Cheering on the new Cold War

Shilling for Wall Street

By Mike Krauss

Bucks County Courier Times

Paul Craig Roberts is a former senior member of the Reagan administration and former editor of the Wall Street Journal who fearlessly exposes the continuing corruption of the government in Washington. He coined a phrase to describe the U.S. corporate dominated media: “presstitute media.”

A recent New York Times column by Thomas Friedman and a CNN news report just days ago provide good examples of what Roberts is talking about.

In his column, Friedman explained the crisis in the Ukraine as the failure of the “West” to confront “Putanisn” – meaning those Russian “bullies” who Washington says decided to invade and annex parts of the Ukraine when the former and thoroughly corrupt Ukrainian president was, as Friedman put it, “overthrown.”

The implication is that the Ukrainian people were making progress to freedom and democracy which Russia wanted to prevent.

That is a total distortion.  Respected journalists such as Robert Parry and Thierry Meyssan, writing in the Canadian Journal, Global Research, as well as Roberts  and others have documented what FriEdman ignores, not the least of which is, there was no invasion.

The former Ukrainian president was no more corrupt that his opposition. He had been bought by Washington to sign up with the European Union, backed out of the deal,  and because of that, our “freedom loving” government in Washington organized and financed the coup that overthrew him.

It’s all on tape. Turns out the U.S.  isn’t the only government that spies, and European spies published the conversation of the U.S. “diplomats” who were helping to organize the coup. You can even hear it on You Tube !

Why did the corrupt Ukrainian president back out of his deal with the U.S. and the E.U.? Because a lot of Ukrainians did the math:  Washington equals Wall Street, equals austerity, equals pension grabs and fire sale asset sell-offs,  equals Iceland, Ireland, the U.S., the U.K., Spain, Italy and most famously Greece, equals government of by and for Wall Street and the one percent.

So while the U.S. was busy organizing a coup that put another corrupt president in power in the Ukraine, who immediately signed off on a Western “aide” package – meaning expensive loans to be paid back in austerity – those Ukrainians with ties to Russia ran back to Mother Russia, or in this case, daddy – that nasty Putin.

And what Friedman also ignores is that Putin didn’t even have to ask. Ukrainian politicians organized a referendum in that part of the Ukraine that had always been Russian, got the vote they expected and turned up on Putin’s door step with a done deal.

This made Wall Street very unhappy. Mind you, looting the Ukrainians is not going to produce the really big bucks looted from Americans and Western Europeans. But a billion here and a billion there – it adds up.

So Washington immediately turned up the heat, moving fighter jets from Italy to Poland (yesterday it was paratroopers) and taking other aggressive moves, all the while complaining of Russian aggression that never happened.

It was the same on CNN. The anchor was talking with two ex U.S. military talking heads who kept referencing the Russian “invasion” of Ukraine. The anchor never asked, for example, on what date the invasion began, and which units and how many troops of the Russian military crossed the border.

To which there would have been an interesting response, because it never happened.

Meanwhile, back in the Ukraine, the guy Washington put in power turns out to be not only as corrupt as his predecessor, but fronting Nazi thugs who French media report were trained (and photographed) in Poland, in how to incite civil violence.

But, hey, you work with the freedom lovers you have, and Ukraine’s central bank dutifully raised interest rates almost fifty percent. Why? Economic reform? Oh, please.

This gave Wall Street another place to invest, as opposed to the low interest American market, which the Fed keeps at low interest to protect Wall Street’s income from municipal swaps. Now Wall Street has another puppet state to loot by lending some part of the almost interest free trillions it got from the Fed.

Here’s the math. Washington equals Wall Street and the Western banking cartel, equals the looting of any nation they can get their hands on, any way they can. Freedom and democracy do not enter into the equation.

Nomi Prins and Paul Craig Roberts

Sleepwalking to Armageddon?

By Mike Krauss

Bucks County Courier Times

In a just published book that too few Americans will read, All the Presidents’ Bankers, Nomi Prins lifts the cover from a century long cooperation and coordination between Wall Street and the White House, stretching back to Teddy Roosevelt in the years just before creation of the Federal Reserve.

As Wall Street veteran Pam Martens explains in a review of the book on her web site, Wall Street on Parade, “Wall Street can collapse, get bailed out by the taxpayers, cause a Great Recession and still call the shots in Washington.”

Every American can now see that on account of Wall Street and with the collaboration of successive administrations, the prosperity of millions of Americans has been shattered, perhaps never to be recovered.

Massive unemployment is lied away by not counting the millions who have given up looking for work. Foreclosures roll on. Home sales are plummeting. A generation of young Americans now graduates college with massive debt and no jobs. Or they take the jobs at Wal-Mart that used to be filled by the less educated.

Who go where? Onto welfare, food stamps and unemployment, which many in Congress want to cut. Where does this lead? For the answer, look no further than Wal-Mart’s most recent annual report.

It notes: “Our business operations are subject to numerous risks, factors and uncertainties, domestically and internationally, which are outside our control … These factors include … changes in the amount of payments made under the Supplement[al] Nutrition Assistance Plan and other public assistance plans, changes in the eligibility requirements of public assistance plans …”

Wal-Mart’s major market is low-income shoppers. The company is acknowledging that public assistance programs are a significant factor in its revenue and profits. Increasingly, Wal-Mart’s customers are too poor to shop at Wal-Mart.

The message in Prins’ book is that the economic trends, Wall Street practices and federal government collusion of today are in so many ways and so very frighteningly like the years before the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed.

Are we sleepwalking into an economic Armageddon?

It is not the only looming catastrophe. The other is a confrontation with Russia.

Forget the story line from Washington parroted by the national media. The crisis over Ukraine has nothing to do with democracy and freedom. It is about an almost messianic assertion of American “exceptionalism,” used as cover by Wall Street for more looting, in this case Ukraine.

Paul Craig Roberts is a former, high security clearance assistant secretary of the Treasury to Ronald Reagan, former editor of the Wall Street Journal and an acknowledged expert on Eastern European and Russian affairs. He is also not widely enough read. But you want to read his most recent blog.

“The drive to war is blatantly obvious. The lies are obvious, and the entire West is participating, both media and governments… Everywhere in the West the message is the same. ‘Putin invaded and annexed Crimea, Putin is determined to rebuild the Soviet Empire, Putin must be stopped’… The extraordinary transparent lie that Russia sent an army into Ukraine and annexed Crimea is now accepted as fact everywhere in the West…”

What actually happened is that the elected government of Ukraine backed out of a U.S. deal to join the EU, when many of its citizens understood that was a set-up for “austerity” and the looting of their pensions and assets by Wall Street.

The U.S. organized a coup and now calls the government it installed freedom loving heroes. Nuts. They are Washington puppets — and Nazi thugs into the bargain — and they are Wall Street patsies. That government immediately signed off on the Wall Street “aide” package: high interest loans to be paid for by the extraction of the wealth and prosperity of every Ukrainian.

Well, not every. Those parts of Ukraine that were historically a part of Russia went running right back to Russia, in a thoroughly democratic referendum, the kind of self-determination Washington says it supports — except where Wall Street profits are concerned.

To get Wall Street its way Washington is playing a juvenile game of “Chicken” with Russia, an energy rich, nuclear power, ratcheting up the threat of military action.

Roberts concludes that this entire chain of events looks like the manipulation, cupidity and stupidity that led Europe and the U.S. into World War I and warns of the horrific consequences of another war in Europe — a nuclear war.

For your own security and safety and that of your family and neighbors, give Fox, CNN and all the rest a rest. Read Prins, Roberts and Martens. Decide for yourself if the nation is sleepwalking to Armageddon.

Wall Street and Washington

Collision course: Juveniles in charge

By Mike Krauss

Bucks County Courier Times

I suppose it still goes on. Adolescent school boys stealing furtive glances in the locker room to see who has the bigger package. Most boys grow out of that sort of thing. Some never do. In the U.S. it seems they go on to Wall Street and Washington to act out their narcissistic fantasies in American banking and foreign policy.

At a truly fantastic cost, Americans have learned the danger of permitting these utterly self-absorbed, swollen vanities to be in charge of our economic well being. Now, in Ukraine, we are getting a lesson in the danger of allowing them to run our foreign policy.

They have the nation on a collision course with Russia. Russia is not Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, the European allies we dominate or the Third World nations we bully. Russia is an oil rich, nuclear power.

To understand the danger, let’s start with who “they” are.

They are the so-called “neo-cons” who have dominated American foreign policy since at least the Clinton administration. They believe the United States is so exceptional and favored of fate (if not God, for whom they have slight regard) that it is our right, duty and destiny to dominate the economies, governments and peoples of the world.

They believe that the U.S. may make the rules and admit to no authority that places limits on their actions. They have kept America at war for more than a decade and visited chaos and horrendous loss of life on entire nations. They flout law and morality.

Back to the Ukraine.

Forget the news. It is all propaganda. The administration is not going eyeball to eyeball with Russia to defend freedom and democracy. This confrontation is the orchestrated outcome of the neo-cons’ obsession with power.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, proof positive to the neo-cons of America’s deserved global supremacy, they were spoiling for any opportunity to display their mastery of the world.

Enter Wall Street. While the neo-cons were busy populating 150 nations with by last count almost 1,000 U.S. military bases, Wall Street moved in to preach the joys of modern capitalism.

From the deregulation of the Reagan administration to the all out surrender of Clinton, Wall Street has been on the rise. Fraud became a business model and narcissism a virtue, and the looting of America was underway.

Along with that of the U.K., Ireland, Iceland, Spain, most notably Greece and any place our military could get a choke hold.

The newly independent nations of the former Soviet Union were too good an opportunity to pass up, and leaders were lobbied and bribed to join the U.S. military and banking fronts, NATO and the European Union.

Hungary bought in and its people are now enduring unprecedented hardship. This did not go unnoticed in Ukraine, and when its government tried to offer up the nation to the Wall Street and Washington hustle, the deal was resisted. So the U.S. organized a coup, and now calls its paid agents in that nation the legitimate government.

And the new, “democratic” Ukrainian government immediately cut a deal with the global banksters for an “aide” package.

It’s a loan, an expensive loan, and the terms are the same as they always are with freedom loving Wall Street: austerity, cuts in pensions, drastic reductions in any spending that helps people and a sell-off of public assets at fire sale prices.

Russia has taken sides with that part of the Ukraine that wants no part of the deal and with which it has historic and important ties, flexing some modest (by American standards) military muscle. And the U.S. Secretary of State lectures Russia about not achieving its aims at the end of a gun.

Mr. Secretary, “Can you say Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, torture, secret prisons or execution by drones?”

This is not only embarrassing, it is dangerous.

Congress will not discipline the destructive and self absorbed juveniles on Wall Street and in Washington. The American people had better.

The Grand Sell Out

Heads I win, tails you lose

By Mike Krauss

Bucks County Courier Times

Whatever may be said of the GOP members of Congress trying to kill Obamacare, one thing is certain. Someone is backing their play.

Whether it’s the promise of campaign contributions, the threat of well funded election opposition or the lure of post Congressional riches, there is a lot of money in play.

What does the money want?

Probably not what the tea partier next door wants, which is a dramatically smaller federal presence in their lives; a goal with which I suspect a lot of Americans are increasingly in sympathy.

But that is not precisely what the money wants.

The one thing you know for sure about modern American government is that it is a government of, by and for established corporate interests. In Washington, corporate profit trumps all.

Obamacare is a windfall for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. “Big pharma” is big, and the finance industry (of which insurance is a part) is the now the biggest of all, by some reports accounting for 60 percent of U.S. domestic profits. They are not going to let Obamcare go down. And neither will the president. It is his “legacy.”

Without it, what will remain for the history ebooks will be eight years of crushing unemployment and more than five million homes foreclosed, an assault on constitutional rights, massive student debt, an Orwellian surveillance and police state and mindlessly expensive foreign military involvement.

And the health care legislation has the president’s name on it. It is not negotiable and everybody knows it.

So Obamacare is a stalking horse. What do the global corporate elite really want?

More.

Where will they get it?

Entitlements.

Not of course from the corporate entitlements: tax breaks and billions in subsidies to banks, energy, defense, agribusiness, IT and the gods of modern American business. But rather, from Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, unemployment and any spending that does not go directly to the corporate bottom line and ever more fantastic salaries for corporate CEOs and dividends for shareholders (the less than 1 percent of the American people).

President Obama put these programs on the chopping block two years ago; the idea got no traction. But corporate America has not given up, because the big prize is big. Get rid of Social Security, and the employer contribution goes away.

Well, not away, exactly. More like diverted — into CEO salaries and shareholder dividends.

And Wall Street gets to play with the $1 trillion a year which Social Security collects, every year, while they load up private retirement plans with fees and commissions, as they have already done with 401ks.

So the puppet masters who pull the strings in both parties have got the president and Congress doing this little dance of crisis — the corporate media providing the sound track — being maneuvered into position to do their deal, bow nicely and end it in a great show of democratic civility.

The American people are being set up for what passes for compromise these days: heads, the 1 percent win, tails the 99 percent lose.

There is of course another possible outcome.

The people still will not accept more austerity for the 99 percent, and the predatory puppet masters will decide they are tired of waiting and collapse the economy entirely; in which case Social Security and about everything else that supports the people and American prosperity may disappear quite suddenly and quite completely.

In either case, it is time for the American people to get ready to shuffle the deck for a Second New Deal.

Reining in the spies

Enemies foreign and domestic: Reining in the spies

By Mike Krauss

Bucks County Courier Times

The Declaration that went out from Philadelphia to the world in 1776 proclaimed a government of the people, and that the purpose of American government is to secure the rights of the people.

But increasingly the United States seems more a people of the government, and the only thing the present American government seems interested to secure is more power.

The first Americans understood the great danger to the rights of the people: the very government they were creating. They understood that all governments use whatever power they have. So they balanced the necessity of government by subordinating it to the will of the people and building into the government limits to its power.

And it worked pretty well, up until the Bush and Obama administrations.

Under the cover of a never ending war on a concept — terror — the control freaks (sometimes referred to as fascists) among those elected to office have done what control freaks always do — seek more control.

One by one the rights of the people and protections from government that are essential to freedom and liberty have been subverted: the due process of the law, habeas corpus, th right to peacefully assemble and protest (“petition”), the right to be confronted by accusers and see the evidence in open court — all have all been subverted.

The executive branch now uses its power to arrest without warrant and imprison indefinitely whoever it chooses. The executive asserts the right to order the execution of American citizens in secret, without judge, jury or trial.

And now we know that everything Americans communicate to another living person is recorded, stored and analyzed by the government’s National Surveillance Agency.

First we learned that all our phone calls and email are monitored. On the 4th of July it was reported that a photo is taken of every piece of mail handled by the postal system: meaning names, addresses and return addresses are noted.

The government knows more about you than your mother, father, spouse, partner or priest.

“But wait,” say the incredibly gullible, “the government will never go beyond taking note of all our private communication, will never look at my life, they’re just looking for the bad guys.”

Oh please.

A president will never want to know exactly what a political foe or potential major donor is saying to his or her friends, family, business partners or allies?

Some high ranking bureaucrat in the vast National Surveillance Agency will never be curious about what kind of valuable investment information can be had from taking a look at what the Federal Reserve Chairman is thinking, before it is announced?

Or that it will never occur to employees of the private company that collects all this data, that the company is in fact the greatest and most powerful private detection agency of all time, and go into business selling the data collected?

It is only a matter of time before all of these abuses and more occur, if they have not already.

Sadly, but not surprisingly, only a handful of members of an increasingly irrelevant Congress have raised the alarm, even after they learned that the head of this domestic spy ring lied to them about it.

The spymaster later admitted his testimony had been “erroneous.” Seems he confused the two laws that set up all the spying.

Which is like the CEO of General Motors saying he forgot the difference between the gas pedal and the brake.

So he lied to Congress or he is incompetent. Take your pick.

What can be done?

First, this national spymaster must go. Second, the entire Patriot Act needs to go, to be repealed and replaced with a law that provides the necessary tools to protect the nation, but with the limits on that power and the protection of the rights and liberties of citizens without which this nation ceases to be a democracy. Third, Congress must put an end to secret decisions made in secret courts by secret people accountable only to other secret people.

Finally, the Secret Keeper in Chief needs to remember his oath of office, to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and reign in a domestic spy agency more vast and frightening than anything ever imagined by the Nazi Gestapo, the Soviet KGB or East German Stasi.

But will he?

Too Big to Jail

The New Untouchables

In an earlier era, the “Untouchables” of American lore were fiercely honest federal agents who went after the gangsters of their time. Now, the Untouchables are the bankster criminals of Wall Street who the feds and the chief law enforcement officer of the nation – the attorney general of the United States – refuse to prosecute.

And the banksters are criminals. The record is clear. They have engaged in massive, systematic fraud that cost and continue to cost the American people trillions of dollars – homeowners, investors, savers, municipal governments, school districts, the now unemployed and just about anybody who uses a credit card.

The banksters have amassed personal wealth on a scale that Al Capone could never have imagined. And they use it to buy protection.

I don’t mean they hand out bags of cash to politicians and law enforcement officers. That’s so yesterday.

Rather, the banksters and the other corporate criminals of modern America sponsor the careers of politicians and the people they put in the government, and reward them richly after their government “service.”

And they get results. They get to commit crimes on a scale never before imagined, involving sums of money never before imagined and never go to jail. They are not even prosecuted.

It was not always so. Back in the S&L scandal, nearly a thousand individuals were successfully prosecuted for their crimes by the Department of Justice (DOJ). And in the Enron scandal, the Bush Justice Department went after the accounting firm Arthur Anderson for its part in the fraud and put it out of business – 28,000 people lost their jobs.

That’s tough law enforcement.

But  a relatively unknown but well respected deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration thought that was too tough and proposed a new policy:  before companies were prosecuted for their crimes, prosecutors should consider the “collateral damage” of a successful prosecution – like the 28,000 people who lost their jobs over the misdeeds of a relative few.

Seems reasonable. But it was the birth of “Too Big to Fail.” And it gave the green light to those other accounting firms that  gave AAA ratings to the junk Wall Street peddled in the mortgage fraud that set off the 2008 crash.

That unknown deputy attorney general left the DOJ, became a partner of one of the major law firms that represents players in the Wall Street mortgage fraud business, then returned to Washington as attorney general for President Obama and applied his policy to the Too Big to Fail (TBTF) banks.

With a new twist. Not only must the TBTF banks not be prosecuted for widespread and massive fraud and criminality, but the CEOs and other executives who run those banks must also not be prosecuted. That might “destabilize the economy.”

Too Big to Fail became Too Big to Jail.

Far better, the attorney general and chief law enforcement officer of the United States argues, to allow criminals to run our biggest banks.

Far better for who?

If the past experience of other federal officials who formerly worked in Wall Street law firms or banks is any guide, when the attorney general leaves the government he will go back to the law firm he came from, earning a lot more money than he did previously. His deputy who was in charge of not prosecuting Wall Street did just that, at a reported $4 million  a year.

It’s called the “Round Trip Ticket” and is one reason why it is fair to say the federal government has been "captured" by Wall Street and the major corporations. 

In a recent interview, Rolling Stone investigative reporter Matt Taibbi described it this way:  “People who worked for the regulatory system, they usually grew out of the same corporate defense firms that represent these companies. And when they leave the regulatory system, they go back to these same corporate defense firms and they know they have 2 and 3 million dollar partnerships waiting for them…and they're not really gonna want to screw it up.”

Let me propose a law. All officers of the federal government - presidents, members of 

Congress, cabinet secretaries, agency heads, regulators and others in senior positions must publicly disclose their income and its sources for a period of ten years after leaving their positions. 

This law may not do much to bring the New Untouchables to justice, but at least the American people will begin to understand why they are untouchable.

The Daily Lesson of our Governing Elite

The collapse of American morality

Bucks County Courier Times

May 30, 2013

Morality and democracy are being extinguished in the United States by an immoral and undemocratic governing elite.

Corporate profit has become the god of modern American idolatry. Wall Street barons and corporate CEOs are the high priests of this perverse religion. Washington is its temple, where the apostles of austerity worship, adore and serve corporate profit.

Catastrophic levels of unemployment among the late middle aged, the young and minorities are destroying more than the once fabled prosperity of the American people. In a nation where optimism was once a national characteristic, deprivation and despair are widespread. A killing poverty and suicide are growing, quantifiable realities.

Hope is being extinguished, and with it the morality that sustains a civilized order.

The change came gradually. In service to corporate profit, tax laws allow major corporations to escape taxation. Trade policies obliterated good paying jobs and decimated American manufacturing. Congress votes massive corporate subsidies while gutting the regulations that add cost to the corporate bottom line and quarterly report — no matter the cost to the environment, public health and safety.

All of this was accomplished by massive amounts of lobbying and campaign contributions in an electoral process that is nothing more than a system of legalized bribes which makes a mockery of democracy.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the rise of Wall Street and its domination of the federal government.

Federal nullification of state usury laws allowed the introduction of obscenely expensive consumer credit to mask falling wages and boost Wall Street profits. Banking laws allowed creation of the few “money center” banks and facilitated their profits, to drive competition from the market. Consumer protections were abandoned one scheming step at a time, to nickel and dime bank customers out of billions.

The American people got used to it.

Then Wall Street bribed and lobbied its way to the combination of its banking and investment activities, giving those “savvy” crooks access to the hard assets of the American people. And in an eight year riot of greed and fraud they gambled it away, some $7 trillion and more of the wealth of the American people.

The American people woke up and demanded that those failed banks should not be rescued.

Instead, led by the presidential candidates of both parties, supported by weeks of almost hysterical propaganda and mindful of the legalized bribes of a thoroughly debased election process and the prospect of post-elected office rewards, Congress bailed out the failed banks.

The Federal Reserve pumped more than $20 trillion into those failed banks and favored corporations, while unemployment and foreclosures devastated the middle class.

The new president surrounded himself with Wall Street minders, and Wall Street operatives were installed throughout the “regulatory” agencies, reporting to their once and future Wall Street paymasters.

The attorney general of the United States, the Treasury secretary, the chairperson of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and a squad of others hold “round trip tickets” back to the Wall Street law and banking firms and major corporations they left for “service” in Washington.

The attorney general found no cause to prosecute a trail of fraud broad enough for a blind man to follow, and then headed off the efforts of state attorney generals to go after the crooks and recover some of the stolen wealth of the American people.

The chairperson of the SEC and her husband made millions representing virtually all of the big banks, which means she must “recuse” herself from any actions against those banks. In other words, the agency will be effectively leaderless in its work to police the markets.

All the while, the incentives and rewards for hustling investors and defrauding depositors remain in place and the Wall Street casino roars on toward the next catastrophe.

While American parents try to teach their children the morality of the ages — the difference between right and wrong, truth and lies, justice and injustice, compassion and exploitation — the daily lesson of our governing elite is that morality is for losers and crime pays, if you’ve got money.