Congresswoman Kaptur skewers jackass Paulson.

I was reading another excellent Dakinikat post at Riverdaughter’s Place.  As I was checking out the comments I found this video which was posted by WomanVoter and wanted to share it.  How in the hell did he get away with it?

The Federal Reserve Is Under Fire

Barack Obama equals Bush’s Third Term h/t simofish

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the 2008 Bilderberg Meeting by enicks

This was written in JUNE 2008 -  it explains what is happening now and who is behind it.  The links are worth reading too, as they were written by none other than Tim Geithner i.e. Obamas pick for Treasury Secretary!

 

Fresh off of the 2008 Bilderberg Meeting, it looks as if New York Federal Reserve president Timothy Geithner is set to push a new agenda in the world of central banking that was likely decided upon at Bilderberg. Geithner yesterday, wrote an article in the Financial Times calling for a global regulatory banking framework. In addition, Geithner called for the Federal Reserve to have an instrumental role in this new framework. Geithner cites all of the problems that were actually created by the central bankers in the first place as the rationale for having greater centralized power. It is interesting Geithner decides to write this piece right after the Bilderberg Meeting where some of the most powerful figures in the world of central banking attended. Not only did Geithner attend, but the attendee list included Ben Bernanke the Federal Reserve Chairman, Henry Paulson the U.S. Treasury Secretary, Jean-Claude Trichet the president of the European Central Bank, Robert Zoellick the president of the World Bank and other high profile bankers. With the who’s who of central banking attending the Bilderberg Meeting, it is highly unlikely that what Geithner is proposing in his Financial Times article was not discussed at the Bilderberg Meeting. It is no secret that the true objective of the Bilderberg Meeting is to steer the world into accepting a global government. By establishing a new global regulatory banking framework, this will inch the planet ever closer to a one world currency operating in a cashless society where microchips are used to facilitate transactions. Make no mistake about it, this system will not be good, because it will be controlled by a bunch of criminal psychopaths like the one’s who attended the 2008 Bilderberg Meeting.

In his Financial Times article, Geithner wrote the following:

The institutions that play a central role in money and funding markets – including the main globally active banks and investment banks – need to operate under a unified framework that provides a stronger form of consolidated supervision, with appropriate requirements for capital and liquidity. To complement this, we need to put in place a stronger framework of oversight authority over the critical parts of the payments system – not just the established payments, clearing and settlements systems, but the infrastructure that underpins the decentralised over-the-counter markets.

Because of its primary responsibility for the stability of the overall financial system, the Federal Reserve should play a central role in such a framework, working closely with supervisors in the US and in other countries. At present the Fed has broad responsibility for financial stability not matched by direct authority and the consequences of the actions we have taken in this crisis make it more important that we close that gap.

Finally, we need a stronger capacity to respond to crises. The Fed has put in place a number of innovative new facilities that have helped ease liquidity strains. We plan to leave these in place until conditions in money and credit markets have improved substantially.

What Geithner is proposing is entirely insane but this is the same tactic that the financial elites used to establish the Federal Reserve back in 1913. They created a crisis and said that the crisis happened because they didn’t have enough power to prevent it. The Panic of 1907 which was used to justify the passage of the Federal Reserve Act was actually caused by JP Morgan and assorted elite financial interests. They did this so they could use the crisis as an excuse to centralize their control and power over the banking system. Through the Federal Reserve, banks were finally consolidated under its umbrella through the Great Depression which was deliberately caused by the tight monetary policies implemented by the central bank. Throughout the 1920s money was made plentiful, but following the stock market crash of 1929, the Federal Reserve tightened the money supply which put hundreds of community banks out of business and allowed the central bankers to consolidate control over the nation’s banking system.

Geithner is using the excuse of the current financial crisis that was caused by the Federal Reserve and the world’s assorted central banks in order to again consolidate more power for the banking cartel. It is simply history repeating itself, only this time it is on a much larger scale.

• Below is another blurb taken from Geithner’s Financial Times piece:

Since last summer, we have lived through a severe and complex financial crisis. Why was the financial system so fragile? What can be done to make the system more resilient in the future?

The world experienced a financial boom. The boom fed demand for risk. Products were created to meet that demand, including risky, complicated mortgages. Many assets were financed with significant leverage and liquidity risk and many of the world’s largest financial institutions got themselves too exposed to the risk of a global downturn. The amount of long-term illiquid assets financed with short-term liabilities made the system vulnerable to a classic type of run. As concern about risk increased, investors pulled back, triggering a self-reinforcing cycle of forced liquidation of assets, higher margin requirements, increased volatility.

What Geithner doesn’t say in his article is that the current global financial crisis was caused by the Federal Reserve and the world’s various central banks. Alan Greenspan intentionally set interest rates at incredibly low levels after the 9/11 attacks. This encouraged lenders to lend out money using all sorts of creative financing packages. It also encouraged borrowers to borrow money from the lenders because of the cheaper money. These policies lead to the continued devaluation of the U.S. Dollar and the U.S. housing crisis which have been the main drivers behind most of the economic problems we are currently seeing.

Geithner wants us to believe that giving the Federal Reserve and the rest of this private banking system more power is what’s needed to resolve all of the economic problems that were caused by the central bankers themselves. How stupid does Geithner and the rest of the global elite think we are? We have a historical track record of central bankers creating economic problems and bringing in phony solutions to expand their control. We need decentralization and free markets to resolve the economic problems that have been created by these people, not more centralized power.

If all of this wasn’t bad enough, Jim Tucker from the American Free Press speaking on the Alex Jones show today stated that one of his Bilderberg sources revealed to him that the global elite are planning to push forward their cashless society grid agenda with the use of implantable microchips. The implantable microchips would be sold as a way for people to easily move through the militarized control grid that they’ve setup via the bogus terror war. Tucker also mentioned that we would see the media hyping the phony terror war and specifically the phony “white Al-Qaeda terror threat” as a way for them to continue the justification of the enslavement grid. Assuming Tucker’s Bilderberg source is providing accurate information, this agenda that Geithner is pushing in his Financial Times article is right in line with their well documented plans to get rid of cash. The central bankers would need a global regulatory framework for the banking system so they can move closer to a global currency operating in a cashless society.

This is some incredibly scary stuff. Of course there was not one word of the 2008 Bilderberg Meeting in any major U.S. media outlets. The corporate controlled media maintained a blackout on any coverage of this incredibly important yearly meeting of the global elite. It is pathetic when citizen journalists like the ones at InfoWars, PrisonPlanet and RogueGovernment provide the best coverage of what is one of the most important geopolitical meetings of the year. Either way, the commentary from Geithner as well as the information from Tucker’s Bilderberg source seems to indicate that the global elite are getting ready to further centralize the banking system in order to establish their one world cashless society grid. These criminals must be exposed and their system of global corruption and tyranny must be defeated. Let’s tell these bastards that they can take their cashless society grid and their implantable microchips where the sun don’t shine.

 

This is an excellent video – remember “who” the Federal Reserve is and what role they are playing in the situation we currently find ourselves……

 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txi8sXO16VU

 

 

Susan Rice needs to shut the fuck up. Who gives a rat’s ass what she has to say? She’s a nobody. She’s not the Secretary of State.

Changed… h/t dakinikat via h/t will bower

Help for Mainstreet comin’ Right-Up (uh, em, in July 2010)

To hear the credit card companies tell it, curbing their predatory lending practices i.e, raising interest rates on pre-existing balances, and implementing rules allowing consumers a reasonable amount of time to make their credit card payments is no easy feat.

“Compliance with the new rules,” wrote American Express’s President of the Consumer Card Services Group Jud Linville in response to Menendez, “is an enormously complex undertaking that will take us some time to fully implement. Because the new requirements are so tightly interrelated, it would be difficult to implement some of the rules in isolation of the others.”

Citi Cards Executive VP John Carey said : “A radical transformation of the industry business model will be required to sustain industry health under the new regulations… None of these changes can be made hastily if the industry is to act prudently and responsibly.”

But what would be imprudent or irresponsible about deciding immediately — today — that there will be no increases on pre-existing balances, or that monthly statements will be mailed at least 21 days before the payment due date (two requirements of the new rules)? What about those changes are “so tightly interrelated” to the other new rules that they couldn’t happen “in isolation” without the whole house of credit cards tumbling down?

Yet the bankers warn of dire consequences. “It would be impractical,” according to Citi’s Carey, “to implement new rules immediately without imposing significant risk to the systems, not the least of which might be serious inconvenience for our cardmembers.”

You mean more seriously inconvenient than cardmembers having their interest rate jacked up to 29.99% (or higher) if they miss a single payment?

Capital One President Ryan Schnieder pointed that the Fed’s own Director of Consumer and Community Affairs, Sandra Braunstein, said that “considering everything that needs to be done and the interconnectedness of the different rules, [18 months] is a very reasonable time period. In fact, 18 months is a challenge.”

18 months?  Cnsidering how many families are currently struggling with the “challenge” of making ends meet, and how many will sink further into credit card debt between now and July 2010, it doesn’t make sense to — as the president put it in another context — “…make the perfect the enemy of the essential.”

Card members falling behind need relief, and they need it now.  Those changes that can be made now, should be made now (some credit card companies are already in compliance with a number of the new rules; and doing so “in isolation” didn’t destroy the industry).

What’s more, the rules the Fed adopted in December had been proposed in draft form in May 2008 — so it’s not as if the banks hadn’t been forewarned. But something tells me they spent the seven months between May and December trying to derail the new regulations as opposed to getting a head start on getting their ships in order.

Congress needs to make sure the credit card companies are not dragging their feet (the 2nd thing they do best, the first is lying) and “passing reform into law,” as  Senator Menendez puts it, “is the most effective way to do it.”

It’s a compelling argument, one raised at a National Press Club luncheon last week when a questioner asked Fed Chair Bernake.  ”Isn’t there something very wrong when banks can borrow at the Fed’s window at less than one percent, but are charging credit card holders interest rates as high as 29 percent?”

Genius (not), Fed Reserve Chairman Bernake didn’t directly take on the point about cheap money for banks but high interest for customers. But, in his letter to Sen. Menendez, Capital One’s Schneider argues that credit cards are typically not financed by money received by the Fed but by packaged credit card debt sold to Wall Street as securities — so the drop in the prime rate has not eased the burden on lenders. “Capital One’s funding in the securitization market,” says Scheider, “is not tied to the Prime rate or any similar index… Thus, notwithstanding decreases in the federal funds rate, when credit losses rise as they have done so dramatically, pricing for our market-based funding rises as well.”

What he doesn’t say is that the market for “credit card receivables” is another example of Wall Street creativity gone awry — and that the hunger for ever-greater profits motivated many credit card companies to offer cards to risky borrowers and to allow customers to accumulate higher and higher amounts of debt. The greater the debt, the more there was to sell off to investors — consequences be damned. So it’s more than a little disingenuous for the bankers to now be blaming “the securitization market” for the credit industry’s woes.

Banks lent irresponsibly and marketed over-aggressively and are now asking their customers — even their “non-delinquent” customers — to pay the price…..and while they’re at it – hand over billions in tax dollars to bail “them” out!

Oink, Oink, Oink…

With or without earmarks — and despite what Obama & Pelosi said — special-interest spending has found its way into the stimulus in massive doses, budget watchers contend. “We were told this was going to be a massive infrastructure spending program,” says Veronique De Rugy, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. She argues that the bill is overflowing not with needed infrastructure spending, but with hundreds of billions in pork.

Perhaps the majority of the $787 billion isn’t pork as so called ‘tax relief ‘ makes up some 34 percent of the bill.  But don’t be mis-led, there is plenty of pork to go along with all the beans being handed out by the Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Democrat Stimulus Bill.

Where you might find the pork is in the so-called discretionary spending portion of the bill, which amount to $308 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Of that money, $48 billion goes to the Department of Transportation for various rail and road projects to repair and expand infrastructure. That leaves about $260 billion of discretionary spending that goes to various federal agencies, as well as to state and local governments. How much of that amount helps special interests instead of the economy as a whole? That depends, of course, on what you consider a special interest. But decide for yourself.

Here is a list of some of the most controversial individual pieces of discretionary spending that might have the pleasant taste of pork.

1) Green golf carts. Ever rode a “neighborhood electric vehicle?” Well, you might want to now. The stimulus includes a tax credit toward the purchase of NEVs, which closely resemble golf carts in appearance. They are considered green vehicles because they use an electric battery instead of gasoline. You fill it up with juice by plugging it into a home electrical outlet. Don’t expect to be able to take your NEV far outside of your neighborhood, though. Federal regulations limit their top speed to between 20 and 25 miles per hour. Freeway cruising is out.

Those aren’t the only green vehicles getting stimulus subsidies. There is also $300 million to buy “green” cars for federal employees.

2) Closing the ice-breaking gap. The U.S. Coast Guard is getting a shot in the arm from the stimulus, thanks to $98 million for a “polar icebreaker.” That’s not a new gum flavor, but a ship. The service currently has three ice-breaking ships able to sail through the frozen Arctic Ocean, but it wants a new and improved one to upgrade the aging fleet. Thad Allen, commandant of the Coast Guard, testified before a House panel last summer that icebreakers are needed for national security reasons. “Russia, Germany, China, Sweden and Canada are all investing and maintaining and expanding their national ice-breaking capacity,” he said.

3) Homeland security stimulus. That pricey icebreaker is just one of several examples of homeland and national security spending contained in the stimulus not directly connected to restoration of the economy. There is also $200 million to “design and furnish” the Department of Homeland Security headquarters. De Rugy says that security spending should be considered by Congress in bills related to security, not the economy. “There was no debating these things on the merits,” she says.

4) Clean Coal. While Obama has stressed the number of “green jobs” his stimulus will create, $3.4 billion of the $787 billion will be spent on old-school, non-green energy technology. That’s how much goes to the Fossil Energy Research and Development program, a Department of Energy project that, among other things, seeks to reduce the amount of carbon emitted by the use of fossil fuels. Daniel Weiss, a senior fellow and director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress, says that most of this money will go toward the development of clean-coal technology. “The goal is to develop a technology that can capture carbon dioxide from coal in a coal-fired power plant,” he says. And where’s the stimulus in clean coal? Weiss says that we won’t see the results of this investment anytime soon, and $3.4 billion is probably only a fraction of what is needed for real clean-coal technology to ever be achieved. But, he adds, in the short term, “this would create research jobs and jobs at power plants.” That isn’t stopping critics from calling this fossil energy provision pork.

5) Mystery Meat. It’s hard to know just how much pork there is in the stimulus package for one simple reason: We still don’t know how exactly a huge chunk of it will be spent. A whopping $144 billion from the bill is flowing directly to state and local governments.

That means the true amount of pork will depend on the priorities of your governors, legislatures, and mayors. The best guesses for what this money will be spent on might be in a list of “ready-to-go” projects released by the U.S. Conference of Mayors in January, dubbed the “Main Street Economic Recovery.” Some of the most outlandish of these projects — such as an $886,000 36-hole disc golf course in Austin, Texas — won’t be allowed to receive stimulus dollars because the bill explicitly says that none of its funds can be used for “any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, or swimming pool.”

But a prohibition on funding toward any “stadium, community park, museum, theater, art center, and highway beautification project” was dropped from the final version of the bill……that means that many other porky projects from the U.S. Conference of Mayors  report are open to get money.  How convenient, just imagine what Mayor Daley has up his sleeve! That includes $150 million for parking improvements at a Little League facility in Cidra, Puerto Rico, and $6 million for a “snowmaking and maintenance facility” at Spirit Mountain ski area in Duluth, Minnesota.  (the mayor of sacramento left late last night for Washington DC to have “breakfast with obama”, along with 300 other mayors).

And here is the Obamamessiah telling the American people that ‘recovery.gov’ is going to ensure that the stimulus plan (American Recovery & Reinvestment Act) is going to “stimulate the economy”.  He’s such an arrogant, condescending liar.    http://www.recovery.gov/

Welcome to Obamas “change & new style of government”….aka [Obullshit]

Republican Senate Finance Committee members are preparing to grill President Obamas pick for Health and Human Secretary;  former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle about his failure to pay more than $128,000 in taxes for 2005 to 2007. And Republicans are interested in hundreds of thousands of dollars that Daschle earned for consulting and speaking to health-care companies and groups in the years after his left the Senate in 2005.

Though not a “registered lobbyist”, the South Dakota Democrat over the past two years earned more than $2.1 million as a “special policy adviser” at Alston & Bird, a law firm with more than 50 lobbying clients in the health-care industry.

Remember this? (“you have to use shame”….and references to insurance & health companies)

“There is a lot of concern on the committee,” said one GOP staffer not authorized to speak on the record.

In addition to the taxes, Republican lawmakers plan to ask Daschle about his work at Alston & Bird, whose clients have included pharmaceutical companies such as Abbott Laboratories, hospital groups such as HealthSouth and pharmacies such as CVS Caremark.

Daschle also represented Minneapolis-based UnitedHealth, one of the country’s largest health insurers, Daschle spokeswoman Jenny Backus said.

And there’s another troubling relationship that has emerged, that being the one between Daschle and the nonprofit student loan company EduCap.  The Senate Finance Committee said it was trying to determine whether trips to the Bahamas and the Middle East provided to Mr. Daschle by the company should also have been reported as income.

The Senate Finance Committee expects to disclose this week the results of a two-year investigation into the possibility that Mr. Daschle’s client EduCap abused its tax-exempt status by providing lavish entertainment and travel to its officers and their guests, including Mr. Dashcle. Mr. Daschle is an old friend of Catherine B. Reynolds, EduCap’s chief executive.

Another client paying for his policy advice was UnitedHealth, a giant insurance company with many issues pending before the Department of Health and Human Services. About a third of its $81 billion in revenue last year came from federally regulated sales of Medicare Advantage and Medicare supplement and prescription drug plans.

The company boasted in its annual report that “one in five Medicare recipients participates in a UnitedHealth Group Medicare program.” (Mr. Daschle has said he will recuse himself from matters involving former clients.)

Affiliated with the firm Alston & Bird, Mr. Daschle has operated in the gap between the popular understanding and “legal definition” of a lobbyist. There is no evidence that he directly sought to influence his former colleagues or other government officials in ways that would have required him to register as a lobbyist or could have run afoul of the restrictions on former lobbyists entering the Obama administration. But the rules still left plenty of room for him to advise businesses seeking to influence the government or to profit otherwise from the fame and insights he acquired in public life.

“Did he attempt to influence? Maybe,” said Thomas Susman, an official at the American Bar Association and author of its lobbying manual. “Did he advise others in the business of influencing? Probably. But he wasn’t a lobbyist.”