Ostracized no more: America’s disenfranchised 99% begin to form their own group.

Two years ago, I was excited to see Barack Obama elected President because I had listened closely to his campaign speeches and I assumed that I would now have a meaningful voice in how my government was being run. I assumed that we would see an immediate decrease to America’s warmongering, domestic spying and fossil-fuel dependence, for example. Since that election, though, I’ve witnessed Mr. Obama cave-in to right wing demands on numerous major issues. I’ve seen Wall Street “reform” that allows bigger “banks” than ever. I’ve seen health care “reform” that shoved single payer under the table and consisted of a sell-out to for-profit monopolistic insurers, without any meaningful price controls. Government spying and secrecy are more prevalent than ever. I’ve seen big business spend more money more flagrantly than ever to purchase politicians, including Barack Obama. As all of this has transpired, I keep being reminded of George Carlin’s words, (at the two-minute mark) that there is a “big club . . . and ain’t in it. . . . You and I are not in the big club." [More . . . }

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Here’s what $2 billion/year for 10 years gets you

We drained the economy of the United States because we needed to enrich the officers of so-called banks, and for this: Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said if the United States and Pakistan ever went to war, his country would back Islamabad, drawing a sharp rebuke Sunday from Afghan lawmakers who claimed the country's top officials were adopting hypocritical positions. In the meantime, as reported by Glenn Greenwald, Bradley Manning, who will likely die in prison, appears to have helped bring an end to America's other major psychopathic, dishonest, infrastructure-draining exercise in warmongering. And here is Iraq, by the numbers.

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Bank of America’s latest assault on American taxpayers

At Common Dreams, former bank examiner Bill Black has written of a terrible (though anticipated) new development at the Bank of America. The bank has taken on enormous toxic debt from its holding company (BAC) in order to saddle American taxpayers with the bill, as the Federal Reserve winks and nods.

BAC continues to deteriorate and the credit rating agencies have been downgrading it because of its bad assets, particularly its derivatives. BAC’s answer is to “transfer” the bad derivatives to the insured bank – transforming (ala Ireland) a private debt into a public debt.
Bloomberg has been aggressively reporting the story. Here's a short description by Jonathan Weil:
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is objecting to the transfers. That part is easy to understand: More risk for the retail lender means more risk for FDIC-insured deposits, which ultimately are backstopped by the U.S. government. The Fed, however, has signaled to the FDIC that it favors the transfers. Shifting the derivatives to the commercial lender may let Bank of America avoid collateral calls and termination fees stemming from the rating downgrade. Some Merrill clients may prefer having their contracts with the higher-rated unit. In short, the Fed’s priorities seem to lie with protecting the bank-holding company from losses at Merrill, even if that means greater risks for the FDIC’s insurance fund. . . . The entire story would be playing out in secret were it not for some unidentified whistleblowers who seem to have this crazy idea that the public should be informed about what the regulators and Bank of America are up to.
In his article, Weil makes it clear that all roads lead to American taxpayers picking of the tab, and it could run into the trillions. In fact, check the comments to Weil's article and you'll see the desperation, because the number being suggested is $75 TRILLION in derivatives, which Ben Bernacke has approved to be dumped on taxpayers, who don't have this money in any way shape or form (the U.S. only takes in $2 trillion in tax receipts each year). Thus, the Fed, a covey of criminal bankers, is in the process of attempting to destroy the FDIC and the American economic system in order to buy a bit more time for its big players (BAC is not alone; Morgan Chase is holding another $75 T in these fraudulent derivatives). What are "derivatives," the source of this immense debt? Bloomberg's Bob Ivry explains derivatives in his article that broke this scandalous decision to move Merrill derivatives to BAC's taxpayer insured banking unit:
Derivatives are financial instruments used to hedge risks or for speculation. They’re derived from stocks, bonds, loans, currencies and commodities, or linked to specific events such as changes in the weather or interest rates. Keeping such deals separate from FDIC-insured savings has been a cornerstone of U.S. regulation for decades, including last year’s Dodd-Frank overhaul of Wall Street regulation.
In these times, as the credit ratings of the big banks continue to slide, the objectives of the banks is always the same, but more intense than ever: Privatize the profit and socialize the losses.   The so-called banks have armies of corrupt accountants, lawyers and lobbyists working hard to find yet another way to make innocent taxpayers foot the bill for the the banks' immense amounts of debt that resulted from irresponsible gambling.  As William Black explains, the banks happily took on this gambling debt sharply, but now they want to dump in on people like you and me.  The Fed has given the nod because it is wholly corrupt in this adventure, contrary to the protests of the FDIC.  The bank management is giving the nod sharply contrary to fiduciary duties they owe to their shareholders and customers. This entire charade needs to be reported on the front page of every paper in America.  If Americans were better informed about the depth and scope of how they are being fleeced, we'd see hundreds of millions of Americans joining the #Occupy protests.

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The War for the Truth-Decision 2012

This is the third article in a series of three (here are the first and second) which are based upon a recent revealing piece published by truthout.org where Mike Lofgren, a veteran Republican operative on the Republican staffs of the US House and Senate Budget Committees reveals what lies at the core of contemporary American Republicanism and why he quit after 28 years of service. Mr. Lofgren writes:

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

… I wrote of the current tactics of the Republicans, especially in the US House of Representatives on the debt ceiling “crisis." Mr. Lofgren continues: [More . . . ]

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Dylan Ratigan to Barack Obama: Fire Timothy Geithner

This is part of a mass emailing I received from Dylan Ratigan today:

In my last piece, I talked about how Tim Geithner's job over the past five years has been to (a) print money, (b) give it to rich friends, and (c) deny everyone else legal and financial rights. This shows up everywhere, from the 0% you get on your savings account versus the insider information the rich get, to your lack of access to the Fed discount window. It's a symptom of bought government, which I try to expose on our show every day. . . . I find it laughable to hear President Obama's spokesperson talking about how his campaign represents the 99%. For starters He'd have to fire Geithner, to prove he's not the leader of a bought government. After all, it is Geithner who took a system indirectly rigged to profit the 1% at the expense of everyone else, and institutionalized and formalized it during a crisis.
The article Ratigan wrote at Huffpo reads like a long detailed indictment of Wall Street, but the word "indictment," when used in the context of Wall Street, is always and only metaphorical, as Ratigan points out:
It's not the scandals that matter, or rather, it's that the scandals are the new norm that matters. The larger context here, what the Occupiers are protesting, is that Tim Geithner formalized a financial elite and gave them special rights they had not previously had, notably a government guarantee for their investing, rights which ordinary people don't get. You can see this in bank borrowing spreads; large banks get a subsidy of $34 billion of dollars a year, simply because investors think their bonds are backed by the US government. This is now written into law - Dodd-Frank requires regulators to draw up a list of systemically significant firms. These are pretty explicitly firms that are too big to fail. Behind these investing advantages are legal advantages. No elite bankers have been prosecuted for the financial crisis, or the foreclosure crisis. NONE.
For Barack Obama to regain some of my trust, yes, he should immediately fire Tim Geithner and replace him with someone who will make Wall Street scream. And then Obama should do everything in his power to see that the big banks Ratigan describes as being on the "systemically significant firms" list are thoroughly investigated by funding hundreds of financially sophisticated investigators.  To top it off, Obama should do everything in his power to effect thorough annual audits of the Federal Reserve. If he will do all of this, I'll start listening to Obama once again, though it will still be with considerable apprehension. And for all of you tried and true "Democrats" out there who still believe that Barack Obama is a President that is on your side, it's time for all of you to closely consider the damage this President has done to our country (by judging him the way you would judge him had he been a Republican) and to start spending some time on the streets with the Occupy protesters.

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