Tag: totalitarian

QUOTES OF THE DAY

“Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty. One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive [or process].”

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Don’t be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated; you can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.”

David Lloyd George

“Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.”

Henry Steele Commager

“Because federal hate-crime laws criminalize thoughts, they are incompatible with a free society.”

Ron Paul

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QUOTES OF THE DAY

“The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists. The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“The fact that these foolish people are often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that they are not independent. In conversation with them, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with them as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of them. They are under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in their very being.

Having thus become a mindless tool, the foolish person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy the human soul.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison

“Power will achieve its murderous potential. It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster, to justify the beginning of murder en masse.”

R. J. Rummel

FASCIST U.S. GOVERNMENT DOLES OUT RETRIBUTION TO ENEMIES OF THE STATE

Spying on every U.S. citizen. Conducting military exercises in major U.S. cities. Shutting down the 20th largest city in America and breaking into the homes of citizens. Arming local police forces with military level weapons. Using the IRS and other government agencies to dole out retribution to dissenters. Attempting to disarm the populace. And now carrying out vendettas against companies that tell the truth about the government financial disaster. We slowly but surely descend into a totalitarian surveillance state.

Geithner Warned S&P Chairman US Would Retaliate For Downgrade

Tyler Durden's picture

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/21/2014 07:39 -0500

Who can forget Tim Geithner’s historic interview from April 2011, in which he said:

Peter Barnes “Is there a risk that the United States could lose its AAA credit rating? Yes or no?”

 

Geithner’s response: “No risk of that.”

 

“No risk?” Barnes asked.

 

“No risk,” Geithner said.

Considering that the US was downgraded by S&P just 4 months later, one person who certainly will never forget his idiotic preannouncement, is the former Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner. And being the sore loser that everyone suspected he was (although one hopes his recent well-paid move to Warburg Pincus will help soothe his sensitivity) it will come as no surprise that Geithner told the Chairman of embattled rating agency Standard & Poor’s, that its downgrade of the US from AAA to AA+ “would be met by a response.”

From Bloomberg:

S&P filed a declaration of McGraw yesterday in federal court in Santa Ana, California, as part of a request to force the U.S. to hand over potential evidence the company says will support its claim that the government filed a fraud lawsuit against it last year in retaliation for its downgrade of the U.S. debt two years earlier.

 

In his court statement, McGraw said Geithner called him on Aug. 8, 2011, after S&P was the only credit ratings company to downgrade the U.S. debt. Geithner, McGraw said, told him that S&P would be held accountable for the downgrade. Government officials have said the downgrade was based on an error by S&P.

 

“S&P’s conduct would be looked at very carefully,” Geithner told McGraw according to the filing. “Such behavior would not occur, he said, without a response from the government.”

 

The Justice Department last year accused S&P of lying about its ratings being free of conflicts of interest and may seek as much as $5 billion in civil penalties. The government alleged in its Feb. 4, 2013, complaint that S&P knowingly downplayed the risk on securities before the credit crisis to win business from investment banks seeking the highest possible ratings to help sell the instruments.

None of this somces as a surprise, and it has been well-known for a long time that the only reason the US Department of Injustice targeted only S&P and not Moody’s or Fitch for their crisis era ratings of mortgages is precisely due to Geithner’s vendetta with S&P. Of course, this kind of selective punishment simply means that nobody else will dare to touch the US rating ever again, or speak badly against the sovereign in a public medium for fears of retaliation.

Naturally, while this means that the credibility of the rating agencies is now non-existent even among the head in the sand groupthink, what is worse is observing the US’ slide into the kind of totalitarian, 1st Amendment quashing tactics that worked out so well for all previous fascist regimes.