[The Rude Guy Podcast #85 November 15, 2011]
Rich Zubaty here. I’ve had it. Let’s Jail the Bankers. Time for that Uncle Tom shoe-shine boy, sell-out, Attorney General Eric Holder, to investigate and prosecute Wall Street fraud. No one is above the law said candidate Barack Obama, but his administration is proving to be more corrupt than George W Bush’s.
I’m gonna play some audio clips about banking fraud from Max Keiser, Robert Reich, and William Black, but first let me squeeze off a few rants.
Here’s somethin’ I like. From Elizabeth Warren:
“The rich guys like to put this down as class warfare. No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory? Good for you. But you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory. You didn’t have to hire someone to protect your business because of the work the rest of us did.”
They only call it class warfare, when we fight back.
Here’s something else I like:
The 5 Rules of Propaganda
As POSTED in the Al Spry radio show Blog, November 24, 2010
1) The rule of orchestration: endlessly repeating the same messages, over and over, in different variations and combinations. “Free markets are free, socialism is slavery…People thrive under free markets and despair under socialism. Blah buh blah buh blah
2) The rule of simplification: reducing all data to a simple confrontation between ‘Good and Bad’, ‘Friend and Foe’. As in: “Free markets good…socialism bad.”
3) The rule of disfiguration: discrediting the opposition by crude smears and parodies. “Socialists want to take your property and brainwash your kids.”
4) The rule of transfusion: manipulating the consensus values of the target audience, for one’s own ends. “We all love freedom don’t we? Then surely we love free markets too.”
5) The rule of unanimity: presenting one’s viewpoint as if it were the unanimous opinion of all right-thinking people: “Harvard economists agree: socialism doesn’t work.”
To paraphrase Goethe…”no one is more hopelessly enslaved, than the person who thinks she’s free”.
[bird]
OK, let’s talk about derivatives. Why? Because if the derivatives blow up, the whole world economy is going down the toilet. We’ll be back to trading fish for tomatoes.
Derivatives are bets on bets on bets on bets. For instance, you make a stock market bet that the price of steel will go up. Then you make a derivative bet, a kind of insurance, that will pay you if the price actually goes down. Then you take out another bet against that bet. And another one against that one. And you bundle your bets together, and sell them to someone else, and bet on them again. It’s insane.
We live in a casino economy. The House…the house of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan and Citibank and Bank of America and Wells Fargo and Bank of New York Mellon…The House, always wins.
Here’s something I just learned about oil derivatives
For every one barrel of oil that actually exists, there are 60,000 barrels traded!
Madness. For every one barrel of oil that actually exists, there are 60,000 barrels traded! And next they want to sell derivatives on water, and drive the price of water, up through the roof. These guys have to be stopped.
The US economy is $13 trillion dollars per year…that’s thirteen million million dollars per year. That’s one million, two million, three million, four million, and so on…up to thirteen MILLION million. Dollars a year.
The Federal Reserve loaned the Big Failed Banks $16 trillion dollars for the 2008 bailout…more than our total annual economic output. And they tried to hide THAT from us, until Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul got the Fed audited.
The entire world economy is $70 trillion dollars per year. Staaaay with me here.
But there are $7 hundred trillion dollars in unregulated derivatives, floating around out there, waiting to blow up.
Big Banks have created, on computer keyboards, phony baloney made-up money, invested in so-called derivatives, that amounts to 54 times the entire U.S. economy and 10 times the entire world economy. And there is no wealth anywhere to back any of this up!
And no one, anywhere, has the political savvy to regulate this economic cancer.
The newest idea on the horizon. Maybe the entire objective of the Occupy Movment, will be to begin national direct ballot initiatives.
This is our future. This should be our “one demand”: citizen direct ballot initiatives at the federal level – i.e. all of us voting directly at a national level to pass laws like ending the Fed or revoking corporate personhood or regulating derivatives. This is participatory democracy. This is the tool we need to fix every other problem we have. This is what “representative democracy” is failing to accomplish. According to former Senator Mike Gravel. “Politicians are cowards. They would be happy just to run the day-to-day operations of government, and leave setting policy to someone else. Like the PEOPLE!”
[bird]
Apart from being a casino economy, the business model of Wall Street is fraud. On a daily basis they lie to their clients and rob the rest of us.
One type of institutional Wall Street fraud is called “front-running”, which you will hear Max Keiser mention in passing in an upcoming clip.
Front running works like this: Some pension fund calls up Maureen, a broker at Goldman Sachs, and says they want to buy a million shares of XYZ company. The broker immediately buys 100,000 shares of XYZ, for Goldman, which bumps up the price for the next buyer – her client. Then she puts in the customer’s buy-order, which vastly reduces the shares available on the market, and therefore drives the price way up. Then, literally a few seconds later, she sells…at the higher price…the Goldman shares she just bought, front running her client, at the lower price. And her bosses love her for it. She’s screwed her client and robbed the economy, which is robbing the rest of us. It’s classic insider trading and nobody does a damn thing to stop it. It’s just extracting money from the system. Remember, they used to HANG financial speculators 200 years ago. Now we let them purchase presidents and congressmen.
Also:
Traders love volatility. That’s why the market bounces up and down several times a day and from one day to the next. The more volatility, the more price spreads on a given day, the more the traders are able to screw their clients. And that’s why they are so often the ones to create the volatility. Because they profit from it.
And all this has been made much worse by high frequency trading…mainframe computerized speed-of-light trading, several times a second.
And here’s my point in all this: a tax on financial transactions, a Robin Hood tax, sometimes called the Tobin Tax, would immediately put an end to most high frequency trading and front running! It would stop the fraud. Yeah! Let’s do it! Tax securities. Stop the fraud.
Plus we would collect another $75 billion a year to help pay for health care and rebuilding infrastructure – for putting people back to work.
[bird]
OK, time for audio clips. Here’s Robert Reich and Geraint Anderson on the failure of regulation of Wall Street.
[play clip]
Here’s how fraud actually works on Wall Street according to Max Keiser, who used to work there, till it made him sick to his stomach to be stealing so much from his unwitting clients.
[play clip]
[after clip] Max Keiser said on a more recent show that quote: “We’re bringing risk back to capitalism. It’s the risk of being impaled.” Ha ha ha He claims he’s set up a guillotine in his Paris studios. No one will put him on TV here in the USA. So he broadcasts to 250 million people worldwide on Russian TV from Paris. Go fuck em up Max. Good show.
And now Amy Goodman and William Black talk about bankster fraud…and…why the hell aren’t we prosecuting these bastards?
[play clip]
………..
Thomas Edison, who hated the bankers, once said: if this country can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond let’s bankers collect interest, whereas the bill pays nobody but those who contribute directly in some useful way. It’s been estimated that up to 40% of the cost of any item we buy is the interest we pay to bankers for creating money on keyboards.
We need to create our own money on keyboards, instead of issuing government bonds that are bought by the FED – that WE then have to pay interest on.
End the Fed. Smash the banks. We need a National Bank of the United States to create our own money without dragging us further and further down the whirlpool of Federal Reserve debt.
Jail the Bankers.
…….
Addendum.
We are having a problem with racism and sexism in the Occupy Maui movement. The problem is being caused by racist Hawaiians, accusing white men of being racist. And knee-jerk white liberals who congenitally assume that anything critical of women is sexist. Racism and sexism are what destroyed the grassroots 60s uprising against war profiteers and corporate dominance. We cannot afford to let that happen again.
I wrote down the following for our Occupy Maui Education Working Group. But the ideas in it are important for everyone to hear. Here goes:
We cannot afford to have the Occupy movement destroyed by sexism and racism the way the grassroots 60s movement against war and corporate dominance was divided and destroyed. In the 60s it was the sexism of women against men, foisted upon America by Gloria Steinem with CIA backing, and of minorities against white men, foisted upon America by agent provocateurs within the black power movement, that shattered our ability to continue to march shoulder to shoulder, against the war machine and the corporate overlords. This led directly to the election of Ronald Reagan and thirty years of neoliberal corporate hell in America, bringing us up to where we are today. Right in the midst of ANOTHER grass roots uprising against war and corporate abuse. Let’s not blow it this time.
In Hawaii we have a special problem elucidated by the situation of the “two Hawaiians”. One Hawaiian was born in the mainland and moved here with nothing, 35 years ago. He worked painting and building houses. His kids were born here. He paid taxes for 35 years and transformed volcanic fern forest into tax paying residential property for the county. He started an agricultural export business, which brought out of state money into Hawaii. And he fought to preserve the “aina”, the natural land, from over-development, by hotels and corporations.
The other Hawaiian was born in Hawaii. He went to school on the mainland and stayed there. He got a job and started a small business and became wealthy and successful by investing in mainland enterprises. And then he got old and retired, back “home” in Hawaii. Upon arriving in Hawaii after 35 years absence, he was able to make a case that mixed in with his Filipino, Chinese, and Caucasian “blood”, he had a part Hawaiian bloodline. And therefore he was entitled to free Hawaiian Homestead Land, preference in job hiring, free or nearly free medical and dental services, special Hawaiian cultural services and opportunities, and more.
Which one of these is the “real” Hawaiian? The one who contributed to and built and defended Hawaii?
The Aryan Nazis once claimed special privileges due to some bloodline they identified as being more special than others. In this modern world, claiming special privilege according to one’s “blood” is flat out racist. We cannot dumbly permit cheap allegations of racism or sexism, perpetrated by the REAL racists and sexists, to blow apart the Occupy movement. We want freedom and fairness and equal treatment for all. Even white men. 30 years of demonizing white men has gotten us nothing but life in a neoliberal corporate hell. The enemy is not white men. The enemy is banks and corporations – these days run as often by women and people of color as they are by white men. Break down the racial barrier and the gender barrier for once and for all.
The reason Occupy is working is that the white men are back. Involved. Getting beat up and rained on. Taking risks along with dedicated and far-thinking women and minorities. Don’t let the rank ignorance of identity politics split us up again! We all need each other for this to work.
[RG voice: no more bullshit.]
