Ron Paul’s Financial Foes: How the Big Banks Bought the Government

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Evidence from a crime scene:

Item One:
“In the spring of 1987, the Federal Reserve Board votes 3-2 in favor of easing regulations under Glass-Steagall Act, overriding the opposition of Chairman Paul Volcker. The vote comes after the Fed Board hears proposals from Citicorp, J.P. Morgan and Bankers Trust advocating the loosening of Glass-Steagall restrictions to allow banks to handle several underwriting businesses, including commercial paper, municipal revenue bonds, and mortgage-backed securities. ”

Item Two:

In August 1987, Alan Greenspan — formerly a director of J.P. Morgan and a proponent of banking deregulation — becomes chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. One reason Greenspan favors greater deregulation is to help U.S. banks compete with big foreign institutions.

Item Three:

In December 1996, with the support of Chairman Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve Board issues a precedent-shattering decision permitting bank holding companies to own investment bank affiliates with up to 25 percent of their business in securities underwriting (up from 10 percent).

On April 6, 1998, Weill and Reed announce a $70 billion stock swap merging Travelers (which owned the investment house Salomon Smith Barney) and Citicorp (the parent of Citibank), to create Citigroup Inc., the world’s largest financial services company, in what was the biggest corporate merger in history.

The transaction would have to work around regulations in the Glass-Steagall and Bank Holding Company acts governing the industry, which were implemented precisely to prevent this type of company: a combination of insurance underwriting, securities underwriting, and commercial banking.

Item Four:

“After 12 attempts in 25 years, Congress finally repeals Glass-Steagall, rewarding financial companies for more than 20 years and $300 million worth of lobbying efforts. Supporters hail the change as the long-overdue demise of a Depression-era relic.

On Oct. 21, with the House-Senate conference committee deadlocked after marathon negotiations, the main sticking point is partisan bickering over the bill’s effect on the Community Reinvestment Act, which sets rules for lending to poor communities. Sandy Weill calls President Clinton in the evening to try to break the deadlock after Senator Phil Gramm, chairman of the Banking Committee, warned Citigroup lobbyist Roger Levy that Weill has to get White House moving on the bill or he would shut down the House-Senate conference. Serious negotiations resume, and a deal is announced at 2:45 a.m. on Oct. 22. Whether Weill made any difference in precipitating a deal is unclear.

On Oct. 22, Weill and John Reed issue a statement congratulating Congress and President Clinton, including 19 administration officials and lawmakers by name. The House and Senate approve a final version of the bill on Nov. 4, and Clinton signs it into law later that month.

Just days after the administration (including the Treasury Department) agrees to support the repeal, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the former co-chairman of a major Wall Street investment bank, Goldman Sachs, raises eyebrows by accepting a top job at Citigroup as Weill’s chief lieutenant. The previous year, Weill had called Secretary Rubin to give him advance notice of the upcoming merger announcement. When Weill told Rubin he had some important news, the secretary reportedly quipped, “You’re buying the government”

From s PBS Frontline article on the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.

Torture Files: torturing the truth

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“Consider the testimony before Congress Thursday of Malcolm Wrightson Nance, a counter terrorism expert who taught at the Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school. He went through the waterboarding procedure to evaluate for himself if it was torture.

In my case, the technique was so fast and professional that I didn’t know what was happening until the water entered my nose and throat, It then pushes down into the trachea and starts the process of respiratory degradation. It is an overwhelming experience that induces horror and triggers frantic survival instincts. As the event unfolded, I was fully conscious of what was happening: I was being tortured.

Yes, he was being tortured. No if ands or buts. Torture. What part of that procedure is so hard for new Attorney General Michael Mukasey to understand?

In previous wars, the United States condemned torture. Now we not only endorse it but export it, sending prisoners overseas so other countries can extract misinformation through pain and suffering.

And what does this get us? False information that is used to launch illegal wars against other nations. Recent reports confirm that an al-Qaida operative was tortured to the point where he told us what we wanted to hear about Iraq, not was actually true.

When torture doesn’t work, we simply allow ourselves to be conned. CBS recently outed “Curveball,” the so-called “top scientist” from Iraq who fed us false information about mobile chemical weapons labs in Iraq. Turns out he was a low-level worker with an active imagination.

America on the world stage is viewed as both a bully and a bumbling joke that can’t do anything right. We ignore the United Nations, violate international law and turn Iraq into the safe-haven for terrorism that we falsely claimed was there before we launched an illegal invasion….”

More by Doug Thompson in “Where, and when, did we go wrong?”at Capitol Hill Blue.

Owen Barfield on perception and imagination

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“Mere perception—perception without imagination—is the sword thrust between spirit and matter.” It was what enabled Descartes to divide the world into thinking substance and extended substance. But something more than mere perception occurs when we look at or listen to a fellow being: whatever our philosophical predispositions, we in fact read his body and voice as expressing something immaterial. We can, moreover, attend to nature in the same way, although such a reading of nature has been progressively eliminated from our habits during the past few hundred years. Strengthening the activity of imagination is the only way to heal the Cartesian sword-thrust. (“Matter, Imagination, and Spirit,” in Owen Barfield, The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays)

Max Stirner on insurrection instead of revolution…

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“He has his thoughts ‘from above’ and gets no further” (Ego, 44). Those who submit themselves to being possessed by these ideals and intentions rather than possessing them in their own subjectivity are rightly called “unselfish” or, as Stirner would also have it, “possessed.” As he notes: “Is it perchance only people possessed by the devil that meet us, or do we as often come upon people possessed in the contrary way—possessed by ‘the good,’ by virtue, morality, the law, or some ‘principle’ or other? Possessions of the devil are not the only ones. God works on us, and the devil does; the former ‘workings of grace,’ the latter ‘workings of the devil.’ Possessed [bessessene] people are set [versessen] in their opinions” (Ego, 45). In short, thoughts, ideals, are to Stirner alienable property: “The thought is my own only when I have no misgivings about bringing it in danger of death every moment, when I do not have to fear its loss as a loss for me” (Ego, 342)

The revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on ‘institutions’. It is not a fight against the established […] it is only a working forth of me out of the established. […] Now, as my object is not an overthrow of the established order but my elevation above it, my purpose and deed are not political or social but (as directed toward myself and my ownness alone) an egoistic purpose indeed. ….” (280)
Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

Ron Paul Revolution: Moolah from “Zionist” fascists-in progress OK, moolah from White fascists-in-waiting NOT OK

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“Frankly, this is a no-brainer. Any other candidate would unequivocally reject that money as soon as its donor’s identity was known. That Paul’s campaign needs time to think about it is shocking.

Also of concern is the fact that Paul’s campaign has ignored my repeated attempts to interview the Congressman for JTA, the Jewish newswire service by which I am employed. I had intended to write a story about the Congressman, and to provide him with the opportunity to distance himself from his extremist supporters, to clarify his position on Israel, and to state his case to the Jewish community. Yet, after three weeks of repeated telephone calls, two chats with his Deputy Communications Director, and several left voicemail messages, I have yet to receive a callback to schedule an interview.

Which leads me to conclude the following about the Congressman from Texas: Ron Paul will take money from Nazis. But he won’t take telephone calls from Jews.

This should be a cause of great concern to those of us in the antifascist community, whereas, for me, it elicits echoes of Europe’s re-embracement of right-wing extremism, the attendant resurrection of ethnic nationalism, and the growing success of far-right parties, many of which have taken over large swaths of European parliaments.

They say such things could never happen in America, but guess what…Here it is.

The sad part is that, as a radical libertarian, I somewhat favored Paul as a candidate, though as a libertarian socialist, he is not my ideal choice. Now, I want him out of the running, and frankly, out of the Capitol. Those who pander to White Nationalists and neo-Nazis have no place serving in the United States government, which exists to serve the most ethnically and culturally diverse nation on Earth, which counts among its citizens Jews and Zionists alike.”

Comment:

Isn’t this a gem of tar-by-association and double-speak..

And, by the way, left libertarianism I understand, but what is a libertarian socialist? Ain’t no such beast….

More at Jewcy.com by Daniel Sieradski in “Ron Paul’s Jewish Problem.”

This, mind you, from the same pro-war crowd that was only too happy to get into office by canoodling with Christian evangelists (including, the no-doubt deeply philosemitic Pat Robertson) of the Darby Bible end-times variant, whose central thesis is the eventual disappearance of the Jews as a group….

But anti-semitism, we know, is sometimes in the eye of the beholder.

Of course, the Paul campaign should give back money from suspect groups. No question. I wonder if the other candidates should give back the money given them by their own ethnic survivalists/racists?

I have the solution. Maybe the big hedge-funds supporting Guiliani and Clinton could throw a few dimes Ron’s way. Then maybe he could be as picky about which group of thieving financiers, high-minded war-mongers, and ethnically diverse corporate-state criminals he could accept wads of money from…

Or maybe, FOX could just give him a show every Friday.

Where’s the business community? Why won’t it wake up and do its duty? Why won’t it support the only candidate whose policies will actually foster business and peace here and abroad?

Then he won’t need to be talking to opportunistic racists (or alleged racists) of any stripe, white, black or brown; Christian or Jewish; Caucasian, Semitic, or Mongolian. And he won’t need to be “necklaced” with this smear-of-last-resort of American politics.

Update:

The author adds:

“If a person was campaigning for President on the “killing niggers and Jews” ticket, should they be allowed to run?

I think the answer ought to be a comfortable and firm “no.”

My comment:

A firm no to people (where are they?) running on a ticket of killing “niggers and Jews” [sic]. Meanwhile, a firm yes to people (all over the place in goverment and Wall Street and with their hands on nukes too) running on a ticket of killing Ay-rabs and rag-heads.

Update: 

Interesting that the Christian Zionist story of a “rapture” in which converts will be taken up into heaven directly by a reappearing Jesus is said by some to be the result of a Jesuit teaching originating in the Counter Reformation.

Until then, the visions of Revelation – especially of “the harlot” — were widely understood as referring to the Catholic church.  The Jesuit’s counter doctrine undermined this belief by interpreting Revelations as something that would take place in the future.

The Jesuit teaching was taken up strongly by one group of Protestants – the Plymuoth Brethren – and one of their most influential preachers, John Derby, and from there came to influence the whole ‘Pentecostal’ wing of Protestantism, including the Moody Institute and its widely distributed, Moody Bible.

And so we end up with Christian Zionism today, an end time teaching that is really only a few hundred years old at best.

Propaganda State: the war we don’t (want to) know…

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In “Operation Homecoming,” one returning Marine, who takes to drinking heavily in an effort to cope with the crushing guilt and revulsion he feels over how many people he’s seen killed, fumes about how “you can’t talk to them [ordinary Americans] about the horror of a dead child’s lifeless mutilated body staring back at you from the void, knowing you took part in that end.” Writing of her return home, Kayla Williams notes that the things most people seemed interested in were “beyond my comprehension. Who cared about Jennifer Lopez? How was it that I was watching CNN one morning and there was a story about freaking ducklings being fished out of a damn sewer drain — while the story of soldiers getting killed in Iraq got relegated to this little banner across the bottom of the screen?” In “Generation Kill,” by the journalist Evan Wright, a Marine corporal confides his anguish and anger over all the killings he has seen: “I think it’s bullshit how these fucking civilians are dying! They’re worse off than the guys that are shooting at us. They don’t even have a chance. Do you think people at home are going to see this — all these women and children we’re killing? Fuck no. Back home they’re glorifying this motherfucker, I guarantee you.””Generation Kill” recounts Wright’s experiences traveling with a Marine platoon during the initial invasion. The platoon was at the very tip of the spear of the invasion force, and Wright got a uniquely close-up view of the fighting. In most U.S. news accounts, the invasion was portrayed as a relatively bloodless affair, with few American casualties and not many more civilian ones. Wright offers a starkly different tale. While expressing admiration for the Marines’ many acts of valor and displays of compassion, he marvels at the U.S. military’s ferocious fire-power and shudders at the startling number of civilians who fell victim to it. He writes of neighborhoods being leveled by mortar rounds, of villages being flattened by air strikes, of innocent men, women, and children being mowed down in free-fire zones. At first, Wright notes, the Marines found it easy, even exciting, to kill, but as the invasion progressed and the civilian toll mounted, many began to recoil, and some even broke down. “Do you realize the shit we’ve done here, the people we’ve killed?” one Marine agonizes. “Back home in the civilian world, if we did this, we would go to prison.”

More by Michael Massing in “We are the Thought Police,” at Salon.

Gao Xingjian on the writer’s solitude

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“Literature is not concerned with politics but is purely a matter of the individual. It is the gratification of the intellect together with an observation, a review of what has been experienced, reminiscences and feelings or the portrayal of a state of mind.”
“The so-called writer is nothing more than someone speaking or writing and whether he is listened to or read is for others to choose. The writer is not a hero acting on orders from the people nor is he worthy of worship as an idol, and certainly he is not a criminal or enemy of the people. He is at times victimised along with his writings simply because of other’s needs. When the authorities need to manufacture a few enemies to divert people’s attention, writers become sacrifices and worse still writers who have been duped actually think it is a great honour to be sacrificed.”

“In fact the relationship of the author and the reader is always one of spiritual communication and there is no need to meet or to socially interact, it is a communication simply through the work. Literature remains an indispensable form of human activity in which both the reader and the writer are engaged of their own volition. Hence, literature has no duty to the masses.”From Gao Xinjian’s Nobel Lecture in Literature in 2000.

Ron Paul Revolution: The Buggy That Pulls the Horse

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“In an interview on Friday, Mr. Paul, 72, a retired physician and a grandfather, acknowledged that his Internet support had surprised even him. He said he did little online but read the news, especially from the Middle East.

“We always knew it was supposed to be important,” he said of the Internet. “My idea was you had to have someone who was a super expert, who knew how to find people. But they found us.”

As for the record one-day fund-raising, he said, “I had nothing to do with it,” adding that he had so far neglected to thank the people responsible. (James Sugra, 28, of Huntington Beach, Calif., acting on his own, posted an online video proposing one big day of fund-raising; Trevor Lyman, 37, of Miami Beach, then independently created a site, www.thisnovember5th.com, that featured the video.)

Mr. Paul estimated that the one-day haul had brought ”$10 million worth of free publicity.”

And where do Ron’s supporters come from? Left and right:

“Andrew Fox, 28, who described his day job as “sitting on a bench with a soldering iron” repairing cable TV boxes, agreed the other night to become the treasurer for the Albany group. “I’m really frightened with what’s going on in this country,” Mr. Fox said. “We have effectively lost our form of representative government. The war is the worst thing, but we also have a police state at home.”

While most meetup members said they were Republicans, David Weck, 54, a chiropractor from Schenectady, said he was a Democrat but that he believed in smaller government and that Mr. Paul was the only candidate who seemed committed to that.

“Never in a million years did I think I would be interested in a Republican candidate,” Mr. Weck said, “especially after this administration.”

Mr. Gould said the country was “in turmoil’ and that he began researching Mr. Paul after seeing him on “The Colbert Report,” the late-night political-satire show on Comedy Central.

“I started learning about our currency,” he said. “It’s scary. Those Federal Reserve notes we’re using like a loan off of a loan that’s physically impossible to ever repay. So our whole country will continuously be in massive debt.”

More here at the New York Times.

Leonard Cohen on truth in the Land of Plenty

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The spare, ambiguous lyrics of Canadian poet and composer, Leonard Cohen, who spent five years in retreat at a Zen monastery, sometimes contain an element of prophecy about this country:

 

“Don’t really know who sent me
To raise my voice and say:
May the lights in the Land of Plenty
Shine on the truth some day.

I don’t know why I come here,
Knowing as I do,
What you really think of me,
What I really think of you.

For the millions in a prison,
That wealth has set apart,

For the Christ who has not risen,
From the caverns of the heart.

For the innermost decision,
That we cannot but obey –
For what’s left of our religion,
I lift my voice and pray:
May the lights in The Land of Plenty
Shine on the truth some day.

I know I said I’d meet you,
I’d meet you at the store,
But I can’t buy it, baby.
I can’t buy it anymore.

And I don’t really know who sent me,
To raise my voice and say:
May the lights in The Land of Plenty
Shine on the truth some day.”

 

Ron Paul Revolution: Who Stole the Cookies from the Cookie Jar?

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“Mark your calendar! 11/07/07 – Today is D-Day, the date the history books will record the start-date of the new Depression. Ironic – those “lucky numbers”. It’s not hyperbole, and here’s why (never mind the 400 point Dow drop, that’s happened before):

The Chinese had begun a sell-off of their US securities. They have dollars held by their government and, separately by their treasury (like the Fed).

Today, that entity has made clear that they will be unloading some $400 billion, which they already began in August (according to the China Daily, they sold off $9 billion – without buying any new debt in that month alone) in an attempt to divest of American Government securities. (They still hold over a trillion dollars of, well, other dollars – stock, corporate paper, etc)

The Japanese, not to be outdone, sold off some $24 billion in US treasuries in August.

Today, GM posted a loss of $40 billion in the 3rd quarter, because they had so much anticipated income from anticipated tax credits that they had opted to show as possible income FOR THREE YEARS in order to minimize the appearances of real losses – that they now had to suck it up and stick it all on the balance sheet for this one quarter, even though – at selling cars, they made a profit in that quarter! Can you wrap your mind around LOSING 40 BILLION DOLLARS IN 3 MONTHS? There are many nations that don’t have that number for a GDP, annually. This is America’s great manufacturing giant. And, as they used to say, what’s good for GM is Good for America……

…Today, like when banks began to fail in 1932, we know who’s in charge, and how his policies got us here. We’ll survive until we have a new president, and we will begin again. And the good news is that from here out, we will be in a rebuilding phase. The dinosaurs have failed themselves and us, but we will build a new and better economy. I’ll tell you all about it…”
Read the whole piece by Michael Fox at Smirking Chimp.

Uh, Fox….or Chimp…..I’m certain you both know all about political primates but you surely don’t think our George is actually canny enough to pull off financial monkey business on his own?

Hmmmm.

Let’s peek beneath that left-right divide and venture a wee guess: NO.

Banking scams are pulled off by…wild guess here…..bankers!

And who is the one candidate taking on the banking system?

Ron Paul.