http://www.atr.org/six-months-untilbr-largest-tax-hikes-a5171#
USA Economic Warfare, Fraud, Fraud, Fraud and more Fraud, utter corruption...
7 Mega-Cartels That Kill the Free Market and Our Sovereignty
- Banking
- Intelligence
- Military
- Energy
- Food
- Medicine
- Media
These cartels have wholly consumed our federal government through the revolving door to function as an oligarchy for the wealthy elites and the power behind the power in USA and elsewhere.....
By Richard Sale, author of Clinton’s Secret Wars
1. The astonishing amount of mortgage fraud (literally, millions of cases annually) and how it hyper-inflated the bubble and led to the Great Recession.
2. The fact that these mortgage frauds were overwhelmingly due to consciously fraudulent lending practices in which the CEOs of seemingly legitimate entities used accounting tricks as their “weapon of choice" to report higher profits and get bigger bonuses. (George A. Akerlof and Paul R. Romer got it right in the title to their 1993 article: Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.)
3. The disgraceful lack of prosecutions which has resulted from regulators virtually ending the practice of making criminal referrals and the pathetic March 2007 "partnership" that the FBI entered into with the Mortgage Bankers Association (the trade association of the "perps") that led the FBI and the Department of Justice to (implicitly) define out of existence fraud by the lenders (and to conceive of them as the "victim" -- which they are, but only of their controlling officers). Bush administration attorney general Michael Mukasey in June 2008 notoriously refused to create a national task force against mortgage fraud based on his claim that mortgage fraud was analogous to "white collar street crime."
4. The "echo" epidemics of fraud set off by the primary epidemic of accounting “control fraud". The fraud designed by CEOs in turn kicked off an epidemic of fraud among loan brokers and appraisers. Reporters should explore the concept of the Gresham's-style dynamic in which bad ethics were a competitive advantage and drove good ethics out of the marketplace.
5. The massive foreclosure fraud we are seeing now as another "echo" epidemic. To optimize their accounting control fraud, lenders gutted underwriting. That led to "fraud in the inducement" (vis a vis borrowers), endemic documentation problems, and an extraordinary numbers of defaults. The process required tens of thousands of real estate financing personnel to commit fraud on a daily basis as their core function. Some of these people are unemployed, but many are in the industry and are presently engaged in loan servicing. Now that their job is to foreclose on properties, there is no reason to expect that they would suddenly become honest, and they haven't.
6. The ongoing massive cover up of losses on bad assets, particularly by the “too big to fail” institutions, which I call “systemically dangerous institutions” (SDIs). Those institutions, along with Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke and Congress (at the behest of the Chamber of Commerce and with no opposition from the Obama administration) in April 2009 forced the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to change the rules so that the banks do not have to recognize their losses unless and until they sell the bad assets. The implications of this cover up are large (and rarely reported). At the very least, it means that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's propaganda campaign about TARP saving the world at virtually no cost (perhaps even a "profit") is nonsense -- despite its success in influencing the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Consider:
A) The repayment of TARP funds does not mean the banks are healthy. Their asset values are often grossly inflated, which means their net worth is grossly inflated. That means that the claims that we have increased net worth requirements (and that Basel III will further increase net worth requirements) are false. Net worth requirements have meaning only if the accounting is honest
B) The repayment of TARP funds does mean that the banks are freed from any meaningful restraint on senior officer compensation. Note that absent the accounting lies the banks would often be reporting losses (and failure to meet required capital requirements, or outright insolvency) and could not pay their senior officers bonuses and would be subject to mandatory closure under the Prompt Corrective Action (PCA) law.
C) No commercial entity would have ever signed the TARP deals on the terms that the U.S. drafted for itself. The U.S. provided not only fresh money but an unlimited de facto guarantee (along with permitting phony accounting). If the U.S. had negotiated competently it would have owned virtually all the shares of every TARP recipient (which, of course, was a political impossibility).
D) The accounting lies are stalling the recovery. Markets cannot clear promptly when one creates an incentive to hold massively overvalued assets for years.
E) The losses are still there, but the taxpayers are on the hook via Fannie and Freddie and the Fed (which has taken over a trillion dollars in toxic collateral at grossly inflated values).
7. The continued absence of effective regulation. It should be scandalous that President Obama left in charge, or even promoted, the anti-regulators who permitted the Great Recession. The (failed) anti-regulator of Fannie and Freddie, for example, remains FHFA's acting director. This is significantly insane as a matter of both economics and politics. (The administration doesn't even seem to realize the issue of integrity.)
8. The crises of state and local government and the lack of a rational basis for Republican and Blue Dog opposition to the proposed revenue sharing component of the stimulus bill. The compounding insanity of the administration failing to fight for its concept and failing to make explicit how badly its removal would harm the recovery, employment, and vital government services.
9. The insanity of accepting mass, long-term unemployment rather than having the government provide productive jobs for everyone willing to work (as the employer of last resort).
For those of us who are victims of sentimentality and national conceit and who like to think of America as cuddly and warm-hearted, it does us good to remember that there are always cold, implacable ulterior motives that lie hidden in even the most generous foreign policy gesture....
In a recent post, I related how the United States had crippled the British Empire soon after the close of World War II. The United Kingdom controlled a huge area with a population of 540 million and from which the use of the U.S. dollar had been shut out. By the time the crisis ended, the exclusion of the dollar had ended, opening vast markets for U.S. goods, but at a cost of further laming a key wartime ally.
There is a another example. We endlessly laud the Marshall Plan as having saved Europe from starvation after World War II, forgetting that U.S. intelligence operatives had a great role in formulation the plan and that the price for European participants was high, including having to impart extremely secret proprietary data about their economies – such as their surge capability and the like.
This is not to say we are not good hearted: we are. But we are also a very cunning and ruthless player in the game of nations, and there are opponents that must be matched in heartlessness if we are to survive, shelter and prosper.
I was recently reminded of just how dangerous we are to taunt and defy when discovering some old files on the Reagan administration’s secret war on the Soviet Union. Some of the incidents are colorful, such as the U.S.-Swedish plot to lure a Soviet nuclear submarine on the rocks in Swedish military waters. The activities of the Reagan group’s secret support of the Afghan rebels in bleeding to death the invading Soviet forces there have been superbly rendered by such books as Steven Coll’s Ghost Wars or Charlie Crile’s Charlie Wilson’s War among others.
But an equally important but almost obscure scheme involved the Reagan group’s resolve to target Soviet hard currency earnings, reasoning that if Moscow were broke, its development of new nuclear weapons would slow, and it couldn’t pay the troops of its overextended military machine much less finance wars of liberation around the world. It could talk tough, “but it would no longer be tough,” as a former Reagan official told me.
The first blow was struck on May 1983 when American pressure forced the International Energy Agency to put a limit on European exports of natural gas, blacking huge sums of money from reaching Moscow. But Soviet natural gas earnings were only a Kremlin sideshow compared to its top engine of economic wealth -- its oil industry, which generated half of its hard-currency earnings, former officials said.
Under the direction of CIA chief William Casey and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, the Treasury Department in early 1983 had completed a voluminous study of U.S. and Soviet energy costs. The study discovered that the optimum price for a US purchase of a barrel of oil was $20, far below the $34 per barrel being charged in that year. If oil prices came down, the U.S. would save almost $72 million a year or almost one percent of the GNP. The question was what would a fall in oil prices do to the Russians?
Very ugly things, apparently. The study concluded that while a cut in oil prices would boost U.S economic welfare, that same cut “would have a devastating effect on the Soviet economy, “ in the words of a source. In fact, then National Security Adviser Bill Clark told a friend of mine, Peter Schweizer, that Reagan was fully aware that energy exports were the “centerpiece of Moscow’s hard currency earnings,” and that a sharp drop in price would help hobble the strength of the Russian economy and stall its military buildup.
Soon U.S. officials were huddling in Geneva with the key Saudi oil adviser Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani. Not long after the meeting, the United States announced it was cutting its oil imports from 220,000 barrels a day to 145,000 barrels, and abruptly the Saudis boosted its production of oil, lowering world market prices. By August of 1985, Saudi production jumped from 2.8 billion barrels a day to over 8 billion..... Since Saudi Arabia was the swing producer of OPEC, which used its production levels to control the market price for crude, the effect on Russia, was “calamitous,” said a former official.
But how did the price cuts affect Saudi Arabia’s incomes? Did it lose much money on the deal. Hardly any... According to former senior CIA officials, in what appears to be an early form of High Frequency trading, the agency’s foreign currency specialists bounced billions of dollars of Saudi currency reserves from one foreign currency to another – from the Belgian franc to the British pound to the Deutschmark and back. The Sands earned “billions’ one former official said.
Said a former White House staffer “Regan’s doctrine was simple – no quarter for the Soviet Union, no concessions. Instead, counter it any way you could whether undermining its economy, supporting free unions or supporting groups resisting its encroachments.”
Viewing such events may fill us with a certain moral uneasiness but the cost is small and the effect is great compared with a mistaken, fatal wasteful war like the one in Afghanistan...
Economic warfare is taking place right now in Europe and American by the elites against the unemployed and poor. Yesterday, the Conservative Government in Great Britain came out with all guns blazing. France is raising the Retirement Age. America is next, especially if the GOP takes over Congress. Only the Chinese government is spending money to build high speed rail lines and infrastructure needed to avoid a double dip recession or worse.
This doesn't even mention the fraud and bad debt in America's Financial Industry. Nine Stories The Press Is Underreporting -- Fraud, Fraud And More Fraud.
The Obama Administration has yet to indict one Financial Fraudster and continues to ignore Foreclosure Corruption and Banks' Pile of Bad Debt....
It appears that the USA at present is not in economic warfare with any individual state, rather it is in war with all states developed, developing, and the rest via printing money from thin air, aka, QE.
The problem is that the USA is effectually bankrupt, and to a large extent has lost her status of know-all in economic effectiveness, thus their leadership options to some degree.
Different nations will react differently to all the loose "instant money" being recirculated world wide: some will tax hot money [e.g. Brazil] some keep their money nonconvertible to foreign denomination [e.g. China] some will design trading systems which bypass the USD [e.g. China C/w Russia, Brazil, Burma, etc], and some will work on ending the petro dollar system [Saudi Arabia and most Persian Gulf oil producers, and some will use their USD reserves to buy up commodities {China], farm land all over the world [Saudi Arabia] and some will be defenseless [e.g USA citizens, most of Africa, etc]] due to the rise of oil prices in USD terms [while possibly staying same in other currencies].
When Food prices, Health insurance costs, all medical related costs are rising at 10%+ rate per annum in the USA in USD terms, there is no way that the USA can win any trade wars for there is a certainty of double dip in a very short time frame....
The current primary target of economic warfare being directed against the Islamic Republic of Iran, primarily through the application of sanctions.
The nakedness of this economic warfare was further exposed by the summary rejection of the 2010 Tehran Declaration, which came as a slap in the face to Brazil-Turkey, who had previously been given the green light to negotiate with the Iranians. The Americans were convinced the Iranians would reject any compromises. This backfired, the Iranians accepted compromises, yet two days later the Americans rejected what they had previously accepted and slapped down another round of sanctions. In spite of everything, the economic war against the IRI endures, according to the public planning of key policy advisers such as Dennis Ross/MOSSAD Sayanim...
http://www.indexmundi.com/energy.aspx?country=sa&product=oil&graph=production
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCassMy2frI&feature=related
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