FedUpUSA

Archive for October 8th, 2011

From Cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Speakers at an Occupy Cleveland rally near the Free Stamp in Willard Park said the movement was endorsed today by supporters on the left and the right, which tells them they are on to something.

“The board of directors of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream said today they backed the movement,” Chris Sobolewski told a crowd of about 200 people Saturday afternoon. “Then we learned that FedUpUSA, one of the founding groups of the Tea Party also support the movement.

“I figure any time you can get a bunch of hippies who make ice cream and a bunch of right-wingers to agree then you’ve got something,” he said.

Signs bearing slogans like “Where’s our loophole?” “Greed will be the end of America” and the timely “Vote no on issue 2″ were everywhere at the park.

Sobolewski, 29, of Painesville Township, said the protests are just the beginning and would continue until fundamental charges are made.

“One percent of the people control 40 percent of the wealth,” he said. “If you are among the 99 percent, if you work for a company that is laying off people while making record profits, this is your movement.”

Yup.  I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Sobolewski.  We must stop attacking our fellow Americans and focus on the REAL criminals.  Everyone must realize that the politico’s worst nightmare is that we stop our infighting and realize we’ve all been robbed….and by WHOM.

Oh, and I LOVE Ben & Jerry’s.  

h/t Ads from the Forum

Source: Good.is.

I call on artists to make Nascar jerseys for all of the D.C. politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, who are – with a few exceptions – bought and paid for. For example, Obama has raised more money from Wall Street than anyone else.

You can find all of the information you need here and here.

ZeroHedge

Icelanders angry with the slow pace of the country’s economic recovery threw eggs at members of parliament and other politicians as they headed to mass in Reykjavik Saturday. The president’s wife, Dorrit Moussaieff, climbed over a barricade to mingle with the protesters.

More than 1,000 protesters were gathered outside the mass that preceded the beginning of a new parliamentary session. That’s a large protest for Iceland, a nation of just 320,000 inhabitants. The country had enjoyed a rapidly expanding economy until the credit crunch hit hard in 2008. Organizers presented the government with a 34,000 signature petition demanding more debt relief for ordinary citizens – and less lenience with the banks at the root of the crisis.

Most protesters stuck to making noise on pots and pans, but some threw eggs at the politicians. One legislator was slightly injured, and had to be helped up by his colleagues.

“People feel like they’ll never be able to repay their loans”

Halldor Sigurdsson, 46, works in a metal recycling plant in Reykjavik.

I have been filming all the protests in Iceland since the crisis started. The Icelandic press doesn’t cover them very well, so I want to get the images out to the world.

It seemed to me like several thousand protesters came out, and the vast majority of them were peaceful. A few people threw eggs, but they were quickly stopped by others. Iceland is a small country of 320,000 people; we are all related to each other pretty closely, so we try to stay civil.

The president’s wife, as you can see in the video, pushed past the police to go meet the protesters. [Her husband, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, is not the top politician country; that role is played by the prime minister.] While some people think she’s a fraud doing this for publicity, I think it was very positive to show people that she wants to talk to them, that the elite are not in an ivory tower looking down on everyone else.

Icelanders just don’t trust the government anymore. Members of parliament are helping the bankers, who have kept their high-paying jobs; no one is being sentenced to jail. People think the special investigator in charge for investigating financial crimes is a joke.

Meanwhile, we are paying for the mistakes of the banks and of politicians. Many people here are losing their houses and can’t pay off their loans, while at the same time companies as well as some members of the government have had their loans written off.

“The situation will take time and patience to fix”

In Iceland, when inflation goes up, loan repayments go up as well. So people feel like they’re never going to see the end of it. Many of those who took out loans before the crisis are now repaying them many times over. So the protesters’ main demand is to stop what they owe from growing with inflation.

There’s also the problem of taxes. The government is heavily taxing everything it can – gas, alcohol, cigarettes. [It has also increased income tax and VAT taxes.] Many people have gone abroad to flee unemployment. [Iceland’s unemployment rate is 6.7 percent compared to 2.8 percent in early 2008, before the crisis hit].

It’s not all bad, though. There is some slow progress. The government is offering tax breaks to foreign companies to bring them to Iceland. So new jobs are beginning to be created. This situation will take time and patience to fix.”

Observers France 24

NOTE: For those unfamiliar. The Icelandic people have removed their government wholesale, TWICE, only to have the new representatives continue to vote in favor of more bank bailouts and more tax money to be transferred from the people to the bankers. So, it would appear there is a lesson to be learnt for us all. It’s the debt-denominated, private-banker controlled monetary system that is the problem. It has a stranglehold on each and every politician that ever sets foot in office.

Conservative Groups Support Protests

Last month, I called on conservative groups to endorse the Occupy Wall Street protests:

It is time for some big conservative endorsements, to rally around the non-partisan issues important to all Americans.

The Tea Party should endorse the protests, but so should the Oath  Keepers, taxpayer rights groups, conservative Christians, limited  government groups, and all other conservative groups.

Yesterday, the Oath Keepers and a founding member of the Tea Party announced that they are supporting the protests:

Oath Keepers sees good reason to stand in the streets with  these awakening souls and protect their right to free speech, to  peacefully assemble, and to redress their grievances to their  government, as the Constitution prescribes for all Americans.  That is  one thing.   Another facet of our initiative is to use these public  gatherings to reach and teach many who now hunger for the truth – we can  show them how the Constitution will protect them better than an  oversized, bloated Federal behemoth hell-bent on controlling every  aspect of each citizen’s life.

To point this out to the masses, Oath Keepers is organizing a joint  effort along with Alex Jones of Infowars dot com (who himself called for  an Occupy the Fed movement); Steven Vincent of End The Fed; Danny  Panzella’s Truth Squad TV; Brandon Smith of  Alt-Mkt.com; Gary Franch of  Restore The Republic; and others as quickly as we can contact them.  Remember Bob Dwyer, the guy who started the first Tea Party to launch  the Ron Paul revolution? He’s in. The forces of Constitutional rule of  law must muster now to deflect the bile being belched forth by the  socialist/statist extremists …. Oath Keepers has the message American  youth need. If we do not go out into the street and give them the truth,  can we really say we’re still honoring our Oath?

Common Ground Between Conservatives and Liberals

As I’ve previously noted, both liberals and conservatives hate corporate socialism (where the federal government favors giant corporations at the expense of the little guy) .  The Oathkeepers announcement zeroes in on this issue in a way that both conservatives and liberals can agree on:

When a corporation becomes larger than is useful, and seeks to  concentrate financial power into the political and governmental spheres,  its likeness is no longer the King Snake, but instead is more like a  Rattlesnake.  At a point we call such corps “Monopoly Capitalists”. By  the time a grouping of such Monopoly Capitalist corps are setting U.S.  foreign policy, which the arms industry certainly does nowadays, the  problem becomes unbearably apparent.  Bechtel comes to mind, along with  Halliburton, the Carlyle Group, Monsanto, General Electric, et al.

That part of Wall Street is certainly to blame. But that is not  “Capitalism”. Instead, it is “Monopoly Capitalism”, and it is now  observably moving America into a new world order with intent to place  America under the alleged authority of a one-world government. As such,  Monopoly Capitalism is un-Constitutional and must be opposed.

Karl Denninger – one of the founders of the Tea Party – supports the protests (even if he doesn’t agree with some of the positions taken by some of the protesters) Denninger posted the following letter today:

You know what the “Occupy Wall Street” movement is?

It is all the things that were in the original Tea Party, but were steadily ignored as the TP became a Republican booster club.

The  Tea Party is a contradiction. They want a balanced budget, but they  also want the US military to intervene everywhere …. Individual  rights are important too, but don’t push it too far. After all,  republicans came up with today’s policies.

There are a few nuts in  the OWS crowd, but from what I hear “Occupy Wall Street” is about  bringing the fraudsters to justice. Its about changing the  banker/government dynamic that runs this country. It’s about free  markets. It’s about ending endless debt. It’s about stopping the wars.  It’s about the rule of law. It’s about the libertarian soul of America.

Since the TP lost the focus of addressing the root problems of America, they remain unresolved.

***

Pete Blome
Chair, Libertarian Party of Okaloosa County

Michael Moore Doesn’t Speak for the Protest

While Michael Moore says that capitalism itself is the problem, Mr. Moore is wrong.  Indeed, one of the main organizers of the protests told me that Moore’s statement is very counter-productive.

As I’ve previously noted:

When Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought about Western civilization, he answered:

I think it would be a good idea.

I feel the same way about free market capitalism.

It would be a good idea, but it is not what we have now. Instead, we have either socialism, fascism or a type of looting.

If people want to criticize capitalism and propose an alternative, that is fine . . . but only if they understand what free market capitalism is and acknowledge that America has not practiced free market capitalism for some time.

***

People pointing to the Western economies and saying that capitalism  doesn’t work is as incorrect as pointing to Stalin’s murder of millions  of innocent people and blaming it on socialism.    Without the  government’s creation of the too big to fail banks, Fed’s intervention in interest rates and the markets, government-created moral hazard emboldening casino-style speculation, corruption of government officials, creation of a system of government-sponsored rating agencies which had at its core a model of bribery, and other government-induced distortions of the free market, things wouldn’t have gotten nearly as bad.

As Justice Louis Brandeis said:

In a government of laws, the existence of the government  will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our  government is the potent, the omnipotent teacher. For good or ill, it  teaches the whole people by its example. If government becomes a  lawbreaker it breeds contempt for law: it invites every man to become a  law unto himself. It invites anarchy.

[Confirmed here.]

If there has been lawlessness and corruption among Wall Street  players, it was partially simply modeling the lawlessness and corruption  of the Executive Branch and Congress members. I’ve written elsewhere  about how the government lied by saying Saddam had weapons of mass  destruction and was behind 9/11 (when he didn’t and wasn’t), that we  don’t torture (when we did), that we don’t spy on Americans (when we  did), etc.  Just like kids model what their parents do as well as what they say, Wall Street modeled the unlawful and corrupt actions of our government employees.

Being against capitalism because of the mess we’ve gotten in would be  like Gandhi saying that he is against Western civilization because of  the way the British behaved towards India.

Corrupt Politicians Enable Wall Street Corruption

The Oathkeepers and conservative alternative media powerhouse Alex Jones also zero in on the Federal Reserve system as a core problem. As Oath Keepers notes in its announcement:

Oath Keepers is planning to “Occupy The Fed Now!”  and publicize this to remind the Occupy Wall Street people that the Fed  is the source problem, without which the Wall Street criminals would be  set back a hundred years. I will be posting our press release and a  longer list of groups and orgs who will be joining Oath Keepers in this  initiative.

We are currently drawing up our press release regarding our own  response to the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon, which will be Oath  Keepers’ official statement.   We are now planning an official Oath  Keepers project which we’ve named “Occupy The Fed Now!”.

Yes, Oath Keepers has seen the need to block the attempted takeover  of the populist movement generally referred to as Occupy Wall Street.

In an extensive phone conference on the evening of October 04, 2011,  we heard from Oath Keepers who have attended Occupy Wall Street, Occupy  Boston, Occupy Los Angeles, and Occupy Seattle. The overall consensus  from our people at these rallies is that most people attending the  rallies are very open-minded to the Oath Keepers mission/message, and  that they are hungry for answers. Indeed, our reports indicate that many  Americans right now are awakening, in droves it seems, and they are  full of questions for which we have the answer – the Constitution for  the united States of America.

While progressives might assume that the Fed has helped the economy from getting worse, or that the importance of ending the Fed is being overhyped, top economists and financial experts disagree. See this, this and this.

As I pointed out Monday, whatever people think the government should do, the D.C. politicos have actually been a large part of the problem:

Because government policy is ensuring high unemployment, it is not surprising that the American protesters are angry at the Federal Reserve and other government institutions, and not just the big Wall Street banks.

Remember, Bush and Obama’s economic policies are virtually indistinguishable.   Indeed,  Obama actually likes high unemployment.

And as I noted in 2009, the government created the giant banks:

As MIT economics professor and former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson points out today, the official White House position is that:

(1) The government created the mega-giants, and they are not the product of free market competition

(2) The White House needs to “regulate and oversee them”,   even though it is clear that the government has no real plans to   regulate or oversee the banking behemoths

(3) Giant banks are good for  the economy

Of course, the government has also made it policy to cover up fraud and protect the fraudsters, and so the free market has no chance to punish fraud or cleanse wrongdoing from the system.

Without government-created moral hazard emboldening casino-style speculation, corruption of government officials, creation of a system of government-sponsored rating agencies which had at its core a model of bribery, and other government-induced distortions of the free market, things wouldn’t have gotten nearly so bad.

Indeed, the government is so corrupt that the head of the economics department at George Mason University says that D.C. politicians are worse than prostitutes … they are “pimps”, since they are pimping out the American people to the financial giants.

And while co-option of government by the big banks is a huge problem,  it is also true that corruption in government leads to corruption in  the private sector.  See this and this.   The U.S. has truly become a banana republic, just like the worst Latin American countries.

So anyone who thinks that government would solve all of our problems  if it were only freed from obstructionists is only seeing half the  problem, and is falling for the oldest trick in the book … the ole’ divide and conquer strategy.

Washington’s Blog

the other day that “What Wall Street did was immoral, but it wasn’t illegal” in response to a question about why nobody had gone to jail.

Really Mr. President?  None of the following is illegal?

• Laundering drug money.  Wachovia admitted to doing it in court.  They got a “deferred prosecution agreement” and not only did nobody go to jail nobody other than a few bloggers like myself raised hell about it until days before that agreement expired.  Then, magically, it got news coverage.  This is a clear black-letter felony; where are the handcuffs? 
• The former chief risk officer for Citifinancial testified under oath before the FCIC that the company knowingly sold loans on to investors that did not meet their quality guidelines and published claims. In fact, he testified that by 2007 80 percent of those loans were defective. This is functionally identical to selling you a car and rolling back the odometer, peddling tainted medicine or selling melamine-laced baby formula.  There is nothing complicated about this and there is under-oath testimony establishing that it was not an accident or an “error in judgment” as it continued for more than a year after it became known and was the subject of internal memos to corporate officers.  This is not my conjecture or analysis, it is factual sworn testimony before a government body.  Where are the damned handcuffs? 
• Ponzi Schemes generally.  Those are all illegal.  They locked Charlie up for it (the originator of the name, natch) and more recently Bernie Madoff went to prison.  Ok, Mr. President, how about all the stock analysts, the market callers, and pension fund managers along with the real estate industry that have been pumping 8, 10 or 11% annualized returns for the last three decades?  These claims are all pyramid schemes and thus by the very definition of such a scheme are illegal.  An 8% “annual return” for 45 years, the average working man’s period of effort (20 to 65) produces a return of nearly 32 times the original amount invested.  The 9% growth rate of medical cost over the last year (close to the premium increases over the last decade in annualized terms) for the person of age 50 that the government claims “will not see their Medicare harmed” has the annual cost of their medical insurance (assuming no increase due to age or greater risk) go from $5,000 a year to $100,000 by the time they’re 85!  The claims of Realtors that home prices would go up 10% “for the indefinite future” turns a $150,000 house into a $4.21 million house in 35 years.  None of this was ever going to actually happen, and it still won’t.  Why did Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff go to prison when your administration, every member of Congress, those on Wall Street and otherwise in the “finance and investment” business community have not for the exact same offense?
• Jefferson County Alabama jailed several politicians and others for bribery and other crimes related to the infamous “sewer bond” nonsense.  Why have no bankers gone to prison?  It takes two people to commit bribery and similar offenses – someone who offers a bribe, and someone who accepts a bribe.  One party went to prison while the other did not.  No crimes in this case among the banksters?  Pull the other one Mr. President; the damage here remains in that the water bills of these residents remains at ridiculously elevated levels as the financial harm done to the county was not forcibly returned from those banksters.
• Perjury is a felony in most circumstances.  Banksters admitted to more than 100,000 instances of it by withdrawing perjured (“robosigned”) affidavits. Just as with the testimony under oath in the case of Citifinancial, just as in the Wachovia admission of drug money laundering, in this case the violation of the law is clear.  Perjury can only be cured at “no penalty” up until it is clear that the defective statement or filing will be discovered; once you’re “caught” you cannot avoid liability by withdrawing the filing.  Whether someone was paying their mortgage or not is immaterial as to whether filing a false affidavit is a criminal matter — it is.  Again, where are the damned handcuffs? 
• Sarbanes-Oxley criminalized false accounting statements.  There have been multiple bank failures by public companies that filed balance sheets under penalty of criminal prosecution were they to be false just weeks before they blew up — balance sheets that showed perfectly-healthy institutions.  The FDIC has documented dozens of bank failures, privately-held and publicly-traded, where those balance sheets were proved factually false, as the losses have been 20, 30, 40% or even more just a few weeks later.   It is beyond comprehension that the assets in question could have actually lost 30 or 40% of their value within that period of time.  The only rational explanation is that these financial statements were a work of fiction.  Sarbanes-Oxley makes this a criminal matter.  Again, where are the handcuffs?

I and many other bloggers and “alternative media outlets” have spent four years documenting these outrages and showing through simple mathematical analysis that the claims made by these charlatans, including yourself Mr. President, are mathematically impossible.  That’s the definition of a pyramid scheme.  They’re illegal because they cannot, mathematically, work.  It is therefore illegal to hawk them to the public because they are by definition abusive; they will ultimately result in those who believe in them losing their money.

Your claim, Mr. President, that these acts were “morally repugnant but not illegal” is a lie.  The simple fact of the matter is that your administration is intentionally refusing to enforce long-standing law and by doing so you and your administration have lent official support to an organized effort to defraud and rob the American public.