by ELLEN BROWN

Confiscating the customer deposits in Cyprus banks, it seems, was not a one-off, desperate idea of a few Eurozone “troika” officials scrambling to salvage their balance sheets. A joint paper by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England dated December 10, 2012, shows that these plans have been long in the making; that they originated with the G20 Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland (discussed earlier here); and that the result will be to deliver clear title to the banks of depositor funds.

New Zealand has a similar directive, discussed in my last article here, indicating that this isn’t just an emergency measure for troubled Eurozone countries. New Zealand’s Voxy reported on March 19th:

The National Government [is] pushing a Cyprus-style solution to bank failure in New Zealand which will see small depositors lose some of their savings to fund big bank bailouts . . . .

Open Bank Resolution (OBR) is Finance Minister Bill English’s favoured option dealing with a major bank failure. If a bank fails under OBR, all depositors will have their savings reduced overnight to fund the bank’s bail out.

Can They Do That?

Although few depositors realize it, legally the bank owns the depositor’s funds as soon as they are put in the bank. Our money becomes the bank’s, and we become unsecured creditors holding IOUs or promises to pay. (See here and here.) But until now the bank has been obligated to pay the money back on demand in the form of cash. Under the FDIC-BOE plan, our IOUs will be converted into “bank equity.” The bank will get the money and we will get stock in the bank. With any luck we may be able to sell the stock to someone else, but when and at what price? Most people keep a deposit account so they can have ready cash to pay the bills.

The 15-page FDIC-BOE document is called “Resolving Globally Active, Systemically Important, Financial Institutions.” It begins by explaining that the 2008 banking crisis has made it clear that some other way besides taxpayer bailouts is needed to maintain “financial stability.” Evidently anticipating that the next financial collapse will be on a grander scale than either the taxpayers or Congress is willing to underwrite, the authors state:

An efficient path for returning the sound operations of the G-SIFI to the private sector would be provided by exchanging or converting a sufficient amount of the unsecured debt from the original creditors of the failed company [meaning the depositors] into equity [or stock]. In the U.S., the new equity would become capital in one or more newly formed operating entities. In the U.K., the same approach could be used, or the equity could be used to recapitalize the failing financial company itself—thus, the highest layer of surviving bailed-in creditors would become the owners of the resolved firm. In either country, the new equity holders would take on the corresponding risk of being shareholders in a financial institution.

Read teh full article at Counter Punch HERE

Having spent the time ourselves to study the true history of this nation for many years, we are thrilled to see this movement being put into action. Kudos to Ms. Rebecca Campbell for her excellent work here.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: CRIMINAL/CIVIL CHARGES AGAINST THE WASHINGTON STATE CORPORATE GOVERNMENT/MEDIA FOR ONGOING SYSTEMIC FINANCIAL/CONSTITUTIONAL FRAUD AND TREASON

Posted by nowisthetimeus on September 19, 2012

Seattle, Washington State, America
September 20, 2012

Criminal/civil charges have been filed with referenced evidentiary weblinks against officials of the Washington State corporate government, as well as media corporations operating in Washington State, for perpetrating/enabling systemic financial/constititutional fraud and treason.

The allegations in these legal actions specifically expose what has been called the CAFR scam, with its implications of fraudulent unnecessary budget cuts to government services at all levels of government all across America as a result of theft by the private Federal Reserve System. These are accompanied by related allegations that the Washington State Constitution of 1889, as well as the present US corporate government, are fraudulent, and that failure to disclose this constitutes treason on the part of state corporate government/media officials.

These criminal/civil charges have been filed with the Federal Grand Jury of the Ninth District Court, the FBI, the Offices of the King County Sheriff, and that of the Seattle Chief of Police and Seattle City Prosecutor here in Seattle . They have also been filed in the state capital of Olympia/Thurston County with the Offices of the Thurston County Sherriff, the Thurston County Prosecutor, the Olympia Chief of Police and the Olympia City Prosecutor.

Copies of these charges’ Proofs of Filing can be seen below. All civil/criminal charges filed at the local level were hand-delivered, with receipts signed at the front desk for documentation of filing. Those filed at the federal level even if local, as well as those filed at a distance in the Washington State capital of Olympia were filed via certified mail.

Those charges filed with the Federal Grand Jury were filed without return receipt to better ensure that they would reach the Foreperson without the interposition of possibly compromised court clerks or US attorneys; accordingly, a copy of the screen shot from the delivery tracking portion of the US Postal Service website has been scanned to show such proper filing, with delivery on September 10, 2012.

It should be mentioned that two attempts to file these charges with the King County Prosecutor’s Office were unsuccessful. In both instances, clerks connected with this office rejected the packet of charges. They stated that sovereign citizens did not have the right to file criminal charges, and that all civil charges against the state need to be filed as a civil lawsuit at the sovereign citizen’s expense — now $400 — with the district court to be decided by state corporate government-appointed judges. This clearly no-win proposition for the plaintiff was immediately rejected by this plaintiff.

All of the filings of these charges been done in such a way to ensure as well as is possible that appropriate action might be taken on the part of law enforcement/judicial agencies located in Washington State, and that if it is not, that such derogation of duty will become immediately and publicly apparent, as seen in the paragraph above concerning Proof of Public Disservice by the King County Prosecutor’s Office.

Since the term “United States of America” is now often considered to denote the bank cartel-controlled federal government corporation, many geopolitically savvy sovereign citizens prefer being called “Americans” and their country “America”, even though we share the North American continent with other nations. This dichotomy illustrates the gravity of the issues being discovered in this document, and is the reason that the terms ” America ” and “Americans” are herein being used instead of ” USA ” and ” US citizens” to denote our nation and its legitimate inhabitants.

Media corporations operating in Washington State are, possibly for the first time in recorded history, included in such a legal action. It finally needs to be publicly acknowledged and acted upon that corporate media distortions and omissions in reporting the news as agreed upon in their corporate charters have long enabled such ongoing criminal activity on the part of corrupt corporate government officials in this state and in others throughout the world. This was also done to remind both media corporations and the public that, besides prosecution of their executives, corporate charters can be legally rescinded as a form of capital punishment for capitalist corporate entities whenever their corporate charters are repeatedly and reprehensibly violated, as many have been in recent memory.

It is hoped that these public legal actions will help create a template by which empowered sovereign citizens everywhere can draft their own like public legal actions based on their own situations, research and laws, and they, like sovereign citizens in Washington State, can themselves publicly file these charges with their own law enforcement agencies to help expose and systemically extirpate this ancient ongoing theft of planetary resources.

Other sovereign citizens of Washington State are cordially invited to print out these charges and file them with their own local law enforcement officials, as well as forward them to their elected representatives, to Washington State media and to their fellow citizens, so that general knowledge of such systemic evil and what can successfully eliminate it can rapidly be increased.

For it is only by such peaceful but effective means that the satanic international bank-based corporate crime syndicate that presently controls most of the governments of this planet will ultimately and forever be defeated.

——————————————————————————–

WCSS 9-5-12.doc

CRIMINAL/CIVIL CHARGES AGAINST WASHINGTON STATE CORPORATE GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS/MEDIA CORPORATIONS OPERATING IN WASHINGTON STATE FOR SYSTEMIC FINANCIAL/CONSTITUTIONAL FRAUD AND TREASON

Against the following Washington State corporate government officials:

Governor Christine Gregoire, Treasurer James McIntire, Attorney General Robert McKenna, Washington State Investment Board Legislature Liaison Rep. Sharon Tomiko-Santos, Budget Director Martin Brown, President of the Senate Lisa Brown, Co-Chairmen of the Senate Ways and Means Committee, Senators Edward Murray and Joseph Zarelli, Speaker of the House Frank Chopp and Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee Ross Hunter, as well as top management of mainstream/alleged alternative media corporations operating in Washington State, the following criminal/civil charges are alleged:

1. Systemic Ongoing Financial Fraud Against the People of Washington State

1.01 That the abovementioned Washington State corporate government officials and their predecessors in office, as well as mainstream/alleged alternative media corporations operating in Washington State have knowingly and repeatedly concealed the existence of approximately two-thirds of state monies shown in the Washington State Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, (CAFR) while misrepresenting the remaining one-third of these monies as the entire “state budget” since at least the mid-1940s;

Websites/links on CAFRs/CAFR Scam

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_annual_financial_report

http://www.cafrman.com/

www.webofdebt.com/articles/mysterious_cafrs.php

http://www.examiner.com/nonpartisan-in-national/carl-herman

www.comprehensiveannualfinancialreport.com

1.02 That Washington State corporate government officials have invested the two-thirds of state monies concealed in the CAFR in institutional corporate Wall Street investments, rather than in investments that would directly benefit the people of Washington State, such as investments in small businesses with the much greater amount of employment, personal prosperity and government tax revenues they would provide, in infrastructure maintenance that would provide widespread employment as well as for the general welfare, or in a public state bank, which, as in the State of North Dakota since 1919, would eliminate state economic downturns altogether;

Websites on Pubic Banking

http://www.wapublicbankproject.org/

1.03. That, next to institutional investments in the US government corporation’s increasingly devalued financial instruments — the collateral damage from the recently revealed LIBOR scandal (LIBOR=London Interbank Offered Rate or “LIBER” (Latin for “Unregulated”) —

http://www.businessinsider.com/infographic-the-libor-scandal-explained-2012-7

the state corporate government’s largest investments are in the corrupt international banking cartel directly responsible for the global depression of 2008, in which the global economy, as well as that of Washington State presently remain;

1.04 That at least eighty-five percent of the state’s investments are in foreign governmental or quasi-governmental entities and transnational corporations; few of them are in any entity located within Washington State , or in any headquartered in America ;

1.05 That of these transnational corporate Wall Street investments, a disproportionate number are in predatory transnational corporations other than the predatory transnational banks, in which the majority of the people of Washington State, if sufficiently informed, would not want their money invested as a matter of ethical and/or environmental principles; this includes institutional investments in BP, Shell, Keystone XL, Dow Chemical, Massey Energy, Cargill and Monsanto;

1.06 That the Washington State government has a grave conflict of interest by aggressively promoting by both executive order and legislation the products of industries in which they have large investments, such as the pharmaceutical cartel and its bioweaponized vaccines, in which it has institutional investments of over one-half billion dollars;

Why the Washington State Government Is a Ruthless Vaccine Pusher

http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/8367537-why-the-washington-state-government-is-a-ruthless-vaccine-pusher

1.07 That the Washington State government has a grave conflict of interest by failing to proportionately tax those Washington State-located transnational corporations in which it is heavily invested and/or whose favor they wish to obtain;

1.08 That the Washington State government has a grave conflict of interest by investing in foreign manufacturing competitors while failing to invest in those which would provide manufacturing employment and infrastructure for the people of Washington State;

1.09 That the Washington State Investment Board (WSIB) — the financial arm of the Washington State Legislature headed by the state treasurer — employs financial advisors of questionable competence and integrity, including accused war criminal former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright and the infamously corrupt investment firm of Goldman Sachs — never consulting with those who offer any alternative economic perspectives and solutions, including those employed within the Washington State government itself;

1.10 That the WSIB plotted in the spring of 2006 to alter the Washington State Constitution so that the fulsome Washington State Education Fund — derived from regular fees paid by the state’s resource extraction industries of mining, fishing and lumbering — could be used in the future for institutional corporate Wall Street investments, rather than as before being kept safely in trust;

1.11 That to achieve this diversion of state funds in trust, the WSIB quietly placed on the state ballot Issue 4215, which proposed an amendment to the Washington State Constitution allowing the state higher education funds to be used in corporate Wall Street investments;

1.12 That the majority of voters in Washington State, deliberately kept ill-informed by state corporate government officials and mainstream/alleged alternative media corporations operating in Washington State, passed this stealth measure by a large margin in November 2006, to be ratified as a constitutional amendment by the state legislature in January 2007;

2006 Washington State Voters Guide Writeup on State Issue 4215

http://vote.wa.gov/Elections/Measure2007.aspx?a=4215&c=7
[Note: When we tested this link it was reporting a server error on their site; perhaps the wa.gov site does not want you to read this document.]

1.13 That, since early 2004, the WSIB has deliberately invested a large portion of its institutional investment portfolio in derivatives and credit default options (CDOs), the most opaque, unstable investment instruments imaginable;

1.14 That, due to the corporate bailouts and banking cartel-engineered depression of 2008, as well as the WSIB’s prodigal, imprudent corporate Wall Street investments, the Washington State Education Fund now has been depleted by half, due to the resulting devaluation of institutionally invested stocks and bonds;

1.15 This has served to radically increase tuition and student loan indebtedness while radically decreasing the availability and quality of higher education to the people of Washington State ;

1.16 That all of this occurred less than two years after Issue 4215 was stealthily and deceptively introduced by the WSIB, passed by the majority of voters, and its related constitutional amendment approved by their state legislators;

1.17 That the amount of the people’s money deliberately being squandered in volatile institutional corporate Wall Street investments is at least eighty times the amount of the alleged state budget deficit of approximately $1 billion, which this invested money could have easily eliminated if used responsibly;

1.18 That the abovecited Washington State officials continually demand increasingly exorbitant taxation and licensing fees from the already deliberately financially stressed people of this state;

1.19 That they do this is while being entrusted with massive amounts of the people’s money, yet knowingly and willfully withholding and purloining it for the benefit of the private international banking cartel and those who secretly control it;

1.20 That the immediate motive for this treasonous fraud perpetrated by the abovecited Washington State corporate government officials and their predecessors in office and mainstream/alleged alternative media corporations operating in Washington State against the people of this state has been their greed for both wealth and power, accepting lucrative bribes, kickbacks, campaign contributions, loans and lucrative advertising contracts, as well as enhanced monies from personal investments from the corrupt international banking cartel and other corrupt transnational corporations;

1.21 That the actual underlying motive of these corporate state government officials’/media corporations’ corporate contributors has been, besides huge profits, the financial destruction and enslavement of the people of this state;

1.22 That therefore the Washington State corporate government budget and its budget deficit are now, and have been since at least the mid-1940s, fraudulent;

1.23 And therefore all budget cuts made on the pretext of this fraudulent state budget deficit that now threaten the general welfare — including the health and wellbeing of the disabled and disenfranchised, the cutting of public library, public transportation and public education services and those budget cuts which threaten to privatize all of the Washington state park system — are therefore criminal.

Websites/links Providing Evidence of the CAFR Scam in the Washington State Corporate Government, Including the Washington State Investment Board’s CAFR With Analysis, and Similar Recent Budgetary Fraud Exposed in the California State Parks System

http://nowisthetime.us/the-cafr-scam/

The Spokane Spokesman/Seattle Times Columnist: Washington State Parks Now on Their Own

http://spokesman.com/stories/2012/aug/04/state-parks-on-their-own

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/dannywestneat/2018850731_danny05.html

CAFR Scam Exposed: California State Parks Department Had $54 million While Asking for Park Volunteers and Cutting Park Services

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/20/local/la-me-state-parks-20120721ry

2. Deliberate Denial of Remedy, Indicating Complicity in Criminal Conspiracy

2.01 That the above-cited Washington State corporate government officials and their predecessors in office, as well as mainstream/alleged alternative media corporations operating in Washington State, have failed repeatedly to disclose publicly that the figures contained in the Washington State Annual Comprehensive Financial Report — not those in what they claim as the annual budgetary document — are the most accurate declaration of actual state corporate government funds;

2.02 That the abovecited Washington State corporate government officials and their predecessors in office have failed to provide to the public clear comprehensive summaries of the fraudulent, unnecessary budget cuts made to each and every state cabinet department and its programs to obfuscate their negative impact on the general welfare of this state; and the abovecited mainstream/alleged alternative media corporations operating in Washington State have failed to demand and report on such essential information;

2.03 That the WSIB has deliberately invested the people’s money in volatile corporate Wall Street investments knowing that it would never be returned to them, not only because their inherent risk, but because of ongoing fraudulent and insidious federal corporate confiscation of these funds, upon which the mainstream/alleged alternative media corporations operating in this state, as well as state corporate government officials, have continually refused to report to duly inform the public;

2.04 That all individual and institutional investments, after being registered by a stock broker with the Depository Transaction Clearing Center (DTCC) — an obscure subsidiary of the privately owned Federal Reserve System doing business as (dba) the sardonically named Cede Inc. — become the tacitly ceded property of Cede Inc., with the people thereby rendered mere “beneficiaries” rather than owners, of their own investments;

2.05 That thereafter the people can be denied access to the dividends of these institutional investments at any time by the Federal Reserve corporation and those who secretly control this privately owned alien entity;

Who Really Owns Your Money: The Depository Trust Clearing Corporation

www.dtcc.com

http://yourmortgageoryourlife.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/who-really-owns-your-money-part-one-the-depository-trust-clearing-corporation/

Here Is Where Some of the Washington State Corporate Government’s Institutional Investments of the People’s Money Actually Went After It Was Stolen by the Federal Reserve Through the DTCC:

Final Federal Reserve Audit Results Posted on September 4, 2012:

$16 Trillion Stolen from the American People to Enrich the International Banking Cartel

http://www.pakalertpress.com/2012/09/04/first-audit-results-in-the-federal-reserves-nearly-100-year-history-were-posted-today-they-are-startling/

Exhaustive Study Finds Globalists Hiding $32 Trillion in Secret Off-Shore Bank Accounts

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/7/31/exhaustive_study_finds_global_elite_hiding

2.06 That the above-cited Washington State corporate government officials and their predecessors in office, as well as the mainstream/alleged alternative media corporations operating in this state have repeatedly failed to enact/accurately report historically proven remedies to the state budget deficit — such as proportionate corporate taxation, state investment in small business, physical/technical infrastructure and a public state bank, while utilizing prudent trusts and investment instruments — although being fully and repeatedly informed of the benefits of these remedies;

2.07 That all of the above constitutes deliberate denial of remedy and complicity in criminal conspiracy.

3. Ongoing Systemic Constitutional Fraud Against the People of Washington State Tantamount to Treason

3.01 That the abovecited Washington State corporate government officials and their predecessors in office, as well as the mainstream/alleged alternative media corporations operating in Washington State have failed both to reveal and remediate the fact that the present Washington State Constitution of 1889 — latest amended by state investments-related Issue 4215 in 2006 — is fraudulent, automatically rendering invalid all legislation and executive orders enacted by officers of the current spurious state government corporation, specifically those dealing with its governmental financial system;

3.02 That the original state constitution enacted via due process by the people of Washington State in 1878 is indeed the actual Washington State Constitution, but was treasonously confiscated and held hostage by the banking cartel-controlled United States Corporation of the District of Columbia (DC) through the calculated failure of the US Congress to act upon it for eleven years until it was quietly replaced by the one of 1889 that had been drafted and enacted by spurious means;

3.03 That this banking cartel-controlled federal corporation had quietly been put in place during the upheaval of the cartel-engineered American Civil War/Reconstruction Period, during which the common-law US Constitution and Bill of Rights was stealthily replaced by unconstitutional statutory/commercial law and executive orders under the rubric of President Abraham Lincoln’s declaration of martial law at the beginning of the American Civil War in 1861 that has continued unrescinded to this day;

3.04 That the Washington DC-based United States Corporation then proceeded by various methods to subvert sovereign US states into becoming corporate subsidiaries of the federal US corporation;

3.05 That one of the methods used was for the de facto board of directors of the federal United States Corporation, the US Congress, to refuse to ratify any lawfully enacted state constitution under the ruse of political partisanship unless that new state constitution incorporated the treasonous agenda of the federal government corporation;

3.06 That such an example is the fraudulent Washington State Constitution of 1889, which diverged from the original of 1878, insofar as it omitted any acknowledgement of sovereign state citizenship and of alloidial personal property rights that the banking cartel-controlled US Corporation ultimately intends to eliminate in America and throughout the world;

3.07 That this has resulted in American government at all levels — including that of Washington State — being since the Civil War the public enabler/enforcer of the subversive, sinister agenda of the international banking cartel and those who secretly control it, to the extreme detriment of the people of this state and of this nation;

3.08 That concerning all of the abovecited treason and its potential remedies, the abovecited Washington State corporate government officials and the mainstream/alleged alternative media corporations operating in Washington State have failed in their duty to even minimally inform the public.

The Fraudulent Washington State Constitution and Its Relationship to the International Banking Cartel’s Clandestine Control of the US Government Since At Least 1861

Articles on the History of the Fraudulent Washington State Constitution

http://www.proliberty.com/observer/20001102.htm

http://freedomrequireswork.org/public_access/washington/wash_const.html

The International Banking Cartel’s Takeover of the US Government Using the Civil War

www.famguardian.org/Subjects/Freedom/…/Sins_022810.pdf
[This link was faulty, and the pdf, when located is corrupted; another reason to download and re post all documents gathered The archive is here: http://famguardian1.org/Subjects/Freedom/ThreatsToLiberty/_vti_cnf/  ]

http://newtomorrow.us/

Historic Quotations Concerning US/Global Corporate Government

http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/quotes/index.htm

Wherefore:

The abovecited Washington State corporate government officials and their surviving predecessors in office, as well as the top management of mainstream/alleged alternative media corporations operating in Washington State need to be summarily investigated, and then potentially arrested and prosecuted for criminal financial/constitutional fraud and treason against the people of this state;

And the people of Washington State need publicly to acknowledge and examine their own complicity in the criminal and treasonous actions/inaction of their abovecited state corporate government officials and their predecessors in office, as well as of the mainstream/alleged alternative media corporations operating in Washington State, through their own self-absorbed denial of, and disinterest in, the long-corrupted governmental and public information systems of this state and of this nation.

I hereby declare that all of the above statements are, to the best of my knowledge, true and accurate.

____________________________________ ___________________________

Rebecca Em Campbell-Plaintiff Date

Seattle, Washington State America

rebeccaphb@yahoo.com

Proofs of Filing.pdf
[This text on the original post is not a link at this time]

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We ahve done our best to test and respost and repair all the linnks in this post fromt he original; almost half of them were broken or corrupted, but the sites still existed; which leads us to assume someone has tamptered with the posting on the oringal page. This is not surprising, as we have pesonal experience of hacking and damage to our site as well. We do our best to protect the site and keep links working. Please post a comment if the links in this post stop working other than as noted on the page itself. Thank you.

It’s all just ‘bad conduct’ doncha know?* Wink Wink Nudge Nudge. No CRIME HERE!*

It is interesting to read this piece just to see how the evidence being presented is, rather than being considered at face value, presented within a framework of ‘opinions’ or ‘arguments’ of Merrill and Goldman supporters, and apparently, non-supporters of Overstock, or at least its boss.

Of course everyone is being very careful not to say anything that might be considered slander we suppose – but unbiased reporting does not look like this, we think.

It is not just a problem of language or of ‘presentation’ for a firm of any kind to ‘short’ more stocks than actually EXIST.

But instead, “Some question the link between failed trades and naked shorting”.  Really? Some of the supporters of Goldman and Merrill? Or just “some”… Not exactly clear.

These two paragraphs AFTER the email excerpts in the piece seem to call into question what the emails themselves convey. Read the emails excerpts and it is pretty clear what you are reading. Read this ‘summary’ and you are back in a fog of confusion.

Goldman and Merrill have denied throughout that they participated in any sort of naked-shorting conspiracy. Their supporters argue that the legal action brought by Overstock is a crude tactic by Patrick Byrne, the retailer’s mercurial boss, to divert attention away from its long history of underperformance. (The firm continues to struggle, despite no longer being plagued by settlement failures.) Some question the link between failed trades and naked shorting, arguing that fails are generally the result of operational problems and other factors rather than naked nefariousness.

Nevertheless, the release of the e-mail excerpts will have done the brokers no favours. They suggest that trades were being intentionally failed; that some of those involved were aware regulators would not look kindly upon some of the activity; that some of the firms’ internal policemen were unhappy with the explanations they received for the proliferation of fails; and that at least one senior executive appeared to have an unusual attitude towards compliance.

Now, let’s see if we can unravel the spin.

Overstock’s boss is Mercurial, while the senior executive at Goldman has an ‘unusual attitude’ toward compliance…

The emails in question, which are quoted in the article above these two paragraphs clearly demonstrate that members of the firms were in communication about how to deal with the inability to deliver on trades (called FAILS – the failure to deliver).

How could they be in this position?

How is it possible to be in the position where you cannot deliver on a trade; unless of course the trade was a naked short and there was nothing to back it up? What sort of operational problems or ‘other factors’ account for these fails?

We’d like some examples.  Perhaps the Jaimie Dimon model of raiding customers accounts of a client firm for cash? Just what operational problems and what factors?

The other firm implicated in all of this, (SBA and in particular the man  Scott Arenstein) taking the heat (sanction order)  is identified in the emails between Merrill and Goldman counterparts as  “our boy” and yet the story goes on to continue to point out that the firms deny collusion and conspiracy?  Well, that was fine in the opening paragraph, but after the content of the emails is laid out – and only in part, mind you, it seems rather pointless.

And of what relevance is it that ‘Overstock continues to do poorly’, other than as a way to insinuate that the Goldman/Merrill supporters who deny the conspiracy to commit naked shorting are perhaps correct that Overstock’s boss only made these allegations as a way to deflect attention from his own ‘poor performance’ rather than as a result of experiencing the consequences of such naked shorting against his firm?

Which, after the disclosure of these emails seems at best, highly unlikely.

The ‘unusual attitude of the President of the Merrill’s stock clearing businesses as expressed in the email quoted in the article?

He responds to internal concerns about the intentional failing of short sales thus: “Fuck the compliance area—procedures, schmecedures.”

Now go over to The Economist and read the entire article here. You’re beginning to see more clearly, perhaps?

Short-selling litigation An enlightening mistake

h

The Bankers vs. the People

 “So far, Fannie and Freddie have asked banks to repurchase $66 billion in mortgages made between 2006 and 2008, according to an analysis of federal filings by Inside Mortgage Finance, an industry newsletter. The balance of outstanding demands from both companies at the end of July was up 37% from a year earlier. Most of these loans have defaulted, so banks face losses when they take them back.”

Is this the most convoluted argument you’ve ever heard? The author admits up-front that “Most of these loans have defaulted” which is a tacit admission that the underwriting was either shoddy or fraudulent, right? And, yet, he seems to think that someone else should stump-up the doe for the losses. In other words, John Q. Public.

Read the full story here

What we do about it and what can be done to help people wake up  and whether there is a strong enough will within the people to wake up is another matter.

We have answers for neither, although we also believe there are those who are awake and there is another kind of awakening occuring which is expressing itself in a super charged personal responsibility which goes far beyond simply ‘voting’ or accepting the roles offered by the ‘system’.

In this other level of wakefulness, people no longer seek to adhere to or engage with the ‘system at all’; but rather, have moved on to creating their own sustainable and self responsible life outside of it.

Clearly, these are in a vast minority, but they do exist.

To the extent  the rest of the population wakes  up to and acknowledges their role in perpetuating the destruction and actively withdraws their financial, social and political power from it, there is hope.

DECLINE, DECAY, DENIAL, DELUSION & DESPAIR

The majority of Americans seem OK with just waddling through life, accepting the lies and misinformation blasted from the boob tube and their various iGadgets by their owners, gorging themselves to death on Twinkies and Cheetos, paying 15% interest on their $10,000 rolling credit card balance, and growing ever more dependent on the welfare/warfare state to provide and protect them from accepting personal responsibility for their lives. A minority of critical thinking people have chosen to question everything they see and hear being spewed at us by the propagandist mainstream media, the corporate fascist government, and the powerful banking cabal that has an iron grip upon our throats as they choke the life out of the global economy in their never ending desire for more riches and more power.

The decline of the Great American Empire cannot be attributed to one factor or one bogeyman. There are a multitude of factors, villains, and choices made by the American people that have led to our moral, civil, social, and economic decline. The kabuki theater that passes for our electoral process is little more than a diversion from our imminent fate. Neither candidate for President has any intention of changing the course of the U.S. Titanic. Our rendezvous with destiny has been charted, and there aren’t nearly enough lifeboats. Those who built the ship and recklessly navigated it into a sea of icebergs will be the 1^st into the few lifeboats. The leaders we’ve chosen, the choices we’ve made, and our unwillingness to deal with facts and reality have set in motion a disaster that cannot be averted. It’s a shame the majority of Americans have the math aptitude of a 6^th grader, because the unsustainability of our empire can be calculated quite easily. Math is hard for Americans, but denial and delusion are easy.

Oddly, a couple of late September days in Wildwood NJ were able to crystalize many of the aspects of our cultural and economic decline in my mind. I should have just enjoyed the 72 degree temperatures, a few beers, and the freedom to read a book on my deck. I wish I was just oblivious to my surroundings, but my weekend in Wildwood NJ was an eye opener. Everywhere I turned I saw something that made me laugh, shake my head in disgust, or wonder how our government could have become so inane, incompetent and out of control. We all generalize based upon our preconceived beliefs, but sometimes what you see is what you get. The weekend started normally with a morning bike ride on the boardwalk with my wife and son to the Hereford lighthouse in North Wildwood. Along the way we passed the usual suspects on the boardwalk: the obese, the tattooed, the pierced, and the blue haired. I wish I was exaggerating, but I saw a dozen hoveround and rascal scooters carrying extremely obese Americans on par with this person:

If I wanted to be politically correct, I’d call the fat asses cruising on their “free” rascal scooters, the weight challenged disabled on their powered mobility enhancement vehicles. You know a trend has become a massive scam, when South Park dedicates an entire show to the shame of obesity and the scooter brigade. The majority of the scooter squad jamming up the boardwalk was less than 50 years old. They weren’t disabled. They were just too obese and lazy to wobble down the boardwalk to the next junk food joint. They were certainly in the right place. The Wildwood boardwalk is home to pizza topped with cheese fries, chocolate covered bacon, fried Oreos, funnel cake topped with powdered sugar, and 64 ounce sugar laced lemonade. The place would make Nanny Bloomberg’s head explode.

We’ve all seen the commercials for the Scooter store urging anyone on Medicare to rush in and get a power scooter or wheelchair “at little or no cost to you”. The entitlement “free shit” mentality permeates our culture. There is a cost and it is over $800 million per year, paid for by the 53% who pay Federal taxes. Records from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services show that the cost of motorized scooters and wheelchairs to the government health service for senior citizens rose 179% between 1999 and 2009, the last year for which full records are available. This data is fascinating as the number of Americans over the age of 65 only increased by 18% over this same time frame. The bill in 1999 was $259 million; in 2009 it was $723 million – and is surely over $1 billion today. This is another billion dollar scam being funded by your tax dollars, but there are no spending cuts possible according to our beloved Congressmen.

A recent report by Medicare’s inspector general also showed that 61% of the motorized wheelchairs provided to Medicare recipients in the first half of 2007 went to people who didn’t qualify for them. (Only people who cannot get around without one are supposed to be eligible.) The inspector general found that Medicare is billed an average of $4,018 for a motorized wheelchair that normally sells for $1,048. As a taxpayer, you will be shocked to find out that people are selling their “no cost” Rascal 600 B mobility scooters on eBay. I’m sure the keen eyed government drones working in the Health & Human Services agency are policing the resale of taxpayer paid for scooters. I find it amusing that scooters have various naming classes, just like BMW and Mercedes. The vast majority of people I see tooling around on their “mobility scooters” are just plain fat. They aren’t over 65 years old. On my Sunday bike ride I was flabbergasted and amused by the sight of a 350 pound woman on a Rascal with the pedal to the metal pulling a 275 pound man in a wheelchair attached by rope. The plague of slow metabolism is sweeping the countryside.

While I was relaxing on my deck reading and trying to blot out the nightmare visions of obese boomers in Rascal formation like German panzers invading Poland, a brand new SUV pulled into the parking lot across the street. After five minutes, the driver’s side door opened and out sidled a four foot five, two hundred and fifty pound female senior citizen in all her girth. She waddled to the back of the SUV and opened the hatch to extract her walker with wheels. She began berating the three hundred pound dude that got out of the passenger side to come and get his walker. Then she motored off towards Laura’s Fudge, while her hubby conserved his energy waiting by the SUV. Minutes later she scooted her way back hauling a sack of fudge. They then trundled off towards the boardwalk, most likely headed for Kohrs Bros for a double dipped fudge ice cream cone or some Boardwalk fries smothered in cheese.

Based upon my unscientific assessment of the people walking on the Wildwood boardwalk, I would conclude that 35% of the people are obese, 40% are overweight by 20 or 30 pounds (myself included), and 25% are in relatively good shape. After checking the government statistics, my assessment appears to be accurate. Who is to blame? The easy answer is to just blame the individual for their lack of self-restraint and inability to contain their impulses. But when you consider that 160 million out of 232 million adults in this country are either overweight or obese, along with 11 million adolescents, there must be something more sinister behind the phenomenon. There is no doubt that a major portion of the blame must be laid at the fat feet of those who could have exercised restraint over their cravings, but the words of master propagandist Edward Bernays provides another factor in the equation:

“If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it.” – Edward Bernays

Bernays reveals a truth that is self-evident to those with critical thinking skills. Sadly, few Americans exhibit any thinking skills whatsoever. Our society has bifurcated into those who control and those who are controlled. The overlord Double Plus Alphas in our society consist of the Wall Street banker cabal, the executives of our mega-corporations, Federal Reserve governors, Washington DC politicians, Federal government apparatchiks, the propaganda experts in the mainstream corporate media, and the secretive billionaire set that manipulate and maneuver behind the scenes. The first step in controlling the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons, as Aldous Huxley knew in 1931, was to indoctrinate them with propaganda in our government run schools. This mission has been accomplished. The vast majority of school children graduate from the government school system with no ability to think critically or question what has been spoon fed to them as facts. The fascist alliance of corporations and the state begin in the public schools, with product advertisements by corporations now subsidizing school budgets. The road to obesity is paved with chicken nuggets, fries and pizza dispensed by the government schools on a daily basis.

Just as in Huxley’s Brave New World, America has been built upon the principles of Henry Ford’s assembly line—mass production, homogeneity, predictability, and consumption of disposable consumer goods. In the dystopian novel, members of every class, from birth, are indoctrinated by recorded voices repeating slogans while they sleep. Huxley didn’t imagine the power of TV and other mass media outlets to do the same while we are awake. We are bombarded day and night by propaganda from mega-corporations to buy their products. Mass consumption of processed food sold by the likes of multi-billion dollar corporations Kraft, Pepsico, Coca Cola, General Mills, Nestle, and Unilever is the chief cause of the obesity epidemic in America. The few know how to manipulate the many through messaging, repetition and persistently molding the opinions of the feeble minded non-thinking masses. The billions spent by corporations on advertising to convince the masses that eating a Wendy’s Baconator, KFC extra crispy bucket, or Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, washed down with a two liter Mountain Dew or Cherry Coke, is a tribute to the invisible government running the show. Huxley and Bernays had it all figured out eighty years ago:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” – Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the masses by the invisible government Alphas has transmuted citizens into overweight, non-thinking, debt dependent, egocentric consumers. This was not a mistake. The powerful interests used their control over the banking system, media outlets, and political system to lure the willfully ignorant into a debt financed lifestyle through the Federal Reserve created inflation, Wall Street peddled credit cards, auto loans and “creative” mortgages. The manipulators convinced the manipulated that borrowing today to buy houses, cars, bling, tech gadgets, clothing, and fast food was preferable to what previous generations of Americans had done – save to buy things they wanted or needed. This behavior seems to be completely irrational as a people that once saved 12% of their income and carried a moderate amount of debt chose to reduce their savings to 0% and not worry about tomorrow.

It is easier to understand when you realize who benefitted from this purposeful shift in societal norms. The low debt, high savings, production era from 1950 through 1980 benefitted the working middle class, allowing millions to improve their standard of living. The rising debt, low savings, consumption era, from 1980 through today, benefits the 1% Alphas while impoverishing the middle class and sentencing the lower class to a lifetime of dependent servitude to the state. Who benefitted from debt fueled conspicuous consumption and continues to benefit today? The peddlers of consumer debt on Wall Street and the mega-corporations that convinced Americans they couldn’t live without that 5,500 square foot McMansion, BMW X5, stainless steel appliances, 84 inch 3D HDTV, iPhone 5, diamond encrusted Coach handbag, and thousands of other Chinese made trinkets that pile up in underwater homes across the land, benefitted tremendously. The proliferation of debt resulted in obscene profits for the financial sector, record profits for the mega-corporations that shipped production to Asia in order to take advantage of the slave labor, and three decades of wage stagnation and increasing debt for the average working middle class American.

The financialization of America was a conscious decision by the oligarchs. They controlled the issuance of credit. They controlled the currency and level of inflation inflicted upon the masses. They controlled the corporations selling consumer goods on credit. They controlled the Congress, courts, and government agencies with their deep pocket lobbying and buying of influence. Lastly, they controlled the media messages and molded the opinions and tastes of the masses through their Bernaysian propaganda techniques perfected over the decades. In one of the boldest and most blatant acts of audacity in world history, the Wall Street/K Street oligarchs wrecked the world economy in their insatiable thirst for profits, shifted their worthless debt onto the backs of taxpayers and unborn generations, threw senior citizens and savers under the bus by stealing $400 billion per year of interest from them, and enriched themselves with bubble level profits and bonus payouts. Meanwhile, median household income continues to fall, real GDP is stagnant, true unemployment exceeds 22%, and 47 million people are living on food stamps.

The propaganda being flogged by the oligarchs since 2009 is the supposed deleveraging by the American consumer and trying to convince the ignorant masses to resume borrowing and spending. It’s working. Consumer credit outstanding is at an all-time high of $2.73 trillion as the Federal government has dished out billions in student loans to 50,000 University of Phoenix MBA aspirants sitting in their basements quivering with anticipation of on-line graduation and future six figure job with Goldman Sachs. The Feds have also added the impetus to the “strong” auto sales through their 85% TARP ownership of Ally Financial by doling out 7 year 0% auto loans to subprime borrowers in urban enclaves around the country. The oligarchs aren’t worried about these loans being paid back, because they are reaping the profits today. The future losses will just be foisted onto the taxpayer, as always. Total credit market debt of $55 trillion now exceeds 350% of GDP. The National Debt of $16.2 trillion will exceed $20 trillion in 2015 no matter who wins the Presidency in November. The oligarchs adapt and control whoever occupies the White House. It is essential for our owners to keep debt growing at an exponential rate or the Ponzi scheme collapses.

Narrow minded ideologues want a simple answer to a complex interaction of generational, cultural, economic, political, and criminal factors that have conspired to put the country into a predicament that, at this point, will inevitably lead to economic collapse. The truth is the American people have learned to love their servitude. They have willfully chosen ignorance over truth. They’ve chosen to believe what their keepers have instructed them. They’ve chosen to trust the storylines generated by the corporate media rather than think critically and question everything. They’ve chosen obesity and sickness over health. They’ve chosen debt financed faux wealth over savings based real wealth. They’ve chosen safety and security over liberty. They’ve chosen dependency over self-reliance. These choices were aided, abetted and promoted by the Alphas through their ability to manipulate and control the unthinking masses. Huxley understood the power of propaganda and brainwashing decades before it was perfected by our owners.

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.” – Aldous Huxley

The saddest part of this episode of the Decline & Fall of the American Empire reality show is the continued delusion of the majority of the populace, as their desire for material goods and fair share of the entitlement pie outweighs their sense of obligation to their children and grandchildren. Their chosen ignorance is fulfilled through their attachment to their personal digital ignorance gadgets and supported by what passes for government education. The truth is obscured and hidden under waves of triviality, reality TV, and data manipulation by our government masters. The dystopian nightmare that engulfs our country has thus far resembled Huxley’s vision of a shallow populace easily distracted by consumerism, pleasure seeking, cultural trivialities, and a never ending ability to be distracted by meaningless minutia. Orwell’s darker vision of surveillance, captivity, information control, authoritarianism and pain will become the norm once the existing social order falls.

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.” – Neil Postman – Amusing Ourselves to Death

I despair for my country that has chosen to eat, amuse and borrow itself to death. But my despair is deepest for my children and their future. The greed, corruption, myopia, selfishness, and disregard for the well-being of future generations by current and past generations has left a barren and bleak landscape for my children. The Huxley vision of America consuming and amusing itself to death is coming to a painful conclusion, as the limits of a fiat currency and debt based lifestyle become evident. Those in power are preparing the masses for a more Orwellian vision of America when they are forced to pull the plug on the existing paradigm. The Patriot Act, NDAA, military exercises in our cities, militarization of local police forces, warrantless surveillance of our communications, searches and seizures in our airports and train stations, purchase of millions of rounds of ammo by government agencies, implementation of drone technology, camera surveillance, attempts to control the internet, manipulation of economic data, and executive orders allowing the President to take over all commerce while imprisoning citizens indefinitely without charges, are the next step in our descent into a dictatorship of tears.

The question is whether we will stand idly by, fiddling with our gadgets, tweeting about Honey Boo Boo, or will we regain our sense of duty to the future generations of this country. The manipulators are powerful, rich, connected and FEW. Those being manipulated, controlled, and abused are MANY. There will be a revolution in this country whether you like it or not. The existing social order will dissolve during the next fifteen years. What replaces it is up to us. George Carlin described what our owners want.

“Politicians are put there to give you that idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations, and they’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State Houses, and the City Halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear.

They’ve got you by the balls.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want—they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest.”

What do “We the People” want?

His succinct and clear explanations of the machinations of a rogue mob of bankers gone amok is, incredibly, not only deadly in its accuracy, but also often hilariously funny.  Indeed, we contend that if the world would all read Matt Taibbi, there might be hope for significant change as people would finally get wised-up enough to know what has gone on and who needs to be gone after.

In this latest piece, Matt gives us a clear blow by blow of the New York trial of three bit players in a case which, in its evidence, clearly illuminates and defines what has really been going on in the ‘halls of finance’ for years now: outright theft, corruption, lawlessness and thuggery.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-scam-wall-street-learned-from-the-mafia-20120620#ixzz1yYrcfz4B

Someday, it will go down in history as the first trial of the modern American mafia. Of course, you won’t hear the recent financial corruption case, United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, called anything like that. If you heard about it at all, you’re probably either in the municipal bond business or married to an antitrust lawyer. Even then, all you probably heard was that a threesome of bit players on Wall Street got convicted of obscure antitrust violations in one of the most inscrutable, jargon-packed legal snoozefests since the government’s massive case against Microsoft in the Nineties – not exactly the thrilling courtroom drama offered by the famed trials of old-school mobsters like Al Capone or Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo.

But this just-completed trial in downtown New York against three faceless financial executives really was historic. Over 10 years in the making, the case allowed federal prosecutors to make public for the first time the astonishing inner workings of the reigning American crime syndicate, which now operates not out of Little Italy and Las Vegas, but out of Wall Street.

The defendants in the case – Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg and Peter Grimm – worked for GE Capital, the finance arm of General Electric. Along with virtually every major bank and finance company on Wall Street – not just GE, but J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia and more – these three Wall Street wiseguys spent the past decade taking part in a breathtakingly broad scheme to skim billions of dollars from the coffers of cities and small towns across America. The banks achieved this gigantic rip-off by secretly colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion. By conspiring to lower the interest rates that towns earn on these investments, the banks systematically stole from schools, hospitals, libraries and nursing homes – from “virtually every state, district and territory in the United States,” according to one settlement. And they did it so cleverly that the victims never even knew they were being ­cheated. No thumbs were broken, and nobody ended up in a landfill in New Jersey, but money disappeared, lots and lots of it, and its manner of disappearance had a familiar name: organized crime.

In fact, stripped of all the camouflaging financial verbiage, the crimes the defendants and their co-conspirators committed were virtually indistinguishable from the kind of thuggery practiced for decades by the Mafia, which has long made manipulation of public bids for things like garbage collection and construction contracts a cornerstone of its business. What’s more, in the manner of old mob trials, Wall Street’s secret machinations were revealed during the Carollo trial through crackling wiretap recordings and the lurid testimony of cooperating witnesses, who came into court with bowed heads, pointing fingers at their accomplices. The new-age gangsters even invented an elaborate code to hide their crimes. Like Elizabethan highway robbers who spoke in thieves’ cant, or Italian mobsters who talked about “getting a button man to clip the capo,” on tape after tape these Wall Street crooks coughed up phrases like “pull a nickel out” or “get to the right level” or “you’re hanging out there” – all code words used to manipulate the interest rates on municipal bonds. The only thing that made this trial different from a typical mob trial was the scale of the crime.

USA v. Carollo involved classic cartel activity: not just one corrupt bank, but many, all acting in careful concert against the public interest. In the years since the economic crash of 2008, we’ve seen numerous hints that such orchestrated corruption exists. The collapses of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, for instance, both pointed to coordi­nated attacks by powerful banks and hedge funds determined to speed the demise of those firms. In the bankruptcy of Jefferson County, Alabama, we learned that Goldman Sachs accepted a $3 million bribe from J.P. Morgan Chase to permit Chase to serve as the sole provider of toxic swap deals to the rubes running metropolitan Birmingham – “an open-and-shut case of anti-competitive behavior,” as one former regulator described it.

More recently, a major international investigation has been launched into the manipulation of Libor, the interbank lending index that is used to calculate global interest rates for products worth more than $3 trillion a year. If and when that case is presented to the public at trial – there are several major civil suits in the works here in the States – we may yet find out that the world’s most powerful banks have, for years, been fixing the prices of almost every adjustable-rate vehicle on earth, from mortgages and credit cards to interest-rate swaps and even currencies.

But USA v. Carollo marks the first time we actually got incontrovertible evidence that Wall Street has moved into this cartel-type brand of criminality. It also offered a disgusting glimpse into the enabling and grossly cynical role played by politicians, who took Super Bowl tickets and bribe-stuffed envelopes to look the other way while gangsters raided the public kitty. And though the punishments that were ultimately handed down in the trial – minor convictions of three bit players – felt deeply unsatisfying, it was still a watershed moment in the ongoing story of America’s gradual awakening to the realities of financial corruption. In a post-crash era where Wall Street trials almost never make it into court, and even the harshest settlements end with the evidence buried by the government and the offending banks permitted to escape with no admission of wrongdoing, this case finally dragged the whole ugly truth of American finance out into the open – and it was a hell of a show.

1. THE SCAM
This was no trial scene from popular lore, no Inherit the Wind or State of California v. Orenthal James Simpson. No gallery packed with rapt spectators, no ceiling fans set whirring to beat back the tension and the heat, no defense counsel’s resting a sympathetic hand on the defendant’s shoulder as opening statements commence. No, the setting for USA v. Carollo reflected the bizarre alternate universe that exists on Wall Street. Like so many court cases involving big banks, the proceeding looked more like a roomful of expensive lawyers negotiating a major corporate merger than a public search for justice.

The trial began on April 16th in a federal court in Lower Manhattan. The courtroom, an aerielike setting 23 stories up, offered a panoramic view of the city and the East River. Though the gallery was usually full throughout the three-plus weeks of testimony, the spectators were not average citizens come to witness how they had been robbed blind by America’s biggest banks. Instead, there were row after row of suits – other lawyers eager to observe a long-awaited case, one that could influence the outcome in a handful of civil suits pending across the country. In fact, the defendants themselves, whom the trial would reveal as easily replaceable cogs in a much larger machine of corruption, were barely visible from the gallery, obscured by the great chattering congress of prosecution and defense attorneys.

Only the presence of the mostly nonwhite and elderly jury, which resembled the front pew of a Harlem church, served as a reminder that the case had any connection to the real world. Even reporters from most of the major news outlets didn’t bother to attend. The judge in the trial, the right honorable and amusingly cantankerous Harold Baer, acknowledged that the case was not likely to set the public’s pulse racing. “It is unlikely, I think, that this will generate a lot of media publicity,” Baer sighed to the jury in his preliminary instructions.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-scam-wall-street-learned-from-the-mafia-20120620#ixzz1yYo32GpV

America and the world have been sold a bullshit bill of goods by the mainstream media, the banks and government that we have all be victims of a ‘crisis’ when the truth is, we have all been victims of a massive, unrelenting and persistent fraud which contines to this day. Thanks Matt, for setting the record straight when no one else would dare to do it.

The Global Debt Crisis: How We Got in It and How to Get Out

Countries everywhere are facing debt crises today, precipitated by the credit collapse of 2008.  Public services are being slashed and public assets are being sold off, in a futile attempt to balance budgets that can’t be balanced because the money supply itself has shrunk.  Governments usually get the blame for excessive spending, but governments did not initiate the crisis.  The collapse was in the banking system, and in the credit that it is responsible for creating and sustaining.

Contrary to popular belief, most of our money today is not created by governments.  It is created by private banks as loans.  The private system of money creation has grown so powerful over the centuries that it has come to dominate governments globally.  But the system contains the seeds of its own destruction.  The source of its power is also a fatal design flaw.

The flaw is that banks advance “bank credit” that must be paid back with interest, while having no obligation to spend the interest they collect so that borrowers can earn it again and again, as they must in order to retire the debt.  Instead, this money is invested in various casinos beyond the borrowers’ reach. This leads to a continual systemic need for more new bank credit money, more debt with more interest attached, to prevent widespread defaults and deflationary collapse.

Today this problem is particularly evident in the EU.  The Euro is a fixed currency system that does not allow for expansion to meet the demands of the private lending casino.  The result is that EU member nations collectively are being crippled by debt.

There are more sustainable ways to run a banking and credit system, as will be shown.

How Banks Create Money

The process by which banks create money was explained by the Chicago Federal Reserve in a booklet called “Modern Money Mechanics.”  It states:

“The actual process of money creation takes place primarily in banks.” [p3]

“[Banks] do not really pay out loans from the money they receive as deposits.  If they did this, no additional money would be created.  What they do when they make loans is to accept promissory notes in exchange for credits to the borrowers’ transaction accounts.  Loans (assets) and deposits (liabilities) both rise [by the same amount].” [p6]

“With a uniform 10 percent reserve requirement, a $1 increase in reserves would support $10 of additional transaction accounts.”  [p49]

 A $100 deposit supports a $90 loan, which becomes a $90 deposit in another bank, which supports an $81 loan, etc.

That’s the conventional model, but banks actually create the loans FIRST.  (Picture how a credit card works.)  Banks need deposits to clear their outgoing checks, but they find the deposits later.  Banks create money as loans, which become checks, which go into other banks.  Then, if needed to clear the checks, they borrow the money back from the other banks.  In effect, they borrow back the money they just created, pocketing the spread between the interest rates as their profit.  The rate at which banks can borrow from each other in the U.S. today (the Fed funds rate) is an extremely low 0.2%.

How the System Evolved

The current system of privately-issued money is traced in “Modern Money Mechanics” to the 17^th century goldsmiths.  People who left gold with the goldsmiths for safekeeping would be issued paper receipts for it called “banknotes.”  Other people who wanted to borrow money were also happy to accept paper banknotes in place of gold, since the notes were safer and more convenient to carry around.  The sleight of hand came in when the goldsmiths discovered that people would come for their gold only about 10% of the time.  That meant that up to ten times as many notes could be printed and lent as the goldsmiths had gold.  Ninety percent of the notes were basically counterfeited.

This system was called “fractional reserve” banking and was institutionalized when the Bank of England was founded in 1694.  The bank was allowed to lend its own banknotes to the government, forming the national money supply. Only the interest on the loans had to be paid. The debt was rolled over indefinitely.

That is still true today. The U.S. federal debt is never paid off but just continues to grow, forming the basis of the U.S. money supply.

The Public Banking Alternative

There are other ways to create a banking system, ways that would eliminate its ponzi-scheme elements and make the system sustainable.  One solution is to make the loans interest-free; but for Western economies today, that transition could be difficult.

Another alternative is for banks to be publicly-owned.  If the people collectively own the bank, the interest and profits go back to the government and the people, who benefit from decreased taxes, increased public services, and cheaper public infrastructure.  Cutting out interest has been shown to reduce the cost of public projects by 30-50%.

In the United States, this system of publicly-owned banks goes back to the American colonists.  The best of the colonial models was in Benjamin Franklin’s colony of Pennsylvania, where the government operated a “land bank.”  Money was printed and lent into the community.  It recycled back to the government and could be lent and relent.  The system was mathematically sound because the interest and profits were returned to the government, which then spent the money back into the economy in place of taxes.  Private banks, by contrast, generally lend their profits back into the economy, or invest in private money-making ventures in which more is always expected back than was originally invested.

During the period that the Pennsylvania system was in place, the colonists paid no taxes except excise taxes, prices did not inflate, and there was no government debt.

How Private Banknotes Became the National U.S. Currency

The Pennsylvania system was sustainable, but some early American colonial governments just printed and spent, inflating the money supply and devaluing the currency.  The British merchants complained, prompting King George II to forbid the colonists to issue their own money.  Taxes had to be paid to England in gold.  That meant going into debt to the English bankers.  The result was a massive depression.  The colonists finally rebelled and went back to issuing their own money, precipitating the American Revolution.

In an international first, the colonists funded a war against a major power with mere paper receipts, and won.  But the British counterattacked by waging a currency war.  They massively counterfeited the colonists’ paper money, at a time when this was easy to do.  By the end of the war, the paper scrip was virtually worthless.  After it lost its value, the colonists were so disillusioned with paper money that they left the power to issue it out of the U.S. Constitution.

Meanwhile, Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Treasury Secretary, was faced with huge war debts, and he had no money to pay them.  He therefore resorted to the ruse used in England known as fractional reserve banking.  In 1791, Hamilton set up the First U.S. Bank, a largely private bank that would print banknotes “backed” by gold and lend them to the government.

The ruse worked: the paper banknotes expanded the money supply, the debts were paid, and the economy thrived.  But it was the beginning of a system of government funded by debt to private bankers, who lent banknotes only nominally backed by gold.

During the American Civil War, President Lincoln avoided a crippling war debt by returning to the system of government-issued money of the American colonists.  He issued U.S. Notes from the Treasury called “Greenbacks” rather than borrowing at usurious interest rates.  But Lincoln was assassinated, and Greenback issuance was halted.

In 1913, the privately-owned Federal Reserve was authorized to issue its own Federal Reserve Notes as the national currency. These notes were then lent to the government, eliminating the government’s own power to issue money (except for coins).  The Federal Reserve was set up to prevent bank runs, but twenty years later we had the Great Depression, the greatest bank run in history.  Robert H. Hemphill, Credit Manager of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, wrote in 1934:

“We are completely dependent on the commercial Banks.  Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit.  If the Banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve.”

For the bankers, however, it was a good system.  It put them in control.

Setting the Global Debt Trap

Prof. Carroll Quigley was an insider groomed by the international bankers.  He wrote in Tragedy and Hope in 1966:

“The powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.  

“The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements [BIS] in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.  Each central bank… sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans….”   

The debt trap was set in stages.  In 1971, the dollar went off the gold standard internationally. Currencies were unpegged from gold and allowed to “float” in currency markets, competing with other currencies, making them vulnerable to speculation and manipulation.

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The number one contributor to both Romney and Obama is Goldman Sachs. That is the bottom line.

An excellent video education for anyone who is still in the dark about how the private banking system works world-wide. The commercial private banks (called The FED, or called JPMorgan or called The Bank of New York or the New York Fed, The Bank of Canada, The Bank of London, etc.)

Watch this entire video; and learn what a 12 year old knows.