Infinite cap on Freddie and Fannie.
And Geitner needs to be held accountable for it and his dealings with AIG. New York Fed paid AIG billions and was told to keep it secret. He needs to prove who's side he's really on.
Show us or step down.
The Fed: A conspiracy of silence. A conspiracy to defraud taxpayers and keep us forever in the dark. Git yer pitchforks. It's time the banksters learn the meaning of a few words, such as fear, retribution and expropriation. They need to be brought low, which, after all, is their natural station. Rough justice is better than none.
I guess the powers that be think it is none of our business where OUR money went. Then these people wonder why they are despised by almost everyone.
MALIGNANTLY Corrupt to the CORE. The massess are helplessly languishing, due to excessive abuse of the top 2 percent. The nation is withering. The collapse of a Super Power ! All rooted from GREED. GREED.GREED. MORE YACHTS, BIGGER YACHTS. MORE MANSIONS. BIGGER MANSIONS. bIGGER JETS, LARGER FLEETS. i' am BIG and I CRUSH you.
We're all serfs now and Barak Obama and his bipartisanship fetish is helping make it all possible.
audit audit audit !
They are all closing ranks now. Anyone outside of Wall Street believing that Obama is still going to protect their interests is delusional. If he were, Geithner would have been gone LONG ago. Never hired in the first place. He wants Bernanke reaffirmed. He's in collusion with them.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness
We are at that point, I believe.
Surprise, Surprise!! NO NEED TO KNOW, JUST PAY! Or what is to KNOW, no small print contract clauses - just a SWEAT DEAL for the ones that CAN!
What could possibly be gained by getting this information from the Fed. People might find out that Goldman got money from the government. Come on. It's a waste of time congress should focus on something worthwhile.
Blind robbery of the American taxpayer is something important. It sucks that you don't think so, but everyone is entitled to an opinion.
I remember Obama promising transparency during the campaign. I also remember the day last fall that Obama invited all the banksters and their lobbyists down to the White House for a walkthrough and sitdown over some kind of presidential lunch and I remember The bank presidents and managers going in and coming out. And the press who were there--CNBC was the only cable channel that even bothered to cover this momentous event--was set up at a small table along the walkway leading to and from the White House entrance the banksters and their lobbyists were using. And the questions were so softball and the answers so banal that it reminded me of that scene in the Bush campaign film made by Alex Pelosi in which Bush tells her about his shirt,his pants, his belt and his cowboy boots. Then Obama later talked about the meetings and discussion in meaningless platitudes and spoke of a "frank and open discussion"!
True transparency that!!!!
I decided then, that I couldn't always get all of my money back, if I put it in a bank, but, I could always get my money back, if I had some stash.......,[please take note of my slightly 'conservative' conclusion on how to deal with this. See? I'm not always a liberal, i been saving $ on my own]....., : )
Who would like to see Bernanke, Summers and Geithner put in stocks with a bushel of rotten tomatoes?
Corporations, which control the levers of power in government and finance, promote and empower the psychologically maimed. Those who lack the capacity for empathy and who embrace the goals of the corporation—personal power and wealth—as the highest good succeed. Those who possess moral autonomy and individuality do not. And these corporate heads, isolated from the mass of Americans by insular corporate structures and vast personal fortunes, are no more attuned to the misery, rage and pain they cause than were the courtiers and perfumed fops who populated Versailles on the eve of the French Revolution. They play their games of high finance as if the rest of us do not exist. And it is a game that will kill us.
These companies exist in a pathological world where identity and personal worth are determined solely by the perverted code of the corporation. The corporation decides who has value and who does not, who advances and who is left behind. It rewards the most compliant, craven and manipulative, and discards the losers who can’t play the game, those who do not accumulate wealth or status fast enough, or who fail to fully subsume their individuality into the corporate collective. It dominates the internal and external lives of its employees, leaving them without time for family or solitude—without time for self-reflection—and drives them into a state of perpetual nervous exhaustion. It breaks them down, especially in their early years in the firm, a period in which they are humiliated and pressured to work such long hours that many will sleep under their desks. This hazing process, one that is common at corporate newspapers where I worked, including The New York Times, eliminates from the system most of those with backbone, fortitude and dignity.
No one thinks in groups. And this is the point. The employees who advance are vacant and supine. They are skilled drones, often possessed of a peculiar kind of analytical intelligence and drive, but morally, emotionally and creatively crippled. Their intellect is narrow and inhibited. They rely on the corporation, as they once relied on their high-priced elite universities and their SAT scores, for validation. They demand that they not be treated as individuals but as members of the great collective of Goldman Sachs or AIG or Citibank. They talk together. They exchange information. They make deals. They compromise. They debate. But they do not think. They do not create. All capacity for intuition, for unstructured thought, for questions of meaning deemed impractical or frivolous by the firm, the qualities that always precede discovery and creation, are banished, as William H. Whyte observed in his book “The Organization Man.” The iron goals of greater and greater profit, order and corporate conformity dominate their squalid belief systems. And by the time these corporate automatons are managing partners or government bureaucrats they cannot distinguish between right and wrong. They are deaf, dumb and blind to the common good.
These deeply stunted and maladjusted individuals, from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to Robert Rubin to Lawrence Summers to the heads of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America, hold the fate of the nation in their hands. They have access to trillions of taxpayer dollars and are looting the U.S. Treasury to sustain reckless speculation. The financial and corporate system alone validates them. It defines them. It must be served. This is why e-mails from the New York Fed to AIG, telling the bailed-out insurer not to make public the overpaying of Wall Street firms with taxpayer money, were sent when Geithner was in charge of the government agency. These criminals sold the public investments they knew to be trash. They used campaign contributions and lobbyists to turn elected officials into stooges and gut oversight and regulation. They took over retirement savings and pensions and wiped them out. And then they seized some $13 trillion in taxpayer money so they could lend it to us with interest. It is circular theft. This is why we will endure another catastrophic financial collapse. This is why firms like Goldman Sachs are more dangerous to the nation than al-Qaida.
“The psychology is about winning, and winning is marked by the level of compensation and bonuses and the power you have within the firm,” Nomi Prins, the author of “It Takes a Pillage” and a former managing director at Goldman Sachs, told me by phone from California. “Every investment bank is like a mini-country. The political maneuvering and the differences between individuals who run certain areas and move up the ladder of the company are not necessarily decided by a vote. They move up depending on how close they are to the person [above them]. If that person moves up they move up with them. A certain set of loyalties get created. It is an intense competition all the time. You have trading and doing deals with clients, but the result is to push people up the ladder and to make money.”
How you make money and how you climb the ladder of the corporate structure are irrelevant. Success becomes its own morality. Those who do well in this environment possess the traits often exhibited by psychopaths—superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation, and the incapacity for remorse or guilt. They, like competitors on a reality television program, lie, cheat and betray to climb over those around them and advance. These demented individuals are admired and envied within the firm. They achieve heroic status. The lower-ranking employees are supposed to emulate them. And this makes Goldman Sachs and other speculative financial firms upscale lunatic asylums where the inmates wear Brooks Brothers suits and drink expensive chardonnay. Our problem is that the lunatics have been let out of the asylum. They have been empowered to cannibalize the government on behalf of the corporations that spawned them like mutant carp.
These corporations don’t make anything. They don’t produce anything. They gamble and bet and speculate. And when they lose vast sums they raid the U.S. Treasury so they can go back and do it again. Never mind that $50 trillion in global wealth was erased between September 2007 and March 2009, including $7 trillion in the U.S. stock market and $6 trillion in the housing market. Never mind that the total amount of retirement and household wealth trashed was $7.5 trillion or that we saw $2 trillion in 401(k)s and individual retirement accounts evaporate. Never mind the $1.9 trillion in traditional defined-benefit plans and the $2.6 trillion in nonpension assets that went up in smoke. Never mind the job losses, the foreclosures and the 35 percent jump in personal and small-business bankruptcies. There are bundles of new money, taken again from us, to make deals and hand out outrageous bonuses. And when these trillions run out they will come back for more until our currency becomes junk. Not that any of these people have thought this through. They are too busy focused on the pathetic, little monuments they are building to themselves and the intricacies of court intrigue.
Blankfein earned a total compensation in 2008 of $53,965,418.
Base salary – $600,000
Cash Bonus – $26,985,474
Stock – $15,542,756
Options – $10,453,031
He declared in an interview that he was doing “God’s work”.
He suggested that Goldman would have been fine without financial assistance from the feds.
Goldman recieved $10 billion in direct aid from the US government.
The Financial Times chose Lloyd C. Blankfein as its person of the year.
He suggested that Goldman’s employees make more than everyone else because they’re better than everyone else. This resulted in massive bonuses.
Goldman Sachs gave out $4.82 billion in bonuses in 2008, despite earnings of only $2.32 billion that year.
Goldman’s revenue in 2008 was 22.2 billion and net earnings were 2.3 billion.
Blankfein is the poster boy for Wall Street’s incredible craving for massive profits.
After helping impact the global financial crisis to the tune of several trillion dollars he said that Goldman regretted any damage they may have committed and apologized.
The public was outraged, but unfortunately most were represented in Congress by a bunch of spineless, worthless cowards.
Today Goldman is a money machine, massive profits, massive bonuses, massive arrogance and a distinct lack of any perceivable code of ethics.
And in gratitude to the public that kept it afloat, kept the limos and private jets running, kept the pay scale far above what any single person is worth, kept it’s customers in a suicidal state and flipped the bird at regulatory agencies everywhere, it’s response is a heart felt “fuck you very much”.
THERE may not be a person in America without a strong opinion about what coulda, shoulda been done to prevent the underwear bomber from boarding that Christmas flight to Detroit. In the years since 9/11, we’ve all become counterterrorists. But in the 16 months since that other calamity in downtown New York — the crash precipitated by the 9/15 failure of Lehman Brothers — most of us are still ignorant about what Warren Buffett called the “financial weapons of mass destruction” that wrecked our economy. Fluent as we are in Al Qaeda and body scanners, when it comes to synthetic C.D.O.’s and credit-default swaps, not so much.
What we don’t know will hurt us, and quite possibly on a more devastating scale than any Qaeda attack. Americans must be told the full story of how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin. Without that reckoning, there will be no public clamor for serious reform of a financial system that was as cunningly breached as airline security at the Amsterdam airport. And without reform, another massive attack on our economic security is guaranteed. Now that it can count on government bailouts, Wall Street has more incentive than ever to pump up its risks — secure that it can keep the bonanzas while we get stuck with the losses.
The window for change is rapidly closing. Health care, Afghanistan and the terrorism panic may have exhausted Washington’s already limited capacity for heavy lifting, especially in an election year. The White House’s chief economic hand, Lawrence Summers, has repeatedlyannounced that “everybody agrees that the recession is over” — which is technically true from an economist’s perspective and certainly true on Wall Street, where bailed-out banks are reporting record profits and bonuses. The contrary voices of Americans who have lost pay, jobs, homes and savings are either patronized or drowned out entirely by a political system where the banking lobby rules in both parties and the revolving door between finance and government never stops spinning.
It’s against this backdrop that this week’s long-awaited initial public hearings of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission are so critical. This is the bipartisan panel that Congress mandated last spring to investigate the still murky story of what happened in the meltdown. Phil Angelides, the former California treasurer who is the inquiry’s chairman, told me in interviews late last year that he has been busy deploying a tough investigative staff and will not allow the proceedings to devolve into a typical blue-ribbon Beltway exercise in toothless bloviation.
He wants to examine the financial sector’s “greed, stupidity, hubris and outright corruption” — from traders on the ground to the board room. “It’s important that we deliver new information,” he said. “We can’t just rehash what we’ve known to date.” He understands that if he fails to make news or to tell the story in a way that is comprehensible and compelling enough to arouse Americans to demand action, Wall Street and Washington will both keep moving on, unchallenged and unchastened.
Angelides gets it. But he has a tough act to follow: Ferdinand Pecora, the legendary prosecutor who served as chief counsel to the Senate committee that investigated the 1929 crash as F.D.R. took office. Pecora was a master of detail and drama. He riveted America even without the aid of television. His investigation led to indictments, jail sentences and, ultimately, key New Deal reforms — the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Glass-Steagall Act, designed to prevent the formation of banks too big to fail.
As it happened, a major Pecora target was the chief executive of National City Bank, the institution that would grow up to be Citigroup. Among other transgressions, National City had repackaged bad Latin American debt as new securities that it then sold to easily suckered investors during the frenzied 1920s boom. Once disaster struck, the bank’s executives helped themselves to millions of dollars in interest-free loans. Yet their own employees had to keep ponying up salary deductions for decimated National City stock purchased at a heady precrash price.
Trade bad Latin American debt for bad mortgage debt, and you have a partial portrait of Citigroup at the height of the housing bubble. The reckless Citi executives of our day may not have given themselves interest-free loans, but they often walked away with the short-term, illusionary profits while their employees were left with shredded jobs and 401(k)’s. Among those Citi executives was Robert Rubin, who, as the Clinton Treasury secretary, helped repeal the last vestiges of Glass-Steagall after years of Wall Street assault. Somewhere Pecora is turning in his grave
Rubin has never apologized, let alone been held accountable. But he’s hardly alone. Even after all the country has gone through, the titans who fueled the bubble are heedless. In last Sunday’s Times, Sandy Weill, the former chief executive who built Citigroup (and recruited Rubin to its ranks), gave a remarkable interview to Katrina Brooker blaming his own hand-picked successor, Charles Prince, for his bank’s implosion. Weill said he preferred to be remembered for his philanthropy. Good luck with that.
Among his causes is Carnegie Hall, where he is chairman of the board. To see how far American capitalism has fallen, contrast Weill with the giant who built Carnegie Hall. Not only is Andrew Carnegie remembered for far more epic and generous philanthropy than Weill’s — some 1,600 public libraries, just for starters — but also for creating a steel empire that actually helped build America’s industrial infrastructure in the late 19th century. At Citi, Weill built little more than a bloated gambling casino. As Paul Volcker, the regrettably powerless chairman of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, said recently, there is not “one shred of neutral evidence” that any financial innovation of the past 20 years has led to economic growth. Citi, that “innovative” banking supermarket, destroyed far more wealth than Weill can or will ever give away.
Even now — despite its near-death experience, despite the departures of Weill, Prince and Rubin — Citi remains as imperious as it was before 9/15. Its current chairman, Richard Parsons, was one of three executives (along with Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs and John Mack of Morgan Stanley) who failed to show up at the mid-December White House meeting where President Obama implored bankers to increase lending. (The trio blamed fog for forcing them to participate by speakerphone, but the weather hadn’t grounded their peers or Amtrak.) Last week, ABC World News was also stiffed by Citi, which refused to answer questions about its latest round of outrageous credit card rate increases and instead e-mailed a statement blaming its customers for “not paying back their loans.” This from a bank that still owes taxpayers $25 billion of its $45 billion handout!
If Citi, among the most egregious of Wall Street reprobates, feels it can get away with business as usual, it’s because it fears no retribution. And it got more good news last week. Now that Chris Dodd is vacating the Senate, his chairmanship of the Banking Committee may fall next year to Tim Johnson of South Dakota, home to Citi’s credit card operation. Johnson was the only Senate Democrat to vote against Congress’s recent bill policing credit card abuses.
Though bad history shows every sign of repeating itself on Wall Street, it will take a near-miracle for Angelides to repeat Pecora’s triumph. Our zoo of financial skullduggery is far more complex, with many more moving pieces, than that of the 1920s. The new inquiry does have subpoena power, but its entire budget, a mere $8 million, doesn’t even match the lobbyingexpenditures for just three banks (Citi, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America) in the first nine months of 2009. The firms under scrutiny can pay for as many lawyers as they need to stall between now and Dec. 15, deadline day for the commission’s report.
More daunting still is the inquiry’s duty to reach into high places in the public sector as well as the private. The mystery of exactly what happened as TARP fell into place in the fateful fall of 2008 thickens by the day — especially the behind-closed-door machinations surrounding the government rescue of A.I.G. and its counterparties. Last week, a Republican congressman, Darrell Issa of California, released e-mail showing that officials at the New York Fed, then led by Timothy Geithner, pressured A.I.G. to delay disclosing to the S.E.C. and the public the details on the billions of bailout dollars it was funneling to its trading partners. In this backdoor rescue, taxpayers unknowingly awarded banks like Goldman 100 cents on the dollar for their bets on mortgage-backed securities.
Why was our money used to make these high-flying gamblers whole while ordinary Americans received no such beneficence? Nothing less than complete transparency will connect the dots. Among the big-name witnesses that the Angelides commission has called for next week is Goldman’s Blankfein. Geithner, Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke should be next.
If they all skate away yet again by deflecting blame or mouthing pro forma mea culpas, it will be a sign that this inquiry, like so many other promises of reform since 9/15, is likely to leave Wall Street’s status quo largely intact. That’s the ticking-bomb scenario that truly imperils us all.
The United States must come to the conclusion that the international monetary financier system is finished.
Unsustainable usury and speculation in every financial transaction, fostering irrational, unreasonable, unconditional, unlimited financial support from the Fed, guaranteed by the faith and produce of the United States, means that the system can not be fixed, regulated, resuscitated, bailed-out, etc. There is simply not enough money that can be created to satisfy the usury, created from fantastical financial products and maneuvers.
All fact-less rhetoric, verbiage, articles, causes, distractions, etc are compounding the destruction to the population's physical economy.
Statecraft demands the termination of the monetary system: put the Fed into bankruptcy protection, recover the bailout trillions, banks that qualify will join the U.S. National Bank under Glass-Steagall standards. Credits and currency will be issued into the population's economy with the executive of creating, improving, and expanding the necessary facilities that enhance our standard of living.
We have never appreciated the accomplishments of this great nation; we are about to lose it all.
Congress must drop the petty passions that foster derision of government and treason; must discover priorities in the order and defense of the nation.
The United States is the Only Cause that will serve humanity; any other cause, issue, agenda, reorientation, etc. is treason.
If Geithner and Summers as well as the refusal to audit the federal reserve does not prove there is no difference between republican and democratic members of congress I do not know what will.
We all seem to like our personal 3 reps in congress but seem to hate everyone else's.
We must start voting out the incumbents every election. At a minimum run someone against them in the primaries in order to remind them of who they work for.. As of now every congressman works for the corporations.
Can any of us say congress is representing the people in any aspect from the military to health care.
(When I read the military is buying rucksacks with their own money because the plastic govt issue does not get the job done (democratic rule and the military did not have the plating on their vehicles necessary to prevent bullets and many IEDs (republican rule)) and I doubt if anyone understands how the health-care bill will affect us. History proves that the majority of laws congress passes costs us more money. Personally I cannot think of any legislation ever passed that saved the regular Joe any money.
We all talk reform and congress only gives us lip service. Must be a great job.
Until we get
donations limited to congressional districts and no money from business or pacs
The World Health Organization (WHO) proclaims itself to be an agency that “is responsible for providing leadership on global health matters, shaping the health research agenda, setting norms and standards, articulating evidence-based policy options, providing technical support to countries and monitoring and assessing health trends.” If this is the kind of leadership they offer, you should run the other direction! The more than 6.3 million Euros (equating to over 9 million American dollars) the WHO’s research center received from GlaxoSmithKline represents the vaccine program’s number one income source. To which they respond, “We are aware that there appears to be a conflict interest.” NO KIDDING. And this is on the heels of a major WHO scandal involving accusations by Austrian journalist Jane Burgermeister that the WHO conspired with Baxter International (a vaccine manufacturer) and the United Nations to produce and release live bird flu virus in 2009, in an effort to trigger a pandemic. Burgermeister has accused them of “planning to commit mass murder.”
WHO’S Who in Government Corruption
As the Flu Case article states, this financial conflict of interest is not an isolated incident with one researcher—the following list of WHO researchers, reported to have financial ties to Big Pharma, suggests a more systemic corruption:
Dr. Peter Figueroa, Professor in the Department of Community Health and Psychiatry in Jamaica, has received money from Merck
Dr. Neil Ferguson has received funding from Baxter, GlaxoSmithKline, and Roche, as well as from some insurance companies
Professor Malik Peiris in Hong Kong has received money from Baxter GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi Pasteur
Dr. Arnold Monto, advisor to Chiron, GlaxoSmithKline, MedImmune, Roche, Novartis, Baxter and Sanofi Pasteur, has received funding from same
Dr. Friedrich Hayden, consultant to MedImmune and Sanofi Pasteur, received money from those companies, in addition to Roche, RW Johnson, and SmithKline Beecham
Introducing Dr. Flu
And then there is Dr. Albert Osterhaus, nicknamed “Dr. Flu” because he is head of the European Scientists Fighting Influenza within the WHO. Dr. Osterhaus is a Dutch physician who has been very active in promoting mass vaccination through WHO and the Western media[i]. The government of the Netherlands is currently conducting an emergency investigation into the activities of “Dr. Flu” since it was recently discovered that he has been receiving a salary from several swine flu vaccine companies. Dr. Osterhaus has received funding from Baxter, Crucell, Novartis, Hoffman-La Roche, MedImmune, Nobilon, Sanofi Pasteur, MSD, GlaxoSmithKline, and Solvay. The WHO is in the powerful position of reviewing and making vaccine recommendations to the world. Tom Jefferson, professor of epidemiology at the Cochrane Center in Rome, aptly states:
“It is disturbing that many of the scientists who sit on various committees of WHO, are presented as ‘independent experts’, but they carefully conceal the fact that they receive money from pharmaceutical companies.”
Dr. Jefferson goes on to tell reporters:
“The WHO is biased in their recommendations. Normal hygiene measures provide much greater effect than these little-studied vaccines, and at the same time WHO refers to the use of masks and hand-washing as a means to combat swine flu only twice in their documents. Vaccines and other medications are referred to 42 times!”
But hand washing never made anyone wealthy. Dr. Jefferson and several of his colleagues believe that paid advisers of the pharmaceutical companies should be removed from their positions and not allowed to give recommendations to the WHO. I couldn’t agree more. But the organization itself is in no hurry to carry out such reform.
The Evil Geniuses of Big Pharma
The WHO is not unique in its vulnerability to the influence of Big Pharma. Washington teems with a thousand industrial lobbyists. They cluster around the band of luxury offices and expensive restaurants that stretches from the White House to the Capitol building--a two-mile axis along which money and power are constantly traded. In this pantheon of corporate muscle, no industry wields as much power as the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association (PhRMA), a pressure group renowned for its deep pockets and aggression, even by the standards of U.S. politics. There is also a perpetual revolving door between government and the pharmaceutical industry—more and more key government positions are filled with people living “double-lives” with drug/healthcare companies:
President Obama’s nominee at the Department of Homeland Security overseeing bioterrorism defense, Dr. Tara O’Toole, has served as a key advisor for a lobbying group funded by a pharmaceutical company that has asked the government to spend more money for anthrax vaccines and biodefense research[ii].
Tom Daschle—the former Democratic senator from South Dakota and Senate Majority Leader—who was President Obama’s first pick for secretary of health and human services. Daschle’s work included being a paid advisor for a lobbying law firm that earned $16 million representing some of the healthcare industry’s most powerful interests.Of course, as you might recall, this nomination didn’t fly.
Senior Advisor David Axelrod is accused of collecting big money from Big Pharma to pass healthcare reform by way of his former partners at a Chicago-based firm called AKPD Message and Media. In fact, he founded the firm, and his son is still employed there.[iii]
These are but a few examples—there are many more to be found. To quote Democratic congressman Sherrod Brown:
“The PhRMA doesn’t need to lobby. The industry is in the While House already.”
Drug giants not only specialize in influencing government officials, but they also have the ordinary physician in their grips. The practice by drug companies of lavishing gifts upon doctors—far beyond pens and mugs—including exclusive vacations, “consulting” agreements that involve little work and other freebies—is gaining increased scrutiny and disapproval in the public’s eye. Even more quietly, another practice is growing in popularity. This devious ploy involves private-practice physicians setting up tax-exempt charities, which then receive major donations—to the tune of millions of dollars a year—from drug companies and medical device makers. The “charities” then typically conduct medical research or education, which the physicians behind them promote as being legitimate. Increasingly, Big Pharma spends billions to influence what doctors see, read and hear, often persuading them to prescribe more drugs, just as it spends billions to taint researchers’ decision-making process. A national survey of physicians published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007, well-known and often quoted, found that 94 percent of physicians have a “relationship” with the pharmaceutical, medical device, or other related industries. This massive conflict of interest has prompted Senators Chuck Grassley and Herb Kohl to introduce a bill called the Physician Payment Sunshine Act, which would require physicians to report annually to the government all payments over $100, beginning in 2010, and that information would be made available to the public.
What’s the Cost of Pushing Pills These Days?
Exactly how much does the pharmaceutical industry spend to push its products? A study in 2008[iv] endeavored to measure those costs, and the results are staggering. They calculated that Big Pharma spends almost twice as much on promotionas they spend on research and development:
The industry spent $57.5 billion on marketing and promotion in 2004. (This estimate far exceeds the $20 billion estimated by the research firm called Integrated Medical Systems (IMS), which is most often quoted.)
The amount spent on research and development pales in comparison, at $31.5 billion.
Add to that what the industry spends in lobbying, and it adds up to a mind-numbing figure. These numbers clearly demonstrate the need for redirecting the priorities of the industry toward more research and less marketing, besides the need for quashing the greed and corruption that run so rampant within it.
“Trust Allah, But Tie Up Your Camel”
Until the umbilical cord between Big Pharma and the government is cut, healthcare/health policy reform will remain a dream. Until then, take what your government and your physician tell you with a grain of salt. Trust but verify. Remain proactive, educating yourself on these issues rather than simply believing the press releases that are reiterated a hundred times on every cable channel. With respect to the swine flu, I recommend spending a little time reviewing the vast supply of information available on the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) site, if you haven’t already done so.
By any metric you choose, whether it's the median home costing half the median income even at artificially low interest rates, to the ballooning cost of insurance, healthcare, education or anything else people spend their money on, the US is experiencing a rapid decline in the standard of living for ordinary Americans and an emerging ultra rich ultra powerful shadow oligarch rule amid a generalized and widespread financial and social decay. The US population is becoming a nation of voiceless serfs with fewer and fewer remaining civil and property rights and a rapidly decaying standard of living, the antitheses of everything America is said to represent and strive for.
The hypocrisy and fraud of the oligarch rule corporate media story line is now nearly impossible for an educated, informed adult to digest. As Jim Grant pointed out recently, according to Section 19 of the Coinage Act of 1792, the penalty prescribed for any official who fraudulently debased the people's money is death, yet in 2009 debasing the people's money resulted in a "man of the year" award from the self serving corporate media who will be next in line for a bailout from the people for their good service to the new oligarch rule. This organized crime, this theft, occurring right out in the open, may explain why employees of the largest US financial institution are now not allowed to gather in groups larger than 12 outside and their executives are carrying firearms. In an affront to the intelligence and sensibility of any citizen of this planet, the new US president expanded a war he was elected to end and started a new frontier in Pakistan, for that he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. The people who were awarded hundreds of billions of dollars of the people's money because they lost all their money are skimming millions and billions off the top for themselves and their associates in what they call "bonuses". 2009 has been a year of egregious assault on the American public by the people in charge.
The "people's representatives" as they like to be called, no longer represent the people at all but instead solely represent and pledge allegiance to the special interests and corporate lobbyists who have bought and paid for their votes, along with the media oligarchs who control who sits in the seats. Regardless of whether they call themselves Democrats or Republicans, they are a group of self important, self serving, morally bankrupt, corrupt, clueless buffoons and criminals running unchecked by a complicit corporate media.
Every American should be ashamed, embarrassed and sad that their country has been bought and sold to an organized criminal enterprise which includes the entire political body and the media. The only thing the "people's representatives" have in common is contempt for the people they are ostensibly representing. It is revolting for any American to watch these cretins heaping praise on Ben Bernanke at the congressional theater of the absurd. His institution has already debased the dollar by 95% and failed miserably in every mandate they had since they took over in 1913. If any American has managed to retain or save any money, he can now put it on deposit in their banking system and earn a negative real return (a loss of his purchasing power) while at the same time the banks will take his deposit and loan it to his brother at 30% interest. So Mr Bernanke the money printer has control over the largest legal loan sharking operation ever concocted and it is funded by the America people, against the America people.
During 2009, the leadership has taken actions which benefit the corporations and special interests who own them, while showing nothing but wanton disregard for the millions of citizens whose lives their sponsors have destroyed. What we are headed towards in the US if we are not there already, is a Straussian society of ultra rich, ultra powerful oligarchs and a serfish powerless population with no middle class to speak of. The US president De Jour is, and from here on out will be a yes man, subservient to the ultra powerful too big to fail oligarchs who control the money and power and are responsible for putting him in the drivers seat. This is not compatible whatsoever with prosperity, democracy or anything else the US still holds itself out as. Here at the end of 2009, the United States has morphed into a bankrupt fascist oligarchy which owns the military machine as a policy enforcement tool, the entire political body and the media. It isn't going to fix itself because the fraud, corruption and malfeasance is systemic. It meets every definition of organized crime and it's all happening right out in the open.
In my way of thinking, this is not at all unlike the breakdown of the Soviet Union where for a period of time a sort of mafia of oligarchs weilded the wealth and power, carved up the remaining wealth of the country among themselves and had their way with the country amid a climate of manufactured fear, chaos and decay. The key point being that the people in control are out to make money and increase their power at the expense of the citizens. Mr Orwell said "the purpose of power is power" and that statement needs to be well understood. These megalomaniac, sociopathic aspirations of ever more power and control by an elitist group of criminals come at the expense of America and future Americans. It doesn't matter whatsoever to the oligarchs because they have property waiting in Croatia. When the remaining wealth has been extracted from America, they will all pull out and the citizens will be left with a rusted out bankrupt hull. I believe the circumstances for this eventuality have already been created, just not yet realized due to the enormous size of the economy and the momentum it has. In other words, I believe it's collapsing as fast as it can although living through it seems like slow motion. When viewed from the future in a historical context however, I think it will have seemed fairly rapid.
The financial markets have deteriorated into a Las Vegas casino atmosphere where the the only consistent winners are the house and the too big to fail entities trading on foreknowledge and inside information shared freely between the treasury and the few remaining large trading houses. The entire system is bankrupt, fraudulent, corrupt and irretrievably broken. The anchor of the global financial system, the US dollar, has become the worlds largest ponzi scheme and the remaining 95% of the worlds population would like a new, viable standard. At this point however, despite any action the FED may or may not take, the US debt is far too large to ever be repaid. It is questionable if the interest payments will even be serviceable if interest rates were to rise, and the only reason interest rates are low is because the FED is using brute force. At this time the only way out without a complete collapse is to inflate away the debt, thus turning a deflationary collapse into a long period of inflationary decay and declining standard of living.
I have been of the opinion that what we saw in October 2008 was a collapse of the global fiat financial system which was more or less expected due to the collapse of the real estatebubble. I have reminded my subscribers that when I was forecasting a drop in real estate prices of as much as 50% during the heyday of the mania, that sounded unfathomable. What I believe is in store for our future sounds nearly as unfathomable now as that idea did back then. I believe the reason it sounds unfathomable is due to the constant barrage of lies, misinformation and propaganda from the tight knit corporate media oligarchy which has essentially merged with the new power structure of the US in a corrupt, overt form of fascism that would make Mussolini blush or Goebbels the propagandist nod in approval.
Over a period of decades and with one FED induced serial bubble after another, the financial system finally reached an unsustainable level of debt and leverage in 2008. When the FED started raising interest rates, when the real estate bubble burst, it involved so much debt and leverage that the whole system failed, pricing models and risk models failed, and the banking system quickly became insolvent.
I believe we have already had a systemic collapse, and the only thing the FED can do now is alter the look and feel of the collapse and to manage the allocation of the remaining wealth. In the end, whether by deflationary collapse or inflationary decay, the result of the collapse will feel the same to the US general population regardless of the interim path taken.
If the FED had done nothing, the whole system would have quickly degenerated into a deflationary collapse and failure of the financial system due to insolvency. The course the FED chose however is the one myself and many others predicted beforehand...the FED chose to solve the problem of too much debt by creating even more debt by taking the unprecedented action of buying it's own debt under euphemisms like "quantitative easing" and "debt monetization" and also covert buying to artificially force negative real return rates of interest. Through this course of action, the FED so far has been able to turn what would have been a rapid deflationary collapse into a decaying inflationary depression which is euphemistically called "a recession that is now over" by the six people who control 96% of the global media and attempt to pass off propaganda as "news" to a woefully mis informed, dumbed down and apathetic general public.
Going forward, If the FED doesn't buy enough of their own debt, then interest rates on the long end would rise and the risk becomes a deflationary collapse into insolvency for the FED and it's banking system. If interest rates remain effectively at zero on the short end and artificially suppressed by quantitative easing on the long end, then the real estate market can recover and the banks can regain solvency. If interest rates rise as the free markets would argue for however, then the real estate market sinks even further, the US dollar rises, and greater insolvency of the banks follows. The higher interest rates go, the thinner the knife edge gets and the FED would quickly find itself staring into another October 2008 collapse kind of situation. On the other hand, if by buying enough of their own debt they can keep short and long term interest rates down, then the free money percolates through the banking system, puts pressure on the dollar, lifts commodity and real estate prices and pulls out of the collapse via inflating away the debt so long as they can avoid run away hyperinflation in the process. This is the path we have traveled throughout 2009.
The key point is that the FED has had the option of doing two things...creating even more debt in order to save itself and the banking system, or do nothing and watch themselves collapse into a mass of failure, loss of power and control, insolvency and domino style bankruptcy and default. They have chosen the expected course, which is to increase the debt and print money, which is the way they save themselves and their banking system. In short, given a choice between saving the people and saving themselves after a collapse, they have taken the expected course which is to attempt to save themselves. What else would you expect? If they had wanted to save the people they would have taken the peoples bailout money and handed it to them in the form of a check. Instead they handed it to the banks.
Although they have been somewhat successful in reducing the insolvency of the banking system, they have effectively created a giant wealth transfer mechanism whereby all the money that disappeared in the collapse was re created out of thin air and given to the banks and wall street. I think of it as a sort of shell game. The money disappeared from Mom and Pop's 401k and re appeared on the balance sheets of the banks via freshly created new money (debt). As a result, we have something still called "free market capitalism" which is not free market capitalism at all. We have emerged from this crisis with a sort of financial oligarchy where a few entities who control all the wealth and power also control politics and media. Understanding this will help to understand issues like "healthcare reform" which will involve you paying more and getting less, with the primary beneficiaries being the oligarchies who control health care and insurance.
The one major point I have to make at this time is throughout 2009, there was no action taken that put the average citizen in a better position, but instead during the course of the year there was a gigantic wealth transfer from the citizens to the banking system, effectively orchestrated by the so called "people's representatives" who are in fact, all owned by the banking system and Wall Street with half a dozen or so oligarchies and lobbyists in a public display of fraud, malfeasance and corruption that sets a new historical precedent.
I have been and remain of the opinion that the ultimate "solution" to this crisis will be for the entities who now control the wealth and power to accumulate even more wealth and power via a global central bank and global currency which now for the first time in public has been discussed on and off throughout 2009 and described as the New World Order by such luminaries as Henry Kissinger. So looking out beyond 2010, I see a new global reserve currency emerging and a global central bank which will effectively also be a global governing authority where the heads of state effectively report to the group of central bankers and their anonymous shareholders who effectively control the money, power and politicians on a global scale. When the global currency is introduced, only then do I expect a sort of collapse of the US dollar versus this global currency. In this way, the world can carry on while the former global reserve currency called the US dollar will be free to depreciate to a level where solvency is regained and the now unpayable US debt is inflated away to the point where it can be repaid in depreciated dollars. US citizens will experience a continued decay as the US becomes to resemble more and more, a third world country. Detroit is already there. The corporate media won't show it to you but if you do a youtube search on Detroit what you see will shock you.
My view of the world tends to be the long view. Throughout 2009 I have been positioned and trading in various hard assets including but not limited to gold silver, back month crude oil, Soybeans, raw land and Americana. I own and trade some Chinese shares but no US equities or bonds. I have lost confidence in the US leadership. I have lost confidence in the fairness of the "system" where some elite entities are free to keep the profits and nationalize their losses. I have opted to opt out by embarking on a long term effort to transfer more and more capital "off wall street" and their organized crime ring they call the banking system, and instead investing in things without fraudulent or impaired balance sheets. At some point in the future, I want to be short US 10 and 30 year bonds because it is nonsensical to me that anyone would be willing to loan a bankrupt country money for 30 years at an interest rate of 4% or so. The only reason this situation exists today is due to the FED monetizing debt and attempting to manipulate the long end using brute force.
So as we head off into 2010, I see a lot of uncertainty in the short term. If interest rates rise and the US dollar gets stronger, by mid year I would expect a repeat of October 2008. What I expect to happen over the longer term however is that the FED will ultimately print enough money to attempt to slowly inflate the debt away to a manageable amount amid a generalized and severe decay in terms of the standard of living for Average Americans. At some point along the line, I expect the world reserve currency role to be moved into a global currency and for the US dollar to be allowed to float against it without the benefits associated with the world currency role, and for the US standard of living to continue to decline and eventually decay into a societal collapse followed by something different. I expect China to emerge as the dominant economic power in the world and to purchase a large amount of US assets. Somewhere along the line I also expect the Nobel Peace Prize recipient to bomb Iran because he will be ordered to do so by the people who control the money.
Personally, based on what I see coming over the long term I have elected to forego city life and have embarked on a long term project in the picturesque Appalachian foothills in an effort to increase my degree of self sufficiency and insulate myself from the continued decay and declining standard of living sweeping the country. My long view for the US is high inflation which will not show up in the government's fraudulent statistics, along with a declining standard of living, increasing decay and ultimately leading to chaos, societal and government collapse in the US within a decade or two, maybe sooner.
I would like to end by quoting Marc Faber with one of the most compelling quotes of 2009. I find this quote compelling because the price of anything as measured by a fraudulent standard is meaningless. To me, it is a gift to be able to still exchange US dollars for anything with real value.
"I am a home grown American citizen, 47, registered Democrat all my life. Before the last presidential election I registered as a Republican because I no longer felt the Democratic Party represents my views or works to pursue issues important to me. Now I no longer feel the Republican Party represents my views or works to pursue issues important to me. The fact is I no longer feel anypolitical party or representative in Washington represents my views or works to pursue the issues important to me. Instead, we are burdened with Congressional Dukes and Duchesses who think they know better than the citizens they are supposed to represent.
There must be someone. Please tell me who you are. Please stand up and tell me that you are there and that you're willing to fight for our Constitution as it was written. Please stand up now. You might ask yourself what my views and issues are that I would feel so horribly disenfranchised by both major political parties. What kind of nut-job am I? Well, these briefly are the views and issues for which I seek representation:
One: illegal immigration. I want you to stop coddling illegal immigrants and secure our borders. Close the underground tunnels. Stop the violence and the trafficking in drugs and people. No amnesty, not again. Been there, done that, no resolution. P.S., I'm not a racist. This is not to be confused with legal immigration.
Two: the STIMULUS bill.I want it repealed and I want no further funding supplied to it. We told you No, but you did it anyway. I want the remaining unfunded 95% repealed. Freeze, repeal.
Three: Czars. I want the circumvention of our constitutional checks and balances stopped immediately. Fire the czars. No more czars. Government officials answer to the process, not to the president. Stop trampling on our Constitution, and honor it.
Four: cap and trade. The debate on global warming is not over. There are many conflicting opinions and it is too soon for this radical legislation. Quit throwing our nation into politically-correct quicksand.
Five: universal healthcare. I will not be rushed into another expensive decision that will burden me, my children, and grandchildren. Don't you dare try to pass this in the middle of the night without even reading it. Slow down! Fix only what is broken -- we have the best health care system in the world -- and test any new program in one or two states first.
Six: growing government control. I want states rights and sovereignty fully restored. I want less government in my life, not more. More is not better! Shrink it down. Mind your own business. You have enough to take care of with your real [Constitutional] obligations. Why don't you start there.
Seven: ACORN. I do not want ACORN and its affiliates in charge of our 2010 census. I want them investigated. I also do not want mandatory escrow feescontributed to them every time on every real estate deal that closes -- how did they pull that one off? Stop the funding to ACORN and its affiliates pending impartial audits and investigations. I do not trust them with taking the census with our taxpayer money. I don't trust them with any of our taxpayer money. Face up to the allegations against them and get it resolved before taxpayers get any more involved with them. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, hello. Stop protecting your political buddies. You work for us, the people. Investigate.
Eight: redistribution of wealth. No, no, no. I work for my money. It is mine. I have always worked for people with more money than I have because they gave me jobs -- and that is the only redistribution of wealth that I will support. I never got a job from a poor person! Why do you want me to hate my employers? And what do you have against shareholders making a profit?
Nine: charitable contributions. Although I never got a job from a poor person, I have helped many in need. Charity belongs in our local communities, where we know our needs best and can use our local talent and our local resources. Butt out, please. We want to do it ourselves.
Ten: corporate bailouts.Knock it off. Every company must sink or swim like the rest of us. If there are hard times ahead, we'll be better off just getting into it and letting the strong survive. Quick and painful. (Have you ever ripped off a Band-Aid?) We will pull together. Great things happen in America under great hardship. Give us the chance to innovate. We cannot disappoint you more than you have disappointed us.
Eleven: transparency and accountability. How about it? No, really, how about it? Let's have it. Let's say we give the buzzwords a rest and have some straight honest talk. Please stop trying to manipulate and appease me with clever wording. I am not the idiot you obviously take me for. Stop sneaking around and meeting in back rooms making deals with your friends. It will only be a prelude to your criminal investigation. Stop hiding things from me.
Twelve: unprecedented quick spending. Stop it now. Take a breath. Listen to the people. Slow down and get some input from non-politicians and experts on the subject. Stop making everything an emergency. Stop speed-reading our bills into law. I am not an activist. I am not a community organizer. Nor am I a terrorist, a militant or a violent person. I am a parent and a grandparent. I work. I'm busy. I am busy, and I am tired. I thought we elected competent people to take care of the business of government so that we could work, raise our families, pay our bills, have a little recreation, complain about taxes, endure our hardships, pursue our personal goals, cut our lawn, wash our cars on the weekends and be responsible contributing members of society and teach our children to be the same all while living in the home of the free and land of the brave.
Take some of the Goldman bonus money back from those thieves, that would be a really good place to start!
I entrusted you with upholding the Constitution. I believed in the checks and balances to keep from getting far off course. What happened? You are very far off course. Do you really think I find humor in the hiring of a speed reader to unintelligibly ramble all through a bill that you signed into law without knowing what it contained? I do not. It is a mockery of the responsibility I have entrusted to you. It is a slap in the face. I am not laughing at your arrogance. Why is it that I feel as if you would not trust me to make a single decision about my own life and how I would live it but you should expect that I should trust you with the debt that you have laid on all of us and our children. We did not want the TARP bill. We said no. We would repeal it if we could. I am sure that we still cannot. There is needless urgency and recklessness in all of your recent spending of our tax dollars.
From my perspective, it seems that all of you have gone insane. I also know that I am far from alone in these feelings. Do you honestly feel that your current pursuits have merit to patriotic Americans? We want it to stop. We want to put the brakes on everything that is being rushed by us and forced upon us. We want our voice back. You have forced us to put our lives on hold to straighten out the mess that you are making. We will have to give up our vacations, our time spent with our children, any relaxation time we may have had and money we cannot afford to spend on bringing our concerns to Washington . We don't want your overpriced words. Stop treating us like we're morons.
We want all of you to stop focusing on your reelection and do the job we want done, not the job you want done or the job your party wants done. You work for us and at this rate I guarantee you not for long because we are coming. We will be heard and we will be represented.. We are the formerly silent majority, all of us who quietly work, pay taxes, obey the law, vote, save money, keep our noses to the grindstone... and we are now looking at you. You have pushed us too far. Our numbers are great. They may surprise you. For every one of us who will be there, there will be hundreds more that could not come. Unlike you, we have their trust. We will represent them honestly, rest assured. They will be at the polls on voting day to usher you out of office. We will use our last few dollars saved. We will find the representation among us and a grassroots campaign will flourish. We didn't ask for this fight. But the gloves are coming off. We do not come in violence, but we are angry. You will represent us or you will be replaced with someone who will.
