Politics in the Zeros

The US government despite blusterings to the contrary is intent on insuring the flow of drugs continues from Mexico, along with  billions of  dollars of dirty money. As for Rule of Law, well, I guess that’s just for the little people. All that drug cartel money flowing into our financial is just too juicy to ignore. And if thousands get tortured to death each year because of it. oh well.  Keeping the banksters happy is the most important goal.

“Anxious to counterattack, the CIA proposed electronically emptying the bank accounts of drug kingpins, but was turned down by the Treasury Department and the White House, which feared unleashing chaos in the banking system.”

This happened under Bush. Obama is no better. Geithner has pointblank said big banks will not be criminally prosecuted for the very same reason, because it would hurt and upset all the corrupt banks and hedge funds.

Scholars Stage comments on the above quote:

This one sentence betrays Washington’s distorted foreign policy priorities. The CIA proposal had several clear benefits: drug lords forced to pull their investments would have less incentive to stay in the game, cartels would be robbed of operating funds, and most importantly of all, the proposal could be implemented with minimal American involvement. [2] There would be no need for more boots on the ground. The drawbacks were also clear: folks on Wall Street would lose money. The White House took Wall Street’s side in the debate, and favored a policy designed to kill or capture the “high value targets” whose bank accounts were not to be touched.

There is only one word that explains this and that is “corruption.”

William Ward, the former head of the United States’ Africa Command, is accused of spending hundreds of thousands in taxpayer dollars on personal expenses.

Ward is (was?) a four-star general accused of using public money for personal use, yet the story is getting very little play in the US and appears absent from major media here. This link is from Al-Jazeera.

Hi, I'm the new Senate Majority Leader you've been waiting for. (wikimedia.org)

Ok, it’s not quite that bad, but close.

A new poll says a mere 5% think Congress is doing a good job with a plurality saying most members of Congress are corrupt.

43% in another poll think random people chosen from a phone book would do a better job than the current Congress.

Disgust with corrupt governments is how rebellions are formed. Sometimes they topple governments too.

Republic Report has hired convicted felon and former corruptor Jack Abramoff to be part of their team, which includes Matt Stoller.

It just launched and the content is already excellent. I’m definitely keeping an eye on Republic Report.

Because there’s just so much of it now…

Richest nations giving up on climate change, probably because the banksters can’t figure out how to properly loot it.

The real reason Obama may veto indefinite detention (it has nothing to do with protecting liberty).

Countrywide whistleblower. Mortage fraud is systemic.

Have we been captured by psychopaths? Um, yes. But there’s way more of us than them.

Detroit threatened by hostile takeover.

And if your answer to all of this is we have to elect more Democrats then your state of denial is near-terminal. Change is possible, and it’s coming. But it won’t happen via the tired and ineffective electoral route. Rather,, that may be the final step after social upheavals have forced it.

So the Justice Department isn’t even bothering to enforce the law, says a departed official.

Well gosh, that’s just swell. They pretend to enforce the law and we pretend everything is fine. But it’s not.

Deliberately not enforcing criminal law against a specific set of lawbreakers means we no longer have a functioning legal system.

Oh, this corrupt edifice will all come crashing down, sooner rather than later, too.

It’s funny but it’s not.
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For two succesive governors of a major state to be convicted of corruption is a sickening example of how payoffs, bribes, and fraud are business as usual in far too many state capitols.

Really folks, we need to take out the trash all across the country because if we don’t, the garbage will drive out whatever good still remains.

Michel Montecrossas. In The Street.

Politics is cheap, you can’t trust a top thief.

Fight your way through, be tuffer than all lies. / You know you’re in the jungle – it’s no surprise. / If you kill enough you belong to the right. / You are the good if you give up your life.

No, I’m in the street, / I won’t lose my right to battle and to win, / to come out of the night, / to be with my loved ones and know the right side.

In the street it is rumblin’, it is underground. / The pavement is a-shakin’ and suddenly it comes: / the obvious difference between right and wrong, / the revolution of love and the moment to be strong.

People in Europe are realizing en masse that their corrupt banking system is trying to force them to pay for its greed and stupidity. And they’re mad as Hell and won’t take it any more. We need to do this here too.

‘Suddenly, the world is realizing that there’s a possible revolution in Spain.’ The ruling Socialist Party there just got hammered in elections for playing too cozy with banks who insist that Spaniards pay back the bonds at full value. Screw the banks, do what Iceland did, Spanish youth is saying. Default on the loans, let the insolvent and corrupt banks fail, then arrest their CEOs. Works for me.

‘Economists from the Left and the Right Agree: Neither the U.S. Nor Europe is dealing with the real problem.’ Of course they’re not. Their primary concern is that the bondholders don’t take a haircut on bonds they knew were risky to buy. But you and I don’t get to do that, so why should the TBTF banks?

Moody’s is about to issue credit warnings on 14 of UKs biggest banks. These banks are insolvent and have been propped up by forcing the public to bail them out – as their executives pay themselves bloated salaries. This is corruption. They are capitalists, right? Then they know that in capitalism sick businesses need to fail so healthy ones can replace them. But of course, they aren’t really capitalists at all, more like gangsters.

“The ECB is an ‘enormous bad bank‘ that’s exposed to everything that could go wrong in Europe.” They hold huge amounts of garbage as collateral for their dicey loans and bonds but want everyone else to pay for their omissions, greed, and shortsightedness.

Bankster spew. Lies and inadvertent humor.

Greece is on the brink of official insolvency… yet in an exceedingly bizarre interview with German news magazine Der Spiegel published today, Jean-Claude Junker insists that (a) Greece is not broke, (b) if Greece doesn’t make its debt payments, this is not the same as ‘default,’ and (c) it’s OK for politicians to lie because people don’t understand capital markets.

Make no mistake. They are getting desperate.

This increasing rigidity of the global economic order is frightening, and dangerous. It is the consequence of the new normal, Spanish and Wisconsin-colored flames licking up at the system be damned. One day, these protests won’t be leaderless, rudderless, and directionless.

Analyzing celebrity doping while Rome burns. Our mass media, as usual, is mostly useless.

The Father of Reaganomics, Paul Craig Roberts, says in an interview with Max Keiser

“Overthrow the government …. and put these people in jail.”
“Would default be catastrophic?” – Max. PCR: “Catastrophic for who? The American bankers?”

Our political and financial systems are increasingly becoming indistinguishable from organized crime. Seriously. I mean, they’re barely bothering to hide it. Both parties are awash in those concealed bribes called campaign contributions. Financial executives who committed multiple serious felonies are not prosecuted. The federal government bails out out insolvent institutions then gives them sweetheart deals that the rest of us don’t get. We the taxpayers are forced pay for bankster recklessness as they continue to make enormous profits at our expense. Large corporations pay lobbyists to game the system with special tax loopholes so they pay no taxes.

If you are in doubt about whether all this counts as corruption, then apply the Polizeros Banana Republic Rule. If such behavior happened in a banana republic, would we call if corruption? If so, then it is corruption here too.

“Corruption is strangling the land,” Steppenwolf once said. But it’s worse than just corruption. We are seeing a genuine collapse of ethics and honesty. The social contract that keeps us together is breaking down. Fewer and fewer care about the common good. Instead it’s about whatever can I grab and screw the law. There is a moral rot in this country and the elites are infected the worst.

We have few, if any, role models who genuinely inspire in positive ways. There are no leaders of national stature who are saying the corruption must end, that laws must be enforced regardless of who you are, that drug money has corrupted our banks and hedge funds. Rather than speaking the truth we get empty platitudes from politicians and CEOs, and the looting continues.

You think I’m exaggerating?

Drug money laundered by banks kept financial system going during 2008 financial crisis, says Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. And of course the banks, hedge funds, and Federal Reserve know where the money comes from. If you knowingly take dirty money, then you yourself become dirty too.

Wachovia laundered billions from Mexico drug cartels and got off with a fine and no criminal prosecutions. Our government has said the reason TBTF banksters aren’t criminally prosecuted is because it would be harmful to the banking system. But this means laws are selectively unenforced. Tell me, how can a teenager be expected to respect the law when the federal government doesn’t? That’s what I mean by a collapse in morality and ethics.

Florida Times-Union

Banker criminality demands prosecution, yet there have been no prosecutions against the top banksters. Will our federal law enforcement agencies ever truly act? Or are they just captured agencies? Mainstream media avoids the topic almost completely. All that sweet insider access they get would vanish should they start seriously investigating corruption.

Corruption never has been compulsory yet sociopaths increasingly occupy positions of power. At a time when we need real leaders to clean up the mess, there are none.

Joe Bageant said only a few fundamentalist preachers get what the real problem in the country is, even if their solutions are wrong. Not to get all theological about this, but when morality and concern for the common good disintegrate, societies often follow. We’re going wrong. And have been for quite some time.

So what is to be done? First off, let’s stop referring to our fellow citizens as dumb or sheeple. I think most people have a real good idea what’s going. But they aren’t sure what to do about it yet. We need broad-based coalitions across all party lines. Lots of people, regardless of their politics don’t like the corruption and want it to end. This is a force that can be harnessed. Then, let’s toss out all the defeatism and moping. Tyrants and thugs can be overthrown. It happens a lot in history. It’s happening now in the Middle East. Protesters there are fighting against severely repressive, vicious governments and winning. We can do.

Finally, get mad, get animated, get creative, and fight back.

'Over'? Did you say 'Over'? Nothing is over until we decide it is!

We The People are far more powerful than the criminals in executive suites and in D.C. when we act together.

AmpedStatus presents three ways to save the country.

1) End the system of political bribery: campaign finance, lobbying and the revolving door.

2) Break up the banks and hold them accountable: The Federal Reserve banking system and their primary dealers (i.e. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo).

3) Open up the mainstream media and protect Internet freedom.

These proposals are neither left nor right. Rather, they are populist. The problem isn’t The Other Party. The problem is an entrenched system of corruption between politicians in Washington and large corporations, primarily financial institutions. That’s where the rot is. That’s what must be changed.