“you cannot touch, feel, squeeze anything they make..”
Goldman is a financial services company.. they are ONLY parasitical to the “real economy”. and yet they are the primary recipient of US Govt bailout money thru the (privately owned) Fed and AIG...
I cannot make the Oligarchy case any more clear than this… the rich get paid first when they produce nothing. they are HARMFUL to the real economy because they feed off of it, to the point of collapse… i don’t think i need to do any proving in this regard, anyone can see it from either Oil Speculation pushing the price of gas up to $4 a gallon or the “Sub-prime Mortgage Crisis”. these are caused by Wall Street… “free market” is a code word tyranny of the rich.
there is only political economy. big gov’t has the job of raising the standard of our poor and putting a leash on the rich…
I usually catch some of MSNBC’s Morning Joe a few times a week and I’ll check out the opening and closing shows on CNBC from time to time so I’m used to seeing Dylan Ratigan around. I considered him to be one of the smarter talking heads on the business news programs. Lately, I noticed him missing so i did a little digging…
Ratigan left (CNBC) on March 27, 2009.The New York Times reported he was considering all options but quoted him as saying he was dedicated to covering the economy, “the story that is affecting every American in every setting.”
Apparently, he’s waking up to the oligarchical nature of the US. But wait, it gets better…
In Ratigan’s final CNBC broadcast from the floor of the NYSE he reported on what he called “an important story developing” that Goldman Sachs and “a variety of European banks”, in his assessment and that of his guests, essentially “perpetrated securities fraud” and an “insurance fraud scam” against AIG—and, by extension, the government and taxpayers funding that insurance company’s “bailout”—by insuring their questionable investment vehicles and, upon their devaluation, making claims on them to be paid by AIG “at 100 cents on the dollar” despite all of the markdowns “being forced upon every other” entity including the government, banks, shareholders, bond holders, taxpayers and homeowners.
“I think that it should be a bigger political issue than whether somebody bought an airplane… Forget the private jets, forget who got a million dollar bonus. Fifty billion dollars“, he emphasized, minimizing what he saw as populist side issues to “the real question” of how “government policy makers” are to deal with the “problems of contract law” inherent in the agreements of businesses receiving government assistance during the financial crisis.
“The banks are being asked to take ‘haircuts’ on their toxic assets, why are the Goldmans and the Deutsche Banks of the world not being asked to take haircuts on their toxic credit default swaps? It’s a real question. I will continue to pursue it for sure, I hope others will as well.” Ratigan praised New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s subpoena of AIG to determine the bank payouts as “legitimate inquiry” and looked forward to “a body of lawmakers in Washington D.C. who are going to ask, it appears, some of the same questions that I’m asking.”
very interesting indeed…
more interesting still are the stories from fox & the new york post about why ratigan left CNBC…
fox does give us this little gem from Ratigan,”The value system of capitalism has been corrupted by a small group of bankers, insurance executives and politicians.”
what exactly is “strategic programming” for CNBC? George Orwell would LOVE that term…
these are interesting because the don’t even mention the AIG money story at all…. in other words, they have something to hide… namely: the biggest robbery in history perpetuated by Wall Street… specifically: Goldman Sachs.
Goldman Sachs, of course, the primary beneficiary of the Wall St orchestrated Crude Oil Speculation Bubble… remember Bart Stupak? and the AIG money… hmmm… gee, it’s starting to look like “Government Sachs” is living up to it’s nickname.
“United States Secretary of the Treasury, serving under President Barack Obama. He was previously the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Geithner’s position includes a large role in directing the nation’s economic response to the financial crisis which began after December 2007. Specific tasks include directing how $350 billion of Wall Street bailout money is allocated. He is currently dealing with multiple high visibility issues, including the survival of the automobile industry, the restructuring of banks, financial institutions and insurance companies, recovery of the mortgage market, demands for protectionism, Obama’s new tax proposals, and relations with foreign governments that are dealing with similar crises.”
He then attended Dartmouth College, graduating with a B.A. in government and Asian studies in 1983. He earned an M.A. in international economics and East Asian studies from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in 1985. He has studied Chinese and Japanese.
His father, Peter F. Geithner, is the director of the Asia program at the Ford Foundation in New York. During the early 1980s, Peter Geithner oversaw the Ford Foundation’s microfinance programs in Indonesia being developed by S. Ann Dunham-Soetoro, President Barack Obama’s mother, and they met in person at least once.
Geithner’s maternal grandfather, Charles F. Moore, was an adviser to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and served as a vice president of Ford Motor Company.
He was Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs (1998–2001) under Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. Summers was his mentor, but other sources call him a Rubin protégé.
In 2002 he left the Treasury to join the Council on Foreign Relations as a Senior Fellow in the International Economics department. He was director of the Policy Development and Review Department (2001-2003) at the International Monetary Fund.
In October 2003 at age 42, he was named president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. His salary in 2007 was $398,200. Once at the New York Fed, he became Vice Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee component. In 2006, he also became a member of the Washington-based financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty.
In March 2008, he arranged the rescue and sale of Bear Stearns; in the same year, he played a pivotal role in both the decision to bail out AIG as well as the government decision not to save Lehman Brothers from bankruptcy, though claims were made after Geithner’s nomination that distanced him from both AIG and Lehman Brothers. As a Treasury official, he helped manage multiple international crises of the 1990s in Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand.
Geithner believes, along with Henry Paulson, that the United States Department of the Treasury needs new authority to experiment with responses to the financial crisis of 2008.
Paulson has described Geithner as “[a] very unusually talented young man…[who] understands government and understands markets.”
Hank Paulson? Jim Cramer? Ben Bernanke? Larry Summers?
Citigroup, went – the price went – down to a very unreasonable price lately. It still was on very solid grounds..
On very solid grounds?? Is he insane?! Of course, this is why they got a $300 billion bailout today. It’s clearly a reward for their long history of stability.. this is a farce of epic proportions.
Citigroup is a credit card company which got into trouble with derivatives speculation and is now feeling the wrath of negative leverage. This is a corporation who could borrow and the Fed’s prime lending rate and charge working people 19-36% on credit cards. This is a can’t lose business as long as you don’t get greedy and get wrapped up in too much leverage… They got greedy. They lost. Plain and simple. We should not be bailing out bad gamblers.
But wait, there’s more. Al-Waleed also talks about Oil speculation:
..no doubt the the price of oil will go up. But I hope this time it will go up in a very steady manner without the speculative element that makes it go to the triple digits in a manner of months. So we in Saudi Arabia we’re against having these big jumps because our interest, as a producer in Saudi Arabia, very much coincides with the interests of the OECD countries and the west and especially the United States.
Here are three suggested guidelines for voters in the general election.
Defeat Obama at all costs, since an Obama victory would put a crypto-Weatherman foundation operative and Trilateral Wall Street puppet into the White House, taking this country and the world towards catastrophe.
Defeat all members of Congress who supported the $700 billion derivatives bailout for Obama’s backers at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase.
Do everything possible to avoid a one-party regime controlled by the Obama-Pelosi-Reid cabal, which would impose a modern version of the Mussolini fascist corporate state, building on the state-sponsored compulsory cartelization embodied in the first installment of the bailout. The realistic goal is to obtain divided government, partisan paralysis, as much gridlock as possible, and a legislative standoff to provide time for the maturation of the necessary New Deal programmatic alternative to the current Democratic and Republican leaderships. We must avoid a Democratic Senate majority so large that opposition filibusters become impossible. (more…)
If there is one post you should read on this blog, it’s this one.
September 29, 2008 was a historic day for America and getting out from underneath Wall Street oppression.. the first of many, i hope. Forget what the talking heads are saying, yesterday was a Victory of Populism. The only thing the market lost yesterday was a bunch of numbers in an accounting book. God didn’t come down and take $1.2 trillion worth of property from the world. Factories didn’t disappear, only paper. And paper “assets” are NOT real.
Expect the oligarchy to try every scare tactic in the world to try and extort money from America… but do NOT submit and they will collapse into their own derivatives black holes. BE STRONG and invest in sustainable production, local communities, things in the REAL world. Real commodities, real production. NOT futures. NOT indexes. NOT paper gambling.
They will NOT tell you the people are winning. DOWN WITH OLIGARCHY!
Derivatives is a taboo word these days. It’s rare that someone even mentions them directly. As a protest vote, Ron Paul is good. However, I question his economic polices. Libertarian Austrian School economics is what got us into this mess in the first place. It’s time to get rid of Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek and return to the Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, FDR New Deal, and the American School of economics.
