Fiatch

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Max Keiser takes offense to Goldman Sachs oligarchy, part 2.

Goldman Sachs is not merely connected. They are closer than inside.  They are it.  They are primary.  One cannot distinguish corrupt Goldman from corrupt government.  It is the one machine.

Max Keiser takes offense, part 1.

“Officials have taken the view that the exact use of the federal aid cannot be tracked because money given to a bank is like water poured into an ocean.”

“Bailout Overseer Says Banks Misused TARP Funds” via the WP

[photo source]

With Jamie Dimon becoming poster boy for the James-Taggart type of banker, where is our Midas Mulligan?

See also “President Obama’s Favorite Banker” via Robert Wenzel.

[photo source]

Life Imitating Atlas…

America has mastered the art of PR which launders ginormous theft in plain view.  This system is wholly corrupt and ripping us off a trillion at a time.

What builds trust?  What destroys it?  What store of value is safe?  Why do we still pretend?  What happens next?  What will you do about it?

HT Robert Wenzel.  See also his “Does Goldman Sachs Run The World?” written October 2007.

Thank you, New York Times, for the motivation needed to leave Chase entirely.  On principle I will not bank with such looters:

Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan Chase, will hold a meeting of his board here in the nation’s capital for the first time on Monday, with a special guest expected: the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.

Mr. Emanuel’s appearance would underscore the pull of Mr. Dimon, who amid the disgrace of his industry has emerged as President Obama’s favorite banker, and in turn, the envy of his Wall Street rivals. It also reflects a good return on what Mr. Dimon has labeled his company’s “seventh line of business” — government relations.

Mr. Dimon, JPMorgan’s chairman and chief executive, comes to Washington about twice a month, compared with maybe twice a year in the past. He requires seniormanagers to commute as well.

In recent months, he has met with officials including Mr. Geithner; the White House economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers; and lawmakers of both parties. He phones or e-mails Mr. Emanuel at whim. Each week, his staff gives him the names of a half-dozen public officials to call.

File under: Life Imitating Atlas.

Yale University law professor Jack Balkin states (via Reason via the WP):

The Obama Administration is continuing a long term bipartisan project of constructing our National Surveillance State. If we don’t pay attention to how that state is being constructed, and what checks and balances are built into its contours, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

Surveillance is but one part.  The grand bipartisan project is the accumulation of power on all fronts.  It makes for quite a party.

In his excellent book Capitalism, George Reisman stated:

Even if global warming turned out to be a fact, the free citizens of an industrial civilization would have no great difficulty in coping with it—that is, of course, if their ability to use energy and to produce is not crippled by the environmental movement and by government controls otherwise inspired. The seeming difficulties of coping with global warming, or any other large-scale change, arise only when the problem is viewed from the perspective of government central planners.

It would be too great a problem for government bureaucrats to handle … . But it would certainly not be too great a problem for tens and hundreds of millions of free, thinking individuals living under capitalism to solve. It would be solved by means of each individual being free to decide how best to cope with the particular aspects of global warming that affected him.

Individuals would decide, on the basis of profit-and-loss calculations, what changes they needed to make in their businesses and in their personal lives, in order best to adjust to the situation. They would decide where it was now relatively more desirable to own land, locate farms and businesses, and live and work, and where it was relatively less desirable, and what new comparative advantages each location had for the production of which goods. Factories, stores, and houses all need replacement sooner or later. In the face of a change in the relative desirability of different locations, the pattern of replacement would be different. Perhaps some replacements would have to be made sooner than otherwise. To be sure, some land values would fall and others would rise. Whatever happened individuals would respond in a way that minimized their losses and maximized their possible gains. The essential thing they would require is the freedom to serve their self-interests by buying land and moving their businesses to the areas rendered relatively more attractive, and the freedom to seek employment and buy or rent housing in those areas.

Given this freedom, the totality of the problem would be overcome. This is because, under capitalism, the actions of the individuals, and the thinking and planning behind those actions, are coordinated and harmonized by the price system (as many former central planners of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have come to learn). As a result, the problem would be solved in exactly the same way that tens and hundreds of millions of free individuals have solved much greater problems, such as redesigning the economic system to deal with the replacement of the horse by the automobile, the settlement of the American West, and the release of the far greater part of the labor of the economic system from agriculture to industry (pp. 88-89).

as excerpted in “Environmentalism Refuted” by George Reisman at Mises.org.

Watch “The Great Global Warming Swindle.”

This con is not new.  Yet we continue to fall for it.

Michael Crichton’s speech “The Case for Skepticism on Global Warming” reported :

In the first Earth Day in 1970, UC Davis’s Kenneth Watt said, “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.”  International Wildlife warned “a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war” as a threat to mankind. Science Digest said “we must prepare for the next ice age.”  The Christian Science Monitor noted that armadillos had moved out of Nebraska because it was too cold, glaciers had begun to advance, and growing seasons had shortened around the world. Newsweek reported “ominous signs” of a “fundamental change in the world’s weather.”

But in fact, every one of these statements was wrong.

In “Complexity Theory and Environmental Management” Crichton shared these dire predictions:

1972, Meadows et al, The Limits of Growth: “We are unanimously convinced that rapid, radical redressment of the present unbalanced and dangerously detriorating world situation is the primary task facing mankind… Concerted international measures and joint long-term planning will be necessary on a scale and scope without precedent… This supreme effort is… founded on a basic change in values and goals at individual, national, and world levels…”

1968, Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb: “The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.  The pain may be intense.  But the disease is so far advanced that only with radical surgery does the patient have a chance of survivial.”

Please note that pattern.  Dire predictions are asserted as a pretext for the massive accumulation of centralized power at the expense of individual liberty. That is always the trade advanced by such cons: give me power and I will give you security; give me power or you face impending disaster arising from capitalism (always scapegoated for government-generated economic calamity), global warming, global cooling, population growth, or technological issues like, e.g., Y2K (per Crichton again):

• 1998, UN Working Group on Informatics: “History offers no example of a parallel threat on a global, national, or even a local scale.  To ‘wait and see’ invites only disaster.  Only the long-term threats of global warming, oxygen loss, exhaustion of other basic resources in the oceans and continents as well as the eventual possibility of an earth-asteroid collision demand worldwide action on a similar scale… A worldwide strategic mobilization… similar to the effort required by World War II must be developed in the weeks ahead.”

As Crichton elaborates:

“What actually happened on January 1, 2000?  Essentially, nothing.

“But once again, notice the urgent language. The situation is desperate, unprecedented action is necessary, ordinary values must be pushed aside, anyone who disagrees is dangerous and reactionary. Terror, fear, and the end of civilization.

“Now you may be thinking, wait a minute, Y2K was a real problem and the concerns, even if exaggerated, nevertheless mobilized people and led to success.  This is a common but erroneous view. Here is the UN again: ‘During the first months of the new century only minor problems were reported… The governments… can congratulate themselves for passing the Y2K challenge.’  (UN website).

“So governments can congratulate themselves! The only problem is, they have no reason to congratulate themselves, because governments didn’t solve this problem. The US government spent 6 billion dollars. But Citibank alone spent nearly 1 billion. And total US expenditures were on the order of 100 billion, which means the government spent 6% of the total needed to fix the problem.

“Would Citibank have spent the money to fix its Y2K problem without government urging? Of course, because not to do so would have put them out of business. The same is true of other banks and businesses around the world. Yet government takes the credit. To encourage what is happening anyway is a common procedure in many areas of advocacy.”

I highly recommend Crichton’s speeches as a small antidote to the constant shilling that characterizes major media, a key perpetrator of this long con.  His talks are great stuff.

Our very real Robin Hoods steal from everyone to give to themselves.  These hoods are not rogues; they are idolized celebrities.

They have become expert at this game.  They are bold.  They are coming for you.

“Gore: U.S. Climate Bill Will Help Bring About ‘Global Governance’” includes:

Former Vice President Al Gore declared that the Congressional climate bill will help bring about “global governance.”

“I bring you good news from the U.S., “Gore said on July 7, 2009 in Oxford at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment, sponsored by UK Times.

“Just two weeks ago, the House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey climate bill,” Gore said, noting it was “very much a step in the right direction.” President Obama has pushed for the passage of the bill in the Senate and attended a G8 summit this week where he agreed to attempt to keep the Earth’s temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees C.

Al Gore is not the only theiving lunatic on this block.

Gore’s call for “global governance” echoes former French President Jacques Chirac’s call in 2000.

On November 20, 2000, then French President Chirac said during a speech at The Hague that the UN’s Kyoto Protocol represented “the first component of an authentic global governance.”

“For the first time, humanity is instituting a genuine instrument of global governance,” Chirac explained. “From the very earliest age, we should make environmental awareness a major theme of education and a major theme of political debate, until respect for the environment comes to be as fundamental as safeguarding our rights and freedoms. By acting together, by building this unprecedented instrument, the first component of an authentic global governance, we are working for dialogue and peace,” Chirac added.

Former EU Environment Minister Margot Wallstrom said, “Kyoto is about the economy, about leveling the playing field for big businesses worldwide.” Canadian Prime Minster Stephen Harper once dismissed UN’s Kyoto Protocol as a “socialist scheme.”

These schemes do not concern the environment.  These are highly successful long cons.  Theft.  Pure and simple.

In addition, calls for a global carbon tax have been urged at recent UN global warming conferences. In December 2007, the UN climate conference in Bali, urged the adoption of a global carbon tax that would represent “a global burden sharing system, fair, with solidarity, and legally binding to all nations.”

“Finally someone will pay for these [climate related] costs,” Othmar Schwank, a global tax advocate, said at the 2007 UN conference after a panel titled “A Global CO2 Tax.”

Schwank noted that wealthy nations like the U.S. would bear the biggest burden based on the “polluters pay principle.” The U.S. and other wealthy nations need to “contribute significantly more to this global fund,” Schwank explained. He also added, “It is very essential to tax coal.”

The 2007 UN conference was presented with a report from the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment titled “Global Solidarity in Financing Adaptation.” The report stated there was an “urgent need” for a global tax in order for “damages [from climate change] to be kept from growing to truly catastrophic levels, especially in vulnerable countries of the developing world.”

The tens of billions of dollars per year generated by a global tax would “flow into a global Multilateral Adaptation Fund” to help nations cope with global warming, according to the report.

Schwank said a global carbon dioxide tax is an idea long overdue that is urgently needed to establish “a funding scheme which generates the resources required to address the dimension of challenge with regard to climate change costs.”

They are coming for you.  Do you care?  Will you fight?  Are you yet?  What are you waiting for?

The environmental group Friends of the Earth advocated the transfer of money from rich to poor nations during the 2007 UN climate conference.

“A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources,” said Emma Brindal, a climate justice campaigner coordinator for Friends of the Earth.

This is not about the environment or science.  This is theft, laundered in plain view via politics and PR.

Please see also Michael Crichton “The Case for Skepticism on Global Warming” and these recent posts from Wealth Is Not The Problem:

• “Science Vs Politics”
• “Science Vs Politics, Part 2”
• “Economics Vs Environmentalism”
• “Science Vs Politics, Part 3”
• “Just Science”

I fear we underestimate the challenge before us.  These thieves know the game and are playing for keeps.

What happens next equals whatever will accumulate the most power.  Perhaps a more interesting question is, What will you do next to fight such theft?