Tea Parties for the Rich

Many conservative columnists are raving about the “tea parties” staged across the country on April 15 tax day, saying don’t underestimate the power of these protests. The real message of these protests should be don‘t underestimate the power the capitalist crooks have over the majority in this country.

The protesters were supposedly upset about taxes but in reality it is Obama’s “socialist” movement in the passing of his 787 billion dollar stimulus bill; they worry about the debt this bill will be leaving to future generations. President Bush gave billions to his banking buddies as he walked out the door and yet there were no protests nor worries about future generations.

But when President Obama spends billions domestically to help the little guy, well then that’s socialism: this is when people start protesting carrying signs, saying things like “pay your own mortgage” and “Stimulus is Socialism”. But when we hand over taxpayer money with no accounting or records to ‘give it freely with no-questions-asked’ to the bankers who got us into this mess, that’s not socialism, that’s democratic capitalism.

Where are the signs telling capitalist crooks like AIG, CitiGroup, Morgan Stanley, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch Bank of America and all the other banking crooks to pay for their reprehensible deeds themselves? There aren’t many and of the few they sure didn’t receive as much coverage as these tax protests on networks like Fox News owned by robber baron Rupert Murdock.

The capitalist crooks own all the networks and tell people what to think and when to protest. That’s why citizens protest and complain when the government wants to bail out our fellow citizens, but when our government doles out billions of our tax dollars to the capitalist crooks there’s nary a peep and certainly no protests organized by the media.

The true power of these protests demonstrates that those who champion for the rights of the little guy will be thwarted, while those who campaign for the rich will be enthusiastically supported.

Whatever happened to rugged American individualism where one thought for oneself? Big Brother in the form of Fox News and the mind numbing media is what happened.

Consolidating Doublespeak

According to an AP article published on Friday, “Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase reported solid earnings for the quarter and Wells Fargo minimized possible future losses on its purchase of failed bank Wachovia. And thanks to a recent rules change, many banks were able to pump up the values of the toxic assets at the heart to the credit crunch.”

Last year the administration told us we had to hurry and pump billions into Wall Street banks or our entire financial system would collapse. But owing to the fact that it was such an urgent nature, we had no time for questions. Subsequently the bail out money was doled out so fast there were no rules and no one kept track of where it was going.

The banks needed the money then, now with this new administration, they’re showing earnings so they can give back the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) money. Yeah they want to give it back now, ’cause the rules changed.

One rule the larger banks are unhappy with is they won’t be able to buy out the smaller banks. Consolidation of wealth into the hands of the few is why we have this recession-depression. Concentration of wealth also means there are fewer and fewer people controlling the influence on our government. The banking industry gives millions in campaign contributions. How can a vote compare with that type of campaign influence? It can’t.

Proof of this influence is the fact that the banks pushed for those rules changes allowing the banks to value their toxic assets at a higher value. Great, now those worthless toxic assets are worth more. Pure Orwellian double speak. Like the double speak when Bear Stearns reported that they were in great shape and had plenty of capital right up to the day they went bankrupt. We even loaned JP Morgan Chase billions at rock bottom interest rates to buy Bear Streams.

So, is it double speak or the truth when the corporate crooks report increased earnings? And if their earnings are increasing then will all those people who lost their jobs in the finance and banking sector get them back? Probably not, their earnings aren’t high enough for that, they’re only high enough to keep the government from implementing rules against banking consolidation.

American Interests

Reading between the lines, what does it mean when Ambassador Holbrook special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan states that “military victory is not possible in Afghanistan, the best we can hope for is the protection of American interests.” Just what are the “American interests” that our military is now in charge of protecting?

What if the main American interest is oil and natural gas? There is plenty of it in countries surrounding Afghanistan where pipelines will be needed to transport this energy supply.

Harmid Karzai is a former oil executive who worked for Unocal, also known as Standard Oil of California. Why is an oil executive running Afghanistan? No wonder his government is corrupt, oil companies put profits over people.

Why does the State Department constantly harp on Iran’s desire to build nuclear weapons when both Pakistan and India have them, and of the three, Pakistan is a lot closer to giving terrorists a nuclear weapon. But it’s Iran who is in the news. Maybe Iran has more oil than Pakistan.

Why is it we’ll be sending billions to Pakistan over the next five years to combat terrorism? We’ve given them billions upon billions already, and they haven’t done anything but continue to support the Taliban, give the Taliban the choicest parts of Pakistan, and pay them off in Dollars, our dollars.

The oil companies are bleeding us here at home and Bin Laden wants to bleed us dry in Afghanistan, just like the Afghans did to the Russians.

Latest estimates are that these two wars will cost us one trillion. One heck of a price for us to pay to protect American interests.

The last oil president called this protection “the global war on terror”, now this new administration is calling this protection “overseas contingency operations”.

What’s in a name? Iran or Iraq, it’s all to protect us from nukes. Too bad we don’t have someone protecting us from American interests.

Trading for Toxic Assets

“This time, the banks, especially the smaller banks, went to their Congress people and said, "The reason we can't lend is because they say we don't have enough capital. But we would have enough capital if they just would let us value these assets at what we think they're really worth." And that got a really good reception in Congress” states Floyd Norris chief financial correspondent for the NY Times.

The week before that, when Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner announced the plan for the government funded selling of these toxic assets said “The alternative approach is we should have the government buying all this stuff, taking on all the risk on their balance sheet, which would be much more expensive to the taxpayer. The alternative of letting it just sit there, let these assets just sit on the balance sheets of banks, would risk creating a much longer, deeper recession.

On the bail out of AIG Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said “At best, the consequences of AIG's failure would have been a significant intensification of an already severe financial crisis and a further worsening of global economic conditions. Conceivably, its failure could have resulted in a 1930s-style global financial and economic meltdown, with catastrophic implications for production, income and jobs.”

Sounds like blackmail to me, especially when one understands that Goldman Sachs recipient of 12 billion in the AIG bail out owns oil pipelines, terminals, and an oil refinery in Kansas and natural gas wells in PA, W. VA, TX, OK, LA and is the new owner of Cobalt International Energy a firm run by former Unocal (originally Standard Oil of California) executives.

In 2005 Peter Fusaro and Gary Vasey of the International Research Center for Energy and Development said “The proprietary trading desks of (Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley) and other large investment banks are actually ‘hedge funds in drag’ just as Enron was.”

The banks are moving aggressively into energy trading and the leaders are investment banks Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Now we’re bailing them out and if we don’t, we’re being threatened with a longer depression.

All these banks have other divisions especially in the unregulated energy trading which make money like in their oil and gas divisions. Why not take some of the profits from these money making divisions and give that back to the tax payer? Why do we get threats of a deeper recession and toxic assets? Why don’t we get any of the cream?

Why?… Because for decades the power and the wealth have been steadily consolidated into the hands of the few that brought us these toxic assets. These banks can pay for their own mistakes but because they have the power, and the wealth to back it up they’re forcing us into paying for them. This is the real reason this recession-depression won’t end and not because their toxic assets don’t have more value but, because they own all the assets (including our government ) both toxic and profitable, furthering the gap between rich and poor.

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.