Excuse Me While I Rant On Bernanke

Fed Debates New Role: Bubble Fighter (WSJ) “Not so long ago, Federal Reserve officials were confident they knew what to do when they saw bubbles building in prices of stocks, houses or other assets: Nothing. Now, as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke faces a confirmation hearing Thursday on a second four-year term, he and others at the central bank are rethinking the hands-off approach they've followed over the past decade. On the heels of a burst housing-and-credit bubble, Mr. Bernanke now calls financial booms "perhaps the most difficult problem for monetary policy this decade."

Excuse me while I rant….

Um, dear, dear, dear Mr. Bernanke. Could it be that the deregulation of tried and true market methods like:

• Removing naked short selling rules, to remove the necessity of covering your shorts - along with other important market regulations which YOU removed in 2004 and 2007, and which allowed bear raiding of perfectly good companies, as well as a risky derivatives markets
• the Mark 2 Market accounting schemes,
• the government and banking industry sanction for the creation of new and risky loans for homes, and the creation of “no matter your credit!” as well as “just state your income – no proof required!” rules
• that were further complicated by new and risky derivatives that go BUST the minute something happens to even ONE of the units within the derivative (in this case ONE single mortgage housed inside a derivative comprised of 100 mortgages, goes belly up) which in turn causes said derivative to instantly become a junk bond due to those very same M2M accounting schemes,
• along with the creation of insurance products (CDS's) that aren’t called insurance products for the express purpose of avoiding insurance regulation rules of those VERY SAME INSURANCE PRODUCTS (that aren’t really insurance) that could maybe….. possibly….. perchance… be the problem?

While we are at it, MR. Bernanke, why not mention the facts that soon after you accepted the position of Fed Chairman:

• YOU stopped the rate increases that were designed to slow an expanding bubble.
• You also well understand that the repeal of Glass-Steagall opened the door to the financial bubble. (After all, you are a “Depression expert”, are you not?)
• That YOU know that the Commodity and Futures Modernization Act opened the door for commodity bubbles. AND THAT YOU DID NOTHING TO FIX ANY OF THOSE ISSUES, KNOWINGLY and COMPLICITLY?
• And at the risk of being repetitive you certainly ought to know that forcing banks to make sub-prime loans is not healthy, for the bank or for the home-buyer.
• If YOU are such an expert on the Depression, the mark-to-market rules have got to be ringing in your ears….as well as the dismantling of uptick rules, unless of course you are as adept at lying to yourself as you are to the American people, the president’s, the world and the Hill.
• YOU knew banks were selling CDS derivatives with a vengeance. YOU are well aware of the whole mess and YOU did nothing…except of course help your buddies at Goldman get their money out of AIG.

In other words dear Mr. Banker Bernanke sir, couldn’t it be YOU, along with all your redistributive (from our pocket to their own), tax stealing, loss publicizing, gain privatizing buddies at all the chop shops on Wall Street (all of whom are right there alongside you) that are the major problem? YOU who STOLE so very many trillions out of the pockets of unsuspecting citizens in the largest “transfer of wealth” event in the history of transfers of wealth? Yep. You betcha!

Honestly Mr. Bernanke - Do you truly believe that we the people are so stupid that we don’t understand what is going on? That we aren’t already about 99.9% certain that it is YOU and YOUR BUDDIES Geithner and your best bud Larry Summers (whom you so adeptly quote today and who is so wrapped up in Citibank it isn’t even funny, as well as the mess at Harvard, the muni bonds and so much else) who orchestrated this whole mess to begin with?

As you blithely sit before the Senate Committee, while all of you in this administration hold our feet to the fire, may God judge you severely for your complicit greed and avarice.

While you are leaving WE THE PEOPLE afraid to make a move in our companies and in our personal lives for what is sure to be coming down the pike tomorrow, in the forms of new banking regulations that are so far reaching as to be nothing but money guzzling big government; not to mention all the other ways we face uncertainty in our businesses and our lives, i.e. new taxes, fees, healthcare insurance, cap and trade or the signing of the Copenhagen treaty (whichever comes first) that we are facing because of your collective efforts to steal our wealth, I simply cannot understand how you live with yourself. Do you honestly believe that we can just freely go ahead and participate in the free market at this time? While you boss is out there doing a “JOBS Summit” with EXACTLY TWO CEO’s in attendance? Really? Do you think we can recover this economy and recapture our wealth in an environment as obviously greedy as this one?

NO! We can’t Because YOU WON’T LET US!

Stop messing with the system so that your buddies at Goldman Sachs can manipulate the markets and all will soon return to normal! LEAVE US ALONE TO FIX IT! The people can fix themselves if you and all your cronies will get the heck out of the way!

You sir, need to go. Not only do you need to go out of office, you need to go to STRAIGHT TO JAIL! Shame on YOU!

Bunning agrees with me….Bunning Statement on Bernanke: ‘You Are the Definition of a Moral Hazard’ A MUST Read/MUST Disseminate Article “It’s highly unusual for us to find a lawmaker’s statement at a hearing to be particularly informative, even rarer for it to be entertaining. At Senate Banking Committee hearings, Sen. Jim Bunning has at times proved the exception on the latter. The Kentucky Republican has firmly staked out his spot on the field as the primary attack dog against the Federal Reserve, its leadership and much of how it operates.
We’ll leave you to grade his statement for content at today’s confirmation hearing for Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. But we’ll gladly give him an A for effort. He’s got zinger after zinger, a citation from prior hearings and even a reference to his baseball career (before he became a Hall of Famer). Some members of his party have tried to quietly nudge Sen. Bunning out of office — he won’t run for reelection next year — so this was his last opportunity to oppose a Fed chairman’s nomination. As a sort of parting gift to him, and to you, we offer his full statement from today’s hearing, as prepared for delivery. (Just remember that one of the leading candidates to replace him is Rand Paul, the son of Texas Republican Ron Paul, the House’s leading Fed hater.)”….

Text of the statements are included in this article.
Here is the opening salvo: “Four years ago when you came before the Senate for confirmation to be Chairman of the Federal Reserve, I was the only Senator to vote against you. In fact, I was the only Senator to even raise serious concerns about you. I opposed you because I knew you would continue the legacy of Alan Greenspan, and I was right. But I did not know how right I would be and could not begin to imagine how wrong you would be in the following four years.” It gets better from there! Read it, you will enjoy it!

SONG THAT SAYS EXACTLY THIS. Hat Tip Cheryl. It is perfect!

Everyone – CALL TODAY and SAY NO TO BERNANKE! 4 more years of him and we may as well throw in the towel.

Related - Exclusive: Republican To Place Additional Hold On Bernanke In Senate Banking Committee “As Ben Bernanke’s confirmation hearing begins in the Senate Banking Committee, a source tells FDL News that one Senate staffer and an outside source confirmed to him that at least one Republican on the committee will also place a hold on the Federal Reserve chairman, throwing the process into potential turmoil and giving Chris Dodd a difficult series of choices to make. The source, speaking on condition of anonymity because of his work behind the scenes on the Bernanke confirmation, told me that two separate sources assured him that the Republican hold would be made public after today’s hearing. One staffer said that two Republicans would place the hold, while the other said it would just be one. The source said that the trans-partisan nature of opposition to Bernanke, with a conservative Republican and a socialist independent uniting to block the appointment, shows the intensity of the feelings on the issue. “It’s great to see everyone come together – Democrats, Republicans, progressives and libertarians, against this Federal Reserve, which is not federal, and not a reserve, just a group printing money and giving it to their buddies,” the source said” Woo HOO!
Bernanke defends his Federal Reserve record Oh just gag me!

GRRRRR - Goldman Takes Offensive on Pay “Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs Group Inc.—known for its outsize profits and unapologetically handsome pay packages to go with them—has begun meeting with major investors in an effort to ward off an investor backlash over its record compensation pool. The private discussions are a first for Goldman, several shareholders said, as the Wall Street firm finds its self on the defensive over its pay, where employees are on track to earn an average of more than $700,000 apiece this year. The meetings are expected to last several more weeks and come as shareholders are filing proposals aimed at restricting pay ..."

CAP and TRADE 20 Talking Points - A Between Post Post

Just finished my study on Cap and Trade. I hope these talking points help you with your Senator. Let it be so! Please call and fax your Senator EVERYDAY!

Most of these are tweetable as well. Others you will have to shorten.

1. Cap and Trade is the largest single welfare bill ever written, again redistributing my paycheck both overseas and here in the US
2. Cap and Trade will require government inspectors to tell me what I must replace to even be able to sell my home. Roof to toilet!
3. Cap and Trade requires every house be registered in a national database as to its energy efficiency which means inspection – who pays?
4. Cap and Trade registery in database leads where exactly? Some newly created agency can tell me I have to upgrade whenever they want? Will you find a way later to fine me?
5. Cap and Trade requires that all Real Estate Appraisers will have to be retrained, and tested, and their schooling paid for by us!
6. Cap and Trade gives even more money to the failed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We're already in a housing crisis, it'll make it way worse!
7. Cap and Trade puts the Full Faith and credit of the US is pledged to interest and principle payments to the guarantee for retrofit and the mortgage. As if FNMA hasn't screwed up enough!
8. Cap and Trade creates Carbon Derivative Options: We are going to allow these to be traded around the world – like CDO’s. We haven't learned? It's even the same damn acronym!
9. Cap and Trade offers grants to take companies overseas because they can no longer justify remaining in the US. Call your Senators!
10. Cap and Trade offers grants to help companies do “market studies” to determine what they can do after CAP and TAX puts them out of business! They ADMIT IT!
11. Cap and Trade is expected to lose 2.5 million jobs a year. Frankly, I think that estimate is quite low - it's always at least double what they say it will be! Call your Senators.
12. Cap and Trade will create a trade war because in order to try to force countries to reduce we will place pressure through the UN according to the Wall Street Journal? Did we elect the UN to be our government?
13. Cap and Trade calls for refusing to import other countries products if they do not comply to our idiocy by 2020. So we can't make it here and we can't buy theirs? Wow.
14. Cap and Trade will increase every single item we buy, exponentially, kill the housing industry – create serious issues for all the foreign countrymen who own property and expect to be able to sell that property….it is a nightmare waiting to happen…the ramifications are literally the most unbelievable that have ever passed through the halls of congress.
15. Cap and Trade will place limits on our energy usage. Could easily go as far as to shut us off during certain hours without warning.
16. Cap and trade builds more agencies, boards and bureaucracies than any bill to date. EVER.
17. Cap and Trade places California standards as Federal building codes on every single State, little nook and cranny in the country. We see how well California manages its agencies, right?
18. Cap and Trade will place requirements on all building code departments in the nation, 3 mandatory full time people, the Inspector, a Health and Human Resources person and One other government agency person. How will Podunk, USA handle the costs? Raise your property tax of course.
19. Cap and Trade is one hidden tax after another. That 2k increase per year in expected additional expenditures? Yeah, I think I would triple it for budgeting purposes.
20. It’s all really simple. We can’t afford the bills they are passing, we can’t continue to “print” our way out of a recession, our debt is currently at nearly 400% of gross domestic product without Cap and Trade, Healthcare Reform, and this NEW new stimulus, Stephanopoulos brought up on Sunday. They are just priming the pump again.

In the Great Depression in 1933 total debt topped out at 300% of GDP. This current financial crisis could be more severe in magnitude and length than the Great Depression and we don’t have the strength or the gold behind us anymore – which is EXACTLY the reason the Senate just today said NO to the Audit of the Federal Reserve! They don’t want us or anyone else to know how much is NOT there against our debt.

I can't stress enough how significant Sunday was as Stephanopoulos led Biden down the primrose path of “stimulus not working” do we need a new stimulus bs. Today Bloomberg reports that an Obama advisors says we need a new stimulus because the other isn’t working. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601070&sid=aStWHJXsvePA

Where Today’s Problems Began, Stage One of Current History

Former President Woodrow Wilson said in 1919,

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is now controlled by its system of credit. We are no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”

I will tell you more about President Wilson in another blog, but this guy is exactly why we are where we are today and he was a "high socialist". He was the first elected Progressive. In case you don’t know, the Progressive party ushered in Prohibition! You know – the law that outlawed “spirits” (alcohol). That’s also Obama’s party, although he didn’t really say so until AFTER the election. Watch your beer folks - although Obama's gig seems to be more about cigarettes – the hypocrite…but I digress…

I am going to start from the beginning. If I start from the end, I only get half the picture. At the very least, it is a distorted view and it doesn’t give me a way to answer the questions well enough to make sure that people cannot continue to mislead me. Whether my broker, my banker, a congressperson or the president.

So what happened to America? What does it all mean and how do you put it together? It’s tough unless you have a economics/history degree. It’s actually really just common sense when you break it down, but the breaking down is not easy. I tried to break the concepts down to make it considerably easier for you. Mainly I did so because I am concerned that if we don’t get it soon, we are going to be in a big lot of trouble that we cannot even fathom now.

There are basically two sides of the fence, statist ideology and the gold specie which we will get into in a later blog, but whose definitions are:

Statism - The practice or doctrine of giving a centralized government control over economic planning and policy.

Specie – means simply the belief in coin, money in the form of coins (as opposed to paper money or bullion) and comes from phrase in specie "in the real or actual form" within a society. Specie can also be related to the Labor of peoples, which is why it was mandatory that Act 1 of the scheme, of which I am about to tell you be played out first.

As you can easily see, one has a doctrine, a belief system attached and the other is based in actuality of a unit of trade.

I have to give a shout out to my senior year Government teacher, Mr. Hurncane. We did not learn just the basics in that class. We broke out the constitution, we broke it down line by line, we learned what the President thought after their terms (when possible) and we learned the forces that shaped the subsequent amendments. So much, I do not remember, but it is amazing that so much is coming back to me as I am watching what is going on in this country. He had a big hand in shaping my life, made me passionate about protecting our freedoms, and made it a lifelong love affair of all things liberty.

My recent education in order to answer the basic question...what in the hell is going on... taught me a few things I knew but didn’t know - if you get my drift. I learned that it all got its start back in 1913 under Pres. Woodrow Wilson, with a "sky is falling" state of fear created by JP Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Paul Warburg. These three private bankers worked with Wilson (a past Princeton professor) that only bankers had the answer and together they could rule the world one day if he would only pass two pieces of legislation.

Led by McAdoo, the then Secretary Treasurer, we had a ‘sky is falling’ announcement to the Citizens very similar to first Paulson and now Geithner’s today. Let's call it a "created" crisis. Between Wilson and McAdoo, they pressured Congress to pass the 16th Amendment - without ratification of a sufficient number of States, I might add. In case you don’t know which Amendment that is, it is the Amendment that says we have to pay an "Income" Tax.

An interesting side note I uncovered here is that in 2003, a US District Court Judge by the name of James Fox wrote opinion in a Tax Case that said,

“If you examine the 16th amendment carefully, you will find that a sufficient number of States never ratified that Amendment”.

Are we to assume this is still the case, since it was as late as 2003 that this opinion was written? That in reality, there is no “ratified” Amendment 16? Does that mean that current law says not enough States passed the Amendment - effectively meaning that we really do not have to pay Income Tax?

It would at least now appear that is true of most of Obama’s cabinet members, anyway…. Alas, that’s a whole other ball of wax, now isn’t it? I’m not going to go into that, but will leave it to someone else.

As to our history lesson though, Congress passed an Amendment that had been ruled unconstitutional just a few short years prior, by the Supreme Court. It appears that after lying to the public - stating that it had been ratified, and subsequently imposing such tax, they summarily saddled every working man and woman with a new law they weren’t expecting in the way of “Income” Tax.

Then we had the next big blow that same year (beginning to sound familar?), the Bankers helped McAdoo and Wilson with a second bill, this one introduced to Congress in the middle of that year’s Christmas holiday break when most of the House was not present.

Now I don’t know how much you and yours pay attention to the passing of legislation, but that’s dirty politics right there. To hold a vote that important without the individuals that had been elected to represent the rights of their constituents, and therefore were listed as “not present”, is just. plain. wrong.!

As a result of that dirty vote though, the House proceeded to ram through the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. That vote effectively began, in large measure, the adoption of the Statist Ideology and began the move away from the Gold Specie. It developed a mixed money system and they did so because the Bankers felt that they could do a much better job than we could or the majority of the people we elected could do. Not really, that’s just what they said; actually, they just wanted control.

That act was and remains the largest elephant (of several) in the room, this isn’t just an 8000 lb elephant, this thing still fills the house floor and is now so bloated it takes up all the space available between the Capital and Wall Street.

So what is the Federal Reserve Board Act?

Many believe the Federal Reserve Board Act is an unconstitutional act. They are probably more right than wrong. The act created a centralized banking system controlled by an independent board of bankers. This board, the Federal Reserve, gave the broad power to perform such central banking functions as: determining and harmonizing discount rates, defining eligible paper, and controlling the issue of notes (aka “money”).

In other words, they are private bankers who control the money, the supply of money – and in still clearer words, the dips, and rises in the economy. They are not a "Federal" anything!

The discount rate is the interest rate charged to commercial banks and other depository institutions on loans they receive from their regional Federal Reserve Bank's lending facility--the discount window. With three types, primary, secondary and seasonal credit, each with its own rate, overnight loans, shortfall loans and less than stellar backed loans. This also allowed a “mixed Gold Standard” meaning that even though Gold remained the backing and a backdrop of support for money, the “Fed” could and did devalue said money by the printing of more money when so desired by raising or lowering the price of Gold or manufacturing money to purchase government securities (bonds, T Bills, etc).

They passed this off as a “good thing” for the American public. Now the very unfederal Fed could issue and print dollar 'notes' at will based on existing gold stores or by buying your government issued bonds with Monopoly money that it then "loaned" to the American Government. The American Government had to pay interest on that money, that the day before this bill was enacted, it already owned - and then turn around to pay interest to the very unfederal Federal Reserve.

You have to admit though; it is a sweetheart deal for the bankers! Admirable even - but I have to think that giving private bankers control over the issuing of money and the setting of interest could be very diabolical, indeed. In reality, it caused a nation that had virtually no inflation and no debt to become one of terrible inflation and way too much debt.

If we are to break it down into easy to understand terms, the true meaning of the establishment of the fed is simply to say that the government and its people no longer had control of their own money. The bankers seized control, and the government had to borrow money from the bankers for anything they needed, then turn right around and pay back that money, with interest, to finance itself...and the best part is that the bankers get to name the interest rate! Sweet!

This from a government that was relatively flush at the time in spite of the fact there were some Industrial hiccups and who had just passed the law that Americans would be taxed on the money they earn to feed their families. This is a very important piece of this whole deal: Hand in hand with the 16th Amendment the government forced fees on the people that the government collected from the sweat of the backs of worker in order to ensure they had enough to pay the interest on the loans – loans for money that yesterday THEY owned.

And the progressives want us to believe they are for the workers....right.

These banker “gentlemen” put us right back into ownership again in a midnight Christmas vote. We fought a war to overcome unreasonable taxation and to take our country away from the throne, and within a little over 125 years, they put us right back there again, only this time to secure votes.

Mayer Rothschild himself said somewhere around 1800 “Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws.” Mayer Rothschild was a private banker, born by the name of Bauer, Feb 23, 1744 –Sept 19, 1812. He was the founder of the Rothschild family banking empire that would become one of the most successful business families in history. In 2005, he was ranked 7th on the Forbes magazine list of the The Twenty Most Influential Businessmen Of All Time. The business magazine referred to him as a "founding father of international finance”. I would assume he knew wherefrom he spoke.

It was this law that created the nervousness of the early part of the century and in spite of the assurances of the Fed and the government, was the driving force in the Great Depression. We are there again folks. Do not doubt that.

Next blog: So what really is money?