Socialism and the End of the American Dream

Goldman Sachs employees are buying up hand guns to protect themselves from the angry throngs of peasants (taxpayers) with pitchforks.  This is clipped from a Bloomberg article!  (Good videos)

excerpt: Henry Paulson, U.S. Treasury secretary during the bailout and a former Goldman Sachs CEO, let it slip during testimony to Congress last summer when he explained why it was so critical to bail out Goldman Sachs, and -- oh yes -- the other banks. People "were unhappy with the big discrepancies in wealth, but they at least believed in the system and in some form of market-driven capitalism. But if we had a complete meltdown, it could lead to people questioning the basis of the system."

Torn Curtain

There you have it. The bailout was meant to keep the curtain drawn on the way the rich make money, not from the free market, but from the lack of one. Goldman Sachs blew its cover when the firm's revenue from trading reached a record $27 billion in the first nine months of this year, and a public that was writhing in financial agony caught on that the profits earned on taxpayer capital were going to pay employee bonuses.

This slip-up let the other bailed-out banks happily hand off public blame to Goldman, which is unpopular among its peers because it always seems to win at everyone's expense.

quote from global warming hoax advocate Stephen H. Schneider: "as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but--which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts."

So let me get this straight.  Scientist who support the global warming hoax are lying.  That puts them at odds with the most fundamental of scientific requirements - don't lie.  So therefore, global warming hoaxsters have disqualified themselves as legitimate scientists.  At best, they are dissembling practitioners of "political science".

So, if we disqualify the scientific posers who are lying about global warming, and then take a look at the consensus of real scientist left (truth tellers), we have an interesting fact.  100% of legitimate scientists do not believe in the global warming hoax.   100% consensus!!!

Bastardos.  Potemkin villages.  Show trials. 5 year plans.  Where have we seen this before?

Incredible story of how the Obama bailout of GM and Chrysler went down.  Very in-depth, exhaustively researched, and well written.

excerpt: Detroit's Big Three automakers came closer than America realized to becoming the Big Two.

General Motors Corp. ended merger talks with Chrysler LLC in November 2008 to focus on getting emergency federal aid, but Chrysler continued to believe a tie-up with GM was its best chance for survival.
In April, as both automakers were surviving on government aid and fighting bankruptcy, Obama administration officials spent two weeks working on a plan for GM to acquire Chrysler's best assets and keep the doors open on a third of its factories.
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Some members of President Barack Obama's auto task force saw it as a fallback position if Chrysler failed to reach a partnership deal with Italy's Fiat SpA. Other members opposed it. But top task force officials ultimately decided it was too late in the game for a merger, too complicated and would cost too many jobs compared to an alliance with Fiat.
The GM-Chrysler tale is among new details that emerged in Detroit News interviews with more than a dozen insiders -- automakers as well as government officials -- over the past two months.
They reveal the much greater government role in the historic bailout of both companies than has been disclosed previously.
Faced with the prospect of losing 1.1 million direct and indirect American jobs, as well as a major leg of the nation's economy, the government believed it could not afford to let the industry fail.
In the end, the GM and Chrysler bailout resulted from fortunate timing and the work of a group of unknown Wall Street veterans. Under the aegis of the White House, and without congressional approval, they forced a restructuring that the automakers themselves had been unwilling or unable to accomplish -- even as they saw disaster looming.

this is extreme stuff.  Which is perhaps why such an outlandish plan might actually work.  Bastardos!

excerpt: an authoritarian control system engineered by the bankers and the global elite. "This new and complete Revolution we contemplate can be defined in a very few words. It is … outright world-socialism, scientifically planned and directed," H.G. Wells wrote in The New World Order.
It is a mistake to believe the Cloward-Piven Strategy is scheme cooked up by academic Marxists of "New Left" bent dedicated to the destruction of capitalism in the name of some sort of vaguely defined humanitarianism. In fact, "the destruction of capitalism in America by swelling the welfare rolls to the point of collapsing our economy and then implementing socialism by nationalizing many private institutions" is a meticulous plan on the part of the global elite to consolidate power and destroy all opposition.
It has nothing to do with liberating the proletariat but rather subjecting them to banker engineered "world-socialism, scientifically planned and directed" and devised to transform the planet into a banker dominated high-tech prison gulag.

This explains everything.  Sadly.  Obama is not trying to lead America forward to recovery, prosperity and strength. Quite the opposite, in fact.

excerpt: The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

In a September 2009 article, James Simpson wrote an article entitled "Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis". Part of a series, it connected then presidential candidate Barack Obama to individuals and organizations practicing a malevolent strategy for destroying our economy and our system of government.   The basis of this strategy is a plan called Cloward-Piven.  

WOW!  Everyday brings new revelations.  We've been robbed!

excerpt:  Now we know: Geithner and Friedman interceded on behalf of Goldman and Wall Street (Merrill received $6.2 billion, Societe General - a whopping $16.5 billion) to deliver a stealth bailout, one that wouldn't need Congressional approval, and even better wouldn't require the counterparties to pay any of it back NOR would it require that they issue shares, warrants or any other instrument to AIG (taxpayers) in return for more than $32 billion in free money.

In any other time, a sitting Treasury Secretary who interceded on behalf of Wall Street to screw taxpayers out of tens of billions, would not be sitting long.  But Democrats control both the House and Senate, so there are no investiagtions (Issa's letter aside).  Traditional media is content not to rock the boat for President Banks Obama lest they be shunned by their peers, and ultimately, 99% of TV and print journalists don't understand the issues well enough to complain with any conviciton, especially against the merry backdrop of the Dow rising and their deflated 401ks beginning to show life.

They fall prey to fear and weakly submit to duplicitous hyperbole (Paulson threatening martial law and blood in the streets), when they should instead be consulting with the objective, critical voices who foresaw the crisis and were prepared with alternative solutions when it finally came (Stiglitz said instead of TARP, create new banks).
A pox on Congress, President Banks Obama, Bush, Paulson, Friedman, Bernanke and Geithner (plus Greenspan and Rubin).  You may have gotten away with it for now, but I would wager there are a few million of us, roughly, who do understand everything that went down last Fall, and we're not amused.  We're not just going to let this one pass, and we will not stop filling the vast interweb with the truth (and our distaste and vitriol for your wretched souls) day after day, week after week, all over message boards and fin

Bob Moriarty from 321 Energy provides a brief explanation of the fundamentals -  excerpt: I've made it clear for a year that I believe we have entered what will be the most serious depression in history. It also will involve the greatest transfer of wealth in history.

There are two basic classes of assets. There are paper assets and real assets. An ounce of gold is a real asset. A copper mine is a real asset. A house is a real asset. An oil field is a real asset.

Over the counter derivatives now total over $596 trillion dollars, (click here [pdf]) ten times the size of the world economy. Those are paper assets, their value is derived from some other asset. That derivative size is what is going to destroy the world's financial system, it's all fraud.

A mortgage is a paper asset. A T-Bill or T-Bond is a paper asset. A $100 bill is a paper asset. It's pretty easy to see that a $500,000 mortgage on a house now worth $250,000 isn't worth very much. Latest figures show 9.6 million homes in the US have negative equity. How many of those loans are going to be paid back?

According to an ex-Fed Director, both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are bankrupt. They were leveraged 65-1. For those comforted by the thought of the FDIC bailing you out should the banking system fail entirely, you need to realize the FDIC is leveraged at 130-1. We are told that the collapse of Washington Mutual alone could bankrupt the FDIC.

In a depression, no real assets appear or disappear. Paper assets, on the other hand, turn to vapor. But the ownership of real assets will change as the real assets move from weak hands into strong hands.

Those bastard banks have taken over $2 Trillion from the taxpayers, and are using this cash to invest in emerging markets instead of the USA.  The Feds are providing interest free money to central banks, which then are used to invest in emerging economies.  The bankers get the profits and USA taxpayers get stuck with the cost.  

There is no possible upside for USA taxpayers unless of course you agree with Obama that the USA standard of living and extraordinary economic prosperity must be lowered before global economic equality can be achieved.  This isn't just about greedy bankers and self interested international corporations.  Wealth redistribution is now the official policy of our government.  And the Federal Reserve is carrying it out with unexpected zeal.

The numbers are coming in.  The facts are on the table.  The USA is being gutted.

excerpt:  Asian stock prices are shooting up, in part due to low interest rates in the U.S. Investors looking for higher yields are borrowing in U.S. dollars and then pouring that money "into countries that are growing more rapidly," said Stephen Cecchetti, chief economist at the Bank for International Settlements, the central banks' central bank, which warned early of the last asset bubble and is beginning to do so again. "That runs the risk of creating property and equity booms in those countries."

About $53 billion has gone into emerging-market stock funds this year, according to data collector EPFR Global. Through Monday's trading, the broad MSCI Barra Emerging Markets Index this year was up 60.7%. Brazil was up 100%, and Indonesia had gains of 102.7%. Over the same period, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 11.5%.

Whoa!  Incredible fact filled analysis of the pre election GDP numbers released by Obama.

excerpt:  Disposable personal income decreased in nominal terms q/o/q by 5.9% while in real terms (inflation adjusted) it decreased q/o/q by 7.4%!  That is an enormous swing in purchasing power and not in the right direction!

Personal outlays increased $148.2 billion (5.8 percent) in the third quarter, compared with an increase of $8.2 billion (0.3 percent) in the second. Personal saving -- disposable personal income less personal outlays -- was $364.6 billion in the third quarter, compared with $533.1 billion in the second.

The personal saving rate -- saving as a percentage of disposable personal income -- was 3.3 percent in the third quarter, compared with 4.9 percent in the second.

So into decreasing personal income and disposable personal income people tried to spend anyway.  Best guess: most of this was "cash for clunkers", which is the worst sort of "spending" - it is the taking on of more debt by replacing a paid-off car with one that now comes with a shiny (and nasty) payment book.  The Trade: Go long auto repo outfits (aside: as far as I know there are no publicly-traded repo companies.)

Nothing in here I like; to the contrary, this report sucks and on a drill-down appears to be full of outright lies.

A compiled list briefly profiling Obama's most important associations.  Most of whom are radical Marxists, racists and social revolutionaries hating Christians, Jews, and the ordered liberty guaranteed by our Constitution.  The list includes William Ayers, Carol Browner, Frank Marshall Davis, Anita Dunn, Dr. Eziekiel Emanuel, Rahm Emanuel, Chai Feldblum, Patrick Gaspard, Eric Holder, John Holdren, Valerie Jarret, Kevin Jennings, Van Jones, Mark Lloyd, Cecelia Munoz, Cass Sunstein, and uber racist Jeremiah Wright.  Good cheat sheet for future reference.

Incredible must read!  

In depth story about the Federal Reserve failure to act as an unregulated subprime mortgage industry raced out of control, and major banking and financial institutions bought into the wild wild west of high interest rate - predatory lending.

excerpt:  during the years of the housing boom, pleas from consumer advocate groups failed to move the Fed, the sole federal regulator with authority over subprime mortgage businesses. Under a policy quietly formalized in 1998, the Fed refused to police lenders' compliance with federal laws protecting borrowers, despite repeated urging by consumer advocates across the country and even by other government agencies.

The hands-off policy, which the Fed reversed earlier this month, created a double standard. Banks and their subprime affiliates made loans under the same laws, but only the banks faced regular federal scrutiny. Under the policy, the Fed did not even investigate consumer complaints against the affiliates.

Excellent read.  The financial crisis is examined in an informative but breezy way.  The conclusion however isn't good.  We're out of options, and there doesn't seem to be anyway of stopping the explosion of government debt that will, sooner or later, crush us.   Great read!

The residents and City Council of Denver Colorado recently passed an ordinance that will bring the fine for possession of small amounts of marijuana down to a single dollar,

Let stupid firms fail.

We need to get back to that.

Yes, the fact that the "stupid firms" this time around included most of Wall Street shows that special rules of financial bankruptcy should apply so the whole system doesn't collapse.  But the firms need to be allowed to fail.

What should the special rules of financial bankruptcy be?

managements should be tossed
compensation contracts and other liabilities should be torn up, 
bonus pools should be zeroed until the firms return to annual profitability
equity and preferred holders should be wiped out, and
junior bondholders should get a major haircut through the immediate, forced conversion of debt to equity.
All of this should happen not over years in the courts, but overnight--in the manner in which the FDIC seizes failing banks. 

In such proceedings, all of Wall Street's idiocy enablers will lose their shirts: The folks who work the at the firms, the folks who lend money to the firms, the folks who invest in the firms and trust the firms' managements to be something other than morons.

Losing your shirt generally has a sobering effect on decision-making.  As long as managers, lenders, and shareholders know they will lose their shirts, the next generation of Wall Street enablers will likely be far more careful and demanding than their predecessors, at least for a little while (and don't hallucinate that the Fed's new policy is anything other than temporary). 

A slide set featuring the corruption bio of the top 16 most corrupt members of congress.  Incredible.  Seems like the longer these clowns serve, the more corrupt and innovative they become.  Kudos to the 

This top tier listing must have been very competitive.  Missing are criminals like Chris Dodd, Kathleen Sebelius, and Barney Frank.  Frank and Dodd are almost single handedly responsible for the Fannie Mae - Freddie Mac mortgage crisis that tripped the entire global economy.

As each day goes by, it becomes more and more apparent that the Republican Party of the United States government is doomed to die a slow and painful death, but these folks are not going down without a fight

Not What They Had in Mind: A History of Policies that Produced the Financial Crisis of 2008.

GMU economist and popular blogger Arnold Kling has released a new paper titled: "NOT WHAT THEY HAD IN MIND: A History of Policies that Produced the Financial Crisis of 2008."
Kling is very much of the view that if you had to choose between blaming private sector greed and public policy, the fault lies in the latter:
As this paper will illustrate, the seeds for much of the current crisis were sown in the policy "solutions" to previous financial and economic crises. Any attempt to dissect and understand the current crisis that does not account for the complex history, evolution, and integrated nature of financial regulations will not yield meaningful lessons for today's policy makers.
Among the topics he addresses: housing policy, bank capital regulations, monetary policy, and bank capital regulations.   Incredible

To even the most casual observer, the ethics of American politics, the legal system, and everyday life is full of contradictions. The vast majority of the citizens of the US adhere to the Big Three religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam

Everyone in the world knows that America is the top exporter of democracy, music, movies, and insipid celebrities, but the one thing that America exports more than all of these things combined is firearms