If You Don’t Understand it Don’t Trust it

[Time for change]

Throughout much or all of human history, people have sought to take advantage of other people by selling them stuff that is purported to be something that it isn’t. When this phenomenon reaches extreme proportions it manifests itself within a society by great concentrations of wealth at one end of the spectrum and consequent mass poverty at the other end. That is the situation that is unfolding in the United States today, as we attain the greatest level of income inequality in our history.

The lies that have been used to attain this status and convince millions of Americans to accept it as a normal state of affairs are too numerous to count. Probably the greatest lie of all – the one that serves as a foundation for all the others – is the one that maintains that great concentrations of wealth are the normal result of nature (or God) rewarding those who deserve it and punishing those who are too lazy or incompetent to deserve even the basic necessities of life. In this bizarro world, CEOs who make tens of millions of dollars a year are seen as deserving every penny that they get, even when they ruin the companies that they run, and even though it should be obvious that they virtually dictate their own salaries by virtue of getting to choose their own board of directors. Conversely, the poor are seen as deserving their poverty – even the children who are born into it.

Another contender for the greatest lie of all in today’s United States of America is that our system of government is a democracy. The rich give money to our elected representatives, who respond with legislative favors, and our courts condone that behavior by calling it “freedom of speech” rather than bribery. The rich also use their money to monopolize mass communication through the “public” airways, and that too is called freedom of speech.

With such a political system our government pretended to attempt to resolve our greatest financial crisis in several decades with a multi-trillion dollar bailout of wealthy banks rather than by directly addressing the needs of ordinary people who were losing their homes by the millions; and so-called “health care reform” passes as a plan to further empower the same insurance industry that helped to give us one of the worst health care systems in the developed world.

Such things could happen only in a society where people are bamboozled into routinely accepting the ridiculous as their reality. Many articles and books have been written to expose the numerous schemes that have been used in recent decades to transfer money from the poor and the middle class to the rich. Yet these things get scant attention in the television, radio, and newspaper media from which most Americans get their picture of reality.


A whole industry that serves no function other than transfer of money to the rich

The award winning bond market reporter Christine Richard’s “Confidence Game” is one of the most detailed stories of how this game can be played. The basic purpose of the book is explained in the book jacket:

Confidence Game is a real-world “Emperor’s New Clothes”, a tale of widespread delusion and one dissenting voice in the era leading up to the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression. Wall Street appeared to have found the secret for turning everything from risky mortgage… into super-safe triple-A-rated securities. Behind the façade of safety, the financial system had become dangerously fragile…

Why only one dissenting voice? Well, this particular game was so complex that apparently only one person in the world cared to spend the time that it took to understand it well. Once he understood it, he became so convinced that it was a fraud that he spent several years of his life trying to expose it and bring it down. Consequently, he was branded a fraud, because the game that he threatened to expose stood to make life very uncomfortable for a lot of very rich people. But he kept at it because he was certain that he was right. Richard explains in the preface to her book the basic outline of this game:

How was it that MBIA could write insurance on hundreds of billions of dollars of debt and yet tell its investors that it guaranteed only bonds on which it expected to pay no claims?... I exposed part of the secret by looking into various public projects… When the insured bonds issued to finance their projects threatened to default, taxpayers were called on to cover the losses. MBIA had a nearly perfect track record in the municipal bond market because it wasn’t the real insurer of the debt: Taxpayers were.

Richard’s story deals with Bill Ackerman’s efforts to expose the scheme, as well as the insights she gleaned from pursuing Ackerman’s efforts and doing some additional digging. From an e-mail from one of Ackerman’s allies to Ackerman:

“I had never given this any thought. If it is true that municipal bond defaults are made improbable by implicit (and explicit) state guarantees… then what we have is a whole industry that serves essentially no function other than to transfer money from the pockets of the public to the pockets of management and shareholders”.

“Zero-loss” underwriting required such extraordinary machinations to stay on the right side of the law that it was hard to believe the concept was not a fraud… The scheme guaranteed that the three reinsurers… got back “every cent of their money plus a profit.” To pull off the scheme, MBIA lied to its investors, its auditors, the credit-rating companies, and its reinsurers…

The book jacket also summarizes how this particular game ended:

With the onset of the credit crisis, the problems exposed turned out to be bigger than MBIA. An unquestioning acceptance of credit ratings… and the abandonment of common sense had become part of a deeply flawed financial system. The collapse humbled nearly every large financial institution and plunged the country into recession.

How India escaped financial disaster in the midst of world-wide recession

Robert Kuttner’s book, “A Presidency in Peril – The Insider Story of Obama’s Promise, Wall Street’s Power, and the Struggle to Control our Economic Future”, is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the essential failures of a combined Democratic President and Congress with large Democratic margins to address one of the worst and most dangerous financial crises our country has ever faced. Two pages in the last chapter of his book serve as a decent summary of the root of our problems:

The bottom line is that the entire business model of the financial industry needs to be drastically simplified, so that banking reverts to the proper role of providing credit and capital to the rest of the economy, and no financial product is too complex for regulators to grasp. This will require not just the tougher rhetoric we have lately seen, but a concerted regulatory push relying on all the powers of the presidency. Some of this requires new legislation, but much of it can be accomplished by executive action… It is simply a myth that the complexity adds to the economy’s efficiency, or that these are financial products required or demanded by bank customers…

Kuttner then explains how India escaped the financial crisis experienced by so much of the rest of the world, as explained to him by Dr. Yaga Reddy, the former governor of the Bank of India, a post equivalent to that of Chairmen of the Federal Reserve in the US:

India somehow missed the consequences of the toxic products invented and exported by US financial institutions. It had no financial crisis… I asked Dr. Reddy how India managed to dodge the financial bullet. “We don’t understand these complex instruments,” he told me with a smile, “so we don’t permit them. We leave them to the advanced nations like you.”…

My reporting has confirmed that Dr. Reddy stood firm in the face of intense pressure from the governments of Britain and the United States, as well as the world’s large banks and their Indian affiliates. He was attacked as old-fashioned and rigid. The Indian central bank under his leadership persisted… to make it unprofitable for Indian banks to create and gamble in the kind of exotic derivative securities that crashed the American system… and Dr. Reddy’s banking colleagues belatedly thanked him.

Kuttner sums up our current situation:

From the 1950s through the 1980s, banks and other financial institutions accounted for between 8 and 16 percent of total corporate profits. By 2006, the figure was more than 40%. Those who defended the bloating of the financial sector argued that innovation on Wall Street, by definition, was good for the real economy. Year after year, Alan Greenspan and others kept… testifying before Congress on how newly created instruments helped disseminate capital and spread risk… We now know that… all of this functioned at the expense of the real economy.

Black box voting

It is very difficult for many of us to understand why more of the American public is not outraged about a situation where private companies count our votes with secret software that provide no assurances about the accuracy of the vote count. The best explanation for that fact is that our corporate media, which is the main source of news for most Americans, does everything it can to persuade us that everything is ok – and too many people are happy to believe that.

I have never seen a poll which asks Americans something like: Do you think it is acceptable for private companies to count our votes with secret software that provide no assurances about the accuracy of the vote count? Yet this is exactly the situation that we are faced with. Why won’t a major polling firm ask that question and publicize the results?

Why on Earth would anyone trust a voting machine that: 1) is designed and made by a for-profit corporation; 2) whose results cannot be verified; 3) has been shown to be susceptible to manipulation and fraud, and 4) whose owners have contributed large sums of money to one of the involved political parties? Yet this is what we are being confronted with more and more.


Walking the tightrope of hypocrisy in the war against the poor and the middle class

If there is any silver lining to all this, it is perhaps that it is extraordinarily difficult to maintain illusions forever, no matter how much wealth is available for that purpose. Perhaps that’s a major reason why all empires in the history of the world have eventually fallen. Noam Chomsky deals with this issue in his recent book, “Hopes and Prospects”:

The persistence of generally social democratic attitudes (in the US) is noteworthy in the face of huge propaganda campaigns to efface any such ideas, a prominent feature of a society dominated to an unusual extent by a highly class-conscious business community, dedicated to winning what they call “the everlasting battle for the minds of men” and to beating back threats of “political power of the masses”, a serious hazard… more recently to the increasingly dominant financial institutions. Over the years the (propaganda) campaigns have had two primary enemies: unions and government.

Yes indeed. We’ve been flooded with this antigovernment blather since the Reagan presidency, and it’s so ridiculous that it is sickening to know that it has picked up as much popular support as it has. Worse yet is the fact that large factions of the Democratic Party have given support to this nonsense by trying to outdo Republicans from time to time with their own brand of anti-big government rhetoric.

Part and parcel of the anti- big government rhetoric is the attempt to brand as “Socialism!!” any attempt by government to fulfill the function of protecting the vulnerable from the powerful, as was done so successfully during the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administration. This has been quite effective. Chomsky describes the results:

The power of financial institutions reflects the increasing shift of the economy from production to finance… one of the root causes of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression: the financial collapse of 2007-8, deep and ongoing recession in the real economy for the large majority, whose real wages stagnated for thirty years, while benefits and social indicators declined… with corresponding increases into the pockets of “those who mattered”.

But the elites have a problem when they try to verbally lambast “big government”. They risk exposing their blatant hypocrisy. Chomsky continues:

The antigovernment campaigns have to be nuanced and sophisticated, because the (propagandists) understand very well the need for a powerful state that intervenes massively in the economy and abroad to ensure that their own interests are most peculiarly attended to. The goal of sophisticated business propaganda is to engender fear and hatred of government among the population, so that they are not seduced by subversive notions of democracy and social welfare, while maintaining support for the powerful nanny state for the rich – a difficult course, but one that has been maneuvered with considerable skill.

[Catherina]

1. Highly interesting. Deserves a reread tomorrow. Rec'd with thanks n/t

[BrklynLiberal]

2. Could be a rule to live by...with a corollary...If you don't understand it, investigate it so you do

[scarletwoman]

3. K&R - so I can find this later to read through more thoroughly. (nt)

[patrice]

4. A fundamental lie that has been used: "Money is real." It's not. It's made up &

they make it up any way that they want to.

[truedelphi]

51. And when the money that TPTB on Wall St wants to have or needs to exist,

It is created out of money that will be owed by those of us who are not part of that Elite.

And that "transfer of wealth" is called "Staving Off Global Economic Crisis" and is saluted as being a sage and wonderful response to circumstances none of the Wall Street Powers That Be could firesee.

None of that is considered as "Socialsim."

But when the Baby Boomers go to retire, only to find out they must wait till they are 89, and Powers That Be say, "No, the Social Security money is Socialism, as the term "Social" is right there in the name of the Fund. But we will privatize this Fund for the sake of the nation, and please applaud us for doing so."
<pause>
"So by our willingness to take that money too, we can avert the Social Security Crisis of 2037."

[Speck Tater]

5. That's right! Unless you can demonstrate a thorough understanding of internal combustion engines...

you should not drive, or be driven for that matter. Gasoline engines just shouldn't be trusted unless you understand them.

This is especially true of people who are thinking of doing anything at all with a computer. Unless you really understand digital logic circuitry you should not trust computers under any circumstances.

[Catherina]

10. Do you have any comments pertinent to the information provided?

Based on your ridicule, I take it you vehemently disagree. Could you explain where and why?

[Time for change]

13. It's relative.

It's true, as you point out, that we can rely on cars to get us places, and we can rely on our computers to address our needs most of the time.

A more accurate way of saying what I meant to say in the title would be "If you don't understand it well enough to provide confidence that it works like it's supposed to work, then don't trust it. But that wouldn't have fit in the title. We trust our cars to get us places because of a vast amount of experience that tells us that cars do just that.

But to take an example from my OP, we had no experience at all to tell us that the tremendously complex financial instruments that pervaded our financial system would do any good for most of our citizens. And few if any people understood how they were supposed to work. It would have been very wise to do as India did, and bring back the regulations of the financial industry that helped get us out of the Great Depression and maintain the longest sustained economic boom in our history (early 40s through late 70s).

[ThomThom]

29. and when we don't understand our cars and they break down,

which they always do, then one is open to be taken advantage of by unscrupulous mechanics. Same is true for all that is mentioned. Knowledge is power and it goes both ways. If throwing money at a problem like car repair is easier than learning about it so be it but when it comes to something that affects us all, I think we all have an obligation to pay attention.

[Posteritatis]

45. I'd say there's another step in there

1 - Don't understand it;
2 - Attempt to understand it;
3 - Evaluate where your trust should be. (I understand plenty of things I don't trust.)

"I don't get this and so I won't even try" is a big problem in a whole variety of areas from basic home repair to politics to science and medicine, and reflexive blind rejection of new things is precisely as big a problem as reflexive blind acceptance of them.

[rucky]

21. A better analogy would be the Medicine Shows

that would travel around, touting a secret formula that would cure what ails you but does nothing it claims to do. The only difference is there's no risk of tarring and feathering nowadays.

[BeFree]

6. Banking - Voting - Class War

Good Gawd, man, you've covered the three pillars of our owners, and damned them all to hell.

Good job. This needs to go far and wide. Thank you.

[laughingliberal]

7. Excellent! K & R nt

[Odin2005]

8. Capitalism is legalized parasitism by the Elites.

[TBF]

19. It's legalized something that's for sure ... and it's not surprising that

Capitalists would put so much effort into demonizing a more equitable system like socialism.

[Hannah Bell]

9. kr

[leftstreet]

11. K&R

Excellent links!

Thanks for putting this together

[Catherina]

12. I just reread this a second time,

India somehow missed the consequences of the toxic products invented and exported by US financial institutions. It had no financial crisis… I asked Dr. Reddy how India managed to dodge the financial bullet. “We don’t understand these complex instruments,” he told me with a smile, “so we don’t permit them. We leave them to the advanced nations like you.”…

My reporting has confirmed that Dr. Reddy stood firm in the face of intense pressure from the governments of Britain and the United States, as well as the world’s large banks and their Indian affiliates. He was attacked as old-fashioned and rigid. The Indian central bank under his leadership persisted… to make it unprofitable for Indian banks to create and gamble in the kind of exotic derivative securities that crashed the American system…

Fascinating stuff we knew in our hearts already. It's interesting to see it confirmed. Your post is excellent, I added your journal to my blogroll so I can track your threads. This is a rare jewel of an OP.

The antigovernment campaigns have to be nuanced and sophisticated, because the (propagandists) understand very well the need for a powerful state that intervenes massively in the economy and abroad to ensure that their own interests are most peculiarly attended to. The goal of sophisticated business propaganda is to engender fear and hatred of government among the population, so that they are not seduced by subversive notions of democracy and social welfare, while maintaining support for the powerful nanny state for the rich – a difficult course, but one that has been maneuvered with considerable skill.

[Time for change]

14. Thank you very much

I too was very much struck by Kuttner's description of how India avoided the financial collapse that so much of the world endured and is still enduring. Such a simple, and yet such an effective move by Dr. Reddy.

I lost about $5 on some sort of foolish pyramid scheme when I was a freshman in college. It was a stupid move on my part, and I should have known better even then. But at least it taught me a lesson I've never forgotten.

[TBF]

20. Excellent, TFC, I enjoyed this piece very much. nt

[defendandprotect]

15. Thanks TFC ... for all of it, but especially for coming back to the computers .....

and how unimaginable that Americans fail to question and challenge that

situation where private corporations are controlling/counting our votes --

in ways which are unverifiable --

and even private corporations are controlling our presidential debates --

and public broadcasting!!

:eyes:

[Time for change]

28. Thank you -- It's very hard to believe that

they haven't or the won't use black box voting machines to steal elections when they feel the need for it. Why these things are tolerated in a nation that aspires to be a democracy is very hard to understand.

[Greyhound]

16. Auto K&R. You've been quite prolific lately. I'm sure many of us appreciate it.

As usual, I have nothing to add to what you've put together.

We've been so wrong for so long that we no longer recognize the wrongness of it all. We've repeated the same mistakes over and over again and once again we're determined to make the same mistakes as if this time we will get different results. Nearly all of us want change, but we're simultaneously too afraid of the unknown to risk it.
:kick: & R

[jtuck004]

17. Well, that's a pretty good description of what has happened and is happening. Now what?

You realize, based on your writings above, that where we are today is the result of a 40+ year campaign to turn the entire economy of the U.S. into a machine that shovels money into the pockets of a small group. Every administration during that period, including the current one, has been complicit in either removing regulation or in not acting to pursue programs that would be in the best interest of the nation.

In the post it is written "If there is any silver lining to all this, it is perhaps that it is extraordinarily difficult to maintain illusions forever, no matter how much wealth is available for that purpose". (I like Chomsky's writing, but so what? We know they are hypocrites, they know they are hypocrites, and I would be that most of the people who voted for them, if they would give you an honest answer would say they are hypocrites. They don't because they are cheerleaders, or just out of spite).

How is that a silver lining? The outcome is the demise of this country. ALL of the wealth is being manipulated into a small group, which includes all the means of creating such wealth. An entire political party (tea) sprang up in reaction. They don't seem to recognize that we have the same enemies. The Democratic party has traditionally been the party that could be counted on to develop the populist programs that would fight back, but they are working closely with people (Rubin, Geithner, Bernanke, others) that have helped bring us to the stage we are at today. The Republican party is far and away the champion of the rich, made worse by their unapologetic stance and philosophy that ignores and even celebrates the breakdown of the nation.

Since the financial and service sector has largely supplanted the industrial base we used to live on, we are well past the point at which we can produce enough to sustain any kind of life. Many government functions are only being held up by loans, banks by rules which allow them to hold their assets at an unrealistic value, pension funds are failing, medicare is in the toilet. People may be filling the shopping malls, but a good chunk of every dollar simply increases China's reserve, while the only thing we create is more zeroes at the Fed.

The most likely outcome is a couple decades of declining employment, health, wealth, and general educational level. We will almost certainly see cities and perhaps states going bankrupt, pensions failing, medicare being slashed, millions of people denied even basic medical care. There is a 10 year glut of homes on the market, and still an expected 9 million foreclosures to finish - virtually all property is going to continue to drop in value, maybe as much as 20-30%. The future for 100 million or more Americans is 20-30 years of being wage and debt slaves with little to no hope of even retiring at a living wage. (Unless we create more jobs every month for the next 14 years than we EVER have in the history of this country, we may not see single digit unemployment rates for at least the next two decades). It might be possible that younger people could use their enthusiasm and energy to change things, but they don't seem to be aware of the need for sacrifice and organization that filled the years from 1900-1970 which led to this country becoming as strong and secure as it was.

I don't mean for this to sound pessimistic, and if anyone has evidence that our reality is something other than this (other than just blind hope, which is what got us here) I would really like to see it. There is a whole bookshelf of books that describe where we are and where we are going, falling right in with the writings above. I think it is an accurate description of reality - whether one likes it or not.

So, back to my first question. Now what? Where are the massive changes going to come from? What politician is going to stand up and tell us that we have sold all the things we built for the past 200 years, and gave all the profit to a small group of people, so we all need to start over, or the alternative is at least 20-30 years of paying off the debt we have accumulated, both personally and as a nation? And that assumes this change starts now, and that ain't happenin'.

[zeemike]

22. I have an answer for what now.

But most of you will not like it....and it is to take back the country...for real.
And what taking back the country is about is taking back it's real value... it's resources and it's land...Wall Street exists because of our resources and they have made themselves indispensable to our livelihood.

[jtuck004]

41. I am not sure that we can't just build around them. I am nearly sure that we should.

Get information out to people which shows them how to spend their money for an American (as opposed to Chinese or Brazilian) advantage, build business that is not under the clutches of wall street. More inclusion, more cooperative, and organized. 'Cause any revolution in the streets is quite likely to result in something like what we did to Chile.

[zeemike]

48. Well your right there ....it will fail if it is just in the streets.

They can handel that quite well.
And I agree that we can and should build around them and starve the beast...it will all depend on whether they can stop the organization or not....and they have experience with that.

[jtuck004]

49. This is the part that just amazes me. Democrats have soooo many

smart people, we have a history of organizing, we have all the tools.

Yet it seems like we haven't matched the conservatives since about 1970. They learned from us. They began to implement them, and have shoved them back down our throats. They put together study groups, implemented what developed from there, realized that control of education and news would do them the most good, found people to fund them, and put thoughts of anything else other than winning behind them. They built on that by gaining positions in the government so they could implement policies and remove regulations that was hampering their greedy search for all the money and power.

Democrats can out-organize anyone. They just have to understand the fight, quit making excuses (lazy voters, people not appreciating what they have done before, yada yada yada), and get it done.

And when they win they need to implement populist policies, not those that make corporations richer and give them more power. Otherwise all that work is likely to be for nothing.

[zeemike]

54. And there is one other thing the GOP does that is important.

They co opt the other side where possable...and that is easier to do when you have a lot of money to through around....and they have that.
So our leaders find that if they compromise just a little it can be rewarding....and that is all a well turned plan needs to succeed.

[lildreamer316]

58. Ok, I have a question:

It seems obvious that the powers that be/the elite 1% & the corporations are hell-bent on amassing as much real estate as they can from us. I know that basic rule that 'he who owns the most real estate holds the power"; but how exactly do we go about getting it back; and then keeping it? It seems to me that this land grab is massive. I'm not quite sure what for; except I guess to lease it back to us... I guess I'm asking, what's the end-game here,and how exactly do we circumvent it?

[zeemike]

65. Well that is a good question.

But the answer is hard...because it is a great change in attitude.
But the land that needs to be taken back is the productive land...farm land. Because it is on this land that our livelihood does chiefly depend...and right now corporations own most of it, so we are totally dependent on them for what we eat.
but in my fantsy....and that is all it is....I see the use of eminent domain being used to take it back...the local government just takes it back and gives it to families to produce the food we need in exchange for a home for them.
Yep I am an agrarian reformer and I guess that also makes me a communist in the eyes of the right.

[Time for change]

56. Now what?

I wish I knew.

I do believe that widespread understanding of what what is being done to us will lead to its end -- exactly how, I don't know. But they need us, and I think they understand that once people see things clearly they'll no longer be able to control them as they do now. Their control over us depends on the willing acceptance by most Americans. Once a critical number understand the fools they've been played for, that will be the beginning of the end.

The Internet holds great hope IMO for shining a light that will allow most Americans to see.

[bertman]

67. jtuck04, yours is the seminal question. Time for change has lead us to water.

How can we be made to drink?

Thanks for asking the right question.

[unhappycamper]

18. Another book I would recommend is "War and Empire" by Paul Atwood.

Like his mentor Zinn, Paul tells you the history behind the "history" you were taught in school.

It's a marvelous read.

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

23. those who count the votes trust "black box voting" to give them the "right" results

thats why we have it.

[OneGrassRoot]

24. K&R and bookmarked. n/t

[zeemike]

25. You pretty much nailed it.

It has been turned into a machine that cranks out wealth for the privileged few, and makes us pay for it.
K&R...another important OP from you.

[BetsysGhost]

26. Wow you're deep!

[Mimosa]

27. K&R A must read.

Thank you, Time for a Change. :)

[bvar22]

30. Another Home Run!...K&R

Why on Earth would anyone trust a voting machine that: 1) is designed and made by a for-profit corporation; 2) whose results cannot be verified; 3) has been shown to be susceptible to manipulation and fraud, and 4) whose owners have contributed large sums of money to one of the involved political parties?"

92% of ALL Americans support TRANSPARENT, VERIFIABLE elections!
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x446445

Why is THIS not a Front Burner Issue with the Democratic Party?
With 92% popular support, it would be an easy WIN/WIN.
And yet, NOT a whisper from our Party Leadership.
WHY?
.
.
.
I can think of only ONE answer,
and that answer is truly frightening.




You should compile your DU essays and publish them.
:patriot:

[Time for change]

57. I believe that there is a widespread (well founded) belief among our elected politicians

that if they rock the boat too much the PTB will put a great deal of effort into beating them, one way or the other. Paul Wellstone and Cynthia McKinney come to mind. More recently we have Feingold and Grayson, who were tremendously outspent in their recent election defeats. They may not always win, but they can certainly stack the odds in their favor.

[Overseas]

31. K&R ! //nt

[Starry Messenger]

32. k & r

[azul]

33. Time for change!

When we could pretend to be fighting a cold war, the resources of the FBI, CIA, and military could be openly and otherwise utilized to suppress socialism here and abroad without too much fuss. Then the USSR collapsed and another ruse was required to keep labor and popular voting power in check and the money flowing in the proper channels.

But propaganda can only take people so far before they snap or snap out of it. The looming and resonating cognitive-dissonance snappage is that we are in debt up to our necks to the communists, and that they are taking the last of our oil. That socialists will be calling the shots from here because Empire-capitalism has turned us into debtors in a failed ponzi-scheme will make our eyes cross with wonder and rage.

It is past time for a change, but will we be pushed into fighting madness when we finally have the wake-up call, or will we be able to make the necessary corrections? The excessive love of money appears to be a mental disease that clouds the thinking of many of the big-shots that are running this show. Expose and treat them for peace's sake.

[N_E_1 for Tennis]

34. K & R saving for further study

[lumberjack_jeff]

35. "I have written you a long letter because I did not have time to write a short one." Blaise Pascal

Otherwise, recommended.

[originalpckelly]

36. One mighty post. NT

[kowalski1]

37. Awesome post

I love the quote from the Indian Fed Chairman. I can also think of another way to avoid these kinds of financial collapse. Just let it know to the banks and ALL financial institutions that they will be NO BAILOUT of any kind to the banks and stick to your guns because we now know that the banks were full aware of the risks they were taking and even worse they knew that the triple securities were junk.

If we had a no bailout system, AIG wouldn't have insured any of those securities, fannie and freddie wouldn't be buying the pseudo triple A securities and the system would in fact police itself or lose all their money

[maryf]

38. K&Rnt

[Goldstein1984]

39. Very well done. Thank you.

[madmax]

40. k&r nt

[Canuckistanian]

42. K&R

Good read. You should have your own column or write a book.

[Jeffersons Ghost]

43. K&R

[Little Star]

44. k&r

[felix_numinous]

46. These powerful groups of people discourage understanding

by obscuring the most important documentation of their financial dealings in legalese. This is done intentionally, and is only one example of how information has been kept from the general public for generations. It has created a culture of not only willful ignorance by some, but the resignation by many other people to accept this lack of understanding, and thus we have given away our power.

While legal text like the Patriot Act, of which few Americans have read in full, are becoming more convoluted, we have more secret branches of the government whose purpose is to operate without American knowledge or consent. The existence of a shadow government removes any illusion of a democracy, liberty or freedom if they are allowed to operate with unlimited funds and without any oversight.

The internet mostly came on line for most people in the late 90's, immediately people with access began to do research and fill the information gap the mainstream did not provide. After 2001, sites like DU appeared, because when Americans were free to do independent research and started thinking for themselves, a bottomless pit of corruption almost immediately began to emerge.

So I think it has taken until now in 2010 for many people to realize what America is up against, we have had to do our own data mining--but I think we have nearly caught up with them. We have the ultimate tool to help us think for ourselves and investigate what we do not understand. That is power.

[Time for change]

62. I very much hope you're right that we have nearly caught up with them

There are many who have. But there are also way too many who refuse to believe anything that goes against the "common wisdom" as defined by our corporate media.

[ProSense]

47. "Robert Kuttner’s book, 'A Presidency in Peril' " Ah Kuttner. He wrote this recently

Kuttner

Liberals cheered when Elizabeth Warren was appointed interim director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after a long internal fight. The bureau, which Warren first proposed in 2007, is one of the more expansive innovations of the financial-reform law known as the Dodd-Frank Act.

<...>

The miracle of Dodd-Frank is that it got stronger as it moved through the process. The question now is whether that forward momentum will be reversed. Because the factions in the executive branch mirror those in Congress, it's worth looking back at the legislative story.

The Senate has been the graveyard of most progressive reforms of the Obama era. In the case of financial regulation, though, the bill reached the Senate just as the economic crisis was worsening and Wall Street had become politically radioactive. A backbench revolt of relatively junior senators like Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Ted Kaufman of Delaware, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas unexpectedly succeeded with floor amendments that toughened regulation of financial derivatives and conflict-of-interest prohibitions. Meanwhile, President Barack Obama, shocked into action by Scott Brown's January 2010 election to the Senate, embraced what he called the Volcker Rule -- a partial return to the pre-1999 Glass-Steagall separation of federally guaranteed commercial banking from more speculative investment banking and proprietary trading of securities.

<...>

Reformers ultimately prevailed on a few key issues, including tough regulation of financial derivatives, the Volcker Rule, and Warren's consumer protection agency, while the moderates and their Wall Street allies were able to block other proposals outright, such as breaking up the big banks. But time after time, to gain the support of key swing votes, the bill's managers had to punt details to the executive branch

<...>

Of course the above was written before he called the President a "dud."

[rtassi]

50. Simple, intelligent, true!

“We don’t understand these complex instruments,” he told me with a smile, “so we don’t permit them. We leave them to the advanced nations like you.”… Simple, intelligent, true, & funny!
On the questions of Black Box voting ... A voting machine developed by the same folk who brought us auto tellers incapable of producing verification of who we voted for ... ranks right up there with WMD's, Osama dragging a dialysis machine through the Afgan mountains, the lone gunman, and the tooth ferry ... just to name a few! ... good read.
rt

[Time for change]

60. Simple, intelligent, true, funny....

and of monumental importance.

Too bad we didn't have someone like him in a position of power in our country at the right time.

[Melissa G]

52. Excellent read. Thanks for posting! n.t

[JackRiddler]

53. Reposted on the Wall Street crisis archive thread (on another board). Thank you!!!

Hundreds of posts archiving articles of interest going back many years...

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=21495&p=368107#p368107

[Time for change]

61. Thank you for reposting this!!

[lordsummerisle]

55. Great post k&r

Needs to be seen by a wider audience...

[flying rabbit]

59. Keep 'em coming man.

Some of the best stuff on this site comes from you.
:thumbsup:

[Poboy]

63. kick

[Dystopian]

64. KandR & Thank you

You are an amazing writer...gifted.
I've learned much....

Thank you for being you...for being here.
You really should write a book;-)


peace~

[Poboy]

66. .

[bertman]

68. Too late to Rec, but here's a 'thanks' for another excellent post, Tfc.

Your post is just one of MANY eye-opening and highly educational exposes that are being written and filmed and delivered in auditioriums, on computers, and in movie theaters all over the nation. They are not rare. They are not unbelievable. They are just falling on deaf ears.

WE the people know what is happening but we cannot bring ourselves to reject the propaganda that has been blasted at us for the last forty years. That propaganda tells us that we can trust the news media that blares its pro-fascist programming, pro-Empire and pro-corporate news, and that we will benefit from the benevolence of these very people who are nailing us to the wall.

As long as half of America thinks that it is going to be 'okay' nothing will ever change.

Sheep do not revolt against the shepherd. They go to be fleeced and they go to be slaughtered.

There's a good reason that we are all urged to be obedient members of the flock. Otherwise, Jesus will not save us.