LET THE BANKS FAIL ~ NOBEL ECONIMIST JOSE STIGLITZ

WHAT A REFRESHING IDEA!

DARN GOOD ONE IF YOU ASK THIS PEON.
BUT WHAT DO I KNOW EXCEPT THAT BANKING IS ONE MASSIVE FAIL FOR THE COMMON PERSON?

WHAT DO I KNOW ABOUT HOW THESE LEECHES ARE SUCKING THE LIVES OUT OF EVERYONE THEY CAN WHILE THREATENING MARTIAL LAW IF THEIR DEMANDS FOR EVEN MORE ARE NOT MET?

I JUST KNOW THIS IDEA APPEALS TO ME IF ONLY BECAUSE IT MEANS SOME FAT CAT DOES NOT EARN A $BILLION BONUS BECAUSE HE WAS ABLE TO SHYSTER THE MOST PEOPLE. AMEN DR. STIGLITZ ~ AMEN.

The Government should allow every distressed bank to go bankrupt and set up a fresh banking system under temporary state control rather than cripple the country by propping up a corrupt edifice, according to Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist.

Professor Stiglitz, the former chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told The Daily Telegraph that Britain should let the banks default on their vast foreign operations and start afresh with new set of healthy banks.

"The UK has been hit hard because the banks took on enormously large liabilities in foreign currencies. He asked,

"Should the British taxpayers have to lower their standard of living for 20 years to pay off mistakes that benefited a small elite?"

AMERICANS!!!
ASK YOURSELF THE VERY SAME QUESTION!
THE GREEKS ARE SHOWING
CHUTZPAH AND FIGHTING.
THE ICELANDERS HAVE DONE WITH IT.
GET YOURSELVES IN GEAR FOLKS.

There is an argument for letting the banks go bust. It may cause turmoil but it will be a cheaper way to deal with this in the end. The British Parliament never offered a blanket guarantee for all liabilities and derivative positions of these banks," he said.

Mr Stiglitz said the Government should underwrite all deposits to protect the UK's domestic credit system and safeguard money markets that lubricate lending. It should use the skeletons of the old banks to build a healthier structure.

"The new banks will be more credible once they no longer have these liabilities on their back."

This would work only if NEW people with integrity, unselfishness, and true commitment to humanity were placed in position to run these banks. It would not do to have the old thieves returning, or their proteges or any who are of a similar mindset. Care would have to be taken that, in the creation of this system, there are no hidden traps to snare the people who, in their relief, become careless.

Mr Stiglitz said the City of London would survive the shock of such a default because it would uphold the principle of free market responsibility. "Counter-parties entered into voluntary agreements with the banks and they must accept the consequences," he said.

Such a drastic course of action would be fraught with difficulties and risks, however. It would leave healthy banks in an untenable position since they would have to compete for funds in the markets with state-run entities.

Mr Stiglitz's radical proposal is a "Chapter 11" scheme for households to allow them to bring their debts under control without having to go into bankruptcy.

"Families matter just as much as firms. The US government can borrow at 1pc so why can't it lend directly to poor people for mortgages at 4pc. ," he said

THE FINANCIAL MELTDOWN WAS A CON

Now we know the truth.
The financial meltdown wasn't a mistake
~ it was a con

Goldman Sachs was in the spotlight last November when demonstrators protested outside its Washington offices against executive bonuses. Photograph: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

You know this. Maybe. I knew this ages ago. In the US Greenspan set the wheels in motion under the Reagan Reign. But it has taken far too long for the media to start giving details. Granted this is hardly a blip of a blip considering the overall picture, but it is a start.

By William Hutton
The Observer
April 18, 2010

Hiding behind the complexities of our financial system, banks and other institutions are being accused of fraud and deception, with Goldman Sachs just the latest in the spotlight. This has become the most pressing election issue of all

The global financial crisis, it is now clear, was caused not just by the bankers' colossal mismanagement. No, it was due also to the new financial complexity offering up the opportunity for widespread, systemic fraud. Friday's announcement that the world's most famous investment bank, Goldman Sachs, is to face civil charges for fraud brought by the American regulator is but the latest of a series of investigations that have been launched, arrests made and charges made against financial institutions around the world.

Big Finance in the 21st century turns out to have been Big Fraud.

Yet Britain, centre of the world financial system, has not yet leveled charges against any bank; all that we've seen is the allegation of a high-level insider dealing ring which, embarrassingly, involves a banker advising the government. We have to live with the fiction that our banks and bankers are whiter than white, and any attempt to investigate them and their institutions will lead to a mass exodus to the mountains of Switzerland. The politicians of the Labour and Tory party alike are Bambis amid the wolves.

Just consider the roll call beyond Goldman Sachs.

In Ireland Sean FitzPatrick, the ex-chair of the Anglo Irish bank ~ a bank which looks after the Post Office's financial services ~ was arrested last month and questioned over alleged fraud.

In Iceland last week a dossier assembled by its parliament on the Icelandic banks ~ huge lenders in Britain ~ was handed to its public prosecution service. A court-appointed examiner found that collapsed investment bank Lehman knowingly manipulated its balance sheet to make it look stronger than it was ~ accounts originally audited by the British firm Ernst and Young and given the legal green light by the British firm Linklaters.

In Switzerland UBS has been defending itself from the US's Inland Revenue Service for allegedly running 17,000 offshore accounts to evade tax. Be sure there are more revelations to come ~ except in saintly Britain.

Beneath the complexity, the charges are all rooted in the same phenomenon ~ deception.

Somebody, somewhere, was knowingly fooled by banks and bankers ~ sometimes governments over tax, sometimes regulators and investors over the probity of balance sheets and profits and sometimes, as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) says in Goldman's case, by creating a scheme to enrich one favoured investor at the expense of others ~ including, via RBS, the British taxpayer.

Along the way there is a long list of so-called "entrepreneurs" and "innovators" who were offered loans that should never have been made. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman's CEO, remarked only semi-ironically that his bank was doing God's work. He must wake up every day bitterly regretting the words ever emerged from his mouth.

For the Goldmans case is in some ways the most damaging. The Icelandic banks, Anglo Irish bank and Lehman were all involved in opaque deals and rank bad lending decisions ~ but Goldman allegedly went one step further, according to the SEC actively creating a financial instrument that transferred wealth to one favoured client from others less favoured.

If the Securities and Exchange Commission's case is proved ~ and it is aggressively rebutted by Goldman ~ the charge is that Goldman's vice-president Fabrice Tourre created a dud financial instrument packed with valueless sub-prime mortgages at the instruction of hedge fund client Paulson, sold it to investors knowing it was valueless, and then allowed Paulson to profit from the dud financial instrument.

Goldman says the buyers were "among the most sophisticated mortgage investors" in the world. But this is a used car salesman flogging a broken car he's got from some wide-boy pal to some driver who can't get access to the log-book. Except it was lionized as financial innovation.

The investors who bought the collateralized debt obligation (CDO) were not complete innocents. They had asked for the bond to be validated by an independent expert into residential mortgage-backed securities ~ a company called ACA management. ACA gave the bond the thumbs-up on the understanding from Fabrice Tourre that the hedge fund Paulson were investing in it.

But the SEC says Tourre misled them, a pivotal claim that Goldman denies. The reality was that Paulson was frantically buying credit default swaps in the CDO that would go up in price the more valueless it became ~ a trade that would make more than $1 billion. Worse, Paulson had identified some of the dud sub-prime mortgages that he wanted Tourre to put into the CDO. If the SEC case is true, this was a scam ~ nothing more, nothing less.

Tourre could see what was coming. In one email in January 2007 he wrote: "More and more leverage in the system. The whole building is about to collapse anytime now… only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab[rice Tourre] .. standing in the middle of all these complex highly leveraged exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstrosities". Fabulous Fab, like his boss, will not be feeling very fab today.

The cases not only have a lot in common ~ using financial complexity allegedly to deceive and then using so-called independent experts to validate the deception (lawyers, accountants, credit rating agencies, "portfolio selection agents," etc etc ) ~ but they also show how interconnected the financial system is.

In Iceland Citigroup and Deutsche Bank covered the margin calls of distressed Icelandic business borrowers, deepening the crisis. Lehman uses the lightly regulated London markets and two independent British experts to validate that their "Repo 105s" were "genuine" trades and not their own in-house liability. The American authorities pursued a Swiss bank over aiding and abetting US nationals to evade tax.

Bankers will complain these cases all involve one or two misguided individuals, but that most banking is above board and was just the victim of irrational exuberance, misguided belief in free market economics and faulty risk management techniques.

Obviously that is true ~ but, sadly, there is much more to the crisis.

Andrew Haldane, executive director of the Bank of England, highlights the remarkable reduction in the risk weighting of bank assets between 1997 and 2007. Put simply, Europe's and the US's large banks exploited the weak international agreement on bank capital requirements in the so-called Basel agreement in 2004 to reclassify the risk of their loans and trading instruments.

They did not just reduce the risk by 5 or 10%. Breathtakingly, they claimed their new risk management techniques were so wonderful that the riskiness of their assets was up to half of what it had been ~ despite property and share prices cresting to new all-time highs.

Brutally, the banks knowingly gamed the system to grow their balance sheets ever faster and with even less capital underpinning them in the full knowledge that everything rested on the bogus claim that their lending was now much less risky. That was not all they were doing.

As Michael Lewis describes in The Big Short, credit default swaps had been deliberately created as an asset class by the big investment banks to allow hedge funds to speculate against collateralised debt obligations.

The banks were gaming the regulators and investors alike ~ and they knew full well what they were doing.

Simon Johnson's 13 Bankers shows how the major American banks deployed vast political lobbying power and money to create the relaxed regulatory environment in which all this could take place. In Britain no money changed hands. Gordon Brown offered light-touch regulation for free ~ egged on by the Tories, who wanted to go further.

This was the context in which Goldman's Fabulous Fab created the disputed CDOs, Sean FitzPatrick allegedly moved loans between banks and Lehman created its Repo 105s along with the entire "debt mule" structure revealed this weekend of inter-related companies to shuffle debt around its empire.

London and New York had become the centre of an international financial system in which the purpose of banking became making money from money ~ and where the complexity of the "innovations" allowed extensive fraud and deception.

Now it has all collapsed, to be bailed out by western taxpayers. The banks are resisting reform ~ and want to cling on to the business practices and business model that has so appallingly failed.

It is obvious why:

it makes them very rich.

The politicians tread carefully, only proposing what the bankers say is congruent with their definition of what banking should be. Labour and Tories alike are united in opposing improved EU regulation of hedge funds, buying the propaganda those operations had nothing to do with the crisis. Perhaps Paulson's trades at Goldman, and the hedge funds' appetite for speculating in credit default swaps, may disabuse them.

It is time to reframe the question.

Banks and financial institutions should do what economy and society want them to do ~ support enterprise, direct credit to where it is needed and be part of the system that generates investment and innovation.

Andrew Haldane ~ and the governor of the Bank of England ~ are right. We need to break up our banks, limit their capacity to speculate and bring them back to earth.

Britain should also launch an official investigation into what went wrong ~ and hand the findings to the Serious Fraud Office. This needs to become this election campaign's number one issue ~ not one which either a compromised Labour party or a temporizing Conservative party will relish. The Lib Dems, the fiercest critics of the banks, have begun to get very lucky.

CRISIS TIMETABLE

September 2007 Funding problems at Northern Rock triggers the first run on a British bank. It is nationalized in February 2008.

April 2008 Bear Stern faces bankruptcy after a run on the company wipes out cash reserves in less than two days. Backed by the Federal Reserve, JPMorgan buys up shares at far below market value.

September 2008 Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy protection, becoming the first major bank to collapse since the start of the credit crisis.

December 2008 Bernard Madoff arrested for operating the largest Ponzi scheme in history.

January 2009 The Bank of England launches £200bn quantitative easing.

March 2010 Former chairman of Anglo Irish bank Sean Fitzpatrick is arrested in Dublin after failing to disclose details of loans worth millions from the bank.

April 2010 Northern Rock former directors, David Baker and Richard Barclay, are fined £504,000 and £140,000 for deliberately misleading analysts prior to nationalization.

April 2010 The US Securities and Exchange Commission accuses Goldman Sachs of "defrauding investors by misstating and omitting key facts".

Joanna Aniel Bidar

ICELAND VIKINGS STAND TALL PT 1: AN EXAMPLE TO US ALL

The Vikings of Iceland have told this British banker they do not intend to pay the money being demanded of them ~ what will happen next? Icelanders need the support of the international community in this endeavour because America is most likely next and their national debt is much much larger.

The case of Iceland and its financial shenanigans is, if nothing else, intriguing and very educational and encouraging. A beacon in the darkness for so many who are embroiled in this struggle. It is not so much for many people involved, but I mean no disrespect. It is in the way this situation is dealt with and in how various parties try to come out on top.

On one side you have the bankers pushing for debt slavery of the Icelanders as they have to so many other countries in their financial grip, on the other you have the descendants of Vikings, a fiercely independent lot when threatened.

For those of you who do not know the details, here is the background of the current standoff between Iceland and the arrogant EU international bankers. Iceland had 3 main banks who all, albeit to various degrees, made unrealistic profits for investors and depositors in early 21st century times, and then went bust. Of course the vulture-like IMF is involved as you might imagine.

One bank, Icesave, which had many clients in England and Holland, owes these clients some $6 billion, a sum the Iceland government is held responsible for and initially seems to have agreed to pay.

The people of Iceland, all 320,000 of them as it were, have started questioning why they should pay for foreign investors' losses with banks with whom they have no connection other than that they happen to be located in their country.

Britain's decision to put Iceland on some terror alert list because of the banking affair is likely a big factor in this, as well as in the decision by the president to let the people decide in a referendum on February 20 whether they want to pay back the losses of foreign investors who had accounts with Icesave only so they could get a few basis points more interest on their funds. It doesn't look like they will.

I like their spunk already!

This is the independence that made America so great in the past.

This may put Iceland on some black list, with the IMF threatening to withdraw emergency funds and Scandinavian loans in peril. The Dutch threat to block Iceland's entry into the EU is seen in Reykjavik as similar to Britain's terror list boondoggle. The prevailing sentiment these days among the geysers can best be summarized like this:

"We may be small, but we ain't your patsy".

That is a sentiment that may provoke a lot of sympathy, provided the Icelanders play their cards right. It certainly has mine!

To be honest though, how great is membership in the EU for the common people anyway?
The rulers of the European union consider the will of the people to be no more than an annoying speed bump which slows down the implementation of their supremely enlightened policies ~ policies which would end up in loss of all freedoms ~ a totalitarian state.

Two Icelandic women tell their leaders how they feel.

Doesn't the rebelliousness of this whole affair appeal to some latent part of your psyche? I, for one, am thrilled to see a nation of people with the cojones to stand up to this group of Rothschild-manipulated financial thugs. The soul-crushing mechanism of the Union is anathema for any freedom loving soul.

Please read Ten Reasons to Get Rid of the European Union .

In the next 6 weeks they will come under huge international pressure to pay up or else, for there's nothing the international community fears more than members who don’t play by the rules, no matter how inane and insane they are. Bean counters with no imagination seem to feel deep terror when their power is threatened.

Plus, of course, Iceland is not some small African nation full of poor black people; it’s a small European nation full of the kind of people that wealthy US and EU citizens can identify with: white and relatively affluent.

They could be your neighbors.
They could be your family.
They could be you.

So how reasonable is it for Britain and the Netherlands to demand restitution of losses suffered? Interesting question this. The answer is not that easy, since it begs the next question.

Who is to blame for the losses?

Could it be the bankers, who went megalomaniacal, and got much bigger than banks based in what is, population-wise, not more than a mid-size town ought to be. But Iceland is a member of the EEA, the European Economic Area, which gives its banks the right to expand to the rest of the EU.

So alright, let's see. There are quite a few options here. Think about them.

First to blame: the bankers.

Second: The Icelandic government, who should have regulated its banks much closer.

Third, the governments of Holland and England, who should have done due diligence and demanded far more strict guarantees from the banks.

Fourth, the Dutch and British investors, individuals, local governments and companies, who all should have read the fine print.

Fifth, the people of Iceland, who were living it up with the cash floating in freely.

One of many demonstrations in Reykjavik.
In this icy country, with its low population,
such a large gathering is very unusual.

But we all know how blame moves. The investors point to their own governments, who didn't warn them.

These governments point to the government of Iceland, which didn’t warn them.

That government points to the bankers, who went nuts, but who they still have to cover for.

Finally, the people of Iceland point to all of the above and say they should all have been wiser, and the fact that they were not doesn’t mean Icelanders should now have to fork over, no matter how certain parties like to interpret laws and regulations.

Some things just don't feel right.

How and what do we feel about this,
who are not directly affected by any of it?

Allow me to numb and dumb down the numbers a bit, the US at 308 million citizens is about 1000 times bigger than Iceland (320,000). Which means that the US equivalent of what the British and Dutch are demanding from Icelanders would be, loosely, $6 trillion.

Now what would you say the odds are that the American people would agree to pay that kind of money, if it were payment for what their banks have (mis-)done in the past, to a group of foreign investors? Let's say Chinese and Japanese?

Angry Brits, feeling a tad cannibalistic towards the banking community.

I may be wrong, of course, but I have the feeling that I know what Americans would think of that. They'd be marching in the streets, on their way to embassies and consulates, if not private businesses. They'd say:

we have a hard enough time ourselves as it is, and we ain't paying no foreigners who weren't making sure they knew what they were doing.

The same reaction would come in London and Amsterdam as well, naturally.

Funny thing is that the British and Dutch governments were very quick to guarantee their citizens' losses ~ then claiming them back from Reykjavik. There doesn't seem to be any legal obligation for them to do so, it looks more like an election-related issue.

There are all sorts of depositor protection schemes in place, that's true enough, but everyone could have known that the established $30,000 guarantee from Iceland for every depositor account wasn't worth much, given that it’s backed only by the full faith and credit of 320,000 people. Britain is 200 times bigger than that?

Icelanders revert back to their Viking past, prepared to take on the EU!

AMERICANS AND ICELANDERS ARE IN THE SAME BOAT!

The main difference between them is that the Icelanders are knowledgeable, unified and standing up for themselves. The Americans, on the whole, don’t understand what's going on. Some know something is wrong but the majority just hide and refuse to consider these issues.

FACT: The US government has already pledged $14 trillion in public funds ~ with a total risk of up to $24 trillion ~ for US bank losses. It's just that American banks are covered by the ability of the US to borrow enough money in international markets to cover their losses, something for which Iceland is simply too small. And also, the US gets to bleep around with accounting rules, so bank losses can remain hidden for a long time ~ but not forever!

Meanwhile, the most devious bankers of all keep playing with the Americans luring them all deeper and deeper into future debt slavery. The people are not only oblivious, they do not think such a thing is possible!

The bankers took the clothes off their backs and
they still refused to get their heads out of the sand!

So while it may look like the situations are entirely different, they’re not really. On the ground level, it's the citizens who are being forced to pay for institutional gambling debts.

This is the old adage of keeping profits private and making losses public.

These thieves know just how furious the people would be to know their coffers swell after their regulated and planned recessions. When the Rothschild agents, including the Schiffs and Rockefellers were hashing out the terms of the takeover of the Federal Reserve, there was included a measure that would leave the people in debt for any shortages created by the bankers. THIS is why the Federal Reserve was fought against by many of the early Presidents and possibly one of the reasons for the assassination of JFK, his desire to abolish that institution.

China doesn't go to Obama to demand payment guarantees tomorrow morning, but it's all just a matter of size.

That size determines that the Icelandic situation is far more transparent, since smaller makes simpler. But down the line, the Iceland banks weren't the greatest gamblers, it was Wall Street and the City of London.

These two places are the largest conglomerations of banking and trade in the World. London is the main international city of banking and calls the ultimate shots on Wall Street, the largest centre of commercial trade.

Both places are controlled by the Rothschilds and their minions. whose ultimate goal is the enslavement of the people of North America, much as are the slave people of industrial China who was recipient of most of the manufacturing base that was once American.

The $20,000 that Icelanders "owe" per capita ~ in the eyes of others ~ isn't really the issue; it won’t kill them. They just take a stand against what they see as being bullied.

The amount Americans "owe", though, is already more than twice as much per capita at $14 trillion. And there's no end in sight, since none of that money has been used to actively solve problems, it's all merely the sleight of accounting that keeps the problem of massive national debt hidden for a while longer.

Here's waiting for the moment Americans become more like Icelanders, and stand up against bullies.

Don't hold your breath, and realize that by the time any sizable group stands up, the amounts owed will be a multiple of $20,000 and enough to generate debt and poverty for years, if not decades, to come.

And do you know what the funniest thing about it all is?

In America it wouldn't even take 320,000 people
standing up, for real,
to change policies and history in a heartbeat.

But they're not there.
They’re in Iceland.
Size matters.
But courage even more so.

SELLING OUT AMERICA TO WALL STREET

Before reading the article by Stephen Lendmen, please read the quote below from "The Prince of the Jews in Constantinople" to Chemor, the Chief Rabbi of Spain, regarding the Spanish Jews' being exiled from Spain for one unsavory reason or another.

This passage will explain the all out genocidal mindset America along with almost every other country on earth deals with today, but for this article, focus primarily the fiscal problems. In dark green I have added many quotes as well as my own $.02 worth of Snippits and Snappits.

In 1492, Chemor, the Chief Rabbi of Spain received the following advice from the Grand Sanhedrin (Elders of Zion) in Constantinople:

l. As for what you say that the king of Spain obliges you to become Christians: do it, since you cannot do otherwise.

2. As for what you say about the command to despoil you of your property: make your sons merchants that they may despoil, little by little, the Christians of theirs.

3. As for what you say about making attempts on your lives: make your sons doctors and apothecaries that they may take away Christians' lives.

4. As for what you say of their destroying your synagogues: make your sons canons and clerics in order that they may destroy their churches.

5. As for the other vexations you complain of: arrange that your sons become advocates and lawyers, and see that they always mix in affairs of State, that by putting Christians under your yoke you may dominate the world and be avenged on them.

6. Do not swerve from this order that we give you, because you will find by experience that, humiliated as you are, you will reach the actuality of power."

Signed: Prince of the Jews of Constantinople." This quote from: Julio-Inigrez de Medrano ~ "La Silva Curiosa" 1608

In 1806, in the MSS of Napoleon, Napoleon remarked: "By what miracle did whole provinces of France become heavily mortgaged to the Jews, when there are only sixty thousand of them in this country?"

The central bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the Principles and form of our Constitution. I am an Enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but Coin. If the American People allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the People of all their Property until their Children will wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered. " ~ Thomas Jefferson

By Stephen Lendman

February 19, 2010

Lenin said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.

By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some.

As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery

Project Censored's top 2010 story was "US Congress Sells Out to Wall Street," highlighting that since 2001, "eight of the most troubled firms have donated $64.2 million to congressional candidates, presidential candidates and the Republican and Democratic parties." It's no surprise that they own them, what showed in a March 2009 Essential Information and Consumer Education Foundation report titled "Sold out; How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America."

The accompanying press release said:

Over the past decade, "$5 billion in political contributions bought Wall Street freedom from regulation, (and) restraint." From 1998 ~ 2008, "Wall Street investment firms, commercial banks, hedge funds, real estate companies and insurance conglomerates (the FIRE sector)" spent over $1.7 billion in political contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists, in return for which:

~ they were freed from regulation;

~ could speculate on financial derivatives and an alphabet soup of securitized garbage, including asset-backed securities (ABSs), mortgage-backed securities (MBSs), collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs), collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), collateralized bond obligations (CBOs), credit default swaps (CDSs), and collateralized fund obligations (CFOs) ~ combined, sliced, diced, packaged, repackaged, and sold in tranches to sophisticated and ordinary investors, many unwittingly through mutual funds, 401(k)s, pensions, and the like;

~ could merge commercial and investment banking and insurance operations;

~ bilk investors and the public through fraudulent schemes; and

~ get trillions of bailout dollars when the economy crashed.

NOTE: KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS = DEATH OF THE HEALTHY "BUSINESS CYCLE" AND THE LIFE BLOOD OF PORNOGRAPHERS AND SPECULATIVE GREED,WHILE BREAKING THE BACKS OF THE WORKING POOR, THE ELDERLY AND THOSE ON FIXED INCOME

For decades, Wall Street and successive governments colluded to defraud the public, using various schemes to transfer wealth from them to the privileged. Carter spearheaded deregulation. Nixon and Ford began by hiring Alfred Kahn to head the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB).

The 1978 Airline Deregulation Act followed. It dissolved the CAB, removed industry restraints, eased consolidation, and subsequent bills deregulated trucking and railroads ~ the 1980 Motor Carrier Act and 1980 Staggers Rail Act, following the 1976 Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act.

Carter also phased out interest rate deposit ceilings, and gave the Fed more power through the 1980 Depository Institutions and Monetary Control Act, removing restraints and enabling subsequent administrations to go further.

Under Reagan, energy deregulation followed, notably oil and gas, then electric utilities under GHW Bush and Clinton, the result being high prices, brownouts, and Enron-like scandals.

In the 1980s, the 1982 Alternative Mortgage Transactions Parity Act led to exotic feature mortgages with adjustable rates or interest-only. They carry low "teaser" rates for several years, after which they're adjusted much higher, often making loans unaffordable, especially for low-income, high-risk borrowers using subprime and Alt-A loans.

Those of you who blame homeless people for their own problems of losing their homes, remember this last. They were set up and were running on optimism as I mentioned in my recent work on the betrayal of false optimism. For so many all it would take is one major illness or accident and they are on the streets for owing to the medical organizations. Or they lost their job because Wall Street sent their job to China or India to pay much lower salaries.

MIND CONTROL ~ OPTIMISM ~ INVISIBLE ENTRAPMENT

The 1982 Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act deregulated thrifts and fueled fraud, so much that the Savings and Loan crisis followed, hundreds of banks failed, and taxpayers got stuck with most of the $160 billion cost. In 1987, the Government Accountability Office (GOA) declared the S & L deposit insurance fund insolvent because of mounting bank failures.

In 1988, global regulators imposed minimum bank capital requirements, known as the Basel Accord or Basel I, enforced in the G-10 countries.

In 1989, the Financial Institutions Reform and Recovery Act abolished the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and FSLIC, transferring them to the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) and FDIC. It also created the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) to liquidate troubled assets, assume Federal Home Loan Bank Board insurance functions, and clean up a troubled system.

Clinton era telecommunications deregulation let media and telecommunication giants consolidate, gave new digital television broadcast spectrum space to current TV station owners, and let cable companies increase their local monopoly positions.

His 1994 Reigle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act let bank holding companies operate in more than one state. In 1996, the Fed reinterpreted Glass-Steagall to let bank holding companies earn up to 25% of their revenue from investment banking.

The 1998 Citicorp-Travelers merger followed, combining a commercial/investment bank with an insurance company ahead of the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, also called the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) authorizing it.

Have you taken a look at your money? It says "Federal Reserve Note" which means it is an instrument of debt. There is no real money in circulation.How the ordinary person living a life of work and children, in an increasingly illiterate and uneducated society, is supposed to know and follow all of this, or even be aware of it, is difficult to fathom.

However, they would trust and then, when the ax fell, be told "the information is out there. You do read don't you?" Between the facts I have just mentioned, and soccer with the kids on Saturday, and the fact they trust, they would never even conceived of such a thing. Such is the way with most Christians of which America is primarily composed. Their religion teaches trust while the religion of the vultures tells them to prey upon such weaknesses.

Some Background

During the Great Depression, (also a Wall Street Manipulation) the Bank Act of 1933 (Glass-Steagall) created the FDIC, insuring bank deposits up to $5,000 and separating commercial from investment banks and insurance companies, among other provisions to curb speculation.

Senator Carter Glass was its prime mover and got Senator Henry Steagall to go along by including his amendment to protect deposits.

Glass believed banks should stick to lending, not speculate, deal, or hold corporate securities. He blamed them for the 1929 crash, subsequent bank failures, and the Great Depression. The Bank Act of 1933 passed quickly to curb them.

No Longer since the Neoliberal 1990s

Later weakened, it still curbed abusive practices until GLBA repealed it, let commercial and investment banks and insurance companies combine, and facilitated consolidated power, fraud and abuse that followed. Other deregulatory rules permitted off-balance sheet accounting to let banks hide liabilities.

In 2000, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) passed, legitimizing swap agreements and other hybrid instruments, at the heart of today's problems by ending regulatory oversight of derivatives and leveraging that turned Wall Street more than ever into a casino.

In her book "It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street," former insider Nomi Prins explained CFMA as follows:

"That act ushered in tremendous growth of unregulated commodity trades through its "Enron Loophole (for its Enron On-Line, the first Internet-based commodity transactions system to let companies) trade energy and other commodity futures on unregulated exchanges."

It also sparked growth in the unregulated credit derivatives trades that bet on defaults of corporations or loans, which became the main ingredient in the hot new Wall Street financial gumbo. Credit derivatives were a type of insurance contract written against not just one corporation or loan but on investments that scarfed up bunches of subprime loans (junk) and stuffed them into the unregulated CDOs that imploded and hastened the greater lending crisis."

Credit default swaps became the most widely traded credit derivative. As unregulated insurance bets between two parties on whether or not a company's bonds would default, financial writer Ellen Brown asked in her April 11, 2008 article titled, "Credit Default Swaps: Evolving Financial Meltdown and Derivative Disaster Du Jour."

What if "the smartest guys in the room designed their credit default swaps (but) forgot to ask one thing ~ what if the parties on the other side of the bet don't have the money to pay up?" In late 2007, when the financial crisis hit, they didn't, causing a "super-sized bubble" to deflate.

New Deal reforms were enacted to prevent it. Deregulatory madness made it inevitable and the subsequent global economic fallout that continues ~ compounded by what Danny Schechter explained in his book, titled "The Crime of Our Time," calling the financial collapse "a crime story (involving) high status white-collar crooks." Their schemes included:

~ "Fraud and control frauds;

~ Insider trading;

~ Theft and conspiracy;

~ Misrepresentation;

~ Ponzi schemes;

~ False accounting;

~ Embezzling;

~ Diverting funds into obscenely high salaries and obscene bonuses;

~ Bilking investors, customers and homeowners;

~ Conflicts of interest;

~ Mesmerizing regulators;

~ Manipulating markets;

~ Tax frauds;

~ Making loans and then arranging that they fail;

~ Engineering phony financial products: (and)

~ Misleading the public."

Worst of all, they got away with it, still do, and got trillions of dollars in bailout money as a bonus, free money from the Fed plus interest on Fed held reserves.

On Hyde Island, when the Federal Reserve Act was hashed out in great secrecy by the enemies of America; the bankers' days were spent seeking a way that the bankers could make the greatest profit but never held responsible for the debts of those whom they had impoverished, leaving the latter victimized yet again with almost no real shot at freedom.

Who created the Federal Reserve? Funny you ask, I just happen to have their names here.

In November OF 1910, a group of vultures met at the Jekyll Island Hunt Club on Jekyll Island, Georgia. What were they hunting? The biggest prize of all, the absolute and complete control of all the money in America which means control of all America and with it the power to enslave all the people.

Senator Nelson Aldrich (Nelson Rockefeller's maternal grandfather);

A. Piatt Andrew, Economist and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury;

Frank Vanderlip, President of the National City Bank of New York;

Henry P. Norton, President of Morgan's First National Bank of New York;

Paul Moritz Warburg, a German who was partner in the New York banking house of Kuhn, Loeb Co.;

Benjamin Strong, an aid to J. P. Morgan.

Bernard Baruch.

Paul Warburg was credited as the architect of the bill which was passed by Congress and signed by traitorous Woodrow Wilson on December 23, after almost all of Congress and Senate had gone home for the holidays. It was entitled the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. America once again had a central bank but this time they had placed America under an absolute dictatorship

THE TEN MEMBER BANKS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE

All owned by the Rothschilds

Rothschild Bank of London

Warburg Bank of Hamburg

Rothschild Bank of Berlin

Lehman Brothers of New York

Lazard Brothers of Paris

Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York

Israel Moses Seif Banks of Italy

Goldman, Sachs of New York

Warburg Bank of Amsterdam

Chase Manhattan Bank of New York

The Absence of Regulatory Oversight

Earlier New Deal reforms were long gone, but for the most part worked when in place. The Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 followed the Securities Act of 1933, requiring offers and security sales to be registered, pursuant to the Constitution's interstate commerce clause. Previously, they were governed by state laws, so-called "blue sky laws" to protect against fraud.

The 1934 law regulated secondary trading of financial securities and established the SEC under Section 4 to enforce the new Act, later under the 1939 Trust Indenture Act, the 1940 Investment Company Act, the Investment Advisors Act the same year, Sarbanes-Oxley of 2002, and the 2006 Credit Rating Agency Reform Act.

The SEC was established to enforce federal securities laws, the security industry, the nation's financial and options exchanges, and other electronic securities markets and instruments unknown in the 1930s, including derivatives and other forms of speculation. In principle, it's charged with uncovering wrongdoing, assuring investors aren't swindled, and keeping the nation's financial markets free from fraud and other abuses.

That was then, but no longer. Under George Bush, the SEC was more facilitator than enforcer, a paper tiger, not a guardian of the public trust. It:

~ turned a blind eye to fraud and abuse;

~ protected Wall Street, not investors;

~ neutered its enforcement staff's authority;

~ adopted voluntary regulation;

~ let investment banks hold less reserve capital;

~ freely use leverage;

~ incur much higher debt levels; and

~ pretty much do what they pleased,
only occasionally punishing an offender with a wrist-slap.

Financial fraud prosecutions dropped sharply, practically never against powerful, well-connected firms, the Bernie Madoff exception because he confessed to his sons, and they turned him in for running what he called a "giant Ponzi scheme."

Obama exacerbated the worst bad practices.
Wall gets a free ride.
Foxes guard the hen house.
Inmates run the asylum.
Regulators don't regulate.
Investigations aren't conducted.
Criminal fraud is ignored.
Nothing is done to curb it, and except for Madoff,
only small fries need worry.
Washington protects the big ones,
Obama assigning Mary Schapiro the task as his SEC chief.

She's a consummate insider, spent years promoting Wall Street self-regulation, headed the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), was the National Association of Securities Dealers' (NASD) chairman, president, and CEO, ran the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and is expert at quashing fraud investigations.

Except for high profile cases too big to hide (like Countrywide's Angelo Mozilo and Texas financier Robert Allen Sanford), she's treaded lightly on the rich and powerful, is doing nothing to curb insider trading, front-running, market manipulation, and other abuses.

Even the Wall Street Journal, commenting on her appointment, said her regulatory record "shows she has infrequently pursued tough action against big Wall Street firms." A year later, her job performance proves it, made easier by decades of deregulation.

The very moment a goy seeks happiness
outside himself,
he becomes our willing servant.
~ The Hidden Tyranny: Interview with Harold Wallace Rosenthal

In 2003, the Controller of the Currency, John Hawke, Jr. preempted state predatory lending laws (in violation of the 10th Amendment), meaning nationally chartered banks (including the nation's biggest) would come under federal standards, not more stringent state ones. According to former New York Attorney General and Governor, Eliot Spitzer:

"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."

In 2004, Basel II replaced Basel I with more comprehensive guidelines, ostensibly to ensure banks hold capital reserves appropriate to their lending and investment practices. In other words, the more risk, the greater the reserves, but given lax regulatory oversight, banks pretty much do what they want, and Obama gives them free reign, all the easier with trillions in bailout dollars.

In 2007, the Fed's Term Auction Facility extended loans to depository institutions with no public disclosure, unlike its discount window operations. In addition, global regulators let commercial banks set their own capital requirements, based on internal "risk-assessment models."

Regulators ignored predatory lending practices. They:

~ overrode state consumer protection laws to curb exploitive lending and other abuses;

~ prevented victims from suing predatory loan issuing firms;

~ freed Fannie, Freddie and giant Wall Street players to operate recklessly;

~ let them hide toxic assets by off-balance sheet accounting;
Financial Accounting Standards Board rules allow it,
and the Security Industry and Financial Markets Association
and the American Securitization Forum have
lobbied furiously to keep them unchanged;
in other words, to deceive the public
by letting insolvent institutions look healthy;

~ let them eliminate some of their own
(Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros. and Merrill Lynch)
to remove competition;

~ abandoned antitrust and other regulatory principles;

~ created too-big-to-fail institutions; and

~ let them do anything they wished, free from meaningful oversight.

Credit rating agencies played their part as well because of their relationship with issuers. They ignored high-risk financial instruments, rated them highly, and duped investors to believe they were safe. The SEC could have intervened but didn't. The 2006 Credit Rating Agencies Reform Act requires regulators to establish clear guidelines to determine which ones qualify as NRSROs (Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations).

The SEC is supposed to monitor their internal record-keeping and prevent conflicts of interest, but can't regulate their methodology and must approve their standards even knowing they're flawed.

One hand thus feeds the other. Conspiratorially, the regulator and credit agencies turn a blind eye to abuses, cry foul when it's too late, then promise greater diligence next time. Change, of course, never comes, so next time is like last time until so extreme the whole system collapses, harming ordinary people the most.

When ordinary people speak out at the wrong time, warning others of what is being done, they are silenced by the thieves in many ways which range from being called "anti semitic" or a "conspiracy wing nut job" to being harassed and possibly more violent methods taken.

After the 2008 Bear Stearns collapse, special lending facilities opened the discount window to investment banks, accepting a broad range of asset-backed securities, principally toxic ones, as collateral - what economist Michael Hudson called "cash for trash." Numerous other programs followed, including:

~ the 2008 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (ESSA) establishing the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to trade bad assets for good ones;

~ the 2008 New York Fed administered Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) to lend up to $1 trillion on a non-recourse basis to holders of certain AAA-rated asset-backed securities (ABS) backed by newly and recently originated consumer and small business loans;

~ Fed purchases of money market instruments;

~ the Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP) to subsidize toxic asset purchases with government guarantees; and

~ trillions of dollars in bank bailouts; according to Neil Barofsky, the Special Treasury Department's TARP Inspector General, banks got or were pledged up to $23.7 trillion, or the equivalent of an $80,000 liability for every American; in March 2009, Bloomberg reported that the Treasury and Fed "spent, lent, or committed $12.8 trillion" up to that point, and more was available for the asking, besides other free money at near zero percent rates plus interest on reserves held by the Fed.

We Jews glory in the fact that the stupid goy have never realized that we are the parasites consuming an increasing portion of production while the producers are continually receiving less and less. ~ The Hidden Tyranny: Interview with Harold Wallace Rosenthal

Wall Street never had it so good. For the public, hard times are worsening as America sinks deeper into depression, a protracted one according to some experts hitting the needy and disadvantaged hardest. The land of the free is now the most callous, the result of what former Wall Street and government insider Catherine Austin Fitts calls a "financial coup d'etat."

Of course they hit these age groups hardest, as well and the physically imperfect, this is "survival of the fittest" banking style to make sure only the ones who can gernerate money happier. The sooner the old ones are gone, memories of what was are removed to give smarter or wiser idea to the new more controlled younger ones.

She explains the "pump(ing) and dump(ing) of the entire American economy," duping the public, fleecing trillions of dollars, and it's more than just "a process (to destroy) the middle class. (It's) genocide (by other means) ~ a much more subtle and lethal version than ever before perpetrated by the scoundrels of our history texts."

The scheme includes abusive market manipulation,

"fraudulent housing (and other bubbles),
pump and dump schemes,
naked short selling,
precious metals price suppression,
and active intervention in the markets by the government and central bank"
along with insiders trading on privileged information unavailable to the public.
It's part of a government ~ business partnership
for enormous profits through "legislation, contracts,
regulat(ory laxness), financing, (and) subsidies" ~

a conspiratorial plot to transfer
household wealth to powerful special interests.

Here's a taste of the consequences, courtesy of economist David Rosenberg on February 16. He reported that "credit contraction continues unabated," and the numbers are staggering:

~ $30 billion in the past week;

~ $100 billion in the first six weeks of 2010, "a historic 16% annualized decline;"

~ since the crisis erupted in fall 2007, $740 billion, "a record 10% decline;" and

` "The fact that credit has dropped at a 16% annual rate since the turn of the year is testament to how the credit contraction is actually accelerating."

And it's broad-based:

~ consumer loans down at a 12% annual rate year to date;

~ real estate down 13.5% annualized;

~ commercial and industrial loans down at a 19.3% annual rate; and

~ short-term business credit down $14 billion year to date.

Rosenberg calls it "alarming," especially "since the bulk of the fiscal and US dollar stimulus is behind us, not ahead of us....The era of the 'green shoots' is officially dead."

Europe is mired in recession.

Britain faces a possible 2010 sovereign debt crisis,
spiking yields and raising borrowing costs,
according to Morgan Stanley.

Eastern European nations teeter on the brink of debt default.

So do Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland.

A January 14 George Magnus Financial Times article titled, "Sovereign default risks loom" said:

"There is no peacetime precedent for the current speed and scale of public debt accumulation....The spectre of sovereign default, therefore, has returned to the rich world," sparking fears of nonpayment, paying less than face amount, inflation, capital controls, special taxes that break private contracts, and/or currency devaluations, measures also threatening America given its crushing debt burden.

As the conversation went on into the late hours, one could sense that perhaps America deserves the reign of terror being planned for her. The Jewish mind pits every ethnic group against the other. "The blood of the masses will flow as we wait for our day of world victory," Mr. Rosenthal said coldly.

Yet according to Rosenberg,

"the consensus community has no clue
as to what the future holds,"
forecasting rosy scenarios while Rome burns.

In fact, "the depression is ongoing even if the most recent recession has faded; and in our view, the next one is not too far away especially now that the stimulus is soon to subside." The contagion will be global, the fallout catastrophic because the worst is yet to come, what economist Michael Hudson foresaw in early 2009 saying:

"The (US) economy has reached its debt limit and is entering its insolvency phase. We are not in a cycle but (at) the end of an era. The old world of debt pyramiding to a fraudulent degree cannot be restored," only delayed for a more painful day of reckoning.

It's coming according to Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (1881 - 1973) because:

"There is no means of avoiding a final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion." It's only a matter of sooner "or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved."

Expect a deepening global depression;
protracted economic, political, social,
and institutional upheaval;
mass unemployment, poverty,
homelessness, and hunger;
and severe repression to curb public anger.

Blame it on decades of political influence
buying yielding unprecedented returns
for the privileged, but economic wreckage
and catastrophic life changes for the rest.

The price of excess is pain,
lots of it for the world's disadvantaged,
the ones who always pay
for rich peoples' sins.

Having read this article by Lendman complete with my inserts, you can see that the opening quote by Communist Lenin is a frightfully accurate description of our world today. People have not yet noticed that America has become extremely Communist over the years. This was not a violent Communist take over; it has been subtly accomplished from within, step by step by step, by a ruthless, patient, very brilliant enemy. And you will find upon further study, that Communism and Zionism are quite the same thing almost 100%.

Think about the people on Wall Street, and who surround the last few presidents, all of whom held dual passports between America and Israel. Now, do the math, folks. Do the math.

"What is the Jew's foundation in our world?

Material necessity, private advantage.

"What is the object of the Jew's worship in this world?

Usury. What is his world god? Money.

"The Jew has already emancipated himself in the Jewish way: the Jew who is, for example, merely tolerated in Vienna, determines with his money power the fate of the entire German Empire.

The Jew who is without rights in the smallest German state,

decides the fate of Europe.

"This is no isolated fact. The Jew has emancipated himself in the Jewish fashion not only by acquiring money power but through money's having become ~ with him or without him ~ the world power and the Jewish spirit's having become the practical spirit of the Christian peoples.

The Jews have emancipated themselves to the extent that the Christians have become Jews ~ KARL MARX Founder of Communism

Quotes from Review by Marx of Bruno Bauer's The Capacity of Today's Jews and Christians to Become Free

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to the Lendman News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Monday - Friday at 10AM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national issues. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://republicbroadcasting.org/Lendman