US CONGRE$$ Sells Out to Wall $treet

All I can say bout this is:  
Campaign Finance Reform

Patti



Federal lawmakers responsible for overseeing the US economy have received millions of dollars from Wall Street firms. Since 2001, eight of the most troubled firms have donated $64.2 million to congressional candidates, presidential candidates and the Republican and Democratic parties. As senators, Barack Obama and John McCain received a combined total of $3.1 million. The donors include investment bankers Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, insurer American International Group, and mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Some of the top recipients of contributions from companies receiving Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) money are the same members of Congress who chair committees charged with regulating the financial sector and overseeing the effectiveness of this unprecedented government program.  In total, members of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, Senate Finance Committee and House Financial Services Committee received $5.2 million from TARP recipients in the 2007-2008 election cycle. President Obama collected at least $4.3 million from employees at these companies for his presidential campaign.

Nearly every member of the House Financial Services Committee, who in February 2009 oversaw hearings on how the $700 billion of TARP bailout was being spent, received contributions associated with these financial institutions during the 2008 election cycle. “You could say that the finance industry got their money’s worth by supporting members of Congress who were inclined to look the other way,” said Lawrence Jacobs, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for the Study of Politics and Governance.

For instance, in 2004 when the Securities and Exchange Commission adopted a major rule change that freed investment banks to plunge tens of billions of dollars in borrowed money into subprime mortgages and other risky plays, congressional banking committees held no oversight hearings.  Congressional inaction also allowed mortgage agents to earn high fees for peddling loans to unqualified homebuyers and prevented states from toughening regulations on predatory lending practices.

Author Matt Taibbi writes that some of the most egregious selling of the US government to Wall Street happened in the late nineties, when “Democrats, tired of getting slaughtered in the fundraising arena by Republicans, decided to throw off their old reliance on unions and interest groups and become more ‘business-friendly.’ Wall Street responded by flooding Washington with money, buying allies in both parties.” In the ten-year period beginning in 1998, financial companies spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists. Wise political investments enabled the nation’s top bankers to effectively scrap any meaningful oversight of the financial industry.

In 1999, Texas Senator Phil Gramm co-sponsored the bill that repealed key aspects of the Glass-Steagall Act, which, since the Great Depression, prevented banks from getting into the insurance business. The very next year Gramm wrote sweeping new legislation called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which made it impossible to regulate credit swaps as either gambling or securities. Trading in risky credit was thus deregulated.

In 1997 and 1998—the years leading up to Phil Gramm’s act that gutted Glass-Steagall—the banking, brokerage, and insurance industries spent $350 million on political contributions and lobbying. Gramm, then the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, collected $2.6 million in only five years.  The law passed 90-8 in the Senate, with the support of thirty-eight Democrats, including Joe Biden, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, Dick Durbin and John Edwards.  The act helped create the too-big-to-fail financial behemoths like Citigroup, AIG and Bank of America—and in turn helped those companies slowly crush their smaller competitors, leaving the major Wall Street firms with even more money and power to lobby for further deregulation.

By early 2009, a whole series of new government operations have been invented to inject cash into the economy, most all of them under the completely secretive control of the financial sector. Taibbi points out that “While the rest of America, and most of Congress, have been bugging out about the $700 billion bailout program called TARP, newly created organisms in the Federal Reserve zoo have quietly been pumping not billions, but trillions of dollars into the hands of private companies (at least $3 trillion so far in loans, with as much as $5.7 trillion more in guarantees of private investments).” Taibbi continues, “This new, secretive activity by the Fed completely eclipses the TARP program in terms of its influence on the economy. . . . No one knows who’s getting that money or exactly how much of it is disappearing through these new holes in the hull of America’s credit rating. Moreover, no one can be sure that these new institutions are really temporary, or whether they are being set up as permanent, state-aided crutches to Wall Street, designed to systematically suck bad investments off the ledgers of irresponsible lenders.”

Taibbi concludes, “The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d’état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.”

Fraud and crisis continue to deepen and expand with significant conflicts of interest in Congress and the executive branch of US government. Simon Johnson, former IMF chief economist, says, “The finance industry has effectively captured our government.”

Update by Lindsay Renick Mayer
Even as the federal government has continued to figure out ways to help the struggling finance sector and give the economy a boost, they’ve been collecting input from the very companies that have accepted taxpayer dollars and are, in part, being held responsible for the current crisis. But that’s not all they’ve collected—Congress has been busy fundraising from the finance sector, including those companies that received billions of dollars from TARP.

Since this story was written in February, the finance sector has, of course, continued to give money to candidates, party committees and political action committees. Since the start of 2009, Wall Street has donated $12.6 million—more than any other sector this year. And 58 percent of that has gone to Democrats, marking a change, perhaps, in political strategy. Not since the 1990 election cycle have finance, insurance and real estate companies given more than 52 percent of its overall donations to Democrats, and from 1991 to 2006 finance gave the majority of its money to Republicans.
Many of the companies that we wrote about in this story that sent their CEOs to testify before the House Financial Services Committee have actually scaled back their overall giving in the first quarter of 2009 compared to the first quarters of 2007 and 2005. This includes JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs (which ranks No. 1 for a decline in contributions this year compared to the start of 2008), Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Wells Fargo.  However, it is still very early in the cycle, and campaign contributions generally don’t start flowing in until closer to an election. For the most part these companies, like the rest of the industry, targeted Democrats with a majority of their political giving.


Of course, a big story this year will be whether lawmakers took a hit to their personal finances like much of the rest of the country, or whether they personally benefited by infusing the Wall Street companies with taxpayer cash, especially members of the banking and finance committees. The 2008 personal financial disclosure reports with those answers are now available on OpenSecrets.org at: http://www.opensecrets.org/pfds/search_cid.php.

To read more about how lobbying and influence peddling are shaping legislation, keep up with CRP’s blog at http://www.opensecrets.org/news/.
And to do some investigating yourself, dive into our industry profiles: http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/index.php.
We also follow the cash flow to committees. Check out the Senate Finance Committee data here: http://www.opensecrets.org/cmteprofiles/index.php.

Student Researchers: Jocelyn Rapp and Caitlin Ruxton (SSU)
Faculty Evaluator: Samual Mikhail PhD Economics, Chip McAuley, PhD
Indian River State College and Sonoma State University

Read Full Article Here:
http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/category/two-thousand-and-ten-book/

What could've been had He not sold us out

BARACK'S BRILLIANT PLAN

Obama's Economic Rescue Package So On The Mark It Would Be A True Game Changer, In A Good Way

by
Ben F. Terton

October 14, 2008 – Half a decade. That's how long I've waited to write this article.

For half a decade the only articles I've been able to write were the ones that explained that, despite "expert" commentary to the contrary, the nation was headed toward a major economic collapse. And then that the collapse was beginning. And then to repeat, yes, really, there's going to be a collapse. And then, finally, I guess now you see what I meant.

The reason I've been able to predict exactly what was going to happen to the economy half a decade ahead of time was not because I'm psychic. It was because during that period, with Republican conservatives in control of the government, there were no significant changes of policy. And so the disastrous course that was set beginning with the first round of Bush tax cuts just trickled on and on, like a slow motion bullet headed toward the nation's heart but with the nation pinned there by the GOP, blindfolded by media nonsense, and so doomed by an easily escapable problem.

Any significant change of policy during that time could have headed off this disaster. But neither Republican nor Democrat ever really hit the mark.

Until now.

Senator Obama's plan was shocking for many reasons. So far ahead in the race, it was unexpected that he would release such a bold, detailed plan. But more than that, it was truly shocking to see, for the first time in a generation, a politician hit a mark so directly on the head. Delivering exactly to the true middle class, rather than to either the poorer people or the richer, Obama's simple, relatively cheap economic rescue plan, if enacted, would immediately and significantly alter the course of the American economy for the better.

Here's why this plan blows all previous ones away.

The first part is pretty simple and only somewhat significant. His offer of tax cuts directly tied to the creation of new jobs - offering $3000 per new job created in America. For years one of the things I pointed out as a flaw in the conservative dogma was that they claimed giving tax cuts to businesses would create jobs, but they never attached any mechanism to the cuts that made it so. They simply handed money to companies, which could decide to use the money for bonuses for their CEO's - which is what they did - rather than create jobs. If they truly wanted to use tax cuts to business to create jobs, I wrote for years, there had to be something in the cuts that required them to be used for hiring.

Obama's plan does exactly that. And notice the last part of his plan - "$3000 per new job created in America." Previous cuts allowed companies to spend their cash overseas. Obama explicitly stops this.

What you see here is a fundamental shift - Obama is actually looking out for America and for the American people. The Republicans were not stupid. They knew if you just handed cuts to businesses without specifying what the money had to be used for, it would go to bonuses and overseas projects. They just didn't care. They were the rich CEO's and they just wanted companies to get richer.

What Obama proposes in this part is simple, but massively different. For the first time in years, the American people are not having their hands tied behind their back while the government spits directly in their face. No lies, no games, no looking the other way. Barack Obama knew what needed to be done, but didn't put his trust in businesses, as conservatives do. He, in effect, instituted oversight and regulation all within a tax cut. And with that he got at the fundamental flaw of the conservative economic scheme: the idea that businesses act with America's best interest in mind, rather than for the profit of their executives and stock holders, which we all know is actually the case.

This part of Obama's plan is very nice. But what he came up with next was not only brilliant, but the most significantly positive step one could have imagined to immediately fix what is broken in the American economy - and in such a way that it has no real downside.

Barack's plan would allow people to withdraw 15% of their retirement funds, up to $10,000, in 2008 and again in 2009.

Now why is this such a big deal? And when I say big deal, I mean so big this could single-handedly save the American economy and head off depression and collapse.

Here's the rub: the average American family currently owes just under $10,000 in credit card debt.

What was destroying the American economy - and going to continue to destroy it for years - was that the American people weren't just spent out, they were overspent. After decades of spending more than they actually had thanks to easy credit, not only were they going to have to cut spending to get back to what they could afford, but all across the nation, people were completely slamming the door on spending to focus on trying to pay down all the debt they had accumulated.

Now with the numbers we've been hearing lately, $10,000 might not seem that much. But for your average middle class family, to pay that off while still getting by would literally mean years - two to five years - of eliminating virtually all non-essential spending. Cars, vacations, even going out to dinner, all things big and little were getting cut from household budgets left and right. With 2/3 of the American economy consumer spending, this was the problem that was destroying our nation.

Now look at Barack's plan. A family can, without penalty, immediately take $10,000 from their IRA and, instantly - instead of crimping and cutting for 4 years - have that debt be gone. And for those a little deeper in, they could do it a second time right after January, since it's allowed in 2008 and 2009.

There are a number of very important things to notice about this plan: unlike a tax cut stimulus plan, this doesn't cost the government a massive amount of money the nation would have to borrow. This plan allows people to help themselves get out of the mess they made. And, at the same time, it both: 1)1 injects a bunch of cash into the economy, particularly helping fend off bank collapses by having people be able to pay off their debts - all without government borrowing - and, 2) gets people instantly out of the holes they are in, enabling them to begin spending again, and so instantly reviving every layer of the economy, from the corner pizza store to the car dealer.

The best part of this again, like with the first part of Barack's plan, is that more than just being a new policy, it is an important change of philosophy and a more advanced, doubly positive solution. Rather than the government bailing out those in trouble, this allows people to be bailed out but instead by themselves. Beyond this being better for the nation's economy, it is the philosophy of self-reliance and responsibility.

Most notably, this plan, unlike previous plans offered by Democrats, which helped only the poorer among us, or by Republicans, which helped only the richer among us, this plan directly hits the mark of helping the one group that always gets missed: the true middle class. If you are poor, this part of the plan won't help you at all. You won't have much of a 401(K), if any, and so won't have any funds to draw on. And if you are rich, $10,000 won't mean much one way or another.

But for the hard working people in the middle, people earning typically from the $30K's all the way up to $200K, this will be a lifesaver and game changer for each and every household. Even for families that can only withdraw $2000, that would still be years worth of paying down credit cards, since families with less would be able to pay less each month, and would be caught in the credit card interest cycle. Suddenly, boom, $2000 gone in 2008, another $2000 in 2009. Back in the game.

And for the others who can take more, they can either knock out credit card debt or, for those who mortgage woes, use that $10,000 a year to stay afloat for a while - $10,000 can buy a lot of time for a mortgage holder.

And again, since the funds are personal funds and not a tax handout, it is like a massive stimulus program and bank rescue program combined with no real cost to the nation whatsoever.

That is true brilliance.

This part of the plan could put people back on their feet in an instant and save countless banks and lenders by enabling people who would have otherwise gone bust to meet their obligations.

The only question anyone could have about this plan would be won't it hurt at retirement time? But truly, if everyone keeps crimping their spending for years to pay down this debt instead of doing it the way Barack's plan does, so many people would lose their jobs due to economic retraction that they would be far worse off come retirement time.

It's been a long time since I've been able to write an article that had any positive economic news in it. It's been a long run of dire and dark. But now there is hope. If this plan is enacted, combined with Obama's claim that he would launch an all out drive to build a new alternative energy economy, not only can America avoid a massive depression, but America could pull out of this recession in rather short order and, even better, climb to economic heights never seen before by bringing home all the wealth that's been going over to the Middle Eastern oil cartels, Russia, and Venezuela.

The third part of Obama's plan is also very sharp. State and local governments are in dire straights. Declining property tax, etc are sending numerous of them toward bankruptcy. Obama's plan would set up an emergency loan agency just for state and local governments. You know where they've had to go before? To a company called AIG - yes, that one we've had to bail out twice now, while it spends half a million on posh retreats. No more would local governments have to go to AIG - nor go bankrupt.

Again, philosophically, Obama is ending the era of putting America's trust in business. No more trusting AIG to back our governments. We are instead going to trust our government over the businesses. A fundamental shift, and not a moment too soon.

The last part of Obama's plan is a bit of a snoozer - a 90-day freeze on foreclosures. Not something too exciting one way or another. But it does buy some time for the other parts of the plan to be enacted, as well as for people to make plans for dealing with their mortgage situations.

It can not be overstated how important and miraculous this plan rolled out by Barack Obama is. And for a candidate who was far enough ahead in the polls that he could have played it safe and avoided putting any plan out there, it was a brave move, and much to the nation's benefit.

Politically, by truly putting tangible economic turnaround out there for the entire American middle class - pending the election of Obama and Democrats so they can pass this bill right after the election - Obama has won the pocketbooks, and likely the hearts and minds of millions of middle class voters. They say people always vote their pocketbooks. For millions, this plan would lift misery and stress and replace it with a return to normal life, with no bill left to pay down the road. With a vote for Barack meaning $10,000 will instantly be put in their pockets, it is hard to imagine anything but an even more massive swing toward Obama's candidacy by middle class voters. Look for a possible bluing of many currently red states, from the plain states to parts of the south.

I don't know where this idea came from for Obama - if it was Warren Buffet or another advisor who gave it to him. But for Obama to choose the plan that exactly hit the mark, and in the gentlest, smartest possible way, he has shown in one of America's most desperate moments ever that he has the vision and leadership to right the nation's ship amidst the wildest storm.

Bravo. And thank you, Barack, for at last allowing me to write an article about a potential positive development for the American economy.


Reposted by
Michael

Senator Sanders Unfiltered: US Congress Bought & Paid For?

http://sandersunfiltered.com/



http://sandersunfiltered.com/

The Eleven Truths of Tyranny

by Matt Giwer (c) 1994 (9/30)

   1. Any law the electorate sees as being open to being perverted from its original intent will be perverted in a manner that is worse than the manner of perversion seen at the time.

   2. Any law that is so difficult to pass it requires the citizens be assured it will not be a stepping stone to worse laws will in fact be a stepping stone to worse laws.

   3. Any law that requires the citizens be assured the law does not mean what the citizens fear, means exactly what the citizens fear.

   4. Any law passed in a good cause will be interperated to apply to causes against the wishes of the people.

   5. Any law enacted to help any one group will be applied to harm people not in that group.

   6. Everything the government says will never happen will happen.
   7. What the government says it could not foresee, the government has planned for.

   8. When there is a budget shortfall to cover non-essential government services the citizens will be given the choice between higher taxes or the loss of essential government services.

   9. Should the citizens mount a successful effort to stop a piece of legislation the same legislation will be passed under a different name.

  10. All deprivations of freedom and choice will be increased rather than reversed. 

11. Any government that has to build safeguards into a law so that it will not be abused is providing guidelines for abusing the law without violating it. 

    * A government is a tyranny when it sets itself above the will and judgement of the people and refuses to comply with the wishes of the people.
 
    * A government is a tyranny when it lies to the people to get what it wants.
 
    * A government is a tyranny when the traditional rights of the people are treated as obstacles to the objectives of government.

    * A government is a tyranny when it creates animosities among the people.
 
    * A government is a tyranny when it blames the people for not stopping it from acting against the wishes of the people.

Cheney has invested 85 million dollars in a mutual fund company which holds shares of for-profit prisons

http://ww4report.com/node/6358


Cheney indicted in Texas prison scandal
Submitted by WW4 Report on Thu, 11/20/2008 - 03:53.
Its not The Hague, but its a start. From AFP, Nov. 19:


Texas jury indicts Cheney, Gonzalez in prison abuse case
WASHINGTON — A Texas grand jury has issued indictments against Vice President Dick Cheney and former attorney general Alberto Gonzalez over abuse at privately run prisons, court documents showed.


The three-page indictment Tuesday alleges that Cheney profited from the abuse because he invested 85 million dollars in a mutual fund company which holds shares of for-profit prisons.


It said this is a "direct conflict of interest" because Cheney had influence over the federal contracts awarded to the prison companies.


The indictment also accused Cheney of committing "at least misdemeanor assaults" of inmates by allowing other inmates to assault them.


The indictment further alleges that Gonzalez "participated by further having used his position ... to stop the investigations as to the wrong doings which includes the assaults committed in the prison for profit in Willacy County, Texas."


Cheney and Gonzalez were charged with engaging in organized criminal activity.


Several other related indictments were brought against a host of public officials in what one lawyer called a circus act by a local prosecutor seeking revenge in his final weeks in office.


"We look forward to having the opportunity to have an independent, competent prosecutor review the facts, and are confident that once that happens these baseless charges will be dismissed," said Michael Cowen, who represents Texas state senator Eddie Lucio.


Cheney's spokeswoman declined to comment because his office had not yet received a copy of the indictment.


"I'm not going to speculate or forecast the vice president's legal options," Megan Mitchell told AFP.


"Let's wait and see if we even receive one."


Associated Content notes these "Also indicted":


GEO Group, Inc., formerly Wackenhut Corrections Corp., and David Forrest, a warden, for murder and manslaughter of an inmate in 2001.


District Clerk Gilbert Lozano for official abuse of official capacity and official oppression.


Special prosecutor Gustavo Garza for official abuse of official capacity and official oppression.


We've noted before Cheney's corporate ties to the domestic police state.