Is Senator Elizabeth Warren Preparing to Take on the Banksters Where Others Are Too Scared?

Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote a letter to the corrupt Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. She “demanded to know why the government keeps accepting financial settlements from criminal bankers when they could instead be taken to trial, convicted and locked up.”

The letter was also sent to corrupt US Attorney General Eric Holder, the person most capable and completely unwilling to deal with the crimes of Wall Street. SEC Chair Mary Jo White also received a copy.

Senator Warren put the matter bluntly, “..…I believe very strongly that if a regulator reveals itself to be unwilling to take large financial institutions all the way to trial — either because it is too timid or because it lacks resources — the regulator has a lot less leverage in settlement negotiations and will be forced to settle on terms that are much more favorable to the wrongdoer.

The consequence can be insufficient compensation to those who are harmed by illegal activity and inadequate deterrence of future violations. If large financial institutions can break the law and accumulate millions in profits and, if they get caught, settle by paying out of those profits, they do not have much incentive to follow the law.”

In other words, Wall Street banks rip off main street citizens, make big profits in the process, and then get assessed tiny penalties that are paid for with the money they stole from us. Doesn’t sound like much of a deal for the 99 percent to me. It’s a scam aided and abetted by the federal government.

We all know the answers to the problems outlined by Warren. The US government has been completely corrupted by big money, through both chambers of congress, both political parties, the white house, and all the way to both liberal and conservative wings of the US Supreme Court. That’s why and how the whole economic game has been legislatively rigged against the 99 percent. Elizabeth Warren is our champion.

The letter is below. It should also have been addressed to Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden, as well as Wall Street President Barack Obama.

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Are Free Trade Supporters Right? Does Free Trade Curb Pollution?

One photograph is worth a thousand words

US corporations have shipped hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of US jobs from the US to China. These corporations exported jobs from the US in part because they could avoid US environmental laws. The result is that the US has exported massive amounts of pollution to China, and with all the health benefits and carbon emissions, and I mean that sarcastically if accurately.

In February 2013, the Guardian reported that, “Beijing residents were urged to stay indoors on Thursday as pollution levels soared before a sandstorm brought further misery to China’s capital.

A thick blanket of smog covered large swathes of the country in the morning, causing residents to once again dig out face-masks as China’s grueling winter of pollution continues.

The noxious haze saw the US embassy’s air quality index reading for Beijing hit 516 at 6am, signaling air quality worse than the highest classification of hazardous.”

That’s one of the cool things about free trade if you’re a member of the 1 percent. Profits before people, the environment and life itself. In other words, those who support free trade while claiming that it helps the environment are lying, and they know it.

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Why the Corporate and Political Elite Insist Population Growth Is Good; or Is the US Getting Set to Enter a Great Depression?

The answer to the title above is simple; constant population growth equals constantly growing corporate profits. That’s not necessarily a good thing for the 99 percent.

The US economy is dominated by a Ponzi Scheme known as Wall Street. As corporate earnings rise, stock prices generally rise. If aggregate corporate profits go down, as they always must in time, then that 15,000+ value we see today with the Dow Jones Industrials can drop to 8,000 or less, as it did during the Great Recession.

Now imagine what would happen if the economy never came out of the Great Recession, like during the Great Depression. In October 1929, the Dow Jones was close to 400, up from less than 100 in 1921. The Depression hit that month, the economy entered into a sustained decline, the Dow dropped and dropped until it was less than 50 in October 1932. That’s a lot of speculative profits that were wiped out. The Dow began climbing with the election of FDR on November 8, 1932. But what if FDR didn’t win and the US continued down the same path? There’s a good chance the Dow would’ve dropped to a value of zero.

One way to avert such a calamity is to have constantly increasing population. As population grows, there are more people to feed, which means constantly growing demand for goods and services, which helps corporate profits rise, which keeps the Dow growing. The government will even feed and house tens of millions of people in order to keep demand up.

If, however, the US population was to decline, especially in the long-run, so too would the demand for goods and services. That means corporate profits would begin a long term drop. The financial markets would plummet in the long run. Paper profits that have grown over decades would vanish like smoke.

The birth rates of US citizens began to slow a few decades ago, and to compensate, your government opened the floodgates of immigration to compensate for that. Of course, there were other factors for doing this, as well. More immigrants meant a downward push on wage growth. The difference between what wages would’ve been in the absence of higher immigration and what they became with greater immigration went into the already fat wallets of the super rich via higher corporate profits, share prices and rising dividends.

This is not to suggest that immigration is always a bad thing, especially if there is a rising tide of prosperity for all. However, immigration during a time when there has been a massive redistribution of income and wealth flowing from the 99 to the 1 percent probably isn’t a good thing for the 99 percent. But it is good for Wall Street and the 1 percent, and for the reasons cited above.

If population growth continues to slow, and last year it grew only 0.7 percent, and middle class income continues to stagnate, then the current record rise in the Dow Jones Industrials suggests it is a bubble caused by redistributing income from the 99 to the 1 percent.

In other words, it is possible the current pathetic economic expansion is ambling down a road that ends at a very steep cliff. This brings us to a question.

Was the Great Recession just a blip on the road to an even greater Depression somewhere down the road a few years from now?

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Video: US Senator Elizabeth Warren Introduces the the Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act

US Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced the Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act on May 10, 2013. She made several good points about student loans, the most depressing one being that interest rates for new subsidized student loans will increase from 3.4 to 6.8 percent on July 1, unless congress does something about it.

She noted that banks get to borrow from the Federal Reserve at 0.75 percent, the same banks that destroyed the economy. The Federal Reserve has also lent and or given out tens of trillions of dollars to the banks on behalf of rich investors, so yes we can afford to push interest rates down on student loans.

However, the banks have investors who want more and more profits, while students only invest in themselves. Student loans are purchased by Wall Street investment banks, who then slice and dice them, and sell bonds backed by the loans to rich investors. Much of the monthly loan payments made by students go directly into the pockets of investors.

Consequently, the current purpose of student loans are to redistribute income from the borrowers to rich investors. As they examine the bill, everybody in congress and on Wall Street will look at it and wonder, why would any investor buy bonds backed by such low interest rates?

So don’t expect congress to vote yes on the bill without sizable pressure from voters calling them to support it. And, of course, the corporate press will be sure to never mention that the bill exists, except perhaps in the least obvious way, like in small print on page 57, or with a five second clip on the 2am news. That way they won’t alarm the general population to act on federal legislation to their benefit and people won’t call Wall Street’s congressional representatives, such as Senator Ron Wyden and Congressman Earl Blumenauer. That way Wall Street hacks won’t complain to the editors.

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Elizabeth Warren Introduces First Bill: Students Should Get Educational Loans at Same Low Rate as Big Banks, 0.75 Percent

Senator Elizabeth Warren has introduced a bill in which student loans will be offered at the same rate banks pay the Federal Reserve. They pay 0.75 percent, less than one percent.

“In her Senate remarks introducing The Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act, Warren bluntly states her rationale: “‘If the Federal Reserve can float trillions of dollars to large financial institution, surely they can float the Department of Education the money to fund our students, keep us competitive, and grow our middle class.’”

Naturally, the entire Republican Party and 80 percent of Democrats will oppose this bill because it’s what they do; wage war against the middle class.

Click on the link below for the full story.

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wall street fraudsters ripped you off again and Guess what Obama’s Justice department is going to do about it for you

How would you feel if a bunch thugs stole your money in broad daylight, were caught red-handed, and they were immune from the law, could not be convicted, and they got to keep your money?

Guess who recently did that to you? The banksters! People are calling it the LIBOR scandal. Sixteen banks, like Citibank and Bank of America, decided not to compete with each other, which is normal business for them. But this time they got caught setting their interest rates at higher levels than if they’d been competing, which coincidentally, is illegal.

This was a massive income redistribution scam from the 99 to the 1 percent. We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars that was stolen by collusion from the 99 percent. Did you know that the 1 percent have gained $5.6 Trillion in this supposed economic recovery, while the rest of us have lost $669 billion?
That’s because most of their gains have been stolen from us.

The US Justice Department has decided the banks are too big to go after, even though they were caught months ago. This really means the banks have been handing out a ton of money to politicians to not go after them; they’ve been handing out the money they stole from us so that the political hacks such as Barack Obama and Eric Holder stand up for the right of the banks (which are tools of the 1 percent) to rip off every one else.

It’s time to end the madness of corruption. Let’s begin to form a broad alliance that can take back our government from thieves and liars, like Wall Street’s Senator Ron Wyden and his buddy, Wall Street Congressman Paul Ryan.

That’s what the Democratic and Republican parties stand for. Click on the link below for the full story.

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US Taxpayers Are Doing What?

Each year since 2008, the U.S. has given $147.3 million to cotton farmers–in Brazil.

Shifting US tax dollars to foreign nations is one example of some of the consequences of free trade policies that redistribute income.

In 2008, Brazil argued before the World Trade Organization (WTO) that U.S. agriculture subsidies to cotton producers violated WTO agreements. Following the WTO’s secret tribunal ruling, instead of ending the subsidies or saying to hell with the WTO, Congress and the Administration agreed to pay the Brazilian cotton industry $147.3 million a year – the amount determined as the losses Brazilians incur as a result of U.S. cotton subsidies.

Now, not only are U.S. cotton farmers receiving millions in subsidies, but we are paying a $147.3 million fine to Brazil every year, year after year, instead of fixing the problem! It’s like choosing to pay a $150 parking ticket every day for your car to sit in front of a fire hydrant rather than in your own driveway.

$147.3 million is not going to solve the debt crisis, but we have better uses for this money here at home instead of Brazil. $147.3 million could be used to:

1 Reduce the deficit
2 Fund Meals on Wheels to deliver approximately 21 million meals to seniors who are struggling with mobility
3 Send up to 20,000 kids to Head Start for a year
4 Provide 26,000 Pell grants to students

The US government has been overwhelmed by a tidal wave of corruption and greed unleashed during the Reagan years. And so nothing will be done to end US taxpayer support of Brazilian cotton growers. That’s because in the corrupt climate of Washington D.C. profits are more important than people, even if such a thing isn’t in the US Constitution.

The US Constitution requires 2/3s of the US Senate vote for any treaty to become law. However, something called an Congressional-Executive Agreement has been made up and become some weird kind of “make believe” treaty. This Anti-Constitution agreement only requires majority yes votes from both houses of congress for the make believe to take effect, like the effects of a narcotic. The Congressional-Executive Agreements is clearly in violation of the US Constitution, although the Koch Brothers/Corporate wing of the US Supreme Court disagrees with this.

The secret tribunals in these treaties are also unconstitutional.

Article III Section 1. states, The judicial Power of the united States shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. Section 2 continues, “The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States and Treaties made, or which shall be made under their Authority….

In other words, only US courts can decide the legal issues that arise from treaties. And no free trade treaty has been passed with two-thirds votes of the US senate.

That suggests free trade treaties and their secret tribunals are illegal devices to subvert the will of 99 percent of US citizens and are used to redistribute their tax dollars, their incomes, and their political rights granted under the Constitution to the 1 percent.

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The Republican Party Continues to Wage War Against the United States

The US added 165,000 jobs in April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This was followed by upwardly revised gains of 332,000 in February and 138,000 in March. The three-month average pace of job gains of 211,000 was slightly above the average pace of 173,000 jobs over the last twelve months. The unemployment rate slid down a little to 7.5 percent. Here’s what the news reports won’t necessarily tell you.

The unemployment rate has now dropped 0.6 percentage point since April, 2012, but much of this is because of declining rates of labor-market participation rather than increases in employment. Worse yet, dropping so little makes this the worse job creation economic expansion probably in the history of the US, including during the Great Depression.

There are two factors at hand that make this so. The corporate media doesn’t like to report either, but sometimes they report that US government austerity is sinking America’s economic ship.

“While the Federal Reserve warned that “‘fiscal policy is restraining economic growth,’” the Republican National Committee released an ad crowing that “‘the sequester is here to stay.’” In other words, by sabotaging the US economy, the Republicans hope to reclaim the presidency and maybe even the senate.

So the public sector, especially, has been a drag on the economy in recent months. While the private sector has added roughly 2.2 million jobs over the past year, employment in state, local, and federal governments has declined by 89,000, including significant losses to teachers and emergency responders. In this challenging economic climate, there is growing concern about how sequestration—the across-the-board budget cuts to discretionary spending that took effect on March 1—may negatively impact the recovery even more. Indeed, forecasters at the Congressional Budget Office project that the sequestration could reduce overall GDP growth in the United States by 0.6 percentage point and cost the economy 750,000 jobs by the end of 2013.

Now here’s the part the press doesn’t want you to know. The redistribution of income and wealth over the last thirty-three years from the 99 to the 1 percent has played a much greater role in why the US economy sucks big time for working people. One percent of the population now takes in over 30 percent of the total income produced in the US, compared to 8 percent back then. That leaves less and less money for the rest of us to demand goods and services. That’s why the economy is so weak. The rich are sucking us dryer and dryer. Worse yet, they buy things like stocks, bonds and derivatives, rather than goods and services. So they don’t help the economy at all. In fact, the purchases of the rich suck us dry, but that’s another story.

Austerity, in other words, isn’t the primary culprit in why the American economy is so historically weak, although it plays a role. It’s almost all about income redistribution.

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Little known Economic Facts About Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Part 2.

Undocumented immigrants in the USA will need to pay back taxes under the new comprehensive immigration reform plan. There’s something that stinks about this. It’s simple. Why aren’t the employers who hired undocumented immigrants under the table going to be compelled to pay a fine and pay back taxes if undocumented workers are going to be forced to? At the very least, these employers should be forced to pay back the social security taxes they didn’t pay in the first place. This is a double standard that probably violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution. Of course, there’s a reason for the double standard.

Many people in high places have likely hired the undocumented as maids, janitors, kitchen help, gardeners, etc…. Because some are members of the 1 percent, the government will not go after them. On the other hand, there’s billions to be had bilking undocumented immigrants.

Credit card companies, banks and Wall Street are the suspects in question. You know those folks; Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citibank, and the usual Wall Street crime family, the same criminals that tanked the economy and committed such crimes as fraud and money laundering, and not a single person was charged with a crime because they’re so politically powerful. But why are these folks dictating many of the terms of comprehensive immigration reform? What’s the link? Money, and lots of it. Here’s how and why Wall Street’s scam will work.

According to Pew Hispanic Research, up to 90 percent of all undocumented workers earn their living under the table, which means they haven’t paid federal and state income taxes, as well as social security taxes. The government says there are 11-12 million undocumented immigrants in the US. However, the 2010 US Census claimed there were 13 million undocumented Hispanics in the US. Assuming that Hispanics make up roughly 60 percent of the undocumented, the total number could be 24 to 26 million people. So let’s say that there are 11-26 million undocumented immigrants. A high percentage work for a living. Most of these folks have worked under the table for multiple years and even decades. That means some of these people owe tens of thousands of dollars in back taxes. Millions of wage earners multiplied by thousands and tens of thousands dollars in back taxes is a ton of money.

How are these folks going to get the money to pay back taxes since most don’t earn very much? They’re going to need to apply for credit, unless the government plans to carry their load, which is unlikely. So these folks will need to use credit cards or home equity loans. Interest rates will likely be high.

The credit card lenders, such as Citibank, will reap tons of interest and late fees. On top of that, they’ll bundle the loans and sell them to Wall Street investment banks, such as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. Those folks will issue bonds backed by the credit card balances and payments. They’ll turn around and sell the bonds to rich investors. There’s billions of dollars to be scammed through all of these transactions. The newly indebted, but now, documented will make their payments and pay their late fees with much of the proceeds going to the investors, as well as to those who service the loans–members of the 1 percent.

In other words, comprehensive immigration reform is simply another way to redistribute income from the 99 percent to the 1 percent. The victims are the undocumented, who, admittedly, put themselves into this position of indebted servitude to Wall Street for decades to come by illegally migrating to the US. But that doesn’t mean they should be used as financial cannon fodder for the rich in their war against the middle class.

Wall Street is also why a Dream Act doesn’t seem to part of the package. The Dream Act is a concept that undocumented immigrants who were smuggled into the US as children by their parents shouldn’t be made to pay for the violations of US law done by their parents. Instead, they should immediately be given a path toward citizenship. Who can argue with that? Not me. But Wall Street and other credit card companies can because there’s no profit in immediate amnesty for these kids. And that’s the sorry state of the worst congress and worst white house that money can buy. The political philosophy is simple enough. Doing the right thing isn’t the right thing to do if it’s not profitable to Wall Street, which is the main conduit through which income is redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent.

One more point needs to be made. If undocumented persons have worked in the US for years, many might have had several employers, and in different states. Some of these employers might be out of business. If they worked under the table, how is the government going to determine who owes what in back taxes? The answer seems to be obvious. The government isn’t going to make that determination. Wall Street will and it likely will be part of the package. That suggests the back tax issue is going to onerous for the undocumented. That’s part of Part 3 of this series.

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Natural Water or Corporate Coca Cola?

Very interesting indeed! Water or Coke? We all know that water is important but a direct comparison is something I’ve never seen.

WATER
1. 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated.

2. The thirst mechanism is so weak in 37 percent of Americans that it is often mistaken for hunger.

3. MILD dehydration will slow down one’s metabolism as much as 30%.

4. One glass of water will shut down midnight hunger pangs for almost 100% of the dieters studied in a University of Washington study.

5. Lack of water, the #1 trigger of daytime fatigue.

6. Preliminary research indicates that 8-10 glasses of water a day could significantly ease back and joint pain for up to 80% of sufferers.

7. A mere 2% drop in body water can trigger fuzzy short-term memory, trouble with basic math, and difficulty focusing on the computer screen or on a printed page.

8. Drinking 5 glasses of water daily decreases the risk of colon cancer by 45%, plus it can slash the risk of breast cancer by 79%, and one is 50% less likely to develop bladder cancer.

And now for the properties of COKE

1. In many states (in the USA) the highway patrol carries two gallons of Coke in the truck to remove blood from the highway after a car accident.

2. You can put a T-bone steak in a bowl of coke and it will be gone in two days.

3. To clean a toilet: Pour a can of Coca-Cola into the toilet bowl and let the “real thing” sit for one hour, then flush clean. The citric acid in Coke removes stains from vitreous china.

4. To remove rust spots from chrome car bumpers: Rub the bumper with a rumpled-up piece of aluminum foil dipped in Coca-Cola.

5. To clean corrosion from car battery terminals: Pour a can of Coca-Cola over the terminals to bubble away the corrosion.

6. To loosen a rusted bolt: Applying a cloth soaked in Coca-Cola to the rusted bolt for several minutes.

7. To bake a moist ham: Empty a can of Coca-Cola into the baking pan, wrap the ham in aluminum foil, and bake. Thirty minutes before the ham is finished, remove the foil, allowing the drippings to mix with the Coke for a sumptuous brown gravy.

8. To remove grease from clothes: Empty a can of coke into a load of greasy clothes, add detergent, and run through a regular cycle. The Coca-Cola will help loosen grease stains. It will also clean road haze from your windshield.

For Your Info
1. The active ingredient in Coke is phosphoric acid. Its pH is 2.8. It will dissolve a nail in about 4 days. Phosphoric acid also leaches calcium from bones and is a major contributor to the rising increase in osteoporosis.

2. To carry Coca-Cola syrup (the concentrate) the commercial truck must use the Hazardous material place cards reserved for Highly corrosive materials.

3. The distributors of coke have been using it to clean the engines of their trucks for about 20 years!

Now the question is, would you like a glass of water or coke?

Want more like this? Visit this link: http://tinyurl.com/b22zbrk

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