The Economic Elite vs. the People of the United States of America: Part IV
by David DeGraw / February 22nd, 2010
Although most of the Economic Elite live and operate inside the
US, they are not concerned for our future. To them, the entire world is
theirs and they work intimately with other elites throughout the world
against the interests of the US public. Ever since the days of Henry
Ford, the Economic Elite have needed a thriving US middle class to
increase growth and profits, but now, in the global economy, they view
the US middle class as obsolete. They increasingly look globally for
profits and they would rather pay cheap labor in countries like China
and India. On top of the millions of jobs they have already shipped
overseas to increase profits at our expense, they are planning to ship
an additional
25% of current US jobs overseas as well.
They now see us as the biggest obstacle to their continued
consolidation of wealth and resources. This is why they have stepped up
their attack on us.
If you want further proof of this, all one needs to do is study the
Wall Street bailout. The entire bailout is strategically designed to
eliminate the US middle class. Every time you hear the word “bailout,”
you should think “coup d’état.” Here is the definition of
coup d’état:
A coup d’état or coup for short, is the sudden
unconstitutional deposition of a government, usually by a small group of
the existing state establishment… to replace the deposed government
with another…. A coup d’état succeeds when the usurpers establish their
legitimacy if the attacked government fail to thwart them, by allowing
their (strategic, tactical, political) consolidation and then receiving
the deposed government’s surrender; or the acquiescence of the populace
and the non-participant military forces.
Typically, a coup d’état uses the extant government’s power to assume
political control of the country. In Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook,
military historian Edward Luttwak says: ‘A coup consists of the
infiltration of a small, but critical, segment of the state apparatus,
which is then used to displace the government from its control of the
remainder’, thus, armed force (either military or paramilitary) is not a
defining feature of a coup d’état.
The bailout was
a financial coup,
an intelligence operation to seize control of the US economy and tax
system. It is similar to what the Economic Elite have done through the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) in many other countries throughout the
world. It is clearly a case of economic imperialism. When financial
coups are carried out in other countries, they call it a
Structural Adjustment Program
(SAP). The end result is the theft of working class wealth, the
privatization of public functions and resources, rising unemployment,
the elimination of the middle class and increasing taxation and debt
that turns the overwhelming majority of the nation into a peasant class.
This is exactly the
track we are on now.
Just look at how they have already done this in
many other countries, and then
look at the “bailout.”
The success of the coup is clear by the control of the US Treasury by
Goldman Sachs criminal masterminds Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner, and
the continued control of the Federal Reserve by Ben Bernanke.
In 1970, Hank Paulson began his career in the Pentagon working for
Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. In 1972, he then moved to the White
House, where he worked for the Nixon Administration. He was “the
assistant to John Ehrlichman
during the events of the Watergate scandal for which Ehrlichman was
convicted, and sentenced to prison.” After Paulson’s disgraced exit
from the political world, he joined Goldman Sachs in 1974, eventually
becoming CEO in 1999 when he led an effort to force out Goldman’s
previous CEO John Corzine. While leading Goldman, Paulson developed very
intimate relations with
members of the Chinese elite, visiting the country over 70 times.
In 2004, during his time as Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs,
Paulson personally led a successful effort to get the SEC to remove the “
net capital rule,”
which was a “requirement that their brokerages hold reserve capital
that limited their leverage and risk exposure.” This was the biggest
reason why the economic crisis happened. With the “net capital rule”
out of the way, Goldman Sachs and other major Wall Street firms with
over $5 billion in assets were free to engage in high risk/high reward
behavior. This led to the housing bubble with the creation of
high risk speculation, essentially rigged Ponzi-style scams like “
mortgage-backed securities, credit derivatives, and credit default swaps…
and other exotic structured finance instruments that only
highly-trained mathematicians understand, based on models that are
beyond the comprehension of most traders.”
After making over $700 million on these
shady high risk activities
that created a ticking time bomb in our economy, Paulson left Goldman
Sachs to run the US Treasury. Shortly after that, the speculative
trading scams blew up, and there was the man who played the most pivotal
role in causing the economy to crash now running the US Treasury and in
charge of “maneuvering” trillions of dollars in national wealth to
“fix” the economy. It was time for Paulson, along with his close
confidant Tim Geithner, then heading the NY Federal Reserve Bank, and
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, to engineer the
greatest theft of wealth in history with the “bailout.”
Paulson quickly brought in several former Goldman Sachs partners to
help him engineer the coup. A pivotal Paulson asset was former Goldman
executive Dan Jester, who Paulson quickly hired as a “contractor.” As
Robert E. Prasch
recently reported,
“Jester was never appointed by Congress or otherwise vetted before
taking up his role as the Treasury’s de facto central player in the
crucial decisions that marked that fall’s bailout of Wall Street.”
Paulson’s most publicized move was the $700 billion Troubled Assets
Relief Program (TARP). This was a blatant
no-strings attached giveaway
of taxpayer money, handed directly to Wall Street’s biggest players.
To oversee the TARP operation, Paulson brought in Goldman Sachs Vice
President
Neel Kashkari.
Another egregious unilateral move by Paulson was
installing Edward Liddy, one of his former board members at Goldman Sachs, as
CEO of AIG. Liddy was the Chairman of Goldman’s Audit Committee, making him the most knowledgeable person regarding Goldman’s
collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Paulson knew these CDOs would go bust because they were based on
fraudulent activities, essentially a massive Ponzi scheme. So Paulson and Goldman Sachs covered their risk by
insuring them through AIG,
making it pivotal to save AIG and have one of his most trusted allies
run the company. With Liddy in place, billions of taxpayer dollars were
secretly funneled by the
Geithner-led NY Federal Reserve through AIG
to Goldman Sachs and several other Wall Street elite counterparties.
Without the AIG bailout, Goldman Sachs would have collapsed as a result
of their own Ponzi scheme.
The assassinations of Goldman rivals
Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers,
and the forced Bank of America acquisition of Merrill Lynch were all
equally scandalous actions as well. The hidden hand of the Bernanke-led
Federal Reserve’s secret “black magic” tactics — which
created and distributed trillions of dollars — turned Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs into
bank holding companies overnight, which gave them access to trillions of dollars to further
manipulate the market and create record setting profits.
Every step of the way, the
economic terrorist organization led by Paulson, Geithner and Bernanke held our economy
hostage by declaring that all their demands must be met or the entire
economy would be destroyed,
as a result of the very actions the players being rewarded had taken.
(I don’t use the words “economic terrorists” as hyperbole. The threat
posed by them and the amount of death, destruction and misery they have
already caused the United States is much greater than that caused by Bin
Laden and Al-Qaeda – it’s not even close.)
Through the crisis, the fundamental structure of the stock market has been
proven to be a scam. The
Ponzi scheme activities, outright
market manipulation and massive
worldwide fraud perpetrated by Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, AIG, the three
major ratings agencies and several other Wall Street elite firms are blatant. Just in the
housing and
oil futures markets alone, the
criminal activity and economic theft is in the
multi-trillions.
By looking the other way, the
SEC, Congress and Presidents Bush and Obama
are complicit. An analysis of actions taken, or most often not taken,
by the leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties prove that
they are now accomplices. They have not only let it happen; they
continue to look the other way and have been stonewalling laws,
investigations and prosecutions in what is
clearly criminal activity.
If we had a nation of law, none of these things would have happened.
This proves to anyone who cares to look that we now live in a Banana
Republic. Our democracy has clearly become a farce.
The overwhelming majority of our politicians are now on the
Economic Elite payroll.
This financial coup started under Hank Paulson in the Bush
Administration and has been carried through, without even the slightest
hitch, under Geithner in the Obama Administration, and all along Ben
Bernanke has been leading the Federal Reserve. Bernanke’s
reconfirmation shows you who the co-conspirators are – just look at the
members of Congress who voted for it.
All three branches of our government are now complicit in what is literally the
greatest theft of wealth in history,
along with a mainstream “news” media that keeps going about their
“reporting,” as if this wasn’t a crime, business as usual. Nothing to
see here…
Obama’s Role
As hard as it is for many Americans to admit, after a year in office
it is now obvious, to those who study policy decisions, that Obama’s
rhetoric is very far from the reality of his actions. Outside of the
tough talk Obama gives concerning “Wall Street Bankers,” all evidence
clearly demonstrates that
he is their puppet. The list of decisions that he has made to support the Economic Elite at our expense is already extensive.
As mentioned before, the fact that the bailout started under Bush and
went straight through without a hitch under Obama is proof enough. On
top of this, Obama’s campaign was
heavily financed by Goldman Sachs, and prior to the election Obama
often spoke with Paulson. An analysis of phone records shows that Obama and Paulson engaged in 26 direct calls
prior to the election. “Paulson placed more than
twice as many individual outgoing calls to [candidate] Obama (14) as to President Bush (6).”
As soon as Obama was elected, he got rid of all the economic advisors
he had during his campaign and replaced them with Wall Street insiders
who were committed to “
turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway.” He took the
main players that caused the economic crisis to begin with, and put them
in charge of economic policy.
Right from the start he appointed Tim Geithner, Paulson’s right-hand
man, to run the US Treasury. Mark Patterson, a former Goldman Sachs
lobbyist, then became
Geithner’s Chief of Staff with the direct approval of Obama. Geithner has surrounded himself with many aides that formerly worked for Goldman Sachs, “
none of whom faced Senate confirmation.”
Obama also allowed Adam Storch, a Goldman Sachs VP, to become “the
first chief operating officer of the Securities and Exchange
Commission’s
enforcement division.” Obama even “
nominated Goldman Sachs executive
Gary Gensler
to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates
futures markets.” Gensler was “a high-level Treasury official in a
2000,” when he helped create a “law that exempted the
$58 trillion credit default swap market from oversight.” Another major player in the economic collapse was
Larry Summers, who Obama quickly appointed as White House National Economic Council Director.
All of this is, in essence, the final stage of a
coup d’état, with Obama now serving as their puppet.
Obama
clearly has not held the thieves accountable. He has
emboldened them in ways that led to record setting profits and bonuses –
bonuses that are 100% a direct result of our tax money. He let them
take the money, keep the money, and now he lets them continue to make
even more money.
Even now, with all his new anti-Wall Street talk, his proposals are
extremely misguided and weak.
Obama always
deceptively frames the bailout
discussion in relation to the $700 billion TARP program. He, along
with the mainstream media, always seems to gloss over the fact that the
bailout is much more than just the TARP program. TARP is a mere
2% of this multifaceted scam.
His
proposal of a tax on Wall Street firms to get some of
our tax money back is estimated to bring in $90 billion over the next
ten years. That works out to $9 billion a year, compare that to the
$150 billion in bonuses handed out by these same firms… just in the past year! The top Wall Street firms would
no longer even exist
if we didn’t bail them out. Their profits are a direct result of our
tax money. If Obama is serious about getting our money back,
100% of the record-breaking bonus money
that these thieves gave themselves should be going back into the tax
system that it came from to pay down our national debt, lower our tax
rates and create jobs.
The $150 billion in bonuses handed out this year cost you $500 of
your hard-earned money. For a family of four, that’s $2000 that was taken from you and
your family just this year and given directly to Wall Street bonuses. Think about that… Your personal money was taken from you and
your family, and given directly to Goldman Sachs CEO
Llyod Blankfein. In fact, your direct gift to Wall Street is much more than that; the $2000
your family lost was just for this year’s bonuses, much more of
your money was
given away in the bailout.
The real size of the bailout is estimated to be $14 trillion, which
works out to be $46,662 for every man, woman and child in America.
On top of being bailed out with our tax money, Goldman Sachs, which just had its
most profitable quarter in its 140-year history, only paid
1% in taxes in 2008!
And now that Obama has given trillions of our dollars to Wall Street, he is all of a sudden so
concerned about our national deficit. That is disgraceful! When it came to the Economic Elite he could
give away trillions, but when it comes to the social infrastructure of the American public and
creating job programs, we all of a sudden have to be tight with our tax money and make “
painful choices.”
When looking at Obama’s latest $100 billion jobs program, again,
compare that to the $150 billion in bonuses. If you want to know if
Obama is serious about creating jobs, just look at where he gave his big
“
Jobs Speech” – at the Business Roundtable affiliated Brookings Institution. Thus again, confirming where his true loyalties lie.
Obama’s sudden change of heart after the Massachusetts Senate election defeat is still
more empty rhetoric. His new found
support for Paul Volcker,
and his proposals to bring back Glass-Steagall type laws to prevent
another economic catastrophe sound great on the surface, but then you
find out that Wall Street firms have already figured out ways
around these proposed laws. While it would be great to have Volcker creating the rules over the
Goldman Sachs-led team at the Treasury now, he is himself a former Federal Reserve Chairman who
represents JP Morgan Chase interests.
Jamie Dimon, current JP Morgan Chase CEO and Business Roundtable
member, is considered by Obama to be a possible replacement for Geithner
at the Treasury. Replacing Goldman Sachs interests with JP Morgan
interests is hardly change for the 99% of Americans who have seen their
interests ignored thus far. JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are two heads
of the same monster.
An analysis of the “Volcker Rules” shows you the essence of what
Obama is all about. The “Volcker Rules” are just more propaganda.
First off, the rules do not go far enough. Simon Johnson
testified before the Senate Banking Committee
and summed them up by saying: “while the principles behind these
proposed rules are exactly on target… the specific rule changes would
need to be much tougher if they are to have any effect.” Johnson
earlier exposed the “Volcker Rules” to merely be a “
marketing slogan.”
Jeff Madrick, writing for the
Roosevelt Institute,
rightly questioned if Obama’s economists even did their homework when
putting together the rule. “What is disturbing is how poorly the Volcker
rule has been thought through. When first announced, it sounded like a
worthy and needed step in the right direction, and a suggestion the
Obama team was waking up to reality. But I also expected more
sophisticated details to come. So far, there are none… it looks like
they didn’t give it much thought before announcing the plan. This is a
critical error in judgment.” Even if the flawed laws make it to the
Senate floor, the Banking Committee has come out
strongly against them
as being too little, too late. To sum this all up, this is another
case of Obama trying to make it look like he’s doing something, when in
reality, he isn’t doing anything.
This is similar to Obama’s $75 billion taxpayer funded foreclosure-prevention program that has been a
spectacular failure in stemming the foreclosure crisis. The Obama Administration
knew the program wasn’t working from the start, but they just sat back and let it continue to fail, wasting billions of taxpayer dollars in the process.
Even Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the TARP program, said the following in his January 30th
report to Congress:
“It is hard to see how any of the fundamental problems in the
[financial] system have been addressed to date…. Even if TARP saved our
financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent
meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain
road, but this time in a faster car.” Now that the “Too Big to Fail”
Wall Street elite know that the government will come in to bail them
out, they are engaging in even riskier behavior than before.
Theodore Roosevelt once declared in a situation much like our current
crisis, “Corporation cunning has developed faster than the law of
nation or state. Corporations have found ways to steal long before we
have found that they were susceptible to punishment for theft. But
sooner or later, unless there is a season of readjustment, there will
come a riotous, wicked, murderous day of atonement…. These fools on Wall
Street think that they can go on forever! They can’t!”
It is hard to face the fact that we have been so taken advantage of
and abandoned by the very people we supported and had put our hope and
faith into. Americans need to understand that Obama, along with
most of the Democrats and Republicans are not looking out for our best interests.
Part V: “Overcoming the Divide and Conquer Strategy” will be posted on Wednesday.
Read Part I, II, and III.
