Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Dispossession by Decree

Don't be so glum: The "common people" can't count on an $85 billion lifeline from the Fed. We just get to pay for it.


During the frontier period, when the government that afflicts us was still in its pupal stage and (therefore) most of North America remained relatively free, Washington employed an interesting method of stealing land from various Indian communities.


Indian nations such as the Nez Perce, who were organized in fiercely independent bands, posed something of a challenge to Washington, since there was no central oligarchy that could be seduced or intimidated into betraying the entire tribe. So the Feds had to take an incremental approach, negotiating separate treaties that pilfered property tract by tract until the targeted Indian tribe was left with a pitiful, resource-poor and indefensible territory.



At that point, the Feds would designate a small group of people, distinguished for their singular lack of character, as "spokesmen" for the entire community. This group of "treaty Indians" would be used to consummate the land-grab by signing treaties that supposedly bound the entire tribe, including those who had rejected the agreement.



Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce was admonished by his father never to sell the land where his ancestors were buried. He faithfully followed his father's advice not so much as to touch a copy of a treaty, lest the White Man's government take this as a form of consent. Yet he and his band were among those whose lands in the Wilamette Valley were turned over to the Feds as the result of an agreement signed, ostensibly on their behalf, by a group of "Treaty Indians" led by a traitor who, appropriately enough, had been given the name "Lawyer. "




Joseph memorably compared this transaction to a hypothetical case in which a man who doesn't wish to sell his horses discovers that his neighbors had "sold" them anyway.


Today, the Regime ruling us uses routinely uses the same trick, but approaches it from the opposite direction. Rather than creating small front groups that agree to surrender our homes, lands, and other cherished possessions, the Regime, consulting only those carefully protected from accountability, "buys" on our behalf things that are not only useless but harmful to us.



Whichever end of this trick is pointed at us, the desired end result is the same one suffered by the Indians: Complete dispossession and reduction to peonage.


Perhaps I was too distracted to notice, but I don't recall a spontaneous outpouring of public demand for a taxpayer-financed bailout of Fannie and Freddie, the costs of which will eventually run into the trillions of dollars.
In that case, however, there is an almost imperceptibly thin thread of public accountability, since Congress -- acting with the desperate haste it displays only when carrying out an errand on behalf of the Power Elite -- passed a patently unconstitutional measure "authorizing" the Secretary of the Treasury to bail out Fannie and Freddie.


This means that the electorate, which installed and tolerates Congress, shares some responsibility for this crime.



However, it's impossible to blame the electorate for the most recent act of mega-larceny,
the Federal Reserve's $85 billion bailout of the American International Group. This was done by the FED -- a nominally private entity that exercises immense political and economic power without constitutional standing or accountability of any kind. Congress didn't appropriate the necessary funds for that bailout. Nor was the money set aside through executive action, the entirely illegal method now commonly used to commit the United States to immensely expensive undertakings such as wars of aggression against distant, helpless countries.


The FED's action amounts to the $85 billion purchase of a private company, on behalf of the federal government, using public funds -- without political accountability of any kind. Outrageous as it is, this action may have the healthy, if thoroughly unintended, consequence of illustrating just who actually runs our political system and economy.



As the immensely perceptive economic analyst Michael Rozeff points out, on this Constitution Day we have witnessed an unprecedented arrogation of power by the unelected government that actually rules us. True power in our putative republic is actually exercised by the oligarchy that created, empowered, and controls the Federal Reserve.


Oh, sure, that oligarchy will allow elected officials to play-act the role of representatives or "Deciders," and every once in a while it will countenance a very limited form of political competition. But the really serious business -- such as the disposition of the lives of the subject population in wars, or the re-allocation of their wealth for the benefit of politically favored constituencies -- is simply too important to be left to the vagaries of representative politics. Thus we are routinely reminded that some issues are insulated from the public by being enshrined as part of the sacred "bipartisan consensus."


The nationalization of AIG
is on that list, which explains why today we hear a palpably relieved silence from Capitol Hill, when the air should be shredded by expressions of bitter outrage over the FED's action. "Until this week," notes the Financial Times, "it would have been unthinkable for the Federal Reserve to bail out an insurance company...."


Actually, this was never "unthinkable" at all. Current FED Commissar
Ben Bernanke has actually gone on record touting the Central Bank's ability to exnihilate what it's pleased to call "money" in any quantity its supervisors deem necessary in order to buy up anything it desires. And as I predicted almost exactly three years ago, the collapse of the debt bubble has left the FED and its controlling oligarchy in a position to conduct the "big buy-out" -- the nationalization of practically everything in the supposed effort to prevent a depression.

"There's no limit to what the Fed is prepared to do," points out investment analyst Richard Daughty, the widely quoted "Mogambo Guru." "The only tool it has is inflation--creating money out of nothing. And Bernanke has explicitly stated that the Fed has the statutory means to use the money it creates to buy anything and everything, including stocks, bonds, houses, and raw land. It's entirely possible that someday we'll see the banking cartel literally owning everything--and Americans are letting this happen."


Given that the FED claims the power to buy both investment instruments and real property, why couldn't it buy an ailing insurance conglomerate? But then again, AIG is not your typical insurance company. It has affiliates in some 130 countries (some of which are now experiencing an old-fashioned bank run) and "counter-party relationships" with nearly every major financial institution on the face of the globe. That's a somewhat florid way of saying that AIG owes everybody money, and if it can't pay its debts, the entire financial services industry may collapse.


The problem here, of course, is that AIG is going to collapse, despite the FED's willingness to custom-print the company tens of billions of "dollars." AIG has been deeply involved in insuring the secondary mortgage bond market. This is why, over the past several years, its value has collapsed like a deflated souffle.


According to letter sent by former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg just yesterday, AIG has lost "over 90% of its value."
That has to be considered a criminally self-serving estimate of AIG's actual worth. Greenberg, it should be remembered, was forced out as CEO about three and a half years ago in the middle of an Enron-style accounting scandal in which the company admitted to overstating earnings by $1.7 billion.


Owing to the firm's size, historic reputation, political clout, and prominent place on the Dow, an investigation never made significant headway, and we have no way of knowing the extent to which the company's accounting was corrupt.
So when Greenberg admits that the company has lost something north of ninety percent of its value, we are justified in rounding its actual value down to zero and simply letting nature run its course.


That's how things would work out for an honest entrepreneur whose business simply didn't work. But that's not how such things play out for the Power Elite.
Picture the world financial market as a hugely overbuilt skyscraper resting on a badly compromised foundation. The core pillars supporting the structure are rotten and about to collapse, and the failure of any one would rapidly induce failure in all of them.


The sensible approach would be to get as far as possible from the impending collapse. The Power Elite's approach is to
force the commoners to work in the basement shoring up the mortally stricken building while the Important People evacuate.


That won't work, of course, and the inevitable collapse will wipe out those left in the basement -- but, hey, that's just the price that has to be paid to save the Important People, who are, after all, more Important than the rest of us.



Deranged financial commentator Jim Cramer didn't take refuge in metaphor to express -- and endorse -- the perspective presented in my illustration.
"Frankly, I don't really care if my community bank is doing well," insisted Cramer. "I care about AIG and the fate of Western banks, all of which have relied on AIG at some point for a risk transfer."


Let banks fail across the length and breadth of the land; let millions be left destitute, and misery be poured without mixture on the heads of the common folk -- the FED must protect the interests of super-rich criminals at AIG and kindred institutions.



The anxiety over AIG's fate reflects its role not only as a pillar of the global financial system, but the prominence of the company within the Power Elite. This has been pointed out by the
Christian Science Monitor, a publication that has hardly earned a reputation as a purveyor of "conspiracy theories."


Greenberg was a major fund-raiser for the Bush campaign, and is on very good terms with China's ruling elite. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, for which AIG has long been a major donor.
Just as significant is AIG's pioneering work as a provider of "terrorism insurance," a new field in which the nominally private company has worked on intimate terms with the Department of Homeland Security.


This creates a new and particularly troubling variety of moral hazard. A market for terrorism insurance requires an ongoing, and preferably growing, terrorist threat. This provides a perverse incentive to preserve the interventionist foreign policy that helps sustain the terrorist threat: The State has a ready-made rationale to expand its power, and the provider of terrorism insurance can keep increasing the premiums.



AIG is thus not merely a tentpole of the world financial system, it's an important pillar of the corporatist Warfare State. All the more reason, then, why it should be permitted to collapse immediately.
But that's just not how things are done, of course. Nationalizing AIG was an immediate priority for the FED, but now the precedent has been set, there's no reason for the banksters to quit until they own everything or the dollar sloughs off its remaining value, whichever comes first.


On sale now!












Dum spiro, pugno!

26 comments:

Anonymous said...

Boy these people suck!

Puck T. Smith said...

Mr. Grigg, you are doing some fine work. Godspeed.

Anonymous said...

Let them eat cake!

Anonymous said...

REM should re-release THAT song. i'm sure it would be a hit again.

rick


....and i feel fiiiiiiiiiiiiine.

Anonymous said...

It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)



That's great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and
snakes, an aeroplane and Lenny Bruce is not afraid.
Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn - world
serves its own needs, dummy serve your own needs. Feed
it off an aux speak, grunt, no, strength, Ladder
start to clatter with fear fight down height. Wire
in a fire, representing seven games, a government
for hire and a combat site. Left of west and coming in
a hurry with the furies breathing down your neck. Team
by team reporters baffled, trumped, tethered cropped.
Look at that low playing! Fine, then. Uh oh,
overflow, population, common food, but it'll do. Save
yourself, serve yourself. World serves its own needs,
listen to your heart bleed dummy with the rapture and
the revered and the right, right. You vitriolic,
patriotic, slam, fight, bright light, feeling pretty
psyched.

It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

Six o'clock - TV hour. Don't get caught in foreign
towers. Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself
churn. Locking in, uniforming, book burning, blood
letting. Every motive escalate. Automotive incinerate.
Light a candle, light a votive. Step down, step down.
Watch your heel crush, crushed, uh-oh, this means no
fear cavalier. Renegade steer clear! A tournament,
tournament, a tournament of lies. Offer me solutions,
offer me alternatives and I decline.

It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

The other night I dreamt of knives, continental
drift divide. Mountains sit in a line, Leonard
Bernstein. Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester
Bangs. Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom! You
symbiotic, patriotic, slam book neck, right? Right.

It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel
fine...fine...

(It's time I had some time alone)

Anonymous said...

Mr. Grigg - Dear Will,

You are being taken. We all are. Nobody understands. Not even the Nobel-Prize-winning economists.

It is all an illusion. A scam. A "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."

The mystical teachers (aka the Gnostics) tell us that this whole universe is purely an illusion, created by Satan to enslave our souls and prevent them from returning to the Creator whence they came. The bankers, like Satan, have created this imaginary thing which they call "money" in order to literally enslave the entire human world, for their own infinite power and profit.

Money does not exist in the physical world. It can be created at will, in unlimited amounts, by the Central Bank and banking system of any country. Very little of what we call "money" is even in the form of paper. Most of it is just bits and bytes in a computer somewhere. It can just as easily vanish, when the public belief in its existence, which keeps it in existence, fails.

Nothing in America has changed. There is still the same quantity of food, clothing, trains, roads, buildings, cars, tablecloths and paper clips today as there was yesterday. America is still just as wealthy as it ever was. The only difference is that a great deal of this imaginary thing called "money" has evaporated into nothing, the same way it was originally created by the banks and the Federal Reserve out of nothing, and everybody now feels poor.

It is the greatest confidence trick in the history of the universe - to make people believe that money is the same thing as wealth.

Bullshit.

And having replaced the concept of wealth in our minds by the concept of "money," they have reserved for themselves the privilege of creating it. If we should try printing some money in our basement, they put us in jail.

So people will be told, you have no money, now you must starve, even though the quantity of food and every other tangible thing in America is still the same. You see how the slavery works? These chains are all in our minds, instilled there by unspeakably evil men.

You think I exaggerate? Look at Zimbabwe and see our future. The people of Zimbabwe are starving, in a country so fertile you only have to shove a stick in the ground and it will sprout. All because the unfortunate Zimbabweans still believe "money" is wealth and the only way you can eat is if you have "money" to "buy" food.

The guillotine is too quick. Boiling oil might do it. Flaying alive perhaps. Rending by wild horses maybe. Dissolution in a vat of lye I can see. No fate is vile enough to repay these leeches for the immensity of human misery they have laid upon the world.

May their souls rest in the bosom of their brother Satan for all eternity.

Yours sincerely,
Lemuel Gulliver.

Anonymous said...

Not for publication:

What kind of insanity has overtaken America? I mean, can't someone just go and help you? Even if they had to pitch a tent (or a wigwam) in your back yard.

May the Lord help Korrin, you and your family during this ordeal with her health!

Can anything here help?

http://www.newswithviews.com/Howenstine/james16.htm

http://www.newswithviews.com/Howenstine/james26.htm

http://www.newswithviews.com/Howenstine/james58.htm

http://www.newswithviews.com/Howenstine/james66.htm

http://www.newswithviews.com/Howenstine/james11.htm

http://www.newswithviews.com/Dean/carolyn16.htm

http://www.newswithviews.com/Dean/carolyn2.htm

If you don't mind, may I also suggest you ask the Lord to show you the cause of this, with Korrin, if you're not doing so already? And if you can find any godly elders ask them to pray for her, as per instruction in James?

Anonymous said...

Section 10. No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin money; emit bills of credit; make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility.

Mark Moore (Moderator) said...

Will, a great piece. Perhaps I don't have to write one on this because you just said everything I wanted to say.

One typo though, the word "people" needs to be inserted at the appropriate point in this section....

The Power Elite's approach is to force to work in the basement shoring up the mortally stricken building while the Important People evacuate.


************************

no need to post this comment. Its FYI.

Anonymous said...

The nerve of those bastards!

Let other people know -- Digg this article here's the link!

http://digg.com/business_finance/AIG_Take_Over_Shows_Fed_Is_Willing_To_Buy_Everything

Anonymous said...

Cool It's already been Dugg! Ignore that last comment Will. Here is the Digg link....

http://digg.com/political_opinion/Dispossession_by_Decree_Will_Grigg

Anonymous said...

Quick does anybody know what yesterday was? The birthday of that "g*%#@!&ed" piece of paper the Constitution. Alot of things are happening right now and it seemed to go under the radar. To some it's not cool anymore maybe even quaint or obsolete, but to me it's the closest man will ever get to "freedom". The much maligned public school system here had us learn the preamble and recite the first few sections in the 7th grade. I'm sure nothing like that is happening now.

whitebuffalo said...

What I have been asking since this story broke is twofold: 1)Who exactly pulled the trigger on this "bailout"? Bush, Paulson, Beranke? And 2)By what authority????!!!! By what authority do any of these clowns have to put this private debt onto the public???? Thanks for clearing this up, Will. Only an ignorant fool can believe we still live in a representative republic...

Thomas R. Eddlem said...

The bailout reminds me of one of my favorite late 19th Century congressmen, William "Bourke" Cockran, a man who savaged the income tax of 1894. Cockran said in his speech against the income tax(I'm paraphrasing here): "I live in a poor neighborhood of New York City, and as a congressman I've never had to protect rich people from the robberies of the poor, but only the poor people from the robberies of the rich."

With the AIG bailout (not to mention Bear-Stearns and Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac) you see the welfare for the richest Wall Street fatcats. It's straight from the poor people's pockets to the rich people's pensions and stock options. And they are telling us it's for our own good.

Hogwash!

(BTW, even welfare nominally for the poor is just a bribe so wealthy politicians can enjoy job security. Bourke Cockran is still right.)

Anonymous said...

And the masses continue on with their lives, planning their amusements, anticipating tonight's football game, the "news" robots hyping high school sports for all the brain dead. We live in an area that was hit by very high winds last Sunday and the power is still out for a number of people. That's the big story around here. Not that Fascism has come right out in the open but that the local welfare recipients are in need of complete care from the government. Television reporting showing big, fat gals standing around complaining about needing others to replenish their fridges and freezers full of food. It's not enough for them to have food given to them for immediate use, they want additional largesse so they can replace their stash that they threw out when their fridges warmed up. When the real crash comes and the masses of drones can't get their handouts it will be hell on earth.

R.S. Ladwig said...

Another excellent analogy, the tying of the Nez Perce rip off to the current one being waged on all Americans was illuminating. It was the other day that a congressman stood up to the treasuries' decision and said "Wait a minute shouldn't we debate these bailouts?" He was essentially told by Paulson to sit down and shut up, this was none of congress' business.

Anonymous said...

Where is our "reign of terror"? I'm starting to understand the French Revolution.

Robert said...

captain jack aubrey said...

Americans today are told that their children have no more right to this country than the child of someone from Guadalajara or Guangdong. Why die for such a place? No one washes a rental car, no one bleeds for a rental country....

It was always a dumb idea to try to suggest that you could strengthen a First World economy with a Third World population - a bit like that John Belushi video where he's an Olympic champion who breakfasts on chocolate donuts and Marlboros.

Anonymous said...

Looking to Paulson, Bernanke or any of these other Wall Street creeps to "solve" the problem their predecessors intentionally created and they are now exploiting is a bit like expecting the guy who just raped your wife or girlfriend to call 911 and provide comfort until help arrives.

R. Cozine

Anonymous said...

"Today we hear a palpably relieved silence from Capitol Hill, when the air should be shredded by expressions of bitter outrage over the FED's action."

Exactly. What is wrong with this picture? Bizarrely, it's the REPUBLICAN candidate who's sensed the appeal of a populist critique. McCain has criticized Obama for profiting from his closeness to GSE lobbyists -- as most of Congress did. Neither is doing what Huey Long would have done -- keelhaul the banksters before Congressional hearings; send the ringleaders to jail; and force the financial sector to pay for its own bailout by seizing its remaining equity on behalf of the people.

From the Democratic party comes the familiar outline of bipartisan "compromise": if Republicans want to spend $500 billion on a bailout, Democrats want $500 billion more for homeowner relief, infrastructure construction, and relief for hard-hit states and cities. Great -- let's just make it an even trillion. We'll be long gone before the victims -- our children and grandchildren -- find out how we stabbed them in the back, even as we hollowly claimed to "love" them.

This will never sell as a political slogan, but it's Principle #1 for managing your financial future:

DEATH TO THE DOLLAR!

Anonymous said...

If busted plutocrats can loot the Treasury for $700 billion when they no longer can make payments on their Park Avenue palaces and their Porsches, why should the jobless homeless not loot stores for shoes and groceries? The only plausible response is, the law is only for little people.

The last two weeks exhibit a trend toward escalating chaos, with headless-chicken government functionaries now babbling loony-tunes calls to "give us a trillion by tomorrow morning." In similar situations when a government has failed to the point of rendering a nation broke and ungovernable, the military has sometimes intervened to place the country under conservatorship until social stability returns.

Obviously, a coup represents a further escalation of risk, which can go horribly wrong and leave the country worse off than before.

Nevertheless, in the present Witch's Sabbath chaos, everyone from generals in the Pentagon to anarchists in safe houses is mulling urgent thoughts, ranging from "anything goes" to "strike now, before there's nothing left to grab."

I dreamt of tanks rumbling across the Potomac, while president George W. Ceausescu flees into Maryland disguised as a bag lady. The Constitution is de facto suspended anyway; a coup would be just a case of replacing one junta with another, possibly more competent one.

Anonymous said...

Quoting from a Sep. 20th Bloomberg article:

"It sounds like Paulson is asking to be a financial dictator, for a limited period of time," said historian John Steele Gordon, author of "Hamilton's Blessing," a chronicle of the national debt. "This is a much-needed declaration of power for the Treasury secretary. We can't wait until the next administration in January."

http://tinyurl.com/54ytll

Condensing Gordon's words: "DICTATOR ... MUCH NEEDED ... POWER ... CAN'T WAIT." This subliminal coded message comes from a gov-worshipping historian, both of whose grandfathers held seats on the New York Stock Exchange. Read between the lines.

Any questions?

Anonymous said...

Bwahaha Teacher Paris that was a good one. This is all a must have happen to finally kill the sovereignty of this formerly great republic. The Terry Schiavo soap opera was a distraction for the meeting of the 3amigos and there is only one meeting on the North American Union left. To those coincidence theorists that are spoon fed their logic and reasoning by the 6 o clock news hour I'll be there laughing at you when it comes to pass. Skeletor Comrade Chertoff (not my tovarisch) is a big driver behind the NAU. In a recent speech Vicente Fox said get over it americans this is our land. I wonder how many wheelbarrows of Ameros it will take to buy a loaf of bread??

Anonymous said...

“Hi all, This might be the last thing I ever post on here but I need to warn you all. I have been with LAPD for a while and have learned alot of things. One of them is to be a little more independent. Don’t put 100 % faith in other humans to take care of you. And yes that means the government 2. Well because things have gotten so bad in LA (Officers being shot at up 39 % in 2007) I decided to move to Idaho. And I love it by the way. Anyway what I’m going to say might shock you or even scare you, but please understand that fear does nothing but makes things worse kinda like stress. So instead of worrying do something to fix it. Remember there’s no problems only solutions. This morning I got a call from my uncle who is very high up in the military and he told me to leave the city now. I hardly ever talk to him so he was unaware that I had already left LA. But he seemed very concerned but refused to tell me why. After about 20 minutes he told me the very basics. The first thing he said was to buy as much can food and water as possible. The second was to stock up on ammo. I have already stacked up on ammo because I knew it would become very expensive later and in LA there was a 1 year wait for .223 bullets for my AR15. But I was still very confused as to why he’s calling out of the blue and telling me these things. Well what he said next is something the american people aren’t suppose to know. He told me that there is an actual plan as to when the economy will completely crash. As of right now he said it will happen in the middle of sept of this year. Also he said that our Government will crash in Feb of 2009. He said that Mexico and Canada will merge with us and that a new dollar called the Amero is going to replace the dollar. But the most scary thing is what he told me he’s been doing for the past couple of years. He’s been overseeing the construction of Prison Camps being built all through out America. He said a Private company called Haliburton is building them. He told me that 1 camp in Alaska can hold 2 million people and there’s almost 1000 camps in the USA. ( not including the ones underground) He also said that these will be used when they declare Martial Law. There’s some more things but I promised him I would never repeat them. But just knowing that this could even be possible makes me say to myself ” why not buy an extra 20 or 30 bucks of food I can store” each time I go shopping. I had about 2 weeks worth because in California you never know when that next big earthquake can hit not to mention the last year and a half we have been training on how to handle food riots in LA.( By the way the first step in the LAPD process is to stand back and observe)

Anonymous said...

Dear Flash Gordon, I don't doubt what you write about is likely in our future but your post sounds bogus to me. I've been preparing for some years now. But when the crash comes I don't know how even preparation will keep the mobs at bay.

Anonymous said...

Dear Mr Gulliver

I enjoyed your posting, but have one question:

If the universe is an "illusion made by satan to ensnare our souls" why in heaven's name do we care so much about it?

In the Judaeo-Christian tradition God commands Satan to bow to God, and he refuses; and this is the cause of his rejection. In Islam by way of contrast it is the command to bow to man - not God - that Satan refuses, with the same consequences.

In this way God makes it explicit through a variety of stories (as appears to be his way) of how difficult is our position, yet we are somehow pivotal in the scheme of creation.

Presumably, if we were all to bow to God, giving up this world and its possibilities for self (the dark side of capitalism?) satan would (of necessity) lose his very power over the world. Then, as he knows he must, he would be forced to bow to us and (either directly, or through us) therefore also to God.

We would then all be worshipping God (as it is prophesied to come to pass) in every realm, and the angelic wars brought to an end.

Do you enjoy watching things burn?

The realm of the fiery Lamb, crucifixion, death and sublime resurrection of what God choses (and no more than that) is taking place right in front of our eyes, right now.

So instead of bowing to this earthly idol, this worldly Christ let us instead start building the kingdom - bow now down to the eternal, immutable glory of God.

Get ye to the work of universal compassion and justice, slaves!

Best wishes