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 If the Bush tax cuts are made permanent, the estate tax (inheritance tax) will be repealed.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.