said, “…the powerful are determined to preserve arrangements that serve their own interests. Those who enjoy these privileges and the politicians who do their bidding-are determined to retain them.” And “…for the rich and well connected, inequality translates into privilege“. Isn’t privileged synonymous with entitled?

When it comes to this year’s campaigning, the heated rhetoric insists it’s Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid bankrupting the country, not a word about the trillions in entitlements we’re giving to Wall Street bankers and war machines.

Dislike for one another is gaining momentum, and it’s being used as a political platform for the privileged to maintain their entitlements, while the rest of us lose entitlements, like dignity in old age.

Net Control

The age of hypocrisy is alive and well. On the issue of net neutrality, Tea Party idealist Ben Cunningham of the Tennessee Tax Revolt said:
“it’s ideological: individual decisions freely made by consumers and vendors will provide the best regulation of the internet. Letting the FTC set rules will only bring out armies of lobbyists seeking to influence policy.”

This is the same hands off policy the government had towards the banks, which brought us the worldwide recession. Federal oversight and regulation of banks was bad, we were told, the markets could regulate themselves said Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan.

After the damage was done and the market crashed, the former Fed champion of deregulation admitted he had been mistaken in thinking markets could or would regulate themselves. Only a banker has the luxury of twenty-twenty hindsight without any repercussions.

And, as if on cue, here’s a supposed grass roots enthusiast telling us we should repeat the same mistake with giant Telecommunication companies.

Without rules, a few corporations will gain too much power, and in turn will control information on the web. If one wanted to look up the impact of the BP oil disaster, would it lead to a corporate propaganda site, or would it lead to a local site showing the devastation up close and personal?

If we don’t protect net neutrality, we’ll end up with covert corporate control as opposed to the overt type of control like we see in communist China.

At this very moment “armies of lobbyists” are working against net neutrality and “seeking to influence policy”. We are a nation of laws for a reason, under the right circumstances and combined with governmental hands off policies, human nature cannot and will not regulate itself. This is a truism even a former banker now admits.

We've been Warned

There is much uproar currently in the news over the president’s religion. Believe it or not, there was actually a time in this country when it was considered rude and socially unacceptable to ask which religion someone belonged to. That information is your personal business and nobody else’s.

Thomas Jefferson said “Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our God alone. I inquire after no man's, and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend’s or our foe's, are exactly the right“.

Not so today where too many bombard us with their brand of religion, like Glenn Beck, who said during his speech on the Washington Mall “it’s not about politics, it’s about God.” Glenn Beck started out as a radio stunt man. Now he’s continuing his antics by using religion as a prop to convince the easily swayed citizen that Glenn’s a ‘shepherd of the people‘, all in his zealous pursuit to merge his brand of religion with politics.

James Madison reminded us what happens when religious and civil power were entwined “What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution”. Madison knew that one day the country would confront “the danger of a direct mixture of religion and civil government.”

That day is now here. The corporations are the leaders, the journalists and politicians are their minions, and the rest of us are the sheep being fleeced by false gods in the name of salvation. It's so ironic that the Founding Fathers predicted this and warned us all, long ago, of the extreme danger of mixing politics with religion.

Deficits Matter Sometimes

When this president was on the campaign trail, he said he’d get rid of President Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. Then after Obama won the election that promise turned into well, he’d wait and let them expire.

Now expiration time has arrived, and the Republicans are calling to make them permanent, but when a jobs bill comes up for a vote, the Republicans block it because they’re worried about the deficit. Deficits in federal and state governments have been gaining momentum because the federal government has steadily decreased taxes on the monied minority, ever since Reagan was President.

According to Robert Reich former Secretary of Labor, “the rich have been getting a larger and larger portion of total income. From 9 percent in 1980, the top 1 percent’s take increased to 23.5 percent by 2007.”

A hedge fund manager making a billion a year pays less in taxes than his secretary does, whose income is taxed at a higher rate than the billionaire’s 17 percent .

Another component in the Bush tax cuts is the estate tax, created to keep dynasties from forming by passing a family’s wealth from one generation to the next. If the Bush tax cuts are made permanent, the estate tax (inheritance tax) will be repealed.

People were up in arms when Senator John Kerry and Congressman Charlie Rangel failed to pay taxes on property they own. If the tax cuts are made permanent, this means family members of John Kerry or Charlie Rangel stand to inherit millions of dollars in property with none of them paying any taxes on it, ever. Meanwhile, ordinary Americans have paid tax on any property they’ve inherited.

The monied minority assaults us with Orwellian double speak, turning the estate tax into the “death tax”, and it’s working as many Americans agree with this double speak. Even if they don’t understand the truth about it they are against the estate tax. The super-rich own the propaganda machines, the politicians and the media.

Former Vice president Dick Cheney said President Reagan proved deficits don’t matter, when it suited the republican cause. Now, because Democrats added to the deficit, they suddenly matter. Why weren’t they important during the Bush years, when he was tilting the odds in the favor of his friends, the monied minority, with tax cuts?

Islam's Inflammatory Issue

The inflammatory issue of the day is the building of the mosque at “Ground Zero”.

When the banks stole our money it was free market capitalism. Private property owners rent space for a mosque, it’s not free market capitalism anymore, now it’s a matter of public concern, and it‘s up to the public to decide.

Try convincing the public to recoup our money from the banks, try bringing that up to a public vote, ha, that’ll never happen. Unfortunately, because ‘secrecy’ is our government’s ally when it comes down to political crooks; thieves and it‘s agenda, there’s not too much behind the scene news coverage on the banks or the war in Afghanistan, but there’s plenty of coverage over a mosque.

It just seems funny that this mosque is in the forefront, especially when public support for the war in Afghanistan is waning.

Rather than concentrate on ending this obscenely immoral war, the public attention is diverted to a debate on religion, specifically Islam, when the real issue of concern should be the fact that Afghanistan’s government is rotten to the core; starting at the bottom and going all the way to the top, and we‘re giving them billions.

Where’s the incensed public debate on the continued squandering of American tax dollars and patriotic lives for a corrupt government? There isn’t any, and yet everyone in the country has an opinion on the mosque.

Bring back the draft and everyone will have an opinion on the “war” in Afghanistan and voila, it’ll be a public concern, and it‘ll quickly be over, then the mosque will be a distant memory.

Transporting Murder

Thomas Jefferson said “Educate and inform the whole mass of the people…They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”

WikiLeaks shows us how little information we’re receiving about Afghanistan. The administration doesn’t want us to know what is going on, which is reminiscent of the deceit; payoffs, contractor scamming and theft during Vietnam.

The Pentagon Papers proved that what the government knew about Vietnam, and what they were telling the American public was a whole different story. Now this administration and even journalists are calling for WikiLeaks to shut up.

Where are the journalists covering the transportation schemes; which are costing the tax payers billions to pay off Taliban war lords to transport supplies to the US troops?

Bordering Afghanistan, the government in Kyrgyzstan was overthrown and a new government was threatening to shut down a key supply base or change the terms of the lease. The US has negotiated a one year lease, so now the new ruling is that crooks can extort even more money from us. Meanwhile, the crook who was overthrown, fled the country with billions we paid him to lease the base.

Because of WikiLeaks info, when asked if the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, is helping the Taliban, the head of the ISI replied “that’s absurd”, then followed with the statement “the world hates America for what they’ve done“. We’re paying the Pakistanis to help us in this “war on terror” and they hate us.

A marine reservist who served in Afghanistan said the batteries in the IED’s (implemented explosive devices) go dead and have to be replaced. Logic dictates it is the Afghani ‘civilians’ who are resetting the IED’s, which means we are fighting the Afghani population just like the US fought the Vietnamese people, many who were friendly to US soldiers by day for pay, but at night would don the black pajamas and were VC. The Afghanis hate us ‘occupiers’ like the Vietnamese hated us being there. They just want our money.

Just like Vietnam and once again, we have to ask ourselves, why are brave Americans dying for people who hate us, and why is the government lying about it?

Judge the Future by the Past

Without a return to the Glass Steagall Act, which prevented banks from becoming “too big to fail”, this financial reform bill will not prevent another financial meltdown. “Among key provisions, it would give federal regulators authority to wind down troubled companies, in a bid to solve the problem of too big to fail“.

It’s not the winding down which needs to be addressed, it’s preventing corporations from becoming too big to fail, like insurance giant AIG. They first bought a bank to become a Bank Holding Company, then fed at the federal trough of tax payer dollars after they had become too big to fail. This is one of the ways banks have morphed into huge mega conglomerates and how trillions in wealth have been transferred to the banks. If Glass Steagall was in effect, AIG couldn’t buy a bank and then be bailed out by us.

Due to the repeal of Glass Steagall, banks own oil companies and oil companies own banks. This legislation exempts Big Oil from the new derivative regulations which allows banks to have loopholes in the shadow market of derivatives.

Bankers have become so influential, the SEC fine levied against Goldman Sachs is chump change. These bankers made billions betting against their own house of cards in the sub prime loan market by misleading investors. Then again maybe a fine of one or two billion wouldn’t be a big enough deterrent. Which is precisely why Glass Steagal worked so well for decades.

Patrick Henry said “I know of no way judging the future but by the past”. We’ve been held hostage by banks before but were able to reverse it through New Deal legislation. Now, once again, we’re held hostage by the banks and this legislation does not reverse it.

Regulators Reload

The current financial reform legislation “Authorizes regulators to impose restrictions on large, troubled financial companies. It creates a process for the government to liquidate failing companies at no cost to taxpayers, which is similar to the F.D.I.C. process for liquidating failed banks.”

Which is not reassuring considering the FDIC liquidated the failed California bank IndyMac by selling it to a hedge fund. A hedge fund is a group of venture capitalists who pool their money to take huge risks at taxpayers expense, while reaping gargantuan returns. And these risk takers are going to own banks and be in control of depositors money?

The billionaire bankers took sub prime lending, that is, lending to lower middle class Americans, and turned it into a multi trillion dollar betting scheme, while undermining our economy by turning debt into profit, all the while betting on the market that it would fail. According to an editorial in the Nation magazine “six banks control assets equivalent to 63 percent of GDP…”. That’s staggering and a direct result of the repeal of the Glass Steagal Act, which kept the few from controlling the many, like hedge funds owning banks.

Supposedly, our government is in the process of passing some of the most sweeping reforms since the Depression.

Wall Street is all about creating value out of nothing, which is exactly how they brought about this financial meltdown via the housing bubble. Without the restoration of the Glass Steagall Act the same thing is going to happen again and instead of sweeping reforms, they’ve swept the problem of “too big to fail” under the rug.

It’s only a matter of time before we’re threatened with financial collapse again and have to clean up the mess left behind by billionaires, whose “troubled financial institutions” create value out of some other trick bet. What are the odds we loose again? 　

They don’t care about the odds, people who created these large troubled financial institutions walk away with billions while we’re left with no jobs, no money and trillions in debt.

Thomas Jefferson was right, banks are more dangerous than standing armies. These crooks hijacked our economy, all without firing a single shot. And what is our government doing? Reloading the muskets and beefing up the corporate arsenal.

Gushing in the Gulf

The cloudlike oil plumes gushing from the oil well in the Gulf are caused by the dispersants BP first threw at the oil spill. Samantha Joye with the University of Georgia, who reported finding areas containing sub sea oil last month said “This well is leaking a mist of oil that is settling out in the deep sea.”

The first thing any crook does is hide the evidence, and that‘s what BP has done with their dispersants whose effects are still untested. After he and a team of divers confirmed the existence of these plumes, Jean Michel Cousteau, son of the late Jacques Cousteau said BP’s actions are reckless . BP is still denying these plumes; from an AP article on June 10-“…marine scientists found a 100-foot-thick layer of oil 1,300 feet below the surface about 45 miles from the well site. BP said in a written statement that while there is oil in the water, the findings so far do not support the existence of undersea plumes.”

A recent poll came out saying 69 percent of the country disapproves of the president’s handling of the BP crisis. What about the government’s handling of the Exxon Valdez’s oil spill? Exxon was first ordered to pay 2 billion but after the victims spent 20 years in court, Exxon whittled that down to 530 million. According to Cousteau who has visited Alaska and seen firsthand the devastating effects, said, you can dig down a foot and a half in the sand and still find oil.

We need to demand less dependence on oil. One look at the macabre scene from Hell of an oil soaked pelican’s dance of death, and that should convince us. But then again, maybe we’ve become so steeled of heart we can watch scenes like that and not flinch.

Tragically, the only way to stop the spills is when every last drop of oil is sucked out of the earth, by that time, we won‘t have to worry about a viable planet or any future at all.

Princes of Fabrication

It is rather ironic to see the Senators grilling Goldman Sachs when it was deregulation of the markets which allowed the bankers to turn Wall Street into the off track betting casinos they have become.

In order to sell billions in mortgage backed securities, they needed to originate billions in sub prime loans. These banks couldn’t make loans fast enough, so they made loans up like interest only loans, and adjustable rate mortgages so anyone who was breathing could get a loan.

Then they pooled these risky mortgages into mortgage backed securities. Out of this came the CDO. As Michael Lewis in his book the Big Short explains it, “Goldman Sachs created a security so opaque and complex …the synthetic subprime mortgage bond-backed CDO, or collateralized debt obligation. In a mortgage bond you gathered thousands of loans, and…created a tower of bonds, in which both risk and return diminished as you rose. In a CDO you gathered 100 different mortgage bonds--usually the riskiest, lowest floors of the original tower---and used them to erect an entirely new tower of bonds”.

Then they lied about these bonds. “ratings agencies who were paid fat fees by Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms for each deal they rated pronounced 80 percent of the new tower of debt triple-A”.

Another risk they made up are credit default swaps (insurance against mortgage defaults) as explained by Michael Lewis. The credit default swap had just been invented by the bankers at J.P. Morgan who then went looking for a company willing to sell them-and found AIG.“. Then after making billions, we the tax payer were sold a bill of goods and had to bail out AIG.

They created risk out of thin air and we backed it up. Mortgage backed securities, CDO’s and CDS’ are bonds which aren’t regulated on exchanges.

We need politicians with stiffer back bones to enforce regulation which will prevent the Wall Street bankers from controlling a nation’s economy through fabricated debt-backed bonds.

The bankers do not want any regulation of derivatives. And with their control of the media, their propaganda will convince citizens to believe the false advertisement that regulation will lead to more bail outs.

If we don’t regulate derivatives, it’s only a matter of time before the banks will be allowed to steal more of our retirement, savings and homes and we‘ll be bailing them out again. It’s my bet we won’t see much in the way of regulation. After all, the banks hold the winning hand, it’s called millions and billions in campaign cash.

Banking American Style

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greesnspan (1987-2006) who was against financial regulation, said in October 2008 he didn’t know the financial markets couldn’t regulate themselves, and yet here we are in 2010 with Senator Mitch McConnell still against regulatory reforms.

Evidently, the Senator is against the fifty billion dollar pool the bill wants to enact so that in the future banks can be wound down slowly, saying it will only lead to more bailouts. It is the banks who would be paying into this fund, not the taxpayer. After the trillions the tax payer has given banks, 50 billion seems like a drop in the bucket so what’s the big deal other than to make another misleading talking point by the Senator.

The FDIC insurance was enacted by the New Deal and is an insurance pool which banks pay into, and where the FDIC obtains its funds. If the Senator wants to be against “bail out pools”, then why doesn’t he elaborate on the fact that the FDIC sold the failed bank it had to take over, IndyMac, to a hedge fund? A hedge fund is billionaires who pool their money to invest. A hedge fund is more interested in short term gains than it is in the welfare of a nation. This is more dangerous than banks coughing up some of the billions in profits they reap.

Larry Summers economic advisor to the president and who was all for the repeal of Glass Steagall which allowed banks to own insurance companies and oil companies, said we shouldn’t bust up the banks and take away these other profitable industries. If one industry isn’t doing well then another industry the bank owns could help to offset their losses. If this is true then why didn’t the banks use their other profitable industries to bail themselves out?

They didn’t have to, it’s become the American way to allow banks to have us cowered from cradle to coffin.

Restoring many of the financial regulations enacted by the New Deal is the place to start in financial regulation, but that’s not going to happen with the control the bankers have amassed over us and our politicians since the seventies.

American Dreamin'

There’s an ongoing crusade to blame the poor for the worldwide financial fiasco.

Just recently Goldman Sachs came out and said the problem with the mortgages was the mortgage companies. But who’s gonna believe that when Alan Greenspan testified that Fannie and Freddie were responsible for this sub prime mortgage fiasco? Actually, Fannie & Freddie got into the game late, after the major Banks had been profiting for years on the rule changes.

According to the book “It Takes a Pillage”, in July 2008 the Kansas City Federal Reserve calculated that nationally, in 2006 the sub prime loan origination alone was as high as 38 percent of the market.

This occurred in large part due to the to repeal in 1999 of financial rules like Glass Steagall (which deregulated separation of deposit banks and risk taking banks from merging). Six weeks later Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin went to work for Citigroup in the same industry he just helped to deregulate.

Henry Paulson championed to repeal the rules on how much banks could borrow against their capital before he became Treasury Secretary. This led to investment banks who over-leveraged themselves by 30 and 40 to one.

In 2001 former Senator Phil Gramm said “some people look at sub prime lending and see evil. I look at sub prime lending and I see the American dream in action.” Now the former Senator no longer sees us as a nation of dreamers but as a nation of whiners.

By singling out Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae as the sole proprietors for this sub prime mortgage failure, they’re letting the real crooks off the hook, the bankers who for decades hammered politicians to set up the conditions for the lawless financial times which enabled those same bankers to take advantage of the masses desire of achieving the “American dream“. After all, it wasn’t the poor or the “dead beats” who rewrote the banking rules.

Game's Over Kids

It’s easier for us to blame this health bill for the ruination of our country, than it is to blame the economic meltdown and ruination on the bankers, who along with their political puppeteers have for decades been changing the rules to favor themselves with less transparency and bigger bonuses through shadier dealings.

Because our politicians enacted banking deregulation during the seventies, we had the Savings and Loan bailouts in the eighties. The rules were changed so depositor banks were allowed to invest in anything, and they did. Bankers used the savings and loans banks as their own personal piggy banks. This deregulated greed led to more banks failing, and when they failed, they were bought up by bigger banks leading to further bank consolidation.

The Glass Steagall Act kept Commercial (deposit accounts) and investment banks (risk takers) separate. In the nineties when it was repealed, Investment banks (now merged with commercial banks) bought all kinds of financial institutions; including insurance companies and non bank mortgage lending companies.

Then these mega-banks used our deposits as collateral to over borrow and risked it all on sub prime junk bonds. Then when no one wanted to buy these sub prime junk bonds, the bottom fell out, and in steps the tax payer with trillions.

Reinstating the Glass Steagal Act would keep banks on a smaller level and unable to negatively control our economy. It would prevent banks from engineering gargantuan profits for themselves while bringing financial ruin to so many Americans.

This should be a top priority of the Administration, but unfortunately the way things look, this is unlikely to happen. Frank Lutz, a Republican pollster advised Republicans to associate the health reform legislation with bail outs. With this sneaky twisting of issues and political adherence to his advice, how can citizens even begin to understand what’s at stake here?

As Mayer Rothschild founder House of Rothschild said “Let me issue and control a nation’s money, and I care not who writes the laws“. It doesn’t matter what new financial laws they write, the banks are in control of our money and our government.

Elizabeth Warren currently in charge of TARP oversight, said, “either we get this financial regulation right, or it’s game over.” The bankers along with their lobbyists will see to it that we get this financial regulation “wrong”, but it won’t be “game over” for them, only for us.

Talking Point Reform

Citizens repeat the TV talking points about the health reform bill, such as the threat that our premiums will go up. Health insurance premiums have risen for decades, and now, many Americans don’t work for a company able to absorb the rising premiums. The increase is always passed onto the employee, so workers take home less in their paychecks. This is a sneaky transference of wealth into the pockets of health insurance executives. The CEO of Coventry Health Care makes eleven million dollars per year with his financial planning, tax preparation and auto expenses reimbursed by the company. People are angry over this health bill but they‘re not angry over CEOs whose million dollar perks they support.

And how ‘bout that death panel’ taking point, now that gained a lot of traction. The NewsHour reported that an American soldier in Afghanistan said, the US Army is fighting with one hand tied behind its back! The report went on to say that if the Americans are taking fire from inside a house our soldiers cannot fire back. We’re not outraged over our soldiers’ ‘death panel‘, but we are over fabricated, spin-city death panels.

Speaking of war, where is the anger over a war that was “crammed” down our throats? That lie will cost us trillions, but that’s not a TV talking point so those trillions don’t count. Besides, that‘s other people‘s kids “over there” so we’re not up in arms over that.

The TV has convinced us that Health Care Reform will bankrupt the country and leave debt to future generations. How much anger is out there over the 13 trillion the US Treasury and Federal Reserve have given to the banks? How much debt will that leave to future generations? But because the media is controlled by the corporations, these trillions spent don’t have the country up in arms because it‘s not publicized. Thirteen trillion would pay for this health bill 13 times, but it won’t because the banks have all that money.

The real “health care crisis” that isn’t on TV, is that health insurance companies are monopolies, allowed to fix prices to the max and eliminate competition. Do any of these talking points address this outrageous corporate control? No!

Nothing will change until either the government breaks up these monopolies or more Americans are dying in the streets. 　

Deficit Deceit Part 2

Quoting William Greider in the Nation magazine, retired mogul Pete Peterson who accumulated his wealth at Blackstone Group, the notorious takeover firm, has now invented a “news service” to promote his advocacy about shrinking Social Security, the only retirement system available to working people. Social Security is actually a savings account where we all pay while we work, so we’ll have a pittance when we retire.

Now, “The retired mogul has created a digital news agency he dubs the Fiscal Times while hooking up with the Washington Post, who has agreed to “jointly produce content focusing on budget and fiscal issues“.

According to the article, Peterson believes Congress should create a commission of eighteen, empowered to make the “tough decisions” politicians are loathe to face; slashing benefits; raising payroll taxes or both.”

And presto look, there’s a presidential commission on the budget.The article goes on further to say that Peterson has two Senate advocates- Kent Conrad and Judd Gregg. Two Senators slated to be on the commission are lo and behold Conrad and Gregg. What a coincidence.

Money talks and when it does politicians listen. It’s billionaires like Pete Peterson doing the talking while the rest of us do the walking.

By the most galling point is; where do the people like Peterson amass these billions? From us, the same citizens whose Social Security benefits he wants to slash. Then they turn around and buy Congress with our money and call it democracy in action. Our democracy is bankrupt already, most just don’t know it.

But now it’s too late, the Pete Petersons of the nation own our government. We the people no longer have a government of the people, by the people and for the people. It’s now a government ‘of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations.’

Just watch the Financial Times or read the Washington Post and you’ll see only the news the billionaires want us to hear, rather than informing us on how these same billionaires are bringing financial ruin and enslavement to the rest of us.

So when the findings of this commission are out, of course they will be Pete Peterson’s findings recommending the re-organization, (dismantling) of our Social Security system, which will be the final Death-throes of our Democracy.

Deficit Deceit

Thomas Jefferson said to question everything, which is why I question this new concerted effort by the administration to look into the federal deficit.

One area the task force will be looking at are reductions in “entitlement” programs or raising taxes or both. By calling Medicare and Social Security entitlement programs, it makes it sound like a government hand-out when in fact these programs funds are due to what tax payers have already paid into the system. Rather than entitlements they should call them obligations. The government is obligated to give the citizens the money they’ve paid into these insurance programs.

Another question is the deceit in looking at these programs in the first place. William Greider writes in the Nation magazine-”Does the government have money problems? Don’t restore the progressive income tax on the wealthy or capital: don’t cut away corporate boodle in the budget, too difficult politically. Instead, let’s whack Social Security while folks aren’t watching”.

Never mind the 13 trillion this administration has given to the banks and the trillions we’re spending on war, it‘s entitlement programs which are the problem.

Decreasing taxes on the wealthy while increasing our bills and we can see why the country has a soaring deficit.

Corporations create the issues and own the media. Precisely why we should question this quest to concentrate on the deficit.

Big Brother is certainly here now, and he's broadcasting with his bull horn.

Supreme Control

A Century of Law was over turned by the Supreme Court when they ruled that corporations have as much right to political free speech as an American citizen.

Now, elections will be tightly controlled by corporations representing the private interests of billionaire hedge fund and private equity firms.

No wonder the Supreme Court went all the way back to 1907, the same year Teddy Roosevelt signed the Tillman Act, which banned corporate donations to federal campaigns.

From an article in the Nation magazine; ”Teddy Roosevelt a Republican president who was so worried about the power of trusts that he called for public financing of elections and told Congress “All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law”.

Spring forward to today and quoting from the Washington Spectator; ”When corporations or unions finance attack ads directly, they must publicly disclose their contributions. Corporations and unions can dodge disclosure, however, if they fund a trade group or non profit to mount their political attack ads for them. In Orwellian fashion, an attack ad funded by ExxonMobil, for example, might be disclosed as being paid for by an entity called something like “Americans for Clean Air”.

Too many people allow themselves to be fooled by TV. Logic cannot combat the onslaught of Orwellian double speak and mind numbing advertisements the Supreme Court has just unleashed.

The Washington Spectator reports the lobbying group Patton Boggs released a memo on the day of the ruling stating; ”While the limits and prohibitions on contributions remain in place, much more spending by outside groups throughout the election cycle specifically praising or criticizing candidates should be expected.” It’s no holds barred now and the corporations know it.

And that’s how we loose our vote. Not that it mattered much before, but they had to throw us a few bones or we’d vote them out. As the Romans used to say “give them bread and circuses“. Now, we’re not getting any bread, nor will we get the few bones thrown our way; it’s more corporate circuses convincing us to vote against our own self interest. 　

Engine of Destruction

The Supreme Court’s decision to throw out all laws on campaign financing dating all the way back to 1907 should leave no doubt in our mind where this country is headed, with accelerating speed.

It’s not just that politicians will be advertising through puppets wearing Nascar jumpsuits, the problem is the concentration of power. As we all know, advertisers lie. Now these same misleading advertisers will have the power over commercials to elect manufactured politicians, just like any other product they’re trying to fool us on. Reality has become a commodity.

Along with free speech comes the responsibility of citizens to be well informed. In a consumerism culture, citizens don’t want to be challenged and the advertisers know this. Being well informed is time consuming and many people only have time to listen to the TV news, owned by the corporations, where thirty second news bites are substitutes for informative journalism. Subsequently, society is less able to differentiate between truth and fiction; shop for facts and take any one’s word for anything, regardless of credentials when it suits their opinion. Opinion is not fact, but when marketed correctly it wins elections.

Lastly, the finding by the Supreme Court that corporations are people implies that we are no longer human beings. We are not on par with corporations, people die, corporations don’t. Corporations have time on their side, we don’t.

Our country was founded on radical ideas, now it is being revoked by a court that as Justice Stevens said, “has it exactly backwards. It is this court decision that is the radical departure from what had been settled First Amendment law."

Thomas Jefferson said in 1821-”Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, as its necessary consequence. The engine of consolidation will be the Federal Judiciary; the other two branches the corrupting and corrupted instruments” This corrupted government is playing us like fiddles.

Open Letter to the President of the United States

Please feel free to copy this letter and send it to the President today!

February 2, 2010

Nancy T. Lindsay

Dear Mr. President,

The American people are in a war, only it’s a war against the middle class. This is the war you need to confront and win first Mr. President.

If you really want to help the middle class, the first thing you can do is to reduce the principle on loans that are upside down. Then you can reduce the principal on all other home owners who had value stolen by the banks. They inflated the prices of our homes, they can just as easily deflate the principal. But they’re too greedy and refuse to take the current value, they want every penny of their over inflated value. The sad part is, they’ll get it by holding our houses hostage for years, until the value rises if ever…unless you put your foot down NOW!

The second action is to put in a price freeze on food and utilities. These corporations have a choke hold on us and you must loosen their grip. If these companies don’t like the price freeze, then tell them to set up their monopolies that rake in billions for food in Baghdad, Haiti or Kabul.

FDR threatened to close down US banks during WW11, therefore I believe you can and must take these steps first.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Nancy Lindsay

Villianous Windfalls

Jamie Dimon, chairman of J.P. Morgan Chase, said- "I'm getting tired of the constant vilification. This is not a casino”.

The banks helped write the laws which created this recession. Now the Chairman of a bailed out bank is whining about blame being rightly laid at his doorstep?

Zach Carter a banking reporter, writes in the Nation magazine, the ABA (American Bankers Association) helped push through the Gramm-Leach-Bliley (which eliminated separation of commercial and investment banking) the “ABA helped craft every single significant part of the Act that affects the banking industry”.

The article goes on to say that Citibank was able to transform “itself from a credit card issuer and commercial lender into a multibillion dollar behemoth, running hedge funds all over the world and gorging itself on subprime mortgages”. “The same story developed at Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase”.

The Bush administration rewarded this reckless behavior by doling out 700 billion in tax payer dollars with no strings attached. When the Obama administration tries to attach strings to this bail out bonanza, suddenly they’re paying back the TARP loans and complaining about being blamed for their actions.

Where are the banks getting this money to pay back the loans?

Bert Ely representing bankers said -“Well, the reason that the banks have been able to repay the money is because they have gone out and raised a lot of additional capital from stockholders. And much of that capital buildup is through capital they have raised, rather than earnings.” Why didn’t these same stock holders bail out the banks when they needed it?

Up till now, the blame for all this has been laid at the door step of all those deadbeat Americans who couldn’t pay back their loans.

Even this is suspect. According to the book “Our Lot How Real Estate Came to Own Us“, author Alyssa Katz states banks gave out loans to people they knew could not repay the loan. The house was foreclosed, it was sold again and in comes another “deadbeat” who couldn’t afford the loan. They just kept reselling the same house over and over to people who couldn’t manage it. Setting people up to fail used to be against the law. Not so today, for banks, it’s standard operating procedure.

Right now the only industry making windfall profits is the banking industry. But hey, when the market’s ripe, who can blame them for making profits? Just as long as we don’t blame them for gambling the value of our homes away in their subprime casino’s, stealing our retirements; or the current recession.　

I Spy

It’s been a bad decade for the intelligence agencies. President Bush blamed group think and poor intelligence at the CIA for the failure to find WMD in Iraq.

President Obama blames poor intelligence analysis for the Christmas day bombing attempt. According to the president, we had the intelligence to prevent this from happening, it just wasn’t analyzed correctly.

Not once but twice now we’re supposed to believe that we were attacked and almost attacked because of poor analysis.

It wasn’t this president’s administration who created four new intelligence agencies to prevent attacks, but the question still remains, are we no smarter at intelligence analysis than we were before 9-11?

Poor analysis is not the problem, we need people in the field obtaining intelligence not analysts sitting behind desks looking at computers.

It’s gotten so bad that the CIA bombing in Afghanistan was carried out by a doctor from Jordan whom the Americans had recruited to spy for them. The tragic results show he was a double agent for Al Qaeda. And since when does the CIA advertise their presence with a base? Are they that stupid or was it a Blackwater Security base operating CIA missions?

Wild Bill Donovan convinced FDR that the Germans were going to fight dirty and we needed a way to fight back, so the spy agency the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) was created.

Bill Donovan recruited the best and the brightest Americans who were able to blend into foreign societies to spy on them. If we want to know where the next attack is coming from, we need spies in the goat herders tent.

A former body guard of Bin Laden said there are a million others like the Nigerian out there. Is it realistic to think that a million names came be put on a no fly list?

It’s being reported that we thought we had the databases which could connect the dots to prevent this attack. Oops guess not. But we’re working on upgrading the system.

Oh good, maybe now the analysts can find “any key”.