The scheme to seize depositors' money

What will Congress do?

Recently, the heads of state of the G20, the developed nations, met in Brisbane, Australia. One piece of business was the advancement of new banking rules that will allow what were called the Too Big to Fail Banks, and are now called Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs) to seize depositors money to save themselves in the next crash.

The scheme has been orchestrated by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the Financial Stability Board (created by the BIS) and the usual crowd of central bank bureaucrats in the banksters’ international cartel.

The official report from the meeting does not, of course, say that in the next crash deposits will be confiscated. The scheme is only alluded to in the official statement by the citation of a report from the FSB, titled Adequacy of Loss-Absorbing Capacity of Global Systemically Important Banks in Resolution.

The summary provided on the G20 web site states that G-SIBs “must have sufficient loss absorbing and recapitalization capacity available in resolution to implement an orderly resolution that minimizes any impact on financial stability, ensures the continuity of critical functions, and avoids exposing taxpayers to loss.”

Pure obfuscation.

Worried that the politicians they have bought won’t stay bought, that their nerve may fail them when confronted with a demand for trillion dollar bail outs in the next crash and that democratic government might assert itself, the banksters have a Plan B: an automatic “bail in.”

This is what the FSB calls “robust arrangements for dealing with stress in the financial system.”

In this soon to be global paradigm, as one commentator explained, “banks [will] no longer recognize your deposits as money, but as liabilities and securitized capital owned and controlled by the bank or institution, just part of a commercial bank’s capital structure.”

In the next crash, depositors will be subordinated to other creditors and will be pushed down through banks’ capital structure to a position of “material capital risk” — just another creditor fighting for a share of the assets of a failed bank, forced to settle for maybe pennies on the dollar.

Small deposits in the U.S. have until now been guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). But as has been reported, total FDIC reserves are dwarfed by the amount of deposits at risk and the more than $200 trillion exposure to derivatives of the banksters’ cartel.

But municipal deposits are not guaranteed by anything, except the liquidity of the bank that holds them. Cities, counties and states all across America have perhaps several trillion dollars on deposit.

Unprosecuted, unreformed, unregulated and unrepentant, Wall Street parties on. Those deposits are at increasing risk.

You might not see it coming. State and municipal treasurers who manage government deposits might not see it coming. Members of Congress might not see it coming. But central bankers like those of the Fed know it is coming.

So does the FDIC. Months ago it laid out this new scheme to protect Wall Street in a policy document prepared jointly with the central bank of the U.K., the Bank of England.

“Wait a minute,” you say. “Why would the FDIC participate in a scheme to raid the deposits it insures? The FDIC works for the American people.”

Wrong. The FDIC was created in 1933 to calm a jittery public after the 1929 crash, head off runs brought on by panicked depositors and save banks, not depositors.

This may strike you as hard to believe, as prior to the Great Depression Americans thought the ownership of gold and silver was inviolate, almost sacred. But in 1933 the federal government confiscated gold and silver to bail out the banks and Federal Reserve.

The American people must recognize that history can and does repeat itself, that the money we thought was our own, protected in our checking and savings accounts could be taken in an instant should there be a financial crisis even remotely similar to that of 2008.

I said “could be.” In the United Sates these policies must be enacted and signed into the law by the Congress and the president. Whose side are they on?

President Obama calls the banksters “savvy businessmen” and his “friends.” He pushed the 2008 bail out through Congress, surrounded himself with Wall Street advisers and put Wall Street agents in charge of the regulatory agencies.

That may leave it up to Congress to protect Main Street from Wall Street and the banksters in the next crash.

What are the odds? Main Street, we have a problem.

Should President Obama resign

Time to shuffle the deck

By Mike Krauss

Bucks County Courier Times

You have to feel at least a little sorry for President Obama. Once compared to Lincoln and FDR and sure to take his place in the pantheon of great American presidents, he is now risks being remembered as another James Buchanan or Herbert Hoover – arguably the most failed presidents in our nation’s history.

Mr. Obama is hurting from a self inflicted wound. No president in modern history came to the office with more good will and political capital, or more promptly threw it away.

The American people did not like the Wall Street bail out – not at all. Obama helped push it through the Congress.

The outgoing Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson suggested to president elect Obama that, for the sake of fairness, some of the bail out billions ought to go to foreclosure relief. 

Obama said “the market” would take care of that.

Then Obama populated his administration with Wall Street agents, the social catastrophe let lose by the Wall Street collapse rolled on, the rich got richer, life got tough for most Americans, has only gotten better for the already well-to-do, and that was that for his administration.

Had the president taken the side of the American people – Main Street, instead of Wall Street  – he could have written the kind of universal health care bill the American people support on the back of a cereal box and delivered it to Congress attached to a kite, and it would have sailed through to passage. Greatness beckoned.

But he did not and his presidency began to unravel, a slow and painful drama that has now delivered  both houses of Congress to the GOP, which has a really unhealthy dislike of the president.

Now what? What can this president and that Congress agree on? The only things they ever agree on: Wall Street and war.

The care and feeding of Wall Street has been the preoccupation of every American president since Ronald Reagan, and the system of legalized bribes showered on the Congress has insured its support.

And more war seems to suit everyone in Washington just fine; although to his credit Mr. Obama seems to be trying to avoid plunging the U.S. into a third war in the Middle East quagmire.

But the American people need more than that. Americans need good paying jobs, lots of them. Americans need affordable health care, investments in infrastructure, secure retirement for our seniors, world class public education and college education that does not condemn our young to decades of crushing debt.

And Americans want out from the hopeless pathologies of the Middle East, the never ending War on Terror and a life of constant fear and anxiety.

 Climate change. Help! Ebola. Watch out! We’re being foreclosed. Oh, God! Where are the kids? Call 911! Terrorists under the bed. The government spying on your every mail and phone call. Make it stop, please!

Two more years. Say it ain’t so. But it will be. Unless.

President Obama should accept the results of the elections for what they were – a resounding vote of no confidence – and resign.  He would be succeeded by Vice President Biden, who unlike the president is a veteran of the Congress and has the skill set and temperament to at least attempt a working relationship with that august body.

It would leave a venomous GOP with nowhere to sink its fangs.

And it would upset the apple cart of Hilary Clinton’s march to her coronation as the next president in the Wall Street dynasty. A President Biden would automatically be a contender for the nomination of the Democratic Party.

That alone ought to tempt the president.

What are the odds? Slim to none, I suppose. It’s nice being president. You and your family get treated really well, if you don’t mind the occasional lunatic over the White House fence and the ones in the Congress and half the world’s capitols.

Nevertheless, the president ought to think about this long and hard. It would change everything, shuffle the deck and give the American people a new deal.

But if not to resign, what? Two years of standoffs, shut-downs and speeches no one wants to hear? Is there an alternative?  One comes to mind. Fight.

The president could fight for those things Americans want, deserve and so urgently need. And maybe the president can claw his way back to greatness, as the American people claw back their stolen prosperity, security and peace.

It’s a thought.