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Obama's Big Sellout
« on: 2009-12-21 00:45:52 » |
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Rollingstone.com
Obama's Big Sellout
The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway
MATT TAIBBI
Posted Dec 09, 2009 2:35 PM
Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans." Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.
Then he got elected.
What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.
How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we've been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is?
Whatever the president's real motives are, the extensive series of loophole-rich financial "reforms" that the Democrats are currently pushing may ultimately do more harm than good. In fact, some parts of the new reforms border on insanity, threatening to vastly amplify Wall Street's political power by institutionalizing the taxpayer's role as a welfare provider for the financial-services industry. At one point in the debate, Obama's top economic advisers demanded the power to award future bailouts without even going to Congress for approval — and without providing taxpayers a single dime in equity on the deals.
How did we get here? It started just moments after the election — and almost nobody noticed.
'Just look at the timeline of the Citigroup deal," says one leading Democratic consultant. "Just look at it. It's fucking amazing. Amazing! And nobody said a thing about it."
Barack Obama was still just the president-elect when it happened, but the revolting and inexcusable $306 billion bailout that Citigroup received was the first major act of his presidency. In order to grasp the full horror of what took place, however, one needs to go back a few weeks before the actual bailout — to November 5th, 2008, the day after Obama's election.
That was the day the jubilant Obama campaign announced its transition team. Though many of the names were familiar — former Bill Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, long-time Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett — the list was most notable for who was not on it, especially on the economic side. Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist who had served as one of Obama's chief advisers during the campaign, didn't make the cut. Neither did Karen Kornbluh, who had served as Obama's policy director and was instrumental in crafting the Democratic Party's platform. Both had emphasized populist themes during the campaign: Kornbluh was known for pushing Democrats to focus on the plight of the poor and middle class, while Goolsbee was an aggressive critic of Wall Street, declaring that AIG executives should receive "a Nobel Prize — for evil."
But come November 5th, both were banished from Obama's inner circle — and replaced with a group of Wall Street bankers. Leading the search for the president's new economic team was his close friend and Harvard Law classmate Michael Froman, a high-ranking executive at Citigroup. During the campaign, Froman had emerged as one of Obama's biggest fundraisers, bundling $200,000 in contributions and introducing the candidate to a host of heavy hitters — chief among them his mentor Bob Rubin, the former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs who served as Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton. Froman had served as chief of staff to Rubin at Treasury, and had followed his boss when Rubin left the Clinton administration to serve as a senior counselor to Citigroup (a massive new financial conglomerate created by deregulatory moves pushed through by Rubin himself).
Incredibly, Froman did not resign from the bank when he went to work for Obama: He remained in the employ of Citigroup for two more months, even as he helped appoint the very people who would shape the future of his own firm. And to help him pick Obama's economic team, Froman brought in none other than Jamie Rubin, who happens to be Bob Rubin's son. At the time, Jamie's dad was still earning roughly $15 million a year working for Citigroup, which was in the midst of a collapse brought on in part because Rubin had pushed the bank to invest heavily in mortgage-backed CDOs and other risky instruments.
Now here's where it gets really interesting. It's three weeks after the election. You have a lame-duck president in George W. Bush — still nominally in charge, but in reality already halfway to the golf-and-O'Doul's portion of his career and more than happy to vacate the scene. Left to deal with the still-reeling economy are lame-duck Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former head of Goldman Sachs, and New York Fed chief Timothy Geithner, who served under Bob Rubin in the Clinton White House. Running Obama's economic team are a still-employed Citigroup executive and the son of another Citigroup executive, who himself joined Obama's transition team that same month.
So on November 23rd, 2008, a deal is announced in which the government will bail out Rubin's messes at Citigroup with a massive buffet of taxpayer-funded cash and guarantees. It is a terrible deal for the government, almost universally panned by all serious economists, an outrage to anyone who pays taxes. Under the deal, the bank gets $20 billion in cash, on top of the $25 billion it had already received just weeks before as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. But that's just the appetizer. The government also agrees to charge taxpayers for up to $277 billion in losses on troubled Citi assets, many of them those toxic CDOs that Rubin had pushed Citi to invest in. No Citi executives are replaced, and few restrictions are placed on their compensation. It's the sweetheart deal of the century, putting generations of working-stiff taxpayers on the hook to pay off Bob Rubin's fuck-up-rich tenure at Citi. "If you had any doubts at all about the primacy of Wall Street over Main Street," former labor secretary Robert Reich declares when the bailout is announced, "your doubts should be laid to rest."
It is bad enough that one of Bob Rubin's former protégés from the Clinton years, the New York Fed chief Geithner, is intimately involved in the negotiations, which unsurprisingly leave the Federal Reserve massively exposed to future Citi losses. But the real stunner comes only hours after the bailout deal is struck, when the Obama transition team makes a cheerful announcement: Timothy Geithner is going to be Barack Obama's Treasury secretary!
Geithner, in other words, is hired to head the U.S. Treasury by an executive from Citigroup — Michael Froman — before the ink is even dry on a massive government giveaway to Citigroup that Geithner himself was instrumental in delivering. In the annals of brazen political swindles, this one has to go in the all-time Fuck-the-Optics Hall of Fame.
Wall Street loved the Citi bailout and the Geithner nomination so much that the Dow immediately posted its biggest two-day jump since 1987, rising 11.8 percent. Citi shares jumped 58 percent in a single day, and JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley soared more than 20 percent, as Wall Street embraced the news that the government's bailout generosity would not die with George W. Bush and Hank Paulson. "Geithner assures a smooth transition between the Bush administration and that of Obama, because he's already co-managing what's happening now," observed Stephen Leeb, president of Leeb Capital Management.
Left unnoticed, however, was the fact that Geithner had been hired by a sitting Citigroup executive who still had a big bonus coming despite his proximity to Obama. In January 2009, just over a month after the bailout, Citigroup paid Froman a year-end bonus of $2.25 million. But as outrageous as it was, that payoff would prove to be chump change for the banker crowd, who were about to get everything they wanted — and more — from the new president.
The irony of Bob Rubin: He's an unapologetic arch-capitalist demagogue whose very career is proof that a free-market meritocracy is a myth. Much like Alan Greenspan, a staggeringly incompetent economic forecaster who was worshipped by four decades of politicians because he once dated Barbara Walters, Rubin has been held in awe by the American political elite for nearly 20 years despite having fucked up virtually every project he ever got his hands on. He went from running Goldman Sachs (1990-1992) to the Clinton White House (1993-1999) to Citigroup (1999-2009), leaving behind a trail of historic gaffes that somehow boosted his stature every step of the way.
As Treasury secretary under Clinton, Rubin was the driving force behind two monstrous deregulatory actions that would be primary causes of last year's financial crisis: the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (passed specifically to legalize the Citigroup megamerger) and the deregulation of the derivatives market. Having set that time bomb, Rubin left government to join Citi, which promptly expressed its gratitude by giving him $126 million in compensation over the next eight years (they don't call it bribery in this country when they give you the money post factum). After urging management to amp up its risky investments in toxic vehicles, a strategy that very nearly destroyed the company, Rubin blamed Citi's board for his screw-ups and complained that he had been underpaid to boot. "I bet there's not a single year where I couldn't have gone somewhere else and made more," he said.
Despite being perhaps more responsible for last year's crash than any other single living person — his colossally stupid decisions at both the highest levels of government and the management of a private financial superpower make him unique — Rubin was the man Barack Obama chose to build his White House around.
There are four main ways to be connected to Bob Rubin: through Goldman Sachs, the Clinton administration, Citigroup and, finally, the Hamilton Project, a think tank Rubin spearheaded under the auspices of the Brookings Institute to promote his philosophy of balanced budgets, free trade and financial deregulation. The team Obama put in place to run his economic policy after his inauguration was dominated by people who boasted connections to at least one of these four institutions — so much so that the White House now looks like a backstage party for an episode of Bob Rubin, This Is Your Life!
At Treasury, there is Geithner, who worked under Rubin in the Clinton years. Serving as Geithner's "counselor" — a made-up post not subject to Senate confirmation — is Lewis Alexander, the former chief economist of Citigroup, who advised Citi back in 2007 that the upcoming housing crash was nothing to worry about. Two other top Geithner "counselors" — Gene Sperling and Lael Brainard — worked under Rubin at the National Economic Council, the key group that coordinates all economic policymaking for the White House.
As director of the NEC, meanwhile, Obama installed economic czar Larry Summers, who had served as Rubin's protégé at Treasury. Just below Summers is Jason Furman, who worked for Rubin in the Clinton White House and was one of the first directors of Rubin's Hamilton Project. The appointment of Furman — a persistent advocate of free-trade agreements like NAFTA and the author of droolingly pro-globalization reports with titles like "Walmart: A Progressive Success Story" — provided one of the first clues that Obama had only been posturing when he promised crowds of struggling Midwesterners during the campaign that he would renegotiate NAFTA, which facilitated the flight of blue-collar jobs to other countries. "NAFTA's shortcomings were evident when signed, and we must now amend the agreement to fix them," Obama declared. A few months after hiring Furman to help shape its economic policy, however, the White House quietly quashed any talk of renegotiating the trade deal. "The president has said we will look at all of our options, but I think they can be addressed without having to reopen the agreement," U.S. Trade Representative Ronald Kirk told reporters in a little-publicized conference call last April.
The announcement was not so surprising, given who Obama hired to serve alongside Furman at the NEC: management consultant Diana Farrell, who worked under Rubin at Goldman Sachs. In 2003, Farrell was the author of an infamous paper in which she argued that sending American jobs overseas might be "as beneficial to the U.S. as to the destination country, probably more so."
Joining Summers, Furman and Farrell at the NEC is Froman, who by then had been formally appointed to a unique position: He is not only Obama's international finance adviser at the National Economic Council, he simultaneously serves as deputy national security adviser at the National Security Council. The twin posts give Froman a direct line to the president, putting him in a position to coordinate Obama's international economic policy during a crisis. He'll have help from David Lipton, another joint appointee to the economics and security councils who worked with Rubin at Treasury and Citigroup, and from Jacob Lew, a former Citi colleague of Rubin's whom Obama named as deputy director at the State Department to focus on international finance.
Over at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is supposed to regulate derivatives trading, Obama appointed Gary Gensler, a former Goldman banker who worked under Rubin in the Clinton White House. Gensler had been instrumental in helping to pass the infamous Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which prevented regulation of derivative instruments like CDOs and credit-default swaps that played such a big role in cratering the economy last year. And as head of the powerful Office of Management and Budget, Obama named Peter Orszag, who served as the first director of Rubin's Hamilton Project. Orszag once succinctly summed up the project's ideology as a sort of liberal spin on trickle-down Reaganomics: "Market competition and globalization generate significant economic benefits."
Taken together, the rash of appointments with ties to Bob Rubin may well represent the most sweeping influence by a single Wall Street insider in the history of government. "Rather than having a team of rivals, they've got a team of Rubins," says Steven Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. "You see that in policy choices that have resuscitated — but not reformed — Wall Street."
While Rubin's allies and acolytes got all the important jobs in the Obama administration, the academics and progressives got banished to semi-meaningless, even comical roles. Kornbluh was rewarded for being the chief policy architect of Obama's meteoric rise by being outfitted with a pith helmet and booted across the ocean to Paris, where she now serves as America's never-again-to-be-seen-on-TV ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Goolsbee, meanwhile, was appointed as staff director of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, a kind of dumping ground for Wall Street critics who had assisted Obama during the campaign; one top Democrat calls the panel "Siberia."
Joining Goolsbee as chairman of the PERAB gulag is former Fed chief Paul Volcker, who back in March 2008 helped candidate Obama write a speech declaring that the deregulatory efforts of the Eighties and Nineties had "excused and even embraced an ethic of greed, corner-cutting, insider dealing, things that have always threatened the long-term stability of our economic system." That speech met with rapturous applause, but the commission Obama gave Volcker to manage is so toothless that it didn't even meet for the first time until last May. The lone progressive in the White House, economist Jared Bernstein, holds the impressive-sounding title of chief economist and national policy adviser — except that the man he is advising is Joe Biden, who seems more interested in foreign policy than financial reform.
The significance of all of these appointments isn't that the Wall Street types are now in a position to provide direct favors to their former employers. It's that, with one or two exceptions, they collectively offer a microcosm of what the Democratic Party has come to stand for in the 21st century. Virtually all of the Rubinites brought in to manage the economy under Obama share the same fundamental political philosophy carefully articulated for years by the Hamilton Project: Expand the safety net to protect the poor, but let Wall Street do whatever it wants. "Bob Rubin, these guys, they're classic limousine liberals," says David Sirota, a former Democratic strategist. "These are basically people who have made shitloads of money in the speculative economy, but they want to call themselves good Democrats because they're willing to give a little more to the poor. That's the model for this Democratic Party: Let the rich do their thing, but give a fraction more to everyone else."
Even the members of Obama's economic team who have spent most of their lives in public office have managed to make small fortunes on Wall Street. The president's economic czar, Larry Summers, was paid more than $5.2 million in 2008 alone as a managing director of the hedge fund D.E. Shaw, and pocketed an additional $2.7 million in speaking fees from a smorgasbord of future bailout recipients, including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. At Treasury, Geithner's aide Gene Sperling earned a staggering $887,727 from Goldman Sachs last year for performing the punch-line-worthy service of "advice on charitable giving." Sperling's fellow Treasury appointee, Mark Patterson, received $637,492 as a full-time lobbyist for Goldman Sachs, and another top Geithner aide, Lee Sachs, made more than $3 million working for a New York hedge fund called Mariner Investment Group. The list goes on and on. Even Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who has been out of government for only 30 months of his adult life, managed to collect $18 million during his private-sector stint with a Wall Street firm called Wasserstein-Perella.
The point is that an economic team made up exclusively of callous millionaire-assholes has absolutely zero interest in reforming the gamed system that made them rich in the first place. "You can't expect these people to do anything other than protect Wall Street," says Rep. Cliff Stearns, a Republican from Florida. That thinking was clear from Obama's first address to Congress, when he stressed the importance of getting Americans to borrow like crazy again. "Credit is the lifeblood of the economy," he declared, pledging "the full force of the federal government to ensure that the major banks that Americans depend on have enough confidence and enough money." A president elected on a platform of change was announcing, in so many words, that he planned to change nothing fundamental when it came to the economy. Rather than doing what FDR had done during the Great Depression and institute stringent new rules to curb financial abuses, Obama planned to institutionalize the policy, firmly established during the Bush years, of keeping a few megafirms rich at the expense of everyone else.
Obama hasn't always toed the Rubin line when it comes to economic policy. Despite being surrounded by a team that is powerfully opposed to deficit spending — balanced budgets and deficit reduction have always been central to the Rubin way of thinking — Obama came out of the gate with a huge stimulus plan designed to kick-start the economy and address the job losses brought on by the 2008 crisis. "You have to give him credit there," says Sen. Bernie Sanders, an advocate of using government resources to address unemployment. "It's a very significant piece of legislation, and $787 billion is a lot of money."
But whatever jobs the stimulus has created or preserved so far — 640,329, according to an absurdly precise and already debunked calculation by the White House — the aid that Obama has provided to real people has been dwarfed in size and scope by the taxpayer money that has been handed over to America's financial giants. "They spent $75 billion on mortgage relief, but come on — look at how much they gave Wall Street," says a leading Democratic strategist. Neil Barofsky, the inspector general charged with overseeing TARP, estimates that the total cost of the Wall Street bailouts could eventually reach $23.7 trillion. And while the government continues to dole out big money to big banks, Obama and his team of Rubinites have done almost nothing to reform the warped financial system responsible for imploding the global economy in the first place.
The push for reform seemed to get off to a promising start. In the House, the charge was led by Rep. Barney Frank, the outspoken chair of the House Financial Services Committee, who emerged during last year's Bush bailouts as a sharp-tongued critic of Wall Street. Back when Obama was still a senator, he and Frank even worked together to introduce a populist bill targeting executive compensation. Last spring, with the economy shattered, Frank began to hold hearings on a host of reforms, crafted with significant input from the White House, that initially contained some very good elements. There were measures to curb abusive credit-card lending, prevent banks from charging excessive fees, force publicly traded firms to conduct meaningful risk assessment and allow shareholders to vote on executive compensation. There were even measures to crack down on risky derivatives and to bar firms like AIG from picking their own regulators.
Then the committee went to work — and the loopholes started to appear.
The most notable of these came in the proposal to regulate derivatives like credit-default swaps. Even Gary Gensler, the former Goldmanite whom Obama put in charge of commodities regulation, was pushing to make these normally obscure investments more transparent, enabling regulators and investors to identify speculative bubbles sooner. But in August, a month after Gensler came out in favor of reform, Geithner slapped him down by issuing a 115-page paper called "Improvements to Regulation of Over-the-Counter Derivatives Markets" that called for a series of exemptions for "end users" — i.e., almost all of the clients who buy derivatives from banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Even more stunning, Frank's bill included a blanket exception to the rules for currency swaps traded on foreign exchanges — the very instruments that had triggered the Long-Term Capital Management meltdown in the late 1990s.
Given that derivatives were at the heart of the financial meltdown last year, the decision to gut derivatives reform sent some legislators howling with disgust. Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, who estimates that as much as 90 percent of all derivatives could remain unregulated under the new rules, went so far as to say the new laws would make things worse. "Current law with its loopholes might actually be better than these loopholes," she said.
An even bigger loophole could do far worse damage to the economy. Under the original bill, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission were granted the power to ban any credit swaps deemed to be "detrimental to the stability of a financial market or of participants in a financial market." By the time Frank's committee was done with the bill, however, the SEC and the CFTC were left with no authority to do anything about abusive derivatives other than to send a report to Congress. The move, in effect, would leave the kind of credit-default swaps that brought down AIG largely unregulated.
Why would leading congressional Democrats, working closely with the Obama administration, agree to leave one of the riskiest of all financial instruments unregulated, even before the issue could be debated by the House? "There was concern that a broad grant to ban abusive swaps would be unsettling," Frank explained.
Unsettling to whom? Certainly not to you and me — but then again, actual people are not really part of the calculus when it comes to finance reform. According to those close to the markup process, Frank's committee inserted loopholes under pressure from "constituents" — by which they mean anyone "who can afford a lobbyist," says Michael Greenberger, the former head of trading at the CFTC under Clinton.
This pattern would repeat itself over and over again throughout the fall. Take the centerpiece of Obama's reform proposal: the much-ballyhooed creation of a Consumer Finance Protection Agency to protect the little guy from abusive bank practices. Like the derivatives bill, the debate over the CFPA ended up being dominated by horse-trading for loopholes. In the end, Frank not only agreed to exempt some 8,000 of the nation's 8,200 banks from oversight by the castrated-in-advance agency, leaving most consumers unprotected, he allowed the committee to pass the exemption by voice vote, meaning that congressmen could side with the banks without actually attaching their name to their "Aye."
To win the support of conservative Democrats, Frank also backed down on another issue that seemed like a slam-dunk: a requirement that all banks offer so-called "plain vanilla" products, such as no-frills mortgages, to give consumers an alternative to deceptive, "fully loaded" deals like adjustable-rate loans. Frank's last-minute reversal — made in consultation with Geithner — was such a transparent giveaway to the banks that even an economics writer for Reuters, hardly a far-left source, called it "the beginning of the end of meaningful regulatory reform."
But the real kicker came when Frank's committee took up what is known as "resolution authority" — government-speak for "Who the hell is in charge the next time somebody at AIG or Lehman Brothers decides to vaporize the economy?" What the committee initially introduced bore a striking resemblance to a proposal written by Geithner earlier in the summer. A masterpiece of legislative chicanery, the measure would have given the White House permanent and unlimited authority to execute future bailouts of megaconglomerates like Citigroup and Bear Stearns.
Democrats pushed the move as politically uncontroversial, claiming that the bill will force Wall Street to pay for any future bailouts and "doesn't use taxpayer money." In reality, that was complete bullshit. The way the bill was written, the FDIC would basically borrow money from the Treasury — i.e., from ordinary taxpayers — to bail out any of the nation's two dozen or so largest financial companies that the president deems in need of government assistance. After the bailout is executed, the president would then levy a tax on financial firms with assets of more than $10 billion to repay the Treasury within 60 months — unless, that is, the president decides he doesn't want to! "They can wait indefinitely to repay," says Rep. Brad Sherman of California, who dubbed the early version of the bill "TARP on steroids."
The new bailout authority also mandated that future bailouts would not include an exchange of equity "in any form" — meaning that taxpayers would get nothing in return for underwriting Wall Street's mistakes. Even more outrageous, it specifically prohibited Congress from rejecting tax giveaways to Wall Street, as it did last year, by removing all congressional oversight of future bailouts. In fact, the resolution authority proposed by Frank was such a slurpingly obvious blow job of Wall Street that it provoked a revolt among his own committee members, with junior Democrats waging a spirited fight that restored congressional oversight to future bailouts, requires equity for taxpayer money and caps assistance to troubled firms at $150 billion. Another amendment to force companies with more than $50 billion in assets to pay into a rainy-day fund for bailouts passed by a resounding vote of 52 to 17 — with the "Nays" all coming from Frank and other senior Democrats loyal to the administration.
Even as amended, however, resolution authority still has the potential to be truly revolutionary legislation. The Senate version still grants the president unlimited power over equity-free bailouts, and the amended House bill still institutionalizes a system of taxpayer support for the 20 to 25 biggest banks in the country. It would essentially grant economic immortality to those top few megafirms, who will continually gobble up greater and greater slices of market share as money becomes cheaper and cheaper for them to borrow (after all, who wouldn't lend to a company permanently backstopped by the federal government?). It would also formalize the government's role in the global economy and turn the presidential-appointment process into an important part of every big firm's business strategy. "If this passes, the very first thing these companies are going to do in the future is ask themselves, 'How do we make sure that one of our executives becomes assistant Treasury secretary?'" says Sherman.
On the Senate side, finance reform has yet to make it through the markup process, but there's every reason to believe that its final bill will be as watered down as the House version by the time it comes to a vote. The original measure, drafted by chairman Christopher Dodd of the Senate Banking Committee, is surprisingly tough on Wall Street — a fact that almost everyone in town chalks up to Dodd's desperation to shake the bad publicity he incurred by accepting a sweetheart mortgage from the notorious lender Countrywide. "He's got to do the shake-his-fist-at-Wall Street thing because of his, you know, problems," says a Democratic Senate aide. "So that's why the bill is starting out kind of tough."
The aide pauses. "The question is, though, what will it end up looking like?"
He's right — that is the question. Because the way it works is that all of these great-sounding reforms get whittled down bit by bit as they move through the committee markup process, until finally there's nothing left but the exceptions. In one example, a measure that would have forced financial companies to be more accountable to shareholders by holding elections for their entire boards every year has already been watered down to preserve the current system of staggered votes. In other cases, this being the Senate, loopholes were inserted before the debate even began: The Dodd bill included the exemption for foreign-currency swaps — a gift to Wall Street that only appeared in the Frank bill during the course of hearings — from the very outset.
The White House's refusal to push for real reform stands in stark contrast to what it should be doing. It was left to Rep. Paul Kanjorski in the House and Bernie Sanders in the Senate to propose bills to break up the so-called "too big to fail" banks. Both measures would give Congress the power to dismantle those pseudomonopolies controlling almost the entire derivatives market (Goldman, Citi, Chase, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America control 95 percent of the $290 trillion over-the-counter market) and the consumer-lending market (Citi, Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo issue one of every two mortgages, and two of every three credit cards). On November 18th, in a move that demonstrates just how nervous Democrats are getting about the growing outrage over taxpayer giveaways, Barney Frank's committee actually passed Kanjorski's measure. "It's a beginning," Kanjorski says hopefully. "We're on our way." But even if the Senate follows suit, big banks could well survive — depending on whom the president appoints to sit on the new regulatory board mandated by the measure. An oversight body filled with executives of the type Obama has favored to date from Citi and Goldman Sachs hardly seems like a strong bet to start taking an ax to concentrated wealth. And given the new bailout provisions that provide these megafirms a market advantage over smaller banks (those Paul Volcker calls "too small to save"), the failure to break them up qualifies as a major policy decision with potentially disastrous consequences.
"They should be doing what Teddy Roosevelt did," says Sanders. "They should be busting the trusts."
That probably won't happen anytime soon. But at a minimum, Obama should start on the road back to sanity by making a long-overdue move: firing Geithner. Not only are the mop-headed weenie of a Treasury secretary's fingerprints on virtually all the gross giveaways in the new reform legislation, he's a living symbol of the Rubinite gangrene crawling up the leg of this administration. Putting Geithner against the wall and replacing him with an actual human being not recently employed by a Wall Street megabank would do a lot to prove that Obama was listening this past Election Day. And while there are some who think Geithner is about to go — "he almost has to," says one Democratic strategist — at the moment, the president is still letting Wall Street do his talking.
Morning, the National Mall, November 5th. A year to the day after Obama named Michael Froman to his transition team, his political "opposition" has descended upon the city. Republican teabaggers from all 50 states have showed up, a vast horde of frowning, pissed-off middle-aged white people with their idiot placards in hand, ready to do cultural battle. They are here to protest Obama's "socialist" health care bill — you know, the one that even a bloodsucking capitalist interest group like Big Pharma spent $150 million to get passed.
These teabaggers don't know that, however. All they know is that a big government program might end up using tax dollars to pay the medical bills of rapidly breeding Dominican immigrants. So they hate it. They're also in a groove, knowing that at the polls a few days earlier, people like themselves had a big hand in ousting several Obama-allied Democrats, including a governor of New Jersey who just happened to be the former CEO of Goldman Sachs. A sign held up by New Jersey protesters bears the warning, "If You Vote For Obamacare, We Will Corzine You."
I approach a woman named Pat Defillipis from Toms River, New Jersey, and ask her why she's here. "To protest health care," she answers. "And then amnesty. You know, immigration amnesty."
I ask her if she's aware that there's a big hearing going on in the House today, where Barney Frank's committee is marking up a bill to reform the financial regulatory system. She recognizes Frank's name, wincing, but the rest of my question leaves her staring at me like I'm an alien.
"Do you care at all about economic regulation?" I ask. "There was sort of a big economic collapse last year. Do you have any ideas about how that whole deal should be fixed?"
"We got to slow down on spending," she says. "We can't afford it."
"But what do we do about the rules governing Wall Street . . ."
She walks away. She doesn't give a fuck. People like Pat aren't aware of it, but they're the best friends Obama has. They hate him, sure, but they don't hate him for any reasons that make sense. When it comes down to it, most of them hate the president for all the usual reasons they hate "liberals" — because he uses big words, doesn't believe in hell and doesn't flip out at the sight of gay people holding hands. Additionally, of course, he's black, and wasn't born in America, and is married to a woman who secretly hates our country.
These are the kinds of voters whom Obama's gang of Wall Street advisers is counting on: idiots. People whose votes depend not on whether the party in power delivers them jobs or protects them from economic villains, but on what cultural markers the candidate flashes on TV. Finance reform has become to Obama what Iraq War coffins were to Bush: something to be tucked safely out of sight.
Around the same time that finance reform was being watered down in Congress at the behest of his Treasury secretary, Obama was making a pit stop to raise money from Wall Street. On October 20th, the president went to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York and addressed some 200 financiers and business moguls, each of whom paid the maximum allowable contribution of $30,400 to the Democratic Party. But an organizer of the event, Daniel Fass, announced in advance that support for the president might be lighter than expected — bailed-out firms like JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs were expected to contribute a meager $91,000 to the event — because bankers were tired of being lectured about their misdeeds.
"The investment community feels very put-upon," Fass explained. "They feel there is no reason why they shouldn't earn $1 million to $200 million a year, and they don't want to be held responsible for the global financial meltdown."
Which makes sense. Shit, who could blame the investment community for the meltdown? What kind of assholes are we to put any of this on them?
This is the kind of person who is working for the Obama administration, which makes it unsurprising that we're getting no real reform of the finance industry. There's no other way to say it: Barack Obama, a once-in-a-generation political talent whose graceful conquest of America's racial dragons en route to the White House inspired the entire world, has for some reason allowed his presidency to be hijacked by sniveling, low-rent shitheads. Instead of reining in Wall Street, Obama has allowed himself to be seduced by it, leaving even his erstwhile campaign adviser, ex-Fed chief Paul Volcker, concerned about a "moral hazard" creeping over his administration.
"The obvious danger is that with the passage of time, risk-taking will be encouraged and efforts at prudential restraint will be resisted," Volcker told Congress in September, expressing concerns about all the regulatory loopholes in Frank's bill. "Ultimately, the possibility of further crises — even greater crises — will increase."
What's most troubling is that we don't know if Obama has changed, or if the influence of Wall Street is simply a fundamental and ineradicable element of our electoral system. What we do know is that Barack Obama pulled a bait-and-switch on us. If it were any other politician, we wouldn't be surprised. Maybe it's our fault, for thinking he was different.
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Walter Watts
Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc.
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Obama's Big Sellout
« Reply #1 on: 2009-12-21 01:12:55 » |
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I was wondering if this didn't really belong in Hermit's obama-failing-dismally subject. I'm just saying . . . 
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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Hermit
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Re:Obama's Big Sellout
« Reply #2 on: 2009-12-21 02:20:50 » |
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[MoEnzyme] I was wondering if this didn't really belong in Hermit's obama-failing-dismally subject. I'm just saying . . .
[Hermit] And then we could add his explaining to the Nobel Peace Committee the inevitability, necessity and nobility of American wars; matched by the Democrats allocating 600 Billion of visible funding to wars in the certain knowledge that this will represent about one third of what will be spent on Obama's escalation of his dangerous games in Asia; in the same week as the Democrats gutted the health reform process and removed any meaningful public option; followed by the inglorious sight of the Copenhagen Conference becoming a game in blame shifting, one-upmanship and providing a beanfeast to the uberwealthy while penalizing the poor, with Obama delivering the most disappointing political speech of the 21st Century - and doing nothing meaningful for the planet at all.
[Hermit] But that would only matter if people were still counting on Obama personally or were stupid enough to expect something better from the cess pits of the American kleptocracy than a one term president doing his level best to ensure stability by delivering Bush's third term while defending meanness and greed as a way of life.
[Hermit] At this point I'm not convinced that documenting the ongoing disintegration of humanity and the path to the resource wars that will almost inevitably follow has any utility except for a masochist.
[Hermit] Right now, I'm not sure that I am enough of a masochist for that.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Obama's Big Sellout
« Reply #3 on: 2009-12-21 02:43:54 » |
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Quote from: Hermit on 2009-12-21 02:20:50
[MoEnzyme] I was wondering if this didn't really belong in Hermit's obama-failing-dismally subject. I'm just saying . . .
Mo: Hermit whines wonderfully for many paragraphs and wraps it up with;
[Hermit] Right now, I'm not sure that I am enough of a masochist for that.
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Mo: checks out Hermit's pulse/blood pressure readouts, makes sure his parachutes are functional, offers him a few fresh shots of sour mash whiskey and declares him fit for some certain amount of masochistic enhanced interrogation.
Just be sure to enjoy yourself, Sir! 
Love,
-Mo
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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Hermit
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Re:Obama's Big Sellout
« Reply #4 on: 2009-12-21 03:02:51 » |
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[MoEnzyme] Just be sure to enjoy yourself, Sir!
[Hermit] Thanks.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Re:Obama's Big Sellout
« Reply #5 on: 2009-12-22 15:04:20 » |
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Did I leave out the administrations passionate arguments that the President needed the ability to declare people non persons with no right of recourse and with torture the expected result of military detention? Coupled with the Supreme Court rolling over and playing dead to strip all US citizens of due process protection in place since at least the 1200s. Even the poster boy of the government people loved to hate, Nazi Germany, offered far greater protection to its citizens than this, yet the US media more or less failed to mention it.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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Re:Obama's Big Sellout
« Reply #6 on: 2009-12-22 18:41:47 » |
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[Blunderov] On the plus side of Obama's presidency; I don't believe he has ever mentioned Osama Bin Laden. That's about it really...
The Unmitigated Gall of O-Dacity
Source: dissidentvoice.org
Author: Jennifer Matsui
Dated: December 22nd, 2009
President Obama, as his now less-than-enthusiastic enablers would have you know, is a “pragmatist”, forced to govern from the “center” in deference to his more unstable, trigger happy Republican colleagues whose support he depends on to institute his compromised, watered down policy objectives from lobbyist-written bills for health care reform (sic) to his small ’s’ troop surge in Afghanistan. Escalating the conflict in Afghanistan, they will tell you, is a “necessary evil”, and a lesser one at that if you compare the president’s sleeker strategy of mass murder to the swifter methods of nuclear annhilation preferred by his Republican cronies. In the same breathe they will tell you that his long term strategy of securing the peace in Empire’s ‘Last-gasp-istan’ reflects his “bigger picture” objectives, overlooking the obvious and cynical politics-as-usual motives for committing more troops to his more “wisely’ chosen battlefield. Never mind that this ill-defined “big picture” is no more than a portrait of a fearful, ‘doomed to serve out one term’ president with his eyes narrowly focused on his chances for re-election in 2012 when he can cite a gradual withdrawal of forces to demonstrate his ability to end wars rather than escalate them — all the while puffing up his “bipartisan” leadership to appeal to the ’swingnuts’ among undecided voters. (Few of whom, it should be noted, will vote for the dithering Murderer-in-Chief since his appetite for dead Muslims will never match his Republican opponent’s promise to put the remains of Osama bin Laden in his Foreman grill and serve them at his next tailgate party/inauguration dinner).
So now American voters have the choice between a government that will destroy the nation quickly (”You Betcha”!) or one that will perform its controlled demolition of the economy and all its remaining institutions more gradually. For some, meaning those who have the luxury of being insulated from the scorched earth reality of American Empire, this toxic equation is perfectly acceptable. As long as it’s ‘their’ guy in the Oval Office, it speaks of loftier ideals like “compromise”, “bipartisanship” and cold hard number crunching (30,000 additional troops over a two year period … yada yada yada.) It avoids the embarrassing cowboy exuberance of Dr Strangelove and instead lays out a point by point plan to further destabilize and impoverish a traumatized region, spelling out its ultimately violent objectives with the overflown, platitudinous language of a precocious high school Valedictorian.
The standard by which Obama’s liberal supporters measure his “success” (It’s a dirty job but someone’s gotta do it) has been significantly lowered since the reign of little King George when his universally discredited world view outlined the necessity of killing millions in order to avoid a “bloodbath” later on. In a curious reversal of logic and principles, this crackpot notion is what the nation’s hope smokers are now stuffing into their pipes to neutralize the bitter, lingering aftertaste of disappointment and dashed hope. In a position that could be best summed up as “Bush foreign policy bad. Obama’s good”, these one time “anti-war” voters now embrace the same delusional, unprincipled logic that insists the carnage and bloodbaths of the present are somehow preferable to the ones that will ensue if US forces withdraw from the battlefield. It is enough for them that the president avoids the rhetorical gaffes of his neo-con predecessors, even if his actions mirror them precisely.
Bush gave away the Imperial game plan with his inept swagger, revealing the gulag casino state at the heart of his vision of ‘freedom’ both in the US and abroad, while Obama’s more prudent delivery of the same talking points provides a bloodless analysis of his government’s equally murderous objectives. Little King George had the disadvantage of a coronation ceremony that publicly dispensed with any illusion of democracy, and made no secret of his servitude to the crude ‘oiligarchs’ who greased his way to office. Likewise, Obama made his allegiances clear in his first month of office, transferring the entire contents of the treasury to his bosses at Goldman Sachs, while adopting Bush’s global strategy to keep Wall Street coffers stuffed with the spoils of war. Again, the policies of this president hardly differ from those of his predecessors over the last 60 years, most of whom were vetted and groomed for office by the lobbyists whose interests the puppet-in-chief ultimately serves.
Unlike the “despots” and “gangsters” we seek to uproot in ‘Bushbamastan’, our leadership’s more refined methods of impoverishing and terrorizing the populations overseas are preferable (honorable even) owing to our success in projecting our barbarism through an upgraded and more attractively packaged hologram. It’s enough, the Hologram’s supporters insist, that its empty, bellicose rhetoric simply mimics the cadences (rather than the content) of a beloved slain civil rights leader. Anyone who endured Obama’s insufferable Nobel acceptance speech (the one where Bush Jr’s crayon doodles, scribbles and Jell-O pudding stains were not too much in evidence) can recognize the familiar, chest pounding refrain of endless war, and the attendant infantile platitudes about the ‘justness’ of military aggression.
Awarding the current US Murderer-in-Chief the same prize that was bestowed upon Dr Martin Luther King Jr in 1964 is yet just another example of the Corporate State’s ability to subvert dissident thought and action into establishment enabling PR. The same institutions that rely on Bono to lend legitimacy and rock star “cred” to their violent neo-colonial agenda have now appointed a youthful former community organizer to head their global operations. In Bono’s case, the peace activism of John Lennon was successfully reconfigured to serve the interests of the ruling class as ‘New Labour’ rallied rock stars and other “anti-Establishment” figures to rise up and allow a new super elite to emerge. We can see the same brain trust at work as neo-cons embrace ‘feminism’ to justify their unending war on the Muslim world, invoking the dreaded veil to get western women on board with their military objectives.
“The Saviour of Hope” by virtue of being an African American man with much lauded oratory skills not so subtly evokes Dr Martin Luther King Jr in the same way a carbonated beverage laden with high fructose corn syrup can be associated with sex appeal. Image trumps substance in every political PR campaign and consumers can be relied upon to put wishful thinking ahead of common sense and reason. Where MLK’s Nobel acceptance speech was unequivocal in its denunciations of using violence to bring about peace and justice, Obama by contrast, used the Oslo stage to justify colonial aggression. The most cringe-inducing part of Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech was his perfunctory, condescending little nod to Martin Luther King Jr and Mahatma Ghandi — peacemakers infinitely more deserving of the honor than the preening prize winner on the Oslo stage in terms of character, courage and integrity. After giving them a verbal pat on the head, he went on to drone that unlike them, ‘He’ actually “governs” and therefore must deal with “the world as it is”. The implication here is the sacrifices of these great men in the name of peace and justice occurred in a less significant fantasy world that “legitimate” leaders like him don’t have the time to indulge. You could say that it was the first time the American president actually demonstrated any of his much vaunted and sorely lacking O-dacity. Sadly, this sudden outburst of “ballsiness” is the kind most often associated with “WTF?” (as in “Did he really just moon his audience and say ‘Kiss this’ to his peace advocating Nobel predecessor?)
In his pre-Oslo speech on the subject of escalating the violence against the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan by committing more troops to the already war-ravaged region, he erroneously cited Al-Qaeda as a threat to the region’s security, despite Al-Qaeda’s mostly chimerical presence in Afghanistan. It should be noted that the Taliban, contrary to the president’s knowingly false assertions, does not have a global agenda, but merely a domestic one. It seeks to remove US forces from within its borders, whereas Al Qaeda is a borderless, loose knit band of brothers atomized throughout the Muslim world, and whose threat to global security is largely dependent on our fluctuating quotas for turbaned scapegoats. For Obama to deliberately conflate these two entirely different entities, while insisting that US security hinges upon our ability to kill anyone who stands in opposition to our Imperial aims, is an unconscionable and egregious act of cowardice, right up there with Colin Powell knowingly making the case for the invasion of Iraq with false intelligence.
Any way you look at it, military occupations are doomed to fail by their very nature — a fact that our educated and well-read president is undoubtedly aware — making his case for escalating his war of choice all the more reprehensible. Just as there is no correct or proper way to administer slavery, or carry out acts of rape or torture, there is no “wise” or “judicious” way of using military force for non-defensive purposes. It’s convenient to label every individual who actively opposes the presence of these troops in their region ‘Taliban’ (”enemy combatants” we don’t have to add to any civilian casualty lists) when in fact, active and often violent opposition to the US led occupation is not limited to these bearded bogey-men, but carried out by ordinary people defending themselves against foreign occupation of their land. If anything, the Taliban are the tragically inevitable outcome of the political vacuum that emerged as a result of centuries of Imperial misadventures in that particular region and elsewhere in the Muslim world. They are not, as the president falsely implies, some virulent manifestation of mental illness brought about by “incorrectly” interpreting the Koran, but a desperate response to a complete breakdown of Afghanistan’s civil society, thanks to decades of colonial subjugation. The continuing presence of foreign troops only ensures more violent resistance to the values and institutions we seek to impose through military force, whether it is Taliban-led opposition to the occupation or some hastily formed militia without a globally recognized brand name. Against all reason, we believe that the defeat of the gangsters and warlords overseas is a necessary and just cause, while ignoring the threat posed by our own criminal class to the economic, political and social well-being of our plundered “Homeland” as rogue banking institutions (enabled by their political and military counterparts) use global financial markets as incendiary devices to destroy competition.
We look back in horror and astonishment at the brutal methods Latin America’s Generallissimos applied to terrorize their own citizenry, when thousands of innocent civilians were “disappeared”, yet we seem unable to summon similar outrage as thousands of our colonized subjects are mercilessly slaughtered, confident that our murderous rampages somehow fall into the “lesser evil” category. We are similarly reassured by Obama’s reliance on anonymous drones to kill villagers in remote mountainous areas as opposed to the cruder methods of mass murder as applied in Iraq, where the poor, dumb grunts on the ground have to brutalize the populace at gunpoint in order to “secure the peace”.
Meanwhile, closer to home, the American middle class is similarly ‘disappeared’. We applaud with one hand gripping the remote control and the other clutching a box of Krispy-Kremes as the Dow Jones responds positively to a “jobless recovery”. We further apply our intellectual laziness to the task of justifying yet more power-enabling double standards as our leaders institute socialist safety nets for Wall Street’s money hemorrhaging casinos under the banner of “Too Big to Fail”. Now that Goldman Sachs has appointed one of their own to the nation’s highest office, its well-heeled Ponzi schemers will never have to adhere to the rules of a so-called ‘free market’ economy, unlike the rest of us fattened, slaughter-ready serfs who have to bear the costs of rewarding corrupt financial institutions for their failures. Luckily for them, Wall Street’s top tier risk takers won’t have to face the consequences of their greed-motivated acts of terrorism, owing in large part to their success in having their own profiteers serve as government appointed ‘watchdogs’ and ‘regulators’ to facilitate the smooth and endless flow of public funds into corporate coffers. We have learned too late that the president’s much vaunted “O-dacity” is just another term for his jaw dropping displays of “unmitigated gall”, whether it’s accepting a peace prize while waging war, or overseeing the fraudulent bank bailout and comparing this act of government-led larceny to FDR’s New Deal.
We are a nation of hypocrites, cheering on acts of resistance and civil disobedience overseas in one of our branded color ‘revolutions’, while remaining fearful and compliant at home, unwilling to take on the the dirty work required to maintain a democracy. Our apathy only ensures that we are beholden to a system whereby consumers can ‘choose’ between a Mccandidate who drives a fuel inefficient clown car or one who is chauffeured in a hybrid limousine; where one party belligerently institutes corrupt, wasteful policies and the other one entrenches them further under a subverted slogan of “Change”. By justifying our knee-jerk support for the President and his misguided policies with the excuse that our dissent would only empower the clown car contingent, we have become the Kool-Aid drinking alternative to the Teabagger Party.
Jennifer Matsui is a freelance writer living in Tokyo. She can be reached at: jenmatsui@mac.com.
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Fritz
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Re:Obama's Big Sellout
« Reply #7 on: 2010-09-23 13:21:16 » |
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I was doing some homework on the Protocols of Sion and confirming in my own mind, what they represent; the inception of the 20th century conspiracy movement. I still prefer the "Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" story the best.
I came across this web site and thought if this idea is floating around out there, you got to wonder if folks just are unable to research and do fact finding anymore; but I had to post it as a documentation of what I just can't understand people nuzzling up to.
Cheers
Fritz
Source: Obama New World Order
http://www.antichristidentity.com/Obama-New-World-Order2.htm?gclid=COyQ_saCnqQCFcEz5wodxX3gFQ
Urgent: The Obama New World Order Threat?
"The Evidence Provided Below on Obama's Frightening Involvement with the New World Agenda is Under a threat of Being Taken Offline. You Must Act Now to Receive it...Fast"
Chaos In A Major Christian Denomination Regarding Obama!
My name is Mel Sanger, an international political researcher. In February 2009 I and my group of 5 political research analysts were asked by a Major American Christian Church (can't name it for obvious reasons) to investigate whether Barack Obama had any involvement with the freemason new world order.
The Christian organization had received numerous calls and emails from its congregational members during 2008 and early 2009 asking whether Barack Obama was the Biblical Antichrist. It would seem that there were a number of teachers in the organization who were teaching this view which was conflicting with the organizations overall general major public support for Obama.
The confusion was causing major issues inside the church and they wanted a political research team without any ties to the organization or political biases to address the matter and report back on the findings. So we gladly accepted the task of tackling this subject. <snip>
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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Fritz
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Re:Obama's Big Sellout
« Reply #8 on: 2011-05-27 16:36:57 » |
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I am disappointed; I really thought Twitter was the better solution. 
The first message :" Everyone look to the north east and witness the lovely mushroom cloud raise into the Heaven's; everyone can now kiss their collective asses good-bye" .... the Politics of fear keeps getting entrenched and accepted as the standard way government will deal with its citizens.... IMO.
Cheers
Fritz
Source: Freedom by, the Way
Author: Freedom, by the way
Date: 2011.05.10
Ah, the miracle of modern technology! It’s providing the answer to the most pressing question of one-world government seekers: How to Control the Populace?
Sorry, New York, you’re first. But beginning next year, all cell phones sold in the US will contain a special chip that allows the federal government to text or call you in the event of a national emergency or…whatever. Actually the government can use the chip for three types of communications:
* Messages from the President.
* National Emergency messages.
* Amber Alerts.
Cell phone owners will have the option of opting out of Amber Alerts and National Emergency Messages. But NOT messages from the President. Now, why would I want to hear from the President unless it WAS a national emergency?
Anybody for setting up a DO NOT CALL registry for the White House? Anybody want to hazard what other capabilities this magic chip may have? Record your conversations? Turn off your phone? Raid your Contacts list?
Before you accuse me of paranoia, let me remind you that the worst offenses of the government’s trashing of our freedoms have come under the guise of “safety and security.” (Just remember how “safe” those new TSA pat downs make us feel).
I don’t give my cell phone number out to just anyone. In order to protect our 4th ammendment right to privacy, shouldn’t this street run the other way? In other words, don’t call us, we’ll call you. Let ME speed dial a government # to receive an information IF I CHOOSE.
This raid on our cell phones is just one more government trampling of our personal liberties. It’s the ultimate tool in “Controlling the Conversation.”
Everyone sitting on the sidelines out there: CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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