READ WHAT VINCE FLAHERTY CAN DO ABOUT:


AUGMENTING THE G.I. BILL

I was just thinking about TO HELL AND BACK, the story of World War II hero Audie Murphy. My friend Bill Norton, who wrote and directed TOUR OF DUTY wants to remake the movie, but from a different perspective.

I knew Murphy came back to the states a hero, and turned that into a successful movie career. But Bill told me that Murphy came home suffering from shell shock and survivor's guilt, and that Murphy had to relive his heroic exploits, with the explosions and all of it, for the movies. I didn't know that part of the story, and how it drove him nuts.

Today I mentioned it to someone, and they informed me that a similar thing had happened to Sergeant Alvin York, the World War I hero, and recipient of the United States Medal of Honor, Italian Croce di Guerra, French Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre.

Tonight, my 12 year old boy John asked me if I knew who the biggest hero of World War II was. I told him that the most famous ones I knew about were Audie Murphy and Commando Kelly. Kelly was the first enlisted man to be decorated with the Medal of Honor for action on the European continent. My son looked up Kelly on the internet, and we discovered that Kelly had suffered a similar fate as Murphy and York.

Kelly came home to America and made enough money from Hollywood to open a gas station, but his wife was diagnosed with cancer, his insurance would not cover the costs, and the medical bills resulted in Kelly losing his home in foreclosure. He had a tough life, eventually dying of liver failure due to alcoholism.

America needs to improve the benefits and the physical and mental health care provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs. It needs an honest single payer healthcare option to safeguard Americans from going bankrupt due to catastrophic illness.

Now, people are wondering what to do with the glut in housing, the millions of empty homes in America, vacated by families, including the families of veterans, who are being gobbled up by our banks. Out of the millions of homes in foreclosure due to bank sleight of hand, Bank of America, for instance, has only made 98 permanent loan modifications.

I am stunned and outraged that there has been nothing tangible done to make those families whole, other than government funding for counseling.

NEW HOMES DEMOLISHED BY A BANK THAT RECEIVED BAILOUT FUNDS


As a temporary measure, to reduce the glut in housing, the G.I. Bill should be augmented to increase the government's down payment for veterans purchasing homes, to fifty percent of the purchase price, and if elected I am prepared to write such a bill.

THE VETERANS OF OUR ARMED SERVICES
The House Subcommittee exposed extreme deficiencies in the treatment of our soldiers returning from duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Continual, aggressive oversight must be implemented to research and correct issues regarding the condition of facilities, staffing at hospitals, disability evaluations and ongoing physical and mental healthcare.

LEGISLATOR'S CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

Vince Flaherty believes that both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have lost touch with the American people, and instead cater to the wishes of special interest groups and lobbyists representing large corporations. He believes that Wall Street and the Banking industry have hijacked our government in Washington D.C. and the majority of our legislators have either ignored or exacerbated the problem.

As such, he is an advocate for the creation of a public financing system for congressional elections, a Clean Money and Elections Act that would create a comprehensive, voluntary system whereby candidates could successfully fund their campaigns without recourse to private contributions.

PROPOSED CONGRESSIONAL REFORM

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators.

1. Term Limits: 12 years only, one of the following possible options: (a) Two six year Senate terms, (b) Six two year House terms, (c) One six year Senate term and three two year House terms

2. No revolving doors: Legislators shall have a 5 or 10 year cooling off period between the time when they leave office, and when they can become eligible to take positions or compensation from regulatory agencies, banks and big business. Conversely, no representatives from big finance, industry, the regulatory system, or large international or corporate interests shall proceed to be elected to the legislature without a 5 or 10 year cooling off period.

3. No Tenure / No Pension: A congressman shall collect a salary while in office and receive no pay when out of office.

4. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security: Congress shall participate with the American people in the Social Security system. All funds in the Congressional retirement shall be moved into the Social Security system.

5. Congress shall purchase their own retirement plans just as all Americans.

6. Congress shall no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

7. Congress shall not have a separate health care system than that availble to the American people.

8. Congress must equally abide in all laws they impose on the American people.

THE NATIONALIZATION OF THE BANKS

When we, through our own elected officials, allow corporations to grow into monopolies so big, that they control our government, then we, the people, have effectively nationalized our corporations. It is no longer real capitalism at work. For when corporations become too big to fail, lest they bring down the government, then government's only option is to nationalize them with taxpayer money, and that is one of the most undesirable aspects of fascism.

THE SQUANDERING OF TRILLIONS

Yes, like millions of people around the world, I opposed the squandering of trillions to keep the central banks afloat. But I wasn't against it necessarily because I thought that banks should be allowed to fail. I was against it because, for one brief moment, certain people in our government had the leverage to require the banks to become accountable, and to stand behind the bogus mortgage backed securities they used to defraud nations around the world. But instead, based upon decisions influenced by panic, poor information, greed and sheer political corruption, they blew it.

Deregulation, predatory lending and the sales of pools of toxic mortgage backed securities to unwitting investors around the world in places like Greece, Iceland, Italy, Spain, France and China, otherwise known as the "secondary market", brought about the national and international financial collapse. The wheels of finance ground to a halt when first China, then France and other countries refused to purchase any more defaulting American mortgage backed securities. Without a secondary market to off-load their mortgages, the banks could not make new loans.

This "Catch 22" has not changed since October 2007 when I first started trying to tell people how we could turn this around. The solution also remains the same. Only legislative reform, financial reform, bank reform, and a resuscitation of the secondary market can truly stabilize America's real economy. Remember, it was the creation of secondary market by the Eisenhower administration, that enabled the America's post-war boom, the American dream, and carried the country's leverage based economy for the past 50 years.

We need to cull out the relatively small numbers of people who became richer by defrauding the people of America, and the world. But meanwhile, Wall Street is doing business as usual, temporarily making record profits once again, and of course giving record bonuses, while millions of American families are worried about having a roof over their heads or putting shoes on the feet of their children.

Most of the legislators in the United States Government and their masters controlling the banks are unconsciously or knowingly covering up how they caused the economic collapse, because they are scared to death of a complete collapse. They are afraid that if they try to change and in doing so reveal the truth, that many of the banks will be shown to be insolvent. Also, they are relying on the time honored adage that "there is a sucker born every minute" and that the old suckers have short memories. So, they are following their tradition of failing to learn from their mistakes of the past, which will condemn them to repeat the very practices exacerbating the destruction of the world economy.

This is not just a financial crisis either; it is a full fledged moral crisis, with far reaching consequences for many who will be convinced to emulate such behavior. It is a crisis bound to result in unprecedented ideological and political blowback. It is an international crisis, similar in characteristics and greater in scope than the era of banking and industrial profiteering during the depression years that culminated in World War II















Vince believes that once in office he will be able to persuade some of our legislators to do the right thing. He sees many of them have been brainwashed by their elite peers, and are failing to see what it is really going to take to get hardworking Americans and American businesses back on their feet. He believes that our politicians are acting as though they have the wool pulled over their eyes. Some don't seem to see that squandering trillions of dollars into institutions and government bureaucracies, propping up bankster regimes as if they were third world dictatorships, and inacting legislation to preserve insurance corporation profits at the expense of citizens, without any conditions, or assurances of actually bringing economic relief to the American people, is absolutely unconscionable.

On the other hand, Vince sees that there appear to be many other legislators, who actually do see the folly in preserving the corrupt status quo. But those legislators are content to go along with the evil in order to receive their campaign funding. What is more disturbing, is that they appear to be so sure of themselves that they are willing to let us see that their hearings are a charade. They are so little afriad of public opinion and outrage that they no longer even try conceal their corruption.

Even if the bait and switch Tarp, and nearly 4 trillion power grab Stimulus Package, was not an unethical government Ponzi scheme, which it was, the bailed out banksters such as Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, ought have had, and should have, been required to make a commitment that none of the bailout funds could be used for lobbying, controlling the market by buying their own stock, or acquiring properly run smaller banks. Now, our government and their bankster masters have essentially turned the Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve into a complicated holding company, fueled by state subsidized hedge fund profiteering, at the expense of future generations of unwitting American taxpayers.

AN ALERNATIVE SOLUTION

While President Obama's administration has promoted worthwhile goals, such as improving water and transportation infrastructure, clean energy technologies, and affordable health care, the benefits of these good projects are overshadowed by a massive amount of wasteful spending, destructive spending, that has nothing to do with job creation, healthcare or economic growth. Our American children and their children's children should not be burdened with this debt.

Vince Flaherty would like to see less spending, and better targeting of funds in a more realistic way. For instance, there is no doubt that in the case of a national bank collapse the government has to back stop the banks on order to avoid a repetition of the problems that precipitated the Great Depression. But instead of engaging primarily in an endless chain of bailouts to crony banks and favored nations, there are plenty of institutional investors here, and around the world, that purchased pools of Triple A rated mortgage paper from our largest American banks. That paper did not turn out to be Triple A like it was supposed to be, and investors in America and around the world were badly burned. They started to stop buying that bogus Triple A paper in 2006, and the worldwide secondary market collapsed entirely in 2007. That is what caused the mortgage crisis that precipitated the world economic crisis, because our lenders have got to have a robust secondary market in order to initiate new loans. Without a secondary market to buy their mortgages, the banks, can never make many new loans because that would put them out of balance with their federally required loan to asset ratio, no matter how much taxpayer money they receive from the fed.

Therefore, what our government needs to do, to restore confidence in the collapsed worldwide secondary market, the market that was primarily responsible for the American boom during the past 50 years, is not to throw trillions at crony banks, or the Wall Street elite. We should simply stand behind and insure the Triple A rated paper that our American banks sold in the first place.

Our government was grossly negligent in failing to oversee the bank's rating agencies, and instead of squandering what will eventually amount to trillions, to prop up the lifestyles of corporate folks, what should be done first is to make sure that the institutional investors that our financial institutions damaged, are made whole.

If our government made a commitment to do that, the secondary market would revive. Then you can bet that the banks would finally have the motivation to see their most egregious loans modified. Otherwise, banks have no incentive to modify loans, or make new loans to stem the real estate collapse. As it stands now, the banks are actually rewarded for gobbling up real estate, and American families with it, because once they have drained every nickel, and then written off the debt, the government is there to reimburse them for the full amount of their loss. It is actually the law. And yes, the law was written by the banks, and passed by their slaves in Congress.

America and the American people don't have to admit fault in order to make restitution to the damaged investors around the world, because it is not our nation that is at fault. It is corporations that bullied our legislators into defrauding the worldwide secondary market. America simply needs to show our economic partners that we have the character to stand behind the things we export.

Even bad loans.

ON PASSAGE OF THE TARP AND STIMULUS BILLS

Why in the world did Congress pass the Tarp and Stimulus, against the wishes of millions of their constituents?

What were they afraid of?

A couple of things. Treasury Secretary Paulson went to Congress and scared the hell out of them by saying that if they did not act immediately to approve the first 700 billion bailout, it was going to be the end of America as we know it. He said if Congress did not act really fast there would be a domino effect shutting down Wall Street and hence the world's multinational corporations. There would be no bank lending at all, the economy would totally shut down, followed by civil unrest and martial law.

Congress was further compelled to act because it was implied that if they did not give Paulson and Bernanke what they demanded, a great many of them were going to lose the backing of the financial services industry that put them in office in the first place. Their careers were threatened, not only by the loss of campaign funds, but yes, by the thought of being blackballed, blackmailed or worse.

What Secretary Paulsen should have said was that if Congress failed to act his business associates would be shut down. He appears to have been protecting the lifestyles of the Wall Street folks he worked for, and who he was planning to work for when he left office.

Who knows? if Congress had not approved the first bailout, maybe the tide would have pulled out further and a lot of those "associates" would have been shown to be presiding over institutions bolstered up and leveraged on mumbo jumbo, cooked books and undecipherable derivatives. God knows what the double books look like at Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, or what is kept secret at AIG, or the Federal Reserve. But the American people probably never will.

Were they afraid of the force that horrified Woodrow Wilson?

"Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."

Woodrow Wilson

During 2005 and 2006 Goldman Sachs purchased over 20 billion dollars of insurance from AIG to hedge against the bogus triple A rated mortgage securities they held. They also began dumping their mortgagre backed securities to institutional investors, while at the same time betting that the mortgage market would crash.

VINCE'S ESSAY FROM RUTLEDGE CAPITAL OCTOBER 26, 2007 REGARDING THE PENDING ECONOMIC CRISIS

People have become so hung up pointing the finger at each other, the political parties, the speculators, the people who got liars loans and the predatory lenders, that they have got many of us thinking that the world's financial problems were started by contagion from the "sub-prime crisis". But no one is taking responsibility. We've lost sight of what we knew in our hearts, that the misnomered sub-prime crisis scenario doesn't adequately explain away what's going on.

There's more blame to put on Democratic legislators, for instance, for blocking regulation of the GSE's and having exacerbated the mess, but that is because Democrats have the majority of legislators in the Senate and the House. These days, if a majority party doesn't materialize to enact legislation in favor of the banks, pharmaceutical or insurance companies and such, then you can bet that politicians from the other party will be changing their votes to make it happen.

In my view, partisan finger pointing about who did or didn't vote for what, even if it's correct, looks like passing the buck, even though it may not be meant to be, and it distracts everyone from the roots of the problem we must confront. Bills have so much stuff in them that off times legislators can't vote yes on a bill they want, because at the same time they would approve something they're against.

It's not the Democrats or the Republicans. It's corporations, and the mortgage perks and campaign contributions that controlled Congress when our legislators could have averted this mess. That, and the fact that when legislators retire from office they are taken care of by those same corporations. And we can follow the money trail at: opensecrets.org

Look at the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, who as you know is is always picked by the president from a list of three supplied by the banks. He gets away, under the flag of fighting inflation, with raising interest rates 11 times this year… eleven times, even as the secondary market is choking to death on the "Triple A" rated paper that is being regurgitated back upon its originators because it really wasn't "Triple A" and had 15 and 20% delinquency rates from the moment investors around the world purchased it from American brokerages. And instead of correcting the problems, the investment managers, who amounted to little more than glorified salesmen, played down the damage being done to their international clients. Meanwhile, all the Federal Reserve and the banks that control it had to do, in order to preserve the medium and lower taxpayer's ability to make their mortgage payments, avoid massive defaults and thereby avert this crisis, was to lower interest rates. And that would not have cost the our government or the taxpayer anything.

Turning to a related subject, I want to tell everybody my life story starting from when I was about 10. Ha ha. I wanted a hit record, and I began writing songs with friends. Especially when I got a little older and saw a duo named Jan and Arnie do it. I thought their tune Jennie Lee that they cut in Jan's garage was really avant garde. It was beyond the rhythm and blues or the Brooklyn rock and roll harmony that came before it, and they were from right here in West Los Angeles. I was a kid in grade school when Jan became a teenager and had hit records, and I wanted to be like him. But like his first singing partner Arnie, I could see there were other things, like becoming a senator for instance, where you could be more useful to people. That seemed to be a more fulfilling goal. But you had to be rich to get elected, so I was out.

By the time I got to be 18, I was under the gun to decide what to do in life, and I remembered Senator George Murphy, who started out with nothing but made enough as a hoofer and actor to get the ball rolling. Now my pop always told me, "Vincie, if you want to be successful, pick one thing, and stick to it." So naturally I disregarded his advice and followed a plan to do everything. I'd do it all. I'd write music and movies, I'd produce, I'd take a shot at being a rock star, and an actor. I even landed the best agent, which was no small feat because they only had 5 leading men and that included the number one and two box office draws at that time.

Up until now I've had a little success, but I never made enough money to enable the political phase of my long shot plan. You could say I am a failure. But I haven't stopped trying. If I were fortunate enough to be elected in the future to public office, here's what I'd do:

1) I'd lie and vote on things that I don't like, just like all the rest of them.

2) Well, maybe not number 1, but I'd do everything else I have to do to stay in office, just so I can hang in there long enough to get the few things done that I promise you I will follow through with.

3) I'd find alternative arrangements to confront and diffuse the incredible conflicts of interest under which our system at every level has enslaved all of us.

4) I promise to do everything I can to provide a more level playing field, between corporations and small business, and from the legislative to the judicial systems.

5) I'd encourage the U.S and Central Banks to find a way to insure interbank lending, and not with derivatives, but with real dollars, in order to restore sorely needed interbank confidence and reign in the runaway Libor to which most adjustable mortgage instruments are tied (Since I originally wrote this piece the Fed has started throwing dollars at big banks, but that isn't exactly the way I thought it should work). The main reason why the lenders aren't lending isn't because they don't trust one another; it is because they are terrified about their own asset to liability ratio.

6) And now here cometh the fear mongering we have all grown to know and love: If these kinds of changes aren't made, we are headed into further disillusionment and crushing of the human spirit. People will think it's smart to become even less ethical in their dealings with others, and this current crisis will repeat itself. And when nations distrust one another and trade across borders becomes disrupted, then it will not be long before armies cross them.

Here's something else I thought of a year ago that I'd fight for:

Instead of rushing in to burn the medium to lower end taxpayers to prop up the lifestyles of corporate folks, what we should do first, and I say first because I believe it would be a mistake to abandon Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers, is to find a way to make whole the investors around the world that these banking corporations damaged with bogus securitizations of AAA mortgages in the first place. We don't have to admit fault, because it's not our nation that is at fault, it's corporations that bullied our government into it.

We simply need to show our economic partners that we have the character to stand behind the things we export. Even bad loans.

That in itself would do a lot more to revive the secondary market and get the world economic crisis under control than squandering our fiscal future to bail out those responsible for the crisis, thereby encouraging them to keep up to their old tricks.

Last year I registered to run for a Republican seat in the 31st District here in West Los Angeles. Not because I'm a Republican or a Democrat, but because that's where I felt I had the best shot. I paid the fee, but in December they told me somebody dropped the ball and it was too late to be on the ballot. Unbelievable isn't it.

If I'd had known how things were going to be right now, I would have made a bigger deal about it then. But I didn't think I had much chance, not being rich, and there are plenty of other guys out there who could do as good or better a job.

It just seems as though there aren't enough of them in Washington D.C.

Read what Rep. Charles A. Lindbergh had to say:

"To cause high prices, all the Federal Reserve Board will do, will be to lower the (discount) rate, producing an expansion of credit and a rising stock market; then when businessmen are adjusted to these conditions, it can check prosperity in mid-career by arbitrarily raising the rate of interest.

It can cause the pendulum of a rising and falling market to swing gently back and forth by slight changes in the discount rate, or cause violent fluctuations by a greater rate variation, and in either case it will possess inside information as to financial conditions and advance knowledge of the coming change, either up or down.

This is the strangest most dangerous advantage ever placed in the hands of a special privilege class by any Government that ever existed. The system is private, conducted for the sole purpose of obtaining the greatest possible profits from the use of other people's money. They know in advance when to create panics to their advantage. They also know when to stop panic. Inflation and deflation work equally well for them when they control finance."

"The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace, and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy."

Abraham Lincoln

(Assassinated by John W. Booth, the leader of one of the teams of Confederate agents funded through Canada by international bankers opposed to President Lincoln's agenda, and his national greenback program to support the financial sovereignty of the government of the United States.)

"Whosoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce. 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."

James Garfield

(About a week before he was assassinated.)

FEDERAL RESERVE RELATED

On June 4, 1963, about six months before he was assassinated, President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order No. 11110. This gave the U.S. Treasury the power "to issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury." This meant that for every ounce of silver in the U.S. Treasury's vault, the government could introduce new money into circulation. This gave the U.S. government back its power to issue currency, while stripping the Federal Reserve's power to loan money to the government at interest. Executive Order No. 11110 is still valid, but not utilized.

(This is not meant to directly blame the assassinations of three American presidents on international bankers, as there were and are, other related reasons. But there is evidence to suggest that organizations and people who enabled the assassins, or covered up the facts, were and still are, connected or beholden to the international banking families and corporations, and the central banks, that today control the Federal Reserve.)

AUDIT THE FEDERAL RESERVE, AND RESTORE STATES RIGHTS TO DEFEND CONSUMERS FROM FEDERALLY INSURED BANKS

Yes, it appears that Willie Aames may have been living beyond his means...


When the news came out that Willie was the most recent celebrity to lose his home, self glorified establishment news commentators were quick to make snide remarks and chalk him up as another fool who wasn't as prudent as they are.

But what if he was living within his means and it was his creditors who pulled the rug out from under him? Or maybe Willie lost his money because he was cheated while investing in a marketplace where the SEC protects the banks far ahead of protecting citizens. Maybe instead of paying his mortgage he simply squandered his savings on booze and dope because he lives in a country that would rather pay to lock up drug addicts than rehabilitate them?

It is very popular today, to think that the foreclosure crisis is about people buying homes or taking loans they could not afford, but we ought to stick up for homeowners who got sucked into this government created financial institution whirlpool, and deplore they way all distressed homeowners have been condescendingly portrayed, by everyone from President Bush, to former Sec of Treasury Paulson to Uncle Ben Bernanke as getting into millions of homes they could not afford.

Rick Santelli on MSNBC bought into that. He was quite vocal that PRUDENT American taxpayers should not have to pay for their neighbors home improvements that were purchased with an unaffordable equity line.

This is a just large dose of Money Master Propaganda, and loudmouth Santelli at MSNBC simply knows on which side his bread is buttered. And he is probably a bit brainwashed too.

We have all been brainwashed. Think about it. All the trillions of dollars in taxpayer money being squandered to prop up the government's favorite banks is going to maintain the lifestyles of the elite. Another portion of the money is being funneled into corrupt federal and local government bureaucracies in the hope that some of it will find its way into worthwhile programs like education, infrastructure or solar energy. But we will never see any of that money going to bail Rick Santelli's neighbor out of an unaffordable home improvement. To the contrary, Rick's philosophy is engineered to focus the blame of the collapse away from the banks and the politicians, and make us dismiss and forget about the millions of American families who continue to be gobbled up by the unabated foreclosure crisis.

Borrowers who were imprudent are not a large percetage of the millions of American familes being crushed. Forty five percent of the all bankruptcies in America are still caused by medical bills, and bogus Big Insurance, with its stranglehold on our legislators, and our laws that are supposed to govern insurance companies, but have been instead rewritten to allow insurance companies to charge exorbitant premiums, or to lawfully avoid paying the full amount of valid claims. Yes 45% of American bankruptcies are still caused by medical bills and not people living beyond their means!

Many other Americans being forced into foreclosure are veterans with families, often with a wife and husband both working 14 hour days to try and pay the interest on loans that were affordable, but were deliberately raised by the lender, to enslave borrowers in a 90% debt to income ratio. Many others have fallen prey to out of control credit card companies, and their unethical model of increasing interest rates at any excuse.

So, maybe for all we know, Willie Ames lost his home for some other reason than living beyond his means. Maybe medical bills wiped out his savings reserve that had previously seen him from actor's paycheck to actor's paycheck. Or maybe he was swindled by someone like Bernie Madoff, when corruption at the top of the SEC put the interests of banks and helping them hide their frauds, ahead of protecting citizens.


And maybe Willie's problem started with the banks themselves. We all know that on the front end the banks pay incentives to their agents to guide people who qualify for good loans into predatory loans. And on the back end, the banks own the rating agencies that fraudulently rated those predatory loans as triple A in order to package them and sell them as pools of mortgage backed securities.

For the past years, multinational financial institutions contaminated Wall Street and its counterparties around the world, with those packages of bogus triple A rated pools of mortage securities, that they named Structured Investment Vehicles, until all the investment banks became so badly damaged that they lost all trust in one another, and refused to trade.

THAT IS HOW FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS JUST CAUSED THE GREATEST ECONOMIC COLLAPSE IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD !

And we only know about the set ups that were happening on the front and back ends! What predatory schemes and strategies were being hatched within the central banks innermost circles?

We may never be able to know, because all that information is protected, once again, by the foxes that are guarding the sheep.

Let's say you are the Attorney General of Illinois and have discovered massive lender fraud in procedures devised to trick borrowers into taking loans that were designed to fail in the first place, and you, as Attorney General attempt to subpoena those bank records.

You will fail, because the State authority has been preempted by the Federal and you have no jurisdiction. You, as Attorney General for the State cannot get to see those records, because four years ago the lender's lobbies at the highest level of our government, succeeded in changing the laws and the rules to shield federally insured banks from the eyes of state government! Now should not the State have first authority in matters relating to a fraud upon its citizens?

Of course there are people on both sides, borrowers and lenders, who cheated the financial system, or who were not prudent. But that still does not mean that good Americans, who did everything right, who saved up their money to buy into the American Dream, but were instead tricked into sub-prime, Alt A and Option Arm Loans, when they qualified for something better, and then cornered with eleven consecutive interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, should be ignored and abandoned by the leaders of our government, and the American people themselves.

For all the trillions that are being literally squandered into the economic collapse, one would think that congress could afford to significantly reduce income taxes, audit the secretive Federal Reserve, and support an honest solution, a real program, where hardworking Americans, who were defrauded, can have their loans reviewed and rescinded or fixed. One would think so...

But not in a government controlled by banksters.

Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime: How the Federal Government Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help Consumers

By Eliot Spitzer
Thursday, February 14, 2008

Several years ago, state attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a marked increase in a range of predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders. Some were misrepresenting the terms of loans, making loans without regard to consumers' ability to repay, making loans with deceptive "teaser" rates that later ballooned astronomically, packing loans with undisclosed charges and fees, or even paying illegal kickbacks. These and other practices, we noticed, were having a devastating effect on home buyers. In addition, the widespread nature of these practices, if left unchecked, threatened our financial markets.

Even though predatory lending was becoming a national problem, the Bush administration looked the other way and did nothing to protect American homeowners. In fact, the government chose instead to align itself with the banks that were victimizing consumers.

Predatory lending was widely understood to present a looming national crisis. This threat was so clear that as New York attorney general, I joined with colleagues in the other 49 states in attempting to fill the void left by the federal government. Individually, and together, state attorneys general of both parties brought litigation or entered into settlements with many subprime lenders that were engaged in predatory lending practices. Several state legislatures, including New York's, enacted laws aimed at curbing such practices.

What did the Bush administration do in response? Did it reverse course and decide to take action to halt this burgeoning scourge? As Americans are now painfully aware, with hundreds of thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure and our markets reeling, the answer is a resounding no.

Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.

Let me explain: The administration accomplished this feat through an obscure federal agency called the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The OCC has been in existence since the Civil War. Its mission is to ensure the fiscal soundness of national banks. For 140 years, the OCC examined the books of national banks to make sure they were balanced, an important but uncontroversial function. But a few years ago, for the first time in its history, the OCC was used as a tool against consumers.

In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules.

But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks. In fact, when my office opened an investigation of possible discrimination in mortgage lending by a number of banks, the OCC filed a federal lawsuit to stop the investigation.

Throughout our battles with the OCC and the banks, the mantra of the banks and their defenders was that efforts to curb predatory lending would deny access to credit to the very consumers the states were trying to protect. But the curbs we sought on predatory and unfair lending would have in no way jeopardized access to the legitimate credit market for appropriately priced loans. Instead, they would have stopped the scourge of predatory lending practices that have resulted in countless thousands of consumers losing their homes and put our economy in a precarious position.

When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners, the Bush administration will not be judged favorably. The tale is still unfolding, but when the dust settles, it will be judged as a willing accomplice to the lenders who went to any lengths in their quest for profits. So willing, in fact, that it used the power of the federal government in an unprecedented assault on state legislatures, as well as on state attorneys general and anyone else on the side of consumers.

Written in the Washington Post, by the Governor of New York, three weeks before they took him down.








AMERICA NEEDS LEGITIMATE HEALTHCARE REFORM

Medical bills are still the number one cause of bankruptcy in America. Currently 46 million Americans do not have health care coverage. Millions more Americans are under-insured causing bankruptcy and tearing families apart when struck with a life threatening illness.

The American people wouldn't even be having a healthcare debate right now if Big Insurance and the medical industry hadn't been allowed to pay record amounts of contributions to our legislators, in order to stack the deck in their favor. Many of the laws on the books today have been actually written by attorneys retained by Big Insurance to protect them from the people, at the expense of the people.

As such, Big Insurance offers hardly any affordable options at all for middle class people unless they are working for government or large corporations that can foot the bill. And to allow middle class families to be gobbled up into bankruptcy because they cannot afford medical care is not only unethical, but it exacerbates a major financial drag on the United States economy.

We need to envision the reality of a National Optional Healthcare Program, as a safety net for those Americans who work just as hard as the folks who are working for government or corporations.

But one of the main arguments against it, comes from the heavy pushback of Big Insurance, and their ability to capture the minds of many people who are fortunate to be satisfied with their present insurance, sometimes because it is paid for by their corporate or government employers.

Those who dissent may rightly believe their existing corporate or government paid insurance programs are fine for them. They don't need or want any change, and so many can be persuaded to believe that their insurance would be threatened by an optional public funded insurance plan. But properly structured public funded insurance wouldn't force anyone to change carriers.

If everyone had a first hand experience of seeing just how low down, dirty and rotten Big Insurance can be, often willing to stop at nothing in order to worm their way out of legitimate claims for life-threatening illnesses, then many people would change their minds about the need for Healthcare Reform.

President Obama is attempting to take a step in the right direction to provide quality healthcare for all. The problem is that the administration is operating from a platform built upon a corrupted corporatocracy that can't help itself from increasing bureaucracy and deficit spending at an dangerously unsustainable rate. It appears that the only option other than a national insurance safety net, is for government to properly regulate Big Insurance. But given Big Insurance's formidable lobby, that has proved to be an insurmountable task for our current legislators...

Still, we must pry Big Insurance from its corrupt mainstream stranglehold of our healthcare system. We need to institute an optional type of American Healthcare, that does not discourage first class treatment, or encourage welfarism such as the Socialist Marxist model in Britain. The last thing we need is the soft tyranny, authoritarianism and irrationality of more bureaucratic power.

IT IS NOT ONLY AIG THAT IS CONDUCTING ITSELF IN THIS MANNER

It is also Allstate, Chubb, and all the other big insurance corporations.

It is frightening and sobering to think, that for a long time, until recently, there were laws on the books in California that protected the rights of citizens to seek justice against such abuses. Now, due to the power of the insurance lobby over our legislators, there are none.

"We just paid 3 billion for these TV stations. The news is what we say it is!"

The dark screen below remains here as a memorial to the Truth, and is just as much a consequence of war as a bombed out position. It is a destroyed weapon of information on the cyber front.

Globalized multinational corporations can be regulated at the state level to honor the good of the people above corporate profits.

ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION / ADVERSE CLIMATE CHANGE

Call this concept what you will, Adverse Climate Change, Ecological Destruction, or simply Man's Inhumanity to Man. Trivialize it by calling the movement against Global Warming a Hollywood scam, promoted by Al Gore and other so-called Illuminati, to usher in a New World Order. Point out there are thousands of crooks and corrupt bureaucrats out there gearing up to syphon off taxpayer funds designated for green technologies. But whatever labels you want to attach to the issue... an Opinion, or a simple Hoax designed to line the pockets of the elite, it is not. There is a much broader definition.

No amount of bogus media debate, or big brother propaganda, should capture our minds and make us lose sight of the fact that man's burning of fossil fuel, and the chemical proliferation of oil based plastic derivatives, poisons the planet in numerous ways. And by the way, the so-called New World Order has been around for a long time. It is the worldwide corporate and financial regime that has been ruthlessly striving to preserve the status quo long before we were born.

Rulers have sought to preserve the status quo ever since there were people. And those so-called cautionary novels, 1984 by George Orwell, and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley... They are not something to watch out for in the future at all. The blatant outrages against humanity described in those books have already happened, while today more complex but less obvious crimes against nature and human beings are being perpetrated and enforced in even more subtle and insidious ways. Meanwhile, the loss of habitat, and other negative influences upon the eco-systems supporting life on planet Earth, have become a scientific reality. These influences affect our well-being and even our potential for survival as a species.

One of the main questions today is about the degree to which human activity is responsible for the enormous impacts of adverse climate change, compared to natural sources of greenhouse gasses such as the carbon dioxide emissions from undersea volcanoes or livestock. Studies show that our planet has experienced many such changes of climate, both colder and warmer than today, over its known history.

A related viewpoint holds that the concept of Adverse Climate Change, is manufactured to focus people, and motivate divided nations, together in a common cause, in order to benefit New World Order politicians and line the pockets of energy corporations. Do world leaders have the capacity to do such a thing? Yes. Is there an ever growing line of energy companies and alternative energy companies controlled by unethical people who are eager to to cheat consumers? Yes, I know several of their names.

But only one gas combustion engine running inside a garage not only heats up the garage, but can be lethal. Picture then millions of gas combustion engines running at the same time in a megalopolis such as Los Angeles, San Diego or Mexico City. Look at the impact that must have on the temperature, the abilities, and the dumbing down of the people who are trying to function every day within that carbon monoxide environment, let alone the impact upon the earth's atmosphere.

So no matter what the level of human responsibility for adverse climate change when compared to other factors such as natural under-sea volcanoes, it still remains, aside from overriding economic concerns, for we must phase out dirty energy without penalizing the world wide economic network, that we need to act responsibly and aggressively to phase out toxic man made contaminants in our environment, particularly the filthy by-products of coal and oil.

The world's leading science journals report that atmospheric greenhouse gases have reached levels not seen for millions of years, glaciers are melting ten times faster than previously thought, and species are vanishing as a result of climate change. They also report of extreme weather events, long-term droughts, rising sea levels and further catastrophic consequences if no action is taken.

The Rio Grande no longer consistently makes it to the ocean. In California, we are in the midst of a ten year drought that has become progressively worse in recent years. If this drought continues at its present pace for another ten years, Lake Mead will be dry, leaving 4,000,000 citizens of the greater San Diego megalopolis without water.

Several CEOs of large coal and oil corporations maintian that they have changed their minds from a year or two ago. Many say they now believe that "global warming" is a threat. They say they are phasing their corporations to become green. But actions speak louder than advertisments. Those same corporations are agressively building new plants. They have additional poisonous plants on the drawing board, and very little green alternatives by comparison.

Meanwhile, many politicians and experts who raise doubts about Adverse Climate Change, are not doing so in good faith. Some of them are just misinformed, but many of them are bought and paid for 100% by the dirty energy companies who don't want to change their ways, or the lumber companies who see nothing but profit when they look at our forests. In fact, many of our highest politicians have repeatedly proven themselves to be bought and paid for, when you consider that the last administration in Washington D.C. put representatives from the oil, lumber and pharmaceutical corporations in charge of the federal regulatory agencies that were designed to protect the people and the environment from the greed of those very corporations in the first place.

Sadly, disgracefully, for the sake of money, many of our politicians and bureaucrats, our elected officials who we entrusted to protect the people, and the environment, have been conspiring with corporations for many years to keep America burning the filthiest, most poisonous, most expensive fuels on the planet.

For the sake of money, they have, and are still conspiring to cut down our forests, pollute the atmosphere, and cover up the polution and injuries caused, by the production of poisonous chemicals like Thimerosal. Even if burning fossil fuels had nothing to do with damaging the environment through climate change, which it does, the creation of phthalates and synthetic estrogenic chemicals from the production of the vast array of fossil fuel based plastics, has been scientifically proven to be causing serious problems in the human reproductive cycle.

ADVERSE ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

I do not have an opinion whether the concept of Global Warming as caused by humans is a hoax or not. I do not really care one way or the other. All you have to do is look around to see the destruction of ecological systems caused by corporate greed. For instance, I remember fishing for all kinds of marine life in the Chesapeake Bay when I was a child. The Chesapeake is the largest estuary in America, but sadly, fish can't survive there anymore.

And as far as the concept of "Global Warming" is concerned, all one has to do is study the planet Venus to realize that the increased production of greenhouse gasses cannot be good. According to Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, co-authors of "Livestock and Climate Change", the environmental impact of the lifecycle and supply chain of animals raised for food has been vastly underestimated, and in fact accounts for at least half of all human-caused greenhouse gases.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization Report, Livestock's Long Shadow, issued in 2006, estimated that 18 percent of annual worldwide greenhouse gas emissions are attributable to cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, pigs, and poultry. However, Goodland and Anhang assert that livestock and their byproducts actually account for at least 32.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, or 51 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions. Whichever account is correct, these kind of findings indicate that there has been an increased production of livestock and poultry to feed more humans on the planet, and that a good percentage of greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced by vegetarian diets.

Notwithstanding legitimate questions as to whether the concept of global warming is a hoax or not, and whether greenhouse gasses present an immediate danger, common sense still tells us that it would benefit the planet's atmosphere, and its citizens greatly, if we can start to phase out the dirty, filthy fossil fuel energy souces from hell, and replace them with clean energy sources from the heavens, like the wind, and the electrons that come down to us for free, from the sun.

Construction has begun in Southern California on two solar thermal plants for Pacific Gas and Electric, and Southern California Edison, that will be providing 2.3 gigawats of solar thermal power. By itself, the Southern California Edison deal is the world's largest solar energy deal.

The plants being built are bigger, but will be more cost effective to build than most other new plants. These kind of solar thermal plants are cheaper to build than coal plants, cheaper than gas plants, and they are building them a lot faster.

As Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental advocate for the past 25 years, has said, "Once the plants are up and running, the energy is free forever. We won't have to go to Saudi Arabia and drill holes in the ground, then pump the oil up, and then refine it, and then ship it across the Atlantic with a military escort, and get in periodic wars in Mesopotamia and other places, and then have to distribute the oil across the country.

The electrons are hitting our country for free, every day. If we build these plants to pick up the electrons, and the infrastructure to deliver them, we can put them into our power lines...

And if we are to build this out across the country, we can provide 100% of the energy needs in this country, in conjunction with other clean power sources, for about 750 billion dollars.

Kennedy makes the point that 750 billion is less than the amount of dollars we export to purchase foreign oil each and every year. "Taxpayers involuntarily gave 700 billion dollars to Wall Street, and everybody believes it will take generations to pay back. But actually, it will only take just one year, without our financial expenditure for foreign oil."

What we need to make this work is a straightforward market place. That is what Americans demand. We need an open marketplace that does what a market is supposed to do, which is to reward good behavior, which is efficiency, and punish bad behavior, which is inefficiency and waste.

Today we have a market that is rigged to favor the dirtiest, filthiest, most poisonous, most expensive fuels from hell. We need to design a marketplace that rewards the clean, cheap, fuels from heaven.

We can do this very quickly. For instance, in 1979 America started a national grid, a national backbone for the internet. In 1980, there were fewer than 500 personal computers in this country and IBM was saying it was a dead end technology. Well now, every American has a PC, because we had a marketplace. Look at the effect that has had on the cost of information. It has plummeted to almost nothing. That same thing will happen with the cost of electrons if we follow through and build a national grid for electricity in this country.

Here is another example, in 1996, President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act which opened up the telecommunications grid and spawned a national, and worldwide telecommunications revolution. That is why we have an Ipod. Today there are companies that can provide unlimited long distance and local calling for $18 a year. That is what is going to happen to the cost of energy, if we build a national marketplace that operates in a straightforward manner.

We need to make sure that the market rules are aligned with our national interests, and with the global interest of saving our planet.

We need to make sure that our utility companies can make money by getting their consumers to conserve energy, and that their profits are not dependent upon them selling as much energy as possible.

And then we need to open up the grid so that everyone can get on it. If you have a solar panel on your roof, and you are not home for one part of the day, and your house is generating more energy than it's using, you ought to be able to sell that energy back to the grid and get market rates for it.

There is no state where you can do that today. Thirty six states will buy it back from you, but all of them limit how much, and none of them will give you the market rate.

If we follow through with these fundamentals of our clean energy plan, we will make every American into an energy entrepreneur, every home into a power plant, and we can power this country from American initiative and entrepreneurship of energy, rather than Saudi oil.

PREVIOUSLY UNAFFORDABLE BRAIN STIMULUS NOW AVAILABLE

If you are one of those who does not feel helped by our government's economic STIMULUS, or are simply having difficulty believing that things are getting better, a NEW kind of STIMULUS, a federally approved (FDA) procedure, DEEP BRAIN STIMULUS, is now available across the country, and locally through the UCLA Department of Biobehavioral Sciences. Funding to treat patients federally approved for DBS is projected to be an ongoing cost to taxpayers over future generations, but is intended in the long run to stem increasing costs of counseling for the clinically depressed or paranoid.

Leave Vince a message at WWW.VOTE4VINCE.ORG if you believe you or your family members should be approved for this procedure.

Leave a message for Vince at WWW.VOTE4VINCE.ORG if you believe it is unconstitutional for our Federal Government to directly support such programs, with or without taxpayer money, and that government supported programs and services should be first and foremost regulated by local State Government, and the vote of the people.



Leave a message for Vince on our CONTACT US page if you are inclined to VOLUNTEER YOUR ASSISTANCE on any of the above mentioned issues, or do something about the fact that a majority of our elected officials violated the law and the Constitution, by passing trillions of dollars in no cap bailout bills, through to multinational corporations, against the wishes, and without a vote from the people of our United States.

YOUR COMMITMENT TO DEMOCRACY

Thank you, if you have read this far, for your commitment to Democracy.

Copy and Paste the link below for some recommended reading about the historical significance of Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th Century French political scientist who explored the social consequenses of tyranny.

Tocqueville reminds us that when the central government asserts its authority over states and communities, a tyrannical shadow lurks just behind. So long as local governments are strong, he says, even tyrannical laws can be mitigated by moderate enforcement at the local level, but once the central government takes control of the entire structure... our liberties are at grave risk.

(Cut and paste this link) http://tinyurl.com/c7oh6a




Here are a few other links to my articles over the past couple of years, if there is any interest in assisting me to genuinely correct the economy:

http://www.examiner.com/x-9613-LA-Bipartisan-Examiner~y2009m4d30-Opinion-Specific-solutions-for-a-deepening-economic-crisis

http://www.examiner.com/x-9613-LA-Bipartisan-Examiner~y2009m6d4-How-Derivatives-Collateralized-Debt-Obligations-and-Credit-Default-Swaps-crushed-the-world-economy

http://www.examiner.com/x-9613-LA-Bipartisan-Examiner~y2009m6d18-How-Derivatives-Collateralized-Debt-Obligations-Credit-Default-Swaps-crushed-the-economy--Part-2

http://www.examiner.com/x-9613-LA-Bipartisan-Examiner~y2009m5d7-State-Attorneys-General-prevented-from-defending-consumers-from-banks

http://www.examiner.com/x-9613-LA-Bipartisan-Examiner~y2009m5d13-Opinion--Why-was-the-Governor-of-New-York-Elliot-Spitzer-assassinated-politically

http://www.examiner.com/x-9613-LA-Bipartisan-Examiner~y2009m10d19-ACTUAL-SOLUTIONS-TO-ECONOMIC-COLLAPSE-REMAIN-SAME