Friday, October 15, 2010

Ecuador: Were the Events of 30 September 2010 a Failed Coup or an Institutional Crisis?

Background/Preview (selected by blogger):

Exclusive documentary posted by theREALnews:

October 1, 2010

Ecuador President Defiant After Failed Coup

This is a special report about the Police Force insurrection and kidnapping of Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa on September 30th, 2010. President Correa was held hostage for 11 hours by a large number of armed policemen inside the Quito Regiment. Eventually leading to street battles and a bloody ending that gripped a nation.

My name is Oscar Leon, reporter and documentary filmmaker from Ecuador. Between 2005 and 2007 I created the documentary "Third World Democracy Handbook" about the fall of President Lucio Gutierrez, at that time he was the 3rd President to fall in less than 10 years, had Rafael Correa fell he would have been the 4rd to fall in less than 14 years. Being a reporter in Ecuador during the "Lost Decade" I can bring some insight about what happened that day. Was this a institutional crisis? Or a foreign power's attempt to overthrow him? This infamous day is being utilized by both political sides. But what is the truth behind it? In order to get a better understanding of what happened on Part 1, we will explain some necessary context. In the Part 2 of this special report we will go over what took place on September 30th 2010.

Pt 1

Pt 2

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Webster Tarpley: "Elizabeth Warren should ... use her new position to provide desperately needed relief to the American middle class against outrageous Wall Street abuses ... and not wait for the inevitable waffling that will come from the feckless Obama."

Advice to Desperate Congressional Dems: Ignore Wall Street Puppet Obama, and Demand a Five-Year Freeze on All Home Foreclosures in the Spirit of the Frazier-Lemke Act of 1935!

Webster G. Tarpley, Ph.D.
TARPLEY.net
October 11, 2010

In the last phase of the election campaign, an issue has emerged which allows voters to separate Wall Street stooges in both parties from real advocates of the middle class. The issue is the massive campaign of foreclosures against the American middle class being carried out by Wall Street zombie bankers who owe their very existence to taxpayer bailouts. Since the world derivatives panic began in 2007, millions of homes each year have been seized by the Wall Street predators, sometimes under the legal color provided by adjustable rate mortgages and, as has now been revealed, often using completely illegal paperwork to throw average Americans and their families out on the street and frequently into poverty and destitution.

The fact that so many foreclosures have been illegal as well as immoral and antisocial has now brought the foreclosure reissue to critical mass. The deeply flawed paperwork used by many bankers in their attack on working people’s homes is now a scandal which is bringing out the populist pitchforks everywhere. Even title insurance companies are now declining to be a part of this swindle. This past Friday, Bank of America, the largest US bank, stopped foreclosures in all 50 states because of the threat of counter-suits and public backlash. Previously, JP Morgan Chase & Co., Ally Bank’s GMAC Mortgage unit, and PNC Financial had halted foreclosures in the 23 states where the consent of the judge is required in order to seize a home.

The current chaos in home foreclosures is once again the direct responsibility of the zombie bankers themselves, who have neglected all traditional legal and accounting standards concerning the necessary paper trails in their frenzied desire to securitize mortgage loans and make them into toxic derivatives in the form of asset-backed securities and mortgage backed securities. The zombie bankers, already the recipients of $24 trillion of public largess in the form of the various bailouts, have turned out to be incompetent even in the technical aspects of their own thieving racket.

But the chaos in the bankers’ filing systems is nothing compared to the chaos created by the millions of foreclosures they have engineered, based on adjustable-rate mortgages and similar misleading contracts which never should have been legal in the first place. For some time, it has been evident that the defense of the American middle class requires a blanket, orderly, federal freeze (or moratorium) on all foreclosures on primary residences, similar to the New Deal protections offered to family farms by the landmark Frazier-Lemke Act of 1935-1949 during the previous depression.

Desperate to avoid defeat at the hands of crazed Tea Party fanatics, top Dems are starting to grasp the explosive potential of this issue and calling for stopping foreclosures: “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) …. urged five large mortgage lenders to suspend foreclosures in his state until they establish ways to make sure homeowners don’t lose their homes improperly. Attorney General Eric Holder said that the government is looking into the matter, and Democratic lawmakers urged bank regulators and the Justice Department to probe whether mortgage companies violated laws in handling foreclosures,” according to AP.

Speaking on Fox News Sunday earlier today, “Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), a top House Democrat, said she backed a foreclosure moratorium and government talks with the banking industry to concoct ways to let lenders reshape troubled mortgages. She said the foreclosure problem has been ‘extremely vexing’ in her state” of Florida, AP reported.

Make the GOP Line Up in Defense of their Wall Street Masters

In a response of great clinical significance, the number two reactionary Republican in the House and would-be majority leader, Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, immediately rushed to defend the Wall Street parasites and their right to feast on the flesh of the American people. Cantor said that ‘”a national moratorium would remove the protections that lenders need.” “You’re going to shut down the housing industry” with a national stoppage, Cantor added, pontificating that “People have to take responsibility for themselves.”‘1

There it was: the eternal reactionary refrain of the New Deal-hating GOP: in a conflict between a citizen and a bank, the citizen will be on his or her own. Canter’s response demonstrates that any time the Democrats attack Wall Street, the Republicans are immediately obliged to throw off their protective camouflage of “tea party” populism, and line up to defend the bankers who own them. This is the dirty secret of the “libertarian” GOP.

Axelrod Offers Nothing but Quick Eviction

Unfortunately, but characteristically, an additional defense of the Wall Street hyenas came from the Obama White House. Financier stooge David Axelrod undercut both Reid and Wasserman-Shultz in his eagerness to shield the zombie banks, telling CBS’ Face the Nation: “I’m not sure about a national moratorium because there are in fact valid foreclosures that probably should go forward,” if their documents are accurate, and the public be damned. “Our hope is this moves rapidly and that this gets unwound very, very quickly,” he added. (AP) In other words, Axelrod and Obama see the solution as speeding up foreclosures so that the crisis can “bottom out” in an orgy of liquidations and homelessness — precisely as prescribed by the anti-human reactionaries of the Austrian school of economics touted by the GOP. If a new object lesson in Obama’s status as an abject Wall Street puppet were needed, here it was.

Congressional Democrats, if they wish to survive, must realize that Obama is nothing more than an anchor tied around their necks. They need to ignore him as party leader now, as a prelude to dumping him as their presidential candidate for 2012.

The Obama White House did respond to the public outrage against Wall Street’s foreclosures by refusing to sign the infamous Leahy-Sessions bill, which would legalize a broad range of foreclosures which are currently illegal, thus catapulting more millions into homelessness. This veto should have been carried out with great fanfare and with extreme prejudice as a direct and defiant challenge to Wall Street and its Republican minions, but Obama, always true to form, did it surreptitiously and almost apologetically, using a form of pocket veto to send the bill back to Congress. so that it can be “improved.”

Elizabeth Warren Should Declare a Freeze on Foreclosures

One person who could do a great deal for the faltering fortunes of the congressional Democrats is Elizabeth Warren, recently named as White House overseer of the new consumer financial protection agency. With the help of some aggressive lawyers, it ought to be possible for Warren to find something in the new FinReg law to use as the basis for a freeze on mass foreclosures, given the current public scandal of faked records. This could also be done under the authority given by existing states of emergency dating back to the aftermath of 9/11. During the last depression, the Frazier-Lemke Moratorium Act of 1935 halted foreclosures on family farms for a three-year period, provided that a local court of law would give its approval both as to the propriety of the delay and the adequacy of the rental to be paid in the interim. Frazier-Lemke was challenged in the courts, “but the Supreme Court upheld the law in Wright v. Vinton Branch of Mountain Trust Bank of Roanoke. After expiring in 1938, the act was renewed four times until 1949, when it expired.”2

The measure most urgently required today is a freeze on foreclosures on one and only one primary residence per family, to continue for five years or for the duration of the current world economic and financial depression, which ever lasts longer. The alternative is social chaos, with Hoovervilles and Obamavilles on a mass scale, and a tragic deterioration in the present and future productivity of the working adults and children being sacrificed on the altar of Wall Street’s insatiable greed.

Combined with state laws requiring mandatory mediation before foreclosure could be carried out, plus the creation of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, New Deal measures were able to stop about 90% of the foreclosure plague, and also offered meaningful assistance to the 10% who were still victimized. This was in an age when the money center Wall Street banks had not received massive public bailouts to save them from insolvency, as occurred in 2008-2009. A halt in foreclosures could be considered a belated expression of gratitude by the Wall Street tycoons to the American people, without whose tax dollars not one major Wall Street institution would have survived the world derivatives panic of September-October 2008.

While she is at it, Elizabeth Warren should also use her new position to provide desperately needed relief to the American middle class against outrageous Wall Street abuses in the following areas:

1. She should declare a ban on Adjustable Rate Mortgages, which are always fatally flawed because they never allow the homeowner to know in advance just what level of interest is going to be charged, no matter how clear their language and no matter how big the print in which they are set down. ARMs are thus the consumer financial equivalent of ticking time bombs, and there is no place for them in the modern US economy.
2. Warren should also set up a de facto 10% maximum ceiling on interest rates on consumer financial products all over the United States. This would merely restore the pre-1979 usury laws which generally established a 10% upper limit on interest rates until the coming of Paul Adolf Volcker and his lunatic 22% prime rate during his tenure as boss of the Federal Reserve under Carter and Reagan.
3. Predatory payday loans and car title loans would be largely ruled out by a 10% upper limit on yearly interest rates, but Warren should institute additional safeguards as needed to ban these two kinds of wildly abusive financial marketing practices.

Elizabeth Warren should take these actions immediately and on her own authority, and not wait for the inevitable waffling that will come from the feckless Obama. The current election season provides her with a golden opportunity to determine whether her new job carries any real power with it, or whether it was simply a sop to certain strata of left-liberal opinion. She should act now against foreclosures and exorbitant interest rates, and see if Obama fires her. The best guess here is that he won’t dare. She should do this right now, when Obama knows that the penalty for firing Warren would be massive disaffection and bitterness among left liberals who believes in her mission and who forced him to appoint her over the objections of Tiny Tim Geithner and other Wall Street operatives.

As for the Republicans, they will start howling bloody murder as soon as any Wall Street privilege is touched or any Wall Street abuse challenged. To get them to drop their posturing and do this in the midst of their populist-demagogical election campaign would be of the greatest benefit to congressional Democrats. With a perfect opportunity offered by the departure of enforcers like Rahm Emanuel and Axelrod, Ms. Warren should dare to struggle and dare to win — now.

1 http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_foreclosures_white_house/print
2 httphttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frazier%E2%80%93Lemke_Farm_Bankruptcy_Act

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Convicted Criminals Take Over Counting U.S. Mail-In Ballots. Plan on Voting Locally!

FELON'S FINGERS IN USA VOTE-BY-MAIL SYSTEM

by Bev Harris
http://www.blackboxvoting.org
Posted Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Vote the old fashioned way. Vote at the polling place, allowing plenty of time, and ready to assert your right to use a provisional ballot if your name is not on the list. Vote by mail is second only to Internet voting in the risk it presents to our democracy.

Permission to excerpt or reprint granted, with link to http://www.blackboxvoting.org

For a glimpse into just how slipshod our vote-by-mail controls really are, take a look at how two convicted felons obtained intimate access to the system:

The primary architect for current vote-by-mail computer software was Jeffrey Dean, an embezzler who specialized in computer crime. Dean's Dept. of Corrections papers:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/dean/dean-criminal-docs.pdf
Court transcripts showing Dean's key role in vote-by-mail software:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/17789.html

While in prison, embezzler Jeffrey Dean became friends with a narcotics trafficker named John Elder. While still in prison, on a work-release program, Jeffrey Dean was tasked with creating a computerized vote by mail program for King County, Washington. He began this assignment while working for his brother, Neil Dean, whose business had a contract with King County to provide temporary workers for its huge absentee voting operation. At the time, King County had about 1 million voters, 600,000 of whom voted by absentee.

Jeff and Neil Dean became involved in creating a vote-by-mail automation program to handle mail processing and signature comparison. Jeff Dean then left his brother Neil Dean's employment to launch his own ballot printing and mailing company, then called Spectrum Print & Mail. He brought in prison buddy John Elder to help him manage the company.

One wonders how Jeff Dean ever got the money together to fund his ballot printing operation, which featured high-end printing machines from Europe. At the time he owed nearly half a million dollars in court-ordered restitution for his embezzlement. Someone funded his ballot printing operation, which almost immediately was given the lucrative ballot printing contract for million-voter King County.

It's not that Jeff Dean didn't have political connections. In his depositions, he claims that his embezzlement from the law firm back in the 1980s was not really an embezzlement, but a kickback scheme for some of the partners related to an off-the-books project they were doing.

Now, Jeff Dean is a liar and a crook, there is no doubt of that (most recently, he did an illegal, unregistered stock offering for an RV park he owns in an Idaho resort area, bilking a lovely couple, the Laners, out of their life savings; he purchased this expensive RV park while declaring in Washington state that he was bankrupt, then sold shares in it to unsuspecting investors).

I've looked at copies of the checks Jeff Dean wrote to himself while allegedly embezzling from the law firm (he took an Alford plea, never admitting guilt). He looks guilty to me, but his claim that he was doing something off the books for the partners is interesting, given the political nature of the firm and his immediate access to the King County election system beginning while still incarcerated. One of the partners, at the law firm Jeff Dean embezzled from was Bud Krogh, who formerly headed the Watergate burglars under Richard Nixon. Jeff Dean claims he took a fall for some of the partners on some off-the-books deal they were doing. There is no doubt that he landed on his feet unusually quickly post-incarceration.

After Jeff Dean was released, having already begun work on the computerized vote-by-mail system which would later come to dominate the US absentee voting market, he somehow launched a pricey print shop, immediately got the biggest ballot-printing and mailing assignment in Washington state, and then was assigned to work INSIDE King County elections with the GEMS central tabulator and the voter registration database. He was given a key and 24-hour access, and when then-supervisor of elections Julie Anne Kempf dug up his prison record and complained, she was fired but Jeff Dean and prison-buddy John Elder were retained.

Jeff Dean then became a primary stockholder in what was then called Global Election Systems, by selling his lucrative ballot printing and mailing operation to Canadian-based Global Election Systems, which was then purchased by Diebold. Dean pocketed a few million in the deal, but due to a court judgment against him, hid the money by transferring it to his son -- then taking assets purchased by the money back -- meanwhile declaring bankruptcy in Washington while hiding assets in Idaho.

Under Diebold, Jeff Dean became a paid consultant and John Elder took over the ballot printing and mailing, until 2004, when Black Box Voting exposed the two felons, along with three more crooks involved in the start-up of Global Election Systems (Michael K. Graye, Norton Cooper, and Charles Hong Lee, who were convicted of embezzlement, stock fraud, "defrauding the queen" and in the case of Charles Hong Lee, ordered to pay restitution for bilking investors).

The story of what became the backbone of the US vote-by-mail software doesn't end here, though. Neil Dean, Jeff Dean's brother and partner during his initial design of the vote by mail software, sold his own firm to Pitney Bowes, which came out with -- guess what? -- vote by mail software. So now we have Pitney Bowes (which purchased Neil Dean's outfit) and Vote Remote (Jeff Dean's software) dominating the automated vote by mail industry in the USA.

John Elder, after being booted out of Diebold's print and mail shop (which by then was national, handling Washington, California, Georgia, Colorado, and many other locations), set up shop as an elections consultant. What does he consult on, you may ask?

Black Box Voting has learned that John Elder has recently been acting as a middleman, massaging the huge vote-by-mail databases for California and Colorado counties before they go to the print shop. It works like this: Counties contract with a middleman to help them with their vote by mail; the middleman is findable through public records for the contracts, but John Elder is not. Why? Because he acts as an off-the-books secondary middleman. The first middleman sends the database to John Elder, who massages the vote-by-mail data and sends the database on to his friend at a print shop in Fresno.

Jeff Dean, meanwhile, lives in a huge home in Idaho overlooking Hell's Canyon, along with his computer server and several expensive horses. No one will ever serve a search warrant by surprise here, because his mountaintop house is accessible only by a forest service road he can watch from his panorama picture windows, and it takes a good 15 minutes of dusty driving to get up to his horse pastures.

Why is Jeff Dean and his server still of interest? According to court transcripts, Jeffrey Dean admitted to remotely accessing the voter databases and vote by mail programs for California counties during live elections. So what we have (or have had) is a convicted embezzler tinkering around by remote access in the vote databases that control elections.

And that's the story on our vote-by-mail craze. What we need to be focusing on is restoration of the public right to see and authenticate every one of the four essential parts of elections. It may be "easy and fun" to vote by mail, but with vote by mail we have just "easy and funned" our way out of public elections. We have transferred power.

Monday, October 11, 2010

The Mortgage Crisis and How Hank Paulson's Inaction as Treasury Secretary Helped Goldman Sachs

McClatchy Washington Bureau

How Hank Paulson's inaction helped Goldman Sachs
Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: October 10, 2010 09:08:29 PM

In this video from theRealnews, economist Bill Black says Paulson missed multiple chances to contain the disaster.

Ellen Brown: The big banks responsible for the current mortgage crisis "are concealing massive fraud." "What we need to avoid at all costs is 'TARP II' – another bank bailout by the taxpayers."

FORECLOSUREGATE AND OBAMA'S 'POCKET VETO'

Ellen Brown, October 7th, 2010
http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/foreclosuregate.php

Amid a snowballing foreclosure fraud crisis, President Obama today blocked legislation that critics say could have made it more difficult for homeowners to challenge foreclosure proceedings against them.

The bill, titled The Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act of 2009, passed the Senate with unanimous consent and with no scrutiny by the DC media. In a maneuver known as a "pocket veto,"

President Obama indirectly vetoed the legislation by declining to sign the bill passed by Congress while legislators are on recess.

The swift passage and the President's subsequent veto of this bill come on the heels of an announcement that Wall Street banks are voluntarily suspending foreclosure proceedings in 23 states.

By most reports, it would appear that the voluntary suspension of foreclosures is underway to review simple, careless procedural errors. Errors which the conscientious banks are hastening to correct.

Even Gretchen Morgenson in the New York Times characterizes the problem as “flawed paperwork.”

But those errors go far deeper than mere sloppiness. They are concealing a massive fraud.

They cannot be corrected with legitimate paperwork, and that was the reason the servicers had to hire “foreclosure mills” to fabricate the documents.

These errors involve perjury and forgery -- fabricating documents that never existed and swearing to the accuracy of facts not known.

Karl Denninger at MarketTicker is calling it “Foreclosuregate.”

Diana Ollick of CNBC calls it “the RoboSigning Scandal.” On Monday, Ollick reported rumors that the government is planning a 90-day foreclosure moratorium to deal with the problem.

Three large mortgage issuers – JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and GMAC -- have voluntarily suspended thousands of foreclosures, and a number of calls have been made for investigations.

Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray announced on Wednesday that he is filing suit against Ally Financial and GMAC for civil penalties up to $25,000 per violation for fraud in hundreds of foreclosure suits.

These problems cannot be swept under the rug as mere technicalities. They go to the heart of the securitization process itself. The snowball has just started to roll.

You Can’t Recover What Doesn’t Exist

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism has uncovered a price list from a company called DocX that specializes in “document recovery solutions.” DocX is the technology platform used by Lender Processing Services to manage a national network of foreclosure mills. The price list includes such things as “Create Missing Intervening Assignment,” $35; “Cure Defective Assignment,” $12.95; “Recreate Entire Collateral File,” $95. Notes Smith:

[C]reating . . . means fabricating documents out of whole cloth, and look at the extent of the offerings. The collateral file is ALL the documents the trustee (or the custodian as an agent of the trustee) needs to have pursuant to its obligations under the pooling and servicing agreement on behalf of the mortgage backed security holder. This means most importantly the original of the note (the borrower IOU), copies of the mortgage (the lien on the property), the securitization agreement, and title insurance.

How do you recreate the original note if you don’t have it? And all for a flat fee, regardless of the particular facts or the supposed difficulty of digging them up.

All of the mortgages in question were “securitized” – turned into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) and sold off to investors. MBS are typically pooled through a type of “special purpose vehicle” called a Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduit or “REMIC”, which has strict requirements defined under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code (the Tax Reform Act of 1986). The REMIC holds the mortgages in trust and issues securities representing an undivided interest in them.

Denninger explains that mortgages are pooled into REMIC Trusts as a tax avoidance measure, and that to qualify, the properties must be properly conveyed to the trustee of the REMIC in the year the MBS is set up, with all the paperwork necessary to show a complete chain of title. For some reason, however, that was not done; and there is no legitimate way to create those conveyances now, because the time limit allowed under the Tax Code has passed.

The question is, why weren’t they done properly in the first place? Was it just haste and sloppiness as alleged? Or was there some reason that these mortgages could NOT be assigned when the MBS were formed?

Denninger argues that it would not have been difficult to do it right from the beginning. His theory is that documents were “lost” to avoid an audit, which would have revealed to investors that they had been sold a bill of goods -- a package of toxic subprime loans very prone to default.

The Tranche Problem

Here is another possible explanation, constructed from an illuminating CNBC clip dated June 29, 2007. In it, Steve Liesman describes how Wall Street turned bundles of subprime mortgages into triple-A investments, using the device called “tranches.” It’s easier to follow if you watch the clip (here), but this is an excerpt:

How do you create a subprime derivative? . . . You take a bunch of mortgages . . . and put them into one big thing. We call it a Mortgage Backed Security. Say it’s $50 million worth. . . . Now you take a bunch of these Mortgage Backed Securities and you put them into one very big thing. . . . The one thing about all these guys here [in the one very big thing] is that they’re all subprime borrowers, their credit is bad or there’s something about them that doesn’t make it prime. . . .

Watch, we’re going to make some triple A paper out of this. . . Now we have a $1 billion vehicle here. We’re going to slice it up into five different pieces. Call them tranches. . . . The key is, they’re not divided by “Jane’s is here” and “Joe’s is here.” Jane is actually in all five pieces here. Because what we’re doing is, the BBB tranche, they’re going to take the first losses for whoever is in the pool, all the way up to about 8% of the losses. What we’re saying is, you’ve got losses in the thing, I’m going to take them and in return you’re going to pay me a relatively high interest rate. . . . All the way up to triple A, where 24% of the losses are below that. Twenty-four percent have to go bad before they see any losses. Here’s the magic as far as Wall Street’s concerned. We have taken subprime paper and created GE quality paper out of it. We have a triple A tranche here.

The top tranche is triple A because it includes the mortgages that did NOT default; but no one could know which those were until the defaults occurred, when the defaulting mortgages got assigned to the lower tranches and foreclosure went forward. That could explain why the mortgages could not be assigned to the proper group of investors immediately: the homes only fell into their designated tranches when they went into default. The clever designers of these vehicles tried to have it both ways by conveying the properties to an electronic dummy conduit called MERS (an acronym for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems), which would hold them in the meantime. MERS would then assign them to the proper tranche as the defaults occurred. But the rating agencies required that the conduit be “bankruptcy remote,” which meant it could hold title to nothing; and courts have started to take notice of this defect. They are concluding that if MERS owns nothing, it can assign nothing, and the chain of title has been irretrievably broken. As foreclosure expert Neil Garfield traces these developments:

First they said it was MERS who was the lender. That clearly didn’t work because MERS lent nothing, collected nothing and never had anything to do with the cash involved in the transaction. Then they started with the servicers who essentially met with the same problem. Then they got cute and produced either the actual note, a copy of the note or a forged note, or an assignment or a fabricated assignment from a party who at best had dubious rights to ownership of the loan to another party who had equally dubious rights, neither of whom parted with any cash to fund either the loan or the transfer of the obligation. . . . Now the pretender lenders have come up with the idea that the “Trust” is the owner of the loan . . . even though it is just a nominee (just like MERS) . . . . They can’t have it both ways.

My answer is really simple. The lender/creditor is the one who advanced cash to the borrower. . . . The use of nominees or straw men doesn’t mean they can be considered principals in the transaction any more than your depository bank is a principal to a transaction in which you buy and pay for something with a check.

So What’s to Be Done?

Garfield’s proposed solution is for the borrowers to track down the real lenders -- the investors. He says:

[I] f you meet your Lender (investor), you can restructure the loan yourselves and then jointly go after the pretender lenders for all the money they received and didn’t disclose as “agent.”

Karl Denninger concurs. He writes:

Those who bought MBS from institutions that improperly securitized this paper can and should sue the securitizers to well beyond the orbit of Mars. . . . [I]f this bankrupts one or more large banking institutions, so be it. We now have "resolution authority", let's see it used.

The resolution authority Denninger is referring to is in the new Banking Reform Bill, which gives federal regulators the power and responsibility to break up big banks when they pose a “grave risk” to the financial system – which is what we have here. CNBC’s Larry Kudlow calls it “the housing equivalent of the credit financial meltdown,” something he says could “go on forever.”

Financial analyst Marshall Auerback suggests calling a bank holiday. He writes:

Most major banks are insolvent and cannot (and should not) be saved. The best approach is something like a banking holiday for the largest 19 banks and shadow banks in which institutions are closed for a relatively brief period. Supervisors move in to assess problems. It is essential that all big banks be examined during the “holiday” to uncover claims on one another. It is highly likely that supervisors will find that several trillions of dollars of bad assets will turn out to be claims big financial institutions have on one another (that is exactly what was found when AIG was examined—which is why the government bail-out of AIG led to side payments to the big banks and shadow banks). . . . By taking over and resolving the biggest 19 banks and netting claims, the collateral damage in the form of losses for other banks and shadow banks will be relatively small.

What we need to avoid at all costs is “TARP II” – another bank bailout by the taxpayers. No bank is too big to fail. The giant banks can be broken up and replaced with a network of publicly-owned banks and community banks, which could do a substantially better job of serving consumers and businesses than Wall Street is doing now.

Ellen Brown is an attorney and the author of eleven books. In Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free, she shows how the Federal Reserve and "the money trust" have usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her websites are webofdebt.com, ellenbrown.com, and public-banking.com.

Saturday, October 09, 2010

World Economic Bombshell: China intervenes to support Greece and the euro

A Surprise Boost for Euro from China

By F. William Engdahl

October 6, 2010
I found the article here; apparently the original was published here.

Image

The embattled Euro has gotten a surprise boost from an unexpected quarter -- China. The country with the world's largest foreign exchange currency reserves, China, has pledged to support Greek debt as well as the Euro in what is clearly a geopolitical decision. In doing so, China has signaled it seeks to prevent the US financial warfare attack on Europe and to play the EU off against the USA in a geopolitical chess game of a fascinating dimension.

Chinese Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, on an unusual visit to tiny Greece, a country which normally would never warrant such a high-level visit from the world's fastest growing economic giant, has pledged support for Greece and for the Euro. According to the official Chinese Xinhua News Agency (and China Daily), "China supports Greece in firmly carrying out structural reforms and cutting its fiscal deficits to improve competitiveness. China welcomes the EU and the IMF's rescue package for Greece and stands ready to help Greece out of recession."

What it means concretely was made clear by Wen Jiabao at a press conference early October in Athens when he stated, "China is holding Greek bonds and will keep buying bonds that Greece issues. We will undertake to support eurozone countries and Greece to overcome the crisis." The last statement is by far the most significant. It indicates that China has made a strategic decision to counter any future attempt by US-based hedge funds and banks to attack the weak countries of the Eurozone, including Ireland, Spain, Portugal or Greece. Early this year, as we noted at the time, Wall Street banks such as Goldman Sachs, working in tandem with the US-based credit rating agencies, Standard & Poors and Moodys and Fitch, exploded the Greece financial crisis at the precise time China and other major investors were beginning to have serious doubts about the fiscal stability of the United States and of the dollar.

Let me be clear. The Euro as it stands, the supranational European Central Bank and the EU approach to international financial stability is not merely a flawed construct. It is inherently programmed to crises. It was born as the product of flawed rotten political compromises in te 1990's through the Treaty of Maastricht as an attempt by France and Italy and Britain to control an emerging German economic colossus after German unification.

However, the concerted attack by a group of New York hedge funds such as George Soros' and Paulson's earlier this year and the precisely timed credit downgrade of Greece to "junk" status were part of a concerted US strategy of financial warfare against that Eurozone, the only potential alternative to the dollar as world reserve currency. Should the US dollar lose its status as the world leading reserve currency -- today it still counts for some 65% of central bank currency reserves -- the United States would be ultimately doomed as world sole Superpower.

Now the surprise announcement by China of plans to support Greece and the euro give an unexpected boost to the embattled country and to the euro and expose the dollar even more to possible selloff.

Greece desperately needs foreign investment to help it meet terms of a 110 billion Euro bailout from eurozone members and the international monetary Fund that saved it this spring from state debt default. "I am convinced that with my visit to Greece our bilateral relations and cooperation in all spheres will be further developed," Wen said on his way to Brussels for an EU-China Summit.

Like most things that China does these days, it is part of a shrewd political calculation. Greece has agreed to support EU recognition of full market economy status for China within the EU, while China agrees to back Greece's call for UN mediation over Cyprus. The two countries will will cooperate on development as well of Piraeus Pier, upgrading it to a distributing and transfer center for Asian exports to Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea.

As if specially timed, US hedge fund speculator, George Soros, who is currently appealing a French court conviction for insider trading [1], has come out publicly blaming the German government of Angela Merkel for austerity measures he says will lead the Euro Zone into a "deflation spiral," demanding instead more of a US-style fiscal stimulus.

US financial warfare against euroland?

Notably, Soros has been one of the strongest voices against the Euro at a time when the world, at the end of 2009 was losing confidence in not the euro but the US dollar. On February 26, the Wall Street Journal reported details of a secret New York meeting involving billionaire hedge fund speculator George Soros of the $27 billion Soros Fund Management, along with SAC Capital Advisors LP, Greenlight Capital and undisclosed others. Accoording to the Journal report, they agreed on a concerted attack on the Euro, using the Greek financial crisis as the lever to make the attack credible. Earlier this year, speaking at the Davos World Economic Forum, the same Soros boosted the potential of the secretly planned collusion against the Euro, when he told press there was "no attractive alternative" to the dollar, a signal for a de facto attack on the Euro which was regarded six months ago as an alternative to the dollar as world reserve currency. He added that the Euro's "problems" made it an unviable substitute reserve currency.

Soros' anti-Euro remarks were followed by prominent New York economist Nouriel Roubini, who said that Europe's fiscal woes were creating "a rising risk" that its single-currency alliance will splinter. "Down the line, not this year or two years from now, we could have a breakup of the monetary union," Both Roubini and Soros are close to the Obama Administration. Soros was one of the first financial backers of Obama and Roubini is reported very close to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Following his hedge fund "chat" about the future of the euro, on Fenruary 22, Soros wrote an OpEd article in London's Financial Times, the world's most prominent financial daily in which he stated, "The survival of Greece would still leave the future of the euro in question."

The attack on Greece and the euro early this year also involved the most powerful players on Wall Street, the Gods of Money as I term them in my new book. The politically powerful Wall Street bank, Goldman Sachs, has been in the middle of the Greek financial manipulations since Greece entered the Euro in 2001. They were also involved in the January 2010 Greek crisis attack. On January 29, Goldman Sachs went with a number of top Wall Street firms to Greece where they met the Greek deputy finance minister and the National Bank of Greece. The Soros hedge fund attacks began several days after that.

According to the Wall Street Journal report, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and London's Barclays Bank joined Soros and the hedge funds, making bets against the Euro at the same time Goldman Sachs is acting as an advisor to the Papandreou government, which would appear to be a rather clear conflict of interest.

The US-based credit rating agencies, Moodys and Standard & Poors also played a critical role in weakening the Euro earlier this year. At the time the EU governments announced agreement in principle on a Greek bailout package in order to stabilize the speculative attacks on the euro, on April 27, Standard & Poors announced an unprecedented rating downgrade of Greek government debt by three-levels to "junk grade." That move insured that pension funds and other investors would be forced to panic sell Greek bonds, a move that greatly exacerbated the pressures on the Euro.

Asia Crisis and British Pound EMU crisis

The pattern of the hedge fund attacks on the Euro follows the financial warfare strategy carried out by select US hedge funds previously. In 1992, on what many market professionals believe must have been insider information, Soros claimed to have made $1 billion speculating against the British Pound Sterling and forcing the British government to abandon plans to bring Britain into the emerging Eurozone. Had Britain and the powerful financial resources of the City of London come into the new Eurozone, many in Wall Street and Washington privately feared that could spell the death knell for the dollar as world reserve currency. The fact that the dollar is world reserve currency has been one of two strategic props for American power in the world, the other being the Pentagon. Were the dollar to lose that, the future of the American Century, the sole superpower would be mortally in doubt.

Similarly, in May 1997, it was a concerted hedge fund attack again led by George Soros's Quantum Fund, joined by Moore Capital Management and Julian Robertson's Tiger Management Group and his Jaguar and Tiger funds, against the currencies of the Asian "Tiger" economies that turned Korea, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia. The wrecking of the Tiger economies in 1997-1998 turned those economies from self-sustaining dynamic economic growth, largely financially independent of US or IMF control, into de facto buyers of US Government debt as Asia tried to defend against future attacks. Like the Sterling crisis of 1992 the 1997-1998 Asia Crisis also served to give a few more years of life support to the fragile dollar.

Now, as the US depression deepens and the dimension of the banking problems worsens by the Day; the dollar's future is threatened as never before. To counter this, clearly the most powerful circles of Wall Street and the Treasury and Federal Reserve are magnifying the small Greek crisis into an exaggerated picture of "collapse of the EU" in hopes of ruining the Euro as a potential alternative to the dollar for foreign central banks. This is not to say that the Euro and the Maastricht Treaty are a model for a healthy alternative to the problems of the dollar region. Far from it. It is merely to identify the geopolitical power battle going on behind the scenes to keep the dollar Titanic from sinking. China has evidently decided to weigh in on that battle on the side of the euro.

By F. William Engdahl, Author of Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century and Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. His other books include Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation. and A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order.; Contact at www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net

[1] Marc Morano, Soros Conviction for Insider Trading Upheld in French Court, CSNNews.com, July 07, 2008.

Michael Collins: Lawless Nation, Part II of III

Lawless Nation - Congress

Submitted by Michael Collins on Thu, 2010-10-07 18:53 Congress

By Michael Collins
Part II of III (Part I)

WASHINGTON - Placed in office through legalized bribery, supported by public funding for their every need, protected against the laws that we're expected to obey, Congress represents the epitome of lawlessness; lawmakers who have no regard for the law. (Image)

Members of Congress are different. They get to retire at age 62 with lifetime pensions and health benefits. To qualify, they need just five years of service.   They get free phone, mail, and other communications plus paid domestic and foreign travel.

Supposedly, they're not allowed to take gifts but the list of exceptions offers plenty of room for luxurious appreciation.

The biggest gift of all - a six to seven figure job with a major corporation or lobbying firm right after retirement - is still fair game for any member. The revolving door never stops.

But supposedly Congress passes laws for the public benefit. They come to power based on contributions from their patrons, usually large donors. Then members resolutely deny that these contributions translate into legislation favorable to the donors. If pressed, members state that the contributions merely buy access not votes.

In fact, members routinely vote the interests of their largest patrons. Thus, the contributions are a form of legalized bribery ("a favor or promise given to influence the judgment or conduct of a person in a position of trust.").

The financial industry contributed hundreds of millions to current members. When Wall Street was about to fail in late 2008, they called in their markers and got an immediate bailout of $700 billion and "total potential Federal Government support (that) could reach up to $23.7 trillion" from the Federal Reserve and other government sources. This was in the midst of the 2008 federal election cycle when members solicited funds from the very people they bailed out.

Would this have happened without years of contributions by the financial industry?

What other incentives were involved that were not revealed?

The people face a health care crisis of epic proportions, losing insurance, under coverage for life threatening conditions. They have to delay or cease medication due to ever rising costs. Health care is unaffordable to many.

Congress addressed the problem much like they did the financial crisis. A bill was passed that left health insurance companies at the center of health care taking a handsome profit for doing little to nothing. Prior to passage of the health bill, the insurers raised rates shamelessly and did so again after the legislation was enacted, using the very health reform passed for the people to gouge the people for more money.

In the midst of total unemployment at about 20%, with the poverty on the rise, what has Congress done? The vast majority of citizens get little or no attention while those who cause the financial meltdown are handsomely rewarded. Members of Congress fret that they simply can't get the votes to help the people. But we know different.

It's planned failure that serves their wealthy donors. That's not a system of laws. It's an oligarchy with a strong dose of kleptocracy.

Congress routinely ignores the Constitution. Article I outlines "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress." Section 8 of the article lists this power: "To declare War." When presidents make war without congressional authorization, Congress passes legislation that negates its war making powers in order to legitimize the illegal act by the executive branch.

These wars are funded by Congress even when a war was found to be based on lies, as was the case in Iraq. Congress continues to fund the efforts claiming it is necessary to protect the troops. They fail to acknowledge that the absence of illegal wars harmful to the nation is the best troop protection available.

With the illegal wars underway, Congress passes legislation to address the problems created by the illegal wars in the name of national security. As they do this, the real issues of national security, the legal rights of citizens and the economic well being of the nation, are violated or ignored.

A key function of Congress is oversight and investigation. When the nation was attacked on 9/11, the hapless response by the executive branch was on full display. A 2002 House - Senate Joint Committee detailed the extensive government knowledge of the emerging plot over years without effective executive action to stop it.
Nothing came of the report. It is as though it never occurred.

When the 9/11 Commission was finally established, Congress allowed a former Bush administration insider to serve as the executive director and appointed co-chairmen who thought that the executive director was just fine. It came as no surprise when a thoroughly inadequate report was produced with key sections blacked out.

Illegal wars, the stripping of fundamental rights like habeas corpus, the declaration that presidents have the right to assassinate U.S. citizens by executive order, the rendering of charges without having to specify those charges were all ratified by Congress. It must be legal. Didn't Congress pass a law?

But they couldn't do this without the full cooperation of the judicial branch of government.   Surely, our Supreme Court and federal judiciary are the last bastion of the law that is to protect us all.

Even if that were the case, the sheer weight of executive and legislative lawlessness presents an overwhelming tide that is irresistible to those in power.   The seamless system of self-supporting lawlessness is an efficient structure denying citizen rights by mocking the laws of the nation.

END

See A Contract by Congress with Citizens of the United States

This article may be reproduced in part or in whole with attribution of authorship and a link to this article.

Friday, October 08, 2010

The Economic Collapse (The Web Site)

27 Signs That The Standard Of Living For America’s Middle Class Is Dropping Like A Rock

Go here for original

If you still have a job and you can put food on the table and you still have a warm house to come home to, then you should consider yourself to be very fortunate. The truth is that every single month hundreds of thousands more Americans fall out of the middle class and into poverty. The statistics that you are about to read are incredibly sobering. Household incomes are down from coast to coast. Enrollment in government anti-poverty programs sets new records month after month after month. Home ownership is down, personal bankruptcies are way up and there are not nearly enough jobs to go around. Meanwhile, the price of basics such as food and health care continue to skyrocket. Don't be fooled by a rising stock market or by record bonuses on Wall Street. The U.S. economy is not getting better. After World War II, the great American economic machine built the largest and most vigorous middle class in the history of the world, but now America's middle class is disintegrating at a blinding pace.

Most of those who write about the plight of the American middle class believe that things can be turned around and that the middle class will eventually be stronger than it ever has been. But unfortunately, that is just not the case. As a society, we have lived far, far beyond our means for decades. Now the bills are coming due and none of our leaders seem to know what to do.

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy is being rapidly assimilated into the emerging one world economy. Middle class American workers now find themselves in direct competition for jobs with the cheapest labor on the other side of the globe. Of course many multinational corporations have taken advantage of this by moving factories and jobs to countries like China where blue collar workers make about a dollar an hour. This has helped raise the standard of living for workers in those nations by a nominal amount, but it has been absolutely devastating for the standard of living of America's middle class.

So what does all of this mean?

It means that the U.S. economy is headed for collapse and middle class Americans are in for some really, really hard times.

The following are 27 signs that the standard of living for America's middle class is dropping like a rock....

#1 Household spending for the middle fifth of all U.S. income earners was down 3.5% in 2009. That was the steepest one year decline since records began being kept back in 1984.

#2 Median household income in the United States fell from $51,726 in 2008 to $50,221 in 2009.

#3 According to one new report, in 2009 residents of New York state experienced their first full-year decline in income in more than 70 years.

#4 Of the 52 largest metro areas in the United States, only the city of San Antonio did not see a decline in median household income in 2009.

#5 Home ownership in the United States declined for the third year in a row in 2009.

#6 In 2009, approximately 4 million Americans fell out of the middle class and now live below the federal poverty line.

#7 The number of Americans enrolled in the food stamp program has set a new all-time record for 20 consecutive months.

#8 In July (the last month for which data is available), 41.8 million Americans were on food stamps.

#9 The number of Americans in the food stamp program skyrocketed more than 55 percent between December 2007 and July 2010.

#10 In 2009, more than 48 million Americans were enrolled in the Medicaid program.

#11 One out of every six Americans is now enrolled in at least one anti-poverty program run by the U.S. government.

#12 According to one recent study, approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010.

#13 According to the Cato Institute, anti-poverty spending by the U.S. government has increased 89 percent over the past decade.

#14 The cost of health care increased a staggering 9.6% for all U.S. households from 2007 to 2009.

#15 It turns out that only the top 5 percent of all U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.

#16 35 percent of all U.S. households now live on $35,000 or less.

#17 New York state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli says that Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.

#18 According to a poll taken in 2009, 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck. That was up substantially from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.

#19 Today, 28% of all American households have at least one member that is searching for a full-time job.

#20 Nearly 10 million Americans now receive unemployment insurance, which is almost four times as many that were receiving it back in 2007.

#21 A recent Pew Research survey found that 55 percent of the U.S. labor force has experienced either unemployment, a pay decrease, a reduction in hours or an involuntary move to part-time work since the recession began.

#22 In 2009, 43.6 million Americans were living in poverty. Sadly, the number of Americans living in poverty has increased for three consecutive years, and the 43.6 million poor Americans in 2009 was the highest number that the U.S. Census Bureau has ever recorded in 51 years of record-keeping.

#23 A staggering 25 percent of all American adults now have a credit score below 599.

#24 It is estimated that nearly a third of all Americans cannot qualify for a mortgage because of low credit scores.

#25 For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all American households put together.

#26 Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a stunning 32 percent increase over 2008.

#27 According to a new report by the U.S. Census Bureau, the bottom fifth of all U.S. income earners brought in just 3.4 percent of all income in 2009 while the top fifth brought in a whopping 49.4 percent of all income.

So is there any hope that things will turn around soon?

No, not really.

At this point, even some of the top economic authorities in the nation are admitting that we are headed for very difficult times.

Goldman Sachs recently announced that the U.S. economy is likely to be either "fairly bad" or "very bad" over the next 6 to 9 months.

Not only that, but Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke now says that the U.S. economy is in a situation that is dire and "unsustainable".

Not that Goldman Sachs or Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke should be trusted when it comes to the economy.

When it comes to the problems we are facing, the truth can be found in the long-term trends. If you have not done so already, please read "11 Long-Term Trends That Are Absolutely Destroying The U.S. Economy". It will open your eyes to the true horrors that our economy is now facing.

But statistics alone do not tell the real story.

Sometimes what gets lost in the endless economic statistics is the very real pain of the millions of Americans who are trying to live through this. The following story from the Unemployed Friends website is from a woman named Leetah who is desperately hoping to be able to get through this upcoming winter....

The place I live in right now has no jobs and no places to live. My fiance, Lloyd, and I have been looking for anything but he lost his job from McDonald's and the factories (the only jobs to make a living off of) consider him an insurance liability. I can't get hired to a factory because of I was fired from our major factory for attendance (I had to miss 3 days of work because I was sick). So we are moving to the Edmond/OKC region where we are hoping to find a job and a place with running water and heating. We've spent the last few years without heat and running water and so having a place with water and heat would be heaven.

Winter is coming up fast and I am so afraid. Last winter we almost died from the cold and now the thought of cold makes my throat close up and my heart pound. But it isn't just ourselves we are looking out for, we have our dog too. Our wonderful APBT Maggie who is 2-years-old and has been with us since she was 5-months-old. She's our baby girl and we can't lose her. We almost lost her to the cold too and it scared me so much. We are going to be living in our car soon with our dog.

I am hoping to be able to keep our food stamps in the new city so we can still eat. I have already applied for ten+ jobs and nothing yet but I am keeping my hopes up. Hopefully it will get easier to find a job once we get there. Then we just have to save up and then we can afford an apartment. Now finding an apartment with my awesome dog is another story.

Please say a prayer for those who are out of work and on the verge of being forced out on the street.

You never know, you might be next.

Thursday, October 07, 2010

Since 2004, the Presidential Election Exit Polls have been readjusted at the end of day, forcing them to match the "official" results. However, these polls also gathered demographic information (in order to remain statistically "fair and balanced"). But these demographic numbers are unavoidably readjusted in the end-of-the-day forcing process -- leading to some stunning inferences. Do you agree with them?

Proof that Obama Won by Much More than 9.5 Million Recorded Votes

Richard Charnin (TruthIsAll)
October 7, 2010

Go here for the True Vote Analysis:
http://richardcharnin.com/ObamaProof.htm

In 2004, Bush won the recorded vote by 62-59 million.

It is a standard operating procedure for exit pollsters to force the final exit poll to match the recorded vote.
Do you agree that the Final 2004 National Exit Poll was forced to match the recorded vote?
Yes.

Bush had 50.46 million recorded votes in 2000. Approximately 2.5 million Bush voters died and 2 million did not return to vote in 2004. Therefore, there could not have been more than 46 million returning Bush voters.
Do you agree?
Yes.

But the Final 2004 NEP indicates that 52.6 million Bush voters returned in 2004.
That means there were 6.6 million phantom returning Bush voters. That is an impossible 110% turnout of living 2000 Bush voters.
Do you agree?
Yes.

Blogger's note: The National Election Pool (NEP) is a consortium of American news organizations formed in 2003 to provide "information on Election Night about the vote count, election analysis and election projections." See Wikipedia.

Did you ever hear or read about this anomaly in the mainstream media?
No.

OK, now let’s move on to 2008. Obama won by 9.5 million recorded votes.

Do you agree that the Final 2008 NEP was forced to match the recorded vote?
Yes.

Then you must believe the Final NEP Obama and McCain shares of returning and new voters.
Yes.

The Final indicates that there were 12 million more returning Bush than Kerry voters. But that is not plausible (Bush had a 22% approval rating on Election Day 2008).
Do you agree?
Yes, I agree that 12 million is not plausible - but it is possible.

The Final 2008 NEP indicates a 103% turnout of living 2004 Bush voters.
That is impossible, right?
Yes.

Therefore the Final 2008 NEP returning Bush 46% weighting must be incorrect, right?
Yes.

The Final 2008 NEP also indicates 5.25 million returning third-party voters (4% of the electorate). But there were only 1.2 million recorded third-party votes in 2004.
Therefore the Final 2008 NEP returning third-party 5% weighting must be incorrect, right?
Yes.

Correcting to feasible returning voter percentage weights should show that Obama won by more than 9.5 million votes, right?
Yes.

Ok, let’s assume that in 2008, Bush, Kerry and third-party voters turned out in equal proportion to their 2004 recorded vote. That is a plausible if there was zero fraud in 2004 (i.e. the recorded vote was equal to the True Vote).
Do you agree?
Yes.

Assuming proportional returning voter turnout, Obama won by 14.7 million votes.

But virtually all election analysts have concluded that the 2004 election was stolen. Kerry won the unadjusted state exit poll aggregate by 52-47%.

If Kerry won the election by 52-47%, then Obama won by 22 million votes. But the True Vote Model indicates that Kerry won by 53.5-45.1%, a 10.5 million vote margin.

If Kerry won by 53.5 - 45.1%, then Obama won the True Vote by 22.9 million.

The True Vote calculations used the same Final 2008 National Exit Poll vote shares that were forced to match the recorded vote. So there can be no argument there.

The 103% turnout of living 2004 Bush voters as indicated in the Final 2008 NEP was impossible. So there can be no argument there.

The 5.25 million returning 2004 third-party voters as indicated in the Final 2008 NEP was impossible. So there can be no argument there.

Impossible 2004 (110%) and 2008 (103%) returning voter turnout ratios were replaced by feasible 98% and 97% turnout. So there can be no argument there.

Q.E.D.

It Seems that Those Who "Let It Happen" Will Never Be Prosecuted

Could U.S. Officials Be Charged for Causing the Financial Crisis?

No. It's not against the law for politicians to screw up.

BY JOSHUA E. KEATING | SEPTEMBER 30, 2010

Iceland's parliament voted this week to refer former Prime Minister Geir Haarde to a special court where he may face charges of criminal negligence during the collapse of the country's financial sector, which left taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars in debt. According to a government investigation, Haarde's administration missed a number of specific opportunities in 2008 to limit the damage of the impending banking meltdown to the greater Icelandic economy. If convicted, Haarde could potentially face up to two years in jail. Could U.S. officials ever face charges for the market crash and the ensuing recession?

No. Even if it could be proved that regulatory decisions or lax oversight in the run-up to the crash directly contributed to the chaos that followed, former President George W. Bush, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, and other officials probably don't have much to worry about. The century-old Icelandic law under which Haarde might be charged -- which has never before been invoked -- stipulates that ministers can be held responsible not just for actions that put the country in danger, but for not taking action to prevent that danger. There's simply no equivalent crime in the United States -- officials can't be held legally responsible for simply doing a bad job.

They're probably safe from civil lawsuits as well. Under U.S. law, government officials are granted immunity for actions conducted during the course of their duties, unless they knowingly violate "clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known." So unless U.S. regulators were purposely colluding with companies to defraud investors, they can't be held responsible.

That might change, however. The doctrine of official immunity is being challenged by convicted terrorist Jose Padilla's lawsuit against former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo. Padilla has accused Yoo of violating his constitutional rights by writing a memo when at the Office of Legal Counsel arguing that the U.S. citizen be classified as an enemy combatant and writing others arguing that these combatants could be subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques." Over the Obama administration's objections, a California judge denied Yoo's request to have the suit thrown out on the basis of official immunity. The motion has been appealed, but in order for Padilla to receive damages, he will have to prove that not only did Yoo give bad legal advice, but that he knowingly or incompetently overlooked constitutional rights that no one could possibly dispute -- a tough standard to meet.

The private ratings agencies and investment banks involved in the subprime mortgage crisis don't have quite the same legal protections as government officials and are fighting suits from state and federal regulators.
Iceland's law is pretty unique, but countries under the Westminster system -- those based on the British parliament -- traditionally operate under a principle of "ministerial responsibility." This holds that ministers are responsible for the actions of the personnel in their ministry and are expected to resign in cases of gross incompetence or face charges for criminal actions, even if they weren't directly involved in the deed. In practice, this is almost never enforced anymore.

So while Iceland may have started a trend as the first government to collapse because of the financial crisis, we probably won't be seeing more heads of state following Haarde into the dock.

Thanks to Peter Schuck, professor emeritus at Yale Law School, Zephyr Teachout, associate professor at the Fordham University School of Law, and Scott Nelson, attorney at Public Citizen.