The United States has been destroyed by the “elected”
representatives in our government who are funded by and serve the interests of the
Creature from Jekyll Island, the Federal Reserve Bank. The people of the world are dying in masses
because the American people failed to heed the prophecy of Thomas Jefferson.
“The
central bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against
the Principles and form of our Constitution. I am an Enemy to all banks
discounting bills or notes for anything but Coin. If the American People allow
private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and
then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them
will deprive the People of all their Property until their Children will wake up
homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered. ”
― Thomas Jefferson
For over 200 years the American people were repeatedly
warned what would happen if the Central Banks were unleashed on the people of
the world. But like cockroaches in the
night the United States Senate passed Commodity Futures Modernization Act on
December 15, 2000, just three days after the United States Supreme Court
ordered an end to the recount of the votes in Florida and declared George W.
Bush the winner.
The 1999 repeal of the Glass Steagall Act or
Gramm-Leach-Bliley which passed the United States Senate with only 8 Senators
voting against making it veto proof, was not the sole cause of the global
banking meltdown of 2008. The direct
cause of the massive industrial scale fraud perpetrated by Wall Street banks
and the Federal Reserve Bank was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.
During this Presidential election year many of the
accusations hurled at the Clinton’s are factually incorrect and grossly exaggerated. Senator Bernie Sanders likes to blame President
Clinton for signing GLBA into law in 1999 and cites his no vote as a demonstration
of his superior judgement. However,
being one of only 8 Senators to vote against GLBA doesn’t take much courage as
he knew it will pass anyway.
The real example of the lack of judgement on Senator Sanders’
part was his vote to deregulate derivatives trading where his vote was crucial
to the Senate getting Commodities Futures Modernization passed. Without his vote the bill would never have
reached President Clinton’s desk to be signed into law. From Huffington Post:
Excerpt:
How Congress Rushed a Bill that Helped Bring the Economy to Its Knees
In the waning days of the 106th
Congress and the Clinton administration, Congress met in a lame-duck session to
complete work on a variety of appropriations bills that were not passed prior
to the 2000 election….
The saga of the Commodity Futures
Modernization Act begins in 1998. At the time, the economy was booming, stocks
soared, and new instruments of trading
were found to make more money while evading the oversight of regulatory bodies.
Two of those growing instruments were financial
derivatives and credit-default swaps…
The chairman of the Commodity
Futures Trade Commission (CFTC) Brooksley Born issued a first call for her
regulatory commission to have power to oversee financial derivatives. While
previous legislative attempts had been made earlier, Born's efforts were the
most direct and threatening to the financial industry…
In the midst of this debate Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), a major hedge fund employing some of the
top economists, collapsed. LTCM was highly over-leveraged and held a big
portfolio of swaps. In the end, during
the government organized bailout of the company, LTCM recorded a loss of
$1.6 billion on swaps alone.
Born felt that an unregulated
derivatives market that spawned the LTCM bailout could "pose grave dangers
to our economy." In the end, Born lost her battle and, in May 1999, asked
to be replaced as CFTC chairman…
Meanwhile in Congress, lawmakers
were still up-in-arms over Born's attempts to regulate the financial
derivatives market and began working to pass their own set of deregulatory
language…
Little attention followed Congress
as the contentious 2000 presidential election was stuck in a stalemate as
lawyers and khaki-clad protesters fought over the Florida recount to decide
whether Gov. George W. Bush or Vice President Al Gore would be the next
president.
During a lame-duck December session, while the media was focused on
the recounts and court cases, Gramm and Ewing sought to strike a compromise on
the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.
The day after the Supreme Court
ruled in favor of Gov. Bush, December 14, Ewing introduced a new version of the
Commodity Futures Modernization Act. On December 15, with little warning or
fanfare--aside from the overshadowed discussions on the floors of Congress--the
new, compromise version was included as a rider to the Consolidated
Appropriations Act for FY 2001, an 11,000 page omnibus appropriations
conference report…
As of June 30, 2008, the global derivatives market had exploded to $530
trillion…
Consensus is nearly universal that the failure to regulate financial
derivatives trading and the subsequent explosion of credit default swaps, by passing the Commodity Futures
Modernization Act, was a mistake.
So Bernie Sanders and the United States Senate, knowing full
well the dangers of an unregulated derivatives market after the collapse and
bailout of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), passed the Commodity Futures
Modernization Act in a lame duck session.
Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders claim Hillary Clinton’s war
vote as the biggest blunder in history and say her vote disqualifies her from
being President for lack of judgement. Both
Sanders and Obama cite their superior judgement, Bernie’s for voting against
the authorization and Obama did have to vote, but claims he would have voted no.
Sanders’ anti-war vote was hardly an act of superior
judgement or courage because the vote overwhelmingly passed and would have with
or without Sanders support. After the
9-11 attack that destroyed the World Trade Center, Senator Hillary Clinton, the
Junior Senator from New York where the attack took place, was put into an
untenable position.
The Bush Administration was hell bent on going to war in
Iraq and any voice that sought to repudiate their claims was immediately
silenced. Members of the Bush Administration went on talk
radio and cable TV daily and warning a terrified public Saddam had nuclear
weapons and was planning an imminent strike in America even bigger than 9-11.
Condoleezza Rice said the “smoking gun” would be a in the
form of a mushroom cloud. Rumsfeld said
absence of evidence of nuclear weapons wasn’t evidence of absence. Dick Cheney
said not only did Saddam have nuclear weapons, he knew where they were, they
were in Tikrit.
C-Span carried 24 hour programming of rightwing groups like
the American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, Federalist Society, Heritage
Foundation, RAND Corporation, etc. claiming an attack on the West Coast was
imminent. Many of their members are in Obama’s
State Department today.
It is not my intention to defend Hillary Clinton’s war vote
but to put that vote into context. But
Bernie Sanders’ vote to deregulate derivatives trading is still resonating
today. From World Socialist Website:
Excerpt:
The looting of US workers’ pensions
Behind the backs of the American
people, the Obama administration is carrying out one of the most significant
measures of its tenure in office: the gutting of benefits for hundreds of
thousands of retired workers covered by multiemployer pension funds. This
attack on private-sector pension benefits coincides with an escalating assault
on the pensions of public-sector workers.
On Monday in Detroit and Tuesday in
Minneapolis, longtime Washington fixer Kenneth Feinberg held the final public
hearings before the implementation of plans to slash the pension benefits of
270,000 retired truck drivers, package handlers and other beneficiaries of the
Teamsters Central States Pension Fund by between half and 75 percent.
Pensioners will receive ballots to
vote on the benefit cuts, which will be counted and totally ignored, as
Feinberg, appointed by the administration to serve as the Treasury Department’s
“special master” for multiemployer pension funds, rules unilaterally to proceed
with the cuts.
As the Obama administration’s
special master on executive compensation for banks and other firms that
received taxpayer bailouts in 2008-2009, Feinberg rubber-stamped
multimillion-dollar bonuses at companies such as the insurance giant American
International Group (AIG), which was bailed out by the government to the tune
of $185 billion.
The social counterrevolution has
been intensified since the financial crisis of 2008-2009. To pay for the bank
bailouts, in which the US government
handed over some $7 trillion to Wall Street, the Obama administration, with
the support and collaboration of the unions, ratcheted up the attack on the
living standards of the working class.
First came the 2009 restructuring of the auto industry, in which the pay was slashed for all newly hired
workers and the share of “second-tier” workers, earning half the pay of older
workers, was expanded from 20 to 40
percent at GM and Chrysler, even as health benefits for retirees were slashed.
In a recent debate Bernie Sanders stated that he wrote the
Affordable Care Act and was proud of it.
In 2010, President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, which created a
mechanism for companies to offload workers from their existing health care
plans into low-quality, high-cost private plans sold through exchanges. It
introduced a sharp penalty, known as the “Cadillac tax,” on higher-quality
health plans.
Next, in a series of deals with
congressional Republicans, the White
House repeatedly slashed vital social services such as food stamps and
unemployment insurance and chipped away at the bedrock social programs Medicare
and Social Security.
Then came the 2013-2014 Detroit bankruptcy, in which an unelected
emergency manager used the bankruptcy courts, in collaboration with the
Obama administration, to set a precedent for slashing constitutionally protected pension benefits of public-sector
retirees. This opened up the floodgates for the dismantling of pensions in
states throughout the country, including Illinois, California, Pennsylvania and
New York.
In late 2014, the Obama
administration worked with Congress, major corporations and trade unions to
pass the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act, which opened the door to the
slashing of the pensions of up to a million retirees, starting with the
beneficiaries of the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund…
Yes, all of it is the result of the passage of Commodity
Futures Modernization Act and there’s more.
The Flint Michigan water crisis is a direct result of CFMA and it’s
spreading across America. From MSN:
Excerpt:
Lead poisoning strikes another US town
A lead poisoning scandal has struck
a second US town, with schools closed in Sebring, Ohio Monday and the water
treatment plant operator accused of falsifying reports.
Initial tests found elevated lead
levels in 28 homes and one school in the midwestern village of about 4,400
people, Ohio's environmental protection agency said. It is not clear how long
lead has been leaking from the town's pipes.
The agency said in a statement it
has "reason to suspect that the operator falsified reports" and has
asked the federal Environmental Protection Agency's criminal division for help
with the investigation….
The Ohio case comes as a special
prosecutor was appointed to investigate how the city of Flint, Michigan exposed
100,000 residents to lead poisoning after cutting water treatment costs.
And the Zika virus is heading for America thanks to
CFMA. From Mother Nature Network:
Excerpt:
In foreclosure-ridden Florida, 'zombie' swimming pools add to mosquito
woes
A discerning skeeter couldn't ask
for a better breeding habitat than an abandoned swimming pool. And
unfortunately for post-recession Florida, there's a whole lot of them.
It’s been well-established that
summertime’s most irksome creature, the female mosquito, requires stagnant
water to lay her eggs. And in Florida, the nation’s leader in both naked real
estate and so-called "zombie foreclosures" — that is, forsaken homes
left in a state of limbo in which the owner has walked away and the bank has
not reclaimed the property — there’s plenty of stagnant water to go around.
In a recent Florida Today article, these abandoned zombie
homes, specifically foreclosed homes with swimming
pools that have been transformed into foul, egg-laying havens for biting
insects, are linked to an increasingly hellish — and dangerous — mosquito
problem in the Sunshine State.
And with thousands upon thousands
of neglected swimming pools — or “algae-caked cesspools” as Florida Today calls
them — only exacerbating the problem, comes an elevated risk of being infected
with mosquito-borne viral diseases including dengue fever and chikungunya.
While the latter tropical disease,
a particularly miserable-sounding affliction transmitted by the Asian tiger
mosquito, has appeared in Florida before, it
has never been contracted inside of the U.S. That is, until earlier this month
when not one but two non-travel-related cases of chikungunya were announced by
Florida health officials. One case was reported in Miami-Dade County and the
other in Palm Beach County.
Sounds lovely — abandoned homes,
zombie pools, bloodsucking insects, and debilitating viral diseases!
Will Bernie Sanders be held accountable for his poor
judgement in voting to pass the Commodity Futures Modernization Act? Will Obama and Biden be held accountable for
slashing pensions after bailing out Wall Street and authorizing billions of
dollars in bonuses for criminal bankers?
Will Timothy Geithner be held accountable for his role in
crashing the economy as Head of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York and then
bailing out Wall Street banks as Treasury Secretary? Wait, what’s this? From USA Today:
Excerpt:
Ex T-man Geithner cashing in on Wall Street
WASHINGTON – Timothy Geithner is
finally cashing in.
After an appropriate stint at a
think tank to write his memoir and a quiet transition to Wall Street, President
Obama’s first Treasury secretary, who left office in 2013, is now ready to make millions thanks to help from a big bank he used to
regulate.
Bloomberg News this week disclosed
that Geithner has gotten a line of
credit from JPMorgan Chase, the
nation’s biggest bank, to invest in a
new $12 billion fund at the private equity firm where he works, Warburg
Pincus...
Geithner of course was the Treasury
secretary who pushed the bailout of the big banks, including JPMorgan, in the
wake of the financial crisis, beating off anyone who wanted to discipline the
banks or punish their executives with the argument that doing so would further
destabilize the financial system…
Geithner also failed to execute the government’s plan for mortgage
relief to individuals in order to shelter the banks from losses, one of the
reasons Barofsky titled his book Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington
Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street…
Vermont's Sen. Bernie Sanders is
hammering away at Wall Street influence, telling voters that the banks’
business model is fraud, and putting rival Hillary Clinton under constant
pressure to explain her ties to Wall Street, including speaking fees from
Goldman Sachs and other institutions.
Will anyone hold Bernie Sanders accountable for his vote to
unleash the creature from Jekyll Island?
I doubt it, what they will do is keep beating down on Hillary Clinton to
destroy her career and legacy while promoting Bernie Sanders. After Hillary is marginalized the DNC will
claim he is unelectable and the Super Delegates will overturn the will of the
voters and pronounce Joe Biden the Democratic Candidate for President.
And what about the rest of us, well we’ll be lucky to get
out of this world alive.
By Patricia Baeten
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