The Aristocracy of our Monied Corporations

“I hope we shall . . . crush in [its] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations." Thomas Jefferson Much has been written about the causes and the effects of the financial crisis of 2008. The right blames easy home loan credit they claim was mandated by federal laws and Democratic legislators. The left blames corporate greed run amok after the GW Bush administration gave up regulation of the financial sector to the “free market.” It is important to know who the players were that brought us to a world-wide economic crisis in 2008 and another which is working itself out in Europe right now as a result of the sovereign debt crisis in the Southern tier of European Union countries of Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. The Irish financial crisis was as a result of an exploded housing bubble much as unfolded in the US. It is important to note there are neither “easy home loan credit… mandated by federal laws” or “Democratic legislators” in Ireland. At the core of the crises is a group of US based banks and financial services corporations, chief among which are Goldman Sachs. Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup, along with Goldman Sachs, are still making massive investments in risky derivatives such as credit default swops and credit default options and currently hold over 95% of such contracts in that market. But, Goldman Sachs has had at the nexus of all the actors its players and yet another has just been appointed as the new head of the European Bank, Mario Draghi. Mr. Draghi’s immediate past position was with the Bank of Italy and just before that Mr. Draghi was with Goldman Sachs. It was during Mr. Draghi’s tenure at Goldman that the firm came under heavy fire for mis-stating Greece’s debts so as to ease its entry into the EU. Italy’s likely new appointed PM, Mario Monti, is also a Goldman Sachs alumnus and will have to leave as the Euro Chair of the Trilateral Commission if he enters government service. Lucas Papademos, the newly appointed PM of Greece, is a technocrat and that’s thought to help Greece and the EU but, resigned (as required) as a member of the Trilateral Commission upon his government appointment. Mr. Papademos served as a member of the Trilateral Commission along with the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and folks from AIG and other major Wall Street players that brought us the 2008 meltdown and now have brought the entire EU sovereign debt crisis to a boil. The very scary reality is that the next economy to falter after the Southern tier is France. France holds the highest amount of any nation of the sovereign debt of the South. Soon, France may lose its AAA credit rating which it has held to even though its debt to GDP ration of 83% is higher than the about 62% of the US. France will next have to enact “austerity measures” such as those already imposed in much of the EU and which have caused riots in Greece. What this all means to us poor average Americans is that while we work hard, pay our taxes, save for our retirements and kids’ college, forces beyond our ken and control are at work around the Western world to make sure that the interests of our monied corporations are those which are served and that our votes, our elections and our very dreams for ourselves and our children just don’t matter any more. And see here and here. There was a war while we slept last night, we lost. Goldman Sachs and its ilk won by removing all our wealth to them, by removing elected officials to be replaced by their former employees and by taking over our dreams and replacing them with their own. "As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." Abraham Lincoln

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Bottle ban quashed at national parks

Banning the sale of disposable water bottles at national parks? Sounds like a good way to preserve the natural beauty of our national parks--and remember that we got along without disposable water bottles for centuries, until about 1990. But banning disposable water bottles means banning Dasani brand water, which is owned by a big company . . .

Weary of plastic litter, Grand Canyon National Park officials were in the final stages of imposing a ban on the sale of disposable water bottles in the Grand Canyon late last year when the nation’s parks chief abruptly blocked the plan after conversations with Coca-Cola, a major donor to the National Park Foundation.
And here's more information, from Philanthropy News Digest. And also consider the fact that the tomato paste used on pizza turns pizza into a vegetable, thanks to Congress.

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Chris Hedges on the Revolution

Chris Hedges of Truthdig writes the following (and much more) on what the Revolution looks like:

Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland, Oakland and New York with their baton-wielding cops into a fool’s paradise. They think they can clean up “the mess”—always employing the language of personal hygiene and public security—by making us disappear. They think we will all go home and accept their corporate nation, a nation where crime and government policy have become indistinguishable, where nothing in America, including the ordinary citizen, is deemed by those in power worth protecting or preserving, where corporate oligarchs awash in hundreds of millions of dollars are permitted to loot and pillage the last shreds of collective wealth, human capital and natural resources, a nation where the poor do not eat and workers do not work, a nation where the sick die and children go hungry, a nation where the consent of the governed and the voice of the people is a cruel joke. Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies, absurdities, trivia and celebrity gossip we feed you in 24-hour cycles on television.

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Arrests should not also be convictions and punishments.

An arrest should be merely an arrest, not a street-conviction or a street-sentencing-and-punishment. This story about the pepper-spraying of an 84-year old Occupy protester in Seattle makes me think that at least some police officers have decided to render their own version of justice on the street, rather than take protesters into custody using the minimum amount of force necessary.

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How to destroy a perfectly good real estate recording system.

What would you think if an outside enemy systematically attacked hundreds of U.S. county real estate recording offices, making it impossible for most of us to know who owns what legal rights regarding real estate anymore.   Imagine that our courts, from coast to coast, have slowed to a crawl because the enemy had nefariously dismantled a system that had worked quite well for centuries. Imagine that, also for centuries, the filing fees paid for recording real estate interests had funded numerous important local government functions, but that the outside enemy destroyed this source of income, causing many government functions to flounder. Image that this enemy then set up its own real estate "information" offices that gave lots of incomplete information, often refusing to provide any information at all, and did so with reprehensible customer service. Imagine one more thing:  This has all really happened, but it was not caused by an outside enemy. Rather, all of this has happened regarding 60% of all home mortgages, and the entities doing the damage are America's banks, who have conspired to create an entity called MERS, designed to circumvent government real estate recording offices, at a high cost to everyone who relies on the integrity of our real estate recording system. If you want to know the specifics, here is a terrific article by law professor Chris Peterson: "Two Faces: Demystifying the Mortgage Electronic Registry System's Land Title Theory." This damage to our recording system is relatively new--it's been happening for a bit more than ten years, but the theme is now familiar to many of us: Corporate players taking over government functions and, in the process, rigging the playing field against the interests of ordinary Americans. The challenge now is to see whether the courts across America can recognize MERS for what it is, a despicable scam that has clouded the real estate titles of millions of people in an effort to rev up private corporate profits.   The courts are now clogged with many cases attempting to deal with the problems caused by MERS; you'll want to keep your eye on this story to see whether the courts will slap down the banks.

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