Coming soon to a bank near you!

U.S. Economy

GAME OVER

This thrilling show brought to you by the Usual Suspects:

Buck-busting Helicopter Ben Bernanke

Hanky-panky Henry Paulson

Darth Cheney

President “I’ve Mission Accomplished the Economy!” Bush

AND

Special Guests Hillary and Bill Clinton—Give ‘em a big hand for repealing Steagall-Glass and looting Social Security!

Sadly, there was no room for John “Keating Five Criminal” McCan’t and pill-popping trollop of a cunt wife Cindy.

Night of the Living Debt

By Edgar J. Steele.

September 23, 2008

“It’s a jungle here–right now we’re advising our clients to put all
they can into canned goods and shotguns!”
— Brain Gremlin in the movie Gremlins II: The
New Batch.

Close your eyes and picture your children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all alone and scared, in an old, abandoned graveyard. The moon disappears behind one of the gathering storm clouds. Lurching forms begin to emerge from behind tilting gravestones.

A hand emerges from the earth and clutches at one of your children. They all begin screaming and dashing about, desperately seeking safety that does not exist.

Suddenly, one child shrieks in heart-rending agony as, set upon by three moldy corpses, her slender leg is bitten by one.

As each child tries to help the other, he or she also is taken to the ground by slimy zombie-like creatures who begin to feed on the tiny forms.

Then you realize that you are one of the zombies, just as you sink your rotten teeth into the warm, gently yielding flesh of your offspring.

Hollywood “B” movie stuff? No.

Reality? Not yet, but it’s coming, even if only euphemistically.

Right now, we are eating our children’s financial future, as well as that of their children and their children’s children. We are the zombies.

How can this be? Consider all the financial carnage of the past two weeks, of which you may have heard a glimmer from the controlled media. Every last bit of it is resulting in massive taxpayer bailouts of fat cats and foreign bankers. So massive, in fact, that taxpayers not yet born will be on the hook for their entire lives.

Our descendants.

Night of the Living Debt

This past week, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (one of an endless number of government functionaries formerly employed by Goldman Sachs, one of the two remaining investment banks in America) announced yet another bailout of Mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, this time to facilitate the increased purchase of mortgages in the near future. How much? “Hundreds of billions of dollars,” is all that he would admit.

This must be added to the $300 billion bailout announced just two weeks ago (ranging up to $1 trillion, in effect, by some estimates). Paulson’s announcement followed a rare meeting including “WhirlyBen” Bernanke, Federal Reserve chairman, and a large number of government and private financial industry functionaries and leaders.

Now, congressional hearings are in progress to rubber stamp Paulson’s demand for $700 billion more to buy any sort of financial “asset,” no matter how worthless, from any sort of financial institution, both American and foreign.

Here’s Your Share

Let’s put the figures into perspective. Of approximately 350 million American residents, perhaps 150 million households exist. Of those, less than half pay anything meaningful in taxes.

Let’s be generous and say that there are 75 million tax-paying households in America today and that the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac bailout is limited to only $1 trillion. Yours almost certainly is one of the tax-paying households.

Your share of the mortgage giant bailout, therefore, is $13,333. And that doesn’t take consideration of the fact that half the tax-paying households rely upon a government paycheck, either.

Of course, you already are on the hook for twice that amount, or nearly $30,000, for the current Iraq war, which was started on a lie told by Bush and Cheney about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction.” This pre-emptive Bush doctrine is the same one now so favored by McCain/Palin and which will lead us into WWIII via Iran, most likely.

Already, many have forgotten the precedent-setting bailout of Investment Bank Bear Stearns, to the tune of $60 billion. That kept Bear Stearns afloat. Think it won’t be back for more? Your share: $800, so far.

AIG was just rescued by us, too. $85 billion, or $1,133 from you. AIG is part of the cartel that illegally has been shorting silver and costing you big, incidentally.

Don’t forget the Bank of America bailout of Merrill Lynch this past week ($50 billion) and, previously, of Countrywide.

Those were brokered by the Federal Reserve and, you can bank on it, funded by
us. Let’s guess and say your share is $1,333.

What about Lehman Brothers, you might ask?
After all, it was allowed to go bankrupt, thereby exposing all its dirty laundry
for us to see. That $600 billion mess is being carved up right now by
other financial companies and will end up pledged as assets to the Fed and the
Treasury for future loans, rest assured. You can count on up to half of
the Lehman corpse ending up as a dead loss. Your share: upwards of
$40,000.

This doesn’t include the banks already taken over by the FDIC so far this year, a mere hint of things to come. Nor does it include the other financial giants teetering on the edge of financial oblivion.

For those keeping track, just the figures above put you in hock for nearly $100,000. Make that a quarter-million dollars if we consider that your government-employee neighbor gets paid with your tax dollars, too. How do you plan to pay that
off, Bunky? Especially since the prices of everything just keep going up
and you just lost your job?

But the fat cats are just fine, thank you,
and thanks to you. Fannie Mae’s departing CEO took $14 million in severance and Freddie Mac’s ex-honcho walked with $9 million. Henry Paulson’s personal fortune is nearly a half billion dollars.

The $700 billion about to be handed over to
Treasury Secretary Paulson will carry no oversight and no regulatory authority
whatsoever: He gets a blank check. Section 8 of the proposed legislation provides that “(d)ecisions by the Secretary pursuant to the
authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and
may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

How about that, eh? The arrogance of the Bush Administration continues to new heights, surpassing even that which buoyed up the Patriot Act.

The USSA

Some form of this new legislation will pass, rest assured. In the course of just two weeks, America’s entire financial system – banks, S&Ls, insurance companies, brokerages, etc. – have become adjuncts to the US government. This is nationalization, pure and simple.

Paulson is being given unlimited authority to order these organizations to do whatever he demands and force our children and their children to pay for it.

If you don’t see this is as the most significant two weeks in American economic history, a period that transformed our country into a purely-socialistic state – the United Socialistic States of America – then you quite simply have not been paying attention.

What is going on right now goes well beyond anything that FDR dreamed when he set America on the path toward socialism.

To the right is a graph that provides just a hint
of the problem as it really exists today. Look at it again – the
vertical line on the right side is not the chart’s border! Now,
imagine it being much, much worse. It will be as we follow the path charted by the Bush Administration.

By the time this is all over, the Federal Reserve Bank will own virtually all of America. Remember that the owners of the Federal Reserve, a private corporation, are almost all foreign central banking families.

What We Can and Cannot Do

We can’t feed and clothe all of America’s children, but we can afford $60 billion to bail out Bear Stearns.

We can’t provide decent medical care to America’s seniors, but we can give $85 billion to AIG insurance.

We can’t lift one finger to help out Americans losing their homes, but we can hand over up to $1 trillion to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

We haven’t the funds to provide proper care and support to American veterans, but we can afford up to $600 billion to buy pledged Lehman Brothers assets.

We can’t do a thing to stanch to flow of jobs offshore and alleviate the suffering of out-of-work Americans, but we can hand $700 billion over to a guy who, until two years ago, ran the main problem-creating company: Goldman Sachs.

We can’t afford to properly educate our children to fit into a changing America, but we can afford $1 trillion for a war that Cheney and Bush knowingly lied us into.

The Dollar is Dead

WhirlyBen Bernanke recently was quoted as admitting: “We have lost control. We cannot
stabilize the dollar.” Read that quote again. Consider how much Bernanke has lied to us and then imagine just how bad is the real truth.

During the past four years, the Federal Reserve Bank has created $4 trillion out of nothing. Every dollar created in this way dilutes the purchasing power of every already-existing dollar.

The recent runup in the dollar index from 71 to 80 was stupidly transparent – an obvious sham and machination of these guys who have created the very problems which they now demand so much more money in order to “solve.” The prices of precious metals were hammered down as a consequence, so much so that now there exists a divide between physical metal prices and the artificial “paper metal” prices.

And these guys – these outright failures – have the gall to come and tell us to hand over the legacy of our children and their children so they can create more failures and further feather their own nests?

US Out of America!

Are you mad yet? You ought to be fit to be tied. We should all be marching on Washington, DC with firebrands and pitchforks, in fact.

Throw them all out on November 4. Vote against every single incumbent for every single office at all levels, local, county, state and federal. Vote against both Obama and Palin …er, McCain.

New America. An idea whose time has come.

FLASHBACK: Predatory Lenders’ Partner in Crime

An article Eliot Spitzer wrote for the Washington Post right before his career was destroyed by the media shitstorm which documented his connections to the Emperor’s Club. Isn’t it interesting how they targeted him, but not other elites who visit hookers? Some liberal bias. This smells like a neocon hit job, and boy was it successful!

So forgive me if I’m extremely skeptical that this 700 bazillion-dollar bailout needs to be passed right now. The chicken littles in government are more than welcome to buy up the mess and bail out their banking buddies themselves.

How the Bush Administration Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help Consumers

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Several years ago, state attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a marked increase in a range of predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders. Some were misrepresenting the terms of loans, making loans without regard to consumers’ ability to repay, making loans with deceptive “teaser” rates that later ballooned astronomically, packing loans with undisclosed charges and fees, or even paying illegal kickbacks. These and other practices, we noticed, were having a devastating effect on home buyers. In addition, the widespread nature of these practices, if left unchecked, threatened our financial markets.

Even though predatory lending was becoming a national problem, the Bush administration looked the other way and did nothing to protect American homeowners. In fact, the government chose instead to align itself with the banks that were victimizing consumers.

Predatory lending was widely understood to present a looming national crisis. This threat was so clear that as New York attorney general, I joined with colleagues in the other 49 states in attempting to fill the void left by the federal government. Individually, and together, state attorneys general of both parties brought litigation or entered into settlements with many subprime lenders that were engaged in predatory lending practices. Several state legislatures, including New York’s, enacted laws aimed at curbing such practices.

What did the Bush administration do in response? Did it reverse course and decide to take action to halt this burgeoning scourge? As Americans are now painfully aware, with hundreds of thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure and our markets reeling, the answer is a resounding no.

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.

Let me explain: The administration accomplished this feat through an obscure federal agency called the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The OCC has been in existence since the Civil War. Its mission is to ensure the fiscal soundness of national banks. For 140 years, the OCC examined the books of national banks to make sure they were balanced, an important but uncontroversial function. But a few years ago, for the first time in its history, the OCC was used as a tool against consumers.

In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government’s actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules.

But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks. In fact, when my office opened an investigation of possible discrimination in mortgage lending by a number of banks, the OCC filed a federal lawsuit to stop the investigation.

Throughout our battles with the OCC and the banks, the mantra of the banks and their defenders was that efforts to curb predatory lending would deny access to credit to the very consumers the states were trying to protect. But the curbs we sought on predatory and unfair lending would have in no way jeopardized access to the legitimate credit market for appropriately priced loans. Instead, they would have stopped the scourge of predatory lending practices that have resulted in countless thousands of consumers losing their homes and put our economy in a precarious position.

When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners, the Bush administration will not be judged favorably. The tale is still unfolding, but when the dust settles, it will be judged as a willing accomplice to the lenders who went to any lengths in their quest for profits. So willing, in fact, that it used the power of the federal government in an unprecedented assault on state legislatures, as well as on state attorneys general and anyone else on the side of consumers.