Our Monolithic Problem With Fraudulent Bailouts And Governmental Deception
Bill Lindner
March 21, 2009
Since bursting upon the public policy scene 30 years ago, Neocons have bankrupted America -- financially and morally -- with their corrupted moral idealism, military assertiveness and intentional deception, carefully crafted and conceived with the intentions of giving power to a select few and ruining democracy and freedom for the rest of us.
The Supreme Court illegally appointing an idiot named George W. Bush to the presidency has proven to be an extremely costly mistake. An article from TruthOut entitled 'How to Destroy the Government in Three Easy Steps' does a good job of spelling out how we got to the point we're at as a country.
The attacks of 9/11 weren't just a casual act of terrorists. It was a carefully thought out plan designed to intimidate the public into submission. Unending war in the Middle East wasn't an accident. Cutting taxes for the wealthy was designed to weaken social programs, make government services inadequate, and keeping the wealthy bankers wealthy among other things.
None of those things were done by accident. One of the few problems not foreseen was just how stupid the appointed Neocon leader -- George W. Bush -- really was. Of course, you can't get away with intentionally destroying a freedom-loving Democracy without having several allies in high places such as the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court.
Last September, when the fraudulent financial bailout was first announced, there were a number of us who warned that it was fraudulent. At stake, as noted by Rense.com, is the fraudulent confiscation of lifelong savings and pension funds to line the pockets of the richest people in America who have controlled our Federal Government for almost a century.
The economic crisis is due to financial manipulation -- part of which will be detailed a little further below -- and outright fraud to the detriment of entire populations. "Shadow Banking" has resulted in the centralization of bank power and unprecedented concentrations of private wealth. You can also be sure that somewhere, the upper echelons of Bush's criminal regime have bank accounts full of taxpayer money.
Contrary to popular belief, the Federal Reserve is not a government entity. It's privately owned and its shareholders are 12 regional privately owned banks. In the words of Louis McFadden, the Federal Reserve banks are private monopolies which prey upon the people of the United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic speculators and swinders; and rich and predatory money lenders. For years the Fed has controlled our government and our economy.
Manufactured Outrage To Cover The Real Problem
Instead of being the public watchdog as originally intended, the media just fans the flames of manufactured outrage, purposely omitting crucial information from the public. It's been that way for several decades. The last eight years just made it clear of how prominent that problem really was. What has been going on in Washington is criminal and it goes all the way to the top.
Public outrage -- as well as manufactured Congressional outrage -- over the $165 million plus in bonuses to AIG has served as a smoke screen to cover the real problem. The bonuses are nothing compared to the billions used to 'bailout' these financial institutions.
Congress has known for years what was going on in the Federal Reserve, having removed the remaining restrictions on financial institutions in 1999 courtesy of then Senator Phil Gramm, opening the door to finish off the fraudulent financial raping of America. Many in Congress have been repeatedly paid off by the large financial institutions, which is why working class America constantly gets screwed by them. As usual, when they're caught doing something wrong, they try to lay the blame on everyone else, which by the way, is why Washington will do little if anything to hold the criminal Bush administration accountable for their treasonous crimes.
Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Barclays and a host of others are getting more billions from AIG, despite having already bilked us for billions. The repeated AIG bailouts have been used to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that already received money from the first fraudulent bailout. The 'change we can believe in' Obama administration has known fully well what was happening all along. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has been in on the financial fraud for years.
Little mention is made of the trillions the Federal Reserve continues quietly pumping into the economy either. The manufactured outrage and crocodile tears have been nothing more than political show to cover the con game being played by the Federal Reserve. Again, as mentioned above, none of what is happening now could have been done without having friends in Congress and the Judicial system. Too many in Congress have been there entirely too long. Instead of being angry at AIG for getting bonuses, the outrage should be directed at Congress where it belongs.
The Global Economic Crisis Is About Power
Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone published a very long, detailed expose on the Wall Street fraud. The Global financial crisis isn't about money. It's about power. Taibbi details the rise and fall of the once mighty AIG and how corporate greed attributed to its downfall as well as how this country and the rest of the world have been intentionally screwed along the way.
AIG's downfall came towards the end of eight straight years of tyrannical rule allegedly devoted to chasing made up terrorists and terrorist threats to no avail that is responsible for every citizen being treated as criminals by their own government -- being searched and humiliated at airports has nothing to do with 'keeping us safe' from terrorists, yet the government had no mechanism for oversight on the balance sheets of companies that had near life-or-death power over our society and didn't bother to do anything but attribute to the fraud being perpetrated by Wall Street.
AIG's crash was not accidental. Their downfall was created by a group of psychopaths on Wall Street who intentionally raped us financially. AIG spent more than a decade scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators and by betting money it didn't have in a toxic, unregulated derivatives market. AIG's gambling came at the cost of middle-class taxpayers.
As noted by Rolling Stone, the reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.
After being given virtually free reign over the economy, these same insiders wrecked the financial world then granted themselves nearly unlimited powers to clean up their own mess. Instead of ending up in prison where they belong, they ended up with a death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, their partners in the Government. It's a power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a giant Enron -- huge and impenetrable, filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is securing the individual profits at the expense of U.S. taxpayers.
Lobbyists and Campaign Contributions Bought Off Congress
Joseph Cassano, formerly the head of AIG Financial Products or AIGFP, was a greedy manager who ran his financial scams -- many of which are detailed in the Rolling Stone report -- right in the open courtesy of Washington's deregulation of Wall Street. The final deregulation came courtesy of former Senator Phil Gramm.
For 10 years, beginning in 1998, financial campaigns spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists. The first piece of legislation created by Gramm in 1999 opened the door for the fraud. The very next year, Gramm wrote legislation that made it impossible to regulate credit swaps, opening the door for Cassano's massive financial fraud.
In those 10 years, Congress deregulated Wall Street and unconstitutionally passed 'legislation' to bail them out courtesy of the taxpayers. While giving Wall Street free reign that allowed them to destroy democracy and bankrupt the world, Congress was busy illegally and unconstitutionally passing draconian legislation that virtually creates terrorists out of every American citizen, destroying democracy, freedom and rights. Constituents don't count for crap since Congress has been bought off by large corporations and lobbyists, both foreign and domestic.
In what proved to be the biggest joke of all, Cassano's fraud was supposed to be regulated by the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS). A law passed in 1999 allowed certain kinds of holding companies to chose the OTS as their regulator. Making matters worse, AIGFP, which is London-based, should have been regulated by Britain's Financial Services Authority. The OTS convinced Europeans that it could regulate Giant companies like AIG. By 2007, the EU handed over the regulation of AIG -- as well as GE and Ameriprise -- to OTS.
That same year the Government Accountability Office (GAO) criticized the OTS, noting among other things, the disparity between the size of the agency and the diverse firms it oversees and that the entire OTS only had one insurance specialist on staff, despite the fact that AIG was the world's largest insurer. OTS could have stopped the financial fraud, but didn't.
By 2007 it was obvious that Cassano's fraud had poisoned AIG. Being the good little con artist that he is, Cassano schemed to keep his fraud hidden from public view. By February 2008, AIG announced the resignation of Cassano, but amazingly enough, allowed him to keep his $34 million in bonuses. On top of that, they kept Cassano on as a consultant at the rate of $1 million a month through the end of September 2008.
When asked by Congress why Cassano was kept on and paid all that money despite his role in destroying Western civilization, Congress was told with a straight face that AIG wanted to "retain the 20-year knowledge that Mr. Cassano had." AIG has repeatedly paid million dollar plus bonuses to 'retain key employees' despite saying they wouldn't.
Adding SEC and Treasury Secretary Corruption To The Mix
In 2004 when the EU threatened to more strictly regulate the foreign operations of America's big investment banks if the U.S. didn't strengthen its own oversight, the top five investment banks got together on April 28th of that year and -- with the help of then-Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson, who would eventually be appointed by George W. Bush as the Treasury Secretary -- made a pitch to the chief of the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) volunteering to submit to new rules restricting them from engaging in excessively risky activity in exchange for being released from any lending restrictions. No one from the press was there to record that fateful decision.
When the SEC OK'd the proposal, the EU dropped its threats to regulate the five firms whose combined assets totaled more than $4 trillion. The SEC never regulated the banks. A commission was created to oversee the five companies, but the group had no director and never completed a single inspection.
Between the 2004 change and the housing collapse, Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson -- who received an estimated $200 million tax deferral by joining the government -- became the Treasury Secretary. Goldman Sachs was Cassano's biggest customer which explains why they received part of the AIG 'bailout.'
Paulson named another ex-Goldman Sachs crony named Edward Liddy to run AIG whose bailout money came in part from the newly created TARP program -- the first fraudulent bailout -- administered by another Goldman Sachs banker named Neel Kashkari.
Ever notice that when an average citizen loses his or her home to foreclosure or is forced into bankruptcy, no one in the government is there to rescue them but when Goldman Sachs -- whose average employee made more than $350,000 last year despite the recession -- is suddenly faced with the possibility of losing money on the unregulated insurance deals the government was there to bail them out? The 'bailout' is nothing more than rich bankers bailing out rich bankers at the cost of the taxpayers.
No one except the Fed knows who's receiving much of the fraudulent bailout money, which is actually in excess of $3 trillion, because of an obscure 1950 law, all the secrecy, and obviously, because of all the fraud. While the larger financial corporations who swindled us out of trillions of dollars get help, some of the smaller banks needing help still have not received it from the government. We've been dealt one major cluster-you-know-what by our corrupted federal government, which obviously is not of, by or for the people, but instead of, by and for the bankers -- who own them.
Taking Control Of Our Political Future
Obama's Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner -- one of the architects of the Paulson bailouts -- does not bode well nor does picking a former Goldman lobbyist as his top aide. As noted by Rolling Stone, the real question is whether the Obama administration will move to bring the financial system back where sanity and lawfulness are restored and the general public has a say in things or if the new financial bureaucracy will remain obscure, secretive and fraudulent. Geithner uses many of the same moves Paulson did, continually talking about using some of the fraudulent moves that Paulson specializes in.
By intentionally creating a crisis and making it so complex that ordinary people don't understand it, Wall Street is using the crisis to destroy democracy and turn it into a two-tiered state, one with fat cat financial executives leading clueless citizens. Incredibly, these fat cat financial executives that defrauded this country actually believe they are entitled to all of our money that is financing their lavish lifestyles.
So much for the party being over on Wall Street as claimed by Speaker Pelosi last September. Our Federal government has failed us. The Neocons may have done themselves in this time. None of the traitors responsible for creating this mess -- from the appointed idiot on down -- have been held accountable for their crimes. It's time for that to change. More information on the defrauding of America and Governmental deception can be found in the article from Rolling Stone. Our political future depends on the outcome of Obama's response to this crisis.
There is fix for this problem. Instead of repeatedly screwing taxpayers, the government could arrest every last one of them -- including the current and former Congress persons and corrupted U.S. Supreme Court 'Justices" responsible for appointing the idiot responsible for the last eight years in the first place -- and take our defrauded loot back. Enough is enough. It's time to get mad and it's time to get involved in our future while we still have one.
The Supreme Court illegally appointing an idiot named George W. Bush to the presidency has proven to be an extremely costly mistake. An article from TruthOut entitled 'How to Destroy the Government in Three Easy Steps' does a good job of spelling out how we got to the point we're at as a country.
The attacks of 9/11 weren't just a casual act of terrorists. It was a carefully thought out plan designed to intimidate the public into submission. Unending war in the Middle East wasn't an accident. Cutting taxes for the wealthy was designed to weaken social programs, make government services inadequate, and keeping the wealthy bankers wealthy among other things.
None of those things were done by accident. One of the few problems not foreseen was just how stupid the appointed Neocon leader -- George W. Bush -- really was. Of course, you can't get away with intentionally destroying a freedom-loving Democracy without having several allies in high places such as the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court.
Last September, when the fraudulent financial bailout was first announced, there were a number of us who warned that it was fraudulent. At stake, as noted by Rense.com, is the fraudulent confiscation of lifelong savings and pension funds to line the pockets of the richest people in America who have controlled our Federal Government for almost a century.
The economic crisis is due to financial manipulation -- part of which will be detailed a little further below -- and outright fraud to the detriment of entire populations. "Shadow Banking" has resulted in the centralization of bank power and unprecedented concentrations of private wealth. You can also be sure that somewhere, the upper echelons of Bush's criminal regime have bank accounts full of taxpayer money.
Contrary to popular belief, the Federal Reserve is not a government entity. It's privately owned and its shareholders are 12 regional privately owned banks. In the words of Louis McFadden, the Federal Reserve banks are private monopolies which prey upon the people of the United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic speculators and swinders; and rich and predatory money lenders. For years the Fed has controlled our government and our economy.
Manufactured Outrage To Cover The Real Problem
Instead of being the public watchdog as originally intended, the media just fans the flames of manufactured outrage, purposely omitting crucial information from the public. It's been that way for several decades. The last eight years just made it clear of how prominent that problem really was. What has been going on in Washington is criminal and it goes all the way to the top.
Public outrage -- as well as manufactured Congressional outrage -- over the $165 million plus in bonuses to AIG has served as a smoke screen to cover the real problem. The bonuses are nothing compared to the billions used to 'bailout' these financial institutions.
Congress has known for years what was going on in the Federal Reserve, having removed the remaining restrictions on financial institutions in 1999 courtesy of then Senator Phil Gramm, opening the door to finish off the fraudulent financial raping of America. Many in Congress have been repeatedly paid off by the large financial institutions, which is why working class America constantly gets screwed by them. As usual, when they're caught doing something wrong, they try to lay the blame on everyone else, which by the way, is why Washington will do little if anything to hold the criminal Bush administration accountable for their treasonous crimes.
Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Barclays and a host of others are getting more billions from AIG, despite having already bilked us for billions. The repeated AIG bailouts have been used to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that already received money from the first fraudulent bailout. The 'change we can believe in' Obama administration has known fully well what was happening all along. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has been in on the financial fraud for years.
Little mention is made of the trillions the Federal Reserve continues quietly pumping into the economy either. The manufactured outrage and crocodile tears have been nothing more than political show to cover the con game being played by the Federal Reserve. Again, as mentioned above, none of what is happening now could have been done without having friends in Congress and the Judicial system. Too many in Congress have been there entirely too long. Instead of being angry at AIG for getting bonuses, the outrage should be directed at Congress where it belongs.
The Global Economic Crisis Is About Power
Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone published a very long, detailed expose on the Wall Street fraud. The Global financial crisis isn't about money. It's about power. Taibbi details the rise and fall of the once mighty AIG and how corporate greed attributed to its downfall as well as how this country and the rest of the world have been intentionally screwed along the way.
AIG's downfall came towards the end of eight straight years of tyrannical rule allegedly devoted to chasing made up terrorists and terrorist threats to no avail that is responsible for every citizen being treated as criminals by their own government -- being searched and humiliated at airports has nothing to do with 'keeping us safe' from terrorists, yet the government had no mechanism for oversight on the balance sheets of companies that had near life-or-death power over our society and didn't bother to do anything but attribute to the fraud being perpetrated by Wall Street.
AIG's crash was not accidental. Their downfall was created by a group of psychopaths on Wall Street who intentionally raped us financially. AIG spent more than a decade scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators and by betting money it didn't have in a toxic, unregulated derivatives market. AIG's gambling came at the cost of middle-class taxpayers.
As noted by Rolling Stone, the reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.
After being given virtually free reign over the economy, these same insiders wrecked the financial world then granted themselves nearly unlimited powers to clean up their own mess. Instead of ending up in prison where they belong, they ended up with a death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, their partners in the Government. It's a power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a giant Enron -- huge and impenetrable, filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is securing the individual profits at the expense of U.S. taxpayers.
Lobbyists and Campaign Contributions Bought Off Congress
Joseph Cassano, formerly the head of AIG Financial Products or AIGFP, was a greedy manager who ran his financial scams -- many of which are detailed in the Rolling Stone report -- right in the open courtesy of Washington's deregulation of Wall Street. The final deregulation came courtesy of former Senator Phil Gramm.
For 10 years, beginning in 1998, financial campaigns spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists. The first piece of legislation created by Gramm in 1999 opened the door for the fraud. The very next year, Gramm wrote legislation that made it impossible to regulate credit swaps, opening the door for Cassano's massive financial fraud.
In those 10 years, Congress deregulated Wall Street and unconstitutionally passed 'legislation' to bail them out courtesy of the taxpayers. While giving Wall Street free reign that allowed them to destroy democracy and bankrupt the world, Congress was busy illegally and unconstitutionally passing draconian legislation that virtually creates terrorists out of every American citizen, destroying democracy, freedom and rights. Constituents don't count for crap since Congress has been bought off by large corporations and lobbyists, both foreign and domestic.
In what proved to be the biggest joke of all, Cassano's fraud was supposed to be regulated by the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS). A law passed in 1999 allowed certain kinds of holding companies to chose the OTS as their regulator. Making matters worse, AIGFP, which is London-based, should have been regulated by Britain's Financial Services Authority. The OTS convinced Europeans that it could regulate Giant companies like AIG. By 2007, the EU handed over the regulation of AIG -- as well as GE and Ameriprise -- to OTS.
That same year the Government Accountability Office (GAO) criticized the OTS, noting among other things, the disparity between the size of the agency and the diverse firms it oversees and that the entire OTS only had one insurance specialist on staff, despite the fact that AIG was the world's largest insurer. OTS could have stopped the financial fraud, but didn't.
By 2007 it was obvious that Cassano's fraud had poisoned AIG. Being the good little con artist that he is, Cassano schemed to keep his fraud hidden from public view. By February 2008, AIG announced the resignation of Cassano, but amazingly enough, allowed him to keep his $34 million in bonuses. On top of that, they kept Cassano on as a consultant at the rate of $1 million a month through the end of September 2008.
When asked by Congress why Cassano was kept on and paid all that money despite his role in destroying Western civilization, Congress was told with a straight face that AIG wanted to "retain the 20-year knowledge that Mr. Cassano had." AIG has repeatedly paid million dollar plus bonuses to 'retain key employees' despite saying they wouldn't.
Adding SEC and Treasury Secretary Corruption To The Mix
In 2004 when the EU threatened to more strictly regulate the foreign operations of America's big investment banks if the U.S. didn't strengthen its own oversight, the top five investment banks got together on April 28th of that year and -- with the help of then-Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson, who would eventually be appointed by George W. Bush as the Treasury Secretary -- made a pitch to the chief of the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) volunteering to submit to new rules restricting them from engaging in excessively risky activity in exchange for being released from any lending restrictions. No one from the press was there to record that fateful decision.
When the SEC OK'd the proposal, the EU dropped its threats to regulate the five firms whose combined assets totaled more than $4 trillion. The SEC never regulated the banks. A commission was created to oversee the five companies, but the group had no director and never completed a single inspection.
Between the 2004 change and the housing collapse, Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson -- who received an estimated $200 million tax deferral by joining the government -- became the Treasury Secretary. Goldman Sachs was Cassano's biggest customer which explains why they received part of the AIG 'bailout.'
Paulson named another ex-Goldman Sachs crony named Edward Liddy to run AIG whose bailout money came in part from the newly created TARP program -- the first fraudulent bailout -- administered by another Goldman Sachs banker named Neel Kashkari.
Ever notice that when an average citizen loses his or her home to foreclosure or is forced into bankruptcy, no one in the government is there to rescue them but when Goldman Sachs -- whose average employee made more than $350,000 last year despite the recession -- is suddenly faced with the possibility of losing money on the unregulated insurance deals the government was there to bail them out? The 'bailout' is nothing more than rich bankers bailing out rich bankers at the cost of the taxpayers.
No one except the Fed knows who's receiving much of the fraudulent bailout money, which is actually in excess of $3 trillion, because of an obscure 1950 law, all the secrecy, and obviously, because of all the fraud. While the larger financial corporations who swindled us out of trillions of dollars get help, some of the smaller banks needing help still have not received it from the government. We've been dealt one major cluster-you-know-what by our corrupted federal government, which obviously is not of, by or for the people, but instead of, by and for the bankers -- who own them.
Taking Control Of Our Political Future
Obama's Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner -- one of the architects of the Paulson bailouts -- does not bode well nor does picking a former Goldman lobbyist as his top aide. As noted by Rolling Stone, the real question is whether the Obama administration will move to bring the financial system back where sanity and lawfulness are restored and the general public has a say in things or if the new financial bureaucracy will remain obscure, secretive and fraudulent. Geithner uses many of the same moves Paulson did, continually talking about using some of the fraudulent moves that Paulson specializes in.
By intentionally creating a crisis and making it so complex that ordinary people don't understand it, Wall Street is using the crisis to destroy democracy and turn it into a two-tiered state, one with fat cat financial executives leading clueless citizens. Incredibly, these fat cat financial executives that defrauded this country actually believe they are entitled to all of our money that is financing their lavish lifestyles.
So much for the party being over on Wall Street as claimed by Speaker Pelosi last September. Our Federal government has failed us. The Neocons may have done themselves in this time. None of the traitors responsible for creating this mess -- from the appointed idiot on down -- have been held accountable for their crimes. It's time for that to change. More information on the defrauding of America and Governmental deception can be found in the article from Rolling Stone. Our political future depends on the outcome of Obama's response to this crisis.
There is fix for this problem. Instead of repeatedly screwing taxpayers, the government could arrest every last one of them -- including the current and former Congress persons and corrupted U.S. Supreme Court 'Justices" responsible for appointing the idiot responsible for the last eight years in the first place -- and take our defrauded loot back. Enough is enough. It's time to get mad and it's time to get involved in our future while we still have one.
Print
Email
