Tag: Jesse’s Cafe Americain

Praetorian Guard: US Role In The New World Order

Via Jesse

“The major function of secrecy in Washington is to keep the U.S. people and U.S. Congress from knowing what the nation’s leaders are doing. Secrecy is power. Secrecy is license. Secrecy covers up mistakes. Secrecy covers up corruption.

The United States [is] cast in the role of Praetorian Guard, protecting the interests of the global financial order against fractious elements in the Third World. As the Praetorian Guard, fighting wars for multinational interests while also paying for such adventures, our relative economic stability, domestic social and material infrastructure, and the freedom and liberties of the American people may all be forfeited.

James Stockwell, Praetorian Guard: US Role In the New World Order

“There are only two reasons why you should ever be asked to give your youngsters. One is defense of our homes. The other is the defense of our Bill of Rights and particularly the right to worship God as we see fit. Every other reason advanced for the murder of young men is a racket, pure and simple.

I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket


The 14 Trillion Dollar Scam and the Unfinished Business of Financial Reform

Guest Post by Jesse

  1. Financial Institutions should not be allowed to cheat people through confusing and complex products, or just plain lying about credit cards and mortgages.
  2. Financial Institutions should not be allowed to use taxpayers to pick up their risks through deposits or bailouts.

We know what needs to be done. Big financial institutions are flexing their political power to keep us from doing it, and to undermine what has already been attempted.

Auto loans now look like the pre-crisis mortgage market because they were exempted by Congress from Consumer Financial Protection Bureau oversight.

Department of Justice relies on deferred prosecutions and does not take repeat offending institutions to trial, and the SEC is even worse. They are abusing a system that was designed for low level non-violent offenders.

It is time to end the slap on the wrist culture at DOJ and SEC. Fines should be equal, at a minimum, to every dime of profits gained, and there should be an independent judicial review of these deals.

It is time for the Fed to make enforcement a top priority. Big financial institutions have every incentive to commit large financial offenses, and that is what they do. They rig global markets, and launder criminal funds and help the very wealthy to engage in tax cheating.

Dodd-Frank did not end ‘too big to fail.’ We need to stop talking about it and break up the Big Banks now, and force them to face the consequences of their own investment decisions. Too much of a technocratic approach is undermined over time, favoring a few well-connected, lawyered-up firms over time. What is needed is a structural approach, not a heavier layer of regulation. We need a new Glass-Steagall Law.

Congress must be able to limit the Fed’s emergency lending of subsidized loans to global financial institutions without oversight.

Reforming the tax laws is critical to effective reform. Corporations are incented for short term thinking and using stock buybacks to manipulate price performance. The tax code incents Banks to engage in higher leverage and lower capitalization.

High Frequency Traders introduce more volatility without adding value. A targeted financial transaction tax would curb this without affecting mom and pop investors.

The shadow banking system is unregulated and open to serious short term financial risk before the next Lehman or Bear Stearns starts another financial crisis.

The system is rigged, and those that rigged it want to keep it that way.


Debt: War and Empire By Other Means

Guest Post by Jesse

This video below may help one to understand some of the seemingly obtuse demands from the Troika with regard to Greece.

The video is a bit dated, but the debt scheme it describes remains largely unchanged. The primary development has been the creation of an experiment called the European Union and the character of the targets. One might also look to the wars of ‘preventative intervention’ and ‘colour revolutions’ that raise up puppet regimes for examples of more contemporary economic spoliation.

From largely small and Third World countries, the candidates for debt peonage have become the smaller amongst the developed Western countries, the most vulnerable on the periphery.

And even the domestic populations of the monetary powers, the US, Germany, and the UK, are now feeling the sting of financialisation, debt imposition through crises, and austerity. What used to only take place in South America and Africa has now taken place in Jefferson County Alabama. Corrupt officials burden taxpayers with unsustainable amounts of debt for unproductive, grossly overpriced projects.

It would be wrong in these instances to blame the whole country, the whole government, or all corporations, except perhaps for sleepwalking, and sometimes willfully, towards the abyss. For the most part a relatively small band of scheming and devious fellows abuse and corrupt every form of government and organization and law in order to achieve their private ambitions, often using various forms of intimidation and reward. It is an old, old story.

Continue reading “Debt: War and Empire By Other Means”

Wall St Pleads For More Government Subsidies and Handouts In NYT Op-Ed

Guest Post by Jesse

“It was the incarnation of blind insensate Greed. It was a monster devouring with a thousand mouths, trampling with a thousand hoofs: it was The Great Butcher — it was the spirit of Capitalism made flesh.”

Upton Sinclair

“Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.”

Erich Fromm

Surely you cannot be surprised by this headline.

Greed is incapable of having enough, by its very definition.

It does not need. But it always wants– more.

Wall Street On Parade
Wall Street Front Group Pleads for Government Help in New York Times OpEd
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
June 17, 2015

After the U.S. government pumped the secret, astronomical sum of more than $13 trillion into Wall Street during the years surrounding the 2008 financial crisis to bail it out of its own greedy and reckless gambles, Wall Street is shamelessly asking for more government handouts in the opinion pages of the New York Times. The woman pitching this pathetic poppycock, Kathryn S. Wylde, was actually on the Board of Directors at the New York Fed during the crisis – the very institution that sluiced the secret $13 trillion into Wall Street’s coffers.

Continue reading “Wall St Pleads For More Government Subsidies and Handouts In NYT Op-Ed”

Fragility: What Has the Watchers Worried In the US Debt Markets

Guest Post by Jesse

As you know I am on the lookout for a ‘trigger event’ that might spark another financial crisis, given the composition of the economy and the financial markets.

In the last financial crisis 2008, it was the failure of the two Bear Stearns hedge funds that exposed the grossly mispriced risks in mortgage backed financial assets, and the generally flawed nature of the market’s collateralized debt obligations. This led to a cascade of failures in fraudulently priced assets, and resulted in increasingly large institutional failures, including the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

One can draw some parallels with the financial crisis before that, which was the gross mispricing of risk and inflated values of internet-related tech companies that had grown to obviously epic proportions by 2000. A failure of several key tech bellwethers to make their numbers, and some negative results in the economy, showed the flaws in the underlying assumptions in what was clearly an asset bubble. And once the selling started, it was Katy-bar-the-door.

The failure of two relatively minor hedge funds was not a great event. The failure of a tech bellwether to make its quarterly numbers is not either. But their interconnectedness to the other portions of the world markets through the financial institutions on Wall Street, and more importantly, the fragile nature of the entire pyramid scheme of fraudulently constructed and mispriced risk of financial assets, caused an inherently shaky system to fall apart. What was most shocking was how quickly it happened once the dominos started falling.

Continue reading “Fragility: What Has the Watchers Worried In the US Debt Markets”

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“There is a vision to remake the world’s economy according to the neo-liberal agenda, and to rule it with an ‘iron rod’ wielded by the US. It would be under the control, described as benevolent guidance, of an oligarchy of the self-proclaimed wisest and most powerful of the multinational elite. The key goal now is to subdue any effective competition, and to gain the full cooperation of the other major powers. They are testing their model of a confederation of nations under central control in Europe.”

Jesse


The Global Monetary Phenomenon That Almost No One Is Seriously Discussing

Guest Post by Jesse

I wish to present, in just a few charts, a remarkable monetary phenomenon that almost no one is discussing publicly.

As you can see below, the central banks of the world, largely those of the West led by the US and the UK, were net sellers of gold throughout the 1990’s and through the turn of the century.

As the Bankers to the world’s reserve currency and sole global superpower, the Western central banks will make no major international policy decisions without the involvement of the Treasury, and especially the Federal Reserve and its constituent global banking machinery including the behemoth Banks and the SWIFT system.

Gold purchases by central banks, at least those they were willing to publicly acknowledge, turned positive by 2010 at most.

The pundits did not expect this change to continue, as is shown in the ‘forecast section’ for 2012 and after in this first chart from RBC/Bloomberg below.

This chart shows most clearly perhaps how the Western central banks stepped up their gold selling attempting to control and then crush the price of gold, driving it down to a low of $250 in 1999-2001.

Continue reading “The Global Monetary Phenomenon That Almost No One Is Seriously Discussing”

Who or What Is Killing the Bankers of Wall Street?

Guest Post by Jesse

“While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control.

A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules … In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenceless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.”

Francis I

“He was a murderer from the beginning, not standing with the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks of his own, for he is a liar, and the father of lies.”

John 8:44

It feeds on whatever is fragile, vulnerable, whether it be the environment, the public peace, the weak, the marginalized, the poor, the disabled, or the hearts and minds of children.

Peace and love are weakness; conquest and plunder are our calling.

There are a number of possible explanations for this recent cluster of untimely deaths on Wall Street.

Continue reading “Who or What Is Killing the Bankers of Wall Street?”

The Children of the Abyss

Guest Post by Jesse

“He shows you how to become as gods. Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his.”

J.H.Newman, The Times of Antichrist

People do not wake up one day and suddenly decide to become monsters, giving birth to unspeakable horrors.

And yet throughout history, different peoples have done truly monstrous things. The Americans were pioneers in forced sterilization and state propaganda. The British invented concentration camps, and were masters of predatory colonization. They even turned a large portion of the capital of their Empire into a festering ghetto through the Darwinian economics of neglect.

None have clean hands. No one is exceptional.

What do they have in common? They all take a walk down a long and twisted path, one cold-hearted and ‘expedient’ decision at a time, shifting responsibility by deflecting the choice for their actions on their leaders.

There is always some crackpot theory. some law of nature, from scientists or economists to support it. What else could they do? It is always difficult, but necessary.

They cope with their actions by making their victims the other, objectified, different, marginalized. And what they marginalize they cannot see. What they cannot see, by choice, is easily ignored.

And so they destroy and they kill, first by neglect and then by more efficient and decisive actions.

They walk slowly, but almost determinedly, into an abyss of their own creation.

But they all seem to have one thing in common. First they come for the old, the weak, the disabled, and the different, in a widening circle of scapegoats for their plunder.

Continue reading “The Children of the Abyss”

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“I am not so optimistic that this reform is possible, because there has in fact been a soft coup d’etat in the US, which now exists in a state of crony corporatism that wields enormous influence over the media and within the government.

To be clear about this, the oligarchs are flush with victory, and feel that they are firmly in control, able to subvert and direct any popular movement to the support of their own ends and unslakable will to power.

This is the contempt in which they hold the majority of American people and the political process: the common people are easily led fools, and everyone else who is smart enough to know better has their price. And they would beggar every middle class voter in the US before they will voluntarily give up one dime of their ill gotten gains.

But my model says that the oligarchs will continue to press their advantages, being flushed with victory, until they provoke a strong reaction that frightens everyone, like a wake up call, and the tide then turns to genuine reform.”

Jesse


Post FOMC Metals Rig: Right On Schedule

Guest Post by Jesse

This is what the pampered princes of privilege do when they fail.

They try to hide it. They lash out. They cheat.

They are petty. But vicious when frightened.

Most of the successes they have obtained throughout their lives have been gained by cheating, using inside information, rigging the game, exercising influence, position, and privilege.

They twist the fabric of society to weave their robes.

They make and break the rules to suit themselves and their friends.

They make our markets into bucket shops. Our laws are just pieces of paper.

They try to make other people pay for their mistakes.

As they have been doing all throughout their lives.

Success. They deserve it, one banal and disreputable way or another.

For the good of the system.

Walter Brueggemann: Speaking Truth To Power, Confronting Today’s Pharaohs

Guest Post by Jesse

Walter Brueggemann is a contemporary theologian and an Old Testament scholar from the United Church of Christ to whom I have been introduced by one of our patrons.

One of the things I appreciate most about le café, besides the occasional noted of how the patrons may have been affected by things served here, is when readers bring in knowledge and ideas and stories that I have not encountered before. It is certainly return enough for the simple fare served here.

Below are excerpts from a recent interview regarding his book Truth Speaks To Power.

For the complete interview which is not all that long you may read these excerpts in context here.

“Legitimate power always includes attentiveness to justice, When power is not attentive to justice it cannot endure. This is a summons to us to keep the agenda of justice for the vulnerable alive and front and center to maintain a kind of subversive stance toward power.

Power is the capacity to organize and administer social goods and social access. Truth is the structure of reality that is in the nature of things that cannot be violated by our capacity to administer it. Power can sometimes be administered in harmony with such truthfulness, but very often power is seduced so that it runs contradictory to truth.

Continue reading “Walter Brueggemann: Speaking Truth To Power, Confronting Today’s Pharaohs”

CORPORATISM

Guest Post by Jesse

The frenzy of the US elites to pass the ‘trade deals’ with Asia and Europe is indicative of their concerns that the progress of their plans is reaching a critical impasse. These deals will fortify the corporatist control over North America, a prerequisite before intensifying their plans for Europe and Asia. I suspect that, when push comes to shove, Asia will be little more than Japan, Australia, and a few other client states. China will almost certainly choose its own say more fitting to its domestic situation which may become more precarious.

Gold is of obvious strategic importance in this struggle since it is a means of settling international payments that does not as easily fall into the financial controls of one faction or another, as is the case with a fiat currency which is, at the end of the day, an instrument of highly discretionary power.
The discussions of these topics on US media is interesting to watch. I fully expect for the propaganda to reach ever more ridiculous levels, and for any domestic dissent to be crushed before it can gain any momentum.

The differences between the Wall St. Democrats and the Corporatist Republicans will continue to become increasingly cosmetic and more factional and social than substantial, in the manner of two competing gangs seeking their own enrichment rather than elected representatives of a diverse population. Big money is steadily disenfranchising the electorate, and the credibility trap chokes off meaningful reform.

Greece may in turn become more pivotal in this struggle between the West and Europe. The difference in treatment between the people of Greece and the government of the Ukraine should be more obvious to the Western observer. The lesson is certainly not lost on the rest of the world. The US-Europe may court you, but once they entwine their fingers through your hands, you are theirs to dispose of as they please.
That is a failing of the winner’s curse. They start overreaching in their belief that they will simply move from victory to victory, no matter how clumsy and brutal their tactics may become.