Does The Economist magazine portray the British economy in an intellectualy honest fashion? Not in my book! What do you think?

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Thatcherism: Good or Bad for Britain?

by David L Griscom | April 17, 2012

The April 13th edition of The Economist magazine featured a picture of Margaret Thatcher on the cover together with the words "Freedom fighter." What did they mean by that?
 
Well, they said "She thought nations could be great only if individuals were set free." They clarified this thought as "...the right of individuals to run their own lives, as free as possible from micromanagement from the states."
 
The Economist goes on to say that when Tharcher took power "She privatized state industries, refused to negotiate with unions, abolished state controls, broke the striking miners and replaced Keynesian with [Milton] Friedman's monetarism."
 
This sounds to me as though the "individuals" being set free were solely those that held corporate personhood.
 
The Economist does mention that Thatcher had her critics: 
"Her reforms, it is said, sowed the seeds of the recent economic crisis."
 
This article further describes the nature of these criticisms in this way:  "Without Thatcherism ...Financial services would not make up such a large slice of the British economy and the country would not now be struggling under the burden of individual debt caused by excessive borrowing and government debt caused by the need to bail out the banks."
 
From what I have learned from the intellectually honest economists that I regularly feature on this blog, the preceding criticism is mostly correct ...except for failing to explain that the burden of individual debt is traceable to Thatcher's privatization of all utilities (see below).  In addition, one might add that "the need to bail out the banks" was due to Thatcher's total deregulation of banking -- a virtual invitation for bankers to speculate in caustic derivatives and credit default swaps, creating a bubble that was bound to blow up.

The Economist concedes that "Some of this [criticism] is true" but continues with the rationalization "but then without Thatcherism Britain's economy would still be mired in state control, the commanding heights of its economy would be owned by the government, and militant unions would be a power in the land."
 
My comment regarding this last "defense" of Thatcherism is that if she hadn't sold off the then-price-regulated, government-run utilities at fire-sale prices to greedy corporations, the British people would not now be shivering in their unheated houses, unable to afford the current kleptocratic prices of heat, electricity, and water.  This cruel state of affairs would never have come to pass if the "militant unions" were still "a power in the land."

But this is just my labor-sympathetic make. Watch the video below for the opinion of a female Member of Parliament and draw your own conclusion:

http://youtu.be/XDtClJYJBj8

Glenda Jackson launches tirade against Thatcher in tribute debate 

 barnetbugle 
 Published on Apr 10, 2013

Distinguished economist Michael Hudson was in England during Margaret Thatcher's rise to power. Here he tells the depressing story of how her determination to privatize every last civic function has made London the heaquarters of kleptocrats, drug lords, and dictators while in the process crushing the working and middle classes. Excerpt: "So by deregulating British banking, Margaret Thatcher led a race to the bottom of international finance. She said, we're going to be the ground floor, we're going to be the absolute bottom, deregulated, everything goes. She opened the doors for what became really the criminalized financial system that ended up wrecking AIG in America, pushing, if you noticed, the Wall Street firms like Lehman Brothers. It was all their London office where all of the real fraud and the gambling occurred."

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 theREALnews                                                                               Permalink

Thatcher Gave More Power to Finance

Michael Hudson: Thatcher deregulated banking and made London the center of speculation and financialization - April 9, 13

Bio

Michael Hudson is a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1968 & 2003), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971). His most recent book is "Beyond the Bubble."

A small extract from what you will read below: "An audit of the Federal Reserve released in July, 2011, revealed that the Federal Reserve had provided $16 trillion – a sum larger than US GDP or the US public debt – in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks, while doing nothing to aid the millions of American families being foreclosed out of their homes. Political accountability disappeared as all public assistance was directed to the mega-rich, whose greed had produced the financial crisis."

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Americans’ Economic Prospects And Civil Liberties Have Been Stolen — Paul Craig Roberts

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March 24, 2013 | Original Here

Note: there are many new interviews posted [on his original]. If you have time on your hands, the interviews will give you a better result than video games.

I receive numerous questions from readers about our economic situation and the condition of civil liberty. There is no way I can answer so many inquiries, and no need. I have written two books that provide the answers, and they are inexpensive. I have done my job. It is up to you to inform yourself. Kindle Reader software is available as a free online download that permits you to read ebooks in your own web browser. No Kindle device is required. Here are the URls for Apple and PC free downloads: Kindle for PC: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000426311
Kindle for Mac: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000464931

My latest, The Failure Of Laissez Faire Capitalism And Economic Dissolution of the West, is available as an ebook in English as of March 2013 from Amazon.com and from Barnes&Noble. My book is endorsed by Michael Hudson and Nomi Prims and has a 5 star rating from Amazon reviewers (as of March 23, 2013). Pam Martens’ review at Wall Street On Parade is available here: http://wallstreetonparade.com/2013/03/paul-craig-roberts’-primer-on-why-the-great-recession-is-the-new-normal/

Libertarians who have not read the book have had an ideological knee-jerk reaction to the title. They demand to know how can I call the present system of crony capitalism laissez faire. I don’t. The current system of government supported crony capitalism is the end result of a 25-year process of deregulation. Deregulation did not produce libertarian nirvana. It produced economic concentration and crony capitalism.

Amazon provides as a free read the introduction by Johannes Maruschzik to the German edition. Below is my Introduction to my book.

Not only has your economy been stolen from you but also your civil liberties. My coauthor Lawrence Stratton and I provide the scary details of the entire story in The Tyranny of Good Intentions. In the US law is no longer a shield of the people against arbitrary government. Instead, law has been transformed into a weapon in the hands of the government.

Josie Appleton documents that in England also law has been turned into a weapon against the people. http://www.spiked-online.com/site/printable/13420/ Anglo-American law, the foundation of liberty and one of the greatest human achievements, lies in ruins.

Libertarians think that liberty is a natural right, and some Christians think that it is a God-given right. In fact, liberty is a human achievement, fought for by Englishmen over the centuries. In the late 17th century, the achievement of the Glorious Revolution was to hold the British government accountable to law. William Blackstone heralded the achievement in his famous Commentaries On The Laws Of England, a bestseller in pre-revolutionary America and the foundation of the US Constitution.

In the late 20th century and early 21st century, governments in the US and Great Britain chafed under the requirement that government, like the people, is ruled by law and took steps to free government from accountability to law.

Appleton says that the result is a “tectonic shift in the relationship between the state and the citizen.” Citizens of the US and UK are once again without the protection of law and subject to arbitrary arrests and indictments or to indefinite detention in the absence of indictments.

In the US, citizens can be detained indefinitely and even executed without due process of law. There is no basis in the US Constitution for these asserted powers. The unconstitutional powers exist only because Congress, the judiciary and the American people have accepted the lie that the loss of civil liberty is the price paid for protection against terrorists.

In a very short time the raw power of the state has been resurrected. Most Americans are oblivious to this outcome. As long as government is imprisoning and killing without trials demonized individuals whom Americans have been propagandized to fear, Americans approve. Americans do not understand that a point is reached when demonization becomes unnecessary and that precedents have been established that revoke the Bill of Rights.

If you are educated by these two books, you will be better able to understand what is happening and, thus, you will be in a better position to survive what is coming.

Introduction to The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic
Dissolution of the West: Towards a New Economics for a Full World

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the rise of the high speed Internet have proved to be the economic and political undoing of the West. “The End Of History” caused socialist India and communist China to join the winning side and to open their economies and underutilized labor forces to Western capital and technology. Pushed by Wall Street and large retailers, such as Wal-Mart, American corporations began offshoring the production of goods and services for their domestic markets. Americans ceased to be employed in the manufacture of goods that they consume as corporate executives maximized shareholder earnings and their performance bonuses by substituting cheaper foreign labor for American labor. Many American professional occupations, such as software engineering and Information Technology, also declined as corporations moved this work abroad and brought in foreigners at lower renumeration for many of the jobs that remained domestically. Design and research jobs followed manufacturing abroad, and employment in middle class professional occupations ceased to grow. By taking the lead in offshoring production for domestic markets, US corporations force the same practice on Europe. The demise of First World employment and of Third World agricultural communities, which are supplanted by large scale monoculture, is known as Globalism.

For most Americans income has stagnated and declined for the past two decades. Much of what Americans lost in wages and salaries as their jobs were moved offshore came back to shareholders and executives in the form of capital gains and performance bonuses from the higher profits that flowed from lower foreign labor costs. The distribution of income worsened dramatically with the mega-rich capturing the gains, while the middle class ladders of upward mobility were dismantled. University graduates unable to find employment returned to live with their parents.

The absence of growth in real consumer incomes resulted in the Federal Reserve expanding credit in order to keep consumer demand growing. The growth of consumer debt was substituted for the missing growth in consumer income. The Federal Reserve’s policy of extremely low interest rates fueled a real estate boom. Housing prices rose dramatically, permitting homeowners to monetize the rising equity in their homes by refinancing their mortgages.

Consumers kept the economy alive by assuming larger mortgages and spending the equity in their homes and by accumulating large credit card balances. The explosion of debt was securitized, given fraudulent investment grade ratings, and sold to unsuspecting investors at home and abroad.

Financial deregulation, which began in the Clinton years and leaped forward in the George W. Bush regime, unleashed greed and debt leverage. Brooksley Born, head of the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission, was prevented from regulating over-the-counter derivatives by the chairman of the Federal Reserve, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The financial stability of the world was sacrificed to the ideology of these three stooges that “markets are self-regulating.” Insurance companies sold credit default swaps against junk financial instruments without establishing reserves, and financial institutions leveraged every dollar of equity with $30 dollars of debt.

When the bubble burst, the former bankers running the US Treasury provided massive bailouts at taxpayer expense for the irresponsible gambles made by banks that they formerly headed. The Federal Reserve joined the rescue operation. An audit of the Federal Reserve released in July, 2011, revealed that the Federal Reserve had provided $16 trillion–a sum larger than US GDP or the US public debt–in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks, while doing nothing to aid the millions of American families being foreclosed out of their homes. Political accountability disappeared as all public assistance was directed to the mega-rich, whose greed had produced the financial crisis.

The financial crisis and plight of the banksters took center stage and prevented recognition that the crisis sprang not only from the financial deregulation but also from the expansion of debt that was used to substitute for the lack of growth in consumer income. As more and more jobs were offshored, Americans were deprived of incomes from employment. To maintain their consumption, Americans went deeper into debt.

The fact that millions of jobs have been moved offshore is the reason why the most expansionary monetary and fiscal policies in US history have had no success in reducing the unemployment rate. In post-World War II 20th century recessions, laid-off workers were called back to work as expansionary monetary and fiscal policies stimulated consumer demand. However, 21st century unemployment is different. The jobs have been moved abroad and no longer exist. Therefore, workers cannot be called back to factories and to professional service jobs that have been moved abroad.

Economists have failed to recognize the threat that jobs offshoring poses to economies and to economic theory itself, because economists confuse offshoring with free trade, which they believe is mutually beneficial. I will show that offshoring is the antithesis of free trade and that the doctrine of free trade itself is found to be incorrect by the latest work in trade theory. Indeed, as we reach toward a new economics, cherished assumptions and comforting theoretical conclusions will be shown to be erroneous.

This book is organized into three sections. The first section explains successes and failures of economic theory and the erosion of the efficacy of economic policy by globalism. Globalism and financial concentration have destroyed the justifications of market capitalism. Corporations that have become “too big to fail” are sustained by public subsidies, thus destroying capitalism’s claim to be an efficient allocator of resources. Profits no longer are a measure of social welfare when they are obtained by creating unemployment and declining living standards in the home country.

The second section documents how jobs offshoring or globalism and financial deregulation wrecked the US economy, producing high rates of unemployment, poverty and a distribution of income and wealth extremely skewed toward a tiny minority at the top. These severe problems cannot be corrected within a system of globalism.

The third section addresses the European debt crisis and how it is being used both to subvert national sovereignty and to protect bankers from losses by imposing austerity and bailout costs on citizens of the member countries of the European Union.

I will suggest that it is in Germany’s interest to leave the EU, revive the mark, and enter into an economic partnership with Russia. German industry, technology, and economic and financial rectitude, combined with Russian energy and raw materials, would pull all of Eastern Europe into a new economic union, with each country retaining its own currency and budgetary and tax authority. This would break up NATO, which has become an instrument for world oppression and is forcing Europeans to assume burdens of the American Empire.

Sixty-seven years after the end of World War II, twenty-two years after the reunification of Germany, and twenty-one years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Germany is still occupied by US troops. Do Europeans desire a future as puppet states of a collapsing empire, or do they desire a more promising future of their own?

If only every American could watch these interviews and understand what is said here, millions would take to the streets when Obama and the Congress get set pass the "Grand Bargain," which is truly the "Grand Betrayal" -- aka legislative theft of American's social safety net. Bill Black is one of the top economists in the country and also a white-colar criminologist who sent over a thousand savings-and-loan CEOs to jail in the early 1990's for kind of financial crimes now committed with impunity by today's "too-big-to-fail" banks, whose CEOs have been rewarded, rather than jailed for their mega-crimes, protected by the likes of Tim Geithner and Jack Lew. Matt Taibbi is an investigative reporter who has been exposing in Rolling Stone magazine the criminality of the big banks and the government that coddles them.

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FRIDAY, JANUARY 11, 2013                                                                               Original Here 

"Failure of Epic Proportions": Treasury Nominee Jack Lew’s Pro-Bank, Austerity, Deregulation Legacy



Former bank regulator William Black and Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi join us to dissect the career of Jack Lew, President Obama’s pick to replace Treasury Secretary Timothy Geither. Currently Obama’s chief of staff, Lew was an executive at Citigroup from 2006 to 2008 at the time of the financial crisis. He backed financial deregulation efforts while he headed the Office of Management and Budget under President Bill Clinton. During that time, Clinton enacted two key laws to deregulate Wall Street: the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Black, a white-collar criminologist and former senior financial regulator, is the author of "The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One." A contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine, Taibbi is the author of "Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History." [Original includes rush transcript]


FRIDAY, JANUARY 11, 2013                                                                               Original Here 

Matt Taibbi & William Black on Bailout Secrets & How New Foreclosure Deal Spares Banks from Justice



Four years after the massive bailout that rescued Wall Street, we look at the state of the financial sector with Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi and former financial regulator William Black. In a new article for Rolling Stone, Taibbi argues the government did not just bail out Wall Street, but also lied on the financial sector’s behalf, calling unhealthy banks healthy and helping banks cover up how much aid they were getting. The government’s approach to the banks came under new scrutiny this week after it reached an $8.5 billion settlement for improprieties in the wrongful foreclosures on millions of American homeowners, including flawed paperwork, robo-signing and wrongly modified loans. The settlement will end an independent review of all foreclosures, meaning the banks could be avoiding billions of dollars in further penalties, in addition to criminal prosecution. [Original includes rush transcript] 

THE LIBOR SCANDLE: ELLEN BROWN'S ANALYSIS OF POSSIBLE CONSEQUENCES, JULY 20TH

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Titanic Banks Hit LIBOR Iceberg: Will Lawsuits Sink the Ship?

By Ellen Brown                                                                                                    Original here

At one time, calling the large multinational banks a “cartel” branded you as a conspiracy theorist.   Today the banking giants are being called that and worse, not just in the major media but in court documents intended to prove the allegations as facts.  Charges include racketeering (organized crime under the U.S. Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act or RICO), antitrust violations, wire fraud, bid-rigging, and price-fixing.  Damning charges have already been proven, and major damages and penalties assessed.  Conspiracy theory has become established fact.

In an article in the July 3^rd Guardian titled “Private Banks Have Failed – We Need a Public Solution”, Seumas Milne writes of the LIBOR rate-rigging scandal admitted to by Barclays Bank:

It’s already clear that the rate rigging, which depends on collusion, goes far beyond Barclays, and indeed the City of London. This is one of multiple scams that have become endemic in a disastrously deregulated system with inbuilt incentives for cartels to manipulate the core price of finance.

. . . It could of course have happened only in a private-dominated financial sector, and makes a nonsense of the bankrupt free-market ideology that still holds sway in public life.

. . . A crucial part of the explanation is the unmuzzled political and economic power of the City. . . . Finance has usurped democracy.

 

Bid-rigging and Rate-rigging

 

Bid-rigging was the subject of U.S. v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, a ten-year suit in which the U.S. Department of Justice obtained a judgment on May 11 against three GE Capital employees.  Billions of dollars were skimmed from cities all across America by colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion.  Other banks involved in the bidding scheme included Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and UBS.  These banks have already paid a total of $673 million in restitution after agreeing to cooperate in the government’s case.

Hot on the heels of the Carollo decision came the LIBOR scandal, involving collusion to rig the inter-bank interest rate that affects $500 trillion worth of contracts, financial instruments, mortgages and loans.  Barclays Bank admitted to regulators in June that it tried to manipulate LIBOR before and during the financial crisis in 2008.  It said that other banks were doing the same.  Barclays paid $450 million to settle the charges.

The U. S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission said in a press release that Barclays Bank “pervasively” reported fictitious rates rather than actual rates; that it asked other big banks to assist, and helped them to assist; and that Barclays did so “to benefit the Bank’s derivatives trading positions” and “to protect Barclays’ reputation from negative market and media perceptions concerning Barclays’ financial condition.”

After resigning, top executives at Barclays promptly implicated both the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve.  The upshot is that the biggest banks and their protector central banks engaged in conspiracies to manipulate the most important market interest rates globally, along with the exchange rates propping up the U.S. dollar.

CFTC did not charge Barclays with a crime or require restitution to victims.  But Barclays’ activities with the other banks appear to be criminal racketeering under federal RICO statutes, which authorize victims to recover treble damages; and class action RICO suits by victims are expected.

The blow to the banking defendants could be crippling.  RICO laws, which carry treble damages, have taken down the Gambino crime family, the Genovese crime family, Hell’s Angels, and the Latin Kings.

 

The Payoff: Not in Interest But on Interest Rate Swaps

 

Bank defenders say no one was hurt.  Banks make their money from interest on loans, and the rigged rates were actually LOWER than the real rates, REDUCING bank profits.

That may be true for smaller local banks, which do make most of their money from local lending; but these local banks were not among the 16 mega-banks setting LIBOR rates.  Only three of the rate-setting banks were U.S.banks—JPMorgan, Citibank and Bank of America—and they slashed their local lending after the 2008 crisis.  In the following three years, the four largest U.S. banks—BOA, Citi, JPM and Wells Fargo—cut back on small business lending by a full 53 percent. The two largest—BOA and Citi—cut back on local lending by 94 percent and 64 percent, respectively.

Their profits now come largely from derivatives.  Today, 96% of derivatives are held by just four banks—JPM, Citi, BOA and Goldman Sachs—and the LIBOR scam significantly boosted their profits on these bets.  Interest-rate swaps compose fully 82 percent of the derivatives trade.  The Bank for International Settlements reports a notional amount outstanding as of June 2009 of $342 trillion.  JPM—the king of the derivatives game—revealed in February 2012 that it had cleared $1.4 billion in revenue trading interest-rate swaps in 2011, making them one of the bank’s biggest sources of profit.

The losers have been local governments, hospitals, universities and other nonprofits.  For more than a decade, banks and insurance companies convinced them that interest-rate swaps would lower interest rates on bonds sold for public projects such as roads, bridges and schools.

The swaps are complicated and come in various forms; but in the most common form, counterparty A (a city, hospital, etc.) pays a fixed interest rate to counterparty B (the bank), while receiving a floating rate indexed to LIBOR or another reference rate.  The swaps were entered into to insure against a rise in interest rates; but instead, interest rates fell to historically low levels.

Defenders say “a deal is a deal;” the victims are just suffering from buyer’s remorse.  But while that might be a good defense if interest rates had risen or fallen naturally in response to demand, this was a deliberate, manipulated move by the Fed acting to save the banks from their own folly; and the rate-setting banks colluded in that move.  The victims bet against the house, and the house rigged the game.

 

Lawsuits Brewing

 

State and local officials across the country are now meeting to determine their damages from interest rate swaps, which are held by about three-fourths of America’s major cities.  Damages from LIBOR rate-rigging are being investigated by Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, officers at CalPERS (California’s public pension fund, the nation’s largest), and hundreds of hospitals.

One victim that is fighting back is the city of Oakland, California.  On July 3, the Oakland City Council unanimously passed a motion to negotiate a termination without fees or penalties of its interest rate swap with Goldman Sachs.  If Goldman refuses, Oakland will boycott doing future business with the investment bank.  Jane Brunner, who introduced the motion, says ending the agreement could save Oakland $4 million a year, up to a total of $15.57 million—money that could be used for additional city services and school programs.  Thousands of cities and other public agencies hold similar toxic interest rate swaps, so following Oakland’s lead could save taxpayers billions of dollars.

What about suing Goldman directly for damages?  One problem is that Goldman was not one of the 16 banks setting LIBOR rates.  But victims could have a claim for unjust enrichment and restitution, even without proving specific intent:

Unjust enrichment is a legal term denoting a particular type of causative event in which one party is unjustly enriched at the expense of another, and an obligation to make restitution arises, regardless of liability for wrongdoing. . . . [It is a] general equitable principle that a person should not profit at another’s expense and therefore should make restitution for the reasonable value of any property, services, or other benefits that have been unfairly received and retained.

Goldman was clearly unjustly enriched by the collusion of its banking colleagues and the Fed, and restitution is equitable and proper.

 

RICO Claims on Behalf of Local Banks

 

Not just local governments but local banks are seeking to recover damages for the LIBOR scam.  In May 2012, the Community Bank & Trust of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, filed a RICO lawsuit involving mega-bank manipulation of interest rates, naming Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and others.  The suit was filed as a class action to encourage other local, independent banks to join in.  On July 12, the suit was consolidated with three other LIBOR class action suits charging violation of the anti-trust laws.

The Sheboygan bank claims that the LIBOR rigging cost the bank $64,000 in interest income on $8 million in floating-rate loans in 2008.  Multiplied by 7,000 U.S. community banks over 4 years, the damages could be nearly $2 billion just for the community banks.  Trebling that under RICO would be $6 billion.

 

RICO Suits Against Banking Partners of MERS

 

Then there are the MERS lawsuits.  In the State of Louisiana, 30 judges representing 30 parishes are suing 17 colluding banks under RICO, stating that the Mortgage Electronic Registration System (MERS) is a scheme set up to illegally defraud the government of transfer fees, and that mortgages transferred through MERS are illegal.  A number of courts have held that separating the promissory note from the mortgage—which the MERS scheme does—breaks the chain of title and voids the transfer.

Several states have already sued MERS and their bank partners, claiming millions of dollars in unpaid recording fees and other damages.  These claims have been supported by numerous studies, including one asserting that MERS has irreparably damaged title records nationwide and is at the core of the housing crisis.  What distinguishes Louisiana’s lawsuit is that it is being brought under RICO, alleging wire and mail fraud and a scheme to defraud the parishes of their recording fees.

 

Readying the Lifeboats: The Public Bank Solution

 

Trebling the damages in all these suits could sink the banking Titanic.  As Seumas Milne notes in The Guardian:

Tougher regulation or even a full separation of retail from investment banking will not be enough to shift the City into productive investment, or even prevent the kind of corrupt collusion that has now been exposed between Barclays and other banks. . . .

Only if the largest banks are broken up, the part-nationalised outfits turned into genuine public investment banks, and new socially owned and regional banks encouraged can finance be made to work for society, rather than the other way round. Private sector banking has spectacularly failed – and we need a democratic public solution.

If the last quarter century of U.S. banking history proves anything, it is that our private banking system turns malignant and feeds off the public when it is deregulated.  It also shows that a parasitic private banking system will NOT be tamed by regulation, as the banks’ control over the money power always allows them to circumvent the rules.  We the People must transparently own and run the nation’s central and regional banks for the good of the nation, or the system will be abused and run for private power and profit as it so clearly is today, bringing our nation to crisis again and again while enriching the few.

Ellen Brown
Web of Debt

Posted: Friday, 20 July 2012

HOW AND WHY THE CURRENT FINANCIAL CRISIS COULD DESTROY WESTERN CIVILIZATION: DEREGULATION HAS FREED THE TOO-BIG-TO-FAIL BANKS TO SELL NAKED SHORTS AND ENGAGE IN RECKLESS GAMBLING THAT WILL ULTIMATELY IMPLODE, REQUIRING THE GENERAL PUBLIC TO ABSORB THE COSTS OF THEIR MISTAKES ...WHICH COULD BE AS MUCH AS 10 TIMES THE U.S. GDP! "FEW AMERICANS AND NO WASHINGTON POLICY MAKERS UNDERSTAND THE DIRE SITUATION."

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Recovery or Collapse? Bet on Collapse

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May 20, 2012 | Original here

The US financial system and, probably, the financial system of Europe, like the police, no longer serves a useful social purpose.

In the US the police have proven themselves to be a greater threat to public safety than private sector criminals. I just googled “police brutality” and up came 183,000,000 results. (Here are two recent brutal assaults, one deadly, by police on hapless individuals: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/05/kelly-thomas-video-dad-they-are-killing-me-.html and http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31364.htm )

The cost to society of the private financial system is even higher. Writing in CounterPunch (May 18), Rob Urie reports that two years ago Andrew Haldane, executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of England (the UK’s version of the Federal Reserve) said that the financial crisis, now four years old, will in the end cost the world economy between $60 trillion and $200 trillion in lost GDP. If Urie’s report is correct, this is an astonishing admission from a member of the ruling elite. http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/18/the-true-costs-of-bank-crises/print

Try to get your mind around these figures. The US GDP, the largest in the world, is about 15 trillion. What Haldane is telling us is that the financial crisis will end up costing the world lost real income between 4 and 13 times the size of the current Gross Domestic Product of the United States. This could turn out to be an optimistic forecast.

In the end, the financial crisis could destroy Western civilization.

Even if Urie’s report, or Haldane’s calculation, is incorrect, the obvious large economic loss from the financial crisis is still unprecedented. The enormous cost of the financial crisis has one single source — financial deregulation. Financial deregulation is likely to prove to be the mistake that destroys Western civilization. While we quake in our boots from fear of “Muslim terrorists,” it is financial deregulation that is destroying us, with help from jobs offshoring. Keep in mind that Haldane is a member of the ruling elite, not a critic of the system like myself, Gerald Celente, Michael Hudson, Pam Martins, and Nomi Prins. (This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of critics.)

Financial deregulation has had dangerous and adverse consequences. Deregulation permitted financial concentration that produced “banks too big to fail,” thus requiring the general public to absorb the costs of the banks’ mistakes and reckless gambling.

Deregulation permitted banks to leverage a small amount of capital with enormous debt in order to maximize return on equity, thereby maximizing the instability of the financial system and the cost to society of the banks’ bad bets.

Deregulation allowed financial institutions to sweep aside the position limits on speculators and to dominate commodity markets, turning them into a gambling casino and driving up the prices of energy and food.

Deregulation permits financial institutions to sell naked shorts, which means to sell a company’s stock or gold and silver bullion that the seller does not possess into the market in order to drive down the price. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/accidentally-released-and-incredibly-embarrassing-documents-show-how-goldman-et-al-engaged-in-naked-short-selling-20120515

The informed reader can add more items to this list.

The dollar in its role as world reserve currency is the source of Washington’s power. It allows Washington to control the international payments system and to exclude from the financial system those countries that do not do Washington’s bidding. It allows Washington to print money with which to pay its bills and to purchase the cooperation of foreign governments or to fund opposition within those countries whose governments Washington is unable to purchase, such as Iran, Russia, and China. If the dollar was not the world reserve currency and actually reflected its true depreciated value from the mounting US debt and running of the printing press, Washington’s power would be dramatically curtailed.

The US dollar has come close to its demise several times recently. In 2011 the dollar’s value fell as low as 72 Swiss cents. Investors seeking safety for the value of their money flooded into Swiss francs, pushing the value of the franc so high that Switzerland’s exports began to suffer. The Swiss government responded to the inflow of dollars and euros seeking refuge in the franc by declaring that it would in the future print new francs to offset the inflows of foreign currency in order to prevent the rise in the value of the franc. In other words, currency flight from the US and Europe forced the Swiss to inflate in order to prevent the continuous rise in the exchange value of the Swiss currency.

Prior to the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, the dollar was also faced with a run-up in the value of the euro as foreign central banks and OPEC members shifted their reserves into euros from dollars. The euro was on its way to becoming an alternative reserve currency. However, Goldman Sachs, whose former employees dominate the US Treasury and financial regulatory agencies and also the European Central Bank and governments of Italy and, indirectly, Greece, helped the Greek government to disguise its true deficit, thus deceiving the private European banks who were purchasing the bonds of the Greek government. Once the European sovereign debt crisis was launched, Washington had an interest in keeping it going, as it sends holders of euros fleeing into “safe” dollars, thus boosting the exchange value of the dollar, despite the enormous rise in Washington’s own debt and the doubling of the US money supply.

Last year gold and silver were rapidly rising in price (measured in US dollars), with gold hitting $1,900 an ounce and on its way to $2,000 when suddenly short sales began dominating the bullion markets. The naked shorts of gold and silver bullion succeeded in driving the price of gold down $350 per ounce from its peak. Many informed observers believe that the reason Washington has not prosecuted the banksters for their known financial crimes is that the banksters serve as an auxiliary to Washington by protecting the value of the dollar by shorting bullion and rival currencies.

What happens if Greece exits the EU on its own or by the German boot? What happens if the other EU members reject German Chancellor Merkel’s austerity, as the new president of France promised to do? If Europe breaks apart, do more investors flee to the doomed US dollar?

Will a dollar bubble become the largest bubble in economic history?

When the dollar goes, interest rates will escalate, and bond prices will collapse. Everyone who sought safety in US Treasuries will be wiped out.

We should all be aware that such outcomes are not part of the public debate.

Recently Bill Moyers interviewed Simon Johnson, formerly chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and currently professor at MIT. It turns out that deregulation, which abolished the separation of investment banks from commercial banks, permitted Jamie Dimon’s JPMorganChase to gamble with federally insured deposits. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31356.htm Despite this, Moyers reports that Republicans remain determined to kill the weak Dodd-Frank law and restore full deregulation.

Simon Johnson says: “I think it [deregulation] is a recipe for disaster.” The problem is, Johnson says, that correct economic policy is blocked by the enormous donations banks make to political campaigns. This means Wall Street’s attitudes and faulty risk models will result in an even bigger financial crisis than the one from which we are still suffering. And it will happen prior to recovery from the current crisis.

Johnson warns that the Republicans will distract everyone from the real crisis by concocting another “crisis” over the debt ceiling.

Johnson says that “a few people, particularly in and around the financial system, have become too powerful. They were allowed to take a lot of risk, and they did massive damage to the economy — more than eight million jobs lost. We’re still struggling to get back anywhere close to employment levels where we were before 2008. And they’ve done massive damage to the budget. This damage to the budget is long lasting; it undermines the budget when we need it to be stronger because the society is aging. We need to support Social Security and support Medicare on a fair basis. We need to restore and rebuild revenue, revenue that was absolutely devastated by the financial crisis. People need to understand the link between what the banks did and the budget. And too many people fail to do that.”

Consequently, Johnson says, the banksters continue to receive mega-benefits while imposing enormous social costs on society.

Few Americans and no Washington policymakers understand the dire situation. They are too busy hyping a non-existent recovery and the next war. Statistician John Williams reports that when correctly measured as a cost of living indicator, which the CPI no longer is, the current inflation rate in the US is 5 to 7 percentage points higher than the officially reported rate, as every consumer knows. The unemployment rate falls because, and only because, people unable to find jobs drop out of the labor force and are no longer counted as unemployed. Every informed person knows that the official inflation and unemployment rates are fictions; yet, the presstitute media continue to report the rates with a straight face as fact.

The way the government has rigged the measure of unemployment, it is possible for the US to have a zero rate of unemployment and not a single person employed or in the work force.

The way the government has the measure of inflation rigged, it is possible for your living standing to fall while the government reports that you are better off.

Financial deregulation raises the returns from speculative schemes above the returns from productive activity. The highly leveraged debt and derivatives that gave us the financial crisis have nothing to do with financing businesses. The banks are not only risking their customers’ deposits on gambling bets but also jeopardizing the country’s financial stability and economic future.

With an eye on the approaching dollar crisis, which will wreck the international financial system, the presidents of China, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, and the prime minister of India met last month to discuss forming a new bank that would shield their economies and commerce from mistakes made by Washington and the European Union. The five countries, known as the BRICS, intend to settle their trade with one another in their own currencies and cease relying on the dollar. The fact that Russia, the two Asian giants, and the largest economies in Africa and South America are leaving the dollar’s orbit sends a powerful message of lack of confidence in Washington’s handling of financial matters.

It is ironic that the outcome of financial deregulation in the US is the opposite of what its free market advocates promised. In place of highly competitive financial firms that live or die by their wits alone without government intervention, we have unprecedented financial concentration. Massive banks, “too big to fail,” now send their multi-trillion dollar losses to Washington to be paid by heavily indebted US taxpayers whose real incomes have not risen in 20 years. The banksters take home fortunes in annual bonuses for their success in socializing the “free market” banks’ losses and privatizing profits to the point of not even paying income taxes.

In the US free market economists unleashed avarice and permitted it to run amuck. Will the disastrous consequences discredit capitalism to the extent that the Soviet collapse discredited socialism?

Will Western civilization itself survive the financial tsunami that deregulated Wall Street has produced?

Ironic, isn’t it, that the United States, the home of the “indispensable people,” stands before us as the likely candidate whose government will be responsible for the collapse of the West.

ROBERT REICH POIGNANTLY RECOUNTS HIS DAYS IN THE CLINTON CABINET TRYING TO STAVE OFF THE ENABLER OF THE CURRENT ECONOMIC CRISIS: THE REPEAL OF THE GLASS-STEAGALL ACT. THIS IS A "MUST WATCH" FOR ANYONE CONCERNED WITH THE ECONOMIC AFFLICTION NOW BEING IMPOSED ON AMERICA'S 99%

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Tuesday, May 8, 2012                                                                                          Permalink

Former Labor Sec. Robert Reich on Clinton’s Errors of Crippling Welfare to Repealing Glass-Steagall

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich critiques President Obama’s handling of the economic crisis and the Clinton administration’s repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a key deregulatory move that ended the separation of commercial and investment banking and is widely seen as having helped lead to the financial collapse. The Clinton administration also presided over a drastic transformation of U.S. welfare laws, throwing millions off of welfare rolls. "I went outside of the White House, walked back to my office along Constitution Avenue, expecting I would see signs. ... There are a lot of people who were concerned about that issue. But there was nobody on the streets. It was deafening. The silence was deafening," Reich says of the day Clinton signed the change into law. He notes this is when he realized, "if people who are concerned about the increasing concentration of wealth and power in this country are not mobilized, are not visible, then nothing progressive is going to happen." Reich is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has written 13 books, including "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future." His latest, an e-book, is just out: "Beyond Outrage: What Has Gone Wrong with Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix Them." [Original includes rush transcript]

Tuesday, May 8, 2012                                                                                           Permalink

"We Need to Make a Ruckus": Robert Reich Hails Occupy for Exposing Concentration of Wealth and Power

In his new book, "Beyond Outrage," former Labor Secretary Robert Reich opens with a dedication to the Occupy Wall Street movement. He writes: "To the Occupiers, and all others committed to taking back our economy and our democracy." We speak to Reich about the success of Occupy in reshaping the national dialogue on the economy and why strong grassroots movements are needed to push elected leaders in Washington to enact a progressive agenda. Reich also discusses why austerity is not the answer to the economic crisis at home or in Europe. [Original includes rush transcript]

THE NEXT FINANCIAL MELTDOWN MAY HAVE ALREADY BEGUN ...THANKS TO THESE KLEPTOCRAT BANKSTERS

Getty Images                                Daniel Mudd, CEO Fannie Mae, fired: Sept. 7, 2008

Getty Images                              Richard Syron, CEO Freddie Mac, fired: Sept. 7, 2008

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Fannie's Scandalized, Freddie's Dead - And The Next Financial Meltdown May Have Already Started

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

February 9, 2011 - 3:43am ET 

Here's an idea: Let's give hundreds of billions of dollars in government-backed guarantees to private banks so they can make a fortune writing mortgages without any risk to themselves. Hey, what could go wrong?

The FCIC's recent report illustrated an important lesson from the economic meltdown: Privatization, not big government, ruined Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Running a government program like a private corporation leads to the worst excesses of executive self-indulgence. Fannie and Freddie didn't bring down the economy, as some have claimed, but they were destroyed by the same privatize-and-deregulate philosophy that led to the crisis.

Now we're learning that Washington may be preparing to take that destructive philosophy even further. Proposals to "reform" Fannie and Freddie by privatizing them even more aren't just bad, dangerous ideas. Worse, they suggest that we're returning to the blind and mistaken ideologies of the past. If that's true, then it's only a matter of time until the next meltdown comes.

Doomsday

Mark your calendars. This may be remembered as the week our next financial crisis began, the moment when the Greenspan Republicans and Rubin Democrats who ruined the economy the last time around regained control ... and the cycle began all over again. Only two short years after Wall Street's fraud and greed brought down the world's economy, a Beltway think tank is proposing to put taxpayers on the hook for mortgages written and administered by the same corporate miscreants.

And that's the Democratic proposal. The Republicans want to double down on a failed strategy of "privatizing" government mortgage financing, while at the same time cutting back on regulation and oversight. It all boils down to the same thing: bringing back the same sybaritic, taxpayer-backed greedfest that 's already shattered the economy more than once.

Fannie and Freddie are "government-sponsored enterprises," or "GSEs." But ideologues have learned exactly the wrong lesson from the Great Recession. It was the "E" part of these companies, not the "G" part, that caused the problem. The real lesson is that it's a mistake to mix government programs with private-sector-style get-rich-quick incentives. The GSEs failed because they treated their Federal mandate as if it was the key to Fort Knox.

SmokingFinancialGun.com

If the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission wants to publicize its work more, maybe it should set up a tabloid website like The Smoking Gun, or pitch a TV tell-all scandal show about badly-behaved executives ("VH1: Behind the Mortgage"). Their first episode could feature Daniel Mudd, the former Fannie Mae CEO who bragged that he wrote his own rules with regulators and boasted that "we always won, we took no prisoners." Regulators later concluded that Mudd ran a company with an "arrogant and unethical corporate culture, where Fannie Mae employees manipulated accounting and earnings to trigger bonuses for senior executives."

Mudd ran the company with so much materialistic self-absorption that he might have been starring in an 80's hair-metal video (presumably without Tawny Kitaen on the hood of a Jaguar, but who knows?) His tenure at Fannie was marked by lying, cheating, bullying, and the reckless pursuit of a fast buck. But then, why wouldn't it be? He was compensated like a private-sector executive, but backed by government authority and coddled with taxpayer guarantees. It was all upside, baby, and Mudd liked his upside.

Regulators found that Mudd and his colleagues "manipulated accounting" so that they could keep paying themselves huge bonuses, even as they ran what one observer called "the worst-run financial institution" he had seen in thirty years as a regulator. It worked, too. Mudd made $65 million between 2000 and 2008. (Hmm ... "manipulated accounting" ... is that legal?)

Conservatives should be just as outraged as progressives. Executives like Mudd didn't build their businesses. They didn't even manage them competently. They took a free ride with government backing, yet paid themselves as if they were captains of industry. How did this perverse situation develop?

Freddie's Dead (Fannie, too)

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are going to die, at least in their present form, as victims of over-indulgence. But they didn't start that way. Fannie Mae was created in 1938 and functioned smoothly for thirty years, all through the postwar housing boom. It was turned into a separate government-sponsored enterprise in 1968 in order to take its large debts off the Federal balance sheet, and Freddie Mac was created shortly afterward (to create "competition"). They're creatures of privatization, and they were encouraged to bring "free market" aggression to their mission.

And man, did they. As FCIC testimony revealed, "The "Fannie and Freddie political machine resisted any meaningful regulation using highly improper tactics ... OFHEO (their regulatory overseer) was constantly subjected to malicious political attacks and efforts of intimidation."

The companies faced a turning point in 2005, when the greed-addled private market was rushing into subprime mortgages and other high-risk loans. A government-sponsored corporation that was true to its mission wouldn't have followed the lemmings, but privatization fever had taken hold. As a Fannie Mae executive told his colleagues back then: "We face two stark choices: stay the course [or] meet the market where the market is." Ill-advised by architects of calamity like Citibank, they jumped in with both feet despite dire warnings from people inside the organization.

Risk and Reward

Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin both told the FCIC that better corporate risk management will help prevent the next financial crisis. The Fannie Mae story proves how naive that belief is. Like many financial executives, Mudd's short-term wealth depended on writing more business, whatever the risk. So he humiliated, abused, and ignored Chief Risk Officer Enrico Dallevecchia when Dallevechia warned him of the dangers of writing substandard business. The frustrated Risk Officer finally wrote a memo to Mudd which said that Fannie had "one of the weakest control processes" he had "ever witnessed in his career," and that he was "upset" that he hadn't even known the company was taking on more risk until he saw the announcement. A bellicose Mudd told Dellavecchia to "address it (to him) man to man" and "face to face," rather than by email.

CFO Robert Levin bullied the company's chief analyst in a similar way when he was told that the company wasn't charging enough for its Alt-A mortgages. That's called "buying business," and it should never happen at a government-sponsored enterprise. It means that an enterprise created to complement the private sector is competing with it instead. Mudd and Levin did what many executives would do in a similar situation: They lowered their underwriting standards, wrote a lot of bad mortgages, and walked away as rich men. Mudd now lives comfortably in Connecticut with $80 million in earnings, thanks to the American taxpayer, and is a director for an investment fund (Fortress Investment Group - a name we're providing as a public service to unwary investors).

Meltdown II: The Sequel

Arguments over Fannie and Freddie are usually a proxy for ideological differences about the role of government. Conservatives who blame Fannie and Freddie for the meltdown (which they didn't cause but certainly made worse) want to prove that government intervention in the economy is a bad idea. But this isn't a battle between right and left as much as it is between what works and what doesn't. We've now seen what happens when American-style bankers are given government-backed guarantees and Goldman Sachs-style bonuses. Privatizing to Wall Street is like giving your car keys to a pickpocket.

Nevertheless, Capital Markets Subcommittee Chairman Scott Garrett is holding a hearing today on "reforming" Fannie and Freddie, and his witness list contains four names: someone from an anti-government, anti-regulation think tank that's funded by Citibank, the Koch Brothers, Chase, and American Express, along with a variety of oil refiners and pharmaceutical companies; someone from another anti-government group which has received funding from Bank of America, Lehman Brothers, PriceWaterHouseCoopers, and the California Realtors Association; someone from a conservative think tank funded by Prudential and American Express, among others; and a Democrat ...

... from the Center for American Progress (CAP), the group that wrote the Democratic "privatize Fannie and Freddie" proposal. In other words, the hearings have been stacked in the banks' favor. Meanwhile, the Administration's plan for reforming Fannie and Freddie is overdue, but the Center for American Progress is known to be close to the White House. If that means that its proposal is a preview of Administration thinking, we've got a big problem.

We're told that the White House plan will be released Friday and that it will include three options. One option would have the government withdraw entirely from the mortgage market, but that's likely to be politically infeasible. Neither party wants to explain to voters why they can't get home loans and the price of their house has plummeted. And while specifics weren't provided for the other two, the Wall Street Journal reports that the others would "create a way for the government to backstop part of the secondary mortgage market" like Fannie and Freddie, but gave no specifics.

The Journal also reports that "top administration officials have publicly discussed the merits of a limited but explicit federal guarantee of securities backed by certain types of mortgages," adding: "The housing and banking industries have advanced proposals arguing that such a guarantee is needed to maintain a healthy market, particularly for long-term, fixed-rate loans that remain a keystone of U.S. housing."
The short version: There will be one proposal that's politically impossible, and two others that give banking and real estate lobbyists what they want. Care to bet which one won't make it through Congress?

Yves Smith gave the CAP proposal the once-over, under the heading "Wall Street Co-Opting Nominally Liberal Think Tanks," but our one-sentence summary of their proposal is this: They want to dismantle Fannie and Freddie and let private banks administer their programs backed by by government guarantees. And don't worry, says CAP. Our "chartered mortgage institutions," though "fully private," will have to be "fully transparent" and follow government rules. (They would never, never "manipulate accounting," would they?)

The End

Proposals like CAP's would make Fannie and Freddie's private-sector successors a microcosm for the entire economy under the failed policies of Democrats like Clinton, Rubin, and Summers, as well as Republicans like Greenspan and ... well, all of them. Executives at these financial institutions would be motivated to cook the books and sell bad mortgages while taking advantage of taxpayer guarantees to consolidate their already too-big-to-fail institutions. And they'd be recruited from a Wall Street cohort with a documented record of deception and criminality. All of CAP's lofty and well-stated goals are undermined by the identify of the folks doing the lending. As for the Republicans, they don't even bother stating lofty goals.

The government has to work out a way to unwind itself from the mortgage market. The Administration has a proposal to lower the size of mortgages it will guarantee, and that's a good first step. But the previews of their overall proposals seem uninspired and weak, if not outright capitulation to Wall Street's whims and desires. And even capitulation is too mild for the Republicans, who appear to be setting the stage for fiscal anarchy and plunder.

The problem is much bigger than Fannie and Freddie. This real danger is that this could be a turning point, a return to the failed ways of the past. If we don't see stronger proposals than these in the coming months, this will be remembered as the week that the destructive policies of the Greenspan/Rubin crowd came back from the dead. It will be recalled as the beginning of the end, the moment when the next wave of privatization began and the way was paved for a collapse that may be even greater than the one we're in today.

______________________________________

This post was produced as part of the Curbing Wall Street project. 

Here's a Blog I Haven't Been Following but Certainly Will Be Henceforth!

Saturday, February 6, 2010

The OTHER Reason that the U.S. is Not Regulating Wall Street

Sure, American politicians have been bought and paid for by the Wall Street giants. See this, this and this.

And everyone knows that the White House and Congress - while talking about cracking down on Wall Street with strict regulation - have actually watered down some of the most important protections that were in place.

For example, Senator Cantwell says that the new derivatives legislation is weaker than the old regulation. And leading credit default swap expert Satyajit Das says that the new credit default swap regulations not only won't help stabilize the economy, they might actually help to destabilize it.

But the U.S. is not being sold out in a vacuum.

On March 1, 1999, countries accounting for more than 90 per cent of the global financial services market signed onto the World Trade Organization's Financial Services Agreement (FSA). By signing the FSA, they committed to deregulate their financial markets.

For example, by signing the FSA, the U.S. agreed not to break up too big to fails. The U.S. also promised to repeal Glass-Steagall, and did so 8 months after signing the FSA.

Indeed, in signing the FSA and other WTO agreements, the U.S. has legally bound itself as follows:

• No new regulation: The United States agreed to a “standstill provision” that requires that we not create new regulations (or reverse liberalization) for the list of financial services bound to comply with WTO rules. Given that the United States has made broad WTO financial services commitments – and thus is forbidden by this provision from imposing new regulations in these many areas – this provision seriously limits the policy [options] available to address the current crisis.

• Removal of regulation: The United States even agreed to try to even eliminate domestic financial service regulatory policies that meet GATS [i.e. General Agreement on Trade in Services] rules, but that may still “adversely affect the ability of financial service suppliers of any other (WTO) Member to operate, compete, or enter” the market.

• No bans on new financial service “products”: The United States is also bound to ensure that foreign financial service suppliers are permitted “to offer in its territory any new financial service,” a direct conflict with the various proposals to limit various risky investment instruments, such as certain types of derivatives.

• Certain forms of regulation banned outright: The United States agreed that it would not set limits on the size, corporate form or other characteristics of foreign firms in the broad array of financial services it signed up to WTO strictures ...

• Treating foreign and domestic firms alike is not sufficient: The GATS market-access limits on U.S. domestic regulation apply in absolute terms; that is to say, even if a policy applies to domestic and foreign firms alike, if it goes beyond what WTO rules permit, it is forbidden. And, forms of regulation not outright banned by the market-access requirements must not inadvertently “modify the conditions of competition in favor of services or service suppliers” of the United States, even if they apply identically to foreign and domestic firms.

In other words, the problem isn't just that Congress and the White House have sold out to the Wall Street giants.

The problem is also that the U.S. has signed WTO agreements that have given the keys to the too big to fails, and have neutered their regulators. Even if some politicians tried to stand up to Wall Street - or even if we "throw out all of the bums" currently in political roles - the U.S. would still be locked into the WTO's scheme for helping the financial giants to grow ever bigger and to take ever-bigger and ever-riskier gambles.

Indeed, the financial giants are pushing hard for further deregulation, demanding that the WTO's "Doha round" of agreements be signed.

On the other hand, if the American people stood up for our sovereignty and demanded that the financial giants be reined in, it would be easy to fix the WTO agreements which the U.S. has already signed. Public Citizen notes, "as a legal matter, these problems are easy to remedy ..."

Will the American people stand up and demand that the WTO deregulatory scheme be rolled back?

Or will we continue to let the financial giants destroy our country through buying and selling politicians (with the help of the Supreme Court) and forcing us into more and more draconian WTO treaties which destroy our sovereignty altogether?

Many people assume that they just have to hang in there until things improve. But the powers-that-be are grabbing more and more power and - unless we stand up to them - they will take it all.

As highly-regarded economist (Michael Hudson, Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, who has advised the U.S., Canadian, Mexican and Latvian governments as well as the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, and who is a former Wall Street economist at Chase Manhattan Bank who helped establish the world’s first sovereign debt fund) said:

"You have to realize that what they’re trying to do is to roll back the Enlightenment, roll back the moral philosophy and social values of classical political economy and its culmination in Progressive Era legislation, as well as the New Deal institutions. They’re not trying to make the economy more equal, and they’re not trying to share power. Their greed is (as Aristotle noted) infinite. So what you find to be a violation of traditional values is a re-assertion of pre-industrial, feudal values. The economy is being set back on the road to debt peonage. The Road to Serfdom is not government sponsorship of economic progress and rising living standards, it’s the dismantling of government, the dissolution of regulatory agencies, to create a new feudal-type elite."

And Foreign Policy magazine ran an article entitled "The Next Big Thing: Neomedievalism", arguing that the power of nations is declining, and being replaced by corporations, wealthy individuals, the sovereign wealth funds of monarchs, and city-regions.

We either stand up, or we slip back into a darker age.

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