OBAMA and HIS
CRIMINAL BANKSTERS – THE LOOTING OF A NATION CONTINUES!
Records show that
four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry
giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207)
and Citigroup ($358,054).
VIRTUALLY
FROM HIS FIRST DAYS, WE ALL REALIZED THAT
OBAMA’S “CHANGE” SIMPLY MEANT HE WOULD REALLY JUST BE BUSH’S THIRD TERM
ON STEROIDS!
BILLIONS
SQUANDERED IN WARS TO PROTECT SAUDIS INTERESTS AGAINST THEIR ENEMIES, SADDAM
AND THE IRANIANS and BILLIONS SQUANDERED TO PROTECT THE BORDERS OF MUSLIM
DICTATORS.
OBAMA’S
HIGHLY CORRUPT HOLDER DEPT OF JUSTICE, HAS HARASSED THE NATION ON BEHALF OF
OBAMA’S AGENDA OF OPEN BORDERS AND LA RAZA SUPREMACY. OBAMA-HOLDER HAS SUED FOUR
STATES (and counting) ON BEHALF OF OBAMA’S LA RAZA PARTY BASE OF ILLEGALS,
SABOTAGED E-VERIFY TO EASE MORE ILLEGALS INTO OUR JOBS, SABOTAGED VOTING TO
ASSURE LA RAZA ILLEGALS ARE WELL REPRESENTED.
OBAMA’S
ADMINISTRATION IS INFESTED WITH THE
MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA. HIS DOMESTIC POLICY ADVISER CECELIA MUNOZ IS
A FORMER LA RAZA V.P. HIS SEC. of (illegal) LABOR HILDA SOLIS.
WHILE OBAMA HAS SABOTAGED THIS
NATIONS LAWS AND BORDERS ON BEHALF OF HIS PARTY BASE OF ILLEGALS, NOT ONE OF
OBAMA’S CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS HAS BEEN PROSECUTED!
*
NO
PRESIDENT IN HISTORY HAS TAKEN MORE MONEY FROM BANKSTERS THAN BARACK OBAMA!
“The
response of the White House was to do absolutely nothing. Not a single senior
bank executive has been criminally charged, let alone imprisoned, for crimes
that have devastated the lives of countless millions of people in the US and
around the world. Instead, the White House has shielded the corporate
criminals.”
An insider’s view of Wall Street
criminality
15 March 2012
Greg
Smith, an executive director at Goldman Sachs, announced his resignation
Wednesday in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, denouncing the bank's
“toxic” culture of avarice and fraud.
Smith
headed the firm’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the
Middle East and Africa. In his column, entitled “Why I Am Leaving Goldman
Sachs,” he describes a corporate environment that encourages and rewards big
short-term returns gained through the bilking of clients and the general
public. “It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients
off,” he writes.
Speaking
of one’s clients as “muppets” and describing deal-making as “ripping eyeballs
out” are commonplace at Goldman, according to Smith. The way to advance at the
Wall Street giant, he writes, is to persuade your clients “to invest in the
stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of,” get your clients
“to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman,” and trade “any
illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.”
The
column describes an operation in which laws and regulations requiring financial
institutions to deal honestly with their clients and protect their interests
are routinely violated. The insider’s indictment of Goldman Sachs highlights a
broader process—the criminalization of American capitalism as a whole.
It confirms from the inside that three-and-a-half years
after Wall Street’s manic pursuit of super-profits triggered a global financial
meltdown and the deepest slump since the Great Depression, nothing has changed
in the boardrooms of corporate America. The same fraudulent and often illegal
practices that enriched the financial aristocracy and plundered the rest of
society continue unabated. The criminals at the top, having been bailed out
with trillions of taxpayer funds, are making more money than ever, while
millions of ordinary people are being driven into poverty and homelessness.
Education, health care, pensions are being gutted, wages are
being slashed and more austerity is on the agenda because there is supposedly
“no money.” Corporate profits and CEO pay, meanwhile, are setting new records.
This is an indictment not
simply of Goldman Sachs, or even Wall Street alone, but rather the entire
economic and political system. Every official institution—the White House,
Congress, the courts, the media, the Democratic and Republican parties—is
complicit.
Smith’s
column was widely reported in the media. NBC Nightly News led its report
Wednesday night with the story, interviewing a former chairman of the
Securities and Exchange Commission who was brought on to deplore the type of
practices described by the former Goldman executive. The ruling class is well
aware that popular anger against Wall Street is rising and capitalism itself is
becoming increasingly discredited in the eyes of millions of Americans—a
process that found an initial expression in the Occupy Wall Street protests. It
is concerned that Smith’s piece will further fuel this sentiment.
The
practices to which Smith points—and worse—are well known to the Obama
administration and the financial regulatory agencies. In April of last year,
the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations published a 640-page report
outlining in detail the fraudulent and illegal practices of major banks that
contributed to the September 2008 crash. Fully 260 pages of that report were
devoted to Goldman Sachs. They explained chapter and verse, giving dates and
naming names, how the bank defrauded its clients by selling them mortgage
securities while betting against the same investments, without telling them it
was doing so.
The committee also documented
the complicity of the credit rating firms and federal regulators in the
colossal mortgage Ponzi scheme that collapsed in 2007-2008, setting off a new world
depression. It cited securities laws that had been violated by Goldman and two
other banks it examined, Washington Mutual and Deutsche Bank, and referred this
information to the Obama administration’s Justice Department.
The response of the White
House was to do absolutely nothing. Not a single senior bank executive has been
criminally charged, let alone imprisoned, for crimes that have devastated the
lives of countless millions of people in the US and around the world. Instead,
the White House has shielded the corporate criminals.
One
Wall Street firm after another—Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup,
Countrywide Financial—has been allowed to settle charges filed by the
Securities and Exchange Commission out of court, paying token fines while admitting
no wrongdoing.
That this continues is seen in the filing Monday in federal court of the
sweetheart settlement between five major banks and the state and federal
governments of charges arising from the banks’ illegal processing of
foreclosures. The banks have merely to pay a combined fine of $5 billion for
illegally throwing thousands of families out of their homes, with no admission
of wrongdoing. In return, they get the quashing of state investigations that
threatened to result in tens of billions in damages and fines.
Not only does the Obama administration protect the Wall
Street criminals, it includes their representatives among its top personnel. To
cite some examples:
* Mark Patterson, a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, is the
chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
* Dianna Farrell, former financial analyst at Goldman Sachs,
is deputy director of the National Economic Council.
* Jacob Lew, Obama’s chief of staff, was a top executive at
Citigroup. He follows two other bankers chosen by Obama to head his White House
operations—former JPMorgan executive William Daley and former Chicago
investment banker Rahm Emanuel.
The
criminalization of the American corporate-financial elite cannot be separated
from the capitalist system itself. It is the product of a decades-long process
of crisis and decay, in which the ruling elite has increasingly separated its
wealth-making from the production of real value.
Manufacturing
and the productive infrastructure have been decimated, while financial manipulation
and speculation have come to dominate economic life. The working class has suffered a catastrophic decline in its social
position at the same time that a parasitic financial aristocracy has come to
exercise a de facto dictatorship over the political system.
Like
all aristocracies, the American financial elite will not accept any
infringement of its wealth and power. The working class must break its grip by
mobilizing its strength in opposition to both parties of Wall Street and
fighting for the establishment of a workers’ government and socialist policies,
beginning with the nationalization of the banks and corporations and their
transformation into public enterprises under the democratic control of the
working people.
Andre
Damon and Barry Grey
The
authors also recommend:
The foreclosure fraud
settlement: An amnesty for Wall Street criminals
[13 February 2012]
[13 February 2012]
Senate report on Wall Street
crash: The criminalization of the American ruling class
[18 April 2011]
[18 April 2011]
THE
BANKSTER-OWNED PRESIDENT PROMISED HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS NO real
REGULATION, NO PRISON TIME, AND UNLIMITED PILLAGING OF THE NATION’S ECONOMY!
DESPITE
THE DEVASTATION THESE BANKSTERS HAVE CAUSED AMERICANS, THEIR PROFITS SOARED
GREATER DURING OBAMA’S FIRST TWO YEARS, THAN ALL EIGHT UNDER BUSH. SO HAVE
FORECLOSURES!
Records show that
four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry
giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207)
and Citigroup ($358,054).
*
“Barack Obama's favorite banker faces losses
of $2 billion and possibly more -- all because of the complex,
now-you-see-it-now-you-don't trading in exotic financial instruments that he
has so ardently lobbied Congress not to regulate.”
Is
JPMorgan's Loss a Canary in a Coal Mine?
Posted:
05/16/2012 4:49 pm
That
sound of shattered glass you've been hearing is the iconic portrait of Jamie
Dimon splintering as it hits the floor of JPMorgan Chase. As the Good Book
says, "Pride goeth before a fall," and the sleek, silver-haired,
too-smart-for-his-own-good CEO of America's largest bank has been turning every
television show within reach into a confessional booth. Barack Obama's favorite banker faces losses
of $2 billion and possibly more -- all because of the complex,
now-you-see-it-now-you-don't trading in exotic financial instruments that he
has so ardently lobbied Congress not to regulate.
Once
again, doing God's work -- that is, betting huge sums of money with depositor
funds knowing that you are too big to fail and can count on taxpayers riding to
your rescue if your avarice threatens to take the country down -- has lost some
of its luster. The jewels in Dimon's crown sparkle with a little less grandiosity
than a few days ago, when he ridiculed Paul Volcker's ideas for keeping Wall
Street honest as "infantile."
To
find out more about what this all means, I turned to Simon Johnson, once chief
economist of the International Monetary Fund and now a professor at MIT's Sloan
School of Management and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for
International Economics. He and his colleague James Kwak founded the
now-indispensable website baselinescenario.com. They co-authored the
bestselling book 13 Bankers and a most recent book, White House Burning, an account every citizen should read to understand how the
national deficit affects our future.
Bill
Moyers: If
Chase began to collapse because of risky betting, would the government be
forced to step in again?
Simon
Johnson:
Absolutely, Bill. JPMorgan Chase is too big to fail. Hopefully in the future we
can move away from this system, but right now it is too big. It's about a $2.5
trillion dollar bank in terms of total assets. That's roughly 20 percent of the
U.S. economy, comparing their assets to our GDP. That's huge. If that bank were
to collapse -- I'm not saying it will -- but if it were to collapse, it would
be a shock to the economy bigger than that of the collapse of Lehman Brothers,
and as a result, they would be protected by the Federal Reserve. They are
exactly what's known as too big to fail.
Moyers:
I was just
looking at an interview I did with you in February
of 2009, soon after the collapse of 2008 and you said, and I'm quoting,
"The signs that I see... the body language, the words, the op-eds, the
testimony, the way these bankers are treated by certain congressional
committees, it makes me feel very worried. I have a feeling in my stomach that
is what I had in other countries, much poorer countries, countries that were
headed into really difficult economic situations. When there's a small group of
people who got you into a disaster and who are still powerful, you know you
need to come in and break that power and you can't. You're stuck." How do
you feel about that insight now?
Johnson: I'm still nervous, and I
think that the losses that JPMorgan reported -- that CEO Jamie Dimon reported
-- and the way in which they're presented, the fact that they're surprised by
it and the fact that they didn't know they were taking these kinds of risks,
the fact that they lost so much money in a relatively benign moment compared to
what we've seen in the past and what we're likely to see in the future -- all
of this suggests that we are absolutely on the path towards another financial
crisis of the same order of magnitude as the last one.
Moyers:
Should Jamie
Dimon resign? I ask that because as you know and as we've discussed, Chase and other
huge banks have been using their enormous wealth for years to, in effect, buy
off our politicians and regulators. Chase just had to
pay up
almost three quarters of a billion dollars in settlements and surrendered fees
to settle one case alone, that of bribery and corruption in Jefferson County,
Alabama. It's also paid out billions of dollars to settle other cases of
perjury, forgery, fraud and sale of unregistered securities. And these charges
were for actions that took place while Mr. Dimon was the CEO. Should he resign?
Johnson: I think, Bill, there should
be an independent investigation into how JPMorgan operates both with regard to
these losses and with regard to all of the problems that you just identified.
This investigation should be conducted separate from the board of directors.
Remember that the shareholders and the board of directors absolutely have an
incentive to keep JPMorgan Chase as a too-big-to-fail bank. But because it is
that kind of bank, its downside risk is taken by the Federal Reserve, by the
taxpayer, by the broader economy and all citizens. We need to have an
independent, detailed, specific investigation to establish who knew what when
and what kind of wrongdoing management was engaged in. On the basis of that,
we'll see what we'll see and who should have to resign.
Moyers: Dimon is also on the board
of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which, as everyone knows is supposed
to regulate JPMorgan. What in the world are bankers doing on the Fed board,
regulating themselves?
Johnson: This is a terrible
situation, Bill. It goes back to the origins, the political compromise at the
very beginning of the Federal Reserve system about a hundred years ago. The
bankers were very powerful back then, also, and they got a Federal Reserve
system in which they had a lot of representation. Some of that has eroded over
time because of previous abuses, but you're absolutely right, the prominent bankers,
including most notably, Jamie Dimon, are members of the board of the New York
Federal Reserve, a key element in the Federal Reserve system. And he should,
under these circumstances, absolutely step down from that role. It's completely
inappropriate to have such a big bank represented in this fashion. The New York
Fed claims there's no impropriety, there's no wrong doing and he doesn't
involve himself in supervision and so on and so forth. Perhaps, but why does
Mr. Dimon, a very busy man, take time out of his day to be on the board of the
New York fed? He is getting something from this. It's a trade, just like
everything else on Wall Street.
Moyers: He dismissed criticism of
his dual role yesterday by downplaying the role of the Fed board. He said it's more like an
"advisory group than anything else." I had to check my hearing aid to
see if I'd heard that correctly.
Johnson: Well, I think he is advising
them on lots of things. He also, of course, meets with some regularity with top
Treasury officials, and some reports say that he meets with President Obama
with some regularity. The political access and connections of Mr. Dimon are second
to none. One of his senior executives was until recently chief of staff in the
White House, if you can believe that. I really think this has gone far enough.
Under these kinds of circumstances with this amount of loss of control over
risk management, what we need to have is Mr. Dimon step down from the New York
Federal Reserve Board.
Moyers: He told shareholders at
their annual meeting Tuesday -- they were meeting in Tampa, Florida -- that these
were
"self-inflicted mistakes" that "should never have
happened." Does that seem reasonable to you?
Johnson: Well, it's all very odd,
Bill, and I've talked to as many experts as I can find who are at all informed
about what JPMorgan was doing and how they were doing it and nobody really
understands the true picture. That's why we need an independent investigation
to establish -- was this an isolated incident or, more likely, the breakdown of
a system of controlling and managing risks. Keep in mind that JPMorgan is
widely regarded to be the best in the business at risk management, as it is
called on Wall Street. And if they can't do this in a relatively benign moment
when things are not so very bad around the world, what is going to happen to
them and to other banks when something really dramatic happens, for example, in
Europe in the eurozone?
Moyers: Some of his supporters are
claiming that only the bank has lost on this and that there's absolutely no
chance that the loss could have threatened the stability of the banking system
as happened in 2008. What do you say again to that?
Johnson: I say this is the canary in
the coal mine. This tells you that something is fundamentally wrong with the
way banks measure, manage and control their risks. They don't have enough
equity funding in their business. They like to have a little bit of equity and
a lot of debt. They get paid based on return on equity, unadjusted for risk. If
things go well, they get the upside. If things go badly, the downside is
someone else's problem. And that someone else is you and me, Bill. It goes to
the Federal Reserve, but not only, it goes to the Treasury, it goes to the
debt.
The
Congressional Budget Office estimates that the increase in debt relative to GDP
due to the last crisis will end up
being 50
percent of GDP, call that $7 trillion dollars, $7.5 trillion dollars in today's
money. That's extraordinary. It's an enormous shock to our fiscal accounts and
to our ability to pay pensions and keep the healthcare system running in the
future. For what? What did we get from that? Absolutely nothing. The bankers
got some billions in extra pay, we get trillions in extra debt. It's unfair,
it's inefficient, it's unconscionable, and it needs to stop.
Moyers: Wasn't part of the risk that
Dimon took with taxpayer guaranteed deposits? I mean, if I had money at
JPMorgan Chase, wouldn't some of my money have been used to take this risk?
Johnson: Again, we don't know the
exact details, but news reports do suggest that yes, they were gambling with
federally insured deposits, which just really puts the icing on the cake here.
Moyers: Do we know yet what is
Dimon's culpability? Is it conceivable to you that a risk this big would have
been incurred without his approval?
Johnson: It seems very strange and
quite a stretch. And he did tell investors, when he reported on first quarter
earnings in April, that he was aware of the situation, aware of the trade -- he
called
it a
"tempest in a teacup," and, therefore, not something to worry about.
Moyers: He's been Wall Street's
point man in their campaign against tighter regulation of derivatives and
proprietary trading. Were derivatives at the heart of this gamble?
Johnson: Yes, according to reliable
reports, this was a so-called "hedging" strategy that turned out to
be no more than a gamble, but the people involved perhaps didn't understand
that or maybe they understood it and covered it up. It was absolutely about a
bet on extremely complex derivatives and the interesting question is who failed
to understand exactly what they were getting into. And how did Jamie Dimon, who
has a reputation that he burnishes more than anybody else for being the number
one expert risk manager in the world -- how did he miss this one?
Moyers:I've been reading a lot of
stories today about members of the House, Republicans in particular, saying
this doesn't change their opinion at all that we've got to still diminish
regulation. What do you think about that?
Johnson: I think that it is a recipe
for disaster. Look, deregulating or not regulating during the boom is exactly
how you get into bailouts in the bust. The goal should be to make all the banks
small enough and simple enough to fail. End the government subsidies here. And
when I talk to people on the intellectual right, Bill, they get this, as do
people on the intellectual left. The problem is, the political right largely
doesn't want to go there because of the donations. I'm afraid some people, not
all, but some people on the political left don't want to go there either.
Moyers: The Washington Post
reported that the Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation
into JPMorgan's trading loss. Have you spotted -- and I know this is sensitive
-- but have you spotted anything in the story so far that suggests the
possibility of criminality? Dodd-Frank is not in existence yet, so where would
any possibility of criminality come from?
Johnson: Well Dodd-Frank is in
existence but the rules have not been written and therefore not implemented. So
yes, it is hard to violate those rules in their current state. And many of
those rules, by the way, violation would be a civil penalty, not a criminal
penalty. If you violate a securities law -- if you've mislead investors, if
there was material adverse information that was not disclosed in an appropriate
and timely manner -- that's a very serious offence traditionally.
I
have to say that the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange
Commission have not been very good at enforcing securities law in recent years,
including and specifically since the financial crisis. I am skeptical that this
will change. But if they have an investigation that reveals all of the details
of what happened and how it happened, that would be extremely informative and
show us, I believe, that the risk management approach and attitudes on Wall
Street are deeply flawed and leading us towards a big crisis.
Moyers: So what are people to do,
Simon? What can people do now in response to this?
Johnson: Well, I think you have to
look for politicians who are proposing solutions, and look on the right and on
the left. I see Elizabeth Warren, running for the Senate in Massachusetts, who
is saying we should bring back Glass-Steagall to separate commercial banking
from investment banking. I see Tom Hoenig, who is not a politician, he's a
regulator, he's the former president of the Kansas City Fed, and he's now one
of the top two people at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the FDIC.
He is saying that big banks should no longer have trading desks. That's the
same sort of idea that Elizabeth Warren is expressing. We need a lot more
people to focus on this and to make this an issue for the elections.
And
I would say in this context, Bill, it's very important not to be distracted. I
understand for example, Speaker Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House of
Representatives, is proposing to have another conflict over the debt ceiling in
the near future. This is the politics of distraction. This is refusing to
recognize that a huge part of our fiscal problems today and in the future are
due to these risks within the financial system that are allowed because the
people running the biggest banks hand out massive campaign contributions across
the political spectrum.
Moyers: Are you saying that this
financial crisis, so-called, is at heart a political crisis?
Johnson: Yes, exactly. I think that a
few people, particularly in and around the financial system, have become too
powerful. They were allowed to take a lot of risk, and they did massive damage
to the economy -- more than eight million jobs lost. We're still struggling to
get back anywhere close to employment levels where we were before 2008. And
they've done massive damage to the budget. This damage to the budget is long
lasting; it undermines the budget when we need it to be stronger because the
society is aging. We need to support Social Security and support Medicare on a
fair basis. We need to restore and rebuild revenue, revenue that was absolutely
devastated by the financial crisis. People need to understand the link between
what the banks did and the budget. And too many people fail to do that.
"Oh, it's too complicated. I don't want to understand the details, I don't
want to spend time with it." That's a mistake, a very big mistake. You're
playing into the hands of a few powerful people in the society who want private
benefit and social loss.
Watch
Moyers & Company weekly on
public television.
See more web-only features like this at BillMoyers.com
*
Why hasn’t Obama been impeached?
His violations of our borders laws, inducing illegals to vote, sabotage of jobs
for Americans, connections to criminal banksters…. WHAT DOES IT TAKE?
NO WORKS IN THE CORRUPT OBAMA WHITE HOUSE THAT IS NOT
CONNECTED TO THE BANKSTERS THAT OWN OBAMA, OR THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA
RAZA!
THE REASON OBAMA BROUGHT IN DALEY WAS BECAUSE WAS FROM
JPMORGAN, AND AN ADVOCATE FOR OPEN BORDERS.
For much of
Obama’s tenure, Jamie Dimon was known as the White House’s “favorite banker.”
According to White House logs, Dimon visited the White House at least 18 times,
often to talk to his former subordinate at JPMorgan, William Daley, who had
been named White House chief of staff by Obama after the Democratic rout in the
2010 elections.
OBAMA
PROMISED HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS NO PRISON TIME AND NO REAL REGULATION.
DID HE DELIVER?
The JPMorgan scandal also
throws into relief the government’s failure to prosecute those responsible for
the 2008 financial meltdown. Despite overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing and
criminality uncovered by two federal investigations last year, those
responsible have been shielded from prosecution.
Records show that four out of Obama's
top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman
Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup
($358,054).
The settlement, reported to be worth $25 billion, was
announced February 9 and hailed by President Obama as a serious rebuke to the
banks and boon to distressed homeowners. (See: “Obama
administration brokers pro-bank mortgage fraud settlement”).
OBAMA
KNEW HE COULD NOT PUNK US AGAIN WITH “CHANGE” AS BY HIS FIRST DAYS HE WAS
SELLING US OUT TO HIS BANKSTER DONORS AND WALL ST CRONIES… AND HISPANDERING FOR
THE ILLEGALS’ VOTES.
OBAMA
HAS PROMISED LA RAZA “THE RACE” NO E-VERIFY, OPEN & UNDEFENDED BORDERS,
DREAM ACTS, AN ADMIN FILLED WITH LA RAZA SUPREMACIST, LIKE SEC. of (illegal)
LABOR HILDA SOLIS, AMNESTY… or continued NON-ENFORCEMENT.
OBAMA
IS BUSH’S THIRD TERM, AND ONE OF THE MOST DISHONEST AND CORRUPT PRESIDENTS
SINCE THE LAST ONE!
25
Statistics About The U.S. Economy Barack Obama Does Not Want You To Know
The
human capacity for self-delusion truly is remarkable. Most people out there end
up believing exactly what they want to believe even when the truth is staring
them right in the face. Take the U.S. economy for example. Barack Obama wants
to believe that his policies have worked and that the U.S. economy is
improving. So that is what he is telling the American people. The mainstream
media wants to believe that Barack Obama is a good president and that his
policies make sense and so they are reporting that we are experiencing an
economic recovery. A very large segment of the U.S. population still fully
supports Barack Obama and they want to believe that the economy is getting
better so they are buying the propaganda that the mainstream media is feeding
them. But is the U.S. economy really improving? The truth is that it is not.
The rate of employment among working age Americans is exactly where it was two
years ago and household incomes have actually gone down while Obama has been
president. Home ownership levels and home prices continue to decline.
Meanwhile, food and gasoline continue to become even more expensive. The
percentage of Americans that are dependent on the government is at an all-time
record high and the U.S. national debt has risen by more than 5 trillion
dollars under Obama. We simply have not seen the type of economic recovery that
we have seen after every other economic recession since World War II.
The
horrible statistics about the U.S. economy that you are about to read are not
talked about much by the mainstream media. They would rather be “positive” and
“upbeat” about the direction that things are headed.
But
lying to the American people is not going to help them. If you are speeding in
a car toward a 500 foot cliff, you don’t need someone to cheer you on. Instead,
you need someone to slam on the brakes.
The
cold, hard reality of the matter is that the U.S. economy is in far worse shape
than it was four or five years ago.
We have
never come close to recovering from the last recession and another one will be
here soon.
The
following are 25 horrible statistics about the U.S. economy that Barack Obama
does not want you to know….
#1 The percentage of
Americans that own homes is dropping rapidly. According to Gallup, the current
level of homeownership in the United States is the lowest that Gallup has ever measured.
#2 Home prices in the U.S.
continue to fall like a rock as well. They have declined for six months in a
row and are now down a total of 35 percent from the peak of the housing bubble. The last time that home
prices in the United States were this low was back in 2002.
#3 Last year, an astounding
53
percent of all
U.S. college graduates under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed.
#4 Back in 2007, about 10
percent of all unemployed Americans had been out of work for 52 weeks or
longer. Today, that number is above 30 percent.
#5 When Barack Obama first
became president, the number of “long-term unemployed workers” in the United
States was 2.6 million. Today, it is 5.3
million.
#6 The average duration of
unemployment in the United States is about
three times as
long as it was back in the year 2000.
#7 Despite what the
mainstream media would have us to believe, the truth is that the percentage of
working age Americans that are employed is not increasing. Back in March 2010, 58.5
percent of all
working age Americans were employed. In March 2011, 58.5
percent of all
working age Americans were employed. In March 2012, 58.5
percent of all
working age Americans were employed. So how can Barack Obama and the mainstream
media claim that the employment situation in the United States is getting
better? The employment rate is still essentially exactly where it was when the
last recession supposedly ended.
#8 Back in 1950, more
than 80 percent of all
men in the United States had jobs. Today, less
than 65 percent of all
men in the United States have jobs.
#9 In 1962, 28 percent of
all jobs in America were manufacturing jobs. In 2011, only 9 percent of all jobs in America were manufacturing jobs.
#11 According to one recent
survey, approximately one-third of all Americans are not paying their bills on time at this point.
#12 Since Barack Obama
entered the White House, the price of gasoline has risen by more than 100 percent.
#13 The student loan debt
bubble continues to expand at a very frightening pace. Recently it was
announced that total student loan debt in the United States has passed the one trillion dollar mark.
#14 Incredibly, one out of every four jobs in the United States pays $10 an hour or less at this point.
#15 Household incomes all
over the United States continue to fall. After adjusting for inflation, median
household income in America has declined by 7.8 percent since December 2007.
#16 Over the past several
decades, government dependence has risen to unprecedented heights in the United
States. The following is how I described the explosive growth of social welfare
benefits in one recent article….
Back in
1960, social welfare benefits made up approximately 10 percent of all salaries and
wages. In the year 2000, social welfare benefits made up approximately 21 percent of all salaries and
wages. Today, social welfare benefits make up approximately 35 percent of all salaries and
wages.
#17 In November 2008, 30.8
million Americans were on food stamps. Today, more
than 46 millionAmericans
are on food stamps.
#19 According to the U.S.
Census Bureau, today 49 percent of all Americans live in a home that receives some form of
benefits from the federal government.
#20 Over the next 75 years,
Medicare is facing unfunded liabilities of more than 38 trillion dollars. That
comes to $328,404 for each and every household in the United States.
#21 During the first quarter
of 2012, U.S. public debt rose by 359.1 billion dollars. U.S. GDP only rose by 142.4 billion dollars.
#22 At this point, the U.S.
national debt is rising by more than 2 million dollars every single minute.
#23 The U.S. national debt
has risen by more than 5 trillion dollars since the day that
Barack Obama first took office. In a little more than 3 years Obama has added
more to the national debt than the first 41 presidents combined.
#24 The Federal Reserve
bought up approximately 61 percent of all government debt issued by the U.S. Treasury Department
during 2011.
#25 The Federal
Reserve
continues to systematically destroy the value of the U.S. dollar. Since 1970,
the U.S. dollar has lost more than 83 percent of its value.
But the
horrible economic statistics only tell part of the story.
In
communities all over America there is a feeling that something fundamental has
changed. Businesses that have been around for generations are shutting their
doors and there is a lot of fear in the air. The following is a brief excerpt
from a recent interview with
Richard Yamarone, the
senior economist at Bloomberg Brief….
You
have to listen to what the small businesses are telling you and right now they
are telling you, ‘Hey, I’m the head of a 3rd or 4th generation, 75 or 100 year
old business, and I’ve got to shut the doors’ or ‘I’ve got to let people go.
And if I’m hiring anybody back, it’s only on a temporary basis.’
Sometimes
they do this through a hiring firm so that they can sidestep paying
unemployment benefit insurance. So that’s what’s really going on at the grassroots
level of the economy. Very, very, grossly different from what you’re seeing in
some of these numbers coming out in earnings releases.”
All
over the country, millions of hard working Americans are desperately looking
for work. They have been told that “the recession is over”, but they are still
finding it incredibly difficult to find anyone that will hire them. The
following example is from a recent CNN article….
Joann
Cotton, a 54-year-old Columbus, Mississippi, resident, was one of those faces
of poverty we met on the tour. Unemployed for three years, Joann has gone from
making “$60,000 a year to less than $15,000 overnight.” Her husband is disabled
and dependent on medicines the couple can no longer afford. They rely on food
stamps, which, Joann says, “is depressing as hell.”
Receiving
government aid, however, has not been as depressing as her job search. Joann
says she has applied for at least 300 jobs. Even though she can barely afford
gas, she drives to the interviews only to learn that the employers want to hire
younger candidates at low wages.
The
experiences have taken a toll: “I’ve aged 10 years in the three years that I’ve
been looking for a job,” Joann told us. “I want to get a job so I can just
relax and exhale … but I can’t. After a while you just give up.”
Meanwhile,
Barack Obama and his family continue to live the high life at the expense of
the U.S. taxpayer.
Even
many Democrats are starting to get very upset about this. The following is from
a recent article by Paul Bedard….
Blue
collar Democratic voters, stuck taking depressing “staycations” because they
can’t afford gas and hotels, are resentful of the first family’s 17 lavish
vacations around the world and don’t want their tax dollars paying for the
Obamas’ holidays, according to a new analysis of swing voters.
It
simply is not appropriate for the Obamas to be spending millions upon millions
upon millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars on luxury vacations when so many
Americans are deeply suffering.
But
Barack Obama does not want you to know about any of this stuff.
He just
wants you to buy his empty propaganda one more time so that he can continue to
occupy the White House for another four years.
*
WHY
WALL STREET GORGES ON OBAMA: HE’S PROMISED THE CRIMINALS NO PRISON TIME AND
SEVERELY DEPRESSED WAGED BY WITH HORDES OF ILLEGALS CLIMBING OUR OPEN &
UNDEFENDED BORDERS TO GET AT OUR JOBS!
PUTTING
LA RAZA IN OUR JOBS, KEEPS WAGES DEPRESSED AND PROFITS HIGHER FOR THE 1%!
BUT
ISN’T OBAMA MERELY THE PRESIDENT FOR ILLEGALS AND HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTERS?
HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS MADE MORE
MONEY DURING THE FIRST TWO YEARS UNDER OBAMA, THAN THEY DID ALL EIGHT UNDER
BUSH!
NOT ONE HAS GONE TO PRISON, EVEN HAS
HUNDREDS OF OCCUPY WALL ST PROTESTORS HAVE BEEN ARRESTED.
IN FACT, THE SHIFT THIS NATION’S
ECONOMY DEEPER INTO THE POCKETS OF THE RICH HAS CONTINUED UNABATED UNDER OBAMA!
HE IS THE 1% PRESIDENT, AND IF YOU’RE A
BANKSTER, OR STRONG TIE$ TO BANKSTERS, OR A LA RAZA PARTY MEMBER, YOU CAN COME
WORK FOR THE BANKSTER-OWNED PRESIDENT!
“This return of corporate power comes in part
because the revolving door between government influence and corporate paydays
has begun to turn anew. Even President Obama has submitted to its centrifugal force.
His new White House chief of staff, William
Daley, comes directly from J.P. Morgan
Chase. Daley scored that lucrative gig after serving as commerce secretary
during Bill Clinton's second term.”
TWO YEARS OF OBAMA:
Fifteen
million Americans are out of work, thanks in part to
reckless Wall Street activities. Yet corporate profits are at record highs,
companies are sitting on vast amounts of cash, and, after a tough two years,
business interests are again atop the Washington power structure.
*
THE U.S. CHAMBER of COMMERCE,
LIKE OBAMA, ADVOCATES NO BORDERS WITH MEXICO, NO E-VERIFY, AND AMNESTY, OR AT
LEAST CONTINUED NON-ENFORCEMENT. IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED!
Big business is back in business
By Dana Milbank
Wednesday, January 12, 2011;
Wednesday, January 12, 2011;
There was a festive
atmosphere at U.S. Chamber of Commerce headquarters
Tuesday morning as the corporate lobby delivered its annual "State of American Business" address.
Margaret Spellings,
the former Bush Cabinet officer who cashed out and joined the business group, made
the introductions, telling members that despite "the worst economic
climate since the Great Depression," the chamber had scored a "number
of legislative victories, tremendous success in the elections and another
strong year of fundraising."
Thanks to the
chamber, Spellings boasted, "the American business community always has a
seat at the table."
A seat?
Business has just about all the seats at the table - and more on back order.
Fifteen
million Americans are out of work, thanks in part to
reckless Wall Street activities. Yet corporate profits are at record highs,
companies are sitting on vast amounts of cash, and, after a tough two years,
business interests are again atop the Washington power structure.
This return of corporate power comes in
part because the revolving door between government influence and corporate
paydays has begun to turn anew. Even President Obama has submitted to its
centrifugal force. His new White House chief of staff, William
Daley, comes directly from J.P. Morgan
Chase. Daley scored that lucrative gig after serving as commerce secretary
during Bill Clinton's second term.
As Daley came in
through the revolving door, OMB Director Peter Orszag had just gone out. He cashed out to
become a vice chairman of Citigroup, where his government expertise should be
worth seven figures annually. One of Orszag's partners on Obama's economics
team, Larry Summers, is returning to Harvard - but that
won't stop him from delivering the keynote address to the Global Hedge Fund Summit in
Bermuda.
The thrill of cashing
out has been endorsed by Obama himself. Explaining press secretary Robert
Gibbs's decision to depart, the president told the New York Times: "He's had a six-year stretch now
where basically he's been going 24/7 with relatively modest pay." The poor
Gibbs, who had been earning a "modest" $172,200 a year, is now contemplating making much more
than that representing corporate clients.
At the other end of
Pennsylvania Avenue, corporate interests are becoming increasingly brazen.
Lobbyists have snagged key staff jobs in the new GOP House leadership and
chief-of-staff positions in many new lawmakers' offices. On the day John
Boehner was elected speaker last week, lobbyists were literally strutting their
stuff on the House floor.
Bob Livingston, the
former Republican congressman, was buttonholing members; he's the head of a
lobbying firm that advertises Livingston as "the only practicing former
chairman of the House Appropriations Committee." Also on the floor, Marty Russo, the longtime Democratic congressman
who had just stepped down as head of the lobbying giant Cassidy and Associates,
shook Boehner's hand.
A House Republican
source says Livingston left when informed that, as a registered lobbyist, he
was not allowed to be on the House floor.
Such behavior by
lobbyists - both registered lobbyists and unregistered corporate "advisers"
- has become more common. At last year's State of the Union address, Post
congressional correspondent Paul Kane observed, on the House floor, former
members Mike Ferguson, who runs a lobbying firm, and Jim Greenwood, CEO of the
biotech lobby. Kane has also spotted former senator Bill Cohen, who runs a big
lobbying and consulting firm, on the Senate floor; former representative Sherry
Boehlert, now a lobbyist, in the Speaker's Lobby off the House floor; and
lawmaker-turned-lobbyist Al Wynn entertaining clients in the members' dining
room.
The Center
for Responsive Politics
has identified more than 340 former members of Congress, and 3,665 former
staffers, in lobbying or related fields. The few rules to slow the revolving
door do little, both because of the routine granting of waivers and because of
loose registration requirements for lobbying.
All of this gave the
business lobby much to celebrate as chamber members discussed the State of American
Business over mini-muffins and banana bread Tuesday morning. Tom Donohue, the chamber's white-maned CEO, hailed
the "new tone coming from the White House" since the elections - which
the chamber influenced by spending tens of millions of dollars from donors kept
anonymous, Donohue explained, so opponents couldn't "demagogue them."
Donohue said he's "absolutely convinced" that the new
business-friendly White House will move his way on regulation and trade.
A reporter asked
Donohue for a suggestion of what corporate America, with its record profits,
should do to put people back to work. "I got to think about this for a
minute," Donohue said, then added: "I think the most important thing
to tell a company is to return a reasonable return to their investors."
*
NEW YORK TIMES
January 10, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
The Other Plot to Wreck America
THERE may not be a
person in America without a strong opinion about what coulda, shoulda been done
to prevent the underwear bomber from boarding that Christmas flight to Detroit.
In the years since 9/11, we’ve all become counterterrorists. But in the 16
months since that other calamity in downtown New York — the crash precipitated
by the 9/15 failure of Lehman Brothers — most of us are still ignorant about what Warren Buffett called the “financial weapons of mass destruction”
that wrecked our economy. Fluent as we are in Al Qaeda and body scanners, when
it comes to synthetic C.D.O.’s and credit-default swaps, not so much.
What we don’t know will
hurt us, and quite possibly on a more devastating scale than any Qaeda attack. Americans
must be told the full story of how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing
bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin. Without that reckoning, there will be no public
clamor for serious reform of a financial system that was as cunningly breached
as airline security at the Amsterdam airport. And without reform, another
massive attack on our economic security is guaranteed. Now that it can count on
government bailouts, Wall Street has more incentive than ever to pump up its
risks — secure that it can keep the bonanzas while we get stuck with the
losses.
The window for change is
rapidly closing. Health care, Afghanistan and the terrorism panic may have
exhausted Washington’s already limited capacity for heavy lifting, especially
in an election year. The White House’s chief economic hand, Lawrence Summers, has
repeatedly announced that “everybody agrees that the recession is
over” — which is technically true from an economist’s perspective and
certainly true on Wall Street, where bailed-out banks are reporting record
profits and bonuses. The contrary voices of Americans who have lost pay, jobs,
homes and savings are either patronized or drowned out entirely by a political
system where the banking lobby rules in both parties and the revolving door
between finance and government never stops spinning.
It’s against this
backdrop that this week’s long-awaited initial public hearings of the Financial Crisis
Inquiry Commission are so critical. This
is the bipartisan panel that Congress mandated last spring to investigate the still murky story of what
happened in the meltdown. Phil Angelides, the former California treasurer who
is the inquiry’s chairman, told me in interviews late last year that he has
been busy deploying a tough investigative staff and will not allow the
proceedings to devolve into a typical blue-ribbon Beltway exercise in toothless
bloviation.
He wants to examine the financial sector’s
“greed, stupidity, hubris and outright corruption” — from traders on the ground
to the board room. “It’s important that we
deliver new information,” he said. “We can’t just rehash what we’ve known to
date.” He understands that if he fails to make news or to tell the story in a
way that is comprehensible and compelling enough to arouse Americans to demand
action, Wall Street and Washington will both keep moving on, unchallenged and
unchastened.
Angelides gets it. But
he has a tough act to follow: Ferdinand Pecora, the legendary prosecutor who served as chief counsel to the Senate
committee that investigated the 1929 crash as F.D.R. took office. Pecora was a
master of detail and drama. He riveted America even without the aid of
television. His investigation led to indictments, jail sentences and,
ultimately, key New Deal reforms — the creation of the Securities and Exchange
Commission and the Glass-Steagall Act, designed to prevent the formation of
banks too big to fail.
As it happened, a major
Pecora target was the chief executive of National City Bank, the institution
that would grow up to be Citigroup. Among other transgressions, National City
had repackaged bad Latin
American debt as new securities that it then sold to easily suckered investors during the
frenzied 1920s boom. Once disaster struck, the bank’s executives helped
themselves to millions of dollars in interest-free loans. Yet their own
employees had to keep ponying up salary deductions for decimated National City
stock purchased at a heady precrash price.
Trade bad Latin American
debt for bad mortgage debt, and you have a partial portrait of Citigroup at the
height of the housing bubble. The reckless Citi executives of our day may not
have given themselves interest-free loans, but they often walked away with the
short-term, illusionary profits while their employees were left with shredded
jobs and 401(k)’s. Among those Citi executives was Robert Rubin, who, as the
Clinton Treasury secretary, helped repeal the last
vestiges of Glass-Steagall after
years of Wall Street assault. Somewhere Pecora is turning in his grave
Rubin has never
apologized, let alone been held accountable. But he’s hardly alone. Even after
all the country has gone through, the titans who fueled the bubble are
heedless. In last Sunday’s Times, Sandy Weill, the former chief executive who
built Citigroup (and recruited Rubin to its ranks), gave a remarkable interview
to Katrina Brooker blaming his own hand-picked successor, Charles Prince, for
his bank’s implosion. Weill said he preferred to be remembered for his
philanthropy. Good luck with that.
Among his causes is
Carnegie Hall, where he is chairman of the board. To see how far American
capitalism has fallen, contrast Weill with the giant who built Carnegie Hall. Not only is Andrew Carnegie remembered for far more epic and generous philanthropy
than Weill’s — some 1,600 public
libraries, just for starters —
but also for creating a steel empire that actually helped build America’s
industrial infrastructure in the late 19th century. At Citi, Weill built little
more than a bloated gambling casino. As Paul Volcker, the regrettably powerless chairman of
Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, said recently, there is not “one shred of neutral evidence”
that any financial innovation of the past 20 years has led to economic growth.
Citi, that “innovative” banking supermarket, destroyed far more wealth than
Weill can or will ever give away.
Even now — despite its
near-death experience, despite the departures of Weill, Prince and Rubin — Citi
remains as imperious as it was before 9/15. Its current chairman, Richard
Parsons, was one of three executives (along with Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman
Sachs and John Mack of Morgan Stanley) who failed to show up at
the mid-December White House meeting where President Obama implored bankers to increase lending. (The
trio blamed fog for forcing them to participate by speakerphone, but the
weather hadn’t grounded their peers or Amtrak.) Last week, ABC World News was
also stiffed by Citi, which refused to answer questions about its latest round
of outrageous credit card rate increases and instead e-mailed a statement blaming its customers for “not paying back their loans.” This from a
bank that still owes taxpayers $25
billion of its $45 billion handout!
If Citi, among the most
egregious of Wall Street reprobates, feels it can get away with business as
usual, it’s because it fears no retribution. And it got more good news last
week. Now that Chris Dodd is vacating the Senate, his chairmanship of the
Banking Committee may fall next year to
Tim Johnson of South Dakota, home
to Citi’s credit card operation. Johnson was the only Senate Democrat to vote
against Congress’s recent bill policing credit card abuses.
Though bad history shows
every sign of repeating itself on Wall Street, it will take a near-miracle for
Angelides to repeat Pecora’s triumph. Our zoo of financial skullduggery is far
more complex, with many more moving pieces, than that of the 1920s. The new
inquiry does have subpoena power, but its entire budget, a mere $8 million,
doesn’t even match the lobbying expenditures for just three banks (Citi, Morgan Stanley,
Bank of America) in the first nine months of 2009. The firms under scrutiny can
pay for as many lawyers as they need to stall between now and Dec. 15, deadline
day for the commission’s report.
More daunting still is
the inquiry’s duty to reach into high places in the public sector as well as
the private. The mystery of exactly what happened as TARP fell into place in
the fateful fall of 2008 thickens by the day — especially the
behind-closed-door machinations surrounding the government rescue of A.I.G. and
its counterparties. Last week, a Republican congressman, Darrell Issa of
California, released e-mail showing that officials at the New York Fed,
then led by Timothy Geithner, pressured A.I.G. to delay disclosing to the
S.E.C. and the public the details on the billions of bailout dollars it was
funneling to its trading partners. In this backdoor rescue, taxpayers
unknowingly awarded banks like Goldman 100 cents on the dollar for their bets
on mortgage-backed securities.
Why was our money used
to make these high-flying gamblers whole while ordinary Americans received no
such beneficence? Nothing less than complete transparency will connect the
dots. Among the big-name witnesses
that the Angelides commission has called for next week is Goldman’s Blankfein. Geithner, Henry
Paulson and Ben Bernanke should be next.
If they all skate away
yet again by deflecting blame or mouthing pro forma mea culpas, it will be a
sign that this inquiry, like so many other promises of reform since 9/15, is
likely to leave Wall Street’s status quo largely intact. That’s the
ticking-bomb scenario that truly imperils us all.
*
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/04/18/112346/obama-ran-against-bush-but-now.html
*
Posted on Mon, Apr. 18, 2011
Obama ran against Bush, but now governs like him
Steven Thomma | McClatchy Newspapers
last
updated: April 19, 2011 09:15:43 PM
WASHINGTON — He ran as the anti-Bush.
Silver-tongued, not tongue-tied. A team player on
the world stage, not a lone cowboy. A man who'd put a stop to reckless Bush
policies at home and abroad. In short, Barack Obama represented Change.
Well, that was then. Now, on one major policy after
another, President Barack Obama seems to be morphing into George W. Bush.
On the nation's finances, the man who once ripped
Bush as a failed leader for seeking to raise the nation's debt ceiling now
wants to do it himself.
On terrorism, he criticized Bush for sending
suspected terrorists to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and denying them access to U.S.
civilian courts. Now he says he'll do the same.
On taxes, he called the Bush-era tax cuts for the
wealthy wrong, and lately began calling again to end them. But in December he
signed a deal with Republicans to extend them for two years, and recently he
called the entire tax cut package good for the country.
And on war, as a candidate he said that the
president didn't have authority to unilaterally attack a country that didn't
pose an imminent threat to the U.S., and even then the president should always
seek the informed consent of Congress. Last month, without a vote in Congress,
he attacked Libya, which didn't threaten the U.S.
Big differences remain between Obama and Bush, to
be sure. His two nominees to the Supreme Court differ vastly from Bush's picks.
Obama does want to end the tax cuts for the wealthy. He also pushed through a
massive overhaul of the nation's health insurance system.
Yet even on health insurance, his stand wasn't so
much a reversal of Bush's approach as an escalation. Bush also pushed through a
massive expansion of Medicare by adding a costly prescription drug benefit — at
the time, the biggest expansion of a federal entitlement since Lyndon Johnson's
Great Society. Indeed, some of the differences between the two presidents are
measured in gray, not black and white as once seemed the case.
Some of the changes in Obama can be attributed to
the passion of campaign rhetoric giving way to the realities of governing,
analysts say.
"He is looking less like a candidate and more
like a president," said Dan Schnur, the director of the Jesse M. Unruh
Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. "He has
discovered that it's much easier to make promises on the campaign trail than it
is to keep them as president."
At the same time, some of the surprising continuity
of Bush-era policies can be tied to the way Bush and events set the nation's
course, particularly on foreign policy.
"Morphing into Bush was not a willful
act," said Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars. "It was acquiescence to the policies
his predecessor shaped and the cruel realities that Obama inherited."
For example, Obama found he couldn't easily close
the prison at Guantanamo Bay because he couldn't find a place, abroad or at
home, willing to take all the terrorist suspects held there.
"Bush created, on the military and security
side, new realities from which no successor, Democrat or Republican, could
depart, "Miller said. "It's like turning around an aircraft carrier.
It cannot happen quickly."
Among the ways Obama has reversed his earlier
promises and adopted, extended or echoed Bush policies:
DEBT
In 2006, Bush had cut taxes, gone to war, and
expanded Medicare, and increased the national debt from $5.6 trillion to $8.2
trillion. He needed approval from Congress to raise the ceiling for debt to $9
trillion.
The Senate approved the increase by a narrow vote
of 52-48.
Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., voted no.
"Increasing America's debt weakens us
domestically and internationally," Obama said in 2006. "Leadership
means that 'the buck stops here.' Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of
bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has
a debt problem and a failure of leadership."
Now Obama's on the other side. He's increased the
national debt to $14 trillion, and needs Congress to approve more debt.
Moreover, Obama's aides now say that congressional meddling to use that needed
vote to wrangle budget concessions from the White House would be inappropriate
and risk financial Armageddon.
What about Obama's own vote against the president
in a similar situation? A mistake, the White House said.
TAXES
As a senator and presidential candidate, Obama
opposed extending the Bush tax cuts on incomes greater than $250,000 a year
past their expiration on Dec., 31, 2009.
In 2007, he said he was for "rolling back the
Bush tax cuts on the top 1 percent of people who don't need it." In a 2008
ad, he said, "Instead of extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest,
I'll focus on you."
As president, Obama proposed letting those tax cuts
expire as scheduled, while also proposing to make permanent the Bush tax cuts
for incomes of less than $250,000.
But he didn't get Congress to approve that. When
the issue came to a head last December, Republicans insisted on extending all
of the tax cuts or none, and Obama went along lest the tax cuts on incomes
below $250,000 expire even briefly. His final deal with the Congress also added
a one-year cut in the payroll tax for Medicare and Social Security.
"What all of us care about is growing the
American economy and creating jobs for the American people," Obama said.
"Taken as a whole, that's what this package of tax relief is going to do.
It's a good deal for the American people."
He said again last week that he wants to let the
Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire, this time on Dec. 31, 2012.
TERRORISTS
As a presidential candidate, Obama vowed a broad
reversal of Bush's policies toward suspected terrorists.
Most pointedly, he said he'd close the prison in
Cuba and try suspected terrorists in civilian courts, not in military
tribunals.
"I have faith in America's courts," he
said in a 2007 speech. "As president, I will close Guantanamo, reject the
Military Commissions Act, and adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Our Constitution
and our Uniform Code of Military Justice provide a framework for dealing with
the terrorists."
He ran into a torrent of opposition, however.
Members of Congress balked at transferring suspected terrorists to U.S.
prisons. New Yorkers balked when his administration said it would try accused
9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court in lower Manhattan.
Last month, he changed course, saying he'd keep
Guantanamo Bay open, and would try Mohammed before a military court.
The reversal, said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., the
chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, "is yet another
vindication of President Bush's detention policies by the Obama
administration."
Echoing Bush, Obama's also asserted that he has the
power to hold suspected terrorists without charges or trial, and that he has
the power to kill U.S. citizens abroad if his government considers them a
terrorist threat.
WAR POWERS
During his campaign, Obama signaled that he'd be
far more circumspect than Bush was in using military power. He did say he'd
send more troops to Afghanistan, which he's done, and that he'd attack al Qaida
terrorists in Pakistan, which he's also done.
But he opposed the Iraq war from the start, and
said he didn't think the president should wage war for humanitarian purposes or
act without congressional approval, absent an imminent threat to the U.S.
"The president does not have power under the
Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that
does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation," he
told The Boston Globe in 2007.
"In instances of self-defense, the president
would be within his constitutional authority to act before advising Congress or
seeking its consent. History has shown us time and again, however, that
military action is most successful when it is authorized and supported by the
legislative branch. It is always preferable to have the informed consent of
Congress prior to any military action."
On March 19, the U.S. attacked Libya on humanitarian
grounds, absent any threat to the U.S. and without approval from Congress.
ORGY
OF GREED… Wall Street Celebrates Victory Over Their Crimes on Americans! AND NO
ONE SERVES THIS GREED MORE THAN BARACK OBAMA!
*
“On
the other side of the social divide is an uninhibited orgy of greed, documented
most recently by a Wednesday story in the New York Times (“Signs of
Swagger, Wallets out, Wall Street Celebrates.”
Thanksgiving
in America
US
corporations shatter profit records
25
November 2010
US corporations took
in $1.659 trillion in the third quarter, breaking records going back 60 years,
according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. It was the seventh
consecutive quarter of profit growth at “some of the fastest rates in history”
according to the New York Times.
If any more proof
were needed, the third quarter profit record exposes the lie promoted by
Democrats and Republicans alike that only the “free market” and private
businesses can reverse the nation’s 9.6 percent unemployment rate. The
corporations and banks are sitting on a cash horde in the trillions of dollars.
This money is not being used to hire workers, but to line the pockets of the
executives and top shareholders.
The profit bonanza
that lasted from July through September eclipsed the old record of $1.655
trillion established in the third quarter of 2006—just as the money-mad
speculation of the financial elite was hurtling the US and world economy toward
the precipice of its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
The resulting
financial crisis, which erupted in the autumn of 2008, threatened a total
collapse of the global financial system. In response, the governments of the
world, led by the US, used the disaster to hand over tens of trillions in
public wealth to the very finance houses that triggered the crisis. This
process continues, as demonstrated by the International Monetary Fund/European
Union-dictated rescue of the Irish banks this week.
The enormous profit
realized by US corporations in the third quarter are only the latest indication
that the Bush-Obama bailout of the financial and corporate elite has achieved
its desired aim of protecting the personal fortunes of the rich:
*Annual bonuses rose
by 11 percent for executives at the 450 largest US corporations last fiscal
year, according to a recent survey published by the Wall Street Journal.
Overall, median compensation—including salaries, bonuses, stocks, options and
other incentives—rose by three percent to $7.3 million in 2009. Shareholder
returns increased by 29 percent.
*An October survey by
the Wall Street Journal found that employees at 35 of the biggest banks,
investment banks, hedge funds, money management firms, and securities exchanges
will be paid a record $144 billion in 2010.
*According to Forbes
magazine, the net worth of the 400 richest Americans increased by 8 percent in
2010, to $1.37 trillion, more than the GDP of India, population 1.2 billion.
These vast fortunes
have been made possible through the impoverishment of the working class, the
vast majority of the population that must work in order to maintain itself.
*In 2009, 15 percent
of all US households, about 50 million people, went part or all of the year
without enough food to eat, according to a recent report from the US Department
of Agriculture (USDA). More than a third of these households, home to one
million children, went without meals on a regular basis.
*A record 49.9
million US adults went without health insurance for at least part of the past
year, up from 46 million in 2008, according to a recent report from the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The uninsured now constitute 26.2
percent of the total adult population, more than one in four, up from 24.5
percent two years ago.
*Average annual wages
for US workers fell by $457 in 2009, and the median annual wage fell by $247 to
$26,261, according to recently updated data from the Social Security
Administration (SSA).
*The US Census Bureau
found that about 44 million Americans were living in poverty in 2009, the
highest number on record and an increase of 3.8 million in one year. Nearly 19
million Americans were living in extreme poverty in 2009, defined as half of
the official poverty level, an increase of 11 percent in one year.
This sampling—many
similar statistics could be cited—paints a portrait of a financial oligarchy
literally gorging itself at the expense of the population. Yet this reality,
which permeates every aspect of life in the US, has only whetted the appetite
of the elite and its political servants.
The holiday season
finds the lame duck 111th Congress putting the finishing touches on two years
of wealth redistribution to the rich. It is almost certain to extend Bush-era
income tax cuts for the richest Americans.
On November 30, five
days after the Thanksgiving holiday, unemployment benefits will expire for 1.2
million workers due to Congressional inaction. By Christmas and the New Year,
this figure will swell to 2 million. The fate of these workers and the several
million children who depend on them, tossed out without cash income into the
worst job market in seven decades, is of little consequence to the millionaires
and multi-millionaires who populate Congress.
One result of these
policies is that more people than ever, including those with jobs, are forced
to turn to soup kitchens, even on a day when families traditionally gather for
a holiday associated with the “bountiful harvest.” Charities across the country
are reporting record demand for help on Thanksgiving—a holiday established at a
national level by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 to honor the material abundance of
the Republic, even in the midst of the Civil War.
On the other side of
the social divide is an uninhibited orgy of greed, documented most recently by
a Wednesday story in the New York Times (“Signs of Swagger, Wallets out,
Wall Street Celebrates.”) From cosmetic plastic surgery to high-priced art
auctions, from rental properties in the Hamptons to bachelor parties that cost
tens of thousands of dollars, “Wall Street’s moneyed elite are breathing easier
again,” the article states.
The stranglehold over
society and the economy exercised by this parasitic social layer, this
modern-day aristocracy, must be broken once and for all.
Tom Eley
Wsws.org… get on their free no ads E-NEWS!
*
Lou Dobbs Tonight
Monday, November 12, 2007
Mortgage giants Wells Fargo and Banks of America are accused of slapping dubious fees on homeowners struggling to save their homes. With fewer new mortgages being written, these
companies appear to be leaning on these lucrative fees to stay profitable—with devastating consequences for homeowners. We’ll have that report.
Monday, November 12, 2007
Mortgage giants Wells Fargo and Banks of America are accused of slapping dubious fees on homeowners struggling to save their homes. With fewer new mortgages being written, these
companies appear to be leaning on these lucrative fees to stay profitable—with devastating consequences for homeowners. We’ll have that report.
“Rightly or wrongly, the
bankers seem to believe that a return to business as usual is just around the
corner.” PAUL KRUGMAN
NEW YORK TIMES
April 27, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Money for Nothing
On July
15, 2007, The New York Times published an article with the headline “The
Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age.” The most prominently featured
of the “new titans” was Sanford Weill, the former chairman of Citigroup, who
insisted that he and his peers in the financial sector had earned their immense
wealth through their contributions to society.
Soon
after that article was printed, the financial edifice Mr. Weill took credit for
helping to build collapsed, inflicting immense collateral damage in the process. Even if we manage to avoid a repeat of
the Great Depression, the world economy will take years to recover from this
crisis.
All of
which explains why we should be disturbed by an article in Sunday’s Times
reporting that pay at investment banks, after dipping last year, is soaring
again — right back up to 2007 levels.
Why is
this disturbing? Let me count the ways.
First,
there’s no longer any reason to believe that the wizards of Wall Street
actually contribute anything positive to society, let alone enough to justify
those humongous paychecks.
Remember
that the gilded Wall Street of 2007 was a fairly new phenomenon. From the 1930s
until around 1980 banking was a staid, rather boring business that paid no
better, on average, than other industries, yet kept the economy’s wheels
turning.
So why
did some bankers suddenly begin making vast fortunes? It was, we were told, a
reward for their creativity — for financial innovation. At this point, however,
it’s hard to think of any major recent financial innovations that actually
aided society, as opposed to being new, improved ways to blow bubbles, evade
regulations and implement de facto Ponzi schemes.
Consider
a recent speech by Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, in which he
tried to defend financial innovation. His examples of “good” financial
innovations were (1) credit cards — not exactly a new idea; (2) overdraft
protection; and (3) subprime mortgages. (I am not making this up.) These were
the things for which bankers got paid the big bucks?
Still,
you might argue that we have a free-market economy, and it’s up to the private
sector to decide how much its employees are worth. But this brings me to my
second point: Wall Street is no longer, in any real sense, part of the private
sector. It’s a ward of the state, every bit as dependent on government aid as
recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a k a “welfare.”
I’m not
just talking about the $600 billion or so already committed under the TARP.
There are also the huge credit lines extended by the Federal Reserve;
large-scale lending by Federal Home Loan Banks; the taxpayer-financed payoffs
of A.I.G. contracts; the vast expansion of F.D.I.C. guarantees; and, more
broadly, the implicit backing provided to every financial firm considered too
big, or too strategic, to fail.
One can
argue that it’s necessary to rescue Wall Street to protect the economy as a
whole — and in fact I agree. But given all that taxpayer money on the line,
financial firms should be acting like public utilities, not returning to the
practices and paychecks of 2007.
Furthermore,
paying vast sums to wheeler-dealers isn’t just outrageous; it’s dangerous. Why,
after all, did bankers take such huge risks? Because success — or even the
temporary appearance of success — offered such gigantic rewards: even
executives who blew up their companies could and did walk away with hundreds of
millions. Now we’re seeing similar rewards offered to people who can play their
risky games with federal backing.
So what’s
going on here? Why are paychecks heading for the stratosphere again? Claims
that firms have to pay these salaries to retain their best people aren’t
plausible: with employment in the financial sector plunging, where are those
people going to go?
No, the
real reason financial firms are paying big again is simply because they can.
They’re making money again (although not as much as they claim), and why not?
After all, they can borrow cheaply, thanks to all those federal guarantees, and
lend at much higher rates. So it’s eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you
may be regulated.
Or maybe
not. There’s a palpable sense in the financial press that the storm has passed:
stocks are up, the economy’s nose-dive may be leveling off, and the Obama
administration will probably let the bankers off with nothing more than a few
stern speeches. Rightly or wrongly, the bankers seem to believe that a return
to business as usual is just around the corner.
We can
only hope that our leaders prove them wrong, and carry through with real reform.
In 2008, overpaid bankers taking big risks with other people’s money brought
the world economy to its knees. The last thing we need is to give them a chance
to do it all over again.
GET THIS BOOK!
*
Obamanomics:
How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends,
Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses
BY TIMOTHY P
CARNEY
Editorial Reviews
Obama Is Making
You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?
Goldman
Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack
Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from
Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and
consumers. In Obamanomics, investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs
up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you
wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate
socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s
corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics.
Congressman
Ron Paul says, “Every libertarian and free-market conservative needs to read Obamanomics.”
And Johan Goldberg, columnist and bestselling author says, “Obamanomics
is conservative muckraking at its best and an indispensable field guide to the
Obama years.”
If
you’ve wondered what’s happening to America, as the federal government swallows
up the financial sector, the auto industry, and healthcare, and enacts deficit
exploding “stimulus packages,” this book makes it all clear—it’s a big scam.
Ultimately, Obamanomics boils down to this: every time government gets bigger,
somebody’s getting rich, and those somebodies are friends of Barack. This book
names the names—and it will make your blood boil.
*
Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?
Goldman
Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack
Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from
Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and
consumers.
Investigative
reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and
the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is
delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling
corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s
Obamanomics. In this explosive book, Carney reveals:
* The
Great Health Care Scam—Obama’s backroom deals with drug companies spell
corporate profits and more government control
* The Global Warming Hoax—Obama has bought off industries with a pork-filled bill that will drain your wallet for Al Gore’s agenda
* Obama and Wall Street—“Change” means more bailouts and a heavy Goldman Sachs presence in the West Wing (including Rahm Emanuel)
* Stimulating K Street—The largest spending bill in history gave pork to the well-connected and created a feeding frenzy for lobbyists
* How the GOP needs to change its tune—drastically—to battle Obamanomics
* The Global Warming Hoax—Obama has bought off industries with a pork-filled bill that will drain your wallet for Al Gore’s agenda
* Obama and Wall Street—“Change” means more bailouts and a heavy Goldman Sachs presence in the West Wing (including Rahm Emanuel)
* Stimulating K Street—The largest spending bill in history gave pork to the well-connected and created a feeding frenzy for lobbyists
* How the GOP needs to change its tune—drastically—to battle Obamanomics
If
you’ve wondered what’s happening to our country, as the federal government
swallows up the financial sector, the auto industry, and healthcare, and enacts
deficit exploding “stimulus packages” that create make-work government jobs,
this book makes it all clear—it’s a big scam. Ultimately, Obamanomics boils
down to this: every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich, and
those somebodies are friends of Barack. This book names the names—and it will
make your blood boil.
*
Praise for Obamanomics
Praise for Obamanomics
“The
notion that ‘big business’ is on the side of the free market is one of
progressivism’s most valuable myths. It allows them to demonize corporations by
day and get in bed with them by night. Obamanomics is conservative
muckraking at its best. It reveals how President Obama is exploiting the big
business mythology to undermine the free market and stick it to entrepreneurs,
taxpayers, and consumers. It’s an indispensable field guide to the Obama
years.”
—Jonha Goldberg, LA Times columnist and best-selling author
—Jonha Goldberg, LA Times columnist and best-selling author
“‘Every
time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich.’ With this astute
observation, Tim Carney begins his task of laying bare the Obama
administration’s corporatist governing strategy, hidden behind the president’s
populist veneer. This meticulously researched book is a must-read for anyone
who wants to understand how Washington really works.”
—David Freddoso, best-selling author of The Case Against Barack Obama
—David Freddoso, best-selling author of The Case Against Barack Obama
“Every
libertarian and free-market conservative who still believes that large
corporations are trusted allies in the battle for economic liberty needs to
read this book, as does every well-meaning liberal who believes that expansions
of the welfare-regulatory state are done to benefit the common people.”
—Congressman Ron Paul
—Congressman Ron Paul
“It’s
understandable for critics to condemn President Obama for his ‘socialism.’ But
as Tim Carney shows, the real situation is at once more subtle and more
sinister. Obamanomics favors big business while disproportionately punishing
everyone else. So-called progressives are too clueless to notice, as usual,
which is why we have Tim Carney and this book.”
—Thomas E. Woods, Jr., best-selling author of Meltdown and The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to American History
—Thomas E. Woods, Jr., best-selling author of Meltdown and The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to American History
*
·
Hardcover: 256 pages
·
Publisher: Regnery Press (November 30,
2009)
·
Language: English
·
ISBN-10: 1596986123
·
ISBN-13: 978-1596986121
*
ARE AMAZED AT HOW UTTERLY BRAZEN THESE CORPORATE OWNED
POLITICIANS ARE?
GET THIS BOOK!
Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats,
Crooks, and Cronies
by Michelle Malkin
Editorial Reviews
In her shocking new book, Malkin digs deep into the records
of President Obama's staff, revealing corrupt dealings, questionable pasts, and
abuses of power throughout his administration.
From the Inside Flap
The era of hope and change is dead....and it only took six
months in office to kill it.
Never has an administration taken office with more inflated
expectations of turning Washington around. Never have a media-anointed American
Idol and his entourage fallen so fast and hard. In her latest investigative
tour de force, New York Times bestselling author Michelle Malkin delivers a
powerful, damning, and comprehensive indictment of the culture of corruption
that surrounds Team Obama's brazen tax evaders, Wall Street cronies, petty
crooks, slum lords, and business-as-usual influence peddlers. In Culture of
Corruption, Malkin reveals:
* Why nepotism beneficiaries First Lady Michelle Obama and
Vice President Joe Biden are Team Obama's biggest liberal hypocrites--bashing
the corporate world and influence-peddling industries from which they and their
relatives have benefited mightily
* What secrets the ethics-deficient members of Obama's
cabinet--including Hillary Clinton--are trying to hide
* Why the Obama White House has more power-hungry,
unaccountable "czars" than any other administration
* How Team Obama's first one hundred days of appointments
became a litany of embarrassments as would-be appointee after would-be
appointee was exposed as a tax cheat or had to withdraw for other reasons
* How Obama's old ACORN and union cronies have squandered
millions of taxpayer dollars and dues money to enrich themselves and expand
their power
* How Obama's Wall Street money men and corporate lobbyists
are ruining the economy and helping their friends In Culture of Corruption,
Michelle Malkin lays bare the Obama administration's seamy underside that the
liberal media would rather keep hidden.
Product Details
• Hardcover:
376 pages
• Publisher:
Regnery Publishing (July 27, 2009)
• Language:
English
• ISBN-10:
1596981091
• ISBN-13:
978-1596981096
*
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