Bankers, Politicians, Corruption and Treason

“A political-economic oligarchy has taken over the nation. This oligarchy has institutionalized a body of law that protects businesses at the expense of not only the common people but the nation itself. Businessmen have no loyalties. The Bank for International Settlements insures it, since it is not accountable to any national government. Yet somehow or other, the people in our government, including the judiciary, do not seem to know it; and they have allowed and even abetted businesses that have no allegiance to any country to subvert the Constitution. Unfortunately, the Constitution does not define such action as treason. Our land was stolen a long time ago. People with absolutely no loyalty to this land now own it. It needs to be taken, not bought, back! But it won’t get a government for the people, unless Americans come to realize just how immoral and vicious our economic system is.” - Prof. John Kozy, Whose Country is it anyway? A political-economic oligarchy has taken over the United States of America, Global Research, July 4, 2009

Bankers Arouse Public Anger. But Will They Change?

December 30, 2011

The Christian Science Monitor - It's not easy being a banker these days. In some European countries, they're the target of street demonstrators who blame them for the financial crisis and resulting government austerity plans.

Britain raised its terror alert in September after Irish Republican Army dissidents threatened British bankers because of Ireland's woes. Now, British bankers worry their bonuses will stoke local public anger.

The mood's not much better on this side of the Atlantic, where commentators wonder how useful some banking really is. "What good is Wall Street?" asked a New Yorker magazine article, the second most-read story on its November website. Much is "socially worthless," concludes author John Cassidy, who has been making the rounds on radio talk shows.

Banking practices have also come under stinging attack from prominent economists and political scientists in the latest issue of Daedalus, a quarterly magazine of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The financial system can quietly distort the direction of the real economy, write Benjamin Friedman of Harvard University and Robert Solow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both in Cambridge, Mass.

"It can induce the real economy to spend human and material resources on activities that can lead to immense private profits for some of those engaged while nonetheless making little or no contribution to general well-being."

That's a sharp indictment. In the run-up to its near meltdown, the financial system operated with the benefit of top bankers too much in mind. They took enormous risks, borrowing as much as 25 to 30 times their own firm's basic capital to enhance profits. When the market turned and their gambles went terribly wrong, taxpayers had to commit their own money, and shareholders of investment banks like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were largely decimated.

How did these bankers fare? The top five executives at Bear Stearns and Lehman made roughly $250 million apiece in sales of stock and bonuses in the 2000 to 2008 period, notes Harvard economist Lucian Bebchuk. There was no "claw back" provisions for these earnings.

Even in 2009, the executives' bottom lines were "positive and substantial," he writes.

Governments have made some progress in discouraging extreme gambles by the financial community, says Jeremy Stein, another Harvard economist. The 26-nation Swiss-based Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, for instance, recently raised capital requirement standards for commercial banks from 2 percent to 7 percent by 2018.

That's "a pretty positive step forward," Mr. Stein says in an interview.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act also potentially strengthens traditional US banks.

"We are being attentive to big institutions," he says. But "a lot of stuff," including detailed regulations under the new law, have yet to be drawn up.

He's especially concerned that the "shadow banking system," consisting of many firms performing bank-like economic functions but without such protections as insured deposits or the right to borrow from the Federal Reserve, could suffer a crisis, say 10 years from now.

Will public anger impel more change? While receiving most of the votes of lower-income voters, the Democratic Party has come to rely more for campaign funds "on the financial resources of wealthier supporters and interest groups," write several political scientists in Daedalus. That may make further reform politically tougher.

Have Bankers Overthrown the U.S. Government? (Yes)

December 30, 2010

John Truman Wolfe - This time it is not the mobile shock troops of Nazi Panzer divisions storming into the countries of Easter Europe, it is a group of pin-striped international bankers operating out of a black glass building in Basel Switzerland.

And it is we Americans that are now under foreign control. The mere fact that you haven’t seen the blood-torn bodies does not mean the invasion was any less successful. The carefully crafted financial crisis was all that was needed.

Like a stealth computer virus covertly morphing into your hard drive, the enemy, aided by its divisions on Wall Street, has taken control of our very financial lives without a single shot being fired.

Sounds conspiratorial doesn’t it?

But whether it is a conspiracy or not, is not the point — the details of the coup, its planning and execution, are spelled out in my book, Crisis by Design.

In an earlier post you learned that the International Bank of Settlements’ “Financial Stability Board” (FSB) was given power over the U.S. financial system when Barack Obama signed an agreement along with other members of the G-20, creating what they have called a Global Monetary Authority. Never mind that Congress is required to approve (or reject) such agreements; they aren’t even looking. The anti-virus software has been disabled by lobbyist with checkbooks — the ultimate power to persuade for many on the Hill.

The government is like a human body with no immune response; and the miraculous medicine to cure the disease — the Constitution — is a ghost of its former self. Lacking its defense by those very lawmakers who are sworn to uphold its tenants, the Constitution is alike on life support.

The President? A facilitator of the coup.

Congress? Addicted to debt like a junkie on Horse.

The American people? Mostly in the dark. Few know that the fiscal autonomy of this country has, to a large degree, been dished off to a handful of bankers who fly into Basel, Switzerland, every couple of months for board meetings behind very closed doors.

Few know that the agreement signed by the President on April 2, 2009, gives the FSB the obligation to dictate to member countries (of which we are one) “specification of the structure and functions of government.”

Go ahead, read it again.

Washington is oblivious to this situation. It is our job, our duty, our responsibility to wake them up and get them to act.

What you can DO:

In the U.S. a body like the FSB must be confirmed either by treaty or Congressional Executive Agreement. This treaty or Congressional Executive Agreement would serve as a vehicle to create a legislative oversight and enforcement body over the FSB.

1.) Write to your U.S. senators and congressperson.

2.) Refer to the communiqué from the Bank of International Settlements signed by president Obama in London on April 2, 2009.

3.) Demand that they classify that agreement as a “treaty” with a foreign power. (This would require 2/3rds vote majority to become the Rule of Law in the USA). Lacking that, it needs to be classified as a Congress Executive Agreement.

4.) Demand that Congress hold open, public hearings on the treaty / agreement for debate.

5.) If you are aware of this situation, take the time and responsibility to do so. If not my book, do your own research as to what has really happened and educate your dearest friends and family. You have everything to lose by remaining uneducated about this situation, and, thus, quiet about it. The international bankers are counting on that!

6.) Keep your powder dry.

MSNBC Analyst: Constitution Has “No Binding Power on Anything”

December 31, 2010

Infowars.com - Now that Republicans have a majority in Congress, they are pretending to be constitutionalists. In order to demonstrate this, they will theatrically read aloud the Constitution from the floor of the House next week.

“And then they will require that every new bill contain a statement by the lawmaker who wrote it citing the constitutional authority to enact the proposed legislation,” the Washington Post reports.

Establishment Republicans, of course, have the same amount of contempt for the Constitution as establishment Democrats. As dedicated worshippers of state power over the individual, Republicans and their ideological twins, the Democrats, hate the founding principles of this country.

“Conservatives regard civil liberties as coddling devices for criminals and terrorists. They see the First Amendment as a foolish protection for sedition,” writes Paul Craig Roberts. “The conservative assault on the US Constitution is deeply entrenched… Today’s conservatives are so poorly informed that they cannot understand that to lose the Constitution is to lose the country.”

While so-called conservatives pay lip-service to the Constitution, so-called progressives actively trash it and cosign the founding document to irrelevance, as the above video demonstrates.

In the video, a blogger and columnist for the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Washington Post, says the Constitution has “no binding power on anything” and is confusing — for liberals and other advocates of state power over the individual — because it is over a hundred years old.

Nancy Pelosi and the formerly ruling Democrats also believe the Constitution is irrelevant.

“Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?” a reporter for CNN asked Speaker Pelosi as Democrats prepared to shove Obamacare down the throats of the American people.

Pelosi responded: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

In August, Illinois Democrat Phil Hare told his constituents that he does not give a whit about the Constitution.

“I don’t worry about the Constitution on this, to be honest,” Hare said in response to a question about the constitutionality of Obamacare.

Hare also demonstrated his contemptible ignorance by saying that the Constitution guarantees each of us “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” In fact, that line is in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.

“We’ve now arrived at the point where a sitting Congressman can openly state that he doesn’t care what the Constitution says, a sentiment obviously held by a majority of Members since Congress continues to putatively enact ‘laws’ in the utter absence of express constitutional text,” Paul Galvin wrote after Hare made his harebrained comments for the camera.

For the establishment political class, the Constitution is completely irrelevant. Consider the following video where Republican Frank LoBiondo cannot answer a simple question about the document he has sworn to uphold from enemies foreign and domestic:

Even the soon to be leader of the House, John Boehner, is largely clueless about the Constitution. In the following video, he mistakenly attributes a line from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution:

Barry Obama did the same, but then he was reading from a teleprompter:

“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” his predecessor reportedly declared. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”

Mr. Klein’s dismissive remark about the Constitution is shared by a large number of politicos and other worshippers of state power in the district of criminals. If the establishment political class is going to successfully strip us of our natural and god-given rights, they have to promulgate the idea that the Constitution is irrelevant and nothing more than a quaint piece of goddamn paper.