The Corruption Crisis of 2008, Failure of Capitalism as a Political Sys

CORRUPTION UPDATES 181

Econ or Ethical meltdown?

posted: December 21, 2008, final edition

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The Corruption Crisis of 2008-20015

Economic Meltdown: Are you ready for Part II?

Alex, December 21, 2008

We are, and have been, sitting in the eye of an economic hurricane for about two months now. We have been sitting in a state of false calm at the 8000 level on the Dow since the October Crash of Global Markets. We are about to depart the eye of the storm.

Although the wise and honest among us clearly saw this disastrous economic hurricane building strength in the heart of the American political economy for well over twenty years, our political, social, and economic leaders have done nothing but feed the corruption that has spawned and fed this storm. This impending economic catastrophe has grown to such terrible size and power due to our politician’s corruption and the voracious corporate greed they feed.
Our “leaders” have fed this storm by draining our middle-class of its wealth and political power, doing everything in their power to accelerate and supercharge the irresponsible corporate concentration of our nation’s wealth, political power, and profits that have kept the corporate politicians of both parties in power. Although the majority of what we are about to experience is economic in nature, make no mistake about it: political corruption is the birth mother of this storm.

The wealth stolen from our middle-class started this storm when it was used to fund the complete corporate takeover of our democratic institutions, the complete privatization of our national resources, and funded the breakdown of ownership laws that allowed the corporate capture of our once free press.
In October this great financial storm, this economic Katrina that has been growing for decades in the heart of America, first hit the markets with full force. The housing, credit, and financial markets were crushed as they moved through the first storm wall, bankrupting banks around the world and dropping the Dow down from the 14,000 level to the 8000 level in the most precipitous fall in values ever seen in World Economic History.

The American Middle-Class was devastated. Personal savings, retirements, and equity-based investments which were unwisely put into the markets have lost nearly half their value. These losses were primarily financial, based on the depth of fraud and criminal irresponsibility in the heart of our political, banking, and credit system. But this was merely the beginning, not the end, as so many pundits and market watchers have been telling us. The next stage will see the storm moving from financial markets to the general economy, and then back into the markets with devastating force. This stage is beginning right now.

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Now we have to depart the eye of this financial Katrina, and our economy is about to go through the other half of the storm as the economy feels the full force of being ripped-off by our corporations and their political minions. Not only have the housing and automotive markets already prepared the way for a general economic collapse by completely collapsing themselves, but the irresponsible credit-fueled shopping spree of the middle and lower classes have come to an abrupt halt.

You must understand by now that this financial crisis has already spread to the general economy and is the process of bringing consumption to a virtual halt, where it will stay at an unbelievably low level for at least the next seven years. Our middle-class was robbed of their wealth over the last 35 years, and now their credit and equity has shrunk to much less than zero, and they are incapable of maintaining the level of purchase required to maintain the Dow at even the 8000 level. Mark my words: the Dow will ultimately drop to the level that reflects the consumption our middle and lower class citizens can support on their actual earnings.

Our average middle-class folk have been drained of their share of our nation’s wealth and political power for decades. What masked this rip-off was that their consumption was pumped up by the false bubble-equity in their houses, the bloated stock prices in their 401Ks, and the flood of easy credit at their disposal.
As every foreigner who our corporations and politicians snuck into our country lowered our wages, destroyed our social infrastructure, and stole our rights, so too was every product we once produced here (for decent wages) sent to be manufactured by slave labor in China. This made corporate profits grow even as our middle-class, our economy, and our infrastructure (not to mention our democracy) was drained and destroyed.

Corporate America, their politicians, and their foreign minions have drained The American Middle-Class of their share of our nation’s wealth and political power during the massive irresponsible expansion which has taken place during the last 35 years. This process has so altered our economic and political situation that our country has used this massive growth to transform itself from a democratic republic into a corporate fascist state right before our eyes.
The American middle-class responded to these dramatic changes by going on a massive debt-fueled shopping spree at Wal-Mart, and sealed their own fate. The American middle and lower classes, which were being drained of their earning and political power, responded putting both parents to work while raising kids, and drowning themselves in debt to maintain the lifestyle that one wage-earner provided twenty years ago. They shopped at Wall-Mart while hiring Mexicans to mow their lawns and clean their toilets, and now they can afford neither. Justice is a funny thing, isn’t it?

The Bottom Line here is that neither the American Middle-Class nor the illegals possesses the money, credit, subservience, or equity sufficient to stop this grand corporate growth-bubble scam that has been perpetuated by our corporate politicians and their corporate masters from imploding.
Understand that the “consumer” (citizen?) cannot shop us out of this crisis, nor can pumping in another couple of million illegals this year to slave for the corporations and pump-up consumption “grow” us out of this crisis. Those scams have both failed at great expense to the general welfare of the average American. But our corporate bastards made themselves as rich as Nazis.
Both processes, the endless massive growth of “consumer” consumption, and massive illegal growth have run their natural courses. Both processes have been completely drained of all their profitability, drained our land of all of its natural resources, polluted our air and water, devastated our social infrastructure, changed the frk’n weather, and this big scam has now economically blown up in our faces.

We are now left with a massive population unable to pay its previous debts, fund its present operating expenses, nor see the bottom of this hole we have dug ourselves into. Gee, that’s a big surprise. The costs of our irresponsible growth policies have come due, and nobody’s ready or able to pay the debt, but pay we will.
The American Middle-Class has been steadily losing their already diminished share of our nation’s wealth and political influence for over a decade, but until just recently the Middle-Class has maintained their outrageous consumption through credit-based purchases backed by the confidence they had in the artificially bloated prices of their housing and stock holdings.
The first stage of this economic Katrina wiped out their housing and stock equity, leaving the tattered remnants of the American middle-class saddled with a massive debt load, houses worth less than their purchase prices, and stock values that will not fund the education of their children or support them in old age. The second stage, which we are just now entering, will take their jobs and the remainder of their wealth.

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After the popping of the housing bubble ravaged the housing market, brought down the related credit, banking, and equities markets this economic storm was not nearly finished. Now it has moved out of the financial/market sectors into the broader economy. Our corporate politicians responded predictably: They ignored the economy and gave 8 TRILLION to exactly the same financial/markets people who stole our money and ruined our economy in the first place: their Wall Street Bribers.

These 8 TRILLIONS did absolutely nothing to support housing prices or stabilize the real economy, which if this bailout was spent properly would have limited the fall of mortgage security values and actually stimulated the credit markets by funding buyers, rather than lenders. This virtual printing of money and the effective lowering of interest rates to zero will ignite strong inflation without stimulating the economy. Just give it a little time. I’d say that within six months inflation will be well on its way to double-digit levels.
We will see that when the US starts putting this much debt onto the global debt markets, the level of interest required to fund a debt of this size will be astronomical. We’ll see if China spends it’s money keeping it’s people from revolting, or buying US Treasuries. It appears that these final acts of thievery by our politicians for their corporate masters, as Rome Burns around them, are going to be paid for during a long and severe bout of inflation during the height of our economic collapse.

As the financial markets are forced to reckon with these radically deteriorating economic conditions, which they themselves created through their financial and political corruptions, we will finally see the final capitulation that will mark the psychological bottom of this market. We are going to see the market move to the 6000 level within the next month or two, and we are going to see this happen through a drastic decline or two, during which the majority of market players will throw in the towel, fold up shop, and go home. When this baby hits the bottom, the sound of this crash will reverberate around the world.

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The next major moves by the financial markets will be strongly downward, and will no longer just be reflecting the fall of the housing and credit markets, but will be a powerful expression of the precipitous drop in citizen spending and a clear indication that the real economy is grinding to a screeching halt. During this stage of our crash the US will have to fund greater and greater amounts of the 8 TRILLIONS+ they have given away to their Wall Street bribers, as well as funding our substantial private debt, which will stoke the flames of inflation upward as the market crashes down, while economic activity comes to a near standstill.

To put it sharply, all of the corporations who based their operations and profits on cheap credit are as finished as are the middle-class that based its consumption on cheap credit. The party is so over. Far too many corporations based their profits on nothing more than cheap money and illegal, if not slave labor. This irresponsible model of growth has collapsed.

This “business model” of borrowing $1,000,000 dollars, hiring state-subsidized illegals to work illegally and cheaply, ultimately making three dollars profit for every $100,000 borrowed, (30 dollars total profit on somebody else’s million) while forcing our citizens to subsidize the education and medicine for their illegal work force is now over.

These abuses are not ending because they are illegal, immoral, treacherous, and bad for our country, but only because the cheap money has dried up and the bills for the last 35 years of draining our infrastructure to subsidize this irresponsible growth are demanding immediate payment. The days of getting a $1,000,000 loan and paying back the loan at $1,000,010 are dead in the water, no matter how much money the government prints and gives to its Wall Street Bribers. This means that Tens of Millions are heading towards unemployment this Christmas.

The result is easy to foresee: Millions of illegals, consumers of our empire, and citizens are going to lose their jobs as our country comes to the very harsh realization that the economic bubbles in our country are not just limited to the Black Heart of Wall Street, nor are they confined to the housing and the credit markets. Our country’s whole model of growth is popping before our eyes.
Our various layers of economic, financial, demographic and consumption bubbles are signs of a much deeper bubble, composed of something other than wealth and power. It is an ethical lapse, a moral bubble of complete stinking corruption that has established itself in the heart of the American Spirit.
Our ethical bubble expresses itself through our national concept of ourselves as forever growing in power and wealth, the center of “a better way of life” that demands illegal wars and crimes against humanity to support itself. We stink of hubris and our pride and greed has eaten away at the very foundations of our democratic institutions and spawned real policies as dependent on endless violence and compulsion as it is dependent on an endless growth in population, consumption, and profits to support itself.

This behavior assures us that our time at the top will be limited by the lifespan of our economic bubble, which is ultimatly determined by the lifespan of the corruption bubble at the heart of our Spirit. All of these material and spiritual expressions of our greed are short-term bubbles in mind and body, and they are doomed to pop and bring a resounding wave of pain to our country and the world.

This grand bubble of endless material growth is not just going to pop, it is about to blow up in our faces. Our concept of ourselves has grown past the writ of our Constitution, past the limits of common sense, and past all ethical restrains on greed that would have moderated a good people. Now it’s time to pay the piper.
Understand this well: The sound of the bubble popping in the housing, credit, and equities markets will be considered as nothing when the bubble of irresponsible growth that has fueled our whole economy for the past few decades pops. The sound of this bubble popping will change the way you think about your country and the crimes it has committed against itself and other nations.

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Here’s where we are: The financial bubble has popped. The economic ramifications of the financial bubble popping have spread to the broader economy, collapsed business activity and consumption, and is about to crash back into the Stock Markets, triggering the next great fall to the 6000 level.

Unemployment will hit an honest 20% within six months, and inflation will begin spiking as the international value of the dollar responds to zero interest and the trillions in government bailout debt are going to be put onto the international debt markets.

The economic reverberations of this broad economic collapse will shortly boomerang back into the financial markets, supercharged by the inflationary pressures our corrupt politicians created by giving 8 TRILLION+ of our dollars to the corrupt corporate thieves on Wall Street. You know who these Wall Street guys are, they are the same guys who brought on this crisis in the first place, after bribing both parties into deregulating open greed.

Now the economy coming to a screeching halt will have to be priced into the already damaged financial markets, and this is when the financial and economic aspects of this crisis will come together and be compounded with interest. Ka-Boom! We will be lucky if the markets stop dropping at the 6000 level.

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Recent Events

part one of The Great Corruption Crash of 1008:

sunday, oct 12, 2008

monday, october 6, 2008

Good Reads

Status of the Econ Crisis: How we got here, where it is Going, and what you should expect to happen, alex, 7-13-08

The Failure of Capitalism as a political system, alex, 9-17-08

Prediction of the Market Crash:

august '07: Markets ready to Kill Economy

august 17, '07: Housing-credit crisis exposing the rotten core of American Markets and Economy

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The Failure of Capitalism as a political system

rewritten and edited on 9-23-08

What our domestic and international markets are experiencing is the complete and total breakdown of Capitalism. This is not the breakdown of Capitalism as an economic system. This is the utter failure of Capitalism as a political system.

This economic crisis did not start in housing or on Wall Street. This economic crisis was born in Washington, where political corruption trumped the power of the voter to select candidates, elect representatives, and regulate our affairs for the general welfare of our people. This crisis was a foregone conclusion when we lost our democratic ability to regulate corporate wealth.

The result was that our bribed politicians allowed the corporations to break all governmental regulation, oversight, and taxation on virtually every aspect of our economy. This allowed the corporations to steal the wealth of our nation, and concentrate it on Wall Street.

The only path out of this crisis is by forcing capitalism out of our government, reestablishing our democracy and our democratic republic, and re regulating and re taxing corporate wealth. The only way to do this is to completely eliminate all corporate political contributions.

Only by re-imposing the strong democratic restraints on commerce required by our Constitution, and restoring the rule of the voter, can we find the wisdom and the honest leaders required to pull us out this crisis. The corporate politicians we currently suffer under will only continue to feed the corporate criminals who bribed them until we go completely broke or drive them out of office.

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Naturally, after subverting our democracy our corporate aristocracy completely deregulated and de-taxed themselves. The dangers posed by allowing the corporations to rule of our country have been rising for decades.

The subversion of our health and safety laws by the manufacturing, health, and pharmaceutical corporations, the corruption of the Interior Department by Big Oil, and the corporate subversion of science to maintain growth and profits are only the tip of the iceberg.

The dangers posed to our health and safety laws by losing our democracy to corporate control have been obvious and growing long before the public recently became aware of the financial meltdown, but they all come from the same source: the corporations have bribed our democracy into submission. Yet despite the obvious and growing damages that corporate bribery has done to our country, our politicians have continued to take bribes and remain silent as they traded off our health, safety, and now our money for corporate bribes

The long term result of allowing our corporations to run our government is that the our middle-class citizens have been impoverished, their social institutions destroyed, and their political power neutralized.

This intentional long-term impoverishment of our middle-class by our bribed politicians allowed our corporations to concentrate the greatest amount of wealth in the hands of the smallest group of people in human history.

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This is not a partisan issue. Both parties have, and continue to cooperate very closely in subverting our Constitution and stripping our middle-class of their wealth. The Dems have perpetuated exactly the same financial and foreign policies as the Repugnants since they took office. They have maintained and assumed predominant control of the mechanism of corporate bribery and earmark payoffs that funds both parties.

As if marching in lockstep, both of our corporate parties have worked very closely together to move our manufacturing to foreign countries, make their corporate bribers exempt from taxes, exempt the corporations from regulation and oversight, all while moving as much cheap illegal foreign labor into the country to create wage levels that no honorable American would allow to exist in their country.

The predictable byproduct of killing our democracy is that the health, wealth, welfare, education and, wealth of our citizens have been sacrificed to enrich their corporate bribe masters. As our stolen wealth continues to evaporate on Wall Street, Americans are becoming painfully aware that the politicians did not just steal their money, but that the social and natural infrastructures of our country have been stripped bare.

Betraying our country, stealing our money, draining our infrastructure, and de taxing themselves has been very profitable for our politicians and corporations. Betraying our democracy has allowed our corporate masters to concentrate the the vast majority of the wealth of our nation on Wall Street, where they just pissed it off.

Yet Americans are still being misled and confused by the politicians and corporate media as to what this crisis actually is, how it started, and how we can meaningfully address it. So let's start at the beginning, with the economic causes of this crisis.

Despite the propaganda of the corporate Media and the lies of our politicians, this is not a mortgage securities/credit crisis caused by the popping of the housing bubble.

Rather, the economic epicenter of this crisis is actually the product of the popping of a massive financial bubble in the heart of our financial markets, centered in Wall Street.

The financial bubble we are watching pop on Wall Street is the stolen wealth of our middle-class, the reward corporate America received after bribing both the Democrats and Republicans into submission. After stealing our democracy and our wealth, Wall Street was left completely untaxed and unregulated as they irresponsibly derived and leveraged our stolen wealth into a massive financial bubble.

Thus the true source of this economic meltdown, and the birth mother of the dot-com and housing bubbles sits in the corrupted political policies that allowed the massive concentration of our nation's stolen wealth on Wall Street.

As the stolen wealth of our middle-class was poured into the pockets of our corporate elite, Wall Street was flooded with our stolen wealth, where they leveraged it into a snowballing mass of expanding liquidity that can only be called a financial bubble located at the center of our investment banking system.

It has been this financial bubble that has been the source of the artificial, unsustainable series of bubbles that have been driving the markets and economy for the last 16 years. This series of economic bubbles has just finally come to a halt with the bursting of the housing bubble. The financial bubble at the center of our financial markets is the true source of the liquidity that has fueled the series of bubbles we have experienced during the last 15 years.

As you may now be beginning to understand, the true source of Wall Street's massive concentration of our nation's wealth was not due to their work or innovation, but was political. The wealth that Wall Street just lost was not their money, it was the wealth of our people stolen by bribing our politicians.

Thus the heart and true source of this economic crisis is located in the breakdown of our democracy, not in the housing, credit, or financial markets.

Our corporations and its wholly owned government have successfully broken our democracy, stole our money, and have put on a Roman orgy-like frenzy of naked greed and meaningless consumption that has run unabated since the beginning of the first Clinton Administration, when the Dems completely gave up the ghost of our Constitutional Republic, and became a wholly owned subsidiary of Corporate America. Until now. Now the party's over, and it will soon be time to make the traitors pay as our people wake up from their 20 year frenzy of greed and consumption.

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Let's be very clear about this: the cause of this bubble is nothing short of the stolen wealth of our middle-class creating a massive liquidity bubble in Wall Street. This money was provided to our corporations by the bribed politicians of both parties who have worked tirelessly to strip the middle-class of our wages, schools, hospitals, and infrastructure.

Wall Street responded to the politicians's gift of our nation's wealth by creating a witch's brew of derivatives and leveraged investments that any honest government would have prohibited. But our bribed government and parties are incapable of honesty. They poured gasoline on the bonfire of our national wealth.

The middle-class, bless their stupid souls, fell into the trap of corporate greed. As their salaries and their share of our nation's wealth plunged to third-world levels, the amount of credit offered by the Wall Street got larger and larger, and our working citizens went deeper and deeper into debt as the massive concentration of our stolen wealth on Wall Street was sucked out of them. As our middle-class was impoverished, Wall Street maintained the rise in profits and values by loaning the middle-class's money back to the middle-class at loan shark rates.

Clinton and Bush both just smiled, and encouraged the frenzy of greed, political bribery, and irresponsible consumption to grow.

And so the spiraling frenzy of greed has had no check, and this financial bubble as run through our economy, first fueling the dot-com bubble, and subsequently the housing bubble.

Few inside or outside of politics raised the alarm against either the political corruption that engulfed our government and was endangering our nation's financial health. In the meantime, our nation's long term health, welfare, and educational systems, as well as our nation's natural resources were stripped bare for the profit of our corporate aristocracy.

Mind you, these are the institutions that once promoted social stability, responsible economic growth, and assure that a basic level of equal opportunity existed in our society. Now these institutions are engines of social inequality.

Even more disturbing, now that the financial bubble in the heart of Wall Street has finally popped, none of these bribed tools of corporate greed, "our" politicians, have come clean and denounced the system of corruption that caused the breakdown of our democracy, of our social institutions, and eventually, our economy.

And under the present system of open bribery and corruption that dominates politics today, there's not a damn thing we can do about it.

Until our Citizens understand that all of our Congresses and the Presidents for the last 35 years have been no more than the bribed tools of Corporate bribery, and demand our democracy be restored, our politicians will continue to strip the bottom of our society to feed the greed at the top, and our economic system will continue to malfunction and plunge.

Our politicians, with very few exceptions, have taken every step humanly possible to strip our citizens of their share of our nation's wealth, subvert honest democracy, and concentrate all of our wealth and political power into the hands of our corporate elite. And they are not going to be stopped until and unless we outlaw corporate bribery, restore our democracy, and regulate commerce within the requirements of the general welfare of our citizens.

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Personally, I believe that the only thing restraining our citizens from killing the politicians is not the rule of law, which the politicians and corporations long ago discarded, but the fact that there are so few citizens left in the US. The politicians are protected in their corruptions because most of our so-called "citizens" of the American Republic are nothing more than Consumers of a Corporate Empire.

The only thing protecting our politicians from the wrath of our citizens is that there are so few of us left, and that the personal ethical restraints of the few loyal citizens of our lost democratic republic still appear to be sufficient to restrain a bloody response against the traitors who have broken our democracy, crushed our rights, and stole our wealth. Despite the lack of democratic principals among our "consumers," our citizens have been betrayed by our government, and shooting a whole bunch of CEOs and politicians is completely justified.

It appears that the average resident of the US is not concerned with our nation's political and Constitutional values, and is therefore incapable of identifying the source of our political and economic breakdown in the political parties that have betrayed and subverted our Constitution, destroyed our democracy and who continue to run our hijacked government into the ground.

But that's what you get when you allow our politicians to base the granting of citizenship on the pursuit of wealth and obedience to those who hold it.

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The sad fact is that the average resident of our country can no longer be considered a Citizen of our Democratic Republic, but are only qualified to be called consumers of a corporate empire.

To really address the political corruption that caused this economic mess, we are faced with a daunting task: we must restore our democracy and the rule of the people over the wealth and power of our nation. To do this we must turn our consumers back into citizens and restore our democracy. As impossible as this may seem, it must be done: The only way we can stop the corruption that triggered this economic meltdown is to change who runs our government from the corporations to the citizens.

The true loyal citizens who seek to restore our Democratic Republic face great obstacles. Our so-called "citizens" appear to be incapable of being offended by the corruption which feeds their consumption. They live in corruption like a pig lives in shit, fat and happy. Despite that fact, they are not immune to the repercussions of their unbridled greed. Although they have ignored the greed and corruption that has led us to the doorstep of disaster, their ignorance will not protect them from its repercussions.

The political and economic corruptions caused by our citizen's inattention to preserving their democracy is going to hurt them badly. I'm afraid that the level of pain required to wake up our sleeping citizens to the dangers posed by the traitors who have stolen our country, and our money, is going to be so high that they will not act until their ability to maintain sufficient work, food, shelter, and clothing is threatened.

But this may not be true, as our middle-class has not objected as our corporate politicians have forced them down on bended knee to live like mexican peasants in their own country. But there is hope: the economic situation is changing rapidly, and the last bits of wealth of the middle-class, their 401ks, their money markets, and their purchasing power is beginning to decline in value as rapidly as their houses lost equity.

It is very possible that the middle-class's loss of their retirement and savings, when combined with the loss of their false housing equity, and their loss of their line of credit, the things that kept them consuming as our economy was looted, will be sufficient to spark them back into loyalty to our democracy.

In any case, this is not a partisan political issue. Both parties are in on the bribery-corruption scam. Both parties receive massive corporate bribes to stay in office. Both parties get their cut from giving our wealth Wall Street and Big Oil, and all the other corporate interests who bribed our them and our democracy into submission.

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The republicans and democrats, despite their very superficial social policy differences, have worked very closely together to strip our middle-class of their share of our nation's wealth and push the loot to their corporate bribers to our corporate elite. The main weapons both parties have used against our citizens has been open corporate bribery, which has directly led to NAFTA, massive illegal immigration, the breakdown of public safety, and sending as much of our work to China and India as possible.

Let's see if I'm right: let's completely ban corporate bribery, restore our democracy, and see what the people have to say about these criminal policies, criminal politicians, and the crimigrant foreign minions of greed who have flooded our country to feed from the hand of their corporate masters.

These bribery-fueled policies have separated the American middle-class from their just share of our nation's wealth, and this stolen wealth has been manipulated and magnified into the vast pools of leveraged private wealth that Clinton launched into the Dot-Com bubble, and his man Greenspan later wrangled into the housing crisis. But hey, what were they going to do with all our stolen money? Give it back? Ha! When the dot-com bubble burst the stolen wealth of our nation was quickly transferred into the housing bubble.

Now the collapse of the housing bubble has exposed the real bubble, the financial bubble caused by concentrating our nation's stolen wealth on Wall Street.

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The only way to restore our economy and deflate the bubble in Wall Street is for the citizens of our country to take our money back, drive the corporate politicians out of office and into jail and onto the gallows, and give their foreign minions a head start in their impending run for the border.

Although the pain we are now experiencing is economic, the cause of this crisis is political treachery, and our pain, and the incredible pain to come, was caused by the corporate takeover of the Dem and Repugnant parties.

This result has been a long term trend of deregulation and de taxing of corporate American, and especially Wall Street, at the same moment and in conjunction with our political traitors instituting policies of "globalism," and massive demographic growth, which really means sending the jobs they cannot get illegals to do here to China and India.

This resulted in the spectacle of our corporations, politicians, and illegals joining forces to use the poverty of the world, and illegal Mexican peasants here, as a tool to disenfranchise and impoverish middle-classes around the world, completely break our democracy here, and impose a corporate "global" state in place of our democratic republic. The Dems have been no more than willing bitches to the corporate power that has stolen our government.

Internationally, our parties and Corporations have joined together to use Our Broken Democracy to create an Empire and impose dictators, if not just openly support tyrants, under the colors of our flag.

The parties' and corporation's corruption has been so successful and complete that they were able to create a financial bubble on Wall Street of a size unparalleled in economic history, with the stolen wealth of our middle-class.

Thus what we have here is an economic crisis born out of the breakdown of our democracy, not just a simple economic crisis caused by a mysterious housing bubble.

Now it should be becoming increasingly obvious why our Revolutionary Forefathers prohibited Aristocracy, required democratic forms, gave regulation of commerce to the people, strictly limited and checked governmental power, and established strong civil rights for our citizens.

Our present government represents none of these principals or values. They are, to put it briefly, TRAITORS. Thus the economic cause of this crisis is not a centered in the bursting housing bubble, it is actually the bursting of the financial bubble caused by concentrating our nation's stolen wealth in Wall Street. This financial bubble did not just happen. The real cause of the bubble in our financial markets sits squarely in our government's allowing their bribers to steal the wealth of our nation.

This is why our government is incapable of addressing the crisis: If they admit that they are the cause of the crisis, the basis of their corrupt power will disappear. And few in our government would be elected to office in non-corporate funded elections. Therefore the only answer to the economic meltdown by our corrupted government is to continue to do what they have done for the last 35 years: pour massive amounts of our wealth into Wall Street to bail out the massive losses of their biggest bribers on Wall Street. As they never represented the people, only fooled them, our politicians are incapable of serving our people, let alone ending this crisis, and must be reformed into democratic forms or removed by any means necessary.

Thus the only way we can stop the economic bleeding is to address it at its cause: we must stop corporate wealth from perverting our democracy, restore our democracy, and bring the wisdom of our people to bear on regulating markets, rather than continuing to allow our corporations to regulate our citizens by bribing our politicians.

And if we have to shoot a few Democrats, Republicans, and CEOs to make the rest of them loyal to our Constitution, it is a cheap price to pay.

It's time to fertilize the tree of liberty.

Contact Us: Committeefordemocracy.org

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Economic Crisis Update:

AIG/Freddie/Fannie/et el...

Feeding the Pig: Will it help or hurt?

Opening the Public Treasury to protect Private Profit

september 18, '08

This is the same as printing money, and although it will limit the losses on Wall Street, it will significantly increase the national debt, lower the value of the dollar, and radically increase the cost of government borrowing. This means that every citizen is going to pay a heavier price to preserve the radically reduced wealth and power of Wall Street than they paid to create it.

In addition to damaging the US dollar and pushing govt borrowing costs up, this massive bailout is conceding that the banking sector is bankrupt, and can only continue to operate with the US assuming liability for trillions in private debt. Now that the government has assumed liability for Fannie, Fredie, and AIG, just how much are we on the hook for?

The answer is that nobody knows. The total liability for Fredie and Fannie is around 5 trillion. How much we will have to cover is dependent on where the housing market goes: if it goes up, our liability decreases. If it continues to plunge, our liability soars.

Although the government is acting "strongly" to protect their corporate sponsors on Wall Street, they have not done a damn thing to support the housing market or housing prices.

Despite all these government moves, housing prices and the value of mortgage securities continues to plunge, and our liability for the thieves on Wall Street is soaring. For all the government has done, they have done nothing to address the fundamental problem: the broken housing market.

The death of the banking system also means that the debt and equity consumer spending spree of the last 15 years is over. This also means that the excessive consumption which substantially fueled China's rapid economic expansion is dead.

I believe that it is no longer in China's economic or strategic interests to buy American Treasuries at exactly the same time that the government's demand for funds to bailout freddie, Fannie, and the banks is reaching a fever pitch. If the expanding economic meltdown in China's markets continues, they may begin selling US Treasuries.

The US assumption of these virtually bottomless private debts has not just pushed our national debt to astronomical heights, but it has also radically increased the risks associated with buying US Treasuries. This is going to radically increase the interest the US will have to pay to sell Treasuries.

If you are just beginning to understand what this means, you should sit down. Putting the government behind this amount of private debt means that our government has just gone "all-in," betting the very value of our money and our national wealth that housing will magically rise in the middle of the largest housing crash in world economic history. As I mentioned above, they have done this without doing a damn thing to stabilize housing.

Now, not only will housing continue to plunge way down to the price and level of sales our impoverished middle-class can support, but every default will be added to our national debt.

Although it is not apparent at this moment, this means that the flood gate of inflation has just been fully opened.

I have to go to an appointment at the VA. I will return this evening and finish this essay, alex

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Confidence vs. Market Fundamentals

The Fed and Politicians have gone "all-in" with our money to cover their Briber's Debts

alex, 10-12-08

I am getting really tired of hearing that the market crash we are experiencing is a "confidence crisis."

The media and politicians are also saying that they and their corrupted markets are looking for "direction."

These statements are lies. These lies are based on the erroneous conclusion that if markets get "confidence," (ie possession of all of our money, and control of our politics, which they already have...) they will have "direction," and the whole problem of everyone in our country, including the banks, the government, and the working class having more debt than assets on their books will magically disappear. It will not.

This way of framing the market crash, as a problem of confidence, which is being heavily pushed by the corporate media and our corporate politicians, is deceptive and incorrect. This perspective is also dangerous, as it has caused us to misidentify and misaddress the real problems that underlay the market crash and our economic collapse.

The so-called "confidence" and "direction" crisis is merely the psychological byproduct of the real cause of the global market crash. We just witnessed the global realization that the United States has had a complete break down in market fundamentals.

A lack of confidence is an appropriate response to a global system of finance that has liabilities that exceed assets and future profits by so large a margin that a significant devaluation of all national assets, including currency values, is necessary.

But this failure of confidence is not the cause of the crisis and crash. This lack of confidence and direction is only a by-product of the failure of our markets and economy to maintain fundamental standards of economic responsibility.

But the financial irresponsibility and greed in our markets and economy are also no more than manifestations of the real cause of our market crash. The real cause of this crisis is the breakdown of the fundamental democratic systems of control capable of counterbalancing the power and wealth of our corporate elite with democratic restraints.

Our markets crashed because the unrestrained political bribery of our corporations allowed them to make the rules.

The unimpeded power of the corporate elite in politics to bend policy and law to their will and interests allowed their unimpeded greed to create precipitous economic and political imbalances to form in the heart of our political economy.

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What we are really experiencing is not a crisis in confidence, but a crisis our democracy which has allowed the corporate interests to control politics. This distortion of our democracy has distorted the markets and allowed unhealthy imbalances to form and grow in the heart of our society and economy since the early '80s, when the right of the people to regulate commerce was discarded in favor of allowing commerce to regulate the people.

It was during the early '80s when American politics, meaning both the Democratic and Republican parties, allowed our country's growth and development to exceed the bounds of responsible economic and demographic growth. Both parties put profits before the welfare of our country.

The massive expansion of the population assisted, as well as masked, significant detrimental effects of both the transfer of wealth and political power from the bottom to the top of American society. Combined with the explosion of untrammeled greed in the wake of the parties' deregulation and de taxation of corporate America, our corporate elite consolidated corporate control of American politics.

What we are really experiencing in this economic crisis and crash is the consequences of the success of greed and the lust for power over democracy. This crash is the consequence of the non-stop campaign to completely de-regulate, de-tax, and concentrate all the wealth and political power of our country into the hands of our corporate elite.

This consolidation of our wealth and political power in the hands of our corporate elite created the monster financial bubble in the hear to Wall Street that drove the wildly irresponsible growth and series of market bubbles we experienced during the last 16 years.

Now that this system of political and economic corruption has completely imploded, the corporate elite and their political lapdogs in both parties don't have a clue about how to replace the corporate government that has done so much damage to the economy and polity of our country. I suggest we revert back to the democratic system required by our Constitution. I believe it is the only system capable of repairing the damage to our economy and ethics.

The corporate system of greed and corruption has failed, and these corrupt fools are incapable of taking the steps required to undo the damage. We must restore our democratic system to redirect the goal of our government from concentrating the wealth of our nation into a very few corporate hands, to one primarily dependent on the people, and dedicated to defending the rights and general welfare of our nation.

...

The trend towards corporate control of government found complete success after the first election of Bill Clinton Clinton took the whole Democratic Party over to the side of un limiting the off shoring of our jobs to tyrannical police states, unlimited illegal immigration of very low-wage workers to finish off our middle class and their social institutions, and completed the dismantling of our already severely weakened federal regulatory powers.

With the corporate takeover of both political parties, American corporations found themselves able to concentrate the greatest amount of our nation's wealth into the fewest hands ever in our nation's history.

The Democratic party's sell-out to corporate bribes signaled the final breakdown in our democracy required to allow the advocates of the "free market" to bribe our politicians into running their scam unimpeded by oversight, regulation, or taxation.

And now we are seeing where allowing the rich and powerful to run our government has got us: They stole our democracy and then looted our nation of its wealth, our middle-class of their wages and schools, and suckered the millions of people who were unwise enough to trust these thieves out of their savings and retirement funds.

Our bribed politicians allowed our corporations to steal the wealth of our nation (and the world) and form it into the biggest ponzi scheme in world history. The collapse of this pyramid confidence scam has sparked the greatest global depression in world history.

Now, right now, this confidence scam has collapsed, and the politicians, corporations, and the corporate media are reporting this historic breakdown of the economy and the failure of running our government and economy through system of political bribery and corruption is merely a "confidence" crisis. Not true. This is the byproduct of a confidence scam, and is not a "confidence" crisis.

What has really failed are the policies as well as the process of allowing the rich and powerful to transform our democracy into a corporate government.

Understand that the thieves of both parties who run our government, deregulated our markets and de-taxed the rich represent the interests who give them the most bribe money, not the people of their district or our country.

As the politicians of both parties depend on these bribes to maintain office, they are incapable of regulating or taxing corporate power in the US, and they are completely clueless about how to turn around the crash caused by the very same economic and political policies that keep them and their corporate coconspirators in power.

So the best analysis of the cause and solution of this massive crisis that the corporate politicians and corporate press can come up with is to describe the failure of corporate politics itself as a failure of "confidence," and a crisis in "direction," rather than a fundamental breakdown in our economy caused by a fundamental breakdown in our democracy.

This system of allowing the rich and powerful to run our polity and economy has just come crashing down on Wall Street, and none in the corporate press or corporate politics has the bravery or honor to confront the real causes of this crisis, or identify the reforms that will be required to productively confront our nation's political and economic degradation.

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The press and politician's framing our system failure as nothing more than a "confidence" and "direction" crisis is the equivalent blinding ourselves to the consequences of allowing open bribery to determine economic policy.

According to the corporate press and politicians there is a problem, but no one in politics or the press can identify it beyond being a problem in "confidence" and "direction."

The fact is that the bankers and their cohorts already have had virtually complete control of our money and our political structure, and they have damaged both severely. We have been going in the wrong direction for over 30 years, and no one in the press or politics has the guts or honor to call it like it is.

The corporate press and politician's dependence on corporate wealth make it virtually impossible for them to either honestly report on the causes, or legislatively undo the economic and political policies that both brought us to this point, and keep them in power.

Thus the press and politicians have continued to perpetuate exactly the same lies that brought us to this point, and have condoned pouring the remainder of our money into the corrupted economic structure that already stripped our nation of its wealth.

Thus the corporate press and corporate politician's characterization of this crash as a crisis of confidence and direction reflects their corporate sponsorship, rather than the true nature of the situation. Their corporate funding has neutralized their ability to see, let alone honestly analyze or criticize, the fundamental corruptions in our system that created this mess.

The trillions of dollars that our government, and governments around the world, are pouring into the private banking system are only capable of protecting a small portion of the assets of their biggest bribers, and has no possibility of stopping the global markets from completely reevaluating American Assets. Because of the global interlinking of our global empire. all global markets and assets that are connected to our massive pyramid scheme are being revalued.

This backwards thinking, that if you give all the money to the rich we will all get rich, is what got us into trouble in the first place, and continuing these corrupt policies will only push us deeper into the hole.

Their "solution" to dump trillions of dollars into the markets has only succeeded in pushing the rapidly approaching market bottom even lower and further away, and has assured that the upcoming post-crash period will be longer in duration, have less economic activity, and be plagued with more severe inflation than if they kept the money in the treasury.

Thus the only way to inspire confidence and direction is for these leaders, and their system of bribery that brought us here, to be removed from power.

They are behaving like the engineer of a train who sees the bridge ahead is on fire ordering the stokers to stoke faster.

What we are really experiencing in these precipitous market drops is the reassertion, for the first time in decades, is the market's shocking acknowledgement that the true fundamental value of assets is the real bottom-line that determines the level of credit available to the economy. That bottom line, and the people who led us here, measure at far less than zero.

And because our corporate political and economic leaders killed our middle-class and our democracy during the massive artificial expansion of the last 35 years, our politicians and their corporate sponsors were able to run all of our stolen wealth into the biggest financial bubble centered in heart of Wall Street in our whole history. In the meantime, our people are impoverished, mired in debt, and unable to purchase and consume our way out of this mess with money they no longer possess.

It took a long time, but market fundamentals have finally defeated "confidence" as the basis of market value. The concept of the "New Economy" developed during the Clinton years, is now officially dead. Yet the corporate politicians and the corporate press are continuing to blind themselves to the fact that their being corporate tools has brought us to this point.

Thus the corporate press and politicians aspire to do the impossible, to re-inflate the massive financial bubble at the heart of Wall Street that just collapsed, taking all of our stolen wealth with it. Their aspirations are doomed, for this bubble will not re inflate.

The reason our corporate politicians and corporate media continue to sell us the same old snake oil is that if they cannot sell it, they will not be able to hold onto the wealth and political power they stole from us.

As they can neither re inflate the bubble, nor change their allegiance from the corporations to their real constituents, their local voters, we are left with with their lies about a crisis of "confidence" and "direction."

If our press and politicians were wiser than greedy, or even marginally ethical, they would have seen the threat to their hold on power and wealth at the start of this crisis, and taken the steps necessary to re stabilize the system that serves them so well.

At that time it would have been prudent to begin re inflating the earning and political power of the middle-class to off-set the imbalances their subordination to corporate corruption created. Now they have gone all-in with the full faith and credit of the US to support the perpetuators of the greatest economic scam in history.

Rather than pursue this foolish path, wisdom and justice would require that they immediately shift the focus of the 700 billion dollar bailout from the bribers of politicians on Wall Street to the middle-class. This could be executed by giving everyone who earns below $100,000 dollars a year a two-year tax holiday with that 700 billion dollars.

The situation is ironic. Not more than a year ago, Joe Biden (credit card joe) championed a bill that essentially removed bankruptcy protections from the middle-class while still allowing corporations to shed all liability through bankruptcy. Now the same people who removed our bankruptcy protection are giving trillions of dollars of our tax money to corporations who went bankrupt while looting our nation of its wealth.

Independent of how our corporate press and politicians ms-frame and respond to the economic crash with trillion dollar bail-outs and wild earmarks, the true end of the economic aspect of this crisis will only appear when the markets reach the level of value that reflects the level of economic activity that the working and middle-class's earning and purchasing power can actually support.

A $700 billion tax-holiday for the wage earners, if done six months ago, would have heavily stimulated housing purchases, which would have established the bottom of the housing crash, thereby setting a housing price based on citizen wealth, and ultimately limiting the housing security market's bottom based on market fundamentals.

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Everybody would know what their assets were worth, giving clarity to exactly how far mortgage security values would fall, and what they would be worth. But these greedy corrupt bastards would not even think of threatening the basis of their political and economic power by actually serving the general welfare or interests of our people. Our fall to the bottom may be so hard that we fall right through the floor I estimated last August.

My analysis then indicated that the market would crash, and bottom out at between 6800 and 7200 on the Dow by June of 2008.

People insulted and ridiculed me.

Now, it appears that the massive give a way of our nation's assets to the bankers and corporation since then merely delayed the downturn from June '08 to Oct '08. But besides delaying the moment of reckoning, these ignorant responses, which have fed rather than curbed the crisis, have moved my predicted market bottom even lower.

The $700 billion bailout for the banks will bring the bottom to an even lower point than the 6800 to 7200 level that I predicted that the Dow would sink to last August.

By backing Freddie, Fannie, AIG, commercial paper, the banks, and the trillion dollar bail-out, our corporate government has gone "all-in," putting the full faith and credit of our country behind assets that will increase the liability of the taxpayer as they continue to drop in value. This, combined with global rate cuts, indicate that what we are witnessing is an incredibly rare instance of global deflation. This will ultimately spark strong inflation in an environment of very low economic activity.

Presently, the profits and economic activity of the our economy, and the ultimate health of the banks, is sitting atop the shaky foundation of an American middle-class that has been stripped of its earning and purchasing power by political corruption. Our middle-class has only been able to maintain their wild consumption by having both spouses work, and borrowing their own stolen wealth back from the banks and politicians at loan shark rates.

The concentration of our middle-class's stolen wealth on Wall Street has created a liquidity bubble in the heart of Wall Street that cannot be stopped, perpetuated, or deflated without catastrophic consequences. The only productive solution, and the only solution that actually reflects our democratic rhetoric and our Constitution, is to transfer the remaining wealth of our nation back into the hands of the people it was stolen from, our tattered middle-class.

This would give the middle-class sufficient funds to actually purchase housing based on their wealth, rather than their credit, and establish the bottom for the housing crisis.

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The bailouts of the banks and Wall Street are only putting the deepening liabilities of Wall Street onto the taxpayer for no good reason, except to steal our money. By not directly addressing the actual source of the problem, the continuing crash of the housing market, they are effectively putting virtually unlimited financial liabilities onto our citizens through the agency of a thoroughly corrupted Congress. In the meantime, their bailouts are effectively transferring our little remaining wealth to the political and economic thieves on Wall Street. These bailouts will not do a thing to stem the collapse of housing prices, and therefore they will do nothing to establish or support the value of mortgage securities, who's unknown value is at the heart of the credit crisis.

Strangely enough, elements on Wall Street itself are beginning to see that their lack of direction comes from the ultimate curse of getting what you wish for: Total Power.

The success of corporate America's system of political bribery and economic corruption been so successful that it has destroyed what it feeds off: our democracy and its economy. Now it is becoming clear to many in corporate America, and every honest observer, why you do not let the wolf guard the henhouse, nor let Wall Street or our corporate elite bribe our politicians.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of Wall Street and their political minions (both parties) are rushing to give our last pennies over to the scoundrels who already robbed us of our rights and wealth.

Corporate America's method of scamming our economy, and maintaining the party headlock on politics, is based on bribing our politicians into submission. The bribed parties then work hard to push all the wealth of our country into our corporate elite and subsequently onto Wall Street.

Our political "leaders" perceive of our whole country as nothing more than a bottomless ATM for their corporate sponsors, and the trillion dollar bail out is just the latest and largest example of what both parties have been doing for decades.

This sick scam is over, and the Corporate politicians, Corporate press, and their corporate sponsors have hung themselves with their own rope. Their corruption is so complete that they cannot give it up even when it threatens their own lively hood. Our corporate politicians and press are so corrupt they are incapable of making the changes necessary to save the system of corruption that nourishes them.

The process of bribing politicians to buy the law and policies necessary to steal all of our wealth is what brought us to this point in the first place. And as it is also what keeps the corporate politicians in power, they are incapable of taking the measures necessary to break the link of corporate corruption that first killed our democracy, then our markets. Our economy is next.

This is the reason why "our" corporate politicians are continuing to pour gasoline (our stolen wealth) onto the bonfire of greed that already drained our middle-class and is now burning Wall Street to the ground. This is why the best analysis that is coming out of the mouths of our corporate politicians and the corporate press continue to call the economic crash and global deflation a crisis of "confidence" and "direction."

Despite the lies of the press and politicians, bailing out the banks will not stem the crisis, but it has, and will continue to, inflame the crisis.

The reason bailouts will not work is that the banks are not withholding inter bank loans to each other because they don't trust each other. The Banks are not loaning money to each other because they are painfully aware that every one of their fellow banks is holding more debt than assets, and any of them could close their doors at any moment, independent of what the government says or does.

This is not a confidence crisis, it is the breakdown of a vast financial pyramid, and there is not enough value in the global economy to restore this vast pyramid.

The only thing that can restore our economy is to restore our democracy. We must elect representatives who will restore the circulation of wealth by restoring the stolen wealth of the middle-class.The only way we can elect leaders competent to identify and solve our corruption crisis is to end the corporate bribery that has made a mockery of our democracy.

Side note

Note that Congress, led by "Credit-Card" Joe Biden, have recently changed the bankruptcy laws so that the average working class families can never escape their debts, essentially becoming financial indentured servants, leaving true bankruptcy protection for the corporations and the rich.

But the rich and the corporations do not have to worry about bankruptcy, and both parties are rushing to pour our money on any of their corporate sponsors who threaten bankruptcy.

Apparently the rich and their corporations are the only entities who can escape crushing debt through bankruptcy, if they cannot survive with the massive bailouts our leaders have flooded them with.

But the corporations do not even have to fear even that scenario, as the government is now directly financing the very corporations who bribed our politicians into gutting the middle-class's bankruptcy protections.

The rest of us get put on a time-payment program, and have the privilege of serving the corporation for life.

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