OpenGov - Open Government Brainstorm

If the government had been doing its job, it would never have allowed corporations to be "too big to fail," requiring the taxpayers to foot the bill for mistakes they made in order to get filthy rich.

If these corporations had not been so big, maybe they would have failed before they ever had the power to create the mass mentality that led so many to act in ways that were so stupid and so risky. Maybe those pursuing a saner strategy would be left standing now, and we'd have avoided having been taken to the cleaners for their mistakes.

Despite the rhetoric, the original anti-trust law was not about breaking up monopolies. It was a war between J. P. Morgan interests and Rockefeller interests.

Do you really want more corporate control over government? Anti-trust laws will not be written the way you imagine they will be. Lobbyists will ensure that they serve the interests of their clients, and the public be damned.

Want to see the surplus money the US government and all states, local governments have? http://CAFR1.com and http://TaxRetirement.com

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The collapse of the American economy event list:

1) Congress & Clinton: Passage of S. 900 [106th]: Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which gutted the Banking Act of 1933 (Glass-Stegall Act). This legislation allows banks to buy, sell, and create securities.

2) Congress & Bush: Passage of H.R. 4541: Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which legalized credit-default swaps (CDS) and made derivatives legal. A derivative is a form of financial gambling upon assets that are not owned by the better and those bets can also be hedged, which is likened to buying insurance on your bet. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) never had jurisdiction to moderate or regulate derivative betting, at least during Bush Jr. Administration. Derivative betting quickly became larger than the combined economies of the entire world.

3) Bush Jr. and Secret Societies: The false flag operation called 9/11. Pentagon losses $2 trillion dollars, the records of which are located in the twin towers. The owner of the twin towers would have had to spent millions of dollars to remove asbestoses and had filed multiple requests to demo the twin towers; requests where denied. Bush Jr. admits prior to 9/11 that he wanted to be a war time president. Days after 9/11 a video tape shows an actor posing as Ben Laden, taking credit for the 9/11 attack, it becomes the slim evidence to linking the Taliban in Afghanistan. (The evidence that 9/11 was an inside job is more overwhelming than the evidence it was not. Please take the time to research it yourself.)

4) Bush Jr., Congress, and Supreme Court: The rise of the terrorism tactic to demonize a group of humanity that never attacked the United States, aka. Taliban. United States attacks a sovereign country without permission of the United Nations in direct violation of a signed treaty; this action is in direct violation of the constitution of the United States. The Supreme Court did not uphold the constitution. The United States and Afghanistan war starts October 7th, 2001. Then on May 1, 2003, Bush Jr. declares war on Iraq because they had weapons of mass destruction (lie), to end Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism (lie), and to free the Iraqi people (their system of government kept the religious fanatics in line with fear of a central power). The real reason to invade Iraq was resources (oil), war profiteers (Halliburton, ete.), military defense industry inventory turnover (stimulate the war economy), Bush Jr. will to be a famous war time president and fulfill what daddy started. Whenever in doubt, always follow the money.

5) Bush Jr. and Congress: War Funding - During Bush Jr. two terms, programs were cut or defunded to pay for the war. Much of the war was funded by debt. The fear here is that if taxes were raised to pay for the war in the time it was fought then the people would take more notice of it and complain. To compound the debt and to keep party members complacent, multiple tax breaks for the rich were enacted during a period of two wars.

6) Economy: Stock market crash of October 6, 2008. On October 3, 2008 the DJIA was 10,325, to October 6, the DJIA lost 330 points to 9,995. The DJIA lowest point was on March 6, 2009, at 6,626. Presently, dark pools and insider trading is artificially pumping up the valuation of the DJIA to its present valuation, June 5, 2009, of 8,763. Dark Pool and Insider trading Link: http://www.marketskeptics.com/2009/06/dark-pools-and-insider-trading-growing.html

7) Wall Street Bailout: Hundreds of U.S. banks get bailout money, the big ones are Wells Fargo $25 billion, State Street Corp. $2 billion, Bank of America $25 billion, JPMorgan Chase $25 billion, Citigroup $25 billion, Morgan Stanley $10 billion, Goldman Sachs $10 billion, Bank of New York Mellon $3 billion, Regions Financial $3.5 billion, Sun Trust Banks $3.5 billion, US Bancorp $6.6 billion, BB&T $3.1 billion, American Express $3.4 billion, just to name a few. For the full list visit: http://money.cnn.com/news/specials/storysupplement/bankbailout Banker bailout money to institutions, whose practices would have been considered fraudulent, prior to 1999, is the direct sacking of the U.S. treasury and dilution of the money pool. For those hard working Americans, this means your wages buy less and less as inflation rises.

8) Bush Jr. & Congress: Governments laissez-faire deregulation policies has opened the financial door to creative mortgage industry where predatory lenders seek out marginally acceptable loan applicants to fill collateralized-debt obligation (CDO) with loan assets of marginal worth. Add a little insurance on the CDO, in case the asset defaults, and sell to the world market with triple AAA credit rating. Most of the creative loans contained scheduled rate increases around 2009. The system was set up to bust.

9) United States Economy Erodes then Collapses: The recession began officially in December 2007 and continues to this day. As of June, the national average of unemployment is 9.4%. Unemployment determination does not count those people who have run out of unemployment benefits, lost hope of finding a job, or underemployed. The actual figure is nearer to 20% national average. The economy is determined to be in a depression once unemployment figures reach 10% or more.

10) Government bond market collapse: Foreign nationals had started to reduce the purchasing of U.S. long term bond securities in January 2009 to present. On March 23, 2009, Federal Reserve Bank announces that it is now going to monetize the U.S. debt by committing to buy up to $300 billion in long-term Treasuries over the next six months. The Fed also said it would buy up to an additional $750 billion in agency mortgage backed securities, adding to an existing program to buy $500 billion of agency Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS). It will also double the size of its purchase program for Government Sponsored Enterprise (GSE) debt to $200 billion from $100 billion. Each time the Federal Reserve Bank purchases a junk of the securities, all markets jump in prices as large infusions of unbacked digital currency is created, aka inflation. It is now widely recognized that the bond rating for U.S. securities will be downgraded from AAA to AA, soon.

11) Complete Collapse of the US Dollar: Very few are questioning if this will happen, but when.

Kdtroxel, you are certainly correct about the collapse of the dollar. However, some of the implications don't follow.

Repealing Glass-Stegall permitted banks to engage in both investment and commercial banking. Those that failed are those that didn't take advantage of it. Those that did had more stabilizing business venues.

One could make the case that this covered up the problem some. But that is not the crux of the issue.

The real heart is a dollar backed by nothing but future tax confiscations. The origin predates Glsss-Stegall (1933) by a couple decades. It became a serious problem after Nixon abrogated Bretton Woods.

There is now no connection at all between the dollar and reality. Hence the currency is easy to game. Government has been complicit in gaming it.

It's tempting to think that more regulation will solve things. But despite increasing bureaucratic budgets, there is no evidence that it works as advertised. Rather, regulators tend to develop cozy relationships with those they're charged with regulating. When problems occur everyone gets upset, then they enact more regulation doomed to failure.

Look at the revolving door. Geithner came from one of the problem corporations, as did Paulson. And numerous other government officials. Do you really expect solutions from guys who helped cause the problems?

We need what the Constitution demands: sound currency, which is democratic currency. Not this FRN crap.

Boring banking was safe banking. Allowing banks to create and trade securities allows them to defraud the people by gambling with their money. We are repeating depression era history because congress wanted to make banking exciting. In congress defense, how could they resist $5 billion dollar lobby effort to make banking fun for everyone. If you want the real none abridged history of what happened to the banks in a real format simply click the following links:

“The Big Takeover” by Matt Taibbi Link: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/22-6

“Geithner’s Dirty Little Secret” By F. William Engdahl Link: http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/Financial_Tsunami/Geithner_Secret/geithner_secret.html

Please post any links or articles that may be pertinent to the banker bailouts. After reading these two links, you will be able to see how “hinesda” argument that repealing Glass-Stegall was not a good thing. @hinesda go back to your board room, we are not buying your bunk anymore.

My board room would be the place in my basement where I store unused lumber.

I did not say that repealing Glass-Stegall was a good thing. I said that you are not dealing with the crux of the issue.

If you read between the lines of your own links, you'd see that Goldman Sachs guys are in charge of "saving" the economy, regardless of the administration in power. Goldman Sachs was an inventor of the CDOs. Do you really believe that giving those guys government paychecks and calling them "regulators" and "Secretaries" gives them haloes?!

I'd agree with your assessment that boring banking is good banking. Well put. But with a government hoping to borrow its way to prosperity and inflate away the debt, boring banking is not in the cards.

Ron Paul has it right: Audit the Fed. That's the most "creative" and unaccountable bank in existence.

With Passage of S. 900 [106th]: Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, being still intact, bankers can still buy, sell, and create securities. The banker bailout money can be used to artificially prop up DJIA and NASDAQ stock exchanges. The people see that the current stabilization of the markets as an opportunity to reinvest. Then the bankers pull out the money and clean up on the suckers. This boom and bust cycle is what Glass-Stegall Act of 1933 was created to prevent. Whenever there is a centralization of money and the freedom to gamble is allowed, it will occur.

An article I found recently hints as to this happening now; link: http://www.marketskeptics.com/2009/06/dark-pools-and-insider-trading-growing.html

You're correct that the centralization of money is the source of the problem. But Glass-Stegall is only tweaking around the edges of the problem. Some Democrat hooked on this as the cruz of the issue so he didn't have to face up to the real problem, and people have been running with it ever since.

The real problem is the Federal Reserve. Even now it is monetarizing the debt, which shall penalize thoe poorest and those on fixed incomes.

Bernanke has created a mountain of money. It's still sitting at high altitudes -- at the big banks. When it comes tumbling down, infation shall bury us. Bernanke believes that he can hold back the avalanche by standing in front of it and yelling "Whoa!" This is the same guy who was saying everything was fine a couple months before he said the government needed billions to prevent the system from crashing.

You'd trust a regulator, probably appointed from Goldman Sachs, rather than sound currency? Democratic money enforces its own disciplines; government regulators butter their own bread.

Investing in stocks these days is very risky, as you say. Not only are the banksters ready to manipulate, so is the government. It has the Plunge Protection Team, a group designed to interfere in the market in order to build false optimism.

I am all for taking the power to print currency away from the Federal Reserve Bank and giving it back to our government where our founders originally intended it to be. We need to print a value backed national currency, based upon metal or equity, something tangible that we own. States are starting to take up fractional banking practices; this will grow the money supply even faster, inflating our currency to where it buys less and less on a daily basis.