Giving U.S. technology to China—as both Holdren and Immelt are doing—is part of the Obama administration’s attempts to undermine the private economy, and it’s unprecedented in its scope.
It’s driving us rapidly toward bankruptcy.
The list of economic failures includes the first debt downgrade in U.S. history, and the highest budget deficits, federal spending, and federal debt as a percentage of GDP since World War II. Under Obama home ownership has declined to its lowest level since the 1960s. The number of Americans paying taxes is the lowest in the modern era, while those dependent on the government for aid is the highest in history.35
On top of this, Obama has announced that he will veto any bill containing spending cuts that are not accompanied by a $1.5 trillion tax increase on the “wealthy.” This is the so-called Buffett Tax, named after multibillionaire Warren Buffett, who traded his support of Barack Obama’s millionaire tax and Obama’s assurance that the Fed would not allow BofA to fail for a chance to buy Bank of America preferred stock that will net him billions over the next few years, even as the bank flounders.
Warren Buffett has repeatedly claimed that he pays less in taxes than his secretary and that millionaires like him should pay their fair share of taxes. As I’ve told you, the reason Buffett pays a small percentage of his income in taxes is that he takes a very small salary—less than $100,000 annually by some reports—as income. The rest of the proceeds from his investments stays in his company, where his tax accountants take advantage of every loophole to keep their tax bite very small.
Like every one of Obama’s policy initiatives, Obama’s millionaire tax is based on false information. In this case, Obama is insisting that “millionaires pay a lower percentage of their incomes in taxes than their secretaries do.” They’re taxed, Obama says, at a much lower rate than the middle class.
In general, ordinary millionaires pay much more than the rest of us in taxes as a percentage of their income. People whose incomes are higher than $1 million annually pay about 29.1 percent in taxes, while people with incomes between $50,000 and $100,000 pay about 15 percent.36
Warren Buffett’s income from wages falls in the second category.
People who earn most of their income from their job tend to pay taxes at a higher rate than those who earn a high percentage of their income from investments. But the differences still don’t result in millionaires paying a smaller percentage of their income in taxes.37
It’s just more of the same lies Obama repeatedly tells in order to perpetuate class warfare and his assault on “the rich.”
Most Americans think that America’s economic failures are occurring because the Obama economic team is blindly committed to Keynesian economic policies and that the president’s economic team doesn’t realize—or won’t admit—that Keynesian economics simply doesn’t work.
I don’t buy that.
I think the situation is much more serious.
I have no doubt that the Obama administration’s intent is to weaken our economy in order to further a crisis of the international financial system and facilitate its takeover by a U.S./global financial elite on the scale of the Leninist postrevolutionary takeover of the Russian economy.
I’ll explain what I mean.
Roots of the Current Crisis
In Trickle Up Poverty, I showed you how the stock market crash of 2008 was engineered in large part by hedge fund managers in order to insure that Barack Obama was elected president. Just before the economic collapse, the largest Wall Street banks came running to Washington, begging to be spared the consequences of the risky investments they’d made. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson handed them hundreds of billions in Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) money to cover losses they were incurring because of their investments in risky housing derivatives and collateralized debt obligations.
What wasn’t revealed at the time was that that money didn’t scratch the surface.
Did you know that after TARP, the Federal Reserve secretly loaned another $1.2 trillion to U.S. and international banks in order to avoid a further catastrophic meltdown of the global financial system?
Take a look at some of the financial institutions involved:
Morgan Stanley: $107 billion
Citigroup: $99.5 billion
Bank of America: $91.4 billion
Royal Bank of Scotland: $84.5 billion
Goldman Sachs: $69 billion
JPMorgan Chase: $68.6 billion38
As one official put it, “These are all whopping numbers.”39
It took three years for the numbers to come to light, but during that time—despite the fact that they would have gone bankrupt without the Fed loans—I didn’t see the banks in question slowing down their suicidal practices.
Instead, they continued to engage in high-risk lending and hedge-fund trading. Even though our country is on the brink of bankruptcy, they’re still following the same strategy and pushing the same agenda today. Their ongoing treachery continues to put the savings and livelihoods of American middle-class citizens at risk, because it’s the middle class they’re counting on to bail them out again.
The treachery is going to be hard to prove, though.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has been accused by one of its employees of destroying more than 9,000 files related to investigations of the very financial giants—Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America—who played a large part in causing the 2008 crisis and who benefited enormously from the TARP bailout and loans from the Fed.40
I’m the only one I know of who’s telling you that the secret loans made to these financial giants as part of the Obama administration’s strategy are for the purpose of transforming the U.S. capitalist economy into a managed economy, controlled by the government in league with the world’s largest financial institutions.
As big as the numbers I’m citing are, the “official” U.S. federal debt represents only a fraction of our total debt obligation. Unfunded liabilities—what we’ve promised to pay to retirees in the form of Social Security and Medicare benefits—add an additional $100 trillion to our debt. The Social Security trust fund had accumulated $3 trillion from those paying into it, but the federal government has borrowed every penny of that and issued “special-interest bonds” to Social Security, so there’s no cash available in the trust fund.
Add in another several trillion dollars for other unfunded liabilities such as federal employee and military retirement benefits and federal guarantees through such agencies as TARP, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac, along with the projected Obama 2012 budget deficit of more than $1.5 trillion, and you start to get an idea of our true economic condition.41
Our national debt and unfunded liabilities amount to nearly ten times the U.S. annual GDP, and there’s no sign the know-nothings in Congress have the will to do anything about it.
But let me give you the larger picture of what’s happening.
It goes way beyond the thievery committed by the Obama administration and the crony capitalists who run America’s banks and brokerages.
The annual world gross domestic product—in other words, when you add up the GDPs of every nation on the planet—amounts to about $60 trillion. The United States, even though we have less than six percent of the world’s population, generates 25 percent of the world GDP, or about $15 trillion.
Keep those numbers in mind when you read what I’m about to say next.
I’ve explained to you in Trickle Up Poverty how financial crooks like George Soros engineered the economic crash that carried Barack Obama to the presidency. One of the reasons that crash happened was financial “derivatives,” debt instruments created in order to spread the risk of loss, especially in the mortgage market. The reason we haven’t been able to recover from the current recession—and the reason that European banks and sovereign governments haven’t been able to stabilize the risk of economic collapse in Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ire
land—is that almost every big bank and every government carries those derivatives on its books.
Do you know what those derivatives are worth?
Six hundred trillion dollars.
Ten times the GDP of the entire planet.
More money than the world generates in ten years by legitimate economic activities like manufacturing, services, and sales.
The world economy is a prisoner of the debt instruments the big banks and sovereign governments created, and there’s no way to avoid it.
There’s not enough money in the world to stave off the coming economic crisis.42
Who’s on the hook for all this?
They’ve rigged the game in their favor to the point where U.S. taxpayers are responsible for the crooked dealings of the banksters who have taken over the U.S. and global economy and are using it as their ATM. They’re getting rich beyond imagination by manipulating every single market in the world—from commodities like gold, silver, oil, and corn to the bonds that sovereign nations use to finance their debt.
The large banks and brokerages like Goldman Sachs call the financial shots around the world, taking risks that banks weren’t allowed to think about only a little more than a decade ago, and when they lose, American taxpayers are on the hook to bail them out, thanks to the crony capitalist in the White House.
The Goldman Sachs Revolution
Over the past several decades, I’ve watched banking giant Goldman Sachs develop the strategy that is now being played out as the international economy comes more and more under the control of a small group of giant financial institutions. The instigator was former GS CEO Robert Rubin.
When Rubin left Goldman Sachs in the mid-1990s to join the Clinton administration, becoming Treasury Secretary in 1995, he began a parade of GS executives through the cabinets of American presidents that’s still happening. Virtually all the key players on the Obama economic team are former Goldman Sachs employees or sympathizers, and many of them, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, former senior economic adviser Lawrence Summers, and former budget director Peter Orszag, were mentored by Rubin himself.
The Times of London has named this unholy triumvirate the “Robert Rubin Memorial All Stars.”43
After he left the Clinton administration, Rubin, as chairman of another banking giant, Citigroup, brought the Ponzi scheme that he had begun to set up during his tenure as Treasury secretary to the private sector. It’s become the model for the one Goldman Sachs, along with the Bilderberg Group, the IMF, and the Council on Foreign Relations, is now implementing on a global scale. In 2008, a lawsuit was filed against Rubin for defrauding Citibank shareholders of some $122 billion, an amount greater than twice that of now-jailed Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff.44
Another Goldman Sachs alum, Jon Corzine, pulled the same kind of scheme on his investors. Corzine, after he left as chairman of Goldman Sachs in 1999, was a U.S. senator from New Jersey before he became the state’s governor in 2006. He fleeced New Jersey taxpayers and lined the pockets of his union cronies until Chris Christie unseated him in 2009. After he was ousted from the New Jersey governor’s office, Corzine went back into the financial services business, heading up a company called MF Global Inc., a company specializing in futures trading.
Less than two years after Corzine took the helm, the company filed for bankruptcy after misappropriating customers’ money and using it to make $6.3 billion in bets on European bonds. As a result of the turmoil in the Eurozone sovereign bonds—the same ones I’ve just told you will be the basis of the next crash—the company was downgraded by credit rating agencies to “junk” status. In the process, it was discovered by “regulators”—the same people who could have prevented the debacle if they’d kept a closer watch on the company and its CEO in the first place—that MF Global had violated a cardinal investment industry rule: They failed to “segregate” their clients’ money from the company’s own cash. Somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.2 billion in clients’ money is missing and unaccounted for.45
More than 1,000 MF Global employees were summarily fired. Corzine resigned in the midst of the growing scandal, then hired Andrew Levander, an attorney who specializes in defending those accused of committing the same kinds of white-collar crimes Corzine is accused of.
Corzine was only one in a long line of crooks who shuttled back and forth between government and the financial industry using what they’d learned at Goldman Sachs.
But whereas Madoff and Corzine focused on fleecing individual investors, Rubin developed the model for the institutional rip-off. What we’re currently witnessing in the international financial markets is Rubin’s model put into practice on a global scale.
Here’s how it works.
The current “debt crisis” is a central part of the scheme. The U.S. Treasury continues to print money and sell Treasury bonds in order to finance government spending and disguise the extent of the potential damage from the near-worthless debt obligations the government and big banks still maintain on their balance sheets.
The people on the hook for this debt?
The American taxpayers.
The same people they’ve been fleecing since Obama took office.
I see it as the perfect setup: a captive group of investors at the mercy of a ruthless and desperate government financial power elite abetted by politicians who are unwilling or unable to see what’s taking place before their very eyes.
The financial industry power players control the action.
The Goldman Sachs/U.S. government Ponzi scheme is carried on at a very high level. For starters, Treasury Secretary Geithner has the entire U.S. GDP and the “full faith and credit of the United States” at his disposal. What he and his Obama administration cohorts, along with their Wall Street cronies, are trying to engineer is in every way the same fraudulent scheme that Bernie Madoff and Robert Rubin pulled off against their investors.
In this case, though, it’s American taxpayers who are the “investors” being scammed, and we don’t have a choice in the matter. If we don’t pay our taxes, we’ll be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
It’s a con man’s dream.
There are others involved in this conspiracy.
In Trickle Up Poverty I explained how the Bilderberg Group, a cadre of international power players, has been designing a strategy to take over the world economy, creating a two-tiered class system consisting of “elites” and everybody else. You and I are in the second group, and if the Bilderbergers have their way we will surrender control of our financial destiny and become beholden to them for everything we need as they move toward creating a world financial system which they dominate. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is, along with the Bilderberg Group, a second key player in the attempt by financial elites to rule the world’s economy.
In 1999, Bill Clinton—a member of both the CFR and the Bilderberg Group—along with his Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin—a member of both groups and a former Goldman Sachs CEO—pushed through the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill, also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999. Gramm-Leach paved the way for the current economic crisis by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act.
Glass-Steagall had been passed in 1933 in order to spur our recovery from the Great Depression. The law required the separation of commercial banking operations from investment banking in America’s financial institutions. Prior to Glass-Steagall, banks were permitted to loan money as well as to invest it and broker investments for their clients. That led to their being dangerously overleveraged and to one of the most disastrous effects of the stock market crash of 1929: the failure of American banks.
By 1933, four years after the Great Crash, nearly half of the more than 25,000 U.S. banks had failed. Americans’ savings disappeared.46
Prior to Glass-Steagall, banks had been essentially unregulated, and they were allowed to engage in both commercial and investment banking activities. Glass-Steagall separated commercial and investment banking
functions, making it illegal for commercial banks to also operate as investment banks.
The Clinton/Rubin/Goldman Sachs repeal of Glass-Steagall opened the way for commercial banks to once again get into the investment banking business. It also opened the door for Goldman Sachs to position itself as the most powerful player in the world economy, to the point where they control everything from the TARP bailout and the taxpayer-funded stimulus money to the terms of the long-term Treasury bonds that countries use to finance their sovereign debt.
After Clinton and Rubin engineered the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the distinction between commercial and investment banks disappeared once again, the stage was set for the crash of 2008 that got Obama elected.
The difference between the Great Crash of 1929 and the crash of 2008, which gave us current economic downturn, is that the 2008 meltdown was intentional.
We’re now experiencing the second stage of that crash: the creation of an international financial power elite that is determined to control the world’s economic activity and subjugate the people of this planet.
Because of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, and because banks are now permitted to engage in high-risk brokerage activities, including selling insurance and underwriting securities, they’re hedging their risk through such strategies as short-selling and continuing to develop and trade extremely risky financial derivatives.
Let me put it another way: We’re being set up for an economic meltdown similar to the one that triggered the Great Depression, but this time it’s going to occur on a global scale and it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to recover within even the next several decades.
Dodd-Frank: Aiding and Abetting the Enemy
With Glass-Steagall out of the way, new horizons opened up for the financial behemoths who sought to rule the global economy.
First, they had to get one of their own into the presidency.
I was one of the first to explain how they did it.
The repeal of Glass-Steagall enabled banks to engage in trading high-risk derivatives in order to hedge their exposure in the mortgage market, and the losses they racked up caused the financial crisis that ushered Obama into the White House. In order to prevent a repeat of the same scenario, Congress enacted the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.47
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