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From: "Jean McIver" <jean@dwmservices.com>
To: <Delegates@yetanotherreason.com>
Subject: [Delegates] NO MORE fleecing of the American Taxpayer!!
Date: Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:32:14 +0000
It’s Time to Stop the Fleecing of the American Taxpayer!
We need to follow the Constitution …
Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution states: "All
Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of
Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments
as on other Bills."
But wait, what about the "stroke of a pen" intervention, as urged by McCain?
DES
MOINES, Iowa - "Republican presidential nominee John McCain is urging
the Treasury Department to intervene aggressively to limit damage from
the financial meltdown, action that McCain says President Bush can take
with the stroke of a pen.
Opening a business round-table
Tuesday in Des Moines, Iowa, McCain said he has urged the Treasury to
use its exchange stabilization fund "as creatively as possible" to
backstop the market crisis. He says officials also should use the
authority granted in a housing bill to purchase up to a trillion
dollars in mortgages.
McCain decried the defeat of the
financial bailout measure in the House, and he warned that the nation's
political leaders will have to take risks even though solutions to the
crisis may be unpopular."
[source: Associated Press, Tue Sep 30, 11:38 AM ET]
Do you remember the Exchange Stabilization Fund?
Paulson’s Bailout Plan, Goldman Sachs, and China by Chris Bentley Tuesday, 30 September 2008
"According
to Presidential candidate John McCain, the Treasury Department should
“intervene aggressively to limit damage from the financial meltdown” by
going to the Exchange Stabilization Fund to “purchase up to a trillion
dollars in mortgages.”
This, he claims, could be accomplished by President Bush with the mere “stroke of a pen.”
Read that again: John McCain says we as taxpayers must surrender $1,000,000,000,000.00 to bail out the banks.
Keep that in mind as the following facts are reviewed.
The
last time the Executive Branch looted the treasury and bypassed
Congress was in the mid-1990s, when we were on the hook for a mere $50
billion. A proposal to prop up the Mexican peso via a bailout was
floundering in Congress.
Many Americans were outraged and
asked why they should foot the bill for Goldman Sachs and that
narco-kleptocracy south of the border. Congress listened.
Getting
nowhere, the Clinton administration thumbed its nose at the public and
went directly to an obscure source called the Exchange Stabilization
Fund, or ESF — the same entity McCain is urging the president to use —
to prop up the peso. Of the total $50 billion package, some $20 billion
were taken from the ESF fund. The ESF was designed (albeit
unconstitutionally) to prop up the dollar. Now it was used to bail out
a foreign economy.
What made the bailout all the more
outrageous was the fact that Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin had been
the co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, which was heavily invested in Mexico.
Rubin had been earning $26 million per year, plus his personal holdings
at Goldman’s had been estimated at $100 million. Goldman’s clients in
Mexico were partly responsible for Rubin’s financial position.
Mexico
was about to default on those loans, which would have hurt Goldman, so
somebody had to do something to prop up Mexico and protect the
Establishment Wall Street banks.
This clear conflict of interest nary got a mention in the press.
Fast forward 14 years later.
According
to Bill Gertz, in his new book The Failure Factory: 'Before taking the
Treasury post, Paulson made millions of dollars for Goldman Sachs in
China, going on some seventy trips there in a decade and a half and
concluding multiple deals with Chinese state-owned businesses. Yet no
one in Congress bothered to question the president or his advisers as
to whether placing someone with such vested interests in making money
in China had a major conflict of interest….
Paulson’s pro-China credentials led conservative critics to dub him
“China’s man in the Bush cabinet.” Former Pentagon official Frank
Gaffney wrote that “Henry Paulson has been Communist China’s Armand
Hammer,” comparing the Treasury secretary to the Western capitalist
enlisted by the Soviet Union to serve as a financial adviser and agent
of influence in Washington and other foreign capitals. Hammer and
others like him were rewarded for their support with lucrative deals
for energy and natural resources while being allowed to market their
products exclusively in the evil empire. It was a deal with the devil
that few in the West fully understood….
In 2006,
Goldman Sachs bought into China’s biggest bank, the Industrial and
Commercial Bank of China, for $2.58 billion, netting Paulson himself,
as CEO, a personal stake worth a reported $25 million.
And as reported on Yahoo news a week ago,
Paulson,
a former Goldman Sachs boss reportedly worth about $700 million, told
Congress, "I share the outrage that people have. It's embarrassing for
the United States of America."…
"What this is about is market confidence," he said. "It's a sad story, but the American taxpayer is already on the hook."
So why are Paulson and his associates so panicked? And why are we “on the hook”? China might supply us a clue.
On
September 24, Reuters reported, “Chinese regulators have told domestic
banks to stop interbank lending to U.S. financial institutions to
prevent possible losses during the financial crisis….”
Gee,
with China no longer willing to swap currencies and lend money to
overextended banks, it’s now up to us as taxpayers to save their skins.
Yes,
it’s a sad, such a sad, story. You and I must make sure that the
billionaire banksters don’t lose their yachts, mansions, and floozies.
No,
Secretary Paulson, the reality is that conflicts of interest abound
everywhere we look, and the American people are fed up with being
fleeced by the criminal syndicate of moneychangers, of which you are
the water boy for this particular bailout.
Even Fox News
has noted, “[L]egislation was highly unpopular with the public,
ideological groups on the left and the right organized against it, and
Bush no longer wielded the influence to leverage tough votes.”
That’s right, and they know it.
The
banksters are not going to rest until they get their bailout. Tell your
congressman that we, the American people, will not be tolerate a
bailout for any amount. None. Zero. Zilch. No bailout at all.
And
this time around, if the Bush administration takes its cue from its
predecessor, and does in fact employ the same ESF tactic, we should
demand that all of the individuals involved should be impeached and
removed from office, and tried for any crimes committed in the process.
It’s long past time for the fleecing to stop – for good."
[source: www.jbs.org]
The Near Death of the State
"I'm
fully aware that Paulson and Bernanke have some nefarious scheme in
mind to reverse the thrilling defeat of their criminal bailout package,
a package shot down by independent members of Congress on both sides.
But reflect for a few minutes on what it means that the House did this.
It was a revolutionary act in the best sense of that term.
The
entire establishment was united in favor of what was surely the most
horrible and outrageous bill to ever come before Congress. The Fed, the
Treasury, leadership of the Democrats and Republicans, the Wall Street
Journal and the New York Times, all the major think tanks, most talking
heads, the wealthiest corporations, important academics – in short, the
whole of the power elite – were united in favor of this awful thing
that proposed the following: Americans were to be stripped of their
earnings and their future to prop up failed enterprises.
Forget
back-door socialism: this was right through the front door. The
consequences would have been dreadful and very scary. It was to be the
first of many bailouts, since of course it cannot and would not work.
Bad debts can't be made good by legislation. This means that more money
would be necessary, as the middle class was sucked dry by the vampire
state for years to come. Deeper and deeper economic depression – a
repeat of the 30s – was certain. Best to put a stop to this now.
The
administration might have tried to do its wicked deeds through
executive order rather than asking Congress. But there are two problems
here. One is that they wouldn't be able to share the blame when the
plan flops. The other is economic. The Fed and Treasury are actually
very worried that they are incapable of injecting more credit into a
banking structure averse to lending right now. They would rather have
the congress authorize the money directly and run up the debt.
In
any case, no matter how you look at it, the defeat of the bill is a
victory for freedom. The defeat of the power elite is essential for
liberty to thrive. For the free market to function, we need the
government/corporate cabal to lose its capacity to get its way in every
area of life. They need to feel fear. They need to lose security. They
need to have a sense of uncertainty as to whether their every wish is
our command. The House defeat of the bailout is a magnificent rebuke in
that sense.
But does it mean that the economy is going to tank
and we will all suffer? On the contrary, it could mean that we can
begin an economic recovery from the Fed-generated bubble that should
have and would have burst years ago but for artificial props by the
Fed. If the stock prices of these troubled institutions can fall to
where they need to be, they can be taken over, and their assets used
productively and traded by the market. Once this deleveraging takes
place, we will be ready for a new round of economic growth.
You
have to understand how ridiculous this whole debate looks to anyone who
understands the price system. Let's change the example from houses to
apples to see how silly it is to suggest that falling prices can be
made to rise. Let's say that the Fed created an apple hysteria that
drove the price from $3 per pound to $10. Stores loaded up and even
used them as collateral for expansion. Suddenly the price collapsed to
$5 and finally to $2.
Now government takes notice. What can
government do to deal with the problem? It can try to boost the price
of apples by forcing stores to raise their prices. But what about
consumers? They won't buy at $10. So the apples sit and rot. Maybe
government should buy them all or force consumers to buy them. Also
perhaps stores will just not buy any more at all. Government could
force them to. But it can't force them to stay in business. People can
always walk away. So perhaps government can just buy the stores, all in
the interest of keeping the price of apples up. But it will have to buy
the apple-leveraged stores at a much higher price than the market would
offer, so this is a bad economic deal on the face of it.
The
tangles can get ever more complicated and billions and trillions can be
spent. You can put everyone in a prison camp and force people at the
point of a gun to buy and sell apples at $10. But in the end, the
problem is still the same: the price of apples wants to fall. Nothing
government does changes that one fact. To attempt to change it is like
trying to change gravity. Of course, the government’s central bank can
raise all prices through inflation to the point that apples do in fact
cost $10, but this is purely cosmetic. In fact, in real terms, the
price of apples is still $2. It is a pointless and destructive activity
to try changing this. You only cause massive damage in the attempt.
More
great things happened after the bailout failed. Commodity prices
including oil fell dramatically. This is a magnificent thing. Right
now, consumers are not threatened by the possible failure of another
paper-addicted investment-banking house. Consumers are threatened by
ever-higher prices for all goods. If we are in a recession, especially
if it lasts and lasts, low prices are precisely what we need to start
economic recovery again.
It is not entirely clear why prices
fall. It could be the worldwide economic slowdown. It could be that the
markets are beginning to doubt the capacity of the Fed to actually
achieve the hyperinflation that it wants, since banks have become quite
risk averse. In any case, we need ever-lower prices on all things,
including gas and groceries – and, yes, houses. This is the basis for
economic recovery.
The failure of the bailout bill was the
precondition for economic recovery. It should make believers in liberty
realize that we can change history, that tyranny is not our fate, that
the leviathan state can be beaten back.
Recently we have urged
readers to look to books on money and banking. Now it is time to look
at books like the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude by 17th-century
French writer Étienne de La Boétie. It was his view that the state is
the least plausible institution on earth, one that would be overthrown
in a day but for propaganda and ideological error. He explained all
this in his book, introduced by Murray Rothbard. We just so happen to
have a new edition out.
Yesterday was one of the worst days in decades for the power elite. It was one of the best for liberty."
[Source: lewrockwell.com/rockwell/near-death-of-state.html]
We
still have our work cut out for us - the House will be called back
into session on Thursday and they are determined to pass this
legislation before the market opens next Monday.
