November 6, 2012

Destroying Empires 101

Every military strategist and war time general knows never to attack an empire head on. You destroy it from the inside out. You cut off supply lines (sanctions), cause civil unrest or civil war by funding both sides (Sunni and Shiite in Iraq), and instill economic destruction and slavery with usery (interest on top of interest to make freedom from debt impossible).

This financial situation we are in is no accident. How can it be? With the supposed best and the brightest Harvard and Yale educated minds making life changing decisions on our behalf, how can they be wrong so often? How can they be so ignorant or naive as not to learn from the past? How can the state of our country and many others around the world be an “accident”? The answer of course is, it can’t be.

If you overspend and have problems paying your bills during a particular month and one of those bills goes into collections, do you do the same thing next month? No, you make sure you don’t repeat that same mistake. Guess what? There is a really good chance you never even went to Harvard or Yale, and you figured that out all by yourself. Imagine that?

Obama’s brilliant answer to this problem was to put the very bankers that caused this situation in charge of the banking industry and to impose (I’m trying not to laugh as I type this) “unprecedented regulatory reform” over Wall Street.

Roosevelt did almost the exact same thing after Hoover left office as to “ensure nothing like this would ever happen again”. But yet here we are “again” albeit with one great difference. That difference is the peoples’ ability to be self sufficient. In the late 20′s and 30′s, people had the ability to farm, to manufacture useful items with their hands, to barter. Their dollars were backed in gold. That was until 1934 when the government ordered all citizens to surrender their gold in the name of “stabilizing markets“. Coincidentally, gold spiked $15 per oz. after the confiscation. Nice profit, too bad it wasn’t in the hands of the people. Most people posses none of those skills, so what will they do?

I understand that its hard to accept the idea of our current situation as being one of intent, but it’s time we do. The sooner we come to this realization, and accept it, the easier it will be to deal with what’s coming.

Wall Street Propagandists Scramble To Cover US Ties to Russian Protesters

As the evidence begins to mount pointing the accusing finger at the increasingly illegitimate corporate-financier occupiers of the West’s governments as having built up Russian opposition movements and being behind the current unrest filling Russia’s streets, the corporate media has already started to rewrite events as they unfold.

Photo: Wall Street and London’s media machine claims Russia’s protests are “leaderless” and not being organized by political opposition movements - even as it interviews protest organizers such as the above pictured opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov, who takes to stages build amidst supposedly “spontaneous” protests with a troupe of US NED-funded NGO leaders and opposition parties cheerleading what is clearly yet another Western-funded color revolution.

An amazing piece of mid-event revisionism titled, “Moscow braces as election protest goes viral,” desperately attempts to portray the protests as “leaderless” even as the article itself interviews “organizers.”

Quoting unnamed, and most likely nonexistent protesters, the article featured in the Sydney Morning Herald insists protesters claimed, “I came on my own. I learnt about it on the web.” But the article then states (emphasis added), “and last night, thanks to the web, organisers were expecting more than 30,000 people to demonstrate against what they see as the rigged results of last Sunday’s elections, because that’s how many have committed themselves to a sign-up sheet on Facebook.”

While the article claims that no political party is recruiting protesters, earlier reports out of the Western media contradict this entirely, with the London Telegraph reproducing a blog post by US NED-funded opposition leader Boris Nemtsov stating before the December 10 protests, “I am talking about pickets at Petrovka 38 (the main police station) and on Simferopol Boulevard where the detained are being held, and other actions too. We start from today. I will take part in all this myself. On Saturday, December 10, a general meeting will be held on Revolution Square (in Moscow) at two o’clock to protest against these false elections. ”

The Daily Mail has also reported,”and Moscow rally organiser, opposition politician Vladimir Ryzhkov, has announced there will be another protest on December 24, which he says will be twice as large,” and RIA Novosti News reporting, “on a stage emblazoned with the logo “Return Power to the People” Russia’s best known opposition figures, from cultural leaders like Navalny and opposition music critic Artemy Troitsky to opposition politicians Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Ryzhkov and Solidarnost youth leader Ilya Yashin, addressed the hyped-up crowds.”

Images: Opposition leader Vladimir Ryzhkov’s movement is not only a beneficiary of US funding, but Ryzhkov himself is a card-carrying member of the US NED World Movement for Democracy (WMD). The WMD “About Us” page clearly indicates that the group is a subsidiary of the US State Department funded National Endowment for Democracy.

It should be noted that Boris Nemtsov’s political adviser, Vladimir Kara-Murza, is also a member of “activist” Ilya Yahsin’s Solidarnost group, and an attendee of a recent NED-funded seminar titled, “Elections in Russia: Polling and Perspectives.” Ilya Yahsin’s Solidarnost group helps head the US-NED funded “Strategy 31″ campaign in tandem with the Moscow Helsinki Group, a NED, Ford Foundation, USAID, and Soros’ Open Society-funded NGO. Also noteworthy is Alex Navalny’s ties to the National Endowment for Democracy, as he is one of the co-founders of the NED-funded DA! (Democratic Alternative) activist movements, as stated in his Yale World Fellows bio.

Image: A screen shot from the “Moscow Helsink Group” clearly subsidized from abroad. The significance of this group & its affiliates leading protests, indicates nothing less than foreign-funded sedition unfolding in the streets of Russia. (click to enlarge)

Hardly leaderless, hardly unorganized, hardly even indigenous, the presence of stages and opposition leaders as well as calls for future protests already being made by the likes of US NED-funded World Democracy Movement steering committee member Vladimir Ryzhkov and his partner Boris Nemtsov, casts very serious doubts not only on the Sydney Morning Herald’s nonsensical claims of the protest’s spontaneous nature and its legitimacy, but on the Herald’s journalistic integrity itself for finding such nonsense fit for print. At the bottom of the article, the Herald writes “Washington Post,” a name already synonymous with propaganda and compromised interests entangled with the agenda of the corporate-financier elite of Wall Street and London.

And even as the Sydney Morning Herald and Washington Post attempt to portray the Russian protests as spontaneous, apolitical uprisings against electoral fraud “exposed” by USAID and US NED-funded Golos, a poll monitor who now has been caught sending e-mails back and forth to its US sponsors, conspiring against Russia’s leadership, the very real, centralized leadership of these clearly politically motivated protests are already calling for another round of unrest on December 24. Not only are the protests and their US-funded leadership illegtimate, but by shamelessly twisting public perception to see them as anything but foreign-funded sedition, the corporate media has once again failed the public in pursuit of carrying out Wall Street and London’s corporate-financier driven agenda.

Image: A screenshot from US National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) website indicating its funding for “independent” poll monitor Golos. USAID also funds Golos. Golos’ shrieking accusations of electoral fraud have been cited as the rhetorical justification for NED’s troupe of foreign-funded opposition groups to flood into Russia’s streets. (click to enlarge)

Beware of these revisionists and the increasingly unsubstantiated, even flat-out ridiculous claims being made by the media. Name names, follow the affiliations, research the organizations, click on “About Us,” follow the money, and discover the truth the corporate media is willfully hiding from the public. Expose both this duplicitous agenda being pursued in Russia, as well as the disingenuous liars throughout the Western media’s press peddling it. And above all, boycott and replace thecorporate interests driving this agenda to begin with.

 

Source: http://www.activistpost.com/2011/12/wall-street-propagandists-scramble-to.html

The Remarkable Political Stupidity of the Street

Wall Street is its own worst enemy. It should have welcomed new financial regulation as a means of restoring public trust. Instead, it’s busily shredding new regulations and making the public more distrustful than ever.

The Street’s biggest lobbying groups have just filed a lawsuit against the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, seeking to overturn its new rule limiting speculative trading.

For years Wall Street has speculated like mad in futures markets - food, oil, other commodities - causing prices to fluctuate wildly. The Street makes bundles from these gyrations, but they have raised costs for consumers.

In other words, a small portion of what you and I pay for food and energy has been going into the pockets of Wall Street. It’s just another hidden redistribution from the middle class and poor to the rich.

The new Dodd-Frank law authorizes the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to limit such speculative trading. The commission considered 15,000 comments, largely from the Street. It did numerous economic and policy analyses, carefully weighing the benefits to the public of the new regulation against its costs to the Street. It even agreed to delay enforcement of the new rule for at least a year.

But this wasn’t enough for the Street. The new regulation would still put a crimp in Wall Street’s profits.

So the Street is going to court. What’s its argument? The commission’s cost-benefit analysis wasn’t adequate.

At first blush it’s a clever ploy. There’s no clear legal standard for an “adequate” weighing of costs and benefits of financial regulations, since both are so difficult to measure. And putting the question into the laps of federal judges gives the Street a huge tactical advantage because the Street has almost an infinite amount of money to hire so-called “experts” (some academics are not exactly prostitutes but they have their price) who will use elaborate methodologies to show benefits have been exaggerated and costs underestimated.

It’s not the first time the Street has used this ploy. Last year, when the Securities and Exchange Commission tried to implement a Dodd-Frank policy making it easier for shareholders to nominate company directors, Wall Street sued the SEC. It alleged the commission’s cost-benefit analysis for the new rule was inadequate.

Last July, a federal appeals court - inundated by Wall Street lawyers and hired-gun “experts” - agreed with the Street. So much for shareholders nominating company directors.

Obviously, government should weigh the costs against the benefits of anything it does. But when it comes to the regulation of Wall Street, one overriding cost doesn’t make it into any individual weighing: The public’s mounting distrust of the entire economic system, generated by the Street’s repeated abuse of the public’s trust.

Wall Street’s shenanigans have convinced a large portion of America that the economic game is rigged.

Yet capitalism depends on trust. Without trust, people avoid even sensible economic risks. They also begin trading in gray markets and black markets. They think that if the big guys cheat in big ways, they might as well begin cheating in small ways. And when they think the game is rigged, they’re easy prey for political demagogues with fast tongues and dumb ideas.

Tally up these costs and it’s a whopper.

Wall Street has blanketed America in a miasma of cynicism. Most Americans assume the reason the Street got its taxpayer-funded bailout without strings in the first place was because of its political clout. That must be why the banks didn’t have to renegotiate the mortgages of Americans - many of whom, because of the economic collapse brought on by the Street’s excesses, are still under water. Some are drowning.

That must be why taxpayers didn’t get equity stakes in the banks we bailed out - as Warren Buffet got when he bailed out Goldman Sachs. That means when the banks became profitable gain we didn’t get any of the upside gains; we just padded the Street’s downside risks.

The Street’s political clout must be why most top Wall Street executives who were bailed out by taxpayers still have their jobs, have still avoided prosecution, are still making vast fortunes - while tens of millions of average Americans continue to lose their jobs, their wages, their medical coverage, or their homes.

And why the Dodd-Frank bill was filled with loopholes big enough for Wall Street executives and traders to drive their ferrari’s through.

The cost of such cynicism has leeched deep into America, causing so much suspicion and anger that our politics has become a cauldron of rage. It’s found expression in Tea Partiers and Occupiers, and millions of others who think the people at the top have sold us out.

Every week, it seems, we learn something new about how Wall Street has screwed us. Last week we heard from Bloomberg News (that had to go to court for the information) that in 2009 the Street’s six largest banks borrowed almost half a trillion dollars from the Fed at nearly zero cost - but never disclosed it.

In early 2009, after Citigroup tapped the Fed for almost $100 billion, the bank’s CEO, Vikram Pandit, had the temerity to call Citi’s first quarter the “best since 2007.” Is there another word for fraud?

Finally, everyone knows the biggest banks are too big to fail - and yet, despite this, Congress won’t put a cap on the size of the banks. The assets of the four biggest - J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo - now equal 62 percent of total commercial bank assets. That’s up from 54 percent five years ago. Throw in Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, and these six leviathans preside over the American economy like Roman emperors.

Speaking of Rome, if Italy or Greece defaults and Europe’s major banks can’t make payments on their debts to Wall Street, another bailout will surely be required. And the politics won’t be pretty.

There you have it. A federal court will now weigh costs and benefits of a modest rule designed to limit speculative trading in food and energy.

But in coming months and years, the American public will weigh the social costs and social benefits of Wall Street itself. And it wouldn’t surprise me if they decide the costs of the Street as it is far outweigh the benefits.

The result will be caps on the size of banks. Some will be broken up. Glass-Steagall will be resurrected. Some Wall Street bigwigs may even see in the insides of jails.

If so, the Street has only itself to blame.

 

Source: http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/279-82/8829-the-remarkable-political-stupidity-of-the-street

Wall St’s Latest Shameless Ploy to Fleece You

The industry’s effort to overturn new regulations could push public anger past the point of no return.

Wall Street is its own worst enemy. It should have welcomed new financial regulation as a means of restoring public trust. Instead, it’s busily shredding new regulations and making the public more distrustful than ever.

The Street’s biggest lobbying groups have just filed a lawsuit against the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, seeking to overturn its new rule limiting speculative trading. For years Wall Street has speculated like mad in futures markets – food, oil, other commodities – causing prices to fluctuate wildly. The Street makes bundles from these gyrations, but they have raised costs for consumers. In other words, a small portion of what you and I pay for food and energy has been going into the pockets of Wall Street.

It’s just another hidden redistribution from the middle class to the rich. The new Dodd-Frank law authorizes the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to limit such speculative trading. The commission considered 15,000 comments, largely from the Street. It compromised on key provisions. It weighed the benefits to the public of the new regulation against its costs to the Street. It did numerous economic and policy analyses. It even agreed to delay enforcement of the new rule for at least a year.But this wasn’t enough for the Street. The new regulation would still put a crimp in Wall Street’s profits.So the Street is going to court. What’s its argument? The commission’s cost-benefit analysis wasn’t adequate. At first blush it’s a clever ploy.

There’s no clear legal standard for an “adequate” weighing of costs and benefits of financial regulations, since both are so difficult to measure. And putting the question into the laps of federal judges gives the Street a huge tactical advantage because the Street has almost an infinite amount of money to hire so-called “experts” (some academics are not exactly prostitutes but they have their price) who will use elaborate methodologies to show benefits have been exaggerated and costs underestimated.It’s not the first time the Street has used this ploy. Last year, when the Securities and Exchange Commission tried to implement a Dodd-Frank policy making it easier for shareholder to nominate company directors, Wall Street sued the SEC. It alleged the commission’s cost-benefit analysis for the new rule was inadequate. Last July, a federal appeals court – inundated by Wall Street lawyers and hired-gun “experts” – agreed with the Street.

So much for shareholders nominating company directors. Obviously, government should weigh the costs against the benefits of anything it does. But when it comes to the regulation of Wall Street, one overriding cost doesn’t make it into any individual weighing: The public’s mounting distrust of the entire economic system, generated by the Street’s repeated abuse of the public’s trust. Wall Street’s shenanigans have convinced a large portion of America that the game is rigged. Yet capitalism depends on trust. Without trust, people avoid even sensible economic risks. They also begin trading in gray markets and black markets. They think that if the big guys cheat in big ways, they might as well begin cheating in small ways. And they’re easy prey for political demagogues with fast tongues and vacuous solutions. Tally up these costs and it’s a whopper.

Wall Street has blanketed America in a miasma of cynicism. Most Americans assume the reason the Street got its taxpayer-funded bailout without strings in the first place was because of its political clout. That must be why the banks didn’t have to renegotiate the mortgages of Americans – who, because of the economic collapse brought on by the Street’s excesses, are still under water and many are drowning.That must be why taxpayers didn’t get equity stakes in the banks we bailed out – as Warren Buffet got when he bailed out Goldman Sachs. So when the banks became profitable gain we didn’t get any of the upside gains; we just padded the Street’s downside risks.

That must be why most top Wall Street executives who were bailed out by taxpayers still have their jobs, have still avoided prosecution, are still making vast fortunes – while tens of millions of average Americans continue to lose their jobs, their wages, their medical coverage, or their homes.The cost of such cynicism has leeched deep into America, causing so much suspicion and anger that our politics has become a cauldron of rage. It’s found expression in Tea Partiers and Occupiers, and millions of others who think the people in charge have sold us out.Every week, it seems, we learn something new about how Wall Street has screwed us. Last week we heard from Bloomberg News (that had to go to court for the information) that in 2009 the Street’s six largest banks borrowed almost half a trillion dollars from the Fed at nearly zero cost – but never disclosed it.In early 2009, after Citigroup tapped the Fed for almost $100 billion, the bank’s CEO, Vikram Pandit, had the temerity to call Citi’s first quarter the best since 2007. Is there another word for fraud?

Finally, everyone knows the biggest banks are too big to fail — and yet, despite this, Congress won’t put a cap on the size of the banks. The assets of the four biggest – J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo – now equal 62 percent of total commercial bank assets. That’s up from 54 percent five years ago. Throw in Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, and these six leviathans preside over the American economy like Roman emperors.

If Greece defaults and Europe’s major banks can’t make payments on their debts to Wall Street, another bailout will be required. And the politics won’t be pretty. There you have it. A federal court will now weigh costs and benefits of a modest rule designed to limit speculative trading in food and energy. But in coming months and years, the American public will weigh the social costs and social benefits of Wall Street itself. And it wouldn’t surprise me if they decide the costs of the Street as it is far outweigh the benefits. If so, the Street has only itself to blame.

 

Six Shocking Revelations About Wall Street’s “Secret Government”

Top officials willfully concealed the true extent of the 2008-’09 bailouts from Congress and the public.

We now have concrete evidence that Wall Street and Washington are running a secret government far removed from the democratic process. Through a freedom of information request by Bloomberg News, the public now has access to over 29,000 pages of Fed documents and 21,000 additional Fed transactions that were deliberately hidden, and for good reason.

These documents show how top government officials willfully concealed from Congress and the public the true extent of the 2008-’09 bailouts that enriched the few and enhanced the interests of giant Wall Streets firms. Here’s what we now know:

  • The secret Wall Street bailouts totaled $7.77 trillion, 10 times more than the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) passed by Congress in 2008.
  • Knowledge of the secret bailout funds was not shared with Congress even while it was drafting and debating legislation to break up the big banks.
  • The secret funding, provided at below-market rates, gave Wall Street banks an additional $13 billion in profits. (That’s enough money to hire more than 325,000 entry level teachers.)
  • The secret loans financed bank mergers so that the largest banks could grow even larger. The money also allowed banks to step up their lobbying efforts.
  • While Henry Paulson (Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury) was informing Congress and the public that only minor reforms were needed to protect Fannie and Freddie from collapse, he met secretly with leading Wall Street hedge fund managers — among them his former colleagues at Goldman Sachs — to alert them that he was about to nationalize the giant mortgage companies – a move that would eradicate nearly all the stock value of the companies. This information was enormously valuable because it allowed these hedge funds to short Fannie and Freddie and thereby make a fortune.
  • While Timothy Geithner was head of the NY Federal Reserve, he argued against legislative efforts by Senator Ted Kaufman, D-Delaware, to limit the size of banks because the issue was “too complex for Congress and that people who know the markets should handle these decisions,” Kaufman recalls. Meanwhile, Geithner was fully aware of the enormous secret loans while Senator Kaufman was kept in the dark. Barney Frank, who was authoring key bank reform legislation was also not informed of the secret loans. No one in Congress was told.

So what does this all mean?

1. The big banks and hedge funds were in much more trouble than we were led to believe.

As many of us suspected, all the big banks were on their knees begging for help – secretly – while telling their investors, the public and Congress that all was well. They had gambled and lost. Under the rules of ideal capitalism, they should have suffered some “creative destruction,” and seen their shareholder value eliminated through bankruptcy, and their managers replaced. The entire banking system should have been reorganized from top to bottom as well. Instead, these colossal failures were secretly rewarded.

2. Wall Street’s secret government made sure the largest banks would grow even larger, aided by the secret funding.

While Congress was debating legislation to break up the large banks and reinstitute Glass Steagall (to separate risky investment banking from insured commercial banking,) the secret government was using public funds to grow even larger through mergers and acquisitions. Because Congress and the public were unaware of the secret funding and ill-health of all the banks, the legislation was easily defeated. As the chart below makes painfully clear, too-big-to-fail banks grew even bigger.

3. The bigger Wall Street becomes, the more government it can buy.

This part isn’t secret. As the top six banks grew larger, they spent more funds lobbying to make sure that they wouldn’t suffer any unprofitable impacts from banking reform legislation. So after the biggest banks received hundreds of billions in secret loans, they upped their lobbying funds to maintain their size and power. Read ‘em and weep:

4. Wall Street’s secret government protects its own.

At first, it’s not easy to understand how Treasury Secretary Paulson, the former head of Goldman Sachs, could risk attending a secret meeting with giant hedge fund managers, many of whom used to work at Goldman Sachs. How could the nation’s highest ranking financial official dare to tip off these hedge fund elites about the imminent government takeover of Fannie and Freddie before Congress and the public were informed? Well, one answer is that Paulson felt obliged to warn his old comrades of the impeding nationalization. Maybe, he wanted to get them out of harm’s way just in case they were heavily involved in those markets. Or maybe he also wanted to give them a very valuable tip to profit by. But the deeper explanation, I believe, is that Wall Street’s key government officials – Paulson, Summers, Geithner, Orszag (the former Obama OMB chief who now makes millions working for CitiGroup), etc. truly believe the following:

  • Wall Street banks are the best in the world and are the cutting-edge of the American economy. They are our future.
  • Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers are enormously smarter and sharper than the rest of us. They deserve our admiration.
  • Helping Wall Street to grow and prosper is precisely the same thing as helping all Americans and the entire economy. They deserve our support.
  • Secret meetings to provide insider information are normal on Wall Street. There’s nothing wrong with warning your friends about upcoming policy decisions that might impact their profits.
  • There’s also absolutely nothing wrong with providing trillions of dollars of secret loans to the best and the brightest and not telling Congress about it.

It’s all a closed loop of self-justification and self-deception: Wall Street is brilliant. What Wall Street does is for the good of the country. Helping Wall Street profit is good for the country. Hiding the truth from democratically elected leaders is also for the good of the country because Wall Street is brilliant and knows better.

And all this is deeply believed by Wall Street and its secret government, even though Wall Street, and Wall Street alone, took down the economy and killed 8 million jobs in a matter of months. Simply brilliant!

5. Wall Street is a clear and present danger to democracy.

Usually, I am not an alarmist. In fact, I often argue against facile conspiracy theories. I want to believe that our democracy still has promise. But, the Wall Street-induced crash and the government’s response to it has me very worried. The Bloomberg News revelations suggest that Wall Street’s secret government has enormous disdain for what remains of our democracy. The financial elites obviously believe that Congress cannot be trusted to do the right thing even when it is bought and paid for by the very banks it supposedly regulates. As for the rest of us? We’re just a financially illiterate mass to be manipulated through the mass media. Our minds too can be bought and sold through careful marketing.

This financial arrogance and corruption is enormously corrosive to our democratic values. Already, many Americans, and for good reason, no longer trust their government. Already, many Americans, and for good reason, no longer vote. Already, many Americans, and for good reason, believe that democracy as we know it is a sham. Wall Street couldn’t have written a better script to maintain its domination.

6. Occupy Wall Street is fundamentally correct, but we need more.

The occupiers dramatically attacked Wall Street elites and captured the country’s imagination with their 1 percent, 99 percent framework. And the idea is sticking and spreading. But that’s only the start. To reclaim our country from Wall Street’s secret government we will need to develop an enormous movement among the 99 percent. Although we hope it just happens spontaneously through Twitter and Facebook, we all know it will require hardcore organizing involving millions of us.

At the moment, no one knows what form it will take. But we do know this: great concentrations of power and wealth do not give up their power and wealth without an enormous fight. Wall Street’s secret government is more than ready to protect itself, even if it means subverting democracy.

Our occupiers have shown great courage in helping us reclaim our democratic rights. Let’s hope it spreads…and soon.

Source:

http://www.alternet.org/economy/153274/6_shocking_revelations_about_wall_street’s_%22secret_government