MegaUpload Fiasco Show DC Politicians Have No Gonads to Go After Wall Street

Riddlemethis? Would the Government or Obama administration arrest banking Presidents/CEOs and seize their assets because it contained the money of drug kingpins? Would the Government or Obama administration arrest and seize the assets of red W. Smith, the Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Federal Express because their truck may transport 10 kilograms of cocaine or a warehouse may contain 20 tons of marijuana? I don’t thinks so.

It is obvious that the Federal Government do not have the gonads to tackle corruption and white collar crime objectively. Just last week, an action reminiscent of Elliot Ness pouring beer into a river occurred when the FBI and Justice Department seized the website Mega Upload accusing the owner of causing $500 million in copyright infringements. My query is why is doing the work of the motion picture and recording industries more vital than the work of the people?

Either Congress or the President is so brazen or so cretinous, that they cannot envisage what they are doing me their efforts to censor the website Mega upload. Maybe a little bit of bot now that I think about it. Brazen because it is pronounced their actions are mainly taken on the bequest of the motion picture and recording industry lobbies. Stupid because most politicians prefer to brag on their ignorance on internet technologies and their low level use of such resources that attempting to learn more about the – a myopia more prescient of Washington politicians dysfunction than seeing the desires and needs of the common, non-super Pac affiliated US denizen.

The Obama administrations seizure of the site and the owner’s assets is more an attestation and forewarning of America’s fascist future of protecting US oligarchs than the penchant of protecting liberty. I mean really, going after a site and using the FBI and department of Justice Resources for what is basically a cloud-based repository for data storage, is like the examples I cited in the beginning of this essay.

No bank or Delivery company or website can track all of the user lot, packages or uploaded data which it hosts. To assume that one could, is silly. Meaning - to arrest the site’s founders under the assumption that they knowingly participated in copyright infringement, is moronic if we’re blaming site owners for user uploaded content now, we’d better start arresting people affiliated with all industries from YouTube to Bank of America (THEY HAVE MORE THAN $1 BILLION IN TOXIC ASSETS).

Now I know inside the belt way folks don’t understand. As an artist, mega upload allows me to get 90% on all the music I write, make and produce without the need of a record company gatekeeper who wants to Romanesquly decide for the public if they should hear or have the right to purchase my music. Not to mention this 90% on every dollar made allows them to get my music for free.

Maybe it is about the loot. Former Democratic senator and current head of the Motion Picture Association of America Chris Dodd have given tons of loot to the campaign of President Barack Obama. DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg raised at least $500,000 for the campaign and the Democratic National Committee and contributed $2 million to a super PAC backing the president was his biggest donor. Not to mention the zillion times the President has held fund raisers held by Hollywood big wigs the likes of Miramax co-founder Harvey Weinstein and Sony Pictures .

I also think that we have ignorant folks making laws and talking about things they have no honest understanding about. I’m sure there are large numbers of individuals inside the beltway like Senator Ted Stevens describing said internets as “a series of tubes,” or Rep. Mel Watt who proudly asserts that declares proudly that he doesn't understand internet/computer technology.

The truth is that a host of variables and factors are involved with the recent and present this financial crisis including everyone from the rating agencies, the bankers and the brokers, and that there is strong evidence for criminal culpability. However, no Wall Street banker wreaking havoc via their exotic derivatives has been charge criminally. What Madoff did to individual investors is what the mortgage & banking industries and Wall Street did to the US taxpayer and the US economy. No one from Goldman Sachs, Lehman’s, Countrywide, Citi, AIG, Bea Sterns or Wachovia just to name a few have been charged criminally or prosecuted by the Obama Administration. Why because we do not count and although the majority of Americans would see greater value in using the FBI and department of Justice Resources by going after criminals that looted $100s of millions and even billions of dollars, congress and Obama do not have the gonads to do such and wag the dog by going after mega uploads $42 million.

Wall Street controls D.C. As long as the financial companies can donate as many dollars as they have been to both sides of the aisle, you will see little in the way of reform of the financial sector and even less in the way of prosecution of wrong-doers. Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild was correct when he said, "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes its laws”

Constipated Now Nows

While many of us continue our habitual over zealous consumption of stuff and things of no real economic value, two events have occurred since the November mid-term election that may be of critical economic importance regarding the future of America, three if one includes the proposal presented this week by President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.

The first was the announcement by the U.S. Federal Reserve this week of $600 billion of extra money being put in the economy. Specifically they will use the loot created out of thin air and computer virtual reality to buy $600 billion of long-term Treasury bonds (about $75 billion a month) through March 2011. They call this “quantitative easing.” In theory, this can be defined as a willy nilly, hocus pocus way to promote a stronger pace of economic growth and recovery. By my math, in addition to the pronouncement made by the New York Federal Reserve Bank to reinvest maturing mortgage securities owned by the Fed in Treasury bonds, that projects to approximately $900 billion of Federal bond purchases in the next six months or almost half the loot issued to finance this year's federal deficit.

The second is the meeting of the G-20 in South Korea. We know that most of the attention during this meeting will be directed towards the global economy. Particularly, monetary and currency policy and international trade. This will be an up hill battle for the US, since most of what we see that is jacked-up economically is our fault. I mean since the time of Nixon, we as a nation encouraged all of this, when we decided to get cheap stuff abroad via Chinese, Vietnamese and Latin American labor and taking the dollar off the gold standard.

Yes, once upon a time there was a gold standard in which the monetary unit is a fixed weight of gold. This came about via the Bretton Woods agreement put in place after World War II, allowing several countries to base their exchange rates to the U.S. dollar. But like I said previously, this ended in 1971 when President Richard Nixon ended the dollar-gold peg, leading to what we have now - floating exchange rates. Even stranger is that at this time, Alan Greenspan, who arrived in Washington in 1967, as a campaign advisor to Richard Nixon, wanted to reshape the economic landscape of America via deregulate, But I digress.


The China/US relationship is a clear example of what I am trying to say. They have pegged their currency to the dollar, which keeps the value of the Yuan artificially low, thus giving them the ability to flood the US market with cheap products. The consequence was that it gave China the ability to use the dollars they earned to buy US debt, which let us live way above our incomes. Unfortunate for us, this created a trade imbalance between the two nations, growing dollar reserves in China and creating a trade surplus (just as what we see with Germany).

Chinese dollar reserves currently are estimated at about $2 trillion. If the Feds puts too much money into circulation, these reserves may be devalued. And if China isn’t happy, and their value is decreased because the dollar is reduced in strength by the Feds actions, a trade war and a worldwide recession would not be far fetched as a probably outcome. Funny thing is we complain about china keeping the value of the Yuan fixed, but the actions the US central bank is doing by flooding billions in the world market, is the same thing, only via monetary policy.

What the federal Reserve has done is to take more risk with respect to our economy, an untested risk, which could not have come at a more dangerous time globally for the US. Banks already have about $3 trillion in cash, they just are hoarding as opposed to lending or spending. Thus such actions seems to increase the risks of higher inflation sooner than latter, especially now since the places we used to get cheap labor from is outcompeting us and holding our economic growth stagnant.

Now, other wealthy nations are super critical of the US economic policy as were of theirs 30 years ago, with the clout being on their side now. Especially the German and Chinese with respect to the Feds actions and overall macroeconomic policies. I just don’t get it, what will buying bonds do to encourage job creation? We still spend too much. On December 31, 2010, the Obama stimulus package, will end and thing will really be up in the air.

I do not know what the end game will be but I can say from our actions at home and our buddies around the world. And on the real the U.S. needs to generate at least a million plus jobs annually to keep up with new workers entering the job market alone. From the actions of the G20 summit there are several things we see. First is obvious, that no one wants to be in any paper currency. This may be why a former banker at Goldman Sachs and deputy secretary of state under George H. W. Bush, suggested a return to a modified gold standard. Second, that we are not in a position to tell other nations how large of a surplus or deficit they can run. And last, Unfortunately neither individual folk or our government have learned anything from the last 6 to 10 years of economic disarray. It is very obvious that folks still think and behave the same and still have not taken responsibility and just spend as much loot as they brought in – Governments included. Foir even with this second round of “quantitative easing," Amercia sure feels constipated to me. And may require Funkadelic - Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis Enema Squad.

Wall Street, DC

For the past coupla a few years I have been writing and thinking a lot about money and economics. Before then I used to always write about foreign policy, I don’t know why, for my professional expertise, or any of my Undergraduate, master of doctorate degrees are in the area of either foreign policy or economics. Moreover, nor am I a conspiracy theorist. I guess you can say I just like puzzles and problem solving and more importantly freely thinking for myself.

I have been consistent and even accurate in my analysis and evaluation with respect to the US government and the so-called representation of an economy it fosters. I have also been consistent in pointing out that there is no difference really between the political beasts we call Washington, DC and the financial varmints we label Wall Street. And for me there is no better example than the Crooks who operate at the top levels of Goldman Sachs. The way I have figured since the 1960, the folks who run and formulate Washington’s economic policy are the same folk who make fist full of loot for their own personal interest. Starting with the chief Thief in charge – Robert Rubin. Now Rubin was forced to resign from CitiGroup as its Chairman earlier this year for his messed performance. It was profitable for him seeing he left with more than 100 million in his pocket. However, he got his start with Goldman Sachs in the mid 1960s where he eventually became co-chairman in 1990. He was only around for a few years for afterwards he became Assistant to the President for economic policy and eventually US Treasury secretary in 1995.

Then there was Stephen Friedman who served as Chairman from 90 to 94 and as the director from 2005 to date. However in between he was the Chairman of the New York Federal Reserve from 2008-2009. Also there is Adam Storch (VP from 2004-2009 for GS) who now serves as the managing executive of the Security and exchange – as if we expect folks to police themselves. Henry Paulson was Chairman CEO of Goldman Sachs until he resigned to become US Treasury secretary in 2006 until 2009.

It also works the other way around. Michael Paese was deputy staff director on the House Financial services committee from 2007-2008 before becoming Director for Government Affairs for GS which he serves as today. Robert Zoellick was US trade representative from 2001-2005 as well as deputy secretary of state from 2005-06 before putting in work as a managing director at GS from 2006-2007.

This is just an example for I can say the same about Citigroup and others. In fact Geithner was VERY close to executives of Citigroup, ( Robert E. Rubin). Now all I am saying is that it is difficult for me to see how folks who created this problem while working both on Wall Street and In the Halls of Washington Politics can solve the problem. Moreover, I think it really show what the problem is. One of importance is revealed incessant incompetence. If most of us messed up dollars on our jobs at scales way less than what Rubin did at Citigroup – we would be fir4d and likely not be employed again. But not these folks. They are head of the game. And we Americans don’t get it, nor does Obama or any of them other politicians regardless of political affiliation. I don’t know about yawl, but I don’t trust nor love them Wall Street, DC hoes. I mean I do not see a difference between the two: Wall Street or DC, do or can you?