THE PROBLEM WITH WALL STREET, GREED AND THE FREED

The world economy is embroiled in a foreclosure crisis that is pushing the planet into a global worldwide depression that will make 1929 look like a mild bad fiscal day on Wall Street.

The cause and source of that depression is of course Wall Street and greed versus the freed in need.

Wall Street is antipathetic to freedom, but capitalism, which is far more sinister and evil than any other form of economic system ever invented by man, has been couched and hidden behind the lies of both Repugnican and demoncratic sides of the political isle.

Wall Street lives and dies on profits motivated by nothing short of pure greed. If this were not the case, why would any human convince you to put your money in any bank, have them pay you a pittance, all the while inflating the global economy for hundreds of years on end until one day, someone looks up in the sky and says, hey, “its all air up there in Manhattan.”

Millions of people are today faced with losing their homes under the false belief that they even owned it to begin with as bankers lent them money they could not afford to repay as a result of abusive lending practices and bad financial decisions.

More tens of millions will be left with no choice but to unwind what our bankers and lawyers and politicians have wielded with their deceptions upon the masses of middle class humans around the world struggling to be free.

Let’s face it, if you have a mortgage you certainly are not free, and you certainly don’t own your own home.

Like Phil Collins sings in his famous song, you’ve all been sold a pack of lies, but you can feel it coming in the air tonight. The hot air has not really finished leaving the balloon, you are only experiencing the beginning of the pin pricks of penny politics.

Now comes the real depression after the commercial credit markets for commercial paper also follow the lead of the general sub-prime mortgage market, followed by bank failures rippling across the planet.

Increasing numbers of foreclosures are depressing home prices all over the planet, adding to the buildup of unsold inventory, and further harming the already down beaten housing market. Meanwhile, despite rate cuts, the dollar has hit par with the Canadian dollar with no bottom in sight, as U.S. dollars in reality are worthless credits.

The flurry of foreclosure activity is having a ripple effect on the entire global economy, which is extremely dependent upon housing, building materials, credit, liquidity, and global trade. When traders do not want to trade because they know prices are still collapsing and they haven’t seen the bottom of the rubble pile, it doesn’t matter how low you drop interest rates.

Over the last fifteen years the mortgage industry has invested more than $500 million in Washington lobbying and campaign contributions. The money has helped to successfully block Congress from restricting lending abuses that had led up to the current foreclosure crisis.

Every single politician who received money from the banks, the building and loan trades, the Realtors, and all those who allowed our monetary system to become worthless would in ancient times been tarred, feathered, hung by the neck or shot at sunrise, no questions asked.

Instead what we have is an apathetic middle class that is about to have such a rude awakening that the swells of homeless who flock to the front steps of the Federal Reserve Banks in this country will be overwhelming.

Especially if some guy shows up standing there with wads of hundred dollar bills buying thousands of rolls of pennies for a dollar each penny from the homeless as the Penny King plans in the documentary comedy drama of the same name.

This foreclosure mess is partly the result of our flawed campaign finance system, which encourages special interests with legislative agendas to pour millions of dollars into the campaign coffers of key members of Congress,' said Jon Goldin-Dubois, executive vice president of Common Cause, a group that recently did some research on the subject.

Of course Erick Gustafson, a vice president of the Mortgage Bankers Association, is calling the accusation a 'spurious claim' and defends the illusory regime that has created the Octodragon of the finance world.

We can safely say that the trouble with Wall Street is one of greed and when the balloon can no longer hold all that hot air, it pops. That is exactly what has happened to the United States official economy, not the underground one which still operates on cash and fair trade in an unwritten policy.

To deliberately quote George W. Bush out of context, "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

In other words, the ultimate harm has come upon our country – our economy has collapsed and the once mighty Octodragon has taken a stab in the vitals from the rest of the world in response to the continued arrogance of most Americans who still believe America is the “greatest nation on earth”.

Much in the same way that US investors were "steered" into rip-off mortgage loans, the entire country has been "steered" into an economic crisis. The question is how to get out of it.

In the subprime loan scandal, unscrupulous brokers conned home buyers with poor credit histories into deals designed to profit lenders and bleed borrowers. Contract "teasers" hid ballooning monthly payments while a lack of regulation allowed the scam to continue unabated. Millions more Americans now face losing their homes.

The Bush administration similarly used promises of cakewalks and increased security to con the US public into wars with Iraq and Afghanistan. US taxpayers have spent over $450 billion on Iraq alone, while Bush/Cheney cronies continue making a killing from military contracts. Meanwhile, global security has degenerated and over 4,100 US service members have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with an untold number of coalition troops, contractors and civilians.

The national debt is now beyond $10 trillion. Foreign bankers have been shifting from dollar denominated oil contracts into Euro denominated exchanges such as the one recently established in Iran, and gradually shifting out of the US Treasury market along with the Chinese who have already shifted billions out of dollar denominated assets.

America’s credit card with the rest of the world has been cut off by the more saner administrations of foreign countries who focus on peace, not war to gain market share.

Bush's military adventurism, not to mention his administration's exorbitant tax cuts for the wealthy, gutted the surplus of $128 billion Clinton handed him in 2001 into a deficit of well over $1 trillion today. Bush has simultaneously increased the national debt by over $3 trillion effectively nailing each and every US citizen with a bill for almost $30,000. The foreign bankers know that its time to wean America off its free debt ride and that any further debt will never be repaid. The greatest ponzie scheme in the history of mankind is rapidly, within the next decade, completely unwind.

While heavy borrowing from Asia has mopped up some stateside red ink, there's an inherent threat: China has already shorted an estimated $900 billion in US bonds and is increasingly calling the shots on the US economy and foreign policy through its lobbying efforts in Washington D.C.

Just weeks ago, Beijing warned that if the Bush administration continued pushing for a revaluation of the Chinese currency, then Beijing would sell dollars, thereby threatening the greenback's reserve currency status. Washington backed down. It had little other option.

In other words, the US itself has become as vulnerable to its lenders as any other subprime borrower. The United States is now the worst rated credit borrower in the world and its government guaranteed bonds and treasury bills are in fact worthless. This crisis is going to require a whole new global financial system, not controlled by ponzi schemers.

Overall, the US debt situation looks so dire that the non-partisan Government Accountability Office Comptroller recently warned, America is on a path toward an explosion of debt. And that indebtedness threatens our country's, our children's, and our grandchildren's futures. With the looming retirement of the baby boomers, spiraling health care costs, plummeting savings rates, and increasing reliance on foreign lenders, we face unprecedented fiscal risks."

Financial analysts say credit markets are facing a Minsky moment - the inevitable downward spiral when over-leveraged investors have to sell valued assets just to pay back their loans. Some analysts have even coined a new term, suggesting we are in a "Minsky meltdown" - the prelude to a wider market crash. The fact is, the deriviatives market along with the commercial paper markets are imploding across the planet.

It’s a "Minsky massacre," not an unavoidable economic downturn but rather a coldly-calculated hit, with the intention of transferring wealth from the lower and middle classes to an unaccountable few at the top. The International Bankers, those at the IMF, the World Bank, the Fed, the European Central Bank, Bank of England, they are all in it together. They know exactly what they are doing to orchestrate this coming global depression.

Bottom line, this economic downturn isn't hurting everyone. Select brokers and lenders made a fortune off the backs of subprime borrowers, and now that the related hedge funds are collapsing, well-leveraged private equity firms can buy assets at fire-sale prices.

And as Jim Hightower recently noted, a "hands-off regulatory ideology" is complicit: "There are no less than five financial agencies at the federal level that could have protected people, yet the subprime surge was allowed to proceed .... The Federal Reserve Board, for example, has direct authority under the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act to 'prohibit acts or practices in connection with mortgage loans that the board finds to be unfair, deceptive or ... associated with abusive lending practices, or that are otherwise not in the interest of the borrower.' The Fed simply ignored this law."

The US has been down this road before. The Savings and Loan (S&L) crisis of the late 1980s was also characterized by loose lending requirements, lax regulation, obscene profits for the few - and US taxpayers left holding the bag for $125 billion.

Ironically, the Bush family was involved in that scandal too, with Bush Jr.'s brother Neil serving on the board of the disgraced Silverado Savings and Loan, which went bust and stuck US taxpayers with a $1.3 billion debt. Regulators accused Neil of ”multiple conflicts of interest" but he never did jail time - thanks at least in part to the S&L bail out engineered by his father, Bush Sr., who happened to be President at the time.

Just as in the S&L crisis, the poor and middle class have borne the brunt of the current subprime disaster, an especially nasty fact given the nation's huge wealth gap. As Inequality.org points out, "The richest one percent of U.S. households now owns 34.3 percent of the nation's private wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent. The top one percent also owns 36.9 percent of all corporate stock."

The US is swiftly approaching banana republic status as the increasing wealth gap, not to mention ballooning budget deficits, low capital spending and reliance on foreign capital are the major disturbing signs of the current debt implosion.

Millions more Americans are now losing their homes, and as The New York Times recently reported, "for the first time since federal housing agencies began keeping statistics in 1950," the median price of homes in the US will fall.

And they will continue to fall for at least a decade to come; forcing thousands of builders out of business, forcing the auto industry into depression, triggering a hundred thousand layoffs in Canada, the ripple effect across the globe will further panic holders of dollar denominated assets, forcing inflations hand.

Meanwhile, Asia and Europe will continue "decoupling" from increasingly volatile US markets The United States Dollar is no longer a stable reserve currency.

Fresh off its recent war games with China and four Central Asian republics, Russia is now actively confronting the US on the world stage. The Bush administration is trying to move closer to a war with Iran, but will be stopped when a major event in Los Angeles from the peace movement sends a message to him and Congress that they no longer control the value of the United States Mint or the Federal Reserve, both being worthless, so sayeth “the Penny King”.

Those that are in need are to be freed from the greed when the value of the penny is agreed at a dollar, and all dollars are agreed, by the freed, to be of no further need. And so predicts the Penny King, that one day, “every little and big thing will cost no more than a penny”.

Photo of "The Penny King's Car" by Alex S. Gabor. Courtesy Alex S. Gabor Syndicate. All Rights Reserved. 2007.