The Final Push for World Government

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Mainstream Media Refuses to Disclose that "Independent" Pundits Are Actually Lobbyists

February 24, 2010

As reporter Sebastian Jones points out (see this and this):

Former Congressman Richard Gephardt runs a lobbying firm representing giant insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

Retired General Barry McCaffrey sits on the board of a giant defense contractor, DynCorp, and lobbies for war.

And many other "pundits" interviewed by the mainstream news are really high-level lobbyists for giant companies, pushing their agendas.

And yet they are treated as "independent experts" by the media.

Indeed, two years after Jones asked the large networks why they don't have a disclaimer on the screen beneath the pundits' names saying who they really work for, nothing has been done.

The corporate media are acting like virtual "escort services" for the powerful, selling access -- for a price -- to viewers and to powerful government officials, instead of actually investigating and reporting on what those in power are actually doing.

And see this.

Fed Gets New Oversight Powers Under Dodd Bill

The Federal Reserve would win sweeping new powers over nonbank financial firms and keep much of its authority over banks, under revised legislation to be unveiled on Monday by the chief architect of financial reform in the Senate.

March 14, 2010

Reuters - In a remarkable recovery by the U.S. central bank after a steep drop in its political popularity, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd was poised to release a bill that leans heavily on the Fed, sources said on Sunday.

Not only would a new government watchdog for financial consumers be housed within the Fed, but it would also retain much of its present authority over large bank holding companies and gain new authority over selected nonbank financial firms.

Dodd's bill would give the Fed authority to supervise bank holding companies with more than $50 billion in assets, down from an earlier threshold of $100 billion, sources said.

The bill may also preserve the Fed's power over state-chartered banks with less than $50 billion in assets that are already in the Federal Reserve system, a source said. An earlier proposal had called for transferring responsibility for supervising such banks to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

That would put hundred of banks under the Fed's purview, including such giants as Bank of America and Citigroup, as well as branches of foreign banks, a source said.

The bill from Dodd, a Democrat, would also empower the central bank to supervise nonbank firms designated as "systemically important" by a council of regulators.

Before it became the poster-child for bailouts, former insurance giant American International Group (AIG) would have fit into that category, for instance.

Revamping how the financial system is supervised is one of the Obama administration's top priorities. Since the worst financial crisis in decades tipped the U.S. economy into a deep recession and sent shock waves across world markets, the United States and the European Union have been pursuing reforms.

The White House unveiled a sweeping package of proposals in mid-2009. The House of Representatives approved most of them in December in a massive piece of legislation that passed without a single Republican vote of support.

But with lobbyists for banks and Wall Street working hard to block or weaken reforms, the Senate has yet to act. With congressional elections approaching in November, Dodd is under intense pressure to push a bill through his committee and onto the Senate floor before political campaigns take center stage.

TURNAROUND BY DODD ON FED

Dodd sharply criticized the Fed last year for regulatory failures. In an early draft of his own reform plan, he proposed stripping the central bank of bank supervision and consumer protection duties, leaving it focused almost exclusively on its role as a monetary policy center.

But Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, other Fed insiders and some banking interests have pushed back hard in recent months to shield the institution, and it appears to have worked.

At the same time that he is proposing new powers for the Fed, Dodd is also considering changes to how regional Federal Reserve bank directors are chosen, a source said.

He also plans to put President Barack Obama's proposed financial consumer watchdog in the Fed. To win support among Democrats for the idea, he will give the watchdog considerable power and autonomy, sources said.

Dodd wants the banking committee to work on his new bill before April, but Republicans have already told him they want sufficient time to consider the legislation.

Dodd's bill will attempt to put an end to a market perception that some financial firms are too big to fail after the government used billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to rescue firms such as AIG.

There is agreement that a fund of about $50 billion should be created to help pay for the cost of unwinding large troubled firms.

Dodd is also expected to give market regulators the authority to regulate the $450 trillion over-the-counter derivatives market with some narrow exemptions.

Wall Street Lobbyists Sinking Washington, Obama, Dodd: $400 Million to Kill Financial Reforms & Destroy America

March 12, 2010

Wall Street War Zone - Yes, Wall Street wins, again. Wall Street’s control of America is a drama right out of a Scorsese film about the mafia and crime in New York.

They bought off Chris Dodd, who’s capitulated to the darkside while “interviewing” for a million dollar job as a lobbyist. They bought off, President Obama. Turns out he’s no Luke Skywalker, no ”game-changer,” not even much of a Chicago politican.

They spent $400 million to kill financial reforms in Congress, to make absolutely sure the American public gets screwed, again … and in the process, they are setting up the next collapse. The big one. The dotcom crash didn’t do it. The subprime credit meltdown didn’t do it. What will? Another, bigger event … a combo of the “Collapse of the American Empire,” plus the “Great Depression II.”

If financial reform ain’t dead, it’ll end up watered down to nothing. That was obvious in a recent Charlie Rose interview with financial reformer Elizabeth Warren in Bloomberg/BusinessWeek: Outrage and Financial Reform. Warren’s a Harvard Law School Professor chairing of the Congressional Oversight Panel. The panel was ”created in 2008 to monitor the Treasury’s bank bailout and to review the regulation of financial markets.” Wall Street hates any reform that would expose their insatiable greed fighting all financial reforms in America, especially the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). So Wall Street doesn’t like Warren much. Here is an excerpt summarizing why she’s an Eliot Ness character they’d like to eliminate:

There are seven bureaucracies in Washington right now that each own a piece of consumer financial protection. Bloated, inefficient, and either ignored and ineffective or captured by the large financial institutions. [This is] the regulatory system we’ve got now. It works very well for the large financial institutions because it means no effective regulation.

What I want is to take this agency out of those seven agencies, shrink it down, and make it effective. You’ve got to have an agency that’s ultimately independent, whether it’s located within the Fed, within Treasury, within the Department of Agriculture, or whether it sits in its own separate place. The key is whether or not it is functionally independent. Does it write its own rules? Does it enforce those rules and does it have access to a budget that’s independent of the folks who want to smother it?

This is an agency that just makes sense. This isn’t liberal or conservative. This isn’t a division of ideology. This is about bank lobbyists. This is about people who are paid professionally to kill this agency so they can protect the revenues of Wall Street banks…

Rose then put the core question of indepencence in context: “As part of overall financial reform, where do you put the significance of the agency?”

The tip of the spear in the sense that this is where our financial crisis started: one lousy mortgage at a time; one family who got tricked, cheated at a time. Then those risks were sliced, diced, and put in all kinds of fancy financial instruments that made billions for Wall Street banks and then [crashed] the whole system … We started at families. The other end is too big to fail. [We need] a Chapter 11 system, whatever we want to call it, a part of the legal structure that permits us as a people to say with real credibility: I don’t care what your business is. I don’t care how big you are, how intertwined you are. If you make bad enough decisions, you can be liquidated -- your shareholders wiped out and top management fired ...