Banker Jekyll Will Hyde Your Money - 10

Mr. America is The Wizard of Oz

This series began in August of 2009 with regular posts following that initial post, lasting until the previous post of November 2011.

Regular readers know that during this series Dredd Blog has made very serious allegations along the way.

Along with those allegations were appropriate links to documentation that backed up the allegations, as well as abundant documentation which pointed out that large scale plunder was taking place out in the open before our very eyes.

The only cover given by officialdom was lying through their teeth while McTell News was doing their "fiscal financial cliff" catastrophe propaganda.

In other words, Dredd Blog pointed out for years that they deliberately stole hundreds of billions of dollars from the U.S. Treasury and transferred the people's money to the criminals who had caused the financial crisis in the first place.

A recent piece in Rolling Stone backs up the Dredd Blog series:

The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come ...

"We will take good care of it"

It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you'd think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we've been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?

Wrong.

It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people...

"put your arms around him you can feel his disease" - Beatles

The sweeping impact of these crucial decisions has never been fully appreciated. In the years preceding the bailouts, banks like Citi had been perpetuating a kind of fraud upon the public by pretending to be far healthier than they really were. In some cases, the fraud was outright, as in the case of Lehman Brothers, which was using an arcane accounting trick to book tens of billions of loans as revenues each quarter, making it look like it had more cash than it really did. In other cases, the fraud was more indirect, as in the case of Citi, which in 2007 paid out the third-highest dividend in America – $10.7 billion – despite the fact that it had lost $9.8 billion in the fourth quarter of that year alone. The whole financial sector, in fact, had taken on Ponzi-like characteristics, as many banks were hugely dependent on a continual influx of new money from things like sales of subprime mortgages to cover up massive future liabilities from toxic investments that, sooner or later, were going to come to the surface.

(Rolling Stone, Secret and Lies of the Bailout, by Taibbi). The Taibbi piece is well worth the read.

Along the way in that series as well as other Dredd Blog posts that were linked to, the origin of the errors was pointed out by quoting the words of one of our forefathers:

James Madison was the 4th President, Bill of Rights author, Congressman, Cabinet Member, and was also called the "Father of the U.S. Constitution".

He voiced a conspiracy theory in 1795:

In war, the public treasuries are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them.

In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle.

The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.

(Toxins of Power Blog, emphasis added). The above quote is from his "Political Observations," April 20, 1795, in Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, Volume IV, page 491.

(Founding Fathers' Conspiracy Theories). Indeed, the plunder took place at a time when we had been lied into wars, then those wars were perpetuated by more and more lies.

Those lies emanated, as Madison indicated long ago, from the executive branch, the Office of the President, all in conspiracy against the people.

Some subsequent series (see e.g. The Homeland: Big Brother Plutonomy and MOMCOM: The Private Parts) pointed out that these banks are tips of the iceberg of an international web of international corporations that are not at all shy about saying "I am not an American company."

Likewise, they sure are not shy about the fact that they like to plunder the money of the American people.

Two books have recently been written about these people (see e.g. On The Origin of Assholes).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.