Slouching Towards Neofeudalism
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/garrett-johnson/slouching-towards-neofeud_b_568972.html
The financial crisis that grips our nation's states and cities has a malicious source, and Governor Tim Pawlenty recently named that source: public school teachers.
http://www.minnpost.com/politicalagenda/2010/04/30/17788/gov_pawlenty_public_employees_are_over-benefited_and_overpaid "It used to be that public employees were underpaid and over-benefited. Now they are over-benefited and overpaid compared to their private-sector counterparts."
The school teacher, the policeman, the firefighter - these are now the faces of what is wrong with America today. It doesn't matter that studies by the Bureau of Labor Statistics say otherwise, America can no longer afford their overpaid, middle-class salaries. At least that is what the right-wing media is telling us. Tea party members also want to see a drastic pay cut for the same people who teach their children. A familiar comment on the internet is, "I took a pay cut last year. Why shouldn't they?"
This attitude goes beyond schadenfreude and goes straight to the crabs in a bucket mentality. Strangely enough this attitude of "if I can't have it, neither should you" only extends to working class people who live next door. For some reason none of the jealousy and malice is reserved for the people who actually broke the budgets of the states and cities, i.e. the people who deserve it.
If you really want to know why the cities and states are so broke, then you must first ask yourself where all the money went. Was the firefighter down the street from you buying vacation yachts for his tropical island? Probably not. However, the guys on Wall Street who sold your school district, county, and state governments complicated financial derivative products are buying yachts for their tropical islands. Maybe we should start there instead.
Detroit Mayor Dave Bing is struggling to save his city from fiscal calamity. Unemployment is at a record 28% and rising, while home prices have plunged 39% since 2007. The 66-year-old Bing, a former NBA all-star with the Detroit Pistons who took office 10 months ago, faces a $300 million budget deficit--and few ways to make up the difference.
Against that bleak backdrop, Wall Street is squeezing one of America's weakest cities for every penny it can. A few years ago, Detroit struck a derivatives deal with UBS (UBS) and other banks that allowed it to save more than $2 million a year in interest on $800 million worth of bonds. But the fine print carried a potentially devastating condition. If the city's credit rating dropped, the banks could opt out of the deal and demand a sizable breakup fee. That's precisely what happened in January: After years of fiscal trouble, Detroit saw its credit rating slashed to junk. Suddenly the sputtering Motor City was on the hook for a $400 million tab. What most often happened is that Wall Street rating agencies, the same agencies implicated in corrupt business practices, downgraded the municipal bonds, thus turning the the financial deals into an albatross for broke cities, but a profitable one for Wall Street.
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http://archives.kpfa.org/data/20111102-Wed1300.mp3 part 1
http://archives.kpfa.org/data/20111109-Wed1300.mp3 part 2
"Unpacking Mr. Global, Part One" with Catherine Austin Fitts. Derivatives exposure of Bank of America and the FDIC; corruption at the Department of Housing and Urban Development; prosecution of Hamilton Securities; Community Wizard; 9/11; collateral fraud
"Unpacking Mr. Global, Part Two" with Catherine Austin Fitts. Collateral fraud in the housing market; the black budget; financing of a breakaway civilization; privatization of advanced technology; $12 trillion leveraged buyout of the country; a financial coup d'etat; debt used to re-engineer governance systems; Uruguay round of GATT; $4 trillion missing from the federal government; pension funds the biggest financier of federal government; blackmail of congress; private defense contractor control of databases.
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Additional resources:
http://dunwalke.com/contents.htm
Dillon Read & Co. Inc. : the Aristocracy of Stock Profits
Catherine Austin Fitts is president of Solari, Inc. and the managing member of Solari Investment Advisory Services, LLC and Sea Lane Advisory, LLC. She previously served as managing director and member of the board of directors of the Wall Street investment bank Dillon, Read & Co., Inc. She also served as Assistant Secretary of Housing/Federal Housing Commissioner at HUD in the first Bush Administration, and was the president and founder of The Hamilton Securities Group, Inc., a broker-dealer/investment bank and software developer. Catherine has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MBA from the Wharton School, and studied Chinese at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
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http://solari.com/blog/dick-cheneys-fluffernutter /
Dick Cheney’s Fluffernutter
Sinclair Lewis once said “When fascism comes to American it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” Dick Cheney’s new autobiography goes light on the religion, and doubles up on the flag, apple pie, kids, grandkids and down home homilies. It is the literary equivalent of a fluffernutter – an amazing amount of goo poured between slices of white bread.
I read Cheney’s book In My Time because I wanted to see how he could explain his political history inside the constricting boundaries of the official reality. He did – he came up with a complete autobiography that tiptoes through his entire chronology. As a creative venture, it is a formidable achievement. There is, however, little reason to classify it as non-fiction.
I enjoyed numerous tidbits. For personal reasons, I am always interested to learn more about Cheney and Rumsfeld during the Ford Administration engineering Rumsfeld to become the youngest Secretary of Defense, replaced by Cheney as White House Chief of Staff, and engineering George H. W. Bush in to run the CIA to help shut down the Church Commission and do damage control regarding its revelations.
Then, of course, there is one twist and turn of dirtball after another. Cheney always blames the victim. Paul O’Neill leaves Treasury because he is not effective, rather than his efforts to illuminate the actual level of debt and contingent liabilities was bad news for budgeting aggressive tax cuts and military spending plans or his insistence on providing a more realistic estimate of what the Iraq War would cost threatened support for the global empire. Cheney’s rewrite of his relationship with Colin Powell and Powell’s presentation at the United Nations has had Powell’s former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson offering to testify if Cheney stands trial. The failure of the Iraqi infrastructure can be blamed on the Iraqi people – let’s not mention the ample documentation that the failure was engineered from the White House.
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http://solari.com/blog/financial-coup-d%e2%80%99etat /
Financial Coup d’Etat
In the fall of 2001 I attended a private investment conference in London to give a paper, The Myth of the Rule of Law or How the Money Works: The Destruction of Hamilton Securities Group.
The presentation documented my experience with a Washington-Wall Street partnership that had:
•Engineered a fraudulent housing and debt bubble;
•Illegally shifted vast amounts of capital out of the U.S.;
•Used “privitization” as a form of piracy – a pretext to move government assets to private investors at below-market prices and then shift private liabilities back to government at no cost to the private liability holder.
Other presenters at the conference included distinguished reporters covering privatization in Eastern Europe and Russia. As the portraits of British ancestors stared down upon us, we listened to story after story of global privatization throughout the 1990s in the Americas, Europe, and Asia.
Slowly, as the pieces fit together, we shared a horrifying epiphany: the banks, corporations and investors acting in each global region were the exact same players. They were a relatively small group that reappeared again and again in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Asia accompanied by the same well-known accounting firms and law firms.
Clearly, there was a global financial coup d’etat underway.
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http://solari.com/articles/popsicle_index /
The Popsicle Index........ Who makes it go up? Who makes it go down?
To help people understand how the global financial system affects their well being, I came up with a very simple quality-of-life index based on one question: what percentage of the people in your place believe that a child can leave their home, go to the nearest place to buy a popsicle or other snack, and return home alone safely?
Your answer gives you the Popsicle Index or Solari Index of your place.
The Popsicle Index is the % of people who believe a child can leave their home, go to the nearest place to buy a popsicle or snack, and come home alone safely. For example, if you feel that 50% of your neighbors believe a child in your neighborhood would be safe, then your Popsicle Index is 50%. The Popsicle Index is based on gut level feelings of the people who have intimate knowledge of a place, rather than facts and figures.
The purpose of the Popsicle Index is to inspire continuous conversation and learning in every neighborhood and village on earth about what it means to feel safe and secure where you live and work, to be physically free to wander and roam without concern and to identify and shift the people and things that contribute or drain that feeling.
Maybe a passersby can be trusted to leave my child alone, but she drives like a maniac through our neighborhood. Maybe a child is physically safe going to the local store, but his parents are concerned about the chemicals and unknown substances in snacks these days, or the influence of older kids hanging around the store. Maybe the family is too poor for the child to have the money to go buy a treat. Maybe she will be perfectly safe going to the market alone, but die of a preventable disease for lack of basic health care. Or maybe there is no market nearby, or any jobs either, so parents commute to someone else's neighborhood to work and shop and bank.
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http://solari.com/articles/databeast
The Data Beast
As the corruption spread throughout our society in the 1990's, I was forced by circumstance to estimate how the operations of systemic physical and financial violence in our society work. How is so much financial fraud engineered? How was it millions of Americans went along with a housing and debt bubble that bankrupted us? What about the distribution of narcotics into every community in America in ways that are invisible to most people? How is $500 billion - $1 trillion of the proceeds of mortgage and financial fraud, drug sales and other illegal businesses laundered through the US financial system with rarely a peep from the network news?
In the drugging and bankrupting of America, I kept coming back to the importance of building proprietary or secret databases and information systems to support your operations. Such operations are quite expensive, which is part of the beauty of having governments pay private companies and banks to collect and maintain such data, which can then be secretly aggregated and applied. What looks like many different government agencies with diverse purposes, is really a few large defense contractors and banks building and maintaining vast databases that are easily aggregated in powerful ways.
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Information presented on a multiplicity of subjects that goes a long way towards explaining the current paradigms we all suffer under.
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