(c)2008 James Bauhaus

BAIL THE RICH: SCREW THE POOR

The longer they stay elected, the longer the

line of lobbyists stuffing cash in their pants

for favors.

James Bauhaus

There is not much that is more mentally nauseating than watching poli-

ticians and their business-lobbiest cronies scheme on raping American tax-

payers while their lapdog, commercial media assist by spreading their lies,

half-truths, balderdash and pettifoggery. The simple, easy-to-see cycle

that repeats every few years is this: mega-theft; financial crash; gov't

bailout of the rich by the poor; legislation of regulations designed to

slow or stop corporate megathefts; sleepy citizens thinking that this is

a problem that is fixed forever; gradual, stealthy corporate purchase of

de-regulative laws from obliging politicians; megatheft again. The gov/

business alliance has been pulling this on consumers throughout history.

Modern economic texts excuse this by mis-naming it the "business cycle".

The convergence is easy to see: merchants continually come up with all

kinds of great ideas on how they can get faster, fatter profits, such as

we see occurring in China, where one enterprising merchant was found sell-

ing cooking oil that he had boiled out of human feces. Also, they harmed

people, children and pets with lead paint and by adulterating food with

melamine to raise profits. American merchants are no different, except that

that they do so on a vastly larger, more complex scale. Next, they sell

these great ideas to the politicians. The politicians sell these merchants

the laws that are required to make these ideas work. The merchants and

politicians get richer as people, babies and pets die of disease and food

poisoning, as banks, pension funds and credit unions get looted, as homes

are foreclosed, prices raised and wages plummet, etc.

Right now, (9-23-08), CNN is broadcasting the politicians' "hearings"

on their proposed $700 billion Wall street bail out. They worked all week-

end and Monday on the pleasing verbiage they would use to sell this mas-

sive fraud past the sensibilities of gullible voters. They used words

and phrases such as "clean slate:", "troubled" or "toxic" assets, "melt-

down", "economic tsunami" and the absurdly ridiculous "We are ALL to blame".

(Lindsey Graham had the gall to say this several times.) Taxpayers were

never invited into the secret meetings where these laws were bought and

sold and are thus not sharing in any of the blame with the perpetrators.

The govt bureaucrats have been for months expanding the money supply.

They are printing much extra money and are selling the treasury bonds that

are used to replace the money stolen out of Indymac, Freddie Mac, Fannie

Mae, Sally Mae, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG and others. The looting

of these companies has already cost about $400 billion that we know of and

could yet cost a trillion dollars or more when all the smoke and mirrors

clear. The $700 billion in EXTRA cash that these millionaires want is for

buying what was looted from Wachovia, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Mer-

ril Lynch and the 90 other banks on their secret list. (This is their list

of "troubled" banks that may suddenly flip over and die if their customers

find out that their vaults are empty except for mounds of IOU's.)

These millionaires in congress and in corporate boardrooms easily stam-

pede the public toward their plans to bail out the rich by using their

eager media tools to spread financial terror speculations. Like mafioso

selling protection, they demand, "Quickly: Give us all your money: Else

you all will lose: (your investments, homes, pensions and jobs, same as did

those poor people eight years ago at Enron, Worldcom, Tycho, Global Crossing,

Enclone and qwest, etc:)" The most terrifying aspect of this is how much

faster the regulate/de-regulate/megatheft cycle operated this time. Never

before in U.S. history has one president enjoyed a double megatheft during

his time in office:

A specific, common, outrageous crime that they perpetrate that allows

much of the megalooting is short-selling. This is where stock brokers sell

stocks that they do not own to gullible investors and managers of other

peoples' money for future delivery. (This is now called "naked" short-

selling, to distinguish it from fake short-selling allowed by brokers to

ordinary investors. They buy it from brokers and get a partial refund if

the stock does indeed diminish in value below the cost of the original pur-

chase and the service fee.) Brokers get paid high fees for providing this

"service", then they can manipulate a price fall in these stocks, buy them

at low prices, and deliver them to the "investors". The hedge-, mutual-

or pension-fund managers can get large kickbacks, the "investment" banks

take a cut, the brokers take commissions and fees. The investors get raped,

usually without ever realizing it. Short-selling is a scam created by

crooks for use by crooks. Short-selling serves no honest purpose despite

the standard mumbling by economists that it "smooths out fluctuations in

the markets". Obviously it was conceived to cause gyrations in the market

that can be exploited by profit-squeezing brokers and financial institutions.

It is nothing but a method of stealthily stealing from the gullible or un-

wary and excusing the thieves from culpability. E.g, colluding financial

criminals recently lifted an old newspaper story titled "American Airlines

Files for Bankruptcy:" They subtly altered it to fit their purpose and e-

mailed it to thousands of stockholders and colluding managers of other

peoples' money to effect plausible deniability for them. The desired stock

crash ensued, the short-sellers bought it to pay their obligations of future

delivery at pre-crash costs. THIS time the S.E.C. cops were told of the

plot and are investigating. The commercial media briefly exposed it to the

largely comatose public. Million$ were siphoned off by organized financial

crooks. No one got punished except the sleepy, gullible or incompetent in-

vestors who provided the free million$. They usually do not bother to sue,

because the cost of merely trying to obtain justice is often far more

than each individual's personal loss, and so-called "punitive" damages are

kept deliberately low or non-existent in order to discourage the seeking of

justice. When the flagrant rip-offs become so common that they discourage

investors from investing, and the victim-pool becomes so large and vocal

that they can not be silenced through ignoring the problem or through pre-

tense at solving it, lawyers are sent to organize the victims into "class-

action" lawsuits that serve to quickly remove the disincentive to invest

by providing settlements that are acceptable, yet rarely just. Generally

law is far too biased, inefficient and glacially slow for any real justice

or even simple payback or punishment to be effected. Citizens are deliber-

ately delayed and thwarted by the lawyers' system until they realize that

there is no good reason for them to wait forever for a small chance at a

settlement of pennies on the dollar. This is how all law operates, and it

is especially true of financial megathefts, because no one dies of invest-

ment thefts. Instead, financial lawsuits degenerate into opposing groups

of lawyers endlessly debating each other. Token repayment may be eventually

made, but the primary result is a lawyer payday bonanza on top of the fi-

nancial crooks' clever looting. This is why the financial crooks are al-

ways operating and why financial crimes are always expanding. The brokerage

houses all have pockets full of powerful politicians to protect them from

the law and to aid their schemes, and their thousands or millions of small,

individual, simultaneous thefts are too costly for their victims to try to

recoup. The victims can not afford to purchase political protection or laws

that counteract the laws that favor financial crooks. The govt refuses to

police financial corporations effectively. In the rare instances where govt

does prosecute financial criminals, they usually are simply told to pay a

relatively small fine to a govt bureaucracy, NOT their victims. The fine

is small compared to their thefts, thus financial crime pays huge profits.

Financial crime is a high-growth industry for these reasons and because there

is no upper limit on how much money can be printed. When there is no one-

to-one correspondence between the Value of money and the value of the good

or service that money pays for, excess money will always exist. It is al-

ways easier for govt to create money than to create goods or obtain services,

thus the value of money always decreases in relation to goods and services.

This situation is the basis of inflation and the reason why there is always

a flood of money at the top seeking ways to make money work to make more

money. This excess of money will ever increase, and thus there will never

be a shortage of persons willing to rent their money out to good risks for .

interest-and-fee profits. Politicians and merchants simply lie to us when

they try to make us believe that there is a "credit crunch". Or they know

no better themselves. Or they are simply serving their super-rich cronies.

They are merely disagreeing on the cost of lending/borrowing money. Lenders

prefer that the cost of money be relatively high, while borrowers seek low-

cost money. Much of what these gov/biz/media alliance doom-shriekers are

selling as a "credit crunch" is nothing more than the delay between a mis-

or mal-managed, bankrupted institution falling and a new, healthier institu-

tion seeing this opportunity and taking advantage of it. The free enter-

prize system should be given time to operate. What makes this current situ-

ation appear as if it may become serious enough to create real consequen-

ces to ordinary persons who perform real work for a living is the large num-

ber of crooked or failed corporations wrongly propped up by crooked or mis-

guided politicians. (See the Keating-five debacle that senator McCain prof-

ited from protecting.)

Financial health can not occur until after these mis- or mal-managed,

bankrupted financial corporations are allowed to fall. When they do, a road-

block to competition is lifted, some of the many super-rich such as George

Soros, Bill Gates, the Waltons, Rochefellers, etc see the opportunity and

take advantage of it to provide the same services at lower prices. The

tendency of business is to price itself out of the market. Competition is

killed off, monopoly is had, or price collusion. Prices rise until the mar-

ket can not bear it. Others notice that prices are too high and can be

profitably undercut. The new corporation takes the older corporation's

customers and profits while the first one dies. Disaster occurs when govt

rewards incompetence and criminality simply because monopolies can afford

to buy from politicians protection from competition.

The height of incompetence and criminality is our politicians trying to

write themselves a brobdingnagian check on taxpayers' backs that they admit

will never be repaid or their antics with it supervised or prosecuted.

Merely proposing such a thing is an unforgivable insult to the intelligence

of voters and the public. The only thing that can be more incompetent than

this is the taxpayers and voters letting them get away with it. Sixty-five

percent of the public sees this as the gigantic ripoff attempt that it is.

The gov/biz/media alliance is determined to conclude their criminal action

before citizens can mount effective opposition.

The Reagan regime mega-lootings of the savings and loans, banks, Hous-

ing and Urban Development Administration, etc, was very similar to this one

in number of institutions failing and the volume of inflation-adjusted dol

lars stolen, wasted and lost. Reagan's cabal kept most of it concealed in-

house, and handled it properly on a one-to-one basis- The crooks were

"punished" by being thrown out of their jobs. Bankrupted corporations were

absorbed by healthier institutions. Only a short, mild economic recession

occurred that few lower- or middle-class persons even noticed. No one pani-

ked.

This time panic is being feigned in order to sell this second round of

megalooting as a "fix" to the workers and voters. Or, real panic is occur-

ring among those who think that this potential economic disaster will pre

vent their installation of John McCain into the presidency, same as a mild

economic downturn prevented re-election of daddy-Bush. This sonny-Bush

cabal megalooting is different from the Reagan-era megalooting in one major

way: this time the megalooting was permitted to proceed for such a long time

that it reached the very last institution in line, leaving no one behind it

to absorb the losses.

The standard financial scenario works like this: instead of saving up

for a large purchase and paying for it in total with cash,

persons prefer to enlist the help of financial corporations who profit by

loaning money at high interest. They purchase the asset in full and allow

you to use it as you repay the loan and service fees over time with small,

periodic payments. The contract is written in terms so onerous that the

corporation can not loose money. (E-g, is even the last payment after 30

years is delayed too long, the corporation can take both the asset and all

that was paid on it.) High interest, large down payments, surprise fees,

small print tricks, hidden penalties and confusing conditions make the rent

of money such an extremely lucrative enterprise that it employs thousands

and thousands of persons to perform this niggling type of "work". Because

the terms are so lucrative, and because few want to wait years for repay-

ment, loans tend to be discounted, bundled together with others and sold

"downstream" for cash to others with Big Money. The cash is used to make

new loans. The cycle repeats. It is called "liquidity". The faster the

cycle can be made to repeat, the more money that this money makes. This

selling of loans farther and farther upstream upon smaller and smaller --°

profit margins increases the cost of loans because each set of hands squeeze

out a separate profit for each middleman. As more and more parasites

squeeze out more profit, a point is swiftly reached where someone miscalcu-

lates expenses and further profit can not be had; someone is finally stuck

with an unsalable financial instrument that takes 30 years to slowly bleed

its payment. People can not wait this long to be paid. This is a standard

occurrence where honest work and production of actual, tangible value is

shunned and replaced by cheap chiseling and penny-shaving- One result is a

backup of losers who are last in line holding "worthless" (more properly,

"profitless"), mortgages or other contracts- They are vocal as they are

numerous. The politicians invented new institutions to save these lazy,

greedy, miscalculating corporate losers. These "victims" were permitted to

sell their financial garbage to a new last-in-line loser: the federal govt;

i.e. taxpayers, called "freddie mat.." and Fannie mae". These two real estate

toilets lead to cesspits that conceal over five trillion dollars worth of

slowly oozing debt from which all possible profit has been previously sucked

by others. (This current so-called "housing meltdown" began with, or is

blamed on, banks' agents who somehow sold homes to persons who could not

afford them. Appraisal companies and credit-rating entities worked together

to convince people to sign. They enticed suckers with terms that were too

good to be true, such as "no money down", apparently merely to reap commis-

sions and upfront fees along with any payments collected before selling

them to suckers upstream. To help point out the absurdity of blaming the

problem on the "housing bubble" alone, one need only realize that $700 bil-

lion will provide $2300 for every man, woman and child in America. Obviously

the problem that the politicians wish to address with the $700 billion is

far larger than just a few housing defaults.) Where banks, credit unions

brokerage housings, savings and loans, etc- are allowed to sell 30 year

notes that they have no intention of servicing for 30 years, the taxpayer is

forced to do so, yet is denied the profit. These various politician-created

bad-debt sinkholes exist solely for exploitation by financial profiteers.

This same type of shell game was spectacularly copied by business executives

eight years ago to hide masses of bad debt for Enron. Since bad debt and

financial thievery tends to be sold downstream to bigger and bigger suckers

and clog up markets long before the 30 year time limit expires, it should

become the task of govt to solve this problem- Govt is going to still exist

in 30 years, where financial corporations often go away in that length of

time. Govt thus has the obligation to solve the problem of loan-chiseling

by either policing the corporations or by cutting out all the middlemen and

taking over the entire long-term loan industry itself. Mere policing has

failed miserably time and again, primarily because of such extreme coziness

that exists between corporations, their money and greedy politicians. Poli-

ticians enact anti-financial-thievery laws only after too many citizens

are victimized and their cries of "foul!" force politicians to enact such

legislation under threat of voting different politicians into power- Citi-

zens think the problem is solved forever and go back to sleep. While citi-

zens sleep, the corporations buy politicians to s screw-off the anti-theft

laws that they just enacted. The gov/biz alliance steals with renewed

ferocity until citizens wake up cold, naked and hungry, and homeless. Only

constant vigilance by citizens will force govt to both KEEP effective anti-

theft laws in place and KEEP govt cops policing corporations. The never-

ending cycle of megatheft, regulation, stealty de-regulation, megatheft,

crash, re-regulation proves that citizen vigilance is sporadic at best.

Thus several methods should be employed to keep financial theft at a mini-

mum, such as citizen vigilance, middleman shutout, govt monopoly with

heavy oversight from disinterested parties who are not millionaires.

It has long been known that oversight boards tend to be taken over by

the agencies that they regulate. One solution is to draw such boards from

groups of persons who have an interest in fairness, and rotate them out

before they can be corrupted or bought by the moneyed, special-interests

wishing to capture the regulatory agency. Also very helpful would be laws

that punish both the agent of corruption AND the corporation he works for.

We can see an example of powerful, moneyed interests taking over regu-

latory agencies today, in the relationship between run-amok govt officials

and the corporate media, (9-29-08). CNN says that a mere 658 of ordinary

citizens troubled themselves to e-vote to them an opposition to US politi-

cians cutting themselves a $700 billion paycheck out of taxpayer pockets so

that no bankers or brokers lose their lucrative jobs. The actual number of

angry replies is so great that some of the net servers have crashed in wash-

ington and various state capitols- The media minimizes reporting of this

and the street protests- Instead, these corporate media giants automatical-

ly presume that these criers of "WOLF!" and "FIRE!" are both right in their

assessment of the situation and competent to demand a fast, $700 billion no-

strings/no-review/no-prosecute check to fix this non-specific, loosely-

defined problem. The corporate media talking heads then gradually shift

from calling it a "wall street bailout" to selling it as a "wall street to

main street rescue"- Alert viewers can almost see the money change hands as

reporters and news-sellers rachet down their barely discernible skepticism

and begin to become full-blown converts and eager-believers in the false

notion that the "credit crunch" can only be solved with a fast, bloated pay-

check quickly approved and applied in the dark. Some editors permit a rare

interview with a university professor, but mostly we get only cheerleading,

same as what stampeded the overly-emotional into permitting a vicious,

costly, unwarranted attack on Iraq that is STILL bleeding us dry! Unbiased

intelligent, educated persons are kept away while they feed us a steady

stream of fast-talking media personalities interviewing each other, bureau-

crats, ex-bureaucrats and some brave politicians with lots of plausible

deniability- A few token seconds of the multi-city taxpayer protests are

shown as theybreak for another commercial- When they come back, it is more

pro-rescue cheerleading and supposed respected, learned biz- or gov-crats

spewing more doom and brimstone. Everyone wants the free billion$, even -

the foreigners, except not the people from whom it will be extracted.

There is good news amid the bad: politicians have noticed, though they

ignore it, the overwhelming citizen fury against their plan and decided that

the unneeded billion$ will not simply be yanked unlawfully from public

pockets as was first envisioned. Instead, mild citizen protest and poli-

ticians fearing de-election for this crime has forced politicians to con-

sider some rights of taxpayers, such as the fact that this country is sup-

posed to be a representative democracy, and that their job is to POLL our

desires and enact MAJORITY RULE into law. The politicians have decided that

they can't sell this secondary megatheft to citizens without first emplac-

ing the pretense of an oversight board. Though this oversight board will

be stocked with no one but the same govt bureaucrats responsible for assis-

ting, allowing or sleeping through the primary megatheft, (the FED, SEC,

HUD and FHFA), it is a nice, symbolic gesture that sets valuable precedent

that alert, motivated citizens can improve on in the future. (See: "War on

Govt Corruption" on www.jamesbauhaus.org). Even better is that the politi-

cians now recognize that citizens should obtain value for suffering the

politicians to take our money- The politicians are claiming that we tax-

payers may be actually let to "buy" some politician- or bureaucrat-selected

financial assets in this bailout. Whether we are or are not allowed any

equity in what the politicians buy with our money, clever accounting will

undoubtedly be used to siphon off any profit that may accrue before it ever

reaches us. Despite this, the politicians have again set valuable prece-

dent that benefits taxpayers, but only if we are watchful and take active

advantage of what they have permitted us. Next, the politicians have said that

insurance may be utilized to protect our billion$. (Fat lot of good this

did A.I.G, the largest insurer in America- However, during the Reaqan

"meltdown", it was the insurance companies that fell into all the gravy

spilled by the failing banks, S & Ls and construction industry- They even

bought up most of the crackhouses that police stole and sold them at huge

profits.) Best of all, the politicians have decided to disclose their

antics with our money on the net for all to see; the oversight board has to

report in five years; only one-third of the money will be taken in the first

cashgrab; there is a possibility that some, maybe even all, of the money

may be repaid, or even (gasp:) a profit had. The fact that the politicians

and their financial and corporate cronies want this extremely excessive

sum to cover their thefts so badly that they feign to grant oversight,

ownership and insurance is proof that taxpayers should begin to seriously

police our govt, politicians and corporations.

When the weeds choke off the crops, intelligent farmers stop wasting

water and fertilizer. Sometimes they plow it all under, or at least apply

herbicides. Taxpayers should ignore most of the gov/biz/media yelping and

insist upon intelligent practices. Bankruptcies need to be let to occur;

crooks need to be found and jailed; de-regulation needs to be done in the

open or not at all; politicians need to quit dodging blame. When a tree in

the forest rots and falls over, the light from the gap it leaves behind is

swiftly used by competitors. Since the gov/biz/media alliance operates

continuously and tirelessly to convert our work into its cash, sleepy citi-

zens need to stop being easy prey. We do this by forming our OWN oversight

board to facilitate and streamline our public duties. Even DUCKS post a

sentry to watch for hungry carnivores: It is high time that citizens did

too. We are at the very bottom of the food chain. Like plankton, everyone

feeds off us. We need to tax ourselves to pay for a virtual parliament that

does nothing but see that we do not get eaten. We need a tradition to get

us organized in town-hall fashion at least one hour per month on the net to

get our needs pushed past the politicians and other legislative or judicial

roadblocks. (See: "Electronic Voting: the Ferrari of Citizen Empowerment"

and other essays on my site.) Our livelihood has steadily diminished since

world war two, and this proposal, if effected, will end this decline. If

we work well and efficiently, this method can restore the prosperity that

has been gradually stolen from us by the politicians, corporations and the

super-rich.

All wealth flows from the bottom and floods up to the top in a steadily

concentrating stream. Trickle-down economics is where the rich piss on us.

And Govt. The federal reserve has been semi-secretly pumping hundreds of

billions of dollars in low-interest loans out to corporations and weak banks

on its secret "troubled" list for months. (General Motors alone got $25

billion:) You can't nurse a cash-addict back to solvency by feeding its

addiction. This is how you get secret, foreign bank accounts to proliferate.

By extraordinary coincidence, this megatheft has been uncovered and be-

came unignorable just ONE MONTH prior to an election affecting one-third of

the politicians. This being so, the politicians are having a hard time

defying voter and taxpayer fury to legislate our money into their pockets

to pass a large fraction on to the New York banks. As the one third of politicians fac-

ing possible de-election refuse to vote for the fat paycheck until they are safely re-elected, the super-rich are selling their stocks and racing to buy bonds. It is a common

trick for govt, corporations and other financial entities to prop up the market as others

flee. (See "The Robber Barons", an account of the era by an author I can't name right

now.) This has been done fairly well by the republican party appacatchik and sonny Bush's

cabal, who have now pushed out over $400 billion in loans to corporations, largely to

help prevent the stock market from so swiftly crashing before they can get McCain elected

and thus republican goals and plans continued, such as their attack upon Iran, among

others. Their temporary inability to sell the bank bailout to somewhat wary voters is

causing the crash that the bailout was to be used to forestall and perhaps avert. (It

crashed 777 "points" today, and the news-talkers claim that this phenomenon caused $1.2

trillion in "value" to evaporate. It really means is that stocks in corporations

that lost value were overpriced and that the Smart Money took their profits and ran.)

The first vote was lost, but just barely, 206 to 218 needed. More concessions to taxpay-

ers are needed. Instead, more propaganda will ensue. Shrieks of impending disaster will

increase in both number and shrillness. Fear of de-election has, for the

moment, overcome their greed and fear of "financial meltdown". A fight for

a second vote will begin, perhaps after the cashgrab has been trimmed down

from three or four times what they need to only two or three times what is

needed to cover the 90 secret, sick banks and refuel their vaults. For this

moment, the Bush cabal, the super-rich and their media cronies have lost.

Hopefully rationality will trump emotion and greed, though the smell of

money in the water is a powerful attractant. Hopefully there will be no massive

bailout of the rich by the poor. If there is any justice, the incompetent will be permitted

to fail, the crooks will be jailed, and others of the super-rich will be given time to use

this opportunity to provide the same credit and financial services at a less monopolistic

price. Every alert, educated, informed person saw this coming and is against feeding more

to the se sharks. By contrast, our "leaders" lied into our faces for over a year, all cun-

ningly saying, "The fundamentals of our economy are strong:" (meaning our backs and our

work ethic, NOT what we were thinking, that the financial industry would treat us fairly and

not loot our money and betray our trust). It is the standard line for politicians to lie

to us to prevent us from panicking and making it worse for the rich, then abruptly and dis-

ingenuously switching to, "Emergency! Give us a trillion dollars: Quickly: No time to

explain, just do it:"

Washington scam artists and New York high-rollers need to take their turns digging

ditches, flipping burgers or performing other honest labor. A few tons of this imaginary,

inflationary, work-poor money NEEDS to vanish out of hereditary-rich hands, because it de

values honest labor that provides real value. These law-lords WILL extract a huge paycheck

from our pockets to theirs; they just have not yet ratcheted up enough panic or provided

enough self-fulfilling disaster prophesies.

So, what happened? The senate added $150 billion worth of special interest blubber

then passed the $700 billion Hank Welfare Act with to trouble at all, proving their enormous

contempt for n, and shamelessness. They and their media mercenaries then spent two days

deepening their terror-propaganda, convincing the gullible that they were about to lose

{heir jobs. One of the casual lies they subtly sold during their fast talking

"explanations" was the fallacy that loans pay wages, e.g. "Car dealers can't get loans to

pay wages:" Fact is, revenues pay wages, or profits. Lack of loans can choke a shakey

business, but without profits, or revenues, there is no business. The elderly and stock-

holders can SEE their pensions, 401k's and IRAs vanishing. With some of their presentations,

they even had graph, and thick-accented foreigners to sell it. By friday, 10-03-08 , the

politicians' checked their polls to see how effective their financial terror campaign had

been. It had worked well enough to cure the politicians' de-election fears, so they went

ahead and passed the $850 billion Bank Bailout/Politician-Pork Bill into law. Sonny Bush

signed it in record time; less than an hour. Then the stock market fell five to seven

hundred points. (The New York Stock Exchange NYSE, had been up 200 points, then fell to

minus 500.) Now it is Monday, (10-8-08), and the NYSE has been down a further 800 points

before 3:30 eastern time. For three days we've suffered the media personalities asking

themselves, "Why did stocks crash after we gave the banks $700 billion?" They put on profes-

sors from Harvard to Stamford and THEY didn't know the answer. They even cornered a broker

who bragged that his family had been brokers since 1840, and HE wouldn't say, though he may

have known. The simple answer not told is this:

October is barely here. Every October there is a small stock crash, though rarely this

early or this deep. Toward the end of October, about 10-20, there is what brokers call the

"triple witching". This is where three kinds of financial instruments come due for payment

simultaneously. I can't recall what they are, but all three are speculative, involve large

amounts of credit, and are highly "leveraged". Colossal hedge-, pension- and mutual-funds

also use October to begin re-positioning their massive portfolios for tax purposes and for

payouts to clients. The worst thing, however, is the fact that they are this time stuck

with excessive and enormous amounts of "leveraged" stocks that they only partially own.

They payed only 10-50 percent of the going rate for them. Now the brokers are nervous and

want them to pay the remaining 50-90 percent of what they owe on them. These megafund man-

agers are unwilling to pay these obligations because their debts are growing as their as-

sets shrink, largely due to the so-called "credit crunch". No intelligent megafund manager

is going to pay off his "investment leverages" while his assets shrink, since this leads to

insolvency and bankruptcy. Instead, these managers get with their co-crooks, the brokerage

houses, which often masquerade as "investment banks", to work together to unload these huge

masses of partially-paid-for stocks slowly enough to avoid losing too much money for them-

selves and their clients, and without either clogging the market or causing a worse, deeper,

faster crash. It will be very interesting to see how many weeks it takes the combined ef-

forts of the global financial industry and the multi-national corporations to unload this

garbage onto unsuspecting private investors. The concerned, helpful media daily has on a

parade of experts and advisors to exhort young adults and others to buy these bargains now,

rather than wait at least another month or two to purchase even better "bargains". While

these worldwide behemoths try to quietly unload many trillion$ in "leverage" onto the various

stock markets, they find that the "market makers" (brokers, banks they work for, "specialists

and the exchanges) can't absorb all this paper they sold. Even the $700 billion that the

U. S. politicians stole from us will not buy much of the offal that these crooks sold. I

have no figures on the total amount of excess cash sloshing about the planet trying to be

invested in someone who will work, but only ONE obscure fund contains $21 billion of other

peoples' money. There are easily hundreds of such funds worldwide. Routinely, when these

market makers" can't buy back what they sold, governments step in and prop up the institutions secretly or sometimes even overtly, until the ants calm down. The ants are called

up by their brokers, who breathlessly inform them, "Wow-ee! Have I got some great deals

on stocks for you!" When he can sell what others need unloaded, he can often obtain com-

missions from both buyer and seller. The news-sellers speak to the public of the many

stock "bargains" available as the crash continues. Governments make banks help prop up the

market by using billion dollar loans as enticements. The federal reserve banks give them

large, low-interest o- no-cost or forgivable "loans" on condition that some of them be used

to buy stocks. Banks love to use free money to buy 10-50 percent ownership in growth- or

dividend-yielding stocks. When it gets so bad that even these standard schemes don't slow

or stop citizens from trying to get their money back, they just throw people out and lock the

doors as you saw for six days after the 9-11-01 Arab counterattack. So far, they have been

able to stall the crash: making it slow enough to appear "orderly" A journalist who ac-

cepts a second, secret paycheck to put a happy face on this explains an "orderly" market as

one where broker phone-banks are able to find buyers for each seller. A disorderly market:

he says, is one where investors are so desperate to get their money back that they will

take "any" price the broker offers.

Foreign stock markets fell from 4-8 percent today too, proving that stocks were vastly

overvalued and overleveraged there too.

10-7-08: I finally obtained some measure of the forces at play here: yearly U.S. gross

domestic product (GDP) equals $14 trillion. The news-sellers brought in a Brit aid gave him

an enormous amount of time on TV (5 min.) to explain a major cause of AIGS problem: "credit

default" insurance coverage. This is insurance against the unlikely event that a thriving

business is unable to obtain credit through any of the enormous variety of normal channels.

The fact that so many businesses were asking for this type of insurance should have made AIG

wonder if these businesses had not already worn out many of their creditors. If I was an

ethicless CEO riding my corporation into the ground, I would probably buy this insurance to

get that last, dying gasp to last long enough for me to switch corporations. AIG sold the

HELL out of this insurance. No figures were released on how much revenue they took in on

this, but if all of it simultaneously defaulted, as in "credit crunch", AIG would be liable

for $62 trillion! (There is still no explanation yet on the other financial security

blamed on the $200 billion-so-far fall of the two mortgage giants; some crap with "auction"

in its title and usually referred to by three initials.) Stocks worldwide stuttered

and mostly fell again. The NYSE lost 500 more, down to 9445.

10-8-08: overnight, worldwide, stocks plummeted by about 10%; a huge loss of "paper

profits" as the smart, insider money continues to take their profits and run. The Russ-

ians threw everyone out of their exchanges and shut them down. Indonesia too. No news

stalkers have yet said where all this money is going, and the usual haven, gold, is not

rising in price at this time, nor gold mining stocks. Megafund managers usually buy bonds

when stocks fall this badly- (In bankruptcies, bondholders get paid before stockholders,

who usually get little or nothing.) Global govts are now cooperating to keep their bub-

ble of over-priced assets from falling too far. (The NYSE is down 33% since its high of

14,000 last October.) The govts engineered a global interest rate cut- US politicians

rendered a .5% "emergency" cut to 1.5% in our prime rate. The banks will suck this up,

passing nothing on to their customers for months. First-world govts worldwide are gouging

their own taxpayers for bank bailout billion$. US politicians have now guaranteed money

market funds and commercial paper markets. These short-term credit operations will help

keep businesses from foundering as profits dwindle and collapse. Some bad news is that

the crime of "naked" short-selling will be re-legalized at midnight, 10-8, after a short

absence measured in days. A good book to learn about these matters is "The Shock Doctrine"

by Naomi Klein. Her theme is the rise of "disaster capitalism". Good news, if true, is

that "pending" home sales are up 7.5%.

This statistic is trying to indicate that the excess cost of housing is finally drain-

ing off enough for the first tier of home buyers to afford. Big Money likes expensive

homes, and fights to keep their appraisal values as high as possible, much like car cor-

porations prefer to sell SUVs. The "mortgage meltdown", "credit crunch" and housing glut

have pushed people out of homes, which makes a bonanza for landlords who rent out living

space. Soon as housing prices fall enough, people will try again to buy homes, even though

it will mean feeding the financial sharks yet a third time. The NYSE fell only 189

points. Thursday, 10-9, it lost 678 points, falling to 8579. If there is a way to

sneak off with a profit by selling stocks they do not own, brokers and their bosses

would be doing it, since "naked" short selling and ordinary short selling is once again

allowed by the SEC. Overnight the global markets declined about seven percent: another

huge drop in value. This morning, 10-10, the NYSE has been down 600 points, but raised

a bit. Sonny Bush got on TV to tell us that he told his cops and regulatory agencies to

look for financial criminals. Too bad they did not get him and 68% of congress when they

were all connected to taking bribes from Enron eight years ago. The commercial media

CONTINUES to tell individual, citizen investors to sit tight and keep their hard-earned

money right there where it is: right where Big Money can cause it to keep shrinking away

as megafunds continue to unload and take their own money out as quickly as possible. This

being Friday, I expect the last minute crush of Big, Insider money to get out of stocks

and into bonds to be exceptionally painful. Big, In-cahoots Money hates to leave its money

vulnerable to worse bad news over a weekend. If govt was for the people instead of the

rich and the merchants, such bad news might take the form of a Ralph Nader suggestion:

a law that puts a one-tenth percent tax on the $500 trillion in yearly US financial trans-

actions, so that the financial crooks can have $500 billion per year to pay for their next

megathefts. (CNN let Nader have a few short minutes to inject a bit of common sense and

rational thinking into the broadcast, which they aired twice before returning promptly to

their standard fare of interviewing each other on what the candidates said and how to

survive financial or gas problems.) The "news" corporations don't sell "news" so much as

they sell "controversy". Unbiased reportage of the news may get them sued, while selling

controversy, however inane, has made them rich. This is a major reason why so much un-

believable ignorance and nonsense spews from TV and radio "news" and information networks.

They WANT you to believe in aliens, sasquatch, ghosts, telepathy, horoscopes and ESP.

They WANT you to be curious and accept faked-up "history" and phony "science" made up by

fast-buck artists and agenda-setters. This type of crap distracts people from affecting the

real world. It compells people to watch and makes them more susceptible to purchasing what

is offered in commercials. Almost any crackpot can get on TV to espouse his nonsense if

he is thought by an editor to be merely entertaining. Also, it helps if he brings his

own "opposing expert" to argue with and sells both as a package. Pre-packaged "news"

videotapes from organized, special interest groups are a huge industry vaguely known as

"public relations firms". PERSONS Watching the news are not told when the "news" suddenly

becomes a slick product from a public relations firm hired to convince them of something

stupid, such as the notion that global warming is a natural phenomenon, not a planet-killing

blanket of smothering brought to you by the fossil fuel industry. (Science proves we ARE

in an ice age, except that the cooling trend has been reversed by man, beginning eight

thousand years ago with the rise of agriculture, technology, resource overuse and over-

population. all of which produce excess greenhouse gases. Proof of this is in Scientific

American, 2007. I apologize for my inability to provide a more precise citation.) De-

tails on the rise of fake news is in chapter nine of "Censored 2008" by Prof. Peter Phillips

and www.prwatch.org/fakenews/execsummary.

The megafunds are still unloading their partially-owned stocks, but not so frantically

as before. It is 10-18. and the US politicians and their financial cronies have kept

very secret the cure for this problem, which is virtually the same cure imposed after the

1929 crash: no more loaning $65 for every $1 of asset (freddie mac, fannie mae); no more

loaning $30 to $1 (Lehman Bros.. Merril Lynch. Goldman Sachs and other brokerage houses

who bought from our politicians the privilege of masquerading as investment "banks"):

no more loaning $10 to $1 for real banks, which were required to keep one-seventh of their

assets as vault cash for servicing customers, and other, common sense rules.

The rules work until they change the rules. The trouble with this plutocracy is that

there is no way to get fair rules set and KEEP them fair and set. Rule by the rich always

favors the rich, especially when the ruled are deliberately kept ignorant by bad, no-disci

pline-allowed schools; apathetic by the myth of powerlessness against govt and city hall;

and by the spread of mindless hedonism from Hollywood to Heroin. We have had it too

easy for too long and have become decadent. The only way back is hardship, learning

and anger enough to effect a permanent solution. Hopefully, the hyperinflation, job-loss

and misery caused by the greed of the law-lords and the merchants will return this

nation to a democracy for all citizens, not just the elite and hereditary rich!