
NO
To The Paulson-Bernanke
Derivatives Scam Bailout
Bail
Out the American People,
Not Wall Street!
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An Economic
Recovery Strategy for Protectionists,
Dirigists, Mercantilists, and Populists
By Webster G. Tarpley
9-23-8
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- WASHINGTON DC
-- The grand theft bailout now being rammed through Congress by
Treasury Secretary Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke,
and other officials of the Bush regime with the help of
accomplices Pelosi, Majority Leader Harry Reid, and other
parliamentarians is a monstrosity for the ages, combining every
hideous feature of monetarism, elitism, oligarchism, and sheer
feckless incompetence. It is to all intents and purposes a
national suicide note of the United States of America, a
contract with the devil that absolutely guarantees irrevocable
national decline. For any person of goodwill there can be only
one impulse at the present moment, and that is to stop this
bailout -- to block it, to sabotage it, to bottle it up, to load
it with killer amendments, and to do everything legally possible
to stop this insane design from going through.
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IF MCCAIN VOTES AGAINST THE BAILOUT, HE WILL WIN THE
PRESIDENCY
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- In political terms,
McCain is now running well to the left of Obama on this issue,
with a much stronger populist profile. McCain has attacked the
outrageous greed and corruption of Wall Street. Obama does not
dare attack Wall Street, since these are his masters. Obama,
sounding like Milton Friedman, only attacks Washington. Obama
has said that he will support whatever Paulson demands. That is
not a surprise, since Paulson represents Goldman Sachs, and
Obama is a wholly owned property of Goldman Sachs, which is his
single biggest source of campaign contributions. Obama is a
creature of Brzezinski, Soros, and Rockefeller, and without them
he has no existence; Obama is an abject Wall Street puppet, an
agent of finance capital. This week, both senators will have to
decide how they vote on the odious derivatives bailout. Obama
will surely vote in favor of it, since this is what Wall Street
demands. If McCain votes against it, he will most probably
propel himself into the White House on the model of Give 'Em
Hell Harry in 1948. Filthy corrupt Democrats like Schumer are
already attacking McCain as the new Huey Long. Huey Long, the
Louisiana populist of the 1930s, had many positive features, and
we could certainly use a good dose of
Huey Long in this country
to counteract the elitism, oligarchism, condescension, and
arrogant snobbery of foundation operatives like Obama. The
bailout is already very unpopular 72% of all voters are
opposed to it and it will become more and more hated when it
becomes clear that it is also a failure. McCain's course is
clear. Will he have the brains and guts to cross Obama's T on
this vital issue?
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PAULSON OF GOLDMAN SACHS, WOULD-BE FINANCE DICTATOR
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- Paulson is a ruthless
and brutal eco-freak usurer who learned his trade at the Goldman
Sachs stock-jobbing operation. He is now the leading member of
the committee of public safety which rules in Washington, and
which includes Gates, Rice, and Mullen. He now demands the
astronomical sum of 700 billion dollars for the bailout of
mortgage-backed derivatives, collateralized debt obligations,
credit default swaps, and other poisonous derivatives. Make no
mistake -- this is not a bailout of homeowners who are
threatened with foreclosure; it is a bailout of the lunatic
house of cards which desperate bankers have built on these
mortgages using derivatives. The entire crisis is not a crisis
of subprime mortgages, it is a crisis of the derivatives bubble
which was launched by Wendy Gramm of the Commodities Futures
Trading Commission and Greenspan of the Fed with the connivance
of Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs and Citibank, and others in the
Clinton administration, some 15 years ago.
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- These derivatives now
amount to a total worldwide notional value that can be estimated
between 1 quadrillion and two quadrillion US dollars. This sum
is so large that it dwarfs the total value of the entire planet
earth and all those who live here. Compared to the cancerous,
bloated, and fictitious mass of derivatives which is at the root
of this crisis, the $700 billion demanded by politicians, large
as this may seem, is nothing but a drop in the bucket. And a
drop in the bailout bucket is what it will be. The mass of world
derivatives between $1 and $2 quadrillion represents an
insatiable black hole which is capable of putting an end, not
just to civilization, but the human life itself. The moral
choice could not be clearer: humanity will either destroy the
derivatives bubble in our time, or the derivatives bubble will
surely destroy humanity. Those are the stakes in the current
exercise.
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- Paulson and Bernanke,
both lawyers for the Wall Street jackals, lampreys, vultures and
hyenas, argue that the public interest demands a bailout of
their cronies at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan
Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Wachovia, and the other large
money center institutions. Before the American public antes up
$700 billion just for openers in the game of genocidal poker
which run by the infernal croupiers Paulson and Bernanke, we
would be very well advised to examine the veracity of this
premise.
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COMMERCIAL BANKS ARE INDISPENSABLE
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- It is of course true
that the healthy functioning of the United States economy
requires a viable and flexible system of commercial banks. No
one should doubt the necessity of commercial banks.
- Andrew Jackson was
clinically insane on this point, and he still has not a few
followers around today. But it ought to be clear that without
the services of a well developed commercial banking system, it
is impossible to organize business activities as essential as
payments, deposits, checking, payrolls, and the discounting of
short-term commercial paper, bills of exchange, bills of lading,
and all the credit instruments that are intimately connected
with real productive activity. Without a functioning commercial
banking system, the economic heart of the United States would
stop beating, as it briefly did at the end of the Hoover
administration in March of 1933. Without commercial banks, no
wheel of a factory or railroad can turn, and no commodities can
move to show up in supermarkets.
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JPM, CITI, BoA ARE DERIVATIVES MONSTERS, NOT COMMERCIAL
BANKS
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- But when we look at
institutions like J.P. Morgan Chase, Citibank, and Bank of
America, we become aware that these large money center
institutions have become detached from any conceivable
connection to the world of production, wages, transportation,
and all other useful and productive activities. These
institutions are not commercial banks any more in any meaningful
sense of the term. Ten years ago, in the midst of the Asian
financial crisis and the aftermath of the Russian GKO state
bankruptcy collapse, the boss of JP Morgan Chase went on
television to announce that his bank was specialized in the
"risk business." The risk business meant that JP Morgan Chase,
had simply given up on the traditional activity of commercial
banks, which was primarily to provide loans to corporations for
productive investment in plant and equipment that would also
create well-paid industrial jobs. J.P. Morgan Chase decided long
ago that that activity was nowhere near profitable enough to be
continued.
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- Instead, J.P. Morgan
Chase devoted itself more and more to the issuance, sale, and
purchase of derivatives. As early as 1992, the best definition
of J.P. Morgan Chase was that it was no longer a commercial bank
but rather a derivatives monster. In 2002, the J.P. Morgan Chase
derivatives monster came very close to imploding, collapsing in
on itself like the hopeless black hole that it still remains to
the present day. According to the most recent report of the
Comptroller of the Curreny of the US Treasury dated September
30, 2007, JP Morgan Chase today has between $90 trillion and
$100 trillion of derivatives. In reality this is a very low-ball
estimate, and the real derivatives exposure is some multiple of
this figure perhaps $300 or $400 trillion, especially now that
Bear Stearns, a smaller black hole of derivatives has been
absorbed. But even a mere $90 trillion is already six times the
US GDP (currently estimated between $14 and $15 trillion).
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DERIVATIVES ARE FINANCIAL AIDS
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- The question of the
derivatives is once again the central issue of the crisis. Most
people may not even know what derivatives are, although by now
many have some idea that they are dangerous and toxic. French
President Jacques Chirac once defined derivatives as financial
aids, and he was right. A share of stock supposedly represents
part ownership in a corporation. A corporate bond is a debt
instrument issued by a corporation, with some claim to a part of
the assets in case of bankruptcy liquidation. That means that
the stocks and bonds are paper, but paper that is at only one
remove from the real world of production, consumption,
employment, and wages. The derivative is something radically
different.
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- A derivative represents
paper based on paper, no longer a stock or bond, but a future,
option, or index that is based on some stock, bond, or other
form of paper. Derivatives are therefore at least one step
further removed from the world of tangible physical commodity
production of useful items which humanity requires in order to
survive and to conduct civilization as we know it. In addition
to the options, futures, and indices, we have all the possible
permutations and combinations of the above, with new variations
that are almost infinite. Even to catalogue these would take a
book. In addition to these exchange traded derivatives, there is
a much larger class of derivative which does not appear on the
Chicago Board Options Exchange or analogous institutions in all
the money centers of the world. The second and larger class
represents the counterparty derivatives, including such things
as collateralized debt obligations, mortgage backed securities,
structured notes, credit default swaps, and the myriad of other
derivative products.
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- These derivatives were
originally supposed to be used as a hedge against risk, but
before too long they began to represent the biggest single
source of risk and the entire lunatic edifice would finance. By
now, to repeat this point yet again, the total world derivatives
of in excess of one quadrillion dollars -- that is to say, 1000
billion dollars, and may be already approaching the neighborhood
of $1.5 quadrillion or even more. One of the inherent problems
of derivatives is that nobody knows this exact figure, since
derivatives are not reportable in many countries and tend to
escape regulation by the proper financial authorities.
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DERIVATIVES ARE USELESS AND A THREAT TO CIVILIZATION
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- You cannot eat
derivatives. You cannot live in a derivative. You cannot wear
derivatives as clothing, nor can you drive a derivative work.
You cannot sail in them or fly in them. They cannot be used as
tools of any useful trade. They are not computers, not machine
tools, not pharmaceutical equipment, not agricultural
implements.
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- Derivatives are
therefore totally outside the realm of capital goods production
needs, no matter how these may be defined.
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FOR RECOVERY, WIPE OUT, SHRED, DELETE ALL DERIVATIVES
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- J.P. Morgan Chase,
therefore, performs no useful or productive social function, and
there is absolutely no reason in the world why the people of the
United States should want to bail out this pernicious and
socially destructive institution. It has probably been several
decades since J.P. Morgan Chase created a single modern
productive job. J.P. Morgan Chase's strategic commitment in
favor of the derivatives bubble means essentially that we can
easily dispense with most of the functions of this self-styled
"bank," really a casino. Instead of being bailed out, J.P.
Morgan Chase ought therefore to be seized by the Federal Deposit
Insurance Corporation, and put through chapter 11 bankruptcy. In
the course of that bankruptcy reorganization, the entire
derivatives book of J.P. Morgan Chase must be deleted, shredded,
used as a Yule log, or employed to stoke a festive bonfire of
the derivatives. The world did much better when there were no
derivatives, and will get along just fine without them.
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- Derivatives were of
very dubious legality in general and were illegal in some of
their specific forms until the mid-1990s.
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INSTRUMENTS MEANS DERIVATIVES
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- According to Paulson's
pact with the devil published in the New York Times on September
20, 2008, the Secretary of the Treasury is supposed to be
empowered by Congress to spend $700 billion on mortgage related
securities, obligations, and instruments. That last word
instruments is the favorite euphemism of television commentators
and journalists who want to propose a derivatives bailout
without using this word, which has now become to some degree
unmentionable and taboo, presumably because of its highly
negative connotations left over from the crises of more than a
decade ago. Accordingly, one very good killer amendment that
ought to be added to this pact with the devil should state that
not one penny of taxpayer money should ever be used to finance
the purchase of derivatives, no matter how they may be
euphemistically referred to.
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WHY BUY MORTGAGE BACKED SECURITIES THAT HAVE NO PRICE BID?
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- Paulson wants to buy up
derivatives. But at what price? Derivatives have no intrinsic
value. Like the rasbucknik in the old L'il Abner comic strip,
derivatives have negative value, since somebody has to be paid
to cart them away. Counterparty derivatives currently have no
price, since there is no market where they are trading, and
nobody would want to buy them if there were such a market.
Collateralized debt obligations were selling at 5 cents on the
dollar a few weeks ago, but that was well before the current
crisis broke in its full fury. So how will Paulson know how much
to pay for the derivatives he wants to purchase? Will he use the
discredited Black-Sholes model, which led to the bankruptcy of
the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund ten years ago? Given
all this, the only price which can be assigned to the mass of
derivatives is not their notional value, but rather a big fat
ZERO. Anything else is stealing from the government.
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"INVESTMENT BANKS" DRIVE UP THE PUMP PRICE OF GASOLINE
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- Let us now leave behind
the category of the commercial banks and move on to institutions
like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the stock jobbing
operations or counting houses that like to call themselves
investment banks these days, even though they do not have the
status of a commercial bank and are not members of the Federal
Reserve. Why should any public money at all be used to prolong
the noxious lives of these sociopathic and pernicious
institutions? A short examination of what these so-called
investment banks do will reveal that there is no public interest
in keeping these creatures alive, and that, once again, touch
better off without them.
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- Investment banks used
to assist corporations and floating issues of stocks or bonds on
the financial markets. Investment banks were supposed to
function as the advisers of industrial corporations and other
corporations as they sought to raise capital needed for new
plant, equipment, and jobs. But today, these functions have
virtually disappeared. The investment banks do a certain amount
of work in initial public offerings for IPOs of new securities,
but these are almost always of a financially speculative nature.
The main thing is that investment banks now place bets on
certain classes of assets in the hope of turning a purely
speculative profit for themselves. Goldman Sachs and Morgan
Stanley maintain trading desks and engage in purely speculative
trading of assets which they themselves own, and most of the
time these assets represent derivatives of one kind or another.
In recent times, the most important asset class which Goldman
Sachs and Morgan Stanley have been trading is probably future
indices on commodities, especially oil. Goldman Sachs and Morgan
Stanley between them have in the past year by various estimates
accounted for about half of the speculative activity in the
commodities markets of London, New York, and other money centers
which brought about the doubling of the per barrel price of oil
between July 2007 and July 2008, increasing the cost of gasoline
to almost five dollars per gallon.
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GOLDMAN SACHS, MORGAN STANLEY CREATE I.C.E. TO FLAY
AMERICANS
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- In a very real sense,
American motorists filling their gas tanks at the pump at
exorbitant prices have been involuntarily subsidizing the
speculative derivatives activity of Goldman Sachs and Morgan
Stanley. How bitterly ironic that the same American motorists
should now be taxed in order to permit their tormentors to live
on and to continue to mercilessly loot them. Goldman Sachs and
Morgan Stanley found that even the very weak regulatory regime
maintained here in the United States under the auspices of the
Commodity Futures Trading Commission was too onerous for them
because it slightly constrained their rapacious quest for
speculative profits at the expense of the American people. These
two investment banks therefore created a new speculative
commodity exchange, the ICE or Intercontinental Exchange located
in London, with a regulatory regime is virtually nonexistent.
The ICE or Intercontinental Exchange in London is where about
half of the world futures contracts in oil have been trading in
recent months.
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- Goldman Sachs and
Morgan Stanley, like their now-defunct brethren Bear Stearns,
Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch, have also made many
speculative investments in the area of mortgage backed
securities based on predatory subprime mortgages. The adjustable
rate mortgages that underlie these derivatives should have been
declared illegal long ago. But now let us imagine what will
happen if a hapless victim of these predatory lending practices
is forced into foreclosure in the current world economic great
depression.
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- Goldman Sachs will send
the bailiff to your door to throw you, your family, and your
belongings out on the street, even though you have been taxed to
permit Goldman Sachs to continue its sociopathic existence. You
will in effect be robbed out of one pocket even as you are being
pushed out the door and made homeless by the same institution
which has been the beneficiary of your forced charity.
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- Surely any politician
daring to come forward to suggest the public bailout of Goldman
Sachs so that it can continue to enforce foreclosures against
the American citizens who are paying the bill for the financial
excesses of this bandit institution ought to be tarred and
feathered and run out of town on a rail. Yet this is exactly
what Pelosi, Reid, Dodd, and Frank are proposing to force
through the U.S. Congress in the coming week. This represents a
new low in public morality.
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- With Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac, the situation is slightly different, but the same
criteria ought to apply. Fanny and Freddie worked very well
during the three decades after the formation of Fannie Mae in
1938 as an agency of the federal government -- a hillbilly
cousin of the US treasury, as it used to be called.
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- Things began to go
wrong in 1968 when Fannie Mae was privatized, under the
pernicious influence of the doctrines of the monetarist Milton
Friedman of the infamous Chicago school of pseudo-economics and
obscurantism. Fanny and Freddie have now been placed under the
control of conservators, but they ought to be nationalized as
part of a permanent state sector of the US economy, and operated
as the public utility that they were intended to be. The
salaries of their officials ought to be determined by the
government-wide GSA schedule. Fannie and Freddie have guaranteed
mortgages, and ought to continue to do so. But they have no
obligation to guarantee mortgage backed securities or any other
form of newfangled derivatives which were never mentioned in
their charter.
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- Accordingly, Fannie and
Freddie thought to strip away the mortgage backed securities
that have been used to package or bundle the mortgages that they
now hold. The mortgages represent a valuable asset for the
future, under conditions of economic recovery which we intend to
organize. But that extra layer of derivatives paper represents a
useless additional tax on the public treasury, which the US
government has no obligation to maintain. In short, it is time
to separate the socially useful core of actual mortgages
representing residential and commercial properties from the
harmful and speculative overlay of the mortgage-backed security.
By this kind of financial engineering, speculators can receive
condign punishment, even as the public treasury is believed of
an extra layer useless payment which would only reward
speculative crimes.
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- If anyone should
inquire as to the ultimate philosophical causes of the current
George Bush world economic depression, the answer is simple:
this depression is a direct result of the influence of Milton
Friedman and the Chicago school, who are themselves to kind of
come down American version of the Viennese school of Friedrich
von Hayek. Ludwig von Mises, and other charlatans masquerading
as economists. The common denominator of the Chicago school is
the Vienna school which is represented by the right-wing
anarchist thesis that government is always bad and the private
sector, especially speculators, are always good. This absurd
thesis is now being consigned to the dustbin of history.
Friedman and von Hayek, if they were alive today, would
doubtless demand the full fury of the free market the unleashed
against the American people. This would lead, not to a recovery,
but merely to death on a large scale.
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- The implications of the
Chicago school and the Vienna school under current circumstances
are nothing short of genocidal, and even the financiers are
hastily dumping the discredited doctrines of Friedman and from
Hayek as they rush to get their hands into the public till
through bigger and better bailouts in an endless series. There
is nothing anywhere in the world left today that might resemble
a free market, only an endless list of cartels, trusts,
monopolies, oligopolies, duopolies, and other conspiracies in
restraint of trade. In fact, there has been nothing even vaguely
resembling a free market in most of the world in the past
several centuries. What is collapsing today in September 2008 is
the delusion that such a thing as a free market might exist in
the modern world.
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- The same negative
judgment applies to the lunatic doctrines of Joseph Schumpeter,
who preached the madness of creative destruction as a way out of
the world economic depression of the 1930s.
- Schumpeter's doctrines
today are nothing less than a public menace, and persons who
demand a deflationary crash of the world economy by preaching
the Andrew Mellon formula of liquidating labor, liquidating
stocks, liquidating bonds, liquidating real estate, etc., are to
be put in a padded cell. This is even worse than Herbert Hoover.
It was tried in 1932-33, and it turned out to be a bottomless
pit already then, so it does not need to be tried again.
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BACK TO THE NEW DEAL:
RESTORE THE GLASS-STEAGAL
FIREWALL
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- Scribblers like
Friedman and von Hayek were paid by finance oligarchs to wage a
relentless war against that heritage of the Franklin D.
Roosevelt New Deal, the set of policies which allowed humanity
to survive the Great Depression of the 1930s. The current crisis
would not have been possible in the present form if the
institutional safeguards enacted during the New Deal had been
left in place, as they should have been. These safeguards
represent permanent features of civilization, and they need to
be restored. The best example is the repeal of the Glass-Steagall
Act under the Clinton administration in 1999. The Glass-Steagall
Act was a classic piece of New Deal legislation which
established that being a commercial bank and being a stockbroker
are mutually exclusive activities that could not be legally
combined in the same company.
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- Commercial banking was
one thing, and stock brokerage was something completely
separate. Naturally, the greedy financiers and their spokesmen
clamored for the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and they finally got
their wish. Now less than 10 years later all of the Wall Street
banks, seemingly without notable exceptions, are bankrupt and
insolvent institutions that cannot not survive without a massive
infusion of taxpayer money. We need to restore Glass- Steagal,
which will mean among other things that Goldman Sachs and Morgan
Stanley will not be eligible to become bank holding companies
after all. If you don't like your tax bill next year, you should
thank Newt Gingrich and others who made it their business to
destroy and roll back the achievements of the New Deal in the
name of the despicable ideology of monetarism as preached by
Friedman and von Hayek. Newt, by the way, is now calling for an
immediate deflationary crash to find out what the real prices of
housing might be. This is like doing experiments on your own
flesh, and Newt should go to the funny farm.
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- BACK TO
THE NEW DEAL:
RESTORE THE UPTICK RULE
-
- Another example is the
uptick rule. This New Deal measure meant that it was illegal to
sell a stock short if it were continuously in decline. The
speculator had to wait until there was an uptick, meaning a
trade in which the stock in question increased in price; only
then could a short sale be carried out. Another piece of bitter
irony inherent in the present crisis is that this uptick rule
was abolished by the feckless and incompetent Chairman Cox of
the Securities and Exchange Commission at the beginning of last
summer, just in time for the explosion of the world credit
crisis which has led to the current world economic depression.
Incredibly enough, Chairman Cox of the SEC has been unable to
pull himself together long enough to permanently re-impose the
uptick rule.
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- Instead, he has drawn
up a list of 799 financial institutions and banks whose stock
will now be illegal to sell short for at least 10 days, although
one suspects that this prohibition will be prolonged
indefinitely. This crackpot expedient reveals the true nature of
the current monetarist regime. Shorting and destroying General
Motors, which actually produces something useful, is fine, but
no shorting of JP Morgan Chase, which is a public menace that
produces nothing but toxic paper. The long-term roots of the
current crisis go back to August 15, 1971, when Nixon,
Kissinger, Arthur Burns and George Shultz wantonly destroyed the
Bretton Woods system of fixed currency parities, ushering in the
new world of financial risk which is now collapsing around us.
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NATIONALIZE THE FEDERAL RESERVE AS A BUREAU OF THE TREASURY
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- The present crisis
ought to provide the death warrant for the failed Federal
Reserve System. When the Fed was created back under Woodrow
Wilson, its Rockefeller and Morgan sponsors promised that the
Fed would protect us against all future financial panics. The
Fed failed once in 1929-1933, and now it is failing again for a
second time. The Fed is worthless as a firewall against
depression. We must therefore seize the Fed, audit it,
nationalize it, and operate it in the future as a bureau of the
US Treasury. From now on, we must go back to the Constitution,
meaning that the size of the money supply and short-term
interest rates will have to be determined by public laws of the
United States, passed by the House and the Senate and signed by
the president. Using this method, we can mandate new initial
credit issues of $1 to $2 trillion to be used exclusively as low
interest (.5% to 1%) and long-term (30 to 40 year maturities)
credit for productive purposes only manufacturing, farming,
mining, commerce, energy production, infrastructure, and the
other things we need. We should stop having the Fed lend money
to Citibank at 2% and then having the Treasury borrow that same
money back for 4% to 5% in the form of Treasury paper.
Nationalize the Fed, and let the Treasury finance itself,
cutting out the parasitical middlemen like JP Morgan Chase,
Goldman, Citibank, and the rest. The taxpayers will be the big
winners.
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HOOVER'S RECONSTRUCTION FINANCE CORPORATION WAS A FAILURE
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- The Paulson-Bernanke
$700 billion is roughly comparable (factoring in about 2000%
inflation from 1932 to 2008) to the Herbert Hoover
Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which started with $2
billion real 1932 dollars, but failed because it tried to prop
up insolvent banks and shore up collapsing financial values.
Under FDR, the RFC was put under Jesse Jones, who used it to
create real plant and equipment with great success. Under Jones,
the RFC contributed decisively to US economic recovery by
building up the Metals Reserve Company, the Rubber Reserve
Company, the Defense Plant Corporation, the Defense Supplies
Corporation, the War Damage Corporation, the U.S. Commercial
Company, the Rubber Development Corporation, and the Petroleum
Reserve Corporation. In other words, the RFC under Jones rebuilt
the industrial infrastructure which we have been using down to
the present day. Most of these investments represented added
physical commodity production. Today, this could be repeated to
produce infrastructure and energy plants for civilian use.
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CLEARING THE DECKS FOR WORLD ECONOMIC RECOVERY
-
- It is time to forget
about paper and the price of paper, and to concentrate on
production securing the tangible physical commodities and hard
commodity production which are necessary for human life and
civilization. It is impossible to prop up financial values in a
panic, and it is foolish to try. To secure a decent future, we
must now enact the following measures. Any of these points, all
of which seek to defend the general welfare and the public
interest, can and should be used as killer amendments to be
attached to the current bailout monstrosity as a means of
bringing it down.
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- Stop all foreclosures
on homes, farms, businesses, factories, mines, transport
systems, for a period of at least five years or for the duration
of the present world economic depression, whichever takes
longer. If you throw a family out of their home or shut down a
family farm, taxicab company, trucking firm, ferry, airline,
railroad, or factory of any kind because of debt, you will be on
your way to Leavenworth. All politicians now say that we have to
keep families in their homes. Excellent! A uniform federal law
with real teeth is the way to do it.
-
- Seize bankrupt banks
and financial institutions. Put them through Chapter XI
bankruptcy, and cancel the hopelessly unpayable parts of their
debts, starting with their derivatives book.
- Wipe out all
derivatives, whether exchange traded or counterparty, without
compensation. They have always been illegal. They are now a
threat to all of our lives. Not one penny of public money must
go to buy derivatives.
-
- Securities transfer tax
or Tobin tax on all financial transactions, including stocks,
bonds, foreign exchange, etc. This is a sales tax on finance
oligarchs who need to start paying their fair share. This will
take the life out of the booze for many speculators.
- Stop oil, food and
commodity speculation with comprehensive re- regulation
including position limits, 50 to 100% margin requirements
depending on market conditions, and by distinguishing between
legitimate hedgers and predatory speculators.
-
- No tax increases on
households. Surtax for foundations like the Ford, Rockefeller,
Carnegie, Annenberg, and Gates Foundations, who use their funds
not for charity but for subversion and divide and conquer social
engineering to divide and weaken the American people in defense
of the financier interest.
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- Restore business
confidence and credit with new credit issue through the
nationalized Federal Reserve, operating under the legal auspices
of the US Treasury. Use credit as a public utility. Provide
cheap, long-term credit for productive purposes only, not
parasitical speculation or financial services.
-
- Institute an absolute
guarantee for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start,
WIC, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and the other
remaining elements of the social safety net. No "entitlement
reform" under any circumstances. Austerity for bankers, not
people. Use the proceeds from the Securities Transfer Tax to
replenish the Social Security Trust Fund and preserve the other
vital programs through the end of the twenty-first century.
-
- Using New Deal methods,
it is possible to stop a depression cold in a single day. We did
it before, and we can do it again. Only 28% of the American
people now support the monstrous derivatives bailout, with 37%
opposed and 35% unsure, according to Rasmussen on Sept. 22. This
is an issue powerful enough to crystallize the current party
re-alignment in the same way that slavery in the territories did
in 1860, or the last depression did in 1932. Within a month, the
current empty husks of the gutted Democratic and Republican
Parties could collapse, and be replaced by the pro-Wall Street
Bailout Party led by Obama and his phalanx of rich elitists and
Malthusian fanatics from both parties, and the pro-middle class
and pro-worker Anti-Bailout Party with support from right-wing
Republicans, libertarians, and working class Democrats. Who will
have the brains and guts need to assert leadership over the
Anti- Bailout Party? Will it be McCain? Or Hillary Clinton? Or
someone else? We will soon find out.
Source
article:
http://www.rense.com/general83/deriv.htm
|
The Bankers 9/11
10-8-8
The US - now world - financial
crisis
has given nations a golden opportunity,
but will they seize it,
asks Eric Walberg
The talented Mr. Greenspan
salon.com > News Jan. 10, 2000
The Federal Reserve chairman has resisted
slowing the economy while waiting for his reappointment,
but will he put the brakes on now?
By Ian Williams
....For example, reportedly he is a staunch atheist,
but that did not stop him taking an oath on the Talmud
(held by his aged mum) to become chairman
of Nixon's Council of Economic Advisors,
while his prophetess Ayn Rand beamed away in the front row.
Apart from his quasi-cultist past, the main problem
with Greenspan is that he has too much power based on
his alleged powers of economic prediction....
Grand
Theft America
By Stephen Lendman
9-29-8
.....The result of unfettered capitalism's fatal flaw
- unbridled greed in a rigged system that rewards
the few at the expense of most others.
First an explanation of how it works.
Free-wheeling, "free market" Chicago School
fundamentalism the way economist Milton Friedman
championed it in his 1962 book
"Capitalism and Freedom" and taught it
to students for decades....
Hang 'Em High!
By Israel Shamir
9-25-8
.....This is not the first confidence trick in US history:
Jay Gould and Joseph Seligman caused the 'Black Friday'
stock market crash in the late 19th century,
while Jacob Schiff caused the notorious 'Black Thursday'
panic that led to a nationwide economic depression[1].
FDR's `New Deal':
An Example of
American System Economics
by Hartmut Cramer
Draft
Economic Recovery Program
To Stop The Bush Depression
By Webster Tarpley
1-22-8
Henry Wallace
Would Never
Have Dropped the Bomb on Japan
by Robert L. Baker
ON THE
NON-NOMINATION OF 1944
The Geometry of the
Henry Wallace Nomination
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
October 18, 2003
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