October 4th, 2008
Zeitgeist - Addendum , exploring the Federal Reserve System, IMF, World Bank, debt based finance and more, has just been released and made available at Google video, YouTube, and of course the official Zeigeist website. Considering recent economic events it is sure to be watched by millions of outraged citizens worldwide and feared by the elite few.
Why is the mainstream media –which keeps lecturing Americans that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s Bailout Package Version 2.0 must be passed immediately– ignoring what might be the most earth-shattering provisions in Paulson’s package?
The media needs to start asking hard questions. Here is where they need to start. If you look at page 180 of the 451-page monster bailout bill that easily passed the Senate yesterday (PDF here), you will see that it includes at Section 116 language about the tax treatment of “industrial source carbon dioxide.” It also provides, at Section 117, for a “carbon audit of the tax code.”
What could a provision about the tax treatment of “industrial source carbon dioxide” and another provision about doing a “carbon audit” of the tax code possibly have to do with restoring confidence in Wall Street’s troubled credit markets?
The answer: NOTHING.
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The Corbett Report has created a new video explaining why people should be angry about more than just the proposed $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. One reason, of course, is the $2.3 trillion missing from the Pentagon the day before 9/11, when the Pentagon’s Budget Analyst Office was destroyed. Watch the video below:
As Congress considers a $700 billion bailout for Wall Street and the banking sector, there are calls to restrict the pay and severance packages for CEOs at investment houses, banks and mortgage lenders poised to be benefit from the plan put forward by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke.
Executives from some of the major investment and commercial banks involved in the financial upheaval and bailout earned hefty paychecks last year, according to proxy statements outlining their salaries, bonuses and stock options:
You have to love this. Here is the story as originally posted on Bloomberg:
“Sept. 25 (Bloomberg) — Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher said the proposed $700 billion rescue of financial institutions backed by Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke would plunge the U.S. government deeper into a fiscal abyss.
The plan by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to buy troubled assets from financial institutions would put “one more straw on the back of the frightfully encumbered camel that is the federal government ledger,” Fisher said today in the text of a speech in New York. “We are deeply submerged in a vast fiscal chasm.”
Now here is how it reads after “Update 1″
“Sept. 25 (Bloomberg) — Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher said the U.S. Treasury’s proposed $700 billion rescue of financial institutions would be “a critical first step” toward calming markets even while adding to the U.S. government’s fiscal burden.
The plan by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to buy troubled assets from financial institutions “is an incremental addition to the federal government ledger,” Fisher said today in a speech in New York. Existing federal obligations in Medicare and Social Security mean “we are deeply submerged in a vast fiscal chasm,” he said. “
Hmmm.
The actual speech is here; this is what it says:
Sean Olender | SFGate.com
Treasury Secretary Paulson’s edict to create a $700 billion fund to buy worthless mortgage securities from agitated wealthy bond investors is nothing short of a final step on the path to the end of the republic. The secretary claims he can only be effective if his decisions are beyond judicial review.
Our government and its owners appear to be testing how much the American public will tolerate. A few years ago, no one could have imagined that the silent majority would quietly accept thefts of this magnitude from a government that stopped tiny payments to single mothers with poor children in the name of welfare reform because the program’s $10 billion cost was breaking the federal budget.
This isn’t socialism, it’s fascism.
A former senior advisor to the U.S. Treasury and highly-regarded economics professor, Nouriel Roubini, says that Washington’s bail outs are “socialism for the rich, the well connected and Wall Street; it is . . . a corrupt system where profits are privatized and losses are socialized.”
In fact, this is a quintessential characteristic of economies run by fascist regimes.
For example, historian Gaetano Salvemini argued in 1936 that fascism makes taxpayers responsible to private enterprise, because “the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise… Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social” (page 416).
Why?
Well, remember that one of the best definitions of fascism is the “merger of state and corporate power“.
I can’t help but notice the Next Big Story on America’s financial meltdown isn’t getting much press this morning on the mainstream media, so let me break it to you here:
The FDIC - the iron-clad $100,000-per-person-per-bank insurer that has “never failed” to deliver and has been continually promising during this crisis that your money is safe (read: “please don’t run on the bank”) - is underfunded. Woefully. To the tune of about $150 billion, and it’s going to need a bailout of its own within the next year. Read more here.
The FDIC expects about 100 banks to fail between now and the end of 2009. Is yours among them? Perhaps. But you’re not allowed to know. Ignorance is good for you in a democracy, apparently. And especially good when you’re trying to avoid a total market meltdown.
To the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate:
As economists, we want to express to Congress our great concern for the plan proposed by Treasury Secretary Paulson to deal with the financial crisis. We are well aware of the difficulty of the current financial situation and we agree with the need for bold action to ensure that the financial system continues to function. We see three fatal pitfalls in the currently proposed plan:
1) Its fairness. The plan is a subsidy to investors at taxpayers’ expense. Investors who took risks to earn profits must also bear the losses. Not every business failure carries systemic risk. The government can ensure a well-functioning financial industry, able to make new loans to creditworthy borrowers, without bailing out particular investors and institutions whose choices proved unwise.
2) Its ambiguity. Neither the mission of the new agency nor its oversight are clear. If taxpayers are to buy illiquid and opaque assets from troubled sellers, the terms, occasions, and methods of such purchases must be crystal clear ahead of time and carefully monitored afterwards.
3) Its long-term effects. If the plan is enacted, its effects will be with us for a generation. For all their recent troubles, America’s dynamic and innovative private capital markets have brought the nation unparalleled prosperity. Fundamentally weakening those markets in order to calm short-run disruptions is desperately short-sighted.
For these reasons we ask Congress not to rush, to hold appropriate hearings, and to carefully consider the right course of action, and to wisely determine the future of the financial industry and the U.S. economy for years to come.
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Karl Denninger |Market-Ticker.net
The Fed has claimed that this is a “liquidity crisis.” | Really Ben? Then perhaps you can explain this?
Note that this is an intentional drain of “slosh”, or liquidity, from the banking system. $125 billion in the last four days drained?
You wouldn’t be trying to intentionally cause a bank failure or two to bolster your call for the $700 billion “bailout” plan, or perhaps intentionally lock the short-term credit markets, would you Ben?
If the market has a liquidity crisis, why would you be intentionally draining reserves from the banking system? Don’t you think you ought to explain that to Congress?
Well now we have it - since this is a proposed bill (public) and in the interests of fair use,
here you have it as reported by Fox:
by Richard C. Cook / August 27th, 2008
How are things going at the Democratic Party National Convention in Denver this week?
Are they talking about the fact that the Western world is run by an international financial elite headquartered in London, the financial capitals of mainland Europe (such as Frankfurt, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Paris, and Milan), and, of course, New York City?
Are they mentioning at their cocktail parties that the financial elite exert control over the world’s population through the cartels that make up the world’s producing economies and through the civilian and military bureaucracies who work for the governments that kow-tow to them?
Of course they know that the most important cartels are those which control energy resources. And that of these, the commodity of central importance is oil. But is any of this helping them draw conclusions regarding the doubling of oil prices during the last year or about the largest oil company profits in history?
Also, they should be drawing the right conclusions from the fact that every private and pubic enterprise operates on the basis of a money economy, though it would be more accurate to call it a credit economy. This means that whoever controls the issuance of money and credit controls the world. And the world’s monetary systems function on the basis of money and credit being introduced into circulation through loans from the banking system, loans for which interest is charged. So what should that tell them?
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Miya Shay | ABC 13.com
“As you know the decrease in the dollar’s value and the increase in energy prices are two sides of the same coin which are being introduced as factors behind the recent instability,”
Iran’s President has blamed a weak US dollar for the soaring fuel prices that have sparked protests across the world. Mahmoud Ahmedinejad told leaders from the OPEC oil-exporting countries that the record-high costs were fake and imposed. He said that supply of oil was plentiful.
Iranian President said, “At a time when the growth of consumption is lower than the growth of production and the market is full of oil, prices are rising and this trend is completely fake and imposed.” Oil recently touched a record 140 dollars a barrel, sparking global strikes and protests led by by truckers, fishermen and labour groups.
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