The British Empire aka the American Empire Needs to Finally Die

It's been said many times that the US is really nothing more than the resurrected British Empire that lost its power and prestige post WW II when the US fanatically embraced British style militarism and empire that catapulted America to the status of the world's sole superpower because of its superior military might. Never before in human history had a sole superpower dominated for so long and without challenge. The US-British alliance has frequently been dubbed the Anglo-sphere. The British Empire at its peak:

Most of those British colonies and possessions are now gone and even Canada and Australia are sovereign nations with little attachment to the British crown.

Throughout human history, the fight for human liberty has been a revolt against government, the state, empires and their formidable military machines. The British Empire grew because its formidable navy ruled the seas for hundreds of years.

America and Britain have a lot in common, starting with the fact that America was largely settled and populated by English speaking peoples who adopted English law and culture. The English bequeathed to us some extraordinary gifts such as its system of secure property rights and a civil and criminal legal justice system (English common law). The Magna Carta is deemed one of the great treasures of western civilization because the 1215 document directly challenged absolute rule by a monarch.

However, America also adopted some of the worst features of the British, namely its perennial addiction to empire, resource exploitation and the perceived right to plunder and murder people to secure resources. Furthermore, the British were never capitalists in the true sense of the word. They were merchantilists.

Mercantilism in England

Celebrating America's Capitalist Revolution

The British system of mercantilism is not capitalism and in fact is more closely aligned with fascism, oligarchy, plutocracy, cronyism, corporatism etc., or in more simple terms the rule of the elites for their exclusive benefit, benefits that typically include monopoly powers and buying legislative bodies to guarantee protectionism from competition.

In many ways, the American Revolution was also a revolt against the British system of mercantilism but only to a degree because America during the Revolutionary period was also swimming with British loyalists and while many of these loyalists joined the Revolution, they remained addicted to the British system of mercantilism, empire, its central bank and even its system of monarchy.  Notable among American mercantilists was Alexander Hamilton.  Hamilton forever denied that he was a monarchist, although he was constantly defending himself against the charge.

A Hamilton biographer, Richard Brookheiser, wrote in a biography titled Alexander Hamilton, American:

He put up with Republican government because he had to, while laboring to transform it, or even subvert it. At heart he was an aristocrat and a plutocrat, who favored rule by an elite of the rich.

The differences between Jefferson and Hamilton couldn't be more clear. As excerpted from The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin:

JEFFERSON: “A private central bank issuing public currency is a greater menace to the liberties of the people than a standing army.” “We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.”

HAMILTON: “No society could succeed which did not unite the interest and credit of rich individuals with those of the state.” “A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing.”

Hamilton only cared about advancing the interests of the rich and the state at the expense of the individual and those further down the ladder of power and money, especially the poor and middle class whose interests were deemed expendable and irrelevant. Conversely, Jefferson vehemently opposed any bank or class of people holding power over anybody.  Hamilton's view of power was that it must be concentrated while Jefferson's view of power was that it must be diffused as far and wide as possible and to the point where political power just lacks the power to oppress.

At the end of the day it was Hamilton who won, and of course, the liberty of the American people was destined for eventual destruction.

The worst and most destructive features of Britain that America embraced were its systems of central banking and economic mercantilism because both ruthlessly combined to advance empire through debt and fascist corporatism through trade. It's a deadly combination that has wrecked havoc upon humanity and its peoples.

It took Hamilton a long time to achieve his dream, a dream that only his ghost can now gloat over. Efforts to fight off the central bank were waged ferociously, especially by Andrew Jackson, but tragically in 1913 the bankster purveyors of paper fiat money finally won, and not surprisingly, with the support of  liberal progressive Democratic President Woodrow Wilson who also gave us the income tax or 16th amendment . America has been at war practically non-stop since we got the Federal Reserve and the purchasing power of the dollars has dropped by at least 95% because, above all, a central bank is nothing more than a vehicle to transfer wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich.

The rich never suffer a loss of wealth from central banking operations, largely because mechanisms are in place to protect powerful insider financial interests from the loss of wealth by directly subsidizing any losses.  But the most ugly legacy of the Federal Reserve and the central banksters in general is that they successfully spread their poisonous central banks and mercantilism throughout the world.

While the Federal Reserve has now replaced the Bank of England as the world's most powerful central bank, its also true that Britain, its mercantilism, its empire and its fiat banking system have all survived across the the pond where these anti-liberty institutions have grown even more powerful, dangerous and deadly.

Bankster power has been absolute for quite a long time and includes the draconian powers of government to squash human liberty at every turn while waging perpetual warfare for resources to plunder. But the banksters have an Achilles' heel that was exposed in all its naked glory in the 2008 financial meltdown. While central banks scrambled to to keep the world's central banks from totally imploding, it's also quite likely that the banksters are finally on angels wings. Printing insane amounts of fiat money to bailout the rich at the expense of the poor and middle class has left the global economy tettering on the brink of collapse and $16 trillion is a most threatening pile of debt fueled fiat money.

Have You Heard About The 16 Trillion Dollar Bailout The Federal Reserve Handed To The Too Big To Fail Banks

While the dollar only survives because of its lofty and prestigious status as the world's reserve currency, it's not necessarily a guarantee or even a foregone conclusion that the dollar will remain the reserve currency of the world. The dollar isn't the world's reserve currency because it's such a great currency but because all other currencies are either much worse and/or even more unstable for purposes of international trade.

There are signs that the dollar will ultimately be challenged and such challenges will come from nations that are stockpiling gold for future use in creating gold backed currencies.

Putin is Stockpiling Gold

According to the World Gold Council, Russia has more than doubled its gold reserves in the past five years. Putin has taken advantage of the financial crisis to build the world’s fifth-biggest gold pile in a handful of years, and is buying about half a billion dollars’ worth every month.

The Hoarding Continues: China Purchases A Record 100 Tons Of Gold In April From Hong Kong

Gold imports by mainland China from Hong Kong climbed 65 percent to a record in April, advancing for a third straight month as investors sought a hedge against financial-market turmoil and an economic slowdown....

"We can’t rule out the possibility that the central bank is buying gold,” said Wang at Agricultural Bank of China, referring to the People’s Bank of China.

Rule out? You can bet on it.

The probability that gold backed currencies will rise to challenge the supremacy of the paper tiger US dollar keeps growing and now appears to be a certainty even if the timing of such events is unclear.

The bad news is that the American people will suffer greatly as the once mighty United States of America joins the heap of being nothing more than just another failed and bankrupt banana boat republic. Few Americans even understand that our $16 trillion debt mountain that sustains our fictitious standard of living is the leverage that America uses to force other nations to buy Treasuries. Effectively, America went to nations like China and said in so many words "buy our debt and we'll buy your goods. We don't even care if American domestic manufacturing ceases and desists because we only care about the continuity of the Empire, whatever the price".  This is so Hamiltonian and so anti-Jefferson.   The price was more than the cost of interest, America sacrificed its legendary domestic manufacturing, the lifeblood of any prosperous society, for the glory of an Empire of Debt that was identical the British model of empire.

The silver lining is that while there will be profound hardships for the American people as they struggle to survive amid the bankster induced carnage, hope lies in the fact that we can once again have the opportunity to rebuilt the free and prosperous nation that we once had but willingly voted to sacrifice on the alter of empire and debt.

When the British Empire finally dies, along with its model of central banking, mercantilism and empire, the world will finally have a chance at real hope, real change and a future of peace, liberty and prosperity.

In the high risk, high stakes game of geo-politics, nothing is ever static although it moves very slowly. Still, there is ample evidence surfacing that the major shift in power is underway, from the Anglo-sphere to the rise of new economic paradigms in other nations who are embracing sound money and economic liberty.

Meanwhile, I can only opine that Americans abandoned their prosperous Republic, unlike the the Swiss who kept their republic, steered clear of wars and foreign intrigues, and still remain one of the most peaceful and prosperous folks on the planet and in human history.

Americans? We had it all and blew it.

Sex, Fraud and Mortgages - America, a Place Where Crime Really Does Pay

No real estate is permanently valuable but the grave. Mark Twain

In a bet there is a fool and a thief. Proverb

If there is one Boondoggle that everybody knows about it’s the Real Estate Boondoggle. It’s in all the papers, on TV and internet bloggers blog away day and night on the real estate quagmire of a nightmare. Of course, for some folks it truly is up close and personal. Those who lost their homes because of economic misery and job losses have experienced profound suffering.

Aside from the fact that the real estate bubble was spawned by the federal government and the Banksters who own the government, there was massive mortgage fraud, massive appraisal fraud, massive mortgage backed securities fraud, massive regulatory fraud and massive amounts of cheap fiat money – all key ingredients in a recipe for a Bernie Madoff styled Ponzi scheme with Madoff being a bungling petty thief compared to the grand larceny of the government and Banksters that toppled the global economy. As the carnage piles up, the Bankster and government solution is to just wait it out and re-inflate an already ruptured balloon, something that defies the laws of gravity. It’s not going to happen.

Just imagine going to a casino and attempting to gamble with Monopoly money from the board game. In the real world, the casino would toss you out on the street and call the nearest insane asylum to put you away. But in America the monopoly money created by the Federal Reserve is the cocaine of delusion – the delusion that freshly minted greenbacks is real wealth in what is increasingly being dubbed our crystal meth economy. The crack cocaine addicted economists and Congress Critters are firmly anchored in the cosmic belief that creating “money” out of thin air creates wealth because so long as folks have an unlimited supply of “free” fiat money, they will spend into oblivion and the spending will keep the economy roaring. So Americans voluntarily jumped on the spaceship to the nearest black hole in the universe and indebted themselves on a scale only witnessed in undiscovered parallel universes.

The Grand Delusion was fun for a while until the bitter day dawned when Americans woke up one day and acknowledged that there was no way they could ever pay back the consumer debt and the mortgage debt. Before arriving at financial Armageddon, Americans attempted to postpone the day of reckoning by endless cycles of refinancing their vastly overvalued homes to pay off debt to start another round of binge spending.

With fiat money more prevalent than all the stars in the universe, life in America was declared great. After all, America had defied the laws of financial, fiscal and monetary gravity or so we thought. As a nation, America ceased producing real and enduring wealth eons ago. This was only a minor setback as the makers of the money piñata declared “No money no problem, no job, no problem, bad credit, no problem”. Just spend, spend and spend and everything will be glorious as the accoutrements of prosperity ooze from every earthy crevice.

An economy born of the dust of cosmic illusions was declared real, tangible and eternal. The debt and the asset bubbles supporting the Grand Delusion just, well, upped and crashed one day, as predicted by a handful of sane observers.

Fiscal sanity requires that folks not borrow more than 2.5-3 times annual income for a mortgage depending on other outstanding debt. But as median housing prices exploded as a result of easy fiat money and the government/Bankster crime families approved loaning nearly 5 times annual income on an overpriced house, it’s clear that the real estate mess is not going to “clear” until housing prices are more in line with wage trends and in some areas of the nation that constitutes a lot more misery. With wages actually on the decline, fewer and fewer folks will find housing that they can afford even at today’s lower prices and low interest rates. Prices are nowhere near low enough and until median housing prices approach 3 times median income or less, the disaster will only fester. At one extreme, there were cities in California with average annual incomes of about $70,000 annually and average home prices of $770,000. Those folks got mortgages.

Case Study 1: One of the most notorious cases of mortgage insanity involved strawberry picker Alberto Ramirez who easily got a $720,000 mortgage on an annual income of $14,000, here.  This Ramirez incident of mortgage insanity had gone media viral a few years back and he lost the house in foreclosure.

Case Study 2: 20 year old Denise Tejada bought a property with FHA financing using her congressional entitlement gift of an $8,000 tax credit. The price of the property was $155,000 and Tejada secured an FHA loan in the amount of $183,000 that included renovation costs based on an income derived from 1 full time job and 2 part time jobs. She walked away from the closing table with a big pile of taxpayer cash in her pocket. Apparently, she’s quite happy as she claims to have made a quick and easy $100,000. "I bought my house for $155,000. And now, after all the fixing, after all the remodeling, my house is worth $255,000. So just within a month period, I made a $100,000,". Her story is documented here but I don't know how her taxpayer funded road to riches ended.

Case Study 3: The Washington Post documented a “sob” story about Daverena White, a single mother with 3 children who never earned more than $15,000 a year and who at times was dependent on food stamps and Section 8 housing vouchers. Moreover, she had never paid more than $700 a month in rent. But White discovered the road to riches, or so she thought. White managed to buy a residential property in a DC suburb at a sales price of $698,00 on 11/8/06 from a couple who earned a living as a mortgage loan officer and a real estate agent. The sellers had purchased the property only 22 ½ months earlier and were earning a whopping profit by selling the property to Daverena for $203,000 more than they paid for it.

According to the Washington Post, White walked away from the closing table with nearly $40,000 that included, among other things, a seller paid $13,000 down payment and $11,200 in cash to make the first two mortgage payments that were $5,635 per month for a borrower never paid more than $700 a month in housing costs. The adjustable rate loan had a start rate of 8.6% that could have been raised to 15.1 within 2 years. The loan was funded by a General Electric subprime subsidiary, WMC Mortgage, who documented White’s annual income at $163,320 – very odd indeed for a woman who never earned more than $15,000 a year and was entitlement dependent. The sellers paid the first mortgage payment and White used the cash she got at the closing table to make the next 2 payments. Then she defaulted and ended up in a homeless shelter with her 3 children. Then the family ended up in a county subsidized motel for a while and eventually moved into a county subsidized apartment.

Interestingly, the Washington Post also reported in another article that “General Electric, the world's largest industrial company, has quietly become the biggest beneficiary of one of the government's key rescue programs for banks. At the same time, GE has avoided many of the restrictions facing other financial giants getting help from the government. The company did not initially qualify for the program… But regulators soon loosened the eligibility requirements, in part because of behind-the-scenes appeals from GE.”

Financial blogs and the NYT have reported that GE Capital secured $140 billion in federal bailout assistance. GE’s fraud artist mortgage lenders should be in jail but they are probably using their bailout bucks for big bonuses for pulling off such a lucrative heist.

Such stories are not at all unusual and during the go-go days mortgage lending mania, mortgage lenders and buyers literally went WILD. Unlike real gambling where the participants actually bring “real” money to the table, our government and insane financial system actually facilitates gambling with no money except for the fiat monopoly money created from something less tangible in value than cosmic dust.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have cost taxpayers a bundle and at one time it was estimated that they would ultimately cost taxpayers several hundred billion. The WSJ reported in 10/11 that Fannie and Freddie bailouts had thus far cost taxpayers $141 billion, here. Obama got Congress to lift the $400 billion limit on Fannie/Freddie bailout so now the sky’s the limit.

Fannie Mae has a most interesting side story.  Fannie Mae crimes proliferated under the leadership of a Bill Clinton pal, Franklin Raines, who ran Fannie from 1998 to 2004 but things got a whole lot worse as lending standards plummeted after Raines left Fannie amidst a financial scandal. Public service doesn’t come cheap and Raines raked in $90 million in compensation, of which $52 million was bonus money tied to earnings that never existed. Being on the public dole is the easiest money in town. For his $90 million worth of public service in helping folks move into houses they couldn’t afford or ever pay for, Raines was involved in an accounting scandal that overstated Fannie’s earning by over $10 billion. Fannie’s profits were pure fraud. Government accounting makes Enron accounting look like a paragon of integrity in financial disclosure.

Every now and then a government employee actually does their job or attempts to do their job. Armando Falcon, as Chief Regulator of the Office of the Federal Housing Oversight (OFHEO), was Fannie Mae’s auditor/regulator. Falcon fought like a tiger for years to expose Fannie fraud and require more audit oversight but Raines made sure through his network of high powered congressional and political contacts that he was untouchable. Falcon, an extraordinarily courageous and competent public servant, ended up being fired for the “crime” of trying to do his job.

Across the nation and long before the real estate crash became official many folks at the state level become very concerned. With so many bizarre mortgage products concocted by Wall Street, many state attorney generals were investigating what they deemed “predatory lending practices”. Also, some state legislatures attempted to rein in insane mortgage lending practices. However, the Bush Administration rabidly intervened and instructed the Justice Department to file lawsuits against such state initiatives. Most probably, the Bush gang was just taking orders from the Banksters who had no interest in anything except securing endless supplies of high risk mortgages to package and sell; the fee income generated by various mortgage products was an enormous source of bankster income. In the aftermath of the popped real estate balloon, journalists were trying to find out precisely what happened. Even the Washington Post took notice with a piece titled “Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime, How the Bush Administration Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help Consumers” written by Elliott Spitzer in 2/08, here.

Several years ago, state attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a marked increase in a range of predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders. Some were misrepresenting the terms of loans, making loans without regard to consumers' ability to repay, making loans with deceptive "teaser" rates that later ballooned astronomically, packing loans with undisclosed charges and fees, or even paying illegal kickbacks. These and other practices, we noticed, were having a devastating effect on home buyers. In addition, the widespread nature of these practices, if left unchecked, threatened our financial markets….

What did the Bush administration do in response? Did it reverse course and decide to take action to halt this burgeoning scourge?...

Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.

It was common knowledge that lenders were giving folks mortgages that they knew they couldn't afford. The lenders didn't care because they weren't keeping the mortgages and all the lenders cared about was commission incomes and the fees generated from packaging and selling 'cash for trash' mortgage loans to unsuspecting investors.

In Seattle, WA a 90 year old stroke survivor, Barbara Simonson, lost a million dollar property through a series of 6 Washington Mutual mortgage deals in six years on a home she lived in for 50 years. Washington Mutual took advantage of an old woman who had no idea what she was signing. She ended up with a $680,000 option arm mortgage that she couldn’t afford on a deal that started out with her son conning her into mortgaging her home to give him $500,000 for a business venture. Mrs. Simonson had SS income of $1,270 a month, couldn’t afford the mortgage payments and though a series of refinances and cashing out to cover escalating mortgage payments, she lost her home. The Washington Mutual folks just filled out the paperwork and had her sign – she had no idea what she was signing including a document that listed her monthly income at $10,300. She denied ever reporting that level of income. But Simonson was among a lot of equity rich older folks who got stiffed in numerous mortgage scams. Had Washington Mutual just followed “old fashioned” lending standards of income verification and tax return reviews, the loan would have been denied as unaffordable. The Banksters didn’t give a hoot if the loans they made were affordable to Mrs. Simonson nor did they care if a 90 year old ended up homeless, here.

It’s not just the poor with bad credit and no money who are victims of mortgage fraud. While the poor get suckered into qualifying teaser rates and some have even actively participated in mortgage fraud, there isn’t much sympathy for folks who had “no skin” in the game. But a lot of folks did have their own skin in the game and got skinned alive. Senior citizens who worked a lifetime to be mortgage free got bamboozled. A lot of senior citizens swimming in equity have been specifically targeted by crooked Banksters and their schemes. The reverse annuity mortgage is a product that was devised to make payments to cash poor but equity rich seniors to supplement their income. These loans were secured with first mortgages and the mortgages were to be paid when the person died and the property was sold.

In March 2009, the FBI’s own website reported on equity theft crimes “FBI and Department of Housing and Urban Development-Office of Inspector General (HUD-OIG) reporting indicate that unscrupulous loan officers, mortgage companies, investors, loan counselors, appraisers, builders, developers, and real estate agents are exploiting Home Equity Conversion Mortgages (HECMs)—also known as reverse mortgages—to defraud senior citizens. They recruit seniors through local churches, investment seminars, and television, radio, billboard, and mailer advertisements, and commit the fraud primarily through equity theft, foreclosure rescue, and investment schemes.1 HECM-related fraud is occurring in every region of the United States, and reverse mortgage schemes have the potential to increase substantially as demand for these products rises in demographically dense senior citizen jurisdictions”. The link has since been scrubbed from the FBI's website.

All the banks ever wanted were an endless supply of garbage loans to package into mortgage backed securities. The Banksters made their money on fee income when the mortgages were closed and again on the sale of mortgage backed securities to victims all over the world. The Banksters had a lot of help and willing partners in their crimes – the government, Congress, the Federal Reserve and the rating agencies that they control like Moody’s, S & P and Fitch. Even the customarily staid Bloomberg chirped in and reported on the practice of the rating agencies to churn junk into stellar AAA rated securities.

Employees at Moody's Investors Service told executives that issuing dubious creditworthy ratings to mortgage-backed securities made it appear they were incompetent or ``sold our soul to the devil for revenue,'' according to e-mails obtained by U.S. House investigators… An e-mail that a S&P employee wrote to a co-worker in 2006, obtained by committee investigators, said, ``Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters.'', here.

The rating agencies did in fact play a key role in facilitating fraud and they were well paid by Wall Street for their crimes.

Why were the rating agencies allowed to get away with facilitating the biggest financial fraud in human history? 

That’s easy. You can’t take down the rating agencies without taking down Wall Street and you can’t take down Wall Street without taking down Congress and the Bankster owned federal regulatory chiefs.

After the implosion of the mortgage fiasco, many investigative journalists began to delve into the real estate carnage and books started to appear that documented massive fraud and the head of the snake is always Wall Street. Businessweek reviewed a book titled Chain of Blame, How Wall Street Caused the Mortgage and Credit Crisis by award winning journalist Paul Muolo and business reporter for The Orange County Register Matthew Padilla. According to Businessweek, the Banksters raked in an astounding $26.6 billion in mortgage back securities scheme profits between 2002 and 2007. The factories established and funded by Wall Street to facilitate the fraud were called wholesale and warehousing shops. These operations were nothing more than “a massive commission scheme with everyone’s hand in the cookie jar”. The Banksters hired hot looking females, called “mortgage sluts”, who solicited business from mortgage brokers.

But the story get real seedy and salacious in another Businessweek piece titled “Sex, Lies, and Subprime Mortgages, The sexual favors, whistleblower intimidation, and routine fraud behind the fiasco that has triggered the global financial crisis”.

A high school dropout and manicurist named Sharmen Lane earned $1 million in 2002 and $1.2 million in 2003 in one of these Wall Street concocted mortgage shops. Sharmen refused to play the “sex for mortgage application” game and got out of the mortgage business just before it crashed in 2007. But besides hot looking babes prostituting themselves for fraudulent mortgage applications to approve in the Bankster created sweatshops, the internal fraud was so widespread and pervasive that folks at all levels were getting a cut. One insider said mortgage underwriters “demanded spiffs of $1,000 for the first 10 loans and $2,500 for the next 20 loans”. Many honest folks in the mortgage business were outright fired. Of course, after the real estate meltdown and the loss of big commissions and high incomes, the mortgage industry insiders started spilling the beans. .

Businessweek reported “The abuses went far beyond sexual dalliances. Court documents and interviews with scores of industry players suggest that wholesalers also offered bribes to fellow employees, fabricated documents, and coached brokers on how to break the rules. And they weren’t alone. Brokers, who work directly with borrowers, altered and shredded documents. Underwriters, the bank employees who actually approve mortgage loans, also skirted boundaries, demanding secret payments from the wholesalers to green-light loans they knew to be fraudulent. Some employees who reported misdeeds were harassed or fired…..In the end, the wholesalers were undone by the same people who allowed for their rise: Their Wall Street overlords”.

Wall Street has so much power and money sloshing around in its manure factories that it could easily afford to buy Congress and their blessings for Bankster schemes and scams. In 2000, the top ten Wall Street investment banks did $245 billion in the mortgage securitization business but by 2006 the mortgage backed securities business mushroomed to $1.5 trillion in one year alone.

But Wall Street wasn’t just content earning tens of billions from mortgage and securities fraud. These fraud artists managed to shift the financial risk of their scams to taxpayers who are covering their losses.

What about all those bond holders and pension funds who got stiffed on mortgage backed securities? After all, they didn’t buy junk rated securities and they paid high prices for supposedly high quality securities. They also threatened to file civil lawsuits for fraud and even demanded criminal investigations.

But in the end, they were silenced and quietly paid off. The Banksters were forced to buy back a lot of the slop they sold to avoid civil lawsuits and criminal prosecutions for fraud. The Federal Reserve, the greenback rainmaker, had spent a whopping $1.2 trillion to buy up the mortgage backed securities slop from the Banksters and the Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSE's like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) according to NPR, here.

Not only were the Banksters making bad mortgages and packaging mortgage backed securities, the Banksters were packaging everything in the fiat financial universe – home mortgages, commercial mortgages, credit cards, 2nd mortgages, auto loans - all during an era where sound lending principles were ditched as irrelevant. And the rating agencies and government were there to aid and abet them in their crimes and even cover up their crimes.

A long, long time ago, a worker would save a percentage of his earnings. These savings filled small and medium sized banks. Folks saved for a variety of reasons; they saved to buy a house, they saved for future consumption, they saved for vacations, they saved for their kid’s education and they saved for their retirement. Shocking as it might be, there was a time in America when folks saved for a down payment on a home and to get qualified for a mortgage, one had to actually have good credit and the ability to repay (a job).

But along comes Uncle Sam and the Banksters who singlehandedly abandoned as irrelevant every principle of sound lending practices. They said, no job – no problem, bad credit – no problem, no money – no problem. Instead of the time honored home purchasing method of working and saving, the government and the Banksters decided that working and saving was archaic and should be abolished.

It was a whopper of a stretch from the days when Teddy Roosevelt campaigned on “a chicken in every pot”. Filling a hungry belly is one thing but churning chickens into houses was quite an imaginary leap.

As incriminating and revolting as all the aforementioned facts are, by far the Big Smoking Gun in the whole scam is that Wall Street criminals betted against the very same securities these fraud hucksters underwrote that were peddled as AAA low risk, high quality securities. Although big mainstream media has the mega resources to investigate and unravel anything, it used their investigative journalists to disclose bits and pieces of the mess for the purpose of misleading the public into not having enough information to connect the dots on Wall Street’s schemes. Mainstream print and broadcast media generally covered up and/or ignored the truth, but bloggers, alternative media and smaller media did some outstanding reporting.

The rather obscure McClatchy Newspapers came out with a blockbuster of an investigative journalist piece on 11/1/09 that actually connects the dots on the biggest financial fraud in human history. “How Goldman secretly bet on the U.S. housing crash” does an outstanding job documenting the real truth of what happened and who made the money. More importantly, the article was just the beginning of a series of articles that culminated after 5 months of investigation. McClatchy even admits that its investigation barely scratches the surface and much of what went on is still largely hidden from public scrutiny. But here are some quotes that piece together the fraud.

In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting…..

Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk.

Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman's failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws…..

To piece together Goldman's role in the subprime meltdown, McClatchy reviewed hundreds of documents, SEC filings, copies of secret investment circulars, lawsuits and interviewed numerous people familiar with the firm's activities.

Goldman has operated a virtual jobs conveyor belt to and from Washington: Paulson, as Treasury secretary, sent tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars to rescue Wall Street in 2008, and former Goldman employees populate some of the most demanding and powerful posts in Washington. Savvy federal regulators have migrated from their Washington jobs to Goldman.

The full extent of the losses from Goldman's mortgage securities isn't known… From 2001 to 2007, Goldman hawked at least $135 billion in bonds keyed to risky home loans, according to analyses by McClatchy and the industry newsletter Inside Mortgage Finance. In addition to selling about $39 billion of its own risky mortgage securities in 2006 and 2007, Goldman marketed at least $17 billion more for others.

It also was the lead firm in marketing about $83 billion in complex securities, many of them backed by subprime mortgages, via the Caymans and other offshore sites, according to an analysis of unpublished industry data by Gary Kopff, a securitization expert. In at least one of these offshore deals, Goldman exaggerated the quality of more than $75 million of risky securities, describing the underlying mortgages as "prime" or "midprime,"….

In early 2007, the firm's mortgage traders also bet heavily against the housing market….

The swaps contracts would pay off big…. Goldman sold off nearly $28 billion of risky mortgage securities it had issued in the U.S. in 2006….

…Goldman has made other bets with hundreds of unidentified counterparties to insure its own subprime risks and to take positions against the housing market…. Another question is whether, by keeping the trades secret, the company withheld material information that would enable investors to assess Goldman's motives for selling the bonds, said James Cox, a Duke University law professor who also has served on the NYSE advisory panel.

If Goldman had disclosed the contrary bets, he said, "One would have to believe that a rational investor would not only consider Goldman's conduct material, but likely compelling a decision to take a pass on the recommendation to purchase."

The last sentence is the heart and soul of the financial fraud and the article goes on to quote professors of securities law who can’t decide if Wall Street violated any securities laws. Above all, if securities laws are to be effective, they must be written to provide maximum disclosure of risks and all relevant facts. We have a situation where Wall Street sold securities and then reaped monster profits by betting against the very same securities they underwrote, packaged and sold. If that’s legal in America, then we really are a nation run by criminals and crime families.

Pension funds are among the biggest victims of Wall Street because millions of folks are dependent on their pension checks for survival. Pensions were already massively underfunded before Wall Street detonated itself and the world for fun, power and profit. The revolving door between Wall Street and Washington reeks of corruption and protectionism for crooks.

But not to worry, Wall Street has hatched a new scheme that is sure to give power mad Bankster owned Congress a dollar filled orgasm of even more campaign contributions. Just when you think that Wall Street couldn’t possibly sink any lower in its own manure pile, these shameless thieves are now going after old dying people. Matt Taibbi exposed this horror:

Wall Street Gambles on Old People Dying

Goldman Sachs has developed a tradable index of life settlements, enabling investors to bet on whether people will live longer than expected or die sooner than planned. The index is similar to tradable stock market indices that allow investors to bet on the overall direction of the market without buying stocks.

…It looks like Wall Street is developing a new use for the securitization process – bungling life insurance policies and selling them as bonds to investors who would be betting, in essence, on when the policy holder will die.

The mechanism here is basically the same as the one used for mortgage-backed securities. Wall Street buys up life policies from elderly or ill people, who sell them for up-front cash that can be enjoyed before actual death (similar to those brokered arrangements with terminally ill HIV patients that received so much attention in the late eighties). They then take those policies and dump them into a securitized pool, where they can then be packaged as bonds and sold to investors who would get paid off when the policyholders die.

In other words, Wall Street will be seeking out seniors or dying folks desperate for cash and get them to make Wall Street the beneficiaries of their life insurance policies. These insurance policies will be packaged and sold to investors. Undoubtedly, the financial carnage and economic misery caused by Wall Street has created tons of desperate folks. And Wall Street is always there to cash-out on human misery – from your birth to your home to your deathbed.

In the end, it’s the Banksters who will end up making millions and billions off their schemes – they are lavishly compensated for their criminal behavior and exempted from criminal prosecution. Maybe that was the plan all along. The American people are the latest addition to Planet Serfs – a systematic and Stalinist styled fascist control over everything and everybody. This is not capitalism folks. This is government engineered greed, massive public corruption, wholesale theft and a total obliteration of sane markets.

In a sane world, the Banksters would have just gone bankrupt and to jail because that’s the price of failure and criminality, but not in America where the thieves rule and crime really does pay.  .

Why is the American Election Process a BIG FAIL and How to Fix It.

The American election process is corrupted, rigged and exists for one purpose only: the massive concentration of wealth and power into the hands of banksters, defense contractors, fascists and bureaucrats.

We the People? We aren't part of the equation and our contribution to approving our own enslavement is to participate in the rigged system to validate and provide electoral legitimacy to the Republican and Democrat crime syndicate that lords over us with an iron fist.

There are 2 primary components of the American election process: 1. money and 2. the rigged 2 party  system itself. It's the big money that facilitates Republican and Democrat monopolies over all elections.

Money

Very few Americans even understand that the lions share of political money is dirty special interest money and it's anything but transparent.  The small contributions raised by We the People are no match for the BIG corporatist money interests of plunderers, banksters, oligarchs, plutocrats and fascists. Every time a campaign finance bill is passed by Congress and there have been many over the decades, the end result is always more secrecy and less transparency.  It's why we have these dangerous PAC's super-PAC's.  Special interests can funnel money into the RNC and DNC machines through PAC's.

The RNC/DNC lock on political money doesn’t bode well for Americans seeking to raise new candidates and get rid of the “same old, same old” congressional institutionalists who thrive on power, greed and fraud. If you find a candidate that you like and would like to support, you are legally banned from contributing more than $2,500 to that candidate; contributing more than the legal limit makes you a criminal who can be prosecuted for violating campaign finance laws. But you can give millions to the DNC and RNC machines through its PAC's who don’t have that limitation and this vastly contributes to the absolute power of special interests.

Special interests own and control American elections because they control the money.

Independent thinking candidates are routinely squashed. Big money only flows to those who can deliver the taxpayer largess to special interest campaign contributors and it’s nearly impossible for any honest politician to ever raise sufficient money to compete with the RNC/DNC money laundering machines. Corporate contributors don’t fund candidates who campaign on “I promise to reduce government power and end the fascist marriage of big business and big government”.

Progressives and liberals went ballistic over the Supreme Court Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision that essentially ruled that corporations and labor unions have a constitutional right to contribute money to political campaigns. The Supreme Court decision was right because corporations are legal entities that pay taxes while being subjected to a myriad of government regulations. Accordingly, they have an absolute legal right to have their interests represented in the election game.

So how do we get around the legal right of corporations outright buy elections and thus control legislative outcomes for its exclusive monopolistic advantage? Personally, I favor banning all political contributions except for individual contributions which should have no limits whatsoever. The limits on individual contributions drives the corrupt system underground and into a legal quagmire of undisclosed political contributions while giving both the Republicans and the Democrats extraordinary financial powers to squash We the People at all levels in the process.

The solution to the problem lies in lifting ALL restrictions on personal political contributions and mandating that all political money goes straight to the candidate by bypassing the parties and their legendary fund raising machines.

Do I care if George Soros directly gives billions to Obama?  No because it's his absolute right to fund the candidate of his choice.

Do I care if the Koch Brothers gives billions to Romney? No, because it's their absolute right to fund the candidate of their choice.

However, what the American voter really needs is real time disclosure of all political money. Every website of every candidate for public office should be required by law to have a link on their websites that lists in real time all political contributions, not by the date received but by the amount of the contribution.  If they can get the money to the bank, they can disclose it in real time.  Right now the system is rigged against disclosure because of quarterly filing requirements and the fact that a whole lot of  political money is exempt from disclosure.

If anything, Americans are nosy about money and you better believe that they'd be checking out who is bankrolling candidates.

Furthermore, America needs to ban all RNC and DNC fundraising activities. Because so much of the BIG special interest money is raised by the RNC and DNC machines through a complex legal maize that facilitates non-disclosure and secrecy, there will never be financial transparency in the election process for voter review until political monetary transparency and disclosure are achieved.

The top 10 corporate PAC contributions for the 2008 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, were as follows:

Obama: Goldman Sachs $739,521, UBS AG $419,550, Lehman Brothers $391,774, Citigroup Inc $492,548, Morgan Stanley $341,380, Latham & Watkins $328,879, Google Inc $487,355 JPMorgan Chase & Co $475,112, Sidley Austin LLP $370,916, Skadden, Arps et al $360,409

McCain: Merrill Lynch $349,170, Citigroup Inc $287,801, Morgan Stanley $249,377 Wachovia Corp $147,456, Goldman Sachs $220,045, Lehman Brothers $115,707, Bear Stearns $108,000, JPMorgan Chase & Co $206,392, Bank of America $133,975, Credit Suisse Group $175,503.

Those figure are far from definitive and the same players funneled a whole lot more money into the campaign finance cesspool through mechanisms not requiring disclosure.  There is also the issue lobbying and its monetary influence far exceeds campaign contribution influence.

Opensecrets.org reports the top spenders on lobbying for 2008 were:

US Chamber of Commerce $91,725,000
Exxon Mobil $29,000,000
AARP $27,900,000 PG&E Corp $27,250,000
Northrop Grumman $20,743,252 American Medical Assn $20,555,000
Pharmaceutical Rsrch & Mfrs of America $20,220,000
Koch Industries $20,023,000
General Electric $19,379,000
American Hospital Assn $18,902,684
Verizon Communications $18,020,000
Boeing Co $17,540,000
National Assn of Realtors $17,340,000
Blue Cross/Blue Shield $16,220,165
Lockheed Martin $15,981,506 AT&T Inc $15,076,675
National Cable & Telecommunications Assn $14,500,000
Southern Co $14,080,000
Altria Group $13,840,000
General Motors $13,351,000

They don’t sprinkle that kind of dough around the District of Crime without getting big paybacks. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is so powerful that it outspends the #2 biggest spender on lobbying by a margin of over 3:1 with a whopping $92 million. What the Chamber of Commerce gets for its $92 million investment is the ability to load up America with cheap third world labor that drives American wages down while shifting the social costs of impoverished “slave” wage earners to the unemployed, broke and suffering American taxpayers.  Basically, it's the systematic wipe out of the American middle class.

The Banksters are always lavishly rewarded for their campaign contributions. Barry Ritholtz, a financial author and pundit, who runs the website Ritholtz.com, put out quite an enlightening article that calculated TARP money (Bankster Bailout Bucks) as a return on lobbyist dollars spent and campaign contributions. The Ritholtz list (prints to 7 pages) listed the banks that received TARP money and included political contributions and lobbying expenditures to arrive at a return on investment.

Campaign Contributions: $37.4 million
Lobbying Expenses: $76.6 million
TARP Payment: $305.2 billion
 Return on Investment: 267,208%

There are a gazillion other special interest groups that are also engaged in the “pay to play” game at the DC Wheel of Fortune.  With a $3.7 trillion pie, those seeking a slice or a crumb descend upon the pie like hoards of hungry cockroaches.

I wonder how many folks would have voted for Obama or McCain in 2008 if they had known upfront that they were heavily funded by Wall Street? Do you really think the American people would have voted for Bankster and corporate welfare?

The Best Government that Fascist Corporatist Bankster Defense Contractor Money Can Buy 

Wall Street and the banksters are far from the only larcenous and felonious gang of  plunderers at the taxpayers gate nor are they the only financiers of political campaigns and lobbying.. Defense contractors and rent seeking corporations demanding subsidies, loan guarantees, protectionism and monopoly rank quite high and are extremely powerful influences.  Entire industries like Big Agriculture and Big Pharm are major power brokers in the Pay to Play Game that reigns supreme in the District of Crime and within our own state legislators and city councils.

Most Congress Critters spend their taxpayer funded time hanging out with special interest lobbyists and favor seeking campaign contributors although most voters don't know it.  We the People have become We the Sheeple and we are laughed at and mocked by those in power, except on election day when politicans pledge their undying love to the people.

How can lobbying and influence peddling be minimized? Again, disclosure could play a key role in scaring politicians away from those who routinely bribe them for a vote.  Of course, in America there is no such thing as bribery as bribery is now nothing more than a legal campaign contribution that is codified into law.

What if Congress Critters and all other elected officials were required to make their schedules public on the Internet?  By making their schedules public I mean putting their calendars on the office holders' official website for the world to see.  Moreover, not publishing a meeting or contact should be a crime because it implies that a public official is engaging in something so underhanded that it reeks of bribery and secrecy.

Wouldn't the American voters just love to know how their elected leaders spend their time and who they spend it with? I suspect that the American people would be shocked and so angry that they'd want these bought and paid for elected representatives voted out of office.

Republican, Democrat, Liberal, conservative or independent, the American people have been denied openness and transparency by the big money games of the RNC and DNC.  Whatever our political and ideological stripes, no one will escape the fascist tyranny until this corrupt fundraising system is dismantled and outlawed.

While we will never be able to fully solve the problems of big money interests and their ability to buy entire legislative bodies, in the Age of the Internet we can certainly accomplish a whole lot more than We the People could ever have hoped to accomplish in the past and before the Internet.

The liberty movement is strengthening and I'd say it's moved from a tropical storm to a Category 1 hurricane.  The politicos and power brokers that controlled us for so many decades are finally running a tad scared and liberty will only be achieved when there's a Category 5 hurricane facing our oppressors.

The Internet is the new portal to liberty as evidenced by the stupendous growth of alternative media that is very successfully putting truth and facts into the hands of ordinary folks.  The once powerful propaganda machines of the government and its media partners in crime are rapidly collapsing.

To be continued with:  What's Wrong With the Primary and General Election System Besides the DIRTY MONEY? 

How Statism and the NWO Will Crash and Burn

If anything, government is an optimistic entity that automatically assumes that the economy will always do well, and perpetually and generously fill government coffers with an abundance of tax revenues. However, the decline and fall of the global economy has badly dinged tax collections. If folks aren't prosperous and making money, the plundering government's cut shrinks and shrinks substantially.

Government survives by either brute force or with the voluntary consent of the people because they perceive a value. But what happens when folks no longer perceive a value in government? Well, folks just opt out of the system, go underground and/or overtly or covertly indulge in non-compliance. When this happens, we see headlines and stories like this:

Island authorities denounce attack on tax police

ATHENS, Greece -- Local authorities on the Greek island of Hydra have denounced an attack by a local crowd on tax police after they detained a restaurant owner who did not provide receipts to clients.

The Friday incident happened after the inspectors wanted to transport the restaurant owner to Athens, an hour's ride away by fast boat. They were set upon by a local crowd, which also attacked the boat's crew.

The police, along with the restaurant owner, had to retreat to the island's police station, which was besieged until riot police arrived Saturday morning. Locals cut off the station's electricity and water supplies.

The Greeks have a long history of refusing to pay taxes to its corrupt and thieving government. However, the Greeks are far from the only folks indulging in a tax revolt. In Germany, statist socialists are alleging that Germans who put their money in Swiss banks are tax cheats who should be imprisoned.

German opposition leader attacks Swiss banks

Gabriel, whose Social Democrats (SPD) have blocked a deal between the German and Swiss governments to levy taxes on German assets in Swiss bank accounts, told Deutschlandfunk that Swiss banking practices in Germany were comparable with organised crime.

"It's a serious crime," said Gabriel, the chairman of the SPD who may run against Chancellor Angela Merkel in the 2013 election. "We're talking about organised crime in Swiss banks (operating) in Germany."

Gabriel, who plans to make criticism of banks a centrepiece of the SPD's 2013 campaign, added the sentence for large-scale tax evasion in Germany could be as long as 10 years in prison.

In Italy, another nation quite notorious for tax avoidance, the desperately broke Italian government is beefing up tax collection efforts.

Italy's tax hunters target super-rich and their yachts off the Sardinian coast

There used to be a time when Italy's super-rich gravitated to the smartest enclaves of Sardinia for a summer of relaxation and luxury. Not any more. In an increasingly austerity-conscious country, the yacht-owning classes are coming under increasing and unwelcome scrutiny, some of which would not look out of place in a scene from the film Apocalypse Now.

"We first spotted the targets with the helicopter's radar and closed in to identify about 50 boats off the two islands," said Italian coastguard captain Pietro Mele, describing a recent raid on yachts suspected of straying too close to the coast.

Although these are only a few examples of governments' insatiable appetite for other peoples money and how people fight back, the stone cold reality is that western governments have been indulging in unsustainable spending sprees for decades. Now that the massive pile of unsustainable debt is evidenced everywhere, another stone cold reality that directly impacts the people is the austerity of cutting public services because bigger and bigger percentages of national income are diverted to debt service. Tax receipts are going to the banksters and not the people.

In a bad and worsening economy, such a situation is the sum of all fears for the government. Not only do governments lack the resources to fund entitlements and public services, they've lost the trust of the people who are waking up to another reality, namely, that a big spending corrupt government wasn't such a good idea after all.

As the world unwinds according to the laws of financial physics and the fictitious fiat monetary paradise implodes, folks will be forced to plunge into raw survival mode as they seek and invent new paradigms of survival that most assuredly won't include trust in government and its army of bureaucratic goons. .

Meanwhile, folks accustomed to feeding off of everybody else will indeed clamor for a more violent and draconian government that will militarily plunder everybody and everything. But there comes a point when there is nothing left to plunder.

The only difference between the murderous and ruthless tactics of Mao/Stalin and Gang who killed 100 million folks during the 20th century alone, and the so-called soft socialism of the west is that the former didn't have the luxury of a wealthy economy to plunder. Well, the plundering class is rapidly running out of options because there isn't much left to plunder which is why the hysteria is now focused on 'tax the rich'. In France, the socialists have passed a law imposing a 75% tax on the rich. What will happen is that what productive capital that remains in socialist France will simply pack up and move to friendlier abodes. The French economy will be deprived of scare financial resources to reboot its ailing economy, the economy will worsen and French misery will intensify. Socialists never think about the future and merely dwell on the immediate and politically expedient that invariably includes class warfare.

At this juncture, it's safe to assume that the west (Europe and America) are going down and it won't be a soft landing. Things are about to get a whole lot worse, it's won't be a pretty sight, there will be massive human suffering and probably violence and massive civil unrest.

However, if folks can just resist the temptation to implement more bad government and thieving central banks, they will finally acquire a bright and prosperous future out of the pile of statist rubble.

Simply put, the glutenous beast that is devouring us must be starved if folks are to survive in peace, liberty and prosperity.  

Progressive/Liberals/Dems are the Original Neocons

I've literally spent years and years pondering "How in the heck did the Republican Party morph into the warmongering, big spending and anti-liberty nightmare that it is today?"

Who got us into WW I, WW II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Balkan Wars? All progressive liberal Democrats - Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson and Clinton.

How much blood is on the hands of the Democrat warmongers?  A lot and they left a bloody trail of carnage that consumed over 100 million lives.

Let’s Do War by the Numbers Because We Love to Kill

WW I resulted in the deaths of 35,000,000...

Of course, WW I only set the stage for WW II that killed at least another 50,000,000 folks (many historians put the WW II death toll at 60-70 million)....

Wikipedia estimates the deaths from the Korean War at 2,500,000 – 3,500,000 and the deaths from the Vietnam War at 2,500,000-6,000,000...

Since the end of WW II, another 20,000,000 to 30,000,000 folks have died as a direct result of U.S. foreign interventionism.

It was Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats who gave us the Federal Reserve and the 16th Amendment (income tax) in 1913. It was no accident that WW I broke out in 1914 and the details of that sordid 'bailout the rich' scheme are well documented.  Without the Federal Reserve, there would have been no WW I.  Moreover,  the Federal Reserve Act was indeed the enabling legislation that actually birthed the military industrial complex and not by accident.  It was all about war profits for America's wealthiest families and the 1% (the only beneficiaries of any war).

World War I, the Banksters, the Lusitania and Bailing Out America’s Wealthiest Families

Interestingly, I witnessed my own Democratic Irish Catholic family abandon the Democratic Party and become Reagan Republicans, largely because blue collar working class families such as mine were sick and tired of having their kids who were drafted into the US military come home from Vietnam in body bags or badly mangled from combat and war injuries.  They not only feared Democrat foreign policy, they were also extremely fearful of the growth in government power and spending.

When the Republican Party was pro-peace and anti-foreign intervention, it experienced the support of the people. How much support? Reagan's 489 electoral votes to Carter's 49 in 1980 and a 51% to 41% victory speaks volumes!

Source: US Election Atlas

Reagan was viewed as the great hope to restore America to fiscal and foreign policy sanity. Unfortunately, he was a big fail. Few Americans are even aware of the extent to which taxes and the Federal Reserve fund the wars and foreign policy.

Taxes are US. The Biggest Tax Increases in US History

The largest tax increases were imposed by Truman (Revenue Act of 1950, Revenue Act 1951 and Excess Profits Tax of 1950) to fund the Korean War. Johnson's two taxes, the Temporary Surcharge of 1968 and the Tax Increase of 1966, were imposed on the American people to fund the Vietnam War.

Reagan, revered by Republicans for his extensive taxation and spending, piled on 5 new and substantial tax increases and is probably the biggest taxing president in US history.

Reagan taxes:

Tax Increase of 1983

Deficit Reduction Act of 1984

Tax Reform Act of 1986

Budget Reconciliation of 1987

The largest Social Security Tax Hike in US history - the Reagan Social Security Tax of 1983.

While taxes are a direct hit to the American people that comes right out of their paychecks, by far the biggest tax is the hideous, invisible and unnoticed inflation tax that gave us this:

If America is ever going to be restored to peace, liberty and prosperity for the people, we need drastic changes, starting with severely cutting spending, ending the damn wars that are bankrupt us and reducing government power at all levels. Meanwhile, I'll be pondering why the warmongering foreign policy hawk Mitt Romney, who has vowed to spend trillions more on foreign policy, isn't sending his own sons off to die in neocon wars or come home limbless and minus their junk.

Wall Street, Crony Capitalism and the Department of the Treasury

Constitutionally speaking, the Secretary of the Treasury is supposed to be nothing more than the nations chief bean counter and it's a job that certainly shouldn't be controlled, influenced or held by Wall Street and the Banksters. The tragic reality is that Wall Street has pretty much always controlled the Department of the Treasury.

At the George Mason University Mercatus Center, David R. Henderson published a fascinating study on crony capitalism titled The Economics and History of Cronyism which is definitely worth reading. Henderson devotes considerable time to defining cronyism and explaining how it works, notably through the mechanism of lobbying which destroys wealth.

If a company spends $10 million on lobbying for tariffs or subsidies, it is investing in reducing wealth. Although the gain in wealth to the firm is likely to exceed $10 million, the $10 million expenditure represents a loss to society. In 2009 the total amount of lobbying expenditures reported by registered federal lobbyists was $3.47 billion.

While Henderson provides numerous documented examples of crony capitalism, his disclosure of Geithner and his deep ties to Wall Street sheds considerable light on how thoroughly corrupt our political system really is:

On November 21, 2008, word leaked that president-elect Barack Obama had chosen Timothy Geithner as his treasury secretary.

...in the 10 days following the November 21 leak, financial firms that had a preexisting connection with Geithner had “a cumulative abnormal return” of about 15 percent. Translation: the value of the stock of these Geithner connected firms rose 15 percent after people learned that Geithner was named Treasury Secretary.

Geithner, of course, is also the former president of the New York Federal Reserve and he personally engineered the massive transfer of wealth to the 1%, Wall Street, AIG and just about every power player in NY and the District of Crime (DC).

It's clear from reading Henderson's article that America is nothing more than a plutocracy, an oligarcy and a nation where the 1% lord over the 99% with raw and absolute power.

One final note. Henderson also documents how Lyndon Johnson got rich.

It is not difficult to find many examples of cronyism in the 20th-century United States. One famous example not reported until decades after it occurred is the case of young Texas congressman whose wife became the nominal owner of a business that he used his political power to help her obtain.

Here’s what happened. Between December 1939 and January 1943, despite countless attempts, the owners of Austin, Texas, radio station KTBC were unable to get permission from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to sell the station. But on January 3, 1943, the wife of a Texas congressman filed her application to buy the station and 24 days later, after waiting more than three years, the owners were allowed to sell. The congressman’s wife paid $17,500 for the radio station. In June 1943, she applied for permission to operate 24 hours a day, up from daylight hours only, and at a much better part of the AM frequency. The FCC granted permission one month later. While all this was happening, the FCC was under attack by another powerful congressman, Eugene Cox of Georgia. The aforementioned Texas congressman strategized secretly with FCC official Red James and used his influence with Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn to deflect the attack. In fact, James later admitted that he had recommended to the congressman’s wife that she apply for the license. In 1943, the congressman and his wife had a net worth of approximately zero. But by 1964, when this congressman was elected president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson and his wife’s net worth was at least $14 million. The radio station’s value accounted for about half of this $14 million.

Americans get high talking about American exceptionalism. Indeed!

The Bankster Meltdown Really Happened in 2004 and Was Covered Up by Bush and Gang

The generally accepted theory of the 2008 financial meltdown is that it just happened suddenly, although financial troubles were indeed expected to be significant from the fallout of the the mortgage debacle and the real estate crash. Moreover, it is also generally accepted that the Bush Administration reacted as if the sudden financial calamity was indeed something that just happened out of the blue. 

There is overwhelming evidence that the Banksters were crashing in 2004, an election year, and that the Bush Administration merely covered it up. In the way of background information that built the foundation for the financial collapse, it all goes back to a 1999 piece of legislation signed by Bill Clinton and supported by Republicans and Democrats called the Financial Services Modernization Act (FSMA). The gory details of the FSMA were astutely laid out in a Global Research 11/12/08 piece by Michel Chossudovsky titled “Who are the Architects of the Economic Collapse” who names the big names and summarizes the bill:

Under the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, effective control over the entire US financial services industry (including insurance companies, pension funds, securities companies, etc.) had been transferred to a handful of financial conglomerates and their associated hedge funds….

Summers, Geithner, Corzine, Volker, Fischer, Phil Gramm, Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Rubin, not to mention Alan Greenspan, al al. are buddies; they play golf together; they have links to the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg; they act concurrently in accordance with the interests of Wall Street; they meet behind closed doors; they are on the same wave length; they are Democrats and Republicans.

While they may disagree on some issues, they are firmly committed to the Washington-Wall Street Consensus. They are utterly ruthless in their management of economic and financial processes.

There is no question that the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act definitely set the stage for 'Banksters Gone Wild'.  By 2004 there was ample evidence that something was radically wrong although nobody noticed at the time.  Post 2008 financial collapse, every financial journalist was scrambling to figure precisely what happened, why it happened and how it happened.  After all, America is a nation that is supposedly swimming in mountains of legislation fictitiously dubbed 'consumer protection bills' and/or just updating laws to comport with modern financial trends and technology.

In a stunning October, 2008 disclosure, New York Times reporter Stephen Labaton laid out a startling account of a secretive meeting in 2004 that explains all we need to know in a piece titled:

Agency’s ’04 Rule Let Banks Pile Up New Debt

The piece starts with:

“We have a good deal of comfort about the capital cushions at these firms at the moment.” — Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, March 11, 2008.

Drained of most of its cash three days later, Bear Stearns was forced into a hastily arranged marriage with JPMorgan Chase — backed by a $29 billion taxpayer dowry.

Within six months, other lions of Wall Street would also either disappear or transform themselves to survive the financial maelstrom — Merrill Lynch sold itself to Bank of America, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley converted to commercial banks.

How could Mr. Cox have been so wrong?

Although Latham burns a lot of ink attempting to spin the disaster into some type of a regulatory failure while focusing on the SEC's refusal to adequately police the Banksters, his story unwinds with remarkable facts and clarity, as if Latham himself didn't even want to believe his own story or the horror that were unfolding before his eyes.

...decisions made at a brief meeting on April 28, 2004, explain why the problems could spin out of control. The agency’s failure to follow through on those decisions also explains why Washington regulators did not see what was coming.

On that bright spring afternoon, the five members of the Securities and Exchange Commission met in a basement hearing room to consider an urgent plea by the big investment banks.

They wanted an exemption for their brokerage units from an old regulation that limited the amount of debt they could take on. The exemption would unshackle billions of dollars held in reserve as a cushion against losses on their investments. Those funds could then flow up to the parent company, enabling it to invest in the fast-growing but opaque world of mortgage-backed securities; credit derivatives, a form of insurance for bond holders; and other exotic instruments.

The five investment banks led the charge, including Goldman Sachs, which was headed by Henry M. Paulson Jr. Two years later, he left to become Treasury secretary.

At this juncture, it's important to understand precisely what the Banksters were demanding at the secret meeting in the basement of the SEC.  Furthermore, it's impossible that Bush and his Administration were not aware of the meeting, who attended the meeting and what the meeting was all about.  Bush and Gang undoubtedly didn't want anybody to know about the meeting.  Congress was not informed.

The Banksters were demanding that they be given a green light to borrow more money and increase leverage so they could gamble on more wild ass investment schemes.

In the post 2008 disaster analysis, Alan Blinder,a former Federal Reserve Vice-Chairman, blamed the SEC for allowing the Banksters to increase their leverage and further stated “Before then, leverage of 12 to 1 was typical; afterward, it shot up to more like 33 to 1. What were the SEC and the heads of the firms thinking?”, here.

That's precisely what happened at the secret 2004 meeting - capital requirements were lowered and Wall Street Banksters were allowed to increase leverage from 12:1 to 33:1 (and even higher).

This is the equivalent of a gambler being up to his eyeballs in casino debt and asking the casino to increase his credit so he can continue gambling in the hope that he might win and wipe out his bankrupting losses.

After the dirty deal was struck to appease the gambling Banksters, SEC Commissioner Roel C. Campos, a former federal prosecutor, said “And I keep my fingers crossed for the future.”

Everybody at that meeting precisely understood the situation. They kept their fingers crossed and the Banksters imploded anyway, along with the global economy.

Latham continues:

With that, the five big independent investment firms were unleashed....

Over the following months and years, each of the firms would take advantage of the looser rules. At Bear Stearns, the leverage ratio — a measurement of how much the firm was borrowing compared to its total assets — rose sharply, to 33 to 1. In other words, for every dollar in equity, it had $33 of debt....

The commission’s decision effectively to outsource its oversight to the firms themselves fit squarely in the broader Washington culture of the last eight years under President Bush.

That's what happens in the District of Crime (DC).  Agencies and Congress Critters routinely outsource power to the very folks an agency is responsible for regulating, which, of course, is why the concept of regulation is a joke.  It's more like a license to steal, concentrate power and legalize monopolies.  Had Wall Street turmoil, fraud, deceit and gambling addiction been allowed to blow up in 2004 when it rightfully should have, we'd still be in a mess but a mess not nearly as big and economically devastating as the mess we are currently enduring.

One thing is clear.  Bush and Gang are clearly responsible for allowing this to happen.  Unquestionably, Bush put the entire nation at grave risk on a gamble he lost.  I'm sure that Bush did the exact same thing the SEC commissioners did - crossed his fingers.

On a more disturbing note, why should any federal agency have the kind of raw and absolute power that allows the SEC to allow the Banksters to bring down an entire nation and the global financial system?

In the District of Crime, Congress Critters and the President are nothing but wholly owned subsidiaries of the Banksters.  Now the suffering taxpayers who are themselves struggling in a Bankster created economic horror are still bailing out the thieving Banksters and their gambling losses.

It's the American way - a nation where crime really does pay.

What Americans Need to Know About the LIBORgate Scandal

With the breaking of the LIBOR scandal, it is indeed instructive on many levels that a prestigious publication like The Economist would title its magazine cover BANKSTERS, Britain's price-fixing scandal and its global impact. LIBOR is the London Interbank Offered Rate and it's a benchmark for setting interest rates.

Most folks in America are snoozing through LIBORgate. This is a huge mistake because the LIBOR scandal has cost American taxpayers and consumers/borrowers a ton of money. According to The Economist article, the LIBOR rate was used to set interest rates on $800 trillion worth of financial instruments.

LIBOR is used to set an estimated $800 trillion-worth of financial instruments, affecting the price of everything from simple mortgages to interest-rate derivatives. If attempts to manipulate LIBOR were successful—and the regulators think that Barclays did manage it, on occasion—then this would be the biggest securities fraud in history, affecting investors and borrowers around the world. That opens the door to litigation not just by the direct customers of implicated banks, but by anyone with a financial interest in LIBOR. The lawsuits have already begun.

To be sure, $800 trillion is a big pile of debt and financial instruments that will undoubtedly affect just about everyone everywhere that ever borrowed money or otherwise was involved in a financial contract.

More importantly, a ton of US municipal bond debt is also pegged to LIBOR. At this juncture, no one has been able to quantify the monetary value of any of the LIBOR interest rate overcharges but the municipal bond business in the US was quite scandalous and corrupt even before LIBORgate broke.

Municipal Bonds: A license to steal and taxpayers don't even know they are being financially raped

Bloomberg reported in 12/2011 that total outstanding US municipal bond debt was $3.7 trillion, here.

The U.S. municipal-bond market is 28 percent larger than reported in June, according to a quarterly Federal Reserve release, which used new data showing individuals own more state and local-government debt.

The face value of outstanding municipal bonds was $3.7 trillion at the end of September...

I suspect that states, counties and cities are attempting to calculate to what extent they got ripped off in LIBORgate.  If they aren't, they should be.

Interest Rate-Fixing Scandal Swindles Baltimore, Other Municipalities out of Millions of Dollars

In 2011, rate hikes cost DC public transport riders over $109 million, and much of that money is going straight to major Wall Street banks. But only recently have observers begun to find out why.


According to a recent report from the Refund Transit Coalition, more than 100 government units nationwide - transit agencies, pension funds, and municipalities - are currently tied into more than 1,100 different debt-swap-deals with major banks.

And a large portion of those deals pegged the interest rates paid out to public-sector investors to the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor. Ongoing investigations into Barclays and other major financial institutions have found that banks conspired to manipulate Libor as far back as 2005, resulting in massive profits for some insider-traders and massive losses for thousands of investors around the world.

The city of Baltimore is taking all 19 of the banks responsible for setting Libor to court, alleging that the suppression of Libor lost the city millions on its debt-swapping agreements.

What we actually know about the extent of the LIBORgate fraud is barely the tip of the iceberg or probably more like the head of a straight pin.

LIBORgate is HUGE and it's not likely that any government body can cover it up because civil lawsuits alleging outright fraud will be flying fast and furious.

TARP's Neil Barofsky, Who Estimated the Bankster Bailout Could Reach 24 Trillion, is Out With a Tell All Book

In July, 2009, Neol Barofsky, TARP's Inspector General, said “The total potential federal government support could reach up to $23.7 trillion” according to the New York Times, here.

Barofsky also said “Our goal is to bring transparency, to put things in context.”.   Barofsky was the chief administrator of the bankster bailout program. Fast forward 3 years and Barofksy has left government and is out with a book, Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street, that is highly critical of the bailout.  Barofsky's book apparently unloads on a lot of troubling issues, including the total lack of transparency throughout the entire bailout fiasco. MSNBC reports:

Barofsky’s complaint: Neil Barofsky, who served as the special inspector general of TARP, is out with a Bloomberg op-ed previewing his new book, and this op-ed is highly critical of the U.S. Treasury Department on a number of levels. It’s critical of Dodd-Frank but it’s also critical of the big banks. It provides fodder to both the Tea Party right and the Elizabeth Warren left. Bottom line: It’s a harsh assessment of Washington and Wall Street -- and one that is under the radar right now but gives fuel to the criticism that nothing has really changed. Barofsky, in his op-ed, seems to both be disappointed in Dodd-Frank and simultaneously worried that some of the potential teeth in Dodd-Frank won’t ever come to fruition.

Dodd Frank was a crafty and destructive piece of legislation that actually expanded bankster and Federal Reserve powers under the guise of consumer protection.   That's the standard game plan of the politicos who are bribed with campaign contributions to pass legislation to concentrate wealth and power all in the name of protecting the people.  What a freaking joke!

While Barofsky is disappointed and expected the government to do more for the people, his statist liberal views do in fact disclose some interesting and relevant facts that are documented in his Bloomberg, op-ed piece titled Bungled Bank Bailout Leaves Behind Righteous Anger.

In the year since I stepped down as the special inspector general of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the sadly predictable consequences of the government’s disparate treatment of Wall Street and Main Street have only become worse. As the banks amass size and power, Main Street continues to get pummeled....

In June 2011, Treasury appeared to take a tentative step toward holding the mortgage servicers accountable for the widespread misconduct in the program by pledging to withhold the incentive payments to three of the largest banks -- Wells Fargo (WFC) & Co., Bank of America Corp. (BAC) and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) -- until they came into compliance with HAMP’s rules....

Treasury couldn’t even keep this modest commitment.

In return for what was touted as a $25 billion payout, the banks received broad immunity from future civil cases arising out of their widespread use of forged, fraudulent or completely fabricated documents to foreclose on homeowners....

As a result, the settlement will actually involve money flowing, once again, from taxpayers to the banks.

Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times and always humorously enlightening and delightful because she does suffer from numerous bouts of incredible lucidity for an NYT journalist, wrote her 'buzz saw' piece on Barofsky's book.

Into the Bailout Buzz Saw

His story is illuminating, if deeply depressing. We tag along with Mr. Barofsky, a former federal prosecutor, as he walks into a political buzz saw as the special inspector general for TARP. Government officials, he says, eagerly served Wall Street interests at the public’s expense, and regulators were captured by the very industry they were supposed to be regulating. He says he was warned about being too aggressive in his work, lest he jeopardize his future career.

And so Mr. Barofsky, who formerly prosecuted Colombian drug lords as an assistant United States attorney in New York City, is schooled in the ways of Washington. One telling vignette comes early on in his book, when he is advised by inspectors general in other agencies about how to do his job....

Thus the collision course was set between Mr. Barofsky and a crew of complacent, bank-friendly Treasury officials.

Barofsky learned what sane folks already knew:  the Banksters rule America and the government takes its orders from the Banksters.

We really don't know the true cost of the Bankster bailout, probably because it's a well guarded government secret, in addition to being an ongoing 'rape of the taxpayers' process.  But here's what we have learned from a one time disclosure of the Federal Reserve, not to be confused with Audit the Fed, a bill that never ever gets passed in Congress because Congress Critters also understand who their bosses are.

Have You Heard About The 16 Trillion Dollar Bailout The Federal Reserve Handed To The Too Big To Fail Banks?

I suspect that by the time this whole sinister bankster bailout mess is finished and disclosed that Barofsky's $23.7 trillion bailout estimate will actually be an understatement.