Greatest Transfer of Wealth in History

Charlie McGrath

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Secret Memos with Summers and Geithner to Deregulate Banking

LipTV

1996 emails have just come to light between Larry Summers, Obama's current nominee to chair the Federal Reserve, and Tim Geithner detailing plans to deregulate international markets and effectively set the stage for the global financial collapse.


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Money Is Not Safe In The Big Banks

GlobalResearchTV

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GlobalResearch.ca

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How the Tea Party and Occupy Movements Are the Same

James Corbett

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G. Edward Griffin: Protectors of the Public

This is the third installment in a series of chapter summaries from G. Edward Griffin's must-read book The Creature From Jekyll Island.  This book may be the most important "red pill" available and we highly recommend that you buy and read the full book at RealityZone.

G. Edward Griffin

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Chapter 3 Summary: Protectors of the Public

The game called bailout is not a whimsical figment of the imagination, it is real. Here are some of the big games of the past and their final scores. 

In 1970, Penn Central railroad became bankrupt. The banks which lent the money had taken over its board of directors and had driven it further into the hole, all extending bigger and bigger loans to cover the losses. Directors concealed reality from stockholders and made additional loans so the company could pay dividends to keep up the false front. During this time, the directors and their banks unloaded their stock at unrealistically high prices.  When the truth became public, the stockholders were left holding the empty bag. The bailout, which was engineered by the Federal Reserve, involved government subsidies to other banks to grant additional loans. Then Congress was told that the collapse of Penn Central would be devastating to public interest. Congress responded by granting $125 million in loan guarantees so that banks would not be at risk.  The railroad eventually failed anyway, but the bank loans were covered. Penn Central was nationalized into AMTRAK and continues to operate at a loss.

In 1970, as Lockheed faced bankruptcy, Congress heard essentially the same story. Thousands would be unemployed, subcontractors would go out of business, and the public would suffer greatly. So Congress agreed to guarantee $250 million in new loans, which put Lockheed 60% deeper into debt than before.  Now that government was guaranteeing the loans, it had to make sure Lockheed became profitable.  This was accomplished by granting lucrative defense contracts at non-competitive bids.  The banks were paid back.

What the Heck is a Bailout?

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Government by the Banks, for the Banks: The ESM Coup D’Etat in Europe

Ellen H. Brown, Contributor
Activist Post

On Friday, June 29th, German Chancellor Angela Merkel acquiesced to changes to a permanent Eurozone bailout fund—“before the ink was dry,” as critics complained. Besides easing the conditions under which bailouts would be given, the concessions included an agreement that funds intended for indebted governments could be funneled directly to stressed banks.

According to Gavin Hewitt, Europe editor for BBC News, the concessions mean that:

[T]he eurozone’s bailout fund (backed by taxpayers’ money) will be taking a stake in failed banks. 

Risk has been increased. German taxpayers have increased their liabilities. In future a bank crash will no longer fall on the shoulders of national treasuries but on the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), a fund to which Germany contributes the most. 

In the short term, these measures will ease pressure in the markets. However there is currently only 500bn euros assigned to the ESM. That may get swallowed up quickly and the markets may demand more. It is still unclear just how deep the holes in the eurozone’s banks are.

G. Edward Griffin: The Name of the Game is Bailout

This is the second installment in a series of chapter summaries from G. Edward Griffin's must-read book The Creature From Jekyll Island.  This book may be the most important "red pill" available and we highly recommend that you buy and read the full book at RealityZone.

G. Edward Griffin

Buy Here

Activist Post

Chapter 2 Summary: The Name of the Game is Bailout

Although national monetary events may appear mysterious and chaotic, they are governed by well-established rules which bankers and politicians rigidly follow.  The central fact to understanding these events is that all the money in the banking system has been created out of nothing through the process of making loans.  A defaulted loan, therefore, costs the bank little of tangible value, but it shows up on the ledger as a reduction in assets without a corresponding reduction in liabilities.  If the bad loans exceed the size of the assets, the bank becomes technically insolvent and must close its doors.  The first rule of survival, therefore, is to avoid writing off large, bad loans and, if possible, to at least continue receiving interest payments on them.  To accomplish that, the endangered loans are rolled over and increased in size.  This provides the borrower with money to continue paying interest plus fresh funds for new spending.  The basic problem is not solved, but is postponed for a while and made worse.

Democracy vs Mythology: The Battle in Syntagma Square

Photo Credit - SturdyBlog

SturdyBlog

I have never been more desperate to explain and more hopeful for your understanding of any single fact than this: The protests in Greece concern all of you directly.

What is going on in Athens at the moment is resistance against an invasion; an invasion as brutal as that against Poland in 1939. The invading army wears suits instead of uniforms and holds laptops instead of guns, but make no mistake – the attack on our sovereignty is as violent and thorough. Private wealth interests are dictating policy to a sovereign nation, which is expressly and directly against its national interest. Ignore it at your peril. Say to yourselves, if you wish, that perhaps it will stop there. That perhaps the bailiffs will not go after the Portugal and Ireland next. And then Spain and the UK. But it is already beginning to happen. This is why you cannot afford to ignore these events.

The powers that be have suggested that there is plenty to sell. Josef Schlarmann, a senior member of Angela Merkel’s party, recently made the helpful suggestion that we should sell some of our islands to private buyers in order to pay the interest on these loans, which have been forced on us to stabilise financial institutions and a failed currency experiment. (Of course, it is not a coincidence that recent studies have shown immense reserves of natural gas under the Aegean sea).

Trouble for the Establishment in Europe, Protests Spread to France (Video)

We Are Change

Luke Rudkowski reports from the new protests in France.  He interviews a stunningly-aware crowd. They truly know the score and what the root problem of the system is: Banskter-Goverment collusion resulting in their enslavement.  Great on-the-ground reporting by Rudkowski.

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Fed's secret loans to banking giants revealed

Dees Illustration

SMH/Bloomberg

Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs and Royal Bank of Scotland each borrowed at least $US30 billion ($29 billion) in 2008 from a Federal Reserve emergency lending program whose details weren't revealed to shareholders, members of Congress or the public.

The $US80 billion initiative, called single-tranche open-market operations, or ST OMO, made 28-day loans from March through December 2008, a period in which confidence in global credit markets collapsed after the September 15 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings.

Units of 20 banks were required to bid at auctions for the cash. They paid interest rates as low as 0.01 per cent that December, when the Fed's main lending facility charged 0.5 per cent.


“This was a pure subsidy,” said Robert A. Eisenbeis, former head of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and now chief monetary economist at Florida-based Cumberland Advisors. “The Fed hasn't been forthcoming with disclosures overall. Why should this be any different?”

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which oversaw ST OMO, posted aggregate data about the program on its website after each auction, said Jeffrey V. Smith, a New York Fed spokesman. By increasing the availability of short-term financing when private lenders were under pressure, “this program helped alleviate strains in financial markets and support the flow of credit to U.S. households and businesses,” he said.

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Matt Taibbi: 'U.S. Politics - Reality Show Sponsored by Wall Street' (Video)

Youtube - RT

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Debt Ceiling Politics: Fearocracy or Democracy?

George Osborne Image

Dylan Ratigan
Huffington Post

Osama Bin Laden's death cast the fear in our politics into stark relief. One of the weirdest cultural reactions after the announcement of his killing was how the Miley Cyrus song "Party in the U.S.A" got a renewed lease on life on Youtube. That song became the unofficial anthem marking the moment. I thought at the time that the partying was mindless cheering, a sports-like spectacle over something somber and important. Yet, while I think it's generally awful to glorify killing, even in righteousness, with some more time to reflect I've changed my mind.

For over a decade, we've been running our politics on fear so often that it's hardly noticeable. Take the debt ceiling kabuki -- catastrophic economic consequences if we don't raise the ceiling, the end of America if we don't cut entitlements. This kind of fear-mongering is exactly how the banks justify any and everything to bail them out. And it's disguising the actual problems we have as a nation, the six industries strangling our freedom: health care, banking, agribusiness, defense, energy, and telecom.

The people who made "Party in the U.S.A" a hit song, twice, are mostly kids who have known nothing but a fear-based dialogue from leaders that ignore their lives and their real problems in favor of slogans about the global war on terror. There are ten-year-olds who have never lived in an America at peace, and 18-year-old soldiers that barely remember when we weren't trying to occupy Afghanistan. This is a generation that grew up on fear, and fear is very powerful.

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The Real Housewives of Wall Street

Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs?

Dees Illustration

Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone

America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. The official budget is public record and hotly debated: Money comes in as taxes and goes out as jet fighters, DEA agents, wheat subsidies and Medicare, plus pensions and bennies for that great untamed socialist menace called a unionized public-sector workforce that Republicans are always complaining about. According to popular legend, we're broke and in so much debt that 40 years from now our granddaughters will still be hooking on weekends to pay the medical bills of this year's retirees from the IRS, the SEC and the Department of Energy.

Most Americans know about that budget. What they don't know is that there is another budget of roughly equal heft, traditionally maintained in complete secrecy. After the financial crash of 2008, it grew to monstrous dimensions, as the government attempted to unfreeze the credit markets by handing out trillions to banks and hedge funds. And thanks to a whole galaxy of obscure, acronym-laden bailout programs, it eventually rivaled the "official" budget in size — a huge roaring river of cash flowing out of the Federal Reserve to destinations neither chosen by the president nor reviewed by Congress, but instead handed out by fiat by unelected Fed officials using a seemingly nonsensical and apparently unknowable methodology.

Sen. McCain: ‘Unless We Enact Draconian Measures,’ America Faces a ‘Fiscal Meltdown’

Nicholas Ballasy
CNS News

Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) said that “unless we enact draconian measures,” America is headed for a “fiscal meltdown.”

“We are at a critical juncture in American history that unless we enact draconian measures, then the results are very obvious, and that is a fiscal meltdown. No country can borrow 40 cents out of every dollar it spends – even the largest and most powerful nation in the world. No nation can continue on that track. So, tough medicine is required,” McCain said during a press conference at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday.



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Cornel West "Barack Obama Is The Black Mascot Of The Wall Street Oligarchs" (Video)

Youtube

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10 Reasons Obama is Just As Bad or Worse Than Bush

Activist Post

George W. Bush was clearly a mentally-challenged puppet of the military/banking/oil elite.  The policies put it in place at breakneck speed after 9/11 were provably predetermined by think tanks well in advance. Not that other presidents were any less controlled by this hidden agenda, but there was a noticeable in-your-face quickening of corporate-government tyranny under Bush.

These policies like wars of aggression, illegal surveillance of Americans, torture of detainees indefinitely held without formal charges, unfair "free trade" agreements, and bank bailouts rightfully enraged many progressives during the Bush years.  Yet, not only have these policies accelerated under Obama, even more of the draconian playbook is unfolding.

US Fed loaned Libya-backed bank billions

Dees Illustration

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The Federal Reserve lent a Libyan state-backed bank billions of dollars during the financial crisis, documents made public on Thursday have revealed.

The Arab Bank Corporation, which is today 59.3 percent owned by the Libyan government, borrowed in slices as big as $1.175 billion from the US central bank.

At the time the bank was not majority owned by the Tripoli government; other shareholders included the Kuwait Investment Authority and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

US Fed to release crisis bailout data

© AFP/File Karen Bleier

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US Federal Reserve said Monday it would release data on its emergency aid to banks after the Supreme Court rejected arguments to keep it secret.

The Supreme Court declined to review a ruling that forces the Fed to publish the names of banks that borrowed from its discount window in April and May 2008, months before the industry fell into a panic.

US Treasury to sell $142 bn worth of toxic assets

© AFP/File Karen Bleier

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US Treasury Department on Monday said it would begin to sell-off toxic assets worth an estimated $142 billion, in an effort to close another chapter of the financial crisis.

"We will exit this investment at a gradual and orderly pace to maximize the recovery of taxpayer dollars and help protect the process of repair of the housing finance market," said Treasury official Mary Miller.

The department said it would offload up to $10 billion in mortgage-backed securities (MBS) -- assets which bundle together large numbers of often distressed mortgages -- each month.