President Obama has responded to my September 5, 2012, challenge. I joined Senator Bernie Sanders and 215 million Americans asking that he reiterate the strong position he took on Social Security four years ago in a speech to the AARP. Senator Sanders noted, “Social Security has not contributed one nickel to our deficit or our national debt. It has a $2.7 trillion surplus. It will be able to pay 100 percent of promised benefits to every eligible recipient for the next 21 years, just as it has done for the past 77 years.”
Thank you, Mr. President, for reaffirming your commitment to Social Security. In addition, I applaud your proposal to strengthen retirement options for working Americans by providing workplace IRAs with “opt out” for employees not wishing to participate.
September 25, 2012
Dear David:
Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me. I have heard from many Americans who are worried about the future of their retirement savings, and I appreciate your perspective.
Retiring with dignity is a promise we must keep to all Americans, and I am working hard to strengthen our retirement system. That is why I am committed to protecting Social Security and addressing Americans’ concerns. Social Security cannot be subjected to risky privatization plans because the future of hard-working Americans should not be left to the fluctuations of financial markets.
To better secure their retirement and prepare for unforeseen circumstances, Americans must also save for their future in other ways. We are laying the foundation for all individuals to participate in workplace retirement accounts. Employees would be automatically enrolled in pension plans and could opt out if they choose. Simple and automatic enrollment makes it easier for people to plan for retirement. This would assist the 75 million working Americans—about half the workforce—who lack access to retirement plans through their employers. Please join me online to learn more at www.WhiteHouse.gov/Issues/Seniors-And-Social-Security.
Thank you, again, for writing.
Sincerely,
Barack Obama
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Ignorance is a choice: Money is power—Knowledge is more powerful.
What can you do—you are only one person? True, but you are only “six degrees of separation,” on average, from any other person on Earth. You become powerful when you share information with your friends and ask them to share it with their friends—it becomes a global revolution. As Stephen King suggests in The Long Walk, when these “society-supported sociopaths” come, step aside, and find the strength to run…
In the television version of The Dirty Dozen – The Deadly Mission, Major Wright learns of a Nazi plot to attack Washington, D.C. using long-range missiles armed with deadly nerve gas. He leads twelve convicts on a mission to destroy the factory in France where the nerve gas is made and to rescue six scientists who are being forced to produce it.
Our version of The Dirty Dozen is even more sinister. ARII’s Dirty Dozen are not convicts turned heroes to save America. They are agents—bought by global money interests—from the three branches of American government. Rather than being villain turned hero, they are congressmen, Supreme Court justices, and presidents gone rogue. How have they defrauded us?
We’ll start with President Lyndon Baines Johnson:
Wanted
For Grand Theft
Lyndon Baines Johnson
Accomplices: Richard Milhous Nixon, Gerald Rudolph Ford, James Earl Carter Jr., Ronald Wilson Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, William Jefferson Clinton, George Walker Bush, Barack Hussein Obama II
REWARD
of
More than $10.5 billion
For the Conviction of Lyndon Baines Johnson and Accomplices.
In 1968 President Lyndon Baines Johnson robbed the Social Security Trust Fund and all other trust funds to pay for the Vietnam War and the Great Society—transforming a deficit of somewhere between $2.1 billion and $8.1 billion into a surplus of a cool $4.5 billion to $10.5 billion. The accomplices have continued the grand theft to pay for wars, social programs, tax cuts, and to make their administrations appear fiscally sound. George Walker Bush openly talked about this theft: “Some in our country think that Social Security is a trust fund—in other words, there’s a pile of money being accumulated. That’s just simply not true. The money—payroll taxes going into the Social Security are spent. They’re spent on benefits and they’re spent on government programs. There is no trust fund.” All of America’s trust funds have been—and are still being—pilfered.
Given under my Hand in the Country of America, this twenty-fourth day of August, A.D. 2012.
Ann Ameri Can
In an open letter dated August 8, 2012, I challenged President Obama to “level with the American people and vow to reverse this monumental ‘rip off.’” I told him, “You can warn Congress in your next State of the Union Address that you will veto any budget coming to you from Congress which includes Social Security or Post Office funds. That would be ‘change we can believe in.’”
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Ignorance is a choice: Money is power—Knowledge is more powerful.
What can you do—you are only one person? True, but you are only “six degrees of separation,” on average, from any other person on Earth. You become powerful when you share information with your friends and ask them to share it with their friends—it becomes a global revolution. As Stephen King suggests in The Long Walk, when these “society-supported sociopaths” come, step aside, and find the strength to run…
Continuing with our comparison of a gambler versus a banker, there is a crucial distinction: a gambler uses his own money—a banker gambles with your money. In the Old West if a gambler were caught out in cold-blooded fraud of the everyday garden variety routinely practiced by some of our biggest banks, he’d first be shot through the heart and then dragged through the street behind a horse until there was nothing left of him.
In those days “regulation” consisted of a shot through the heart. In these more civilized times, our regulations are written by Congress. Modern day legislation arose in the wake of the stock market crash and the ensuing failure of many banks during The Great Depression. The Glass-Steagall Act made a distinction between commercial and investment banks, acting on the perception that unregulated bank investment in the stock market was one of the causes of the crisis.
In the years that followed, the financial community increasingly found fault with Glass-Steagall. It limited banking profits, and came to be considered an overreaction to the problems of the 1930s. “Consequently, to the delight of many in the banking industry (not everyone, however, was happy), in November of 1999 Congress repealed the GSA with the establishment of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which eliminated the GSA restrictions against affiliations between commercial and investment banks. Furthermore, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act allows banking institutions to provide a broader range of services, including underwriting and other dealing activities.”
Fast forward to the banking crisis of 2008 and the stubborn recession/depression that followed. Twenty-five U. S. banks failed during that year. J. P. Morgan picked up the wreckage of Washington Mutual, making itself the largest bank in the U. S., ahead of Bank of America. Later it “rescued” Bear Stearns, while Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch.
The survivors, now unmistakably “too big to fail,” had not, at the same time, become better servants of the American people. Speaking of Bank of America, Matt Taibbi writes: “All the government bailouts succeeded in doing was to make the bank even more prone to catastrophic failure – and now that catastrophe might finally be at hand. Bank of America’s share price has plunged into the single digits, and the bank faces battles in courtrooms all over America to avoid paying back the hundreds of billions it stole from everyone in sight. Its credit rating, already downgraded to a few rungs above junk status, could plummet with the next bad analyst report, causing a frenzied rush to the exits by creditors, investors and stockholders – an institutional run on the bank.”
Suddenly it was inescapable—our bankers were greedy bastards, incapable of acting in the best interests of their clients. They had no more restraint than an habitué on a roll at Vegas. Since they couldn’t control themselves, maybe some regulations were called for. Out of the Democratically-controlled Congress in 2010 came the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act.
This is how Matt Taibbi describes the outcome in his Rolling Stone piece, How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform. “At 2,300 pages, the new law ostensibly rewrote the rules for Wall Street. It was going to put an end to predatory lending in the mortgage markets, crack down on hidden fees and penalties in credit contracts, and create a powerful new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to safeguard ordinary consumers. Big banks would be banned from gambling with taxpayer money, and a new set of rules would limit speculators from making the kind of crazy-ass bets that cause wild spikes in the price of food and energy. There would be no more AIGs, and the world would never again face a financial apocalypse when a bank like Lehman Brothers went bankrupt.”
As in Taibbi’s companion article, Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail, he documents how, while the congratulations were still flowing, forces were already at work to strip the legislation of the very elements that made it necessary in the first place. “The giant reform bill turned out to be like the fish reeled in by Hemingway’s Old Man – no sooner caught than set upon by sharks that strip it to nothing long before it ever reaches the shore. In a furious below-the-radar effort at gutting the law – roundly despised by Washington’s Wall Street paymasters – a troop of water-carrying Eric Cantor Republicans are speeding nine separate bills through the House, all designed to roll back the few genuinely toothy portions left in Dodd-Frank. With the Quislingian covert assistance of Democrats, both in Congress and in the White House, those bills could pass through the House and the Senate with little or no debate, with simple floor votes – by a process usually reserved for things like the renaming of post offices or a nonbinding resolution celebrating Amelia Earhart’s birthday.”
Taibbi’s disturbing account leaves little to the imagination. He presents five “strategies” banks skillfully use to circumvent or destroy the consumer protections in the bill. These strategies are carried out by lobbyists in the financial services industry, by legislators themselves (in the pay of the big banks), or even, incredibly enough, by appointees of the very administration that supported the bill. The scene is reminiscent of Julius Caesar, who, on his way to the forum, is set upon by friends and enemies alike who stab him to death for a supposedly higher purpose. The result of these attacks on Dodd-Frank is just as bloody and just as harmful to the cause of the people.
By design, very little of this destructive activity ever comes before the public eye. Banking regulations are not easy reading, and they probably require a lawyer’s training to understand them. But the results are already being felt, and they will only increase. If you care about your financial well-being and want to protect your credit, investments, and savings from the Gordon Geckos of the world, learn how to fight back! We’ll deal with that in Part 3 of The Gambler.
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What can you do—you are only one person? True, but you are only “six degrees of separation,” on average, from any other person on Earth. You become powerful when you share information with your friends and ask them to share it with their friends—it becomes a global revolution. As Stephen King suggests in The Long Walk, when these “society-supported sociopaths” come, step aside, and find the strength to run…
