Trickle Up Poverty: Stopping Obama’s Attack on Our Borders, Economy, and Security

by Michael Savage

  But there’s another disturbing layer of alleged treachery behind this story. There are those who have claimed that the financial meltdown—ostensibly engineered by the MFA—may well be a part of an even larger movement to both manipulate and reduce the United States (as well as other powerful world economies) into mere pawns of a shadow world government. Some assert that is the goal of the Bilderberg Group. You may wonder, What’s that? After all, most people don’t know the difference between Bilderberg and Pittsburgh.

  The Bilderberg Group is a secretive organization whose activities, from its inception in 1954, remain hidden from both press and public scrutiny. While little is known about their inner workings, we do know that the Bilderberg Group is an international consortium of politically and economically powerful people who envision a New World Order—with them at the top pulling the strings. They’re dyed-in-the-wool pan-Leninists. They’re egotists of the lowest order who want to effectively erase national boundaries and control the world economy.

  And they have the connections to pull if off.

  After all, the Bilderberg Group isn’t a bunch of average blue collar guys working the night shift at a bowling alley. Far from it. The membership list from past attendees reads like a Who’s Who of United States and international politics, finance, and communications, including former U.S. President Bill Clinton; Fox News owner and media mogul Rupert Murdoch; George Soros; U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner; Richard Holbrooke, U.S. Special Envoy to Pakistan; EU Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet; Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke; and U.S. Senators Chris Dodd and Dianne Feinstein, among others.

  Those attending from the U.S. in 2010 included Roger Altman, Chairman, Evercore Partners; Sonia Arrison, Author and policy analyst; Timothy C. Collins, Senior Managing Director and CEO, Ripplewood Holdings; Martin Feldstein, George Baker Professor of Economics, Harvard University; Niall Ferguson, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History, Harvard University; William Gates, Co-chair, Bill & Linda Gates Foundation and Chairman, Microsoft Corporation; Philip H. Gordon, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs; Donald Graham, Chairman and CEO, The Washington Post; Richard Holbrooke, Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan; Robert Hormats, Under Secretary for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs; James Johnson, Vice Chairman, Perseus; John Keane, Senior Partner, SCP Partners; Henry Kissinger, Chairman, Kissinger Associates; Klaus Kleinfeld, Chairman and CEO, Alcoa; Henry Kravis, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.; Marie-Josée Kravis, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute; Eric Lander, President and Director, Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT; Jessica Mathews, President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Microsoft Corporation; Moisés Naím, Editor-in-Chief, Foreign Policy; Peter Orszag, Director, Office of Management and Budget; Sean Parker, Managing Partner, Founders Fund; Frank Pearl, Chairman and CEO, Perseus; Richard Perle, Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research; Charlie Rose, Rose Communications; Robert Rubin, Co-Chairman, Council on Foreign Relations, Former Secretary of the Treasury; Eric Schmidt, CEO and Chairman of the Board, Google; James Steinberg, Deputy Secretary of State; Lawrence Summers, Director, National Economic Council; Peter Thiel, President Clarium Capital Management; Christine Varney, Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust; Paul Volcker, Chairman, Economic Recovery Advisory Board; F.J. Bing West, Author; and James Wolfensohn, Chairman, Wolfensohn & Company.

  That’s just a list of those who are coming from the U.S. that we know of. Many who attend choose to be anonymous and, as such, are not included in this list. We also know that the annual meeting of these elitists is a heavily guarded affair—complete with armed sentinels. Why the secrecy? What are these heads of states, financial tycoons, and world leaders saying and doing behind closed doors? Let’s be clear. I’m not a conspiracy thrill seeker. The fact of the matter is that where there’s smoke there’s fire. Once in a while a picture of their aspirations for world control emerges.

  Take, for example, this statement made by Bilderberg member David Rockefeller. In his 2002 book entitled, Memoirs, Rockefeller wrote:

  Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure—one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.9

  One investigative reporter described the group’s charter as coming to an “agreement on questions of policy, economics, and strategy in jointly ruling the world.”10 And Former NATO Secretary-General, Willy Claes, who attended the Bilderberg meetings twice thus far, made this astonishing disclosure during a radio interview following the 2010 meeting. He explained each participant is given ten minutes to speak to the group. These comments are summarized and form the basis for a report. In turn, Claes went on, according to this translation of the interview, to state: “The participants are then obviously considered to use this report in setting their policies in the environments in which they affect.”11 In other words, he’s admitting that the Bilderbergers set global policy based upon the exchange of views shared in secret and, in turn, return to their sphere of influence to carry out the plan.

  Another pundit claims the Bilderberg Group’s overall objective is the elimination of the middle class and the creation of a world order comprised only of “rulers and servants,” and using such tactics as the establishment of such instruments as “green taxes” (including “cap and trade” legislation) in order to control the world energy market and to subjugate the world’s citizens in the interest of combating the now proven-fraudulent notion of man-made global warming.12

  What does all of this have to do with the financial crisis that sent Wall Street reeling out of control? Plenty. It validates the idea that the run on the American economy was ultimately a conspiracy designed to elect a leftist, globalist president of the United States. How else do you explain the actions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in June, 2008, during the campaign, when they ditched members of the press and disappeared?

  According to one report, during their absence the two candidates were meeting secretly with members of the Bilderberg Group in a northern Virginia hotel to discuss Obama’s and Clinton’s involvement with the group after the election. It is also reported that powerful businessman James A. Johnson, a Bilderberg Group member, selected Obama’s running mate after the Democratic primary.13

  Which is why investigating the abuses on Wall Street is the furthest thing from Barack Obama’s mind. In my opinion, Mr. Obama would rather conspire with the members of the Bilderberg Group to control the world. And, what better way could Obama endear himself to this inner circle of globalists than to keep Wall Street vulnerable to outside manipulation in the future?

  The Housing Crisis and TARP Bailouts

  Two thousand eight marked a perfect leftist storm of financial conditions ensuring that the shadow government would be able to engineer the election of Barack Obama through their raid on U.S. markets. Among the most important contributors to the financial meltdown was a housing bubble that began in the 1990s, during the Clinton administration, as part of the left’s entitlement mentality.

  Using taxpayer-funded mortgage guarantees through two quasigovernmental organizations, the Federal National Mortgage (FNMA), better known as Fannie Mae, and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), better known as Freddie Mac, policies were enacted that federally guaranteed home loans and encouraged giving mortgages to people who were unqualified to receive them. This, of course, perpetuated the left’s strategy of expanding entitlements in order to create widespread dependency.

  One of the leaders of this expansion of entitlements was über-leftist Massachusetts Soviet-Democratic Congressman Barney Frank. Although Democrats, with the collusion of the mainstream media, managed to convince Americans that the financial crisis was overwhelmingly the result of “c
apitalist greed,” the fact is that the triggers for the crisis included both anti-capitalist hedge fund short sellers and corrupt Democratic policy-driven governmental agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In fact, Allan H. Meltzer, writing in the Wall Street Journal, declared that “without the policies followed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—and the destructive changes in housing and mortgage policies, like authorizing sub-prime and Alt-A mortgages for impecunious borrowers—the crisis would not have happened.”14

  Corruption surrounding Fannie and Freddie was rife.

  In the late ‘90s, Barney Frank seems to have “been in bed” with Fannie Mae’s Director of Project Development, Herb Moses, as he (Frank) made decisions that benefited Fannie and its principals enormously. During that period, for instance, Clinton crony and Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines absconded with $90 million in “bonuses.” At the same time, directives from Democrats to loosen the standards on mortgages so that people previously unable to obtain them meant that the system was overweighted with bad credit risks. When the subsequent over-leveraging of the mortgage market through highly suspect mortgage-backed securities came home to roost, the rout was on.

  Among many other things, the rout led to the failure of Lehman Brothers, the largest financial institution failure in American history. In addition to its extensive sub-prime mortgage holdings and its inability to meet demands for collateral against loans it was seeking to help it avoid bankruptcy, the 158-year-old company hid some $50 billion in distressed assets just before its collapse.15 Richard S. “Dick” Fuld, then Lehman CEO, had guided the company deep into the business of making sub-prime loans and then repackaging them and reselling the resulting bonds. Fuld was just getting started.

  He then approved hiding these and other toxic assets from public scrutiny, all while raking in more than $500 million in compensation.16 Fuld, having sold his $13 million mansion in Florida to his wife for $100,17 remains a free man, although he is being sued for fraud and misrepresentation. He’s currently working for (what else?) a New York–based hedge fund firm, Matrix Associates.18

  Mike Whitney, a virulent, unrepentant leftist whose work appears on a number of blogs, actually got something right when he wrote, “Lehman was a planned demolition (most likely) concocted by ex-Goldman Sachs CEO [and then Secretary of the Treasury] Henry Paulson, who wanted to create a financial 9/11 to scare Congress into complying with his demands for $700 billion in emergency funding (TARP) for underwater U.S. banking behemoths.”19

  Even without the TARP legislation, there were strategies in place, including the Fed’s guaranteeing the “commercial paper” Lehman was trying to sell to raise cash, which could have saved the distressed company. But Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke chose not to use them. By doing this, Bernanke (he’s a former Goldman Sachs associate also) “blackmail[ed] congress” to achieve his and Paulson’s goal of pushing through the TARP legislation and using the money to save AIG, Bear Stearns, and Goldman Sachs, all of which would now likely be dead without Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury intervention.20

  Within a week of the passage of TARP legislation, the Fed created “a special lending facility to buy commercial paper,” 21 precisely the strategy that was already available and could have been used to save Lehman, and without putting Americans $700 billion further in debt. The U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan has ruled that the Fed must release the names of the institutions that received TARP money after the Lehman collapse and the amounts of money they received, something those involved have strenuously resisted because it might reveal the extent of the criminal collusion involved in their actions.22

  Lehman’s bankruptcy announcement had the effect of causing a run on other financial institutions by investors wanting to withdraw their money, creating the panic that enabled Paulson and Bernanke to get TARP pushed through Congress, committing U.S. taxpayers to bail out an entire industry of too-big-to-fail financial behemoths through a legislative initiative that, like so many others since late 2008, was unnecessary and unwise. In fact, as many commentators have pointed out, the passage of TARP was simply not needed to “save” the financial industry.

  All that would have been required was a federal guarantee of the commercial paper financial companies needed to sell in order to stop the run on their funds and quiet investors’ fears. Congress eventually capitulated and passed TARP legislation, after rejecting it once, and Paulson and Bernanke had fortified their financial fiefdoms against further assault by grabbing a stranglehold on three quarters of a trillion taxpayer dollars. Talk about the ultimate spreading the wealth around scheme.

  What happened to the money is typical of what happens in cases where federal bureaucrats get their hands on money that confers power. It went right into the hands of the institutions that contributed campaign money. Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Dodd, Chairman of the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, received nearly $900,000 in campaign contributions from financial institutions receiving TARP bailout money. President Obama did even better, garnering more than $4 million in contributions for his war chest from the same group.23

  We can only imagine what the retiring Dodd received from the Mohe-gan Indian tribe in his state which was awarded an astonishing $54 million in federal stimulus dollars. While techically a low-interest loan from the Department of Agriculture which must be repaid, it’s not as if the Mohegan tribe is cash-starved. Far from it. After all, they own the Mohegan Sun casino—which scored more than $1.3 billion in gross revenues in 2009. Talk about hitting the jackpot. Those funds were supposed to help rural communities with fewer than 20,000 people struggling to “obtain other credit at reasonable rates and terms and are unable to finance the proposed project from their own resources.”24

  Tell me how the owners of a cash-rich casino fit the bill? This is nothing but an abuse of power and taxpayer money by Chris Dodd.

  That said, much of the rest of the TARP money was used to purchase newly issued stock in banks, thus replenishing their capital and, presumably, encouraging them to resume lending at normal rates. The problem is that banks haven’t ramped up lending. Neil M. Barofsky, appointed by President Bush as the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Assets Relief Program, attests to this. SIGTARP, as the position is known, released its report on the uses of TARP funds in October, 2009.

  The report revealed that “Treasury and the TARP program lost credibility when lending at those institutions [the nine banks that were the recipients of the initial $300 billion in TARP funds] did not in fact increase and when subsequent events—the further assistance needed by Citigroup and Bank of America being the most significant examples—demonstrated that at least some of those institutions were not in fact healthy.”25 The fact that this strongly worded conclusion was drawn by a government agency emphasizes just how crooked, ineffective, and unnecessary the TARP legislation was.

  TARP also provided Barack Obama with fuel for a further assault on capitalism in the form of his opposition to high levels of executive compensation, especially for TARP fund recipients, but for other financial industry executives as well. “This is America,” the president declared at the White House. “We don’t disparage wealth. We don’t begrudge anybody for achieving success. And we believe success should be rewarded. But what gets people upset—and rightfully so—are executives being rewarded for failure, especially when those rewards are subsidized by U.S. taxpayers.”26

  The problem is that this isn’t really “America” anymore.

  Barack Obama does begrudge anybody who achieves success.

  He supports forced bailouts of financial institutions, then declares $500,000 annual limits on compensation of executives who take bailout money. He also places restrictions on such expenditures as “golden parachutes” and “luxury spending” on extras like corporate jets and office remodeling, decisions that should be the responsibility of Boards of Directors and shareholders. The Wall Street Journal called the president’s actions and pronouncements “the most aggressive as
sault on executive pay by federal officials.”27

  Interestingly, no one bothered to tell Goldman Sachs about Obama’s restrictions on executive pay. The company’s Chairman and CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, received nearly $10 million in compensation in 2009, including “a $600,000 annual salary, $9 million in restricted stock awards and about $262,000 in other compensation.”28 Compensation for other financial industry executives was equally lucrative. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon received $15.5 million, and American International Group head Robert Benmosche will receive $7 million in salary alone in 2010. AIG is the giant insurance company that has received more than $182 billion in

  TARP funds.

  The website OMBWatch.org provides this assessment:

  The Special Inspector General for TARP … estimates that taxpayers will lose almost $30 billion on [the government’s investment] in AIG, in large part because of bad choices the government made when bailing out the company. Instead of forcing AIG creditors to take a loss, Treasury insisted that they be paid in full.29

  The reason for the government’s paying full value for AIG’s troubled assets has everything to do with Goldman Sachs alums Paulson and Geithner bailing out their buddies, at taxpayer expense. Both the government and the financial institutions are fending for themselves, very likely in collusion against American taxpayers.

  What you may not know is that Goldman Sachs is the former home of many of the Obama administration’s top financial advisors, including Neel Kashkari, who headed the TARP bailout; Mark Patterson, Chief of Staff for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner; Gary Gensler, a top executive at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; Goldman Sachs lobbyist Michael Paese, placed as a top aide to Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Barney Frank, chair of the House Financial Services Committee;30 and Adam Storch, a Goldman Sachs Vice President, Chief Operating Officer of SEC Enforcement.31