I am not sure how much the American people understand exactly what is happening in this nation in regards to the de-evolution of our standard-of-living, and overall way of life. There is a massive paradigm shift coming our way, which will affect around 80% of the country, and most dramatically, 70% of the population. It is not a matter of if, but more likely when.
Once you realize that what is being said in Washington is really a script to a massive David Mamet-like stage performance, you will see that there are more players than those on the stage. It all resembles the film, The Spanish Prisoner. It is basically a giant con game played upon an individual in possession of a corporate secret. There is more to the story, so I won’t spoil it, since it is very cool to watch!
But what is happening is a giant con game being played upon the average American, which will affect them for years and years to come. What is amazing is just how many people are watching something different unfolding. They are more engaged in what is happening on the periphery instead of what is happening at the core. They are upset with Obama’s determination with health care reform, and believe it is a government take-over of their health care insurance, when in reality their health care insurance has already been taken over by an industry that has caused millions of personal bankruptcies. Out of the 1.4 million personal bankruptcies, over 60% are because of medical bankruptcies. And out of those people, 75% had health care insurance.
Just this week we learned that the hypocrite Sarah Palin, after quitting her seat as governor, all the while condemning universal health care, was going to Canada for medical treatment. So much for using her own private health insurance when needed for her own care. When really desperate, use the Canadian’s socialized health care system instead, right Sarah?
These same people are seeing their roads filled with potholes the size of Baltimore, bridges decaying all over the place, empty shopping malls, and local community storefronts with for-rent signs propped in the glass windows. In small town America, we will see many more become ghost towns. These same people are victims and don’t really get it just yet.
This Washington stage performance is starring Barack Obama, and his cast members, which include his cabinet, Ben Bernanke, and others, such as Robert Rubin. But those people standing behind the curtain are the key to the script. This is an interactive stage performance because Congress is in the audience. We are watching it from afar, and really do not have a strong influence over the action, since we are thinly scattered all around the country. But nevertheless, our voices enmasse, are being heard through protests.
But what many of us know is that this entire political theater performance is filled with a fear, a silent fear, of actually fixing the problems that are destroying the very core of what this nation has achieved. There is a fear of fixing a very broken economy because to fix it properly would require a profound declaration that there has been collusion by those behind the curtain to keep it broken. And those who are standing out of sight, as I have said in previous posts, are the most powerful people in the country. They were able to control Lil’BoyBush, and now, they are controlling Barack Obama. The Shadow Cast members behind the curtain are directing the stage performance. The show should be called The Federalized Crime Syndicate Operations of the U.S. Government (FCSO).
What is occurring is the continuation of the transfer of wealth from the working classes to the top 1% of the income earners. Because of the shift of Treasury money to the Federal Reserve, and the process of off-handing toxic financial syndicate debt to the Federal Reserve for the taxpayers to cover, as well as for the Fed to increase the FCSOs liquidity as a result of the toxic debt exchanges in order to illegitimately prop up asset value prices; the public will ultimately be responsible for this subside to the rich asset classes’ return to full wealth values.
This blogspot has been posting many pieces on the fact that what exists in this county is financial crime syndicate operation. Much of it clearly performed in the open for all Americans to watch, but those in Washington continue to endorse it.
Washington’s infrastructure stimulus spending has gone into full body scanning machines (Chertoff Group) sold by former Homeland Security boss, under Lil’Boy, Michael Chertoff. Let’s keep those former government insiders in the cash flow money loop provided by the US Treasury. Feeding from the public trough in and out of government. The other “infrastructure stimulus” appears to be the rebuilding of Iraq and Afghanistan, yet our streets, schools, bridges, mass transit systems, and rail systems can go to rot.
The US, being a sovereign nation, has allowed itself to be hijacked by the ‘FCSO’. For 30 plus years, this banking slim mobster take-over of our government and monetary system has been sanctioned with the phony legitimacy of those in power. The US is no longer a sovereign country, since the mega-investment banking crime syndicate has been allowed to manipulate currencies, the amount of money placed in circulation, interest rates at the consumer credit lending level, the level of debt and chicanery used to make us believing that such unauditable debt can be magically turned into capital, when inadequate or non-existent, as a result of this illusionary act. These financial crime syndicate operators have significantly controlled the political process and outcomes in the US, and around the world. The fact is that they have become the masters-of-ceremonies when buying and selling our government.
The Shadow Cast members has been pressing Senate Banking Committee Chairman, Chris Dodd-D-Conn. to fall into lock step. They have been pressing him to prevent a Consumer Financial Protection Agency from having any independence or political power. They have been forcing Dodd to make sure that any chief financial regulator duties would be performed by the Federal Reserve chairman, or stationed inside the Treasury so that the chief regulator would have all his/her teeth removed before taking the position.
David DeGraw, the author of The Economic Elite Vs. The People Of The United States, has written extensively how those behind the curtain, the Shadow Cast, are engaged in economic terrorism against working Americans. He begins his article, “Economic Terrorism": The Consequences are Poverty and Mass Unemployment, with this quote written by Michael Lind, ““The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight.” Lind is the Policy Director of the New America’s Economic Growth Program.
Mr. DeGraw wrote, “In total, Americans have lost $5 trillion from their pensions and savings since the economic crisis began and $13 trillion in the value of their homes. During the first full year of the crisis, workers between the age of 55 - 60, who have worked for 20 - 29 years, have lost an average of 25% off their 401k. Personal debt has risen from 65% of income in 1980 to 125% today. Over five million US families have already lost their homes, in total 13 million US families are expected to lose their home by 2014, with 25% of current mortgages underwater. Deutsche Bank has an even grimmer prediction: “The percentage of ‘underwater’ loans may rise to 48 percent, or 25 million homes.” Every day 10,000 US homes enter foreclosure. Statistics show that an increasing number of these people are not finding shelter elsewhere, there are now over 3 million homeless Americans, the fastest growing segment of the homeless population is single parents with children.”
And here is more: “The millions struggling to find work are just part of the story. Due to the fact that we now have a record high [when there are] six people for every one-job opening; companies have been able to further increase the workload on their remaining employees. They have been able to increase the amount of hours Americans are working, reduce wages and drastically cut back on benefits. Even though Americans were already the most productive workers in the world before the economic crisis, in the third quarter of 2009, average worker productivity increased by an annualized rate of 9.5%, at the same time unit labor cost decreased by 5.2%. This has led to record profits for many companies. Of the 220 companies in the S&P 500 who have reported fourth-quarter results thus far, 78% of them had “better-than-expected profits” with earnings 17% above expectations, “the highest for any quarter since Thomson Reuters began tracking data.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national median wage was only $32,390 per year in 2008, and median household income fell by 3.6% while the unemployment rate was 5.8%. With the unemployment rate now at 10%, median income has been falling at a 5% rate and is expected to continue its decline. Not surprisingly, Americans’ job satisfaction level is now at an all time low.
There are also a growing number of employed people who, despite having a job, are still living in poverty. There are at least 15 million workers who now fall into this rapidly growing category. $32,390 a year is not going to get you far in today’s economy, and half of the country is making less than that. This is why many Americans are now forced to work two jobs to provide for their family to hopefully make ends meet.” (End)
Phillip Davis wrote in Seekingalpha.com, in his piece, “America’s Commodity Crisis”, “Commodities are a TAX. They are the worst kind of tax because they flatly (not progressively) charge every man, woman and child in this country more money for the same food, fuel, shelter and clothing that they had to have last week in order to live. It doesn’t matter if those people are trying to save or trying to tighten their belts or trying to get out of debt - high commodity prices are a shake-down that rips money out of the pockets of the middle class and funnels it to the very, very small class of commodity producers, commodity speculators and the people who finance them and collect the fees.
Over 99% of the people in this country do not own mines or oil wells (and I’m not counting small farmers because they are literally raped by speculators and bankers, often leaving them worse-off than the consumers) or huge plantations and they do not buy futures contracts on margin with cash they borrow at prime plus 0.5% nor do they own tankers filled with 2M barrels of crude that they arbitrage along the crack spread, looking for an opportune moment to deliver their goods (hopefully during a crisis) at a maximum profit.
So 99% of the people in this country don’t even own a commodity ETF - they have no way to profit from high commodity prices and they need to eat, and they need to buy clothing and have shelter and they need fuel to heat or cool their homes and go from place to place. There is a word for people like that, at the bottom end of a transaction they have no control over - VICTIMS!” (End)
Who is Mr. Davis? He is a stocks and option trader, among other things. His clients are wealthy, but he understands exactly what is happening to the rest of us. He gets it!
In Michael Whitney’s brilliant piece, “Why They Should Be Indicted: The Case Against Bernanke and Greenspan”, Counterpunch.org, he clearly states that there is a clear-cut case to indict them for being the human vehicles who have allowed the financial crime syndicate, ie. economic terrorists, to take over the monetary system of this country. He writes that there appears to be enough proof that Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan aided and abetted the banks and other financial institutions in the sale of fraudulent loans to investors. He goes on to say that on one hand “Bernanke denies culpability in the meltdown, but--at the same time—[he] eagerly points out that the Federal Reserve is the chief regulator responsible for overseeing the “large complex financial firms that pose a threat to the stability of the financial system.” So, which is it? Does he accept responsibility or not? Here is a statement Bernanke made earlier in the week during an appearance before the Senate Banking Committee which may help to clarify the point.”
Bernanke said, “I think that stripping the Federal Reserve of supervisory authorities in the light of the recent crisis would be a grave mistake…we’ve learned from the crisis large complex financial firms that pose a threat to the stability of the financial system need strong consolidated supervision…”
Mr. Whitney responds to say that by saying that “Bernanke admits that the Fed is the ‘primary regulator’ that is responsible for “strong consolidated supervision” over “large complex financial firms that pose a threat to the stability.” If we accept his definition, than we must also accept that the Fed should be held accountable when it abuses its authority and puts the system at risk…at the very least, the Fed it guilty of criminal negligence.” (End)
Throughout the piece, Mr. Whitney quotes competent and brilliant economists who support the claim that the Fed purposefully executed a plan to transfer the nation’s wealth to the ‘FCSO’.
Georgewashington2.blogspot.com posted: Nobel Prize-Winning Economist: Federal Reserve System is Corrupt and Undermines Democracy,
“Joseph Stiglitz - former head economist at the World Bank and a Nobel-prize winner - said yesterday that the very structure of the Federal Reserve system is so fraught with conflicts that it is "corrupt" and undermines democracy.
[Furthermore], Stiglitz said: If we [i.e. the World Bank] had seen a governance structure that corresponds to our Federal Reserve system, we would have been yelling and screaming and saying that country does not deserve any assistance, this is a corrupt governing structure. Stiglitz pointed out that - if another country had presented a plan to reform its financial system, and included a regulatory regime that copied the makeup of the Federal Reserve system - "it would have been a big signal that something is wrong."
The Fed, and Treasury have done everything they can to put our economic system at risk in order to make sure that the top 1%, or top 400 people, remain in financial and political power. They have done this by making sure that this economy is debt based. They took mortgages and created investment vehicles, ie. capital assets, using that debt. They insured that debt using AIG as they were betting that the mortgage debt would go bust, since so much of it was bogus. They created debt-based, and over-leveraged instruments off of previously debt-based derivatives and securities. This was done over and over again. They colluded with the Federal Reserve to take on their toxic mortgage debt, and create money from that debt. They claimed that toxic debt was collateral capital, therefore, the Fed could go forward and print money using its Quantitative Easing policy.
The Federal Reserve prints money allowing the FCSO to borrow it at a zero percent interest rate, and hands over toxic, worthless mortgage based debt securities as collateral. Then the FCSO buys Treasury bonds and receives a 3+percent interest rate return. Then, when the government needs money, they borrow it from the FCSO, and pay interest to them for the use of the money that was originally at zero percent interest, and sitting in the Federal Reserve vaults. In those vaults, or depository, were the Treasury revenues, which were later lent to the financial crime syndicate, and then borrowed back from them for a price! Does any of this make a bit of sense? Is this not a type of Ponzi scheme? Is this not a way to further enrich the richest people in the country without them every really having to lift a finger to earn it? It is basically a planned Treasury theft.
Dr. Ellen Brown, in her piece, “What Goes Around Comes Around IMF-Style Austerity Comes To America”, masterfully explains what is going on behind the curtain. She points out that one of the Shadow Cast members is the Blackstone Group, and is currently chaired by hedge fund magnate Peter G. Peterson, former chair of the Council on Foreign Relations and one-time-head of the New York Federal Reserve. He is also founder of the Peter Peterson Foundation, which is engaged in imposing itself on Congress. The Blackstone Group has been hired by Congress to dispense government bailout funds to AIG. His foundation is spearheading a massive effort to remake Social Security and Medicare benefit allocations as a way to bring about fiscal governmental responsibility Peterson Foundation style. In other words, punish working Americans for what the corporate elite has created through their government take over.
In addition, Peter Peterson’s Blackstone Group is pushing for a mandatory government savings plan for all Americans to be administered by the Social Security Administration. This makes Wall Street salivate, since a good portion would be invested in Wall Street stocks. As Peterson’s group has embedded itself inside the government policy machine, as it feeds from the public trough, as well, he has been contracted to manage around $100B, that is one-half of the total pot of the federal employee’s savings plan, through his Blackrock Financial. I would say there appears a conflict of interest: working for the government, profiting off the government, and influencing government fiscal policy all at the same time. This appears perfectly OK by those performing on the Washington stage.
So much of what is going on upon the Washington stage is to convince working Americans that to issue any more money for stimulus is bad, that the creation of debt is bad, and that the only way to fix the problem is to squeeze on the middle class, and to make them further indebted to the corporate elite through increased fees, higher gas prices, higher food prices, current taxing levels, and higher commodity prices, as well as lower wages, while staying shackled to their employer’s health care plan and the banker’s mortgage contract. No health care mobility for YOU!
If you were to have a single-payer health care system, more than likely your wages would increase because you would have job mobility as you carried your health care elsewhere. Your employer might actually negotiate a wage increase in order to keep you working instead of leaving. Also, the opportunity for starting up your own business would open up. Ultimately, employers would not have to use profits or operating expenses for health care. The FSCO is against this.
What many fail to understand is that when workers have less money to spend, the tax base shrinks, less federal, state and local taxes flow through the system, taxes are likely to increase to cover shortfalls and losses, unemployment increases forcing government to support out-of-work citizens to survive, underemployment squeezes personal budgets, less personal savings, higher debt burdens occur as households use credit cards to pay weekly bills, their assistance in college tuition, and pay medical costs.
One way or another, the government will have to spend money on people and jobs. Either through stimulus, or personal disaster relief payments.
President Obama is planting the fear in Americans that he must look at ways to cut the budget because our rising debt is extremely harmful to our recovery. The fact is that we are paying less than 4% of GDP on the debt’s interest payments.
Dr. Brown writes that we are lucky that the US is able to pay its debts in dollars, which is not always the case with other countries suffering from debt burdens. “We have been deluded into thinking that “fiscal responsibility” (read “austerity”) is something for our benefit, something we actually need in order to save the country from bankruptcy. In the massive campaign to educate us to the perils of the federal debt, we have been repeatedly warned that the debt is disastrously large; that when foreign lenders decide to pull the plug on it, the U.S. will have to declare bankruptcy; and that all this is the fault of the citizenry for borrowing and spending too much. We are admonished to tighten our belts and save more; and since we can’t seem to impose that discipline on ourselves, the government will have to do it for us with a “mandatory savings” plan. The American people, who are already suffering massive unemployment and cutbacks in government services, will have to sacrifice more and pay the piper more, just as in those debt-strapped countries forced into austerity measures by the IMF.
Fortunately for us, however, there is a major difference between our debt and the debts of Greece, Latvia and Iceland. Our debt is owed in our own currency – U.S. dollars. Our government has the power to fix its solvency problems itself, by simply issuing the money it needs to pay off or refinance its debt. That time-tested solution goes back to the colonial scrip of the American colonists and the “Greenbacks” issued by Abraham Lincoln to avoid paying 24-36% interest rates.”
She writes, “But there is a solution to that too. The government can just mandate that the Federal Reserve buy the government’s debt, and that the Fed not sell the bonds to private lenders. The Federal Reserve states on its website that it rebates its profits to the government after deducting its costs, making the money nearly interest-free.
All the fear-mongering about the economy collapsing when the Chinese and other investors stop buying our debt is yet another red herring. The Fed can buy the debt itself – as it has been stealthily doing. That is actually a better alternative than selling the debt to foreigners, since it means we really will owe the debt only to ourselves, as Roosevelt was assured by his advisors when he agreed to the deficit approach in the 1930s; and this debt-turned-into-dollars will be nearly interest-free.
Better yet would be to either nationalize or abolish the Fed and fund the government directly with Greenbacks as President Lincoln did. What the Fed does the Treasury Department can do, for the cost of administration. There would be no shareholders or bondholders to siphon earnings, which could be recycled into public accounts to fund national, state and local budgets at zero or near-zero interest rates. Eliminating debt service payments would allow state and federal income taxes to be slashed; and the public managers of this money, rather than hiding behind a veil of secrecy, would be opening their books for all to see.” (End)
As has been written here, we are all but pawns of this Washington stage performance. It does not have to be this way. There are some obvious solutions, but President Obama and Congress are failing to strip away the curtain and unveil to the people the reasons that motivate the actions of the Shadow Cast members, when they could, at last, finally be declared as well deserving Shadow Cast-Aways.
Thanks for reading, jerry
http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com
