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 "I am doing God's work!"
Lloyd Blankfein, CEO Goldman Sachs |
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 It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
Henry Ford
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 Back in the '50s and '60s, kids used to say, when one of us did something the others didn't approve of, "Hey, it's a free country." I'll bet you haven't heard that expression for many years. Back in the '70s, there used to be a joke: "America will never have concentration camps. We'll call them something else." Guantanamo, and the long rumored FEMA detention centers, are proof that it wasn't a joke after all.
Doug Casey
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 War is a LIE. Not the "lie" of idealogic or religious causes, but the economic truth of competition between global capitalists for control of resources including minerals, precious metals, oils, cheap labor, and markets. If endless war wasn't profitable ... we wouldn't have it.
David Swanson |
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 In this casino (Wall Street) the house represents both sides of any bet. The players play with others money and win or lose they still keep their fees.
Paul Randall |
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 Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.
Friedrich Nietzsche |
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 “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.”
Benjamin Franklin |
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 In fairness to the impartiality of the Supreme Court, the poor as well as the rich have the right to spend unlimited amounts of money for political purposes.
Rudy Avizius |
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 In other words, the people of Iceland have not had their future mortgaged in order to bail out a bunch of greedy bankers.
Peter Krauth |
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 Can you think of a better business model than being a Wall Street bank? You hand out 500 million credit cards to 118 million households, even though 60 million of the households make less than $50,000. You then create derivatives where you package billions of subprime credit card debt and convince clueless dupes to buy this toxic debt as if it was AAA credit.
James Quinn |
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 Debt is backed with debt, based on debt, dependent on debt and leveraged with yet more debt. For example, today it is possible to buy a bond (i.e., lend money) on margin (i.e., with borrowed money).
Keith Weiner |
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 Wall Street and major European banks usurped unprecedented money making power.
With complicit politicians, they make it the old fashioned way.
They steal it.
Steve Lendman |
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 A tiny fraction of our society, a few hundred families, are in the process of purchasing our democracy, and they don’t plan to give it up once they own it. We are in a power struggle right now. People or donors?
Eric Byler |
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 A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.
— Edward R. Murrow |
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 There's no doubt that the banks are happy with this deal. You would be, too, if your bill for lying to courts and end-running the law came to less than $2,000 per loan file.
Gretchen Morgenson |
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 The mortgage debacle was equivalent to all the big car companies manufacturing cars that they knew were going to crash and buying life insurance on the people that they sold the cars to knowing that they would die so they could collect on both ends.
Peter Grandich |
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 "Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce...and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate."
President James Garfield, 2 weeks before his assassination. |
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 Wealth inequality is not such a big problem when you are at the top of the income pyramid.
Rudy Avizius
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 Food stamps really are a subsidy to businesses that do not pay their employees enough money to feed their families.
Kevin Zeese |
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 Whoever is in power in a society creates its money. If you want to know who is in power, look for the money-maker.
Bernard Lietar |
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 It is true that 50% of American workers pay no Federal income tax. It is also true that 50% of American workers make less than $25,000 per year. If these workers are employed in Philadelphia they pay 4% city income tax, 3% state income tax, 7.65% Social Security and Medicare tax, 6% sales tax on everything they buy, 15% state and federal taxes on gasoline, and they pay city and county property taxes whether they own or rent.
James Quinn |
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 They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq ...
Why don't we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys. It worked for over 200 years, and we're not using it anymore.
David Petrovich |
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 If in the face of one medium-sized brokerage firm [MF Global] going under, the regulators will openly allow ordinary people to be ripped off for the sake of protecting the so-called "Systemically Important Financial Institutions"—in this case JPMorgan—what will happen if there is a system-wide run?
Tyler Durden |
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 I'm left scratching my head trying to understand their animosity towards people drawing attention to the enormous debt based ponzi scheme that is our country, versus their silent acquiescence to the transfer of trillions in taxpayer dollars to the criminal bankers that have destroyed the worldwide financial system.
James Quinn |
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 If governments everywhere are in debt, who are they in debt to? The answer is that they are in debt to PRIVATE BANKS. The "cruel hoax" is that governments are in debt for money created on a computer screen, money they could have just created themselves.
Ellen Brown, Author, Web of Debt
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 How more plainly can it be said? The US financial system as it now stands cannot be trusted to observe even the most basic property rights as it continues to unravel from a long standing culture of fraud.
Jesse |
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 We are indentured to a Wall Street money machine that creates our money and lends it back to us at interest, money our sovereign government could be creating itself.
Ellen Brown
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 There is not much that the Federal Reserve won't do behind the scenes to keep big banks flourishing. We just found out, 3 years after the fact, that they pumped a whopping $17.7 TRILLION in no interest money into the coffers of financial institutions whose lobbyists and media decry big government intervention and Socialism.
Danny Schechter |
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 Have you ever bothered to wonder why there have been no real investigations and prosecutions of the bankers and the credit ratings agencies?
And why they have been permitted to continue to operate, largely unimpeded? Some of the banks may have become instruments of state policy, too big and important to prosecute. They and the state are becoming one. Jesse |
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 Get a job..... after you take a bath
Newt Gingrich
Hey Newt:
If you climbed out of your ivory tower
long enough you would be aware that there are over 25 million unemployed people in this country.
It's amazing how so many millions of people became so lazy and shiftless after our economy was trashed in 2008 by the 1%ers, (yes people like you and those who bought YOUR influence).
con·science/[känCHəns]
Noun: An inner feeling or voice viewed as acting as a guide to the rightness or wrongness of one's behavior.
Wikipedia-Dictionary.com |
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 Inequality hardens society into a class system, imprisoning people into the circumstances of their birth -- a rebuke to the very idea of the American Dream
George Packer |
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 Elections are supposed to resolve conflicts in a great democracy, but our next one will not. The elites will face off against the elites to a standoff, and the issues animating the class war in both parties won't even be on the table.
Frank Rich |
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 'Occupy Wall Street' is about saying "No."
"No" to institutionalized greed of such vast width and breadth that it plunders our country even as it smiles around a mouthful of filet mignon.
"No" to the ocean of corporate cash that drowns our democracy.
"No" to rewarding the failure of frauds who proudly carry the banner of capitalism even as they enjoy the galloping socialism of the government bailout.
William Rivers Pitt |
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 Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?
William O. Douglas |
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 The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarch, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than a bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at the rear is my greatest foe.
Abraham Lincoln |
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 In the Middle Ages, 2% of the people owned 90% of the wealth, now 1% of the people owe 95% of the wealth. We are worse than in the Middle Ages. We are serfs, and it is time for the serfs to revolt.
Kevin Zeeze
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 What is happening in Europe, and particularly in Germany, is beyond belief - a plan to prop up the hopelessly bankrupt financial states through deregulation of the financial sector. If legislation allow all this to happen you could have revolution in Germany and other countries. It is a frightful situation.
Bob Chapman |
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 In the USA of all countries in the world, the police should have been deployed to PROTECT the protesters - not a giant brass bull that is the ultimate symbol of greed and corruption in America.
Anonymous
The police priority is to protect the biblical golden calf at the foot of the Temple of Greed where the elites worship their gods and Lloyd Blankfein does "God's Work". 2000 people occupy a square in New York to protest Wall Street greed, and there is hardly any mention of it in the corporate controlled media. More on this story...
https://occupywallst.org/ |
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 Washington politicians must think we're stupid. They take money from powerful corporate interests like Big Oil and Wall Street. They introduce, debate and pass legislation that boosts the bottom lines of these companies. And they expect us to believe that the campaign cash has nothing to do with how they vote.
Robert Weissman |
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 The public is in the process of realizing that corporate America, the financial sector and government are a criminal enterprise where fraud and criminality goes unprosecuted.
Bob Chapman |
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 Eliminating crucial protections [through deregulation] is not a way to make more jobs, no matter how many times Big Business and its allies in Congress say so. The reason so many millions are out of work now is that a deregulated financial sector destroyed the economy.
Rick Claypool |
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 All Senators and Congressmen must wear a listening device with video camera 24/7 and be required to use ONE cellphone only, which is publicly streamed over the Internet. So we can hear what the scheming lying lobbyists say to them.
Todd Boyle |
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 Truth is treason in the empire of lies.
Ron Paul
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 My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It's time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.
Warren Buffett
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 Go figure that 300 million Americans have not one single suite on K Street. Not even a single kiosk. Nothing.
Andy Sutton |
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 The human population is composed of two personality types. The masses are the worker bees, and a small minority are human parasites who live off the masses through deception and manipulation.
Bob Livingston |
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 Hungry people will do anything for food. Those who control food supply can use it as leverage.
Henry Kissinger |
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 When there is no check on the steady growth of corporate power, we lose the balance and equality necessary to democracy
Ellen Dannin |
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 Perpetual war for perpetual peace will continue and our elderly will starve and go without health care to insure early death, thus relieving government of the burden of having to care for them.
Bob Chapman
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 Nine months have passed since the robo-signing scandal broke, yet there still hasn't been a serious investigation of its reach. That's because states, suffering from severe budget troubles, lack the resources for a full investigation — and federal officials, who do have the resources, have chosen not to use them.
Paul Krugman |
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 The IMF is nothing more than the International Mafia Federation, the loan sharks of last resort, and the people know it. They call it privatization. Adults call it stealing valuable public assets, and selling them to your friends really cheaply."
Stephen Lendman |
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 The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
Plato |
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 If a 'reformer' does not speak to the need to reform the financial system, the huge advantages and subsidies being given to the corporations and the ultra rich who control them, it is a fairly good indication of what sort of a reformer they really are, and who is pulling their strings.
Edward Bernays
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 "Deficits don't matter"
Dick Cheney
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 The next time you boast of making a "killing" trading that health care stock, you are absolutely correct.
Lynn Petrovich |
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 There's class warfare, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."
Warren Buffet
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 Fascism should rightly be called corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.
Benito Mussolini
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 Any nation that year after year continues to raise the Defense budget while cutting social programs to the neediest is a nation approaching spiritual death.
Rev. Martin Luther King |
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 If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.
Thomas Jefferson |
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 Rather than embark on debt restructure and systemic reform, the national leaders dominated by the banker syndicate chose to dole of multi-$trillion welfare for the big US banks, redemption at nearly full value of their toxic bonds, coverage of the endless bills at the black holes in Fannie Mae and AIG, and blind approval of executive bonuses for those largely responsible for the national collapse.
Jim Willie CB |
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 Our debt and our inability to revive capitalism and cut the waste in government will be our demise. Sadly, the only glimmer of hope I see is that Corporatocracy will destroy itself. I say sadly because it will destroy the average American citizen like some parasite that kills it's host.
D. Sherman Okst |
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 A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.
Chris Hedges |
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 The costs of the Iraq war alone could have kept every foreclosed family in their home, provided health care for every American child, and wiped out the student loans of graduates who cannot find jobs because they have been outsourced to foreigners.
Joseph Stiglitz - Nobel Memorial Prize Winner in Economic Sciences (2001) |
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 1913 wasn't a very good year. 1913 gave us the income tax, the 16th amendment and the IRS.
Ron Paul |
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 Let's remember that the recession was caused by Wall Street hyper-speculation, not the pay scales of elementary school teachers or public hospital nurses.
Robert Pollin
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 Their ploy is to frighten the public with a nightmare of $1 trillion deficit to pay retirement income over the next half century – as if the Treasury and Fed have not just given Wall Street $13 trillion in bailouts without blinking an eye. President Obama’s $750 billion tax giveaway to the wealthiest 2% is mere icing on the cake that the rich will be eating when the bread lines get too long.
Prof. Michael Hudson |
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 The clueless cast of US economists would do well to read basic textbooks on capitalism, capital formation, and the other cycle. It starts with business investment, then hiring, then value added, then worker income, then consumer spending.
Jim Willie CB |
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 Americans consistently underestimate the amount of inequality in our nation. And why is that? Could our media have anything to do with it, a media consumed with when it bleeds it leads, but where context and background are missing?
Danny Schechters |
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 Ask yourself this: if you were to put ten grand into a savings account and another ten into silver, which asset will have more purchasing power five years from now?
Jeff Clark
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 When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed.
Ayn Rand |
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 Throw in the appeal of the Roman Coliseum in the form of NFL football and the masses have their entertainment. Keep them all busy while you plunder their wealth. Convince them that flipping hamburgers at McDonalds for minimum wage is "employment". Load them down with cheap credit so they feel wealthy while at the same time they sell their soul to the company store. Give them football five nights a week while you slowly take away their rights and their liberty that their forefathers sacrificed so much for.
Anthony J Stills |
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 We have spent over $2 trillion to "help" the economy since the fall of Bear Stearns, but still lost 7.3 million jobs. Instead of giving this money to the same people who created this economic mess, this amount would have provided everyone who lost a job with a check for $273,972.
Rudy Avizius |
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  The average cost of food as a percentage of disposable income for an American is 10%. Averages obscure the truth that the cost is probably .0001% for Lloyd Blankfein, Ben Bernanke and Chuck Grassley, while it is 30% for a poor family in Harlem.
James Quinn |
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 And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.
Senator Dick Durbin |
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 The wealth of the country has been pillaged by an elite group at the very top of the economic food chain, who were able to reap the rewards of globalization (outsourcing American jobs), manipulate the debt based financial system through synthetic fraud products, and avoid taxes by hiring thousands of lawyers, accountants and tax consultants.
James Quinn |
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 The terrorists are in the banks, on Wall Street, in the City of London and running transnational conglomerates that are destroying our society and that of Europe.
Bob Chapman |
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 Over the Counter derivatives directly and indirectly support higher investment and growth in living standards in the US and around the world.
Larry Summers
In congressional testimony where he warned of dire consequences if these derivatives were to be regulated. |
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 These [financial institutions] are pure casinos, they are not capital markets, they are not adding to the productive capacity of our economy, they simply are a bunch of robots trading with each other by the millisecond as a result of the Fed giving them zero cost overnight money, and giving them all kinds of hand signals on what to front-run.
David Stockman, Former Reagan OMB Director, December, 2010 |
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 In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.
Spencer Bachus,
Incoming chairman of the House Financial Services Committee
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 This is a mental recession. ... We have sort of become a nation of whiners. You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline ...
Former Sen. Phil Gramm (July 2008)
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Not a single top shot banker has been charged with bringing the world financial system on the brink of collapse in 2009. They continue to enjoy record bonuses while the unemployment continues to increase and families lose their homes to foreclosure.
Akhil_Khanna |
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The corporations harvest public money as subsidies and investment capital, they are protected by the the US armed forces and diplomacy and they are rescued when they get into trouble. This is a one way relationship and the American public knows it.
William Greider |
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If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill.
Thomas Edison |
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In today's America, the proud claim of "justice for all" is being replaced by the more modest claim of "justice for those who can afford it". And the number of people who can afford it is rapidly diminishing.
Joseph E. Stiglitz |
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The worst effects by far will be experienced by the overstretched debt-wracked countries such as Britain and the US, which are parasitic service economies with little manufacturing capacity that nurture the mistaken belief that the rest of the world will continue sending them cheap goods produced by real labor in exchange for electronically created worthless credits and IOU's including junk such as Treasuries in perpetuity.
Clive Maund |
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Six corporations now collectively control US media and absolutely dominate news and entertainment. When you control what Americans watch, hear and read you gain a great deal of control over what they think. They don't call it 'programming' for nothing.
Gordon T Long |
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Real unemployment is not 9.8%. If you put all of U6 together (the Bureau of Labor Statistics measures six types of unemployment, U1-U6) and removed the birth/death ratio, you're talking about 21.5% unemployment.
Bob Chapman |
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It takes a lot of PhDs to convince the public that their systematic looting at the hands of politicians is actually for their own good.
Robert Murphy |
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Wall Street bankers have rewarded themselves for their brilliance in destroying the middle class by reaping multi-million dollar bonus packages.
James Quinn |
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Since the 1980s, the US has conspired with others to suppress the price of gold as it is an indicator of the failings of the fiat financial system upon which its power is based. This is akin to doctors icing the thermometer to convince others that the patient is not in danger; and while they have been successful in so doing, the patient is now about to expire.
Darryl_R_Schoon |
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The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
Franklin D. Roosevelt |
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When Wall Street is hurting, money's never a problem. But when the states are on the brink of default and 14 million workers are scrimping to feed their families, there's not a dime to spare. Explain that to your kids.
Mike Whitney |
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Ignorance is dangerous, but knowledge without responsibility is more dangerous.
Bruce B. Clark |
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Never have so few, done so little, and made so much, while screwing so many.
James Quinn |
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The USGovt and Wall Street have never made any legitimate effort to reform or restructure. Their entire motivation and purpose has been to raid the USTreasury and Congressional till, to grab as much banker aid as possible, and offer nothing in return for bonafide reform.
Jim Willie CB |
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If you could get 2% of the American population against a policy, and they acted on their beliefs, and the government cracked down on them for acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, that would clog the courts and, of necessity, change the policy.
Albert Einstein |
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Goldman Sachs built the bomb by developing complex mortgage securities and built a bomb shelter by betting against the mortgage market in 2007. The question is, did they light the fuse by lowering the value of mortgage securities.
Phil Angelides , Chairman - Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission |
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Is it possible to make hundreds of billion of dollars in profits on securities that are backed by nothing more than cyber-entries into a loan book?
It is not only possible; it has been done. And now those who cashed in on the swindle have lined up outside the Federal Reserve building to trade their garbage paper for billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded loans.
Where is the justice? meanwhile, the credit bust has left the financial system in shambles and driven the economy into the ground like a tent stake.
Mike Whitney |
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Whowever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce...
and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another by a few powerful men at the top,
you will not have be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.
1881 President Garfield, 2 weeks before he is assassinated |
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I have 2 great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me, and the financial institutions in the rear.
Of the two, the one in my rear is the greatest foe.
President Lincoln, 1865 statement to Congress |
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The bottom 40 percent of all income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth. But of course many on Wall Street and in the government would argue that there is nothing wrong with an economy where nearly half the people are dividing up 1 percent of the benefits.
Michael Snyder |
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Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
Eleanor Roosevelt |
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Historians will probably conclude that the package of [economic] reforms was surprisingly modest given the depth and severity of the 2008-09 financial crisis. A harsher historical judgment might find that the political and economic power wielded by the financial industry in the late 20th and early 21st centuries was so extensive that it could weather a near total collapse of the system without having to yield its power or privilege.
David Kurtz |
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When the smartest guys in the room designed their credit default swaps, they forgot to ask one thing – what if the parties on the other side of the bet don’t have the money to pay up?
Ellen Brown |
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It is increasingly becoming clear that the working majority around the world face a common enemy: an unproductive financial oligarchy that, like parasites, suck the economic blood out of the working people, simply by trading and/or betting on claims of ownership.
Ismael Hossein-zade |
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The connection with reality has been severed so completely that the market for over-the-counter derivatives has now reached many times the money supply of the world.
John Hoefle |
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One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous.
Carl Sagan |
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Government is no longer the referee that promotes the general welfare. Government is the facilitator for the "opulent minority," ensuring that they can extract every last penny from the people they impoverish.
Vi Ransel |
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Today’s economic crisis is actually the mismanagement of nature’s bounty in an age where technology has solved the problem of scarcity if it is properly viewed as the heritage of all mankind, not the cartel of financiers, corporate oligarchs, military strongmen, and politicians who have the world at the throat in order to safeguard their own wealth and power.
Richard C. Cook |
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By the end of 2010, about half of all commercial real estate mortgages will be underwater.
Elizabeth Warren, chair TARP Congressional Oversight Paneler |
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The chief offense at the Nuremberg war-crimes trials involved the starting of a war; today, such an act is a cause for celebration among patriotic Americans.
Butler Shaffer |
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From the point of view of economic analysis – the pursuit of self-interest – secrecy by the FED is required because the FED is the administrator of a cartel of government-protected commercial banks.
Gary North |
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Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank...You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the grace of the Eternal God, will rout you out.
President Andrew Jackson (The one on the $20) |
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When you add to that a generation of outsourcing of manufacturing jobs abroad, completely irresponsible and out-of-control behavior by the financial industry, and the cancerous growth of the military-intelligence-industrial complex and their pet wars, you have all the signs of an empire in precipitous decline.
Richard C. Cook |
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A lot of people think that the president of the New York Fed works for the U.S. government. But in fact you work for the private banks that elected you.”
Representative Marcy Kaptur to Timothy Geithner at a House hearing |
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According to a 2007 study, the government pays for more than two-thirds of all Canadian health care costs. The US government, by contrast, pays for less than half of these costs. In 2007, the US spent a staggering 16% of GDP on health care compared to 10% in Canada. Health costs paid for out-of-pocket by Canadians amount to less than $300 per capita annually.
Ellen Brown |
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The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." .
Plato, ancient Greek philosopher |
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“We wonder if the public realizes that all the bad debt bought up by the Fed, more than $2 trillion, will in part eventually have to be assumed by the taxpayer. Some realize the problem, and they seem to be in denial, the rest simply don’t understand. In time the gravity of the situation will become reality.
Bob Chapman |
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I am not for turning the keys to the Treasury over to the private sector.
Washington Senator Maria Cantwell after voting against the TARP bill |
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Unbeknownst to most Europeans, the public money that financed the bank bailouts created a massive public debt problem, to be solved by massively slashing public programs that benefit workers and the poor. This amounts to a blatant transfer of billions — maybe trillions of dollars — in public wealth, away from the majority of citizens toward a parasitic crust of bankers.
Shamus Cooke |
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A whopping 97 percent of all U.S. bank-held derivatives are concentrated in the hands of just FIVE institutions — JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citibank and Wells Fargo. JPMorgan alone holds $79.9 trillion in derivatives — more than the grand total held by Bank of America and Citibank combined.
Martin D. Weiss |
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| While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader." —Samuel Adams |
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Gold Sachs made $27,000 million during the first three quarters of 2009 and is paying out massive bonuses, leaving the busted taxpayers with the debt and interest charges. Little wonder the US can’t afford health care for the uninsured and unemployed. It is far more important to finance multi-million dollar bonuses for investment bankers. I mean, what would we do without capitalism?
Paul Craig Roberts |
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The financial system is so fragile that a [Dubai] default on a paltry $60 billion can send the dominoes skittering through world markets. That sounds like a system on its last legs.
Mike Whitney |
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Then again, Wall Street in their arrogance tells us they are doing God’s work. That is why they get giant bonuses as the public starves.
Bob Chapman |
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The so-called Jobless Recovery is more like a Job-Loss Recovery
Jim Willie CB |
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Taxpayers bailed them out. And in turn they paid themselves record bonuses thinking they were putting one over on everyone.
Michael Eachus |
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The people at Goldman Sach's are getting zero percent loans from the Federal Reserve. If you got zero percent loans you could make a lot of money too. This doesn't mean they are smart, it means they're insiders.
Robert Weissman - Public Citizen |
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The Fed is bailing out unproductive speculators, while tossing the "creators of the nation's wealth", the workers, a few table scraps.
Mike Whitney |
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"Monetary policy is too important to be left to politicians," the paid propagandists called economists assure us. The politicians believe this. Until the crisis of 2008, so did voters.
Gary North |
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One conclusive hallmark of a failed state is that the crooks are inside the government, using government to protect and to advance their private interests.
Paul Craig Roberts |
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For people living in the United States, in regards to their healthcare exeperience: for most working people under 65, we're Germany or France or Japan; for Native Americans, military personnel and veterans, we're Britain, or Cuba; for those over 65, we're Canada; for the 45 million uninsured Americans, we're Cambodia, or Burkina Faso or rural India.
T.R. Reid, Author "The Healing of America." |
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The bailout scheme is an arb on taxpayers in which banks effectively borrow from taxpayers at near zero rates and re-lend to them at higher rates. This is a de facto transfer or wealth from taxpayers to banks.
Bob Chapman |
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If lower pay lures some of Wall Street's finest away, so be it. It's not as if the best and brightest were doing a good job to begin with.
Colin Barr |
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Cheap money is a stimulant, also an intoxicant. If the dose is large enough, a substantial temporary effect can be brought about, but headaches follow.
Benjamin Anderson, Chief Economist of Chase National Bank, April 1930 |
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Beware, and be on your guard against every form of greed.
Luke 12:15 |
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Around the middle of the 20th century a group of big New York bankers made a conscious and deliberate effort to corrupt the teaching of economics in American colleges. They succeeded in planting a collection of crackpots and phonies into the economics departments of most universities, who in turn turned out several generations of crackpot students. All these crackpots have impressive degrees and titles, and the only way that you can tell them is that almost everything they say turns out wrong.
Howard S. Katz |
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There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.
Warren Buffett |
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The financial oligarchy is hyping a recovery while American unemployment and home foreclosures are rising. The hype owes its credibility to the high positions from which it comes, to the problems in payroll jobs reporting that overstate employment, and to disposal into the memory hole of any American unemployed for more than one year.
Paul Craig Roberts |
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Gold and silver coins are presently valued at market prices in the assessment of taxes, while valued at face value for the collection of taxes. This is a gross injustice of the highest order and must be changed.
Douglas Gnazzo |
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We diligently apply the principle of accountability to the poor and powerless, and the principle of forgiveness to the wealthy and powerful.
Christopher Hayes |
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It is absurd that the United States has a central bank that is more accountable to the financial industry than it is to the public.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard |
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In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation
Alan Greenspan |
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The elite have it so bad now that they are being forced to sell one of their 7 homes.
Author unknown |
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The revolving door between government offices and lobbying firms is so lucrative and so established that it can only be characterized as institutional corruption.
Rudy Avizius |
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By no rational calculus can the outstanding debt be expected to be repaid without inflationary or deflationary adventures, even if further increase were stopped dead in its track. The discussion of the present financial crisis by academia and media avoids all reference to this fact.
Antal Fekete |
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Eight major American and European banks will pay the 141,000 employees in their investment banking units $77 billion in 2011 — about $543,000 per worker, not far from the 2007 peak — even after minor regulatory changes are adopted.
Kian Abouhossein - analyst at J.P. Morgan |
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If measured according to the methodology used when I was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, the unemployment rate today in the US is above 20%. Moreover, there is no obvious way of reducing it. There are no factories, with work forces temporarily laid off by high interest rates, waiting for a lower interest rate policy to call their workforces back into production.
Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term |
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And I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.
Thomas Jefferson |
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Americans are so confident about their future prospects that they can even refuse national health care – in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression – at the very same time they happily prop up dying US banks and corporations with their own tax dollars. And then they can actually criticize a national healthcare plan as “socialist”! Hello? Yes, the lights are on in America, but is anybody home?
Robert Bridge |
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana |
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Truth is treason in an empire of lies.
Ron Paul |
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The 'green shoots' that set the pundits alight are nothing more than the direct effects of massive monetary expansion. What we have is nominal growth in the unproductive service and consumption sectors. In short, Bernanke is being praised by the drug addicts for not cutting them off. But the thing about addiction is that the longer you stay hooked, the more deadly the withdrawal.
Peter Schiff |
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“The Central Bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the Principles and form of our Constitution. I am an enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but coin. If the American people allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation the banks and corporations that grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property, until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered.”
Thomas Jefferson. |
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"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
Dwight D. Eisenhower |
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You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession, we have sort of become a nation of whiners.
Former Senator Phil Gramm |
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During the great depression, at least the bankers had the courtesy to jump out of windows, now these parasites ask for and expect $billions in bailouts.
Rudy Avizius |
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The imaginative conceit that lies behind the accounting rule changes is that the toxic assets polluting bank balance sheets are not really toxic at all. They are in fact highly valuable assets that for some irrational reason no one wants to buy.
Author unknown |
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When will AIG be on its feet independently again? Never! And Fannie Mae? Never! They are both black holes intended to cover up the evidence, whose price tag is absorbed by the public.
Jim Willie |
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The Federal Reserve — the quasi-autonomous body that controls the US’s money supply — is a “Ponzi scheme” that created “bubble after bubble” in the US economy and needs to be held accountable for its actions.
Eliot Spitzer, former governor and attorney-general of New York. |
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…If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain -- an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
Matt Taibbi, Goldman Sachs |
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“Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value – ZERO”
Voltaire 1729 |
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And the banks --- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created --- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place!
Richard Durbin, Senator Illinois |
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Slowly but surely, the greatest manufacturing economy in the world destroyed itself by outsourcing its real source of strength, which was making things others wanted to buy.
Kevin Geary |
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The wealth of a nation is fundamentally based on the physical wealth it creates. Physical wealth consists of things that are beneficial to human life such as food, houses, clothes, cars, etc. The foundation of a nation’s wealth is the industries that create physical wealth: raw material extraction, energy, agriculture, and manufacturing. A nation is not made wealthy through banking, finance, litigation, or insurance.
Arian Nevin |
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On a side note, if you think this country rewards failure and punishes success, I'd like you to take a field trip to two homes.
1. The home of a retiree who worked hard and faithfully most of his adult life doing grunt work in some company that was mismanaged into the ground over the last ten years. (Think: Line workers for GM, mail room clerks at Enron, whoever.)
2. Now visit the home of a retiree who presided over that mismanagement before leaving the workforce.
Author unknown |
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In exchange for more affordable automobiles, America has traded good jobs. In exchange for cheap trinkets from China, America has mortgaged off its future with ballooning debt. In exchange for the hope of oil deals in Iraq, America has traded thousands of lives and up to $3 trillion before it’s over. While money is spent in Iraq to rebuild hospitals, schools, roads and bridges – all destroyed due to the US presence - taxpayers are stuck with the bill to rebuild this demolition.
Mike Stathis
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People say that the government owns the banks and financials, however, it appears that the banks and financials actually own the government. With their lobbying money, the result is: unemployment, foreclosure, and eviction notices for the working class, and TARP $billions and record bonuses for those who got us into this mess.
Rudy Avizius |
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We're a country that, for the last decade, acquiesced meekly and quietly as our Government transferred huge amounts of national wealth to a tiny elite; launched a devastating war based on purely false pretenses; tortured, spied on us and literally claimed the right to invalidate law and the Constitution; and turned itself over to the highest bidders.
Glenn Greenwald |
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Globally, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) reports a total of $57.3 trillion in credit default swaps, more than 28 times larger than AIG’s CDS portfolio. Clearly, the money available to the U.S. government is too small for a crisis of these dimensions.
Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D |
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