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The bailout's perks have been no less favorable for private investors who are now picking over the economy's still-smoking rubble at the taxpayers' expense. The newer bailout programs rolled out by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner give private equity firms, hedge funds and other private investors significant leverage to buy "toxic" or distressed assets, while leaving taxpayers stuck with the lion's share of the risk and potential losses.
Given the lack of transparency and accountability, don't expect taxpayers to be able to object too much. After all, remarkably little is known about how TARP recipients have used the government aid received. Nonetheless, recent government reports, Congressional testimony and commentaries offer those patient enough to pore over hundreds of pages of material glimpses of just how Wall Street friendly the bailout actually is. Here, then, based on the most definitive data and analyses available, are six of the most blatant and alarming ways taxpayers have been scammed by the government's $1.1-trillion, publicly funded bailout.
The handling of the bailout makes at least one thing clear, however. It's not your health that the government is focused on, it's theirs-- the very banks and lenders whose convoluted financial systems provided the underpinnings for staggering salaries and bonuses, while bringing our economy to the brink of another Great Depression.
Numerous events mark major milestones. They should be viewed in aggregate. The major media networks have no vested interest in enabling more than trivial perceptions toward each story. Paradigm Shifts are magnificent processes, not easily made possible, which require great and steady powerful forces behind them. Cooperation must be present from most global players of importance. Here is a list of events. To be honest, if after reading them in entirety, a deep sense of tectonic changes is not sensed, then at best a sleepy state prevails in the cerebrum and at worst a compromised state dominates.
This article provides an outline of events that have occurred only in the last few weeks, as the pace is accelerating for transformation that begins at the foundation.
Peak Oil is not just the end of globalization. I was saying clearly that globalization was dead five years ago. It was obvious. But Peak Oil is potentially the end of the human race and that outcome is perhaps just a few years away unless the human race essentially throws every ideological sacred cow out the window and starts with a fresh piece of paper. There are around five billion people alive today that were not sustainable before oil came along. There is no combination of alternative energies (nor will there ever be) that can possibly sustain the edifice built by oil. In the industrialized world there are ten calories of hydrocarbon energy involved in the production of every calorie of food. Our soils have been little more than infertile sponges onto which we throw massive amounts of chemicals derived from oil and natural gas.
Many mainstream pundits are claiming that a wave of regulation and reform of the banks and the financial industry is on its way. On the other hand, some alternative news writers are saying that real reform may never really happen (see this, for example). Indeed, Obama has appointed to most of the key economic posts the people most responsible for deregulation in the first place. In fact, in at least one area - one of the most important causes of the financial crisis - reform has already been defeated. By way of background, the derivatives industry has volunteered (once again) to regulate itself. As Newsweek noted April 10th, the big boys were using bailout money to aggressively lobby against the regulation of credit default swaps.
Instead of "blowing up or burning" over-the-counter CDS - as nobel economist Myron Scholes urged - or making any other real changes which would help the economy and the consumer, the rule changes are mainly a p.r. effort by the derivatives industry itself (like the stress tests were a p.r stunt by the banking industry.) The "changes" will do virtually everything the derivatives industry asked for, including guaranteeing the big banks' profits in selling CDS by keeping out smaller competitors.
Regulation of over the counter CDS has already failed.
One of the many benefits of being a leading citizen of the Potemkin economy and a silent partner with the Treasury and Federal Reserve. There is an analog to this in the tech sector, in which some companies may choose to write down the value of their components and subassembly inventories in fat quarters, and then take them as an improvement to their Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) in lean quarters, to boost EPS even as the top line revenues are flat to down. And as for merger accounting, there are several companies showing excellent and consistent results using that rolling paintbrush of accounting embellishments. Things are not always as they appear, especially when viewed through magic lantern of Wall Street.
Few office towers have been left untouched by the flood of sublet space that has recently inundated the New York office market. In Midtown Manhattan — where many of the world’s largest financial companies are headquartered — three out of every four office towers now have sublet space available. Robert Sammons, the managing director in charge of research at Colliers ABR, said that sublet space in trophy office towers along Madison Avenue and Park Avenue has been leasing for as little as one-third of what that space might have commanded in early 2008, at the height of the roaring market.
Discussion of the 50% Retracement Rule,
potential future price levels, time studies, key dates, Fibonacci, Gann, Astro numbers, Robert Rhea's Great Depression analysis.
On May 21st and May 22nd, an unprecedented gathering of the nation’s Freedom Movement leaders was held in Georgia at the Jekyll Island Club Hotel. The planning meetings, coined the “Jekyll Island Project,” were hosted by We The People Foundation for Constitutional Education, Inc., chaired by Bob Schulz. A highlight of the gathering was a special ceremony held in the Federal Reserve Room at the Club, specifically to establish a “righteous record” to supplant the secretive deliberations which occurred in that same location in 1910 to conceive the (unconstitutional) Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Beloved Freedom leader G. Edward Griffin, author of The Creature at Jekyll Island, spoke about the 1910 gathering and the importance of the current leader meeting in the location, at this particular time. Bob Schulz followed with a talk entitled “A New Record for America.”
Who are the officers guiding our ship of state, steering us through the troubled waters of a failed economy and two tragic and costly wars? Do we have bold leaders ready to move us away from the failed policies that generated a free market kleptocracy for insiders and their masters, the ultra wealthy? Are they brilliant tacticians who can think far enough outside of the box to get us out of calamitous foreign adventures that generate nothing but death, destruction, and ill will on the part of those we seek to "help"? At the start of President Obama's administration, it was clear that this would be a cabinet that spanned those few degrees of that mythical political spectrum called "the middle." The political middle, like the Hobbits' "middle earth," is a contrivance, although much less artful. It's where you're supposed to be if you're the president. You stand for those who count; those with the vested interests in the economy. You are that special gatekeeper at the intersection between avarice and the nation's wealth. Will anything truly change? We can tell by the key players in domestic and foreign policy.?
If you have any info that would help, please contact me at my private email address: bailout@michaelmoore.com
