While political pundits are spouting off about how the pResident shouldn’t be blaming America, many folks are missing the point (including Chairman Zero). America hasn’t gotten soft; it’s been looted by the very same banking cartel, special interests, and crony capitalists that have been steering the economy for decades by bribing the political class and turning America into a nanny state. Now the economy has been completely decimated and those very same forces are trying to keep the bubbles they have created from popping because they went too far and they are about to lose all their money.
Here is a piece from ZeroHedge.com that hopefully will make you all understand, once and for all, that this ain’t the 1930′s, and that there is absolutely no way in hell that this Republic is going to make it to November 2012.
Summary: The five largest banks in the U.S. (JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and HSBC) are carrying $238 TRILLION dollars in derivative exposure. JP Morgan alone is carrying $78 TRILLION in derivative exposure BY ITSELF.
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I’m going to add to what Ann has explained so well:
By the end of 2007, all the Too-Big-to-Fail (TBTF) banks were writing these things hand-over-fist because they already knew they were in doo-doo. All this did was put massive leverage into the system…..debt, leveraged upon debt, with no asset value behind much of it. And here is where it gets truly ugly for my conservative friends who refuse to look at Wall Street as the criminals they are: THEY DID THIS KNOWING FULL WELL THE MAJORITY OF THE DERIVATIVES THEY WERE CREATING WERE FRAUDULENT AND BACKED BY NOTHING. How do I know this? A myriad of lawsuits filed all over the country with a literal shitton of depositions on discovery. These are not lawsuits filed by merely disgruntled foreclosure victims; these are lawsuits filed by large insurance companies like Allstate and MetLife, and even The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFH) because they all realized far too late that they’d been sold worthless crap. This is not to mention how adamantly the TBTFs have lobbied against any whiff of the idea of forcing these things onto an exchange where they would be made transparent. That’s pretty much a tipoff that they’re hiding something very bad. If the used car salesman won’t let you look under the hood, you can be pretty sure there’s something there you won’t like much.
The idea Wall Street had here with creating these fraudulent pieces of toxic waste was that if even a fraction of these ‘paid out’ for them, they could ‘save themselves.’ Unfortunately this doesn’t work when Wall Street runs out of suckers; you know, pension plans, insurance companies, retail investors and other places they could sell these things to without anyone understanding what they were buying. Most importantly, when they ran out of suckers they could put into home loans they couldn’t afford, this was the beginning of the end and the whole scheme began to unravel.
Even better, our government not only looked the other way when they were made aware of what was going on, they began to aid and abet the criminal activity….because the TBTFs convinced the government that ‘economic meltdown could be avoided’ if they were just given time for the ‘asset values to come back.’ THIS whole game was facilitated by none-other than Hank Paulson. You know, ‘Mr-I-Have-A-Bazooka.’
Our entire global economy is a giant Ponzi Scheme. Makes Social Security look like a rounding error. This also gives one a better perspective on the stock market movements. (Yeah, 400 point Dow Jones Industrial ranges in a day is a ‘stable market’.) What the market is now is merely the TBTF banks chasing government cheese. Where is the next bailout coming from? Wherever they THINK it is (and since they push for it, they have a good idea), they front run it and pile in, using HFT to try to position better than the next TBTF. Who is going to get the next ‘exemption from the law’? Wherever they think THAT is coming next, again, they go ‘all-in’ – thus providing the massive swings in the market with both bonds (treasuries and corporate debt) and stocks. Any idea that there is ANYTHING left of a ‘free-market’ is a LIE. Wake up and smell the Ponzi conservatives, and stop defending the criminals with your cries of ‘it’s anti-capitalist to protest against Wall Street.’ It’s not about your neighbor getting a free house, it’s about massive, global, legalized financial rape.
Wall Street a/k/a the Too-Big-To-Fails are chasing corruption. They’re chasing legalized theft sanctioned by our government and you can watch it in real-time every day….just pull up a stock chart. Any stock chart.
Have a nice day.
Perhaps now you will start screaming STOP THE LOOTING & START PROSECUTING!
One more time for those Americans that still have not seen the truth about the pillaging of our economy!!!
Catherine Austin Fitts, ‘The Looting Of America’:
So they are shifting massive amounts of capital, and as they are shifting that capital, they totally change who is the owner. So when it leaves this country, $5 trillion of that is in the US government, shared, its in the commons if you will; by the time it gets to Asia, the ownership is in the hands of small groups of people. So you see this enormous capital shift, and one of the other things that happens as that capital shift occurs is we’re watching the end of sovereign governments, and the rise of corporations. We’re literally changing the governance structure on planet Earth so that we’re no longer governed by countries that coordinate with each other, we’re literally governed by private corporations. In this process…you’re watching liabilities being shifted into sovereign governments and assets being shifted to corporations.
One of the ways to look at this is when we did that capital shift, we said in the beginnings of the 90’s, we can’t afford the retirement of the boomers. We’ve promised them in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid more than we can afford to pay, so what we are going to do is, we’re going to pull all their retirement savings out, we’re going to basically shift out all the money that’s in the pension funds; the equivalent, and what we are going to put back into their pension funds is phony baloney paper, and we’re going to shift out the money that’s in the Social Security fund and shift in phony baloney paper, so once we’ve gotten all the money out, they’re going to be sitting with a bunch of phony baloney paper and promises to each other. So it’s really a way of leaving the American middle class high and dry, and getting out while the getting is good. – Catherine Austin Fitts; ‘The Looting Of America’
Excellent piece, Diamond! The Truth is our only hope.
I disagree. AmeriKans have gone soft. And they will vote for one of the republican candidates and STILL take it up the butt.