FedUpUSA

Archive for October 2nd, 2011

One note to this film:  NONE OF THESE CRIMINALS PROFILED IN THIS DOCUMENTARY HAVE GONE TO JAIL.  While a number of them were charged with various offenses, such as securities fraud, the worst thing that happened to any of them, including Angelo Mozilo, is that they received a fine, a slap on the wrist and they walked.

For those unfamiliar:  Bonus Army, circa 1932.

Hmmmm….

Watch this first folks:

Then look through these pictures.

Both are from 2008.

Now it’s 2011 and we have this:

Caution: Language contains the f-bomb.  I could have given that speech.

There are many who argued that The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

I retort that this is not by any stretch of the imagination always true.  Sometimes, the enemy of your enemy just means you have two enemies.  My reluctance to get involved in championing the “Occupy Wall Street” movement has to do with what I consider to be an essential first determination of which of these two principles is more-likely to be correct.

After all, supporting one is good.  Supporting the other is suicidal.

That there is no “cohesive set of demands” may be a good thing, if it’s real.  The problem is that I’m not sure this is the case.  Among some of the “looney tunes” demands I’ve heard include:

• A $20/hour minimum wage.
• The right to receive it irrespective of whether you work.
• Cancellation of student loan debt (Note: Not bankruptcy discharge, which I support – just flat cancellation without consequence to the borrower.)
• Tariffs to stop wage and environmental arbitrage (good) and wide-open borders (horrifyingly bad and flatly impossible given the first two demands.)
• A right to a college education (not an aspiration, a right – which means irrespective of ability.  How has this worked out for our High Schools when we forced everyone, including those who are on the lower end of the bell curve in intelligence, into “mainstream” classrooms? It’s been an unqualified statistical disaster.)

Add up all the above and you have a thinly-disguised attempt to demand Communism.

Not socialism – communism.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

That not only won’t work, it will destroy what’s left of America and give rise of a dictatorship from the smoldering ruins of the collapse.

On the other hand we have demands that make perfect sense, such as:

• Prosecute the banksters.
• Your kids (and those not yet born!) are being told they’ll have to bail out the crooks.
• The “99%” are against those robbing the nation.

So here’s the deal, as I see it.

If the so-called “Tea Party” is going to mean anything at all then it has to get in the middle of this debate and protest movement right now and amplify the voice that represents common ground.

There’s a lot of that common ground.  The messages we the people must send are:

• Stop the looting and start prosecuting.  Not protesters, banksters.  Right now.  Fraudclosure, fraudulent lending practices, fraudulent securitization, fraudulent accounting here and abroad.  It all must end right now with prosecution both for past and forwardly-committed financial scam sins.
• We will not pay for the bailouts and handouts.  Not now, not tomorrow, not ever.  Nor will our children and those not yet born.  We will withdraw consent through our cessation of taxable work product if the government refuses to meet this demand and claw back every nickel of the transfers it already made.  That response is lawful and is, in fact, exactly what happened in Egypt.  We will bring it here.
• We are the 99%.  Yes, some of us are liberal and some of us are conservative on social issues.  On this issue – the rule of law – we are united and we stand as one.  This crap stops right now; we’ll fight about the other issues later.
• There is a process for unpayable debts and it’s constitutional.  It’s called bankruptcy and it must be available to all with unpayable debts.  Period.  This means medical debt, it means student loans and it means mortgages.  All debts.  If you want a demand that will collapse the bankster BS game, that’s the one.  You shouldn’t get off if you borrowed foolishly but neither should the lender who lent you money they either knew or should have known you couldn’t repay.  No bailouts and no handouts on either side of the ledger.
• We know that pulling the deficit spending and “supports” from under the banksters and housing will cause an economic contraction worse than the 1930s.  We know the pension funds are levered up with bank debt that must be haircut severely and that stock prices will fall precipitously if financial institutions are forced to tell the truth and “easy credit” is removed.  WE NOT ONLY KNOW THIS, WE ACCEPT IT AND DEMAND THAT IT HAPPEN RIGHT NOW ANYWAY.  Why?  Because we are Americans.  We make mistakes.  We accept the possibility of bankruptcy for ourselves when we make mistakes but we demand that the jackass on the other side of the desk gets the same punishment for making a bad loan we get for taking one out.  We want to buy houses when they’re cheap just like we want to buy DVD players when they’re cheap.  We want American industry to provide jobs, not jobs for Chinese who were tending rice-paddies with the “profits” flowing to executives while Americans go jobless on the dole.  We accept that realignment and re-industrialization of America will be painful but the fact remains that wealth disparity that comes from ripping people off is bad while wealth disparity that comes from being inventive and industrious is good — the latter is how we make progress and the latter are the people who we want to have the money to hire us, not the former!
• We demand that the “cheap money” policies, which in fact are really nothing more than bailouts and handouts across the board along with protectionism for the bankster class and those who offshore jobs, end right now.  This means no more negative real interest rates anywhere on the curve and a true zero inflation target with criminal penalty teeth in the law. We’re prepared to back this up with the sort of durable protest that we see in NYC and elsewhere and we will expand it as we’re able and as is required until the above demands are met.
• We demand tax reform that results in nobody getting a free ride and nobody having loopholes they can exploit. Whatever we do for a tax system the instructions must fit on one 8-1/2 x 11 sheet of paper and be presumptively correct under law when followed.  Your “return”, if you have to file one, must fit on a postcard.  Corporate taxation must be similarly simple and presumptive.  We demand that the government bring in via taxes every dollar it wishes to spend in programs in the present tense, not borrowing from the future.  We can and will have the debate over exactly what those services are in the public square, as we should, and render our opinions in the voting booth.  We will not tolerate one more day of deficit spending.  Period.

I don’t see anything here that the “Occupy Wall Street” folks could disagree with.  Maybe I’m wrong – but if I’m right, these seven points should be what we preach – and what we stand for.

WHERE IS THE TEA PARTY WITH THESE SEVEN POINTS –  SEVEN POINTS THAT, PART OF THE EXISTING PROTEST AND AMPLIFIED, BACKED BY MILLIONS IN THE STREETS WHO PEACEFULLY PROTEST AND REFUSE TO STAND DOWN, WE CAN BRING TO THE FORE AND MAKE HAPPEN IN THE PRESENT TENSE?

In this case, one picture is indeed worth a 1,000 words.

Nobody knows what will happen tomorrow, much less 30 days from now, but things aren’t looking good for global stocks in the infamous month of October.As Mark Twain observed, there is nothing special about October; the stock market can swoon, plummet or crater in any month:    “October: This is one of the particularly dangerous months to invest  in stocks. Other dangerous months are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.”

Maybe stocks will make the jump to hyperspace this month, but if the laws of financial gravity still apply, the market looks like the oh-so-heavy vehicle in this photo:

This may well be a case where a single photo says much more than a mere 1,000 words.

Charles Hugh Smith – Of Two Minds

I have long mused, in fact since the beginning of this blog, about one primary question:

What happens when the people discern that the government is nothing more than a band of felons instead of the cops?

Many considered this a rhetorical question.  Those on the left sneered, those on the right looked at the argument and scoffed: Oh no, look, we busted Marco over there for drug running last week.

Ah, you did, but Wachovia you did not “bust” in a criminal sense, even though they admitted in court that they ran drug money for criminal cartels.

There was no prosecution.  Instead there was a “deferred agreement”, and the screaming in the media started only once it expired and criminal charges could no longer be brought.

The Ticker, on the other hand, covered it long before that time.  Few others did, and there was no mainstream coverage and demand for prosecution at all.

The danger, as I have repeatedly pointed out, in the government’s willful, intentional and repeated refusal to put an end to these abuses is that there is a point at which the people have had enough and will simply not sit for it any more, nor will they believe they can vote for a change and actually receive that change. 

How many people voted for “change” in 2008 yet did not receive it?

Once that point is reached civil order can be lost, perhaps irretrievably so.

Government, for its part, always seems to believe that this day will never come, no matter the severity of the abuses they tolerate by the rich and powerful, the favors they grant or the screwing they either mete out themselves or allow others to perform in exchange for some renumeration in campaign contributions.  The King of England didn’t think the people would snap.  Neville Chamberlain was quite sure that we could have “peace in our time” through appeasement of bad acts by others, in his case Adolph Hitler.  In the more-recent past there was Hosni Mubarak, among others.

Likewise, both President Bush and President Obama have taken this same approach, and have even said in public that we must “move on” and not look to what happened, but to what we can do in the future.

Will this willful refusal to hold people to account for their ponzi schemes in the interest of “Wall Street” and continued pretension that we’ll “muddle through” be proved correct in the fullness of time?

Or will, as this video states, the simple fact that once there is nobody left to screw an ugly reality will face those who have been doing the screwing: The man who you have screwed out of everything — the man with nothing left — has nothing left to lose.

I do not look forward to the day being proclaimed and looked toward in this presentation.  There is no reason for our political and justice system to have allowed the financial rape of our nation and her people, not to mention that of the rest of the developed and developing world.

Please remember, ladies and gentlemen, that the Bush Administration sued states that attempted to put a stop to predatory lending — a major part of the housing bubble.  Did President Obama reverse these decisions and go after the banksters?  No — instead he has tried to “settle” the fraudclosure robosigning and predatory lending of the 2000s rather than prosecuting wrongdoers, despite sworn, under-oath testimony regarding intentional sales of loans that did not conform to claimed standards and over 100,000 withdrawn affidavits that appear to clearly document pervasive and outrageous acts of perjury.

Should you or I attempt to run a pyramid scheme as the banksters and government have, or screw little old ladies out of their retirement income we would be sitting in prison serving a just sentence.  Charles Ponzi was prosecuted and jailed, as was Bernie Madoff.  But those who ran the below claim of “prosperity” for 30 years — including but certainly not limited to Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and the political elites in both Democrat and Republicans parties, which is just as mathematically impossible as what Charles did — walk free.

If you’re of the religious sort it would seem that prayer would be appropriate at this time.

The Market-Ticker

Discussion (registration required to post)