The Federal Reserve Mob Is Killing America's Economy

"Bugsy" Bernanke has been exchanging Wall Street banker's Monopoly money (mortgage backed securities that are worth-less) as the lender of last resort, but to the banker's delight, it has become the lender of first resort become the lender because of the cheap 2.5% interest rate. With the lending occurring daily at the Fed's get-it-while-its-hot Drive-Thru Discount Window, Bugsy has been handing it out at an astounding rate of $39 billion per day. Plus, Bugsy is offering $200 billion per week at his weekly auction facility. These transfusions of diseased collateral for healthy, fresh Treasuries will continue for, as far as we know, the next 6 months. When you add up the total, the American taxpayer will watch $5 trillion of OUR $17 trillion federal budget being handed over to a collective bunch of gambling shysters, who betted away other people's money and now want the Fed to take the secondary mortgage backed security junk bonds, which are worth a small fraction of what they originally were worth, off their balance sheets and replace them with currency that is actually worth something! Does this sound like a form of money laundering?

Bugsy takes a form of stolen money, which I say is stolen because these banksters knew they were selling mortgages to people who could not keep up with ballooning interest payments yet made huge fees and bonuses off those mortgages in the secondary investment market selling to investors who were lied to and told these collateralized debt obligations were virtually risk free and held the highest ratings by bond raters. Another big fraud. 

Fees, bonuses and big sells were all that these high-rolling fraudster bankers cared about. Therefore, the term stolen money is not used loosely. Mortgages that were bundled and wrapped up and sold, or gambled on, a couple times over began to show signs of rot. These Wall Street banks and the spider web tying them to the shadow banking companies that sold the secondary securities began to lose their capital foundations. They went to the Fed hoping that which still remained on their balance sheets could be salvaged and saved from further big losses in value after their mortgages and debt obligations began to default, foreclosure or found abandoned, would be worth something again. 

The Wall Streeter Bankster Gangsters were left holding considerably worth-less paper and saw their bank's balance sheets become top heavy and go upside down. Since the banks did not have enough capital to back up their newly acquired losses, and could not sell the once valuable on-paper debt obligations, they ended up going down with the Drano. Now, the richest of Americans are crying and want to be bailed out and have the American people tighten their belts and eat the losses for them so they can keep their lavish lifestyles. Don't you love it!

Our $17 trillion yearly national budget has 1/3 of it being handed over to the Pentagon (44 cents of every dollar), with much of it going toward the money pit called Iraq and Afghanistan, 1/3, it appears, will be handed over to the Wall Street shysters, who now have healthy capital placed magically on their tattered balance sheets so they can lend to each other in order to "creditize" (Did I make this word up?) this nation into a deeper and longer credit debt crisis. Are we not in in enough debt? We have a federal budget deficit approaching $500 billion, and a national debt of $10 trillion. Americans have absolutely no money saved, and their buying power is falling because the Dollar is evaporating in value by the day.

In many cases, these investment banks don't want to lend because they are trying to build up their capital so they have a nice cushion once commercial property defaults and credit default swaps, which I wrote about last week, begin to slap at them like a loose tarp tied up at only one corner as a gale force wind blows in.

Bugsy Bernanke and Paulie Paulson both feel that by unlocking the current credit freeze-up, a $5-6 trillion defrost is all we need to take the country out of recession and back into prosperity. Some are saying only a one trillion dollar thaw will be felt. I guess, that could then be viewed as only pocket change. No country has ever borrowed themselves into prosperity!

So, where do they buy this hallucinogenic Kool-Aid? Are there enough rich slobs out there wanting to buy more stuff? Are there enough rich Wall Streeters to pull us out of recession if they buy an extra beach house and yacht?

We have just seen four airlines roll over dead. Washington Mutual will be laying off 3000 employees and will close 190 of its 336 loan centers. Las Vegas is beginning to fall. 232,000 American jobs have disappeared since January. More lay-offs are in the works. Restaurant, services, and temp jobs are drying up (the last hold out in employment statistics).

Bugsy and Paulie, the monetary mob bosses, are hoping that business will borrow and expand during a time of recession, consumer inflation, jobs losses, and deflating dollar value. Who are these two guys listening to? Could it be a bunch of Republican Regressives who preach that letting the markets do their thing, but without regulation, and of course, with a government-socialized-bailout, is the best cure for such ills?

Dimwitted Bush and his minion of menacing marauders don't really want to do what is needed and will not disappoint the Wall Street mobsters, although they have already sold them out by devaluing the dollar so much that those Americans still holding out for a stable stock market valuation will only cry when they find out that the current Dow Jones figure is not what they think it is. The Regressives are really the Great Kreskin, full of illusions.

Kevin Phillips, wrote in his article, "The Destructive Rise of Big Finance", 4-4-08, www.Alternet.org; www.Huffingtonpost.com, "In fact, phony Washington statistics and warped market measurements make it doubly hard to tell. The Federal Consumer Price Index is already regarded by many Americans as a con job, and the press periodically quotes investors who state their belief that current U.S. inflation is really 6 to 9 percent a year, and not the 2-4 percent the government alleges. I agree. On top of which, because the value of the dollar has dropped so far, the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the end of March was not really 12,200, a number barely up from its 11,700 peak in 2000. If you measure the Dow in Swiss francs or euros, two strong currencies, it has already lost some forty percent of its value. Too many Americans live in a dream-world of economic misinformation."

WOW! Does that mean that our Dow is really at 7400 due to the deflationary factors pushing down the value of the Dollar? And Mr. Phillips is a reputable writer and researcher. Have you finally woken up yet?

A barrel of oil is $110 when bought with dollars because that has been the currency used to trade in oil. The reserve currency of choice (dollar) may have reached the end of its life. Yet now, as the dollar deflates, it takes more dollars to buy one barrel of oil. What happens when the world no longer decides to use the dollar to trade in oil because of the deflated value? If we were another currency, that same barrel of oil may only cost $75 or $85.

What happens when the world decides that dollars are not worth having anymore, and countries begin to dump them on the street in auction just to get rid of them? Look out. A depression would sweep over us like a dark cloud just before a tornado.

The Fed is planning to further deflate the dollar on April 29, 2008, when it again lowers its discount interest rate below the current 2.5%.  I really cannot see it working. Bugsy, Paulie, and Dimwit's monetary policy should scare us all. Their belief that Americans will begin to miraculously borrow, once again, occurs in children stories from the 1950's. They believe they are the goose that laid the golden egg. But, as we know, it was only a fairy tale.

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A Post script: Attorney General Michael Mukasey revealed a startling fact in a speech he gave around 4-4-08, that the NSA failed to eavesdrop on an Afghan terrorist calling a terrorist in the U.S. prior to 9-11, which may very likely be related to the 9-11 attack! His NSA (Condo Rice) just did not go forward to listen to this key page turner. Now, the 9-11 Commissioners are mum and will not speak about it and will not say if they even were given this information during their investigation!!! This is chilling. Did Dimwit Bush and the Evil Chenster hold back this cover up? Listen to a more expanded discussion of this impeachable, and probably, criminal act on the video or podcast. 

The New Government Wise Guys: Bugsy and Paulie

(To all those who hoped to see our latest video broadcast, you will have to wait a week. There is no new show this week.)

President Bush has consistently told the American worker, who was laid off by a company that decided to outsource all their jobs, that they needed to get retrained for the New Economy. What new economy? Does he mean the socialist new economy, for the wealthiest of all Americans? Does he mean the fascist new economy, whereby there is an interweaving of corporate and government interests solely to take care of each other?

If that is so, then why are we NOT sick of a pandering and protectionist policy that embraces Wall-Streeters who have driven their banks to financial ruin and then get hooked up to the Bush and  "Bailout" Bernanke Socialized Reform Policy in order to keep them deep within their riches-fix by supplying them with Treasury bills. If the economy is only hitting a bump in the road, then why do they need to get bailed out of their disasters? 

I guess Bush and Bugsy Bernanke are dealers. Bugsy is part of the Bush crime family supplying his boys with their Treasury bill fix in order to keep those Republican Party contributions pouring in. So, in other words, there is a direct line between Treasury, the Fed and the Republican National Committee. You get cheap bailout money; then you give payola. I think they call that quid pro quo.

Have we had enough of being told that "we" working class Americans need to be responsible by getting retrained for the tough new world economy, while the filthy rich banksta gangstas get to exchange their garbage Monopoly money (those nearly worth-less junk bonds called mortgage backed securities--MBS, collateralized debt obligations, and credit default swaps) for low interest, 2.5% government T-bills? These slap happy banker CEOs, CFOs, and executives then go back out into their investment world to further their money making acquisitions that support their yacht and beach house habits. All these bankers, and even non-bankers (broker dealers), have to do is drive up to Bugsy's Federal Reserve Discount Window in their high end luxury cars, roll down their hand washed car tinted window, give over a bag full of Monopoly money and, in return, get brand spankin' new Federal Reserve money at a wholesale price. "Let me give it to you wholesale." Then Bugsy Bernanke, with his helmet on hoping no hopeless foreclosed citizen throws a brick at his head, says out the darkened sliding Discount Window, "Do you want fries with that?"

Mr. Danny Schechter, in his article, "Fed up: The Bush-Paulson Financial Reform Plan is a Bogus Scheme", 3-31-08, Alternet.org, wrote about the history of the Federal Reserve. "...the Fed is a private agency with no Constitutional authority run by bankers for bankers. It is a privately owned central banking system. Bankers sit on its many boards. The banks in turn get to borrow money at rates the Fed sets, and tack on interest and fees for loans. The Bank is there to do their bidding, and save them from themselves. When they run into trouble, they are then often bailed out."

He further writes, "On December 23, 1913...President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law. Wilson would later express profound regret over his decision, stating, "I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation is, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, and one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world--is no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."

I gather what he meant by dominant men were the Board of Governors, and, later, the more recent Plunge Protection Team members. Is this scaring you yet?

So, why has not Bush been impeached yet? Oh, yes. The cowardly Democrats are still around drinking from the public Kool-Aid trough. Did they forget that they were voted in for a purpose other than to make friends with lobbyists, capitulate to Bush and the Neo-con Regressives, and fear a few of their oppositional constituents? My mistake.

It was reported that 25% of all mortgages in the nation are upside down!!!!! And, there are 2 million foreclosures working their way into our future. 

Now, as Bush says to the banksta gangstas, "Go forward my good men and privatize the profits, and we will socialize the losses." So much for Limbaugh's mantra that "Roosevelt is dead. His memory may still live on, but his policies are dead." Limbaugh must be mainlining Oxycotin knowing he is wrong. Bush has clearly channeled FDR. We now have a socialized monetary policy. For a small fee all one has to do is put up garbage securities, and pseudo-insurance policies called credit default swaps ($500 Trillion) that cannot be sold to anyone and use it as collateral. In exchange, the winner gets freshly minted T-bills, at a cheap rate, so the banksta gangsta can go out and buy Swiss Francs or Euro-based bonds, which are worth more than dollars, in order to build up their bank's capital, increasing its overall wealth and stock price, and ultimately, the banksta sees a boost in his vested holdings. WOW!!! Does it get any sweeter? Do you see that the free market philosophy is a scam?

The heck with your vested pensions from your outsourced industry/factory job. Bugsy Bernanke and his wise guy pal, Hank "Paulie" Paulson never thought you were worth any assistance. Oh yes. I forgot. Get retrained!

Tell me why these fraudsters, who ran these tinderbox Wall-Street banks, which are and will likely be going up in flames unless a good trillion dollars or more of monetary policy hoses them down, were not told that if they wanted to obtain government T-bills they needed to attend the Fed's auction (TAF-Treasury Auction Facility) and put up real capitalized collateral if they want a few billion at the 2.5% interest rate? Why were they not told to sign up at the big tent, get a number, and bid for OUR money along with the other banksta sharks? Because none of them had enough capitalized collateral to put up. Their pockets were filled only with Monopoly money from the selling of leveraged debt obligations and credit default swaps (a form of betting). And most of those bets went so far out in the stratosphere that no one knew what they were holding or what they were really worth. As the subprime mortgages went down, the rest of the space debris fell upon their capital wiping much of it out. Holding 32 dollars of junk to 1 dollar of capital is not a good business practice from a Wharton School of Business graduate or one from Yale or Harvard. They all knew what they were doing. It was only about greed. And still is! There is no payback to straighten up these suits.

This is what the Fed should have done. They should have told those bankstas to go back to their offices and work out refinancing arrangements with the homeowners who needed it. But, they did not have to. These were not the rules, because there were no rules. Now Bugsy and Paulie are giving lip service to establishing some smoke and mirror regulatory rules. Paulie is handing over the regulatory policy to Bugsy, who is not a government employee, but a private officer whose sole purpose is to look out for the bankstas. It is like putting the fox in charge of the other foxes who want to continue to raid the hen house.

Does anyone trust this president to do anything right for the nation? He has not done so yet, so why start now. Why ruin his track record.

Finally, can anyone tell me what is up with this week's stock market surge? These Wall Street bankstas cannot help but to rub their giddy exuberance over all of us who work for a living. They bolster the stock prices and the market heads upward, while the rest of America, those of us who do our own grocery shopping, and own used cars, wonder in dismay just what is going on? Yet we see UBS write down $19 billion; Toyota and Ford auto sales decline by 10% and 14% respectively. Chrysler and GM take bigger hits. Even Honda sales dropped by 3%. Construction activity--down. Manufacturing Index is 48.6, the biggest drop in 5 years. 80,000 jobs lost over the last 3 months. And, millions of Americans are now receiving more food stamps than ever before. Now, Great Britain is reporting a recession about to hit their shores. So who's zoomin' who?

QUESTION ASKED TO GEORGE BUSH: "What's your advice to the average American who is hurting now---facing the prospect of $4 a gallon gasoline..."

BUSH: "Wait a minute. What did you just say? You're predicting $4 a gallon gas? There's a lot [of] economic uncertainty. If you're out there wondering whether or not--you know, what your life is going to be like and you're looking at $4 a gallon, that's uncertain. In the long run, our economy is going to be fine. Right now we're dealing with a difficult situation."

Like I said, who is zoomin' who?

Bush, Beanie Bernanke and The Bailout

This giddy false exuberant belief that a rising stock market, lower oil prices and falling gold prices to only be temporary, will likely be proven wrong. So, be prepared for the reverse to reoccur and hit you on the back of the head like the day when you were walking home from school, and from out of nowhere came that icy packed snowball. Wham!!

The market has climbed not because of increased productivity, or the delight of a retreating recession, but because the Federal Reserve is handing out newly minted Greenbacks in exchange for worthless garbage cyber-dollars that cannot be sold to anyone with a brain other than Beanie Bernanke and his Federalies. Single payer loan dealer Wall-Street bankers. 

This is a bailout. Let us admit it now! If I gave you real money for Monopoly money, that would be a bailout. I would be saving you from looking stupid and from sure disaster.

The Wall Street banks gambled on making money from bundled debt securities in order to cover loans and deposits hoping to make billions from gullible suckers. This was all done off the bank's balance sheets and from the back rooms of a quiet, shadow banking system that would make Tony Soprano proud. These risky sales were made away from the public's eye. These deals were out of view from the handful of Bush regulators still on the job, and not hanging out at the local unemployment office. Unfortunately, these risky pieces of paper went up in flames as subprime loans went south taking down those home values and related over-extended personal unpaid debt.

So, Ben "Bailout" Bernanke could not have his rich, greedy banker pals lose their upper crusty lifestyles and end up in the pit with us middle-classites. Oh no; anything but that, Ben!! They have worked way too hard scamming working America to be knocked off their elitist pedestals.

Bernanke does not care to make any of these greed-lusting socialists accountable and responsible for their pre-planned fraud upon the American worker. The Fed holds only $709 billion in Treasury bills to pay for the bailouts and junk collateral exchanges at the Primary Dealer Credit Facilities discount window. Drive by and pick up your fat 2.5% government subsidy. So far, he has visibly given away $230 billion of the $709 billion in only one week. What a spending spree! Once that is gone, Beanie will head down to the basement printing press to pull an all-nighter rolling dollars off the copier.

The facts are that in spite of these "exchanges", there has been an $8 trillion housing bubble and foreclosures pile up. As home values fall further, some are scooping up bargains; yet, the question still remains, will those bargains lose more value over the coming weeks/months/year? Jobs continue to be lost. (Two consecutive months of actual job losses.) Prices continue to eat away at expendable incomes. And, for most Americans, they cannot afford to go into further debt. These giddy bankers really don't want to loan out money. It just is too risky. Instead, they take OUR Federal Reserve T-bills and rush over to Europe and buy Euro-backed bonds because they are worth more than the dollar. Back To The Greedy Future.

Is the Justice Department concerned? Are they going after these "gambling swindlers" with billions in their trust funds and beach houses? No.

Dean Baker, a smart progressive economist, with great ideas, suggested that the Fed should just take over such failed banks, kick out the top brass and restructure the operation with more

competent managers with a goal to sell the thing once they make it solvent again. Why cannot we do it, to? Oh, I forgot, Bush is still president and Reed and Pelosi run Congress. Oh, silly me!

What will the giddy Stock Marketeers, from Bernanke Brothers Studios, do when they realize that we are really in a credit crunch, and maxed out on it, too? If Americans will not, or cannot borrow another dime, then the flow of credit stalls, the nation's economy grinds down, the dollar falls further, and gold prices increase along with consumer prices causing a deepening recession and inflation. Remember, the developing world, such as India and China, are in great need of what we need, too.

We can thank decades of Regressive (credit to David Michael Green for the term) policies shipping away jobs, gutting our manufacturing sector and bringing about an approaching $9 trillion national debt, a $700 billion trade deficit, and a $500 billion budget deficit. And don't forget a $2000/second war budget.

The Bush Regressives want our economy and standard of living to fall so far down that labor costs are par with China and India instead of stabilizing our standard of living and building it back to a place close to where it once had been. Instead of reinventing America into the World's Greatest Green Show on Earth, they want to bring us the "more wars" Regressives, who want to perpetuate the war machine, while, at the same time, raising the national debt by borrowing more to make it run, and subsidizing their corporate cronies who produced the war machine with OUR tax dollars. When will America say enough is enough?

McCain's Poor Judgement

A blogger, named Bob, wrote a response to McCain-the Flipflopper, and felt Carl and I were too progressive for him. No doubt, he was a McCain Regressive and wanted to have nothing to do with universal healthcare, which would be helpful to all working Americans, as well as our industrial, and small business sectors.

I want to put out some facts about Senator McCain and how he has been drinking the GOP Regressive brand of Kool-Aid.

• McCain had a big dose of the Regressive Kool-Aid when he began supporting Ahmed Chalabi, the former head of the Iraqi National Congress, 2000-2003, an exiled Iraqi group, leading McCain and other GOP'ers by the nose to war through misinformation. Chalabi's goal was to take down Saddam and be installed as the president of Iraq. McCain had supplied this exiled group, specially Chalabi, with millions of taxpayer dollars. Chalabi was a mastermind in setting up the Regressives to believe that Saddam had WMD's when there were none. He had recently been Iraq's oil minister, no doubt, hoping to gleen more from that position.
• He was found guilty, and Jordanians find him a fugitive from justice, for embezzling $300 million from the bank he ran in Jordan. He is really an upstanding fellow for McCain to supply with American dollars.
• McCain appears to not know the difference between Sunni and Shia, and which side of the fight Iran is on. So much for McCain's foreign policy acumen. Now he needs Joe, 100 more years of war, Lieberman to help him answer questions.
• And then there is McCain's deep ties to lobbyists, whereby he does their Congressional bidding for them. His girlfriend, Vicki Iseman, and client, Paxton Communications, had McCain do their bidding when they tried to take over a Pittsburgh Public Broadcasting t.v. station and convert it into a full time religious station. This is just one example of how McCain does the political bidding for lobbyists who give him political contributions.
• In mid 2007, McCain missed 10 of 14 votes on Iraq. 
• In 9/07, McCain voted against the Webb Amendment calling for adequate troop rests between deployments.
• In 7/07, McCain voted against a plan to drawdown troop levels in Iraq.
• In 3,5,6/06, McCain voted against an amendment that would provide $20 M for veteran health care facility needs and for veteran medical care needs.
• In 3/04, McCain voted against creating a veteran's reserve fund addressing medical care.
• In 10/03. McCain voted to table an amendment to provide additional safety equipment for troops in Iraq.
• In 8/01, McCain voted against increasing funds for veteran medical care.

Is this the Commander-in-Chief Bob and other GOP Regressive supporters want in our White House? The 100 year war and "there'll-be-more-wars" Regressive choice for president needs to be shown the exit door for good!

Now, Bob and other Regressives attacked Obama over a number of inane issues. One Bob brought up was that Obama did not engage in the pledge of allegiance ceremony by placing his hand over his heart during the recitation. This ineptness on Bob's part shows that the Regressives are desperate. 

Bob, what about President Bush not placing his hand over his heart during the pledge? Or, when he placed the wrong hand over his heart?

The real question is, does Bob have any shame over the real facts about his right-wing positions? Is this all he has to complain about, while American deaths rise to 4000 in Iraq? And why does he support McCain, a loose cannon, whose votes in Congress have shown he does not want to ease the stresses our soldiers are suffering from during a war that has lasted longer than World War 2? The reality is, McCain does not support the soldiers. He only pays lip service to it by making an appearance with his puppet master, Joe-the Shmo- Lieberman. 

The fact is, Bob, that during a fish fry in Iowa, a woman at that event sang the Star Spangled Banner, and that was when a photographer snapped the picture of Obama standing there with his hands clasped together and not over his heart. If you don't know, one does not need to place their hand over one's heart during the Star Spangled Banner, Bob, then I have just told you so.

It is sad how people like Bob follow the Regressive talking point spin-lie machine without ever doing some simple fact searching.

Bob, and other right-wing sheep will follow the wolves even though they will be taken down by their con game.

John McCain-the double speakin' flip-flopper

Hey guys, great site. I love it. Check out www.therealmccain.com   John McCain says anything to get elected. In addition, we have to remember that Hillary voted for the Bush resolution to attack Iraq. For her to refuse to admit she was wrong shows a significant hole in her character. There were many more politically motivated votes she made as she moved toward her announcement as a presidential candidate.