Guest Post by Martin Armstrong
For those who just read the news and believe whatever they report, in the industry, everyone talks all the time. If Madoff was losing billions trading, everyone would have known. It is one thing to have a portfolio of assets that itself collapses in value which would NOT involve trading, then that presents a more private issue but everyone would suspect something for the news would be circulating around as to what he bought. There is just no way money vanishes. The likely prospect is that Bernie was aware of the dark side of Wall Street and perhaps facilitated that for a price.
Bernie’s case began on December 10th, 2008. Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns both collapsed and the Fed took over Fannie & Freddie. The collapse of Lehman shocked the world and that unleashed real panic. That above all took down Madoff, but then came the bailout of AIG which was really to save Goldman Sachs. No doubt, Bernie was hit with withdrawals and on whatever investment he did have in place, he would have lost a fortune without a Ponzi scheme. With the practice of laundering money going on in NYC, no doubt the counterparty risks collapsed. That most likely pushed Bernie over the edge.
Understand one thing. Madoff did not collapse in isolation. His losses were curiously suddenly attributed to a Ponzi scheme. That was very convenient. Calling something a Ponzi scheme as a matter of law meant that EVERY transaction was a fraud. Therefore, that cuts off all investigations to understand what really happened. It is no longer needed because everything and every transaction need not be investigated because it was all Bernie as a fraud.
As long as they called it a “Ponzi Scheme” there was no investigation into money laundering.
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i have been doing some deep research into the Madoff story the past couple of weeks since viewing the Netflix Documentary series. Too many red flags came up in the film for me to just casually accept the narrative they were trying to sell, too many of the same statements by different people using the same phrases- always a sign of coaching or a shared cover story, too many conicidences in regards to the cast of players, and running beneath it all, what appears to be a government guided oversight virtually from the beginning.
Using the term Ponzi scheme glosses over the complexity of the crime. It wasn’t simply a case of taking in money with the one hand and passing it back out to the early investors with the other. It allowed much bigger players than Madoff ever was to use his fund as a money laundering operation, far in excess of the 60 some billion they try to peg as the total at the time of his arrest. Sure there were plenty of tiny fish much further downstream from the big operation that did lose money, people all over the world that had invested in the feeder operations run by banks- not one of which was ever prosecuted for their complicity. But these “investors” were collateral damage, in fact their entire purpose was to muddy the waters, to make it much more difficult to see the far larger tranches of dirty money that flowed in and then out on a monthly basis, like the scene in Scarface where Tony Montana’s men walk into the banks with duffel bags filled with cash.
What stands out is not, as most people would have you believe, government incompetence in terms of regulating financial operations, but their direct involvement in keeping the story under wraps whenever some well meaning, honest person stumbled across this ridiculous charade. Harry Markopolous, the dour financial forensic accountant uncovered the story fairly early and was able to demonstrate clearly how obvious this fraud was. He was able to document an airtight case on his own time and then turn it over to the authorities who responded promptly by doing exactly nothing. Over and over, year after year. He was a dog with a bone and no matter how many times he went to the authorities, they’d shine him on and scoot him out the door with assurances that they would look into it which they not only failed to do, but instead went to Madoff to make a showing without actually doing anything at all. They provided cover, not oversight.
And the arrest and conviction of Madoff didn’t really alter the landscape in the financial industry at all, in fact the very premise was expanded to create the much larger Ponzi scheme called the TBTF Bank Bailout, which runs to this day.
What seems clear in the final analysis is that our entire government is run by criminals, using the financial system to corrupt or compromise anyone that gets too close, in order to steal whatever isn’t nailed down or in your pocket. They use their regulatory agencies to develop replacement soldiers in this clandestine economic war against the American people and to provide cover for thse tenacious enought to stand up for the truth and go nose to nose with the people who serve as the face of the Government. Once you understand fully what’s happening, you can’t unsee it. The thing we think of as the economy isn’t really one at all, it’s a piracy operation that drains the lifeblood from everything that actually generates products, services, or profits. Bonds, stocks, securities, none of them have any value at all because the money part has long ago been stripped off the top and nothing is left but boxes filled with worthless paper reflecting lies and theft.
The only thing that stopped Madoff was a Black Swan event. Had the 2008 crisis not occurred he would still be in business. Once the contagion started to spread he was nothing more than than the first clown in the opening scene of The Dark Knight, a scarifical pawn in a much larger game of chess.
It’s all fake and gay.
Another victim of September 11th.
+1000
The genius of the bankman is to live off people; not off land, nor off the production of commodities from raw material, but off people. Let other people till the soil; the bankman , if he can, will live off the tiller. Let other people toil at trades and manufacture; the bankman will exploit the fruits of their work. That is his peculiar genius. If this genius be described as parasitic, the term would seem to be justified by a certain fitness.
Henry Ford
(The International Bankman , November 13, 1920)
Kudos for that Henry Ford quote. Nobody said it better.
Jews need not apply for work at Ford; Arabs okay.
The Netflix version of Madoff events has been sitting in queue. Don’t know when or if it will get out of queue. Most of q stays q.
Right.
“The economy.”
Like “capitalism” is an unknown ideal (Rand).
So are markets (because the necessary prefix, “free,” isn’t there – & contra Archy, never has been). And the lubricating signals, real money & real interest rates, aren’t there either.
I have a spinning hard drive in this computer. Those are somewhat prone to mechanical failure, a sort of flying apart at the seams. But this one is 15 years old & still folding around spindle w/o mutilation. Overall performance is dog years dog eared, tho.
“Solid state” hard drives are the thing now, apparently. In those, kinetic mechanicals have been reduced all the way down to just electricity.
(Like chemical reactions in battery-juice are.
Cue the battery farm scene … but updated: batteries “driving” batteries … its batteries of battery-turtles, all the way down ….)
No kite, no key, no ben franklin*, & tesla, the Serbian savant, was taken out before he could do the various arch-dukes that really needed doing … & who, like all Ahabs, want to be done …
*& that slithery sumbitch was/held a key to the solid state check-kiter … fox in the henhouse … or better, since lived, by me, yellow rat snake in the quail coop… the quavering social quail cooperative ….
No give & take. No competition. No progress. No improvement.
No need for all the moving parts from which the good emerges.
(Passports, Toiletries.Socks.Asspats., no-fly lists, short range electric golfcart cars, 15-minute cities for the citizens …. Best most cult of efficiency way to tap all those saps is to turn ‘em into trees … then life’ll be maple-sweet … “poems are made by fools like me, but only god can make a tree” – “not true,” Klaus Schwab disagrees … about who is god & what is trees ….)
The state is solid. Long “live” the state.
The “economy” is a hive-cube of economic rentiers. Mulcting via fraud & force isn’t economic activity. It is criminality.
And the solidifying of states is, & has always been, purely about organizing for-max-efficiency criminality.
Cue the scene in The Godfather where Michael points out Kay’s “naiveté.” He’s a criminal (solid state) & she’s an idiot (solid citizen) – the match made in ‘heaven.”
Anybody who doesn’t know this doesn’t know anything worth knowing. Cuz no context. Cuz merely conned by texts.
(And those always need to rabbi it on.
Run, rabbit, run.
Those ain’t the feed your head white ones Grace sang about.)
The arch-villain-dukes are comin’ for all those merely moving parts. And they ain’t like the ones that came for the Dukes of Hazard.
Or are they?
Early Spring, Savannah GA, early seventies, semester of the serpent … sexy sssss-sibilance all over the place.
On the opposite bank of the canal I spied a medusa-head clump of red-bellied water snakes, just out of the den & waiting on the sun-bask to jumpstart their metabolisms.
I circled round to jumpstart a mess of them into my catchbag. It was gonna be so easy. Buncha half asleep snakes snarled up in pile versus wide awake confidence-of-youth me? No contest – bet all ya got on the kid.
I sprang. I pounced. I stabbed my forked stick over & over into the instantaneously boiling serpentine terrine that was heaving all around my feet.
I didn’t catch one.
The pitched slope of the bank, & gravity, & all my inadequate attention on etch-a-sketch snakes gone wild almost landed me in the canal.
Slow is fast sometimes.
Aim small miss small.
Spray & pray ain’t the way.
And pray is placebo spray air freshener, or maybe something that hangs from rearview mirrors & fogs up the reflection … to make sure the next time you jump in a nest of serpents its goes the same way as the last time you jumped in a nest of serpents.
The learn-to is the lean into like the big wave surfers do. Because that’s what it is. An enormous wave. Either you surf, or you are Charlie flotsam & jetsam.
When the day comes and you’re down
In a river of trouble, about to drown
I always liked this one from flotSam & jetDave:
Populism (Mencken was correct) is the stuff that floats up the stuff Barnes describes, & that is also the same stuff that is floated, kited, & unrequited by the ones Barnes describes. But caste-credential-criminal cartels, & those that love ‘em &/or cash checks cut by ‘em is the pie Don Mclean thought he knew to sing about gone bye-bye.
“Charles Murray Coming Apart was like a sequel to the brilliant book The Big Sort. Lived experience now varies as widely and wildly as ever: working class Americans see, feel, and remember a very different narrative of life than the professional-managerial upper middle class who govern us. Who is this class? Those with certifications or licensures, college or more degrees, in a job that manages others. They dominate those with a post-college degree especially. They claim the right to govern others due to those degrees and certifications and licenses, as the credentialed class claims credibility from those credentials.
Consider what is typical or atypical of this professional managerial class. Most spent their lives amongst other upper middle-class professionals. Quite literally. Their neighborhoods were professional class dominated neighborhoods. No risk of a Mr. Rogers’ or Mr. Robinson’s neighbor. Their schools were professional class dominated institutions. Their churches or organizations are professional class dominated. Their cultural outings are usually professional class dominated. Their parents and siblings and cousins were professional class dominant. They often never lived in a small town. They often never employed in a working-class occupation involving physical labor. They often never served in the grunt units of the military. They know few firemen, cops, or frontline workers. They never experienced poverty or dramatic loss of status. They don’t own guns, smoke or dip tobacco, or even ever walked on a factory floor or construction site. Evangelicals are freaks to them. Swamp people means neither DC nor the excellent reality series; it’s those folks who live in the scary backwoods.
They see their status as deserved, as they define deserts by professional class standards: approval from teachers in school, and approval from authority figures in life, measured by grades, degrees, credentials, licenses, and public acclaim from approved authority figures. Their over-achieving, teacher-pet mindset surrounded themselves often with like-minded individuals, often not even knowing the kids for whom school was not a match.
Now, add to that surrounding themselves with other professional class sources of information: medical “experts” approved by the state, judges in courts of law, professional politicians in representative government, professionalized credentialed journalists in big institutional media, and teachers of themselves and their children. Of the professional class, by the professional class, for the professional class. Then add to that censorship of dissident opinions, deplatforming dissidents, taking away their licenses, removing their credentials, defaming their reputation, and picking friends by political alliance and allegiance.
Middle America ain’t like these folks. For many in the professional class, all of the following is absent: Pickup trucks, cheap beer, old school action films, proud patriotism, all kinds of fishing and hunting, chain restaurants, the local Kiwanis or Awanas more than art galleries and lefty parades, riding the dog, dream vacations to Dollyworld or Branson still await, folks smoke (and not just weed), work that might require a uniform, friends and family in protective services at the grunt level of police, fire, medical, or military.
In other words, we are governed by an insular elite acculturated and educated to intellectually incestuous intersectionalism at the moral and practical effect of disastrous public policy. Any platform of change must do all it can to reallocate political capital from the professional managerial class to the people as broadly as achievable. Populism provides part of that answer to any problem: reallocate power to the people whenever and wherever you can.”
Licenses … to steal.
If one wants to see how a Ponzi scheme really works, look no further than the US government and the Social Security system. It was so successful in its early years, that a huge surplus of taxes were collected than were paid out. There was a group of 535 thieves who saw this massive stash of cash and decided to use it for nefarious purposes such as funding wars in SE Asia and buying votes of poor people.
The surplus of taxes paid in and payments going out is no longer there and the day of reckoning is drawing near. CONgress will soon have to come up with large amounts of cash to redeem the Special Treasury Bills that SS surplus was “invested” in.
Just this morning I overheard a talking head saying if the debt limit is not raised that SS payments & military pay would be in jeopardy. No mention of EBT cards not getting filled or welfare checks not going out, though; I wonder why?
Blah …blah …blah.. Social Security is a drop in the bucket compared to what these Deep Shekel pwnd vermin steal every day. It’s a fucking non-issue. They’re a much bigger fish to fry than a social safety net, that’s entirely affordable, if not for the massive amount of theft committed daily by the various NGOs and US bureaucrat crime cartels.
“A Michigan State University economics professor discovered $21 trillion unaccounted for in the federal budget starting in 1998 until the end of fiscal year 2015. Professor Mark Skidmore enlisted the help of his graduate students to examine government documents from the Department of Defense and Housing and Urban Development to uncover an unfathomable amount of unauthorized spending.
According to the Constitution, all federal spending must be voted on and authorized by Congress each fiscal year. Any discrepancies found in the way of unauthorized spending would normally elicit a congressional hearing and investigation.
Skidmore and his students’ analysis used publicly available government documents from the two agencies’ websites to expose this inconsistency. Shortly after Skidmore published his findings, both agencies removed those documents from public access.”
https://www.gaia.com/article/21-trillion-missing-us-budget
What could ever go wrong with massive off-budget financing of the US government?
A dog is smarter than a Republican.
How much time have Americans wasted waiting for back-stabbing faggot Republicans to do something that actually conserves one damn AmericanFirst-centric thing?
Same as it ever was, worse than the shell game.
Pied Pipers, and the idiots are still following.
(Pied : of two or more colors in blotches
also : wearing or having a parti-colored coat).
viz. wolf in sheep’s skin.
Having Wwatched the NetFlix series on Bernie, and taking special notice of the congressional hearings, it appears the committee was probing for collusion between Bernie and the SEC. The delay action on the SEC’s part is damnable, leading one to speculate the possibility that Bernie was paying off the SEC to keep its distance. While that thread was sought out, no one has really pushed for the possibility that the SEC was complicit. By now, the trail has been paved over and those, if any, who benefited are well into their retirement. How many congressmen/women and senators were invested with Bernie is not revealed, there had to be at least two, likely more than that. Now is also a good time to go over the Enron documentaries.
Bernie’s unforgivable sin, the one which resulted in incarceration, was to have parasitized fellow talmudics. Cheating goyim is one thing, and allowed, even encouraged, but doing the same thing to other tribalists is not to be done.