Clinton On Alinsky: A Revelation of the Method
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Joe Wäges
Infowars.com
December 29, 2009
Reading the college thesis of our former First Lady Hillary Clinton titled “There is Only the Fight… An Analysis of the Alinsky Model”, it becomes painfully clear why this document has been off limits for the public at large until recently. It shows in very tangible unambiguous detail the motivations and methodology of the modern incarnation of Marxism. In an equally disturbing fashion the author not only shows no aversion to its aims but defends at every chance, the pioneer of this modern system, Saul Alinsky.
Hillary Clinton during her Wellesley College days in the mid to late 60s when she wrote her thesis on Alinksy.
Let us begin by noting that in the acknowledgements section she gives thanks to Mr. Alinsky for providing a topic sharing some time and offering a job to then Ms. Rodham. She asks the question what a radical is and provides the answer in Mr. Alinsky’s own words.
“They are a people creating a new bridge of mankind in between the past of narrow nationalistic chauvinism and the horizon of a new man kind—a people of the world.”
This is precisely the aim of the power structure behind Communism, the erasing of all borders and boundaries and the establishment of a world government based on a modified form of Communism called Humanistic Socialism. The author continues and defines what it means to be an American radical. Again she lets Mr. Alinsky define the term.
“…that unique person who actually believes what he says… to whom the common good is the greatest personal value… who genuinely and completely believes in mankind.… Alinsky outlines American history focusing on men he would call “radical,” confronting his readers again with the “unique” way Americans have synthesized the alien roots of radicalism, Marxism, Utopian socialism, syndicalism, the French Revolution, with their own conditions and experiences:”
So the reader concludes that an American radical is someone who believes in collectivism and synthesizes the roots of Communism with the origins of Liberty. What an exercise in semantical and mental gymnastics. To equate liberty and authoritarianism as synonymous terms is a perversion in and of itself. Ms. Rodham continues defining radical in her own terms.
“A radical is one who advocates sweeping changes in the existing laws and methods of government. These proposed changes are aimed at the roots of political problems which in Marxian terms are the attitudes and the behaviors of men. Radicals are not interested in ameliorating the symptoms of decay but in drastically altering the causes of societal conditions. Radicalism “emphasizes reason rather than reverence, although Radicals have often been the most emotional and least reasonable of men.” One of the strongest strains in modern radicalism is the eighteenth Century Enlightenment’s faith in human reason and the possible perfectibility of men. This faith in the continuing improvement of man was and is dominated by values derived from the French and American Revolutions and profoundly influenced by the Industrial Revolution.”
She herself defines radicalism under Marxian terms and correctly points out that the origins of radicalism do indeed begin in the Enlightenment. Her term the “perfectibility of men” is rather striking considering that the object of Communism is to create the perfect man. Also the original name of the Illuminati Order, the prototype of Communism, was the Order of the Perfectibilists and that Adam Weishaupt’s successor J. J. C. Bode went to The Grand Orient Lodge and initiated the architects of the French Revolution into the order some two years before the French Revolution began. This account is confirmed in Bode’s personal diary and also in the book “Fire in the Minds of Men”.
The author points out that radicalism often must be achieved through non-radical means, chiefly operating inside the existing system. We learn that the object of radicalism is power and it is obtained through organization. The means to obtaining power is through conflict. It is pointed out that …
“Alinsky argues that those who wish to change circumstances must develop a mass-based organization and be prepared for conflict. He is a Neo-Hobbesian who objects to the consensual mystique surrounding political processes; for him conflict is the route to power.”
In short it is learned that through collective action in the form of conflict can power be achieved. She expands on this concept in relation to morality.
“Alinsky claims a position of moral relativism, but his moral context is stabilized a belief in the eventual manifestation of the goodness of man. He believes that if men were allowed to live free from fear and want they would live in peace. He also believes that only men with a sense of their own worth an a respect for the commonality of humanity will be able to create this new world.”
This is a repetition of the central theme in Machiavelli’s “The Prince”, the end justifies the means. Morality then is subjective so long as the object of creating a new world based on the commonality of humanity also known as Communism. Not surprisingly the idea that the ends justify the means is central in his 1971 work titled “Rules for Radicals”. Interestingly this work was dedicated to what he referred to as the original radical, Lucifer.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Ms. Rodham focuses on community organizing efforts in relation to the Alinsky Method noting that it has two distinct elements.
“One, the “Alinsky-type protest” is “an explosive mixture of rigid discipline, brilliant showmanship, and a street fighters instinct for ruthlessly exploiting his enemies weakness.” The second, modeled after trade union organization methods, involves the hard work of recorganizing interests, seeking out indigenous leaders, and building an organization whose power is viewed as legitimate by the larger comunity.”
So the elements then are staged theatrical protests, prying on your enemies weaknesses, and identifying indigenous leaders so as to appear legitimate to the community that you are trying to organize. This idea is repeated in the following excerpt that defines the criteria of an Alinsky organization.
(a) It is rooted in the local tradition, the local indigenous leader ship, the local organizations and agencies, and, in short, the local people.
(b) Its energy or driving force is generated by the self-interest of the local residents for the welfare of their children and themselves.
(c) Its program for action develops hand in hand with the organ Ization of the community council. The program is in actual fact that series of common agreements which results in the develop ment of the local organization.
(d) It is a program arising out of the local people carrying with it the direct participation of practically all the organizations in a particular area. It involves a substantial degree of indi vidual citizen participation; a constant day to day flow of vol unteer activities and the daily functioning of numerous local com mites charged with specific short term functions.
(e) It constantly emphasizes the functional relationship between prob lems and therefore its program is as broad as the social horizon of the community. It avoids, at all costs, circumscribed and seg mental programs which in turn attract the support of only a seg ment of the local population.
(f) It recognizes that a democratic society is one which responds to popular pressures, and therefore realistically operates on the basis of pressure. For the same reason it does not shy away from involvement in matters of controversy.
(g) It concentrates on the utilization of indigenous individuals, who, if not leaders at the beginning, can be developed into leaders.
(h) It gives priority to the significance of self-interest. The organ Ization itself proceeds on the idea of channeling the many diverse forces of self-interest within the community into a common dir ection for the common good and at the same time respects the autonomy of individuals and organizations.
(i) It becomes completely self-financed at the end of approximately Three years. This not only testifies to its representative character In that the local residents support their own organization finan cially, but insures to the local council the acid test of ide pendence: “the ability to pay one’s way”
The over arching theme is the rule and representation of the collective by its indigenous leaders, whether real or developed. The power lies in mob rule. This is precisely what a democracy is. Our founders understood that a democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what is for dinner. That is why we are founded as a Republic and not as a democracy as Ms. Rodham falsely believes. The term democracy in fact appears nowhere in our founding documents.
The point of the preceding analysis is to reveal the motivation and methodology of the modern collectivist. Through understanding their means and motives, we can safeguard our liberty from the mob waiting to tear this great nation to pieces. Communism has taken many forms throughout the last few hundred years and it ideology is rooted in antiquity. It is not a monolithic form and is always changing to the needs of the groups it represents. It has been called Illuminism, radicalism, democracy, socialism, syndicalism, and lately communism. It is not for the benefit of the people but is the tool of totalitarian oligarchical control. If you need any verification of this, then consider why all ten pillars of the Communist Party destroy the freedoms and rights of the individual in the name of the collective but transfer it to the banks and the state. Who in their right mind would advocate for such a thing?
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production
Friday, January 1, 2010
2010’s Top Ten Myths
2010’s Top Ten Myths
By Alan Caruba Thursday, December 31, 2009
In no particular order, here are ten myths that will affect U.S. domestic and international policy in the year ahead.
By Alan Caruba Thursday, December 31, 2009
In no particular order, here are ten myths that will affect U.S. domestic and international policy in the year ahead.
Control of Climate Policies by Unaccountable Bureaucracies;
It involved the role of bureaucrats at Environment Canada (EC) in determining national policy on climate change
Control of Climate Policies by Unaccountable Bureaucracies; The Canadian Example
By Dr. Tim Ball Friday, January 1, 2010
CanadaFreePress published some of this article a few years ago but few saw it because it was quickly pulled after I received a legal threat I was financially unable to fight. Legal threats to silence people are a common practice of supporters of human caused global warming. I related my experience to Dr Fred Singer and he immediately named the lawyer. How did he know? He and others had received threats from the same lawyer.
The threats are part of personal attacks and other tactics perpetrated by nasty web sites like Desmogblog, organized by James Hoggan, Chairman of the Board of the David Suzuki Foundation. William Connolley perpetuated many of the smears through his control of climate entries on Wikipedia. We now know those who were attacked were viewed as real threats by the CRU gang and their supporters at Realclimate.
Now the web of lies and deception associated with climate science are exposed it is time to revisit what triggered the legal attack on the CFP article. It involved the role of bureaucrats at Environment Canada (EC) in determining national policy on climate change, particularly the role of Gordon McBean former Assistant Deputy Minister (ADM). Canadian bureaucrats were more important than most appointed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) about who MIT Meteorology professor and former IPCC member Richard Lindzen wrote, “Most of the 2500 members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are bureaucrats appointed by their governments to push a political agenda.” “It is no small matter that routine weather service functionaries from New Zealand to Tanzania are referred to as ‘the world’s leading climate scientists.’ It should come as no surprise that they will be determinedly supportive of the process.”
Bureaucratic Bastions
Scientists associated with the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) also controlled the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) whose Reports became the bible for politicians developing global energy and economic strategies. Their corrupted climate science needed a permanent conduit to the politicians. Maurice Strong, mastermind of the IPCC, used his skills with bureaucratic systems and through the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) involved national weather agencies that then controlled politicians. Strong’s close connections to former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin apparently meant early Canadian involvement. It continues as the government web page notes; Environment Canada is a strong supporter of, and an active participant in, the IPCC. Dr. John Stone (Environment Canada, retired), holds a position on the Bureau and Working Group II, Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Art Jaques, Director, Greenhouse Gas Division, Environment Canada, is a member of the Task Force Bureau on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories. As well, over 30 Canadian scientists from government, universities and the private sector are participating as authors and editors for the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report. John Stone’s position is critical as the liaison between the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) group and the IPCC. The ACIA Reports are almost the sole source for Arctic coverage in the 2007 IPCC Report.
Years ago, I warned Henry Hengeveld of EC that convincing politicians of global warming due to human production of CO2 was difficult, but twice as difficult once they were convinced. The theory was unproven and total adoption so early placed them on a treadmill of denial. No bureaucrat would risk telling those politicians who adopted it as their political position that it was wrong. EC bought the theory completely. Instead of following scientific method of disproving the hypothesis Environment Canada worked to prove it was correct by ignoring evidence and stifling questioners.
Gordon McBean was the person responsible for the singular and devastating direction the department took. He came with a PhD and quickly achieved high rank. He brought his political view of environmental issues and particularly global warming expressed in a speech to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1995. He spent his career promoting these views and virtually destroyed the Canadian weather service while wasting billions of dollars. The Auditor General put the cost at $6.8 billion from 1997 to 2005.
McBean also established his post-bureaucratic career by using $61 million of money to set up the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences (CFCAS) a climate research organization that he took over as Chair in the month he retired. This agency only funded research that proved the human caused warming theory or the impact of warming. The current government stopped the funding.
Interestingly, McBean’s bio on Wikipedia makes no mention of his role as a bureaucrat. It does mention he orchestrated a letter with another CRU associate and IPCC member, computer modeler Andrew Weaver, in response to the letter signed by 60 scientists asking the Canadian Prime Minister for an open debate.
Why were they afraid of a debate? They got 90 signatures but the majority were Environment Canada employees or people benefiting from government largess. In the fall of 2008, McBean pushed for more funding. Foundation Chair Gordon McBean met with new Environment Minister Jim Prentice late last fall and walked away hopeful the minister would fight for foundation funding at the budget table. McBean continues as a lead author for the ACIA.
McBean’s influence went beyond his role with EC. He was a principal participant in the formation of the IPCC and chaired the preliminary meeting in Villach, Austria in 1985 attended by the CRU leaders Jones and Wigley. Canadian appointees to the IPCC always excluded most Canadian experts, a situation that continues today. He directed department funding and resources into studying global warming, but only to prove the hypothesis. I realized what was going on years ago when they spent $300 million on a computer incapable of simulating global climate or climate change.
To cover these wastes they took money from other programs that now make any hope of good science impossible. There are fewer weather stations in Canada now than in 1960, and many were replaced with Automatic Weather Observing Stations (AWOS). Many important activities and data collection practices were abandoned. When I chaired the Assiniboine River Management Advisory Board (ARMAB) in Manitoba the worst flood on record occurred. We asked Water Resources why they didn’t forecast the event. They said they had no data on the amount of water in the snow in the valley. We learned EC had canceled flights that used special radar to determine water content. Savings as I recall were $26,000. The cost of unexpected flood damage was $7 million to one level of government alone. Loss of weather data means long continuous records essential to any climate studies will fail. This data cannot be replaced or replicated.
Another egregious example of ECs failure was cancellation of support for a joint program with the National Museum of Canada in the 1980s and 1990s. Run under the auspices of the National Museum of Natural Sciences it was titled “Climatic Change in Canada During the Past 20,000 years.” This program brought together a multitude of experts in all different aspects of climate and climate reconstruction and produced volumes of collected papers that put Canada in the forefront of climate research and reconstruction. To my knowledge none of these experts was called to testify before Parliamentary hearings on Kyoto or were appointed to the IPCC. EC deliberately excluded Canadian climate experts ‚Äì something that continues to this day. Although climate change became political the unaccountable bureaucrats at Environment Canada controlled it.
They took the singular and unsupportable position that climate change due to human CO2 was fact. It put them on the treadmill I warned Henry Hengeveld about. They thwarted the standard method of science to disprove a theory. They deliberately excluded experts who challenged the science. When Natural Resources Minister David Anderson said they had consulted all Canadian climate experts on the Kyoto Accord, I traveled to Ottawa with seven others and in a press forum announced we were never consulted. They used all the power and vehicles of government to promote their false claims to the public. The EC web site continued to carry the ‘hockey stick’ graph long after it was discredited among other erroneous information. A wider problem was all other government agencies had to accept their claims as the basis for their policies and planning. The inclusion of so many bureaucrats in the IPCC almost guarantees that similar situations occurred in most other governments.
CFP Tools
Control of Climate Policies by Unaccountable Bureaucracies; The Canadian Example
By Dr. Tim Ball Friday, January 1, 2010
CanadaFreePress published some of this article a few years ago but few saw it because it was quickly pulled after I received a legal threat I was financially unable to fight. Legal threats to silence people are a common practice of supporters of human caused global warming. I related my experience to Dr Fred Singer and he immediately named the lawyer. How did he know? He and others had received threats from the same lawyer.
The threats are part of personal attacks and other tactics perpetrated by nasty web sites like Desmogblog, organized by James Hoggan, Chairman of the Board of the David Suzuki Foundation. William Connolley perpetuated many of the smears through his control of climate entries on Wikipedia. We now know those who were attacked were viewed as real threats by the CRU gang and their supporters at Realclimate.
Now the web of lies and deception associated with climate science are exposed it is time to revisit what triggered the legal attack on the CFP article. It involved the role of bureaucrats at Environment Canada (EC) in determining national policy on climate change, particularly the role of Gordon McBean former Assistant Deputy Minister (ADM). Canadian bureaucrats were more important than most appointed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) about who MIT Meteorology professor and former IPCC member Richard Lindzen wrote, “Most of the 2500 members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are bureaucrats appointed by their governments to push a political agenda.” “It is no small matter that routine weather service functionaries from New Zealand to Tanzania are referred to as ‘the world’s leading climate scientists.’ It should come as no surprise that they will be determinedly supportive of the process.”
Bureaucratic Bastions
Scientists associated with the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) also controlled the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) whose Reports became the bible for politicians developing global energy and economic strategies. Their corrupted climate science needed a permanent conduit to the politicians. Maurice Strong, mastermind of the IPCC, used his skills with bureaucratic systems and through the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) involved national weather agencies that then controlled politicians. Strong’s close connections to former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin apparently meant early Canadian involvement. It continues as the government web page notes; Environment Canada is a strong supporter of, and an active participant in, the IPCC. Dr. John Stone (Environment Canada, retired), holds a position on the Bureau and Working Group II, Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Art Jaques, Director, Greenhouse Gas Division, Environment Canada, is a member of the Task Force Bureau on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories. As well, over 30 Canadian scientists from government, universities and the private sector are participating as authors and editors for the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report. John Stone’s position is critical as the liaison between the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) group and the IPCC. The ACIA Reports are almost the sole source for Arctic coverage in the 2007 IPCC Report.
Years ago, I warned Henry Hengeveld of EC that convincing politicians of global warming due to human production of CO2 was difficult, but twice as difficult once they were convinced. The theory was unproven and total adoption so early placed them on a treadmill of denial. No bureaucrat would risk telling those politicians who adopted it as their political position that it was wrong. EC bought the theory completely. Instead of following scientific method of disproving the hypothesis Environment Canada worked to prove it was correct by ignoring evidence and stifling questioners.
Gordon McBean was the person responsible for the singular and devastating direction the department took. He came with a PhD and quickly achieved high rank. He brought his political view of environmental issues and particularly global warming expressed in a speech to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1995. He spent his career promoting these views and virtually destroyed the Canadian weather service while wasting billions of dollars. The Auditor General put the cost at $6.8 billion from 1997 to 2005.
McBean also established his post-bureaucratic career by using $61 million of money to set up the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences (CFCAS) a climate research organization that he took over as Chair in the month he retired. This agency only funded research that proved the human caused warming theory or the impact of warming. The current government stopped the funding.
Interestingly, McBean’s bio on Wikipedia makes no mention of his role as a bureaucrat. It does mention he orchestrated a letter with another CRU associate and IPCC member, computer modeler Andrew Weaver, in response to the letter signed by 60 scientists asking the Canadian Prime Minister for an open debate.
Why were they afraid of a debate? They got 90 signatures but the majority were Environment Canada employees or people benefiting from government largess. In the fall of 2008, McBean pushed for more funding. Foundation Chair Gordon McBean met with new Environment Minister Jim Prentice late last fall and walked away hopeful the minister would fight for foundation funding at the budget table. McBean continues as a lead author for the ACIA.
McBean’s influence went beyond his role with EC. He was a principal participant in the formation of the IPCC and chaired the preliminary meeting in Villach, Austria in 1985 attended by the CRU leaders Jones and Wigley. Canadian appointees to the IPCC always excluded most Canadian experts, a situation that continues today. He directed department funding and resources into studying global warming, but only to prove the hypothesis. I realized what was going on years ago when they spent $300 million on a computer incapable of simulating global climate or climate change.
To cover these wastes they took money from other programs that now make any hope of good science impossible. There are fewer weather stations in Canada now than in 1960, and many were replaced with Automatic Weather Observing Stations (AWOS). Many important activities and data collection practices were abandoned. When I chaired the Assiniboine River Management Advisory Board (ARMAB) in Manitoba the worst flood on record occurred. We asked Water Resources why they didn’t forecast the event. They said they had no data on the amount of water in the snow in the valley. We learned EC had canceled flights that used special radar to determine water content. Savings as I recall were $26,000. The cost of unexpected flood damage was $7 million to one level of government alone. Loss of weather data means long continuous records essential to any climate studies will fail. This data cannot be replaced or replicated.
Another egregious example of ECs failure was cancellation of support for a joint program with the National Museum of Canada in the 1980s and 1990s. Run under the auspices of the National Museum of Natural Sciences it was titled “Climatic Change in Canada During the Past 20,000 years.” This program brought together a multitude of experts in all different aspects of climate and climate reconstruction and produced volumes of collected papers that put Canada in the forefront of climate research and reconstruction. To my knowledge none of these experts was called to testify before Parliamentary hearings on Kyoto or were appointed to the IPCC. EC deliberately excluded Canadian climate experts ‚Äì something that continues to this day. Although climate change became political the unaccountable bureaucrats at Environment Canada controlled it.
They took the singular and unsupportable position that climate change due to human CO2 was fact. It put them on the treadmill I warned Henry Hengeveld about. They thwarted the standard method of science to disprove a theory. They deliberately excluded experts who challenged the science. When Natural Resources Minister David Anderson said they had consulted all Canadian climate experts on the Kyoto Accord, I traveled to Ottawa with seven others and in a press forum announced we were never consulted. They used all the power and vehicles of government to promote their false claims to the public. The EC web site continued to carry the ‘hockey stick’ graph long after it was discredited among other erroneous information. A wider problem was all other government agencies had to accept their claims as the basis for their policies and planning. The inclusion of so many bureaucrats in the IPCC almost guarantees that similar situations occurred in most other governments.
CFP Tools
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Mandatory Bacterial Meningitis Menactra® Vaccinations Required for All Incoming College Dorm Students in Texas Starting January 1, 2010
Texas loves making vaccines mandatory. First, it was the Gardasil HPV vaccine requirement imposed by Governor Rick Perry. Now, it is a mandatory bacterial meningitis vaccine for all incoming students who want to live in the college dorms.
Incoming college dorm residents will need an additional vaccine next month, thanks to a new Texas law. Without the shot, they cannot live in the dorm. KERA's Bill Zeeble reports.
Texas college students moving into dorms for the first time after January 1st will now need a vaccine against bacterial meningitis. June Brownlee, with the University of North Texas Student Health and Wellness Center says the bill has come up in past legislative sessions, and finally passed earlier this year.
The name of this vaccine is called Menactra® and the vaccine is manufactured by Sanofi Pasteur Inc. You can read the Menactra® package insert by clicking this sentence.
Source: KERA ; Sanofi Pasteur
Posted by The Moderator at 8:14 PM
Labels: Vaccines
Mandatory Bacterial Meningitis Menactra® Vaccinations Required for All Incoming College Dorm Students in Texas Starting January 1, 2010
Texas loves making vaccines mandatory. First, it was the Gardasil HPV vaccine requirement imposed by Governor Rick Perry. Now, it is a mandatory bacterial meningitis vaccine for all incoming students who want to live in the college dorms.
Incoming college dorm residents will need an additional vaccine next month, thanks to a new Texas law. Without the shot, they cannot live in the dorm. KERA's Bill Zeeble reports.
Texas college students moving into dorms for the first time after January 1st will now need a vaccine against bacterial meningitis. June Brownlee, with the University of North Texas Student Health and Wellness Center says the bill has come up in past legislative sessions, and finally passed earlier this year.
The name of this vaccine is called Menactra® and the vaccine is manufactured by Sanofi Pasteur Inc. You can read the Menactra® package insert by clicking this sentence.
Source: KERA ; Sanofi Pasteur
Posted by The Moderator at 8:14 PM
Labels: Vaccines
SAVING THE EARTH
SAVING THE EARTH
Excerpts from Brave New Schools by Berit Kjos
* * * * * *
"In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.1 Club of Rome (an influential group of globalist leaders)
* * * * * *
In the weeks surrounding Earth Day (April 22, Lenin's birthday), students from coast to coast celebrate their spiritual connection to Mother Earth, chant prayers to the Great Spirit, and imagine politically correct answers to the unequal distribution of the world's resources. Using computers that "simulate the real world," they recreate environmental disasters and "solve" global problems.
These dubious lessons share a common aim-. to persuade students to reject Western culture and become advocates for new global beliefs and values While this agenda makes little sense to those who view America from a traditional perspective, it makes perfect sense to leaders seeking global laws that would govern land, people, education, and consumption.
A lesson in Clean Sweep, an environmental curriculum published by the Iowa Department of Education, illustrates the bias behind environmental education. The class divides into two groups: first, the world's current population seated in a circle representing the earth; second, the "unborn" people of the world. Played like musical chairs, the game instructs the first group to gather natural resources whenever the music stops.
Meanwhile, new children are "born", adding to the fast-growing "population" consuming the dwindling resources. Guess what happens. The world runs out of resources.
Like most environmental classroom exercises, the game sounds logical but distorts reality. Designed to change attitudes, it ignores scientific facts, social statistics, and renewable resources.2 Yet, what it does is far more dangerous than what it omits: it gives children an alarming view of an imagined reality. They feel the exaggerated dangers. They agree to solve the problem.
To make sure the children understand that America is the villain of the world, they discuss the main message: "The U.S.A. uses over 20% of the world's resources. . . How do the others feel toward the U.S.A. in this game?" Other questions prod the children toward these "right" conclusions: America's demand for resources deprives poorer nations of their equal share. Greedy nations must reduce consumption, block population growth, and make whatever sacrifices needed for common good and planetary healing.
Genuine concern for the environment is needful, for ecological abuses do destroy farm land, sea life, forests, and other resources-especially outside the Western word. But since most environmental problems are local or regional, they fail to serve the political purposes of global leaders who want nothing less than global governance.
Rousing whole nations to action, and inspiring a unified call for planetary management requires global disasters like ozone holes3 and rising ocean levels, not merely dying lakes and rivers. Globalist leaders know that well.
"In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill," declared members of the Club of Rome in a sweeping 1991 report on global governance." All these dangers are caused by human intervention.... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." 4
Al Gore, who wrote a book to spread a similar message, said, "We must make rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization."5 In Earth in the Balance, he calls for a "worldwide education program" and a "panreligious perspective" based on "the wisdom distilled by all faiths."6
Gore knows that common beliefs and values based on idealized (not factual) models of earth-centered cultures are vital to planetary oneness. Just as tribes, not individuals, owned the land and shared common values, so government must control land, populations, and beliefs in the next decade. A mythical "common good" must inspire the new policies.7
"We'd like to see the world a better place... to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination," said Stanford University environmentalist Stephen Schneider. "That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we might have... Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."8 (Emphasis added)
In other words, facts must yield to ideology. Excluded from public debate are uncompromising scientists like Dr. Frederick Seitz, past President of the National Academy of Sciences and recipient of the National Medal of Science, who refuses to conform to the government agenda.
"There is reason," writes Dr. Seitz, "based on sound scientific work, to express doubt that we are in immediate danger from either global warming or depletion of the ozone layer as envisaged by some extreme activists in the environmental movement."9
Yet, environmental curricula and children's ecology books echo those scary scenarios envisioned by the "extreme activists." Many blame parents for exaggerated global problems. "They may deny it," says Captain Eco, the high flying superhero of a large picture book called Captain Eco and the Fate of the Earth, "but ... they're stealing your future from under your noses."10
Captain Eco takes two children on a tour of the damaged earth. After showing them all the familiar abuses in the worst possible light, the captain points them to the final mega-problem: "and that's YOU."
"We're not that bad, are we?" they respond.
"Not you personally, but the whole human race. There are so many of you.... Either you go on... polluting all over the planet... Or you can work toward a better world.... Will you help me?"11
Lots of children are willing. They plant trees and clean river banks--which is great! They join Kids for Saving the Earth, Kids for a Clean Environment, Kids' in Nature's Defense, and the K-12 Network save the planet. They become vegetarians, peace activists, and Enviro-Cops who receive badges and recite oaths to protect the earth. They write letters by the thousands--to the White House, to Congress, to local newspapers. . . .
Spurred by activist teachers, students join worldwide environmental networks through global computer links, which can tap into advocacy groups like PeaceNet and EcoNet. Nearly 300 schools in 21 countries are linked through the International Education and Resource Network (I*LEARN) which was formed in 1991 when the Copen Foundation expanded its New York/Moscow project. Few children are equipped to recognize the indoctrination. In order to resist classroom pressures to embrace environmental globalism, children need to....
* Know science facts that expose false scenarios yet show practical solutions genuine problems. For scientific data, read The True State of the Planet: Ten of the World's Premier Environmental Researchers in a Major Challenge to the Environmental Movement, edited by Ronald Bailey.
* Understand some of the political visions which fuel the environmental movement.
* Remember that classroom computer programs and models don't simulate the real world. At best they match environmental ideology. The programmers decide what the computers will demonstrate.
To avoid compromise with mythical thinking and earth-centered environmentalism, children should watch out for songs, rituals, and myths that encourage pantheism and earth worship.
When God put humans in charge of his creation, He intended that we love and care for it as He would, not abuse it. (Genesis 1: 26, 28, 2:15). To do our part, we need to heed the Maker-not earthy spirits. By His life in us, we can share His concerns and follow His caring ways before the watchful eyes of the world.
* * * * * *
For more information about environmental education, read Brave New Schools (Harvest House Publishers) by Berit Kjos. Available through Radio Liberty. Call 1-800-544-8927
Endnotes:
1 Alexander King & Bertrand Schneider, The First Global Revolution (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), 115.
2 For example, trees are a renewable resource. The fact that the USA plants more trees than it cuts down is rarely, if ever, mentioned in environmental curricula.
3 Actually the ozone "hole" is not a hole at all. It is a seasonal thinning discovered back in 1956 by Dr. Gordon Dobson. Each spring, after the long sunless southern winter, the ozone layer thins over the Antarctica. Conversely, it always expands after the southern summer when ultraviolet radiation once again creates ozone. (The media didn't tell you that the "hole" closes each year, did it?) The annual thinning varies from year to year. In fact, less ozone was measured in 1985 than in 1990 though more freon was used. Why? Scientific data indicate a strong consistent correlation between ozone depletion and major volcanic explosions and other natural factors.
4 Alexander King & Bertrand Schneider, The First Global Revolution (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), 115.
5 Steven Chapman, Chicago Tribune, October 8, 1992.
6 Al Gore, "Earth in the Balance (Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 355, 258-9.
7 Globalists would like the California Social Studies Framework. Twisting the old meaning of "literacy," it requires students to demonstrate "Cultural Literacy" (understand "the mytholigy, legends, values, and beliefs" of the world's cultures), "Economic Literacy" ("understand...the problem of scarcity" and how to determine "what, how, and for whom to produce" within a planned economy), and "Geographic Literacy" ("Understand world regions" and how people are "changing the land"). History-Social Science Framework (Sacramento: The California Department of Education, 1988), 14-17.
8 Jonathan Schell, "Our Fragile Earth," Discover (October 1989); 44.
9 Dr. Frederick Seitz, Global Warming and Ozone Hole Controversies: A Challenge to Scientific Judgment (Washington, DC: George C. Marshall Institute, 1994), 25, 27, 33.
10 Jonathan Porritt, Captain Eco and the Fate of the Earth (New York: Dorling Kindersley, Inc., 1988), 5.
Excerpts from Brave New Schools by Berit Kjos
* * * * * *
"In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.1 Club of Rome (an influential group of globalist leaders)
* * * * * *
In the weeks surrounding Earth Day (April 22, Lenin's birthday), students from coast to coast celebrate their spiritual connection to Mother Earth, chant prayers to the Great Spirit, and imagine politically correct answers to the unequal distribution of the world's resources. Using computers that "simulate the real world," they recreate environmental disasters and "solve" global problems.
These dubious lessons share a common aim-. to persuade students to reject Western culture and become advocates for new global beliefs and values While this agenda makes little sense to those who view America from a traditional perspective, it makes perfect sense to leaders seeking global laws that would govern land, people, education, and consumption.
A lesson in Clean Sweep, an environmental curriculum published by the Iowa Department of Education, illustrates the bias behind environmental education. The class divides into two groups: first, the world's current population seated in a circle representing the earth; second, the "unborn" people of the world. Played like musical chairs, the game instructs the first group to gather natural resources whenever the music stops.
Meanwhile, new children are "born", adding to the fast-growing "population" consuming the dwindling resources. Guess what happens. The world runs out of resources.
Like most environmental classroom exercises, the game sounds logical but distorts reality. Designed to change attitudes, it ignores scientific facts, social statistics, and renewable resources.2 Yet, what it does is far more dangerous than what it omits: it gives children an alarming view of an imagined reality. They feel the exaggerated dangers. They agree to solve the problem.
To make sure the children understand that America is the villain of the world, they discuss the main message: "The U.S.A. uses over 20% of the world's resources. . . How do the others feel toward the U.S.A. in this game?" Other questions prod the children toward these "right" conclusions: America's demand for resources deprives poorer nations of their equal share. Greedy nations must reduce consumption, block population growth, and make whatever sacrifices needed for common good and planetary healing.
Genuine concern for the environment is needful, for ecological abuses do destroy farm land, sea life, forests, and other resources-especially outside the Western word. But since most environmental problems are local or regional, they fail to serve the political purposes of global leaders who want nothing less than global governance.
Rousing whole nations to action, and inspiring a unified call for planetary management requires global disasters like ozone holes3 and rising ocean levels, not merely dying lakes and rivers. Globalist leaders know that well.
"In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill," declared members of the Club of Rome in a sweeping 1991 report on global governance." All these dangers are caused by human intervention.... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." 4
Al Gore, who wrote a book to spread a similar message, said, "We must make rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization."5 In Earth in the Balance, he calls for a "worldwide education program" and a "panreligious perspective" based on "the wisdom distilled by all faiths."6
Gore knows that common beliefs and values based on idealized (not factual) models of earth-centered cultures are vital to planetary oneness. Just as tribes, not individuals, owned the land and shared common values, so government must control land, populations, and beliefs in the next decade. A mythical "common good" must inspire the new policies.7
"We'd like to see the world a better place... to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination," said Stanford University environmentalist Stephen Schneider. "That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we might have... Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."8 (Emphasis added)
In other words, facts must yield to ideology. Excluded from public debate are uncompromising scientists like Dr. Frederick Seitz, past President of the National Academy of Sciences and recipient of the National Medal of Science, who refuses to conform to the government agenda.
"There is reason," writes Dr. Seitz, "based on sound scientific work, to express doubt that we are in immediate danger from either global warming or depletion of the ozone layer as envisaged by some extreme activists in the environmental movement."9
Yet, environmental curricula and children's ecology books echo those scary scenarios envisioned by the "extreme activists." Many blame parents for exaggerated global problems. "They may deny it," says Captain Eco, the high flying superhero of a large picture book called Captain Eco and the Fate of the Earth, "but ... they're stealing your future from under your noses."10
Captain Eco takes two children on a tour of the damaged earth. After showing them all the familiar abuses in the worst possible light, the captain points them to the final mega-problem: "and that's YOU."
"We're not that bad, are we?" they respond.
"Not you personally, but the whole human race. There are so many of you.... Either you go on... polluting all over the planet... Or you can work toward a better world.... Will you help me?"11
Lots of children are willing. They plant trees and clean river banks--which is great! They join Kids for Saving the Earth, Kids for a Clean Environment, Kids' in Nature's Defense, and the K-12 Network save the planet. They become vegetarians, peace activists, and Enviro-Cops who receive badges and recite oaths to protect the earth. They write letters by the thousands--to the White House, to Congress, to local newspapers. . . .
Spurred by activist teachers, students join worldwide environmental networks through global computer links, which can tap into advocacy groups like PeaceNet and EcoNet. Nearly 300 schools in 21 countries are linked through the International Education and Resource Network (I*LEARN) which was formed in 1991 when the Copen Foundation expanded its New York/Moscow project. Few children are equipped to recognize the indoctrination. In order to resist classroom pressures to embrace environmental globalism, children need to....
* Know science facts that expose false scenarios yet show practical solutions genuine problems. For scientific data, read The True State of the Planet: Ten of the World's Premier Environmental Researchers in a Major Challenge to the Environmental Movement, edited by Ronald Bailey.
* Understand some of the political visions which fuel the environmental movement.
* Remember that classroom computer programs and models don't simulate the real world. At best they match environmental ideology. The programmers decide what the computers will demonstrate.
To avoid compromise with mythical thinking and earth-centered environmentalism, children should watch out for songs, rituals, and myths that encourage pantheism and earth worship.
When God put humans in charge of his creation, He intended that we love and care for it as He would, not abuse it. (Genesis 1: 26, 28, 2:15). To do our part, we need to heed the Maker-not earthy spirits. By His life in us, we can share His concerns and follow His caring ways before the watchful eyes of the world.
* * * * * *
For more information about environmental education, read Brave New Schools (Harvest House Publishers) by Berit Kjos. Available through Radio Liberty. Call 1-800-544-8927
Endnotes:
1 Alexander King & Bertrand Schneider, The First Global Revolution (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), 115.
2 For example, trees are a renewable resource. The fact that the USA plants more trees than it cuts down is rarely, if ever, mentioned in environmental curricula.
3 Actually the ozone "hole" is not a hole at all. It is a seasonal thinning discovered back in 1956 by Dr. Gordon Dobson. Each spring, after the long sunless southern winter, the ozone layer thins over the Antarctica. Conversely, it always expands after the southern summer when ultraviolet radiation once again creates ozone. (The media didn't tell you that the "hole" closes each year, did it?) The annual thinning varies from year to year. In fact, less ozone was measured in 1985 than in 1990 though more freon was used. Why? Scientific data indicate a strong consistent correlation between ozone depletion and major volcanic explosions and other natural factors.
4 Alexander King & Bertrand Schneider, The First Global Revolution (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), 115.
5 Steven Chapman, Chicago Tribune, October 8, 1992.
6 Al Gore, "Earth in the Balance (Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 355, 258-9.
7 Globalists would like the California Social Studies Framework. Twisting the old meaning of "literacy," it requires students to demonstrate "Cultural Literacy" (understand "the mytholigy, legends, values, and beliefs" of the world's cultures), "Economic Literacy" ("understand...the problem of scarcity" and how to determine "what, how, and for whom to produce" within a planned economy), and "Geographic Literacy" ("Understand world regions" and how people are "changing the land"). History-Social Science Framework (Sacramento: The California Department of Education, 1988), 14-17.
8 Jonathan Schell, "Our Fragile Earth," Discover (October 1989); 44.
9 Dr. Frederick Seitz, Global Warming and Ozone Hole Controversies: A Challenge to Scientific Judgment (Washington, DC: George C. Marshall Institute, 1994), 25, 27, 33.
10 Jonathan Porritt, Captain Eco and the Fate of the Earth (New York: Dorling Kindersley, Inc., 1988), 5.
How Goldman Sachs Made Tens Of Billions Of Dollars From The Economic Collapse Of America
How Goldman Sachs Made Tens Of Billions Of Dollars From The Economic Collapse Of America In Four Easy Steps
Investment banking giant Goldman Sachs has become perhaps the most prominent symbol for everything that is wrong with the U.S. financial system, but most Americans cannot even begin to explain what they do or how they have made tens of billions of dollars from the economic collapse of America. The truth is that what Goldman Sachs did was fairly simple, and there may not have even been anything "illegal" about it (although they are now being investigated by the SEC among others).
The following is how Goldman Sachs made tens of billions of dollars from the economic collapse of America in four easy steps....
Step 1: Sell mortgage-related securities that are absolute junk to trusting clients at vastly overinflated prices.
Step 2: Bet against those same mortgage-related securities and make massive bets against the U.S. housing market so that your firm will make massive profits when the U.S. economy collapses.
Step 3: Have ex-Goldman executives in key positions of power in the U.S. government so that bailout money can be funneled to entities such as AIG that Goldman has made these bets with so that they can get paid after they win their bets.
Step 4: Collect the profits - Goldman Sachs is having their "most successful year" and will end up reporting approximately $50 billion in revenue for 2009.
So is it right for the biggest fish on Wall Street to make tens of billions of dollars by betting that the U.S. housing market will collapse?
You see, when you are talking about a financial giant the size of Goldman Sachs, the line between "betting that something will happen" and "making something happen" gets blurred very quickly.
Not that Goldman Sachs was the only one betting against the housing market.
According to the New York Times, firms like Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley also created mortgage-related securities and then bet that they would fail.....
Goldman was not the only firm that peddled these complex securities — known as synthetic collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s — and then made financial bets against them, called selling short in Wall Street parlance. Others that created similar securities and then bet they would fail, according to Wall Street traders, include Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley, as well as smaller firms like Tricadia Inc.
But certainly Goldman Sachs was the most prominent financial player involved in this type of activity.
In fact, without mentioning specifics, Goldman has even admitted publicly to wrongdoing. On November 17th, 2008 Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein even issued a public apology....
"We participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret."
But complicated financial transactions are something that most Americans simply do not understand, so the public outrage towards Goldman Sachs and others has been somewhat limited. But that does not change the very serious nature of the activities that Goldman was involved in....
"The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen," Sylvain Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R & R Consulting in New York, recently told The New York Times. "When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson."
But the sad thing is that many Americans do not even understand what Goldman Sachs is. Goldman Sachs was founded in 1869 and has forged a reputation as one of the elite financial institutions in the entire world. They only hire "the best and the brightest" and Ivy League graduates flock to the firm. Of the five major investment banks that dominated Wall Street before the crash, only Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have survived. Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns were severely damaged by the crash and ended up being purchased by retail banks and Lehman Brothers ended up folding.
There are persistent rumors that Goldman played a major role in the collapse of Bear Stearns and that ex-Goldman CEO Hank Paulson could have done much more to bail out Lehman Brothers, but perhaps nobody will ever know the full truth. All we do know is that at the end of the crash several of Goldman's competitors were destroyed and Goldman found itself in a more dominant position than ever.
The truth is that Goldman is a financial shark and they do not apologize for it.
An article in Rolling Stone recently put it this way....
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
So how did Goldman Sachs prosper so greatly in an environment that destroyed their competitors?
The following is an extended breakdown of just how Goldman Sachs was able to reap tens of billions of dollars in profits from the collapse of the U.S. housing market....
Step 1: Sell mortgage-related securities that are absolute junk to trusting clients at vastly overinflated prices.
In late 2006, Goldman Sachs made some fundamental changes in the way that they were approaching the U.S. housing market. According to a McClatchy report, Goldman spokesman Michael DuVally said that the firm decided at that time to reduce its mortgage risks by selling off subprime mortgage-related securities and by purchasing credit-default swaps to hedge against a serious downturn in the U.S. housing market.
The key moment came in December 2006. After "10 straight days of losses" in Goldman's mortgage business, Chief Financial Officer David Viniar called a meeting of key Goldman personnel.
Vanity Fair described the results of that meeting this way....
After a now famous meeting in David Viniar’s office on December 14, 2006, Goldman’s traders began to protect the firm against further declines in the market. Just as you can short the S&P 500, the traders took short positions in an index that tracked the price of mortgage-backed securities. They also either sold assets they owned to others at losses or dramatically marked down the price on their own books. In the aftermath of the crisis, criticism erupted that Goldman had continued to sell mortgage-backed securities to its clients while betting against those very securities for its own account. Clearly, in the simplest terms possible, this is true: while Goldman was never the biggest underwriter of C.D.O.’s (collateralized debt obligations—Wall Street’s vehicle of choice for mortgage-backed securities), the firm did remain in the top five until the summer of 2007, when the market crashed to a halt.
So Goldman Sachs proceeded to sell approxmiately $39 billion of its own mortgage securities in 2006 and 2007 and they sold at least $17 billion more mortgage securities for others, but they never told the buyers of those securities that Goldman was secretly betting that a significant drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those mortgage securities plummeting.
These sales and the massive clandestine wagers placed by Goldman enabled the firm to pass most of its potential losses on to others prior to the collapse of the U.S. housing market.
But many of the investors who got the short end of the stick were not pleased. When they discovered that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were actually a bunch of garbage, many of them were absolutely furious.
"The Securities and Exchange Commission should be very interested in any financial company that secretly decides a financial product is a loser and then goes out and actively markets that product or very similar products to unsuspecting customers without disclosing its true opinion," said Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff. "This is fraud and should be prosecuted."
One of the victims of this fraud was the state of Mississippi....
Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, whose state has lost $5 million of the $6 million it invested in Goldman's subprime mortgage-backed bonds in 2006, said the state's funds are likely to lose "hundreds of millions of dollars" on those and similar bonds.
Another one of the victims of this fraud was California's retirement system for public employees....
California's huge public employees' retirement system, known as CALPERS, purchased $64.4 million in subprime mortgage-backed bonds from Goldman on March 1, 2007. While that represented a tiny percentage of the fund's holdings, in July CALPERS listed the bonds' value at $16.6 million, a drop of nearly 75 percent, according to documents obtained through a state public records request.
So who is left holding the bag in cases such as these?
The taxpayers.
And that is just fine with Goldman Sachs. Just as long as they keep raking in huge profits.
Vanity Fair was even more blunt regarding this injustice....
"Goldman’s management team was almost flawless in its execution. But how many people needed government help because of the things Goldman sold them?"
The truth is that a lot of people needed help because of the things Goldman sold them, but up until now Goldman has completely gotten away with it.
Step 2: Bet against those same mortgage-related securities and make massive bets against the U.S. housing market so that your firm will make massive profits when the U.S. economy collapses.
Not only did Goldman sell mortgage-related securities that were absolute junk to investors at vastly overinflated prices, they also placed massive bets that the U.S. housing market would absolutely collapse.
The New York Times recently described how Goldman used a new index known as the ABX to make many of these bets....
A handful of investors and Wall Street traders, however, anticipated the crisis. In 2006, Wall Street had introduced a new index, called the ABX, that became a way to invest in the direction of mortgage securities. The index allowed traders to bet on or against pools of mortgages with different risk characteristics, just as stock indexes enable traders to bet on whether the overall stock market, or technology stocks or bank stocks, will go up or down.
Goldman, among others on Wall Street, has said since the collapse that it made big money by using the ABX to bet against the housing market. Worried about a housing bubble, top Goldman executives decided in December 2006 to change the firm’s overall stance on the mortgage market, from positive to negative, though it did not disclose that publicly.
These bets would only make money for Goldman Sachs if the U.S. housing market declined.
So if the biggest giant on Wall Street has a huge financial incentive to see the U.S. housing market fail, what do you think the odds are that they are going to do anything to support it?
Step 3: Have ex-Goldman executives in key positions of power in the U.S. government so that bailout money can be funneled to entities such as AIG that Goldman has made these bets with so that they could get paid.
For years, Goldman Sachs has encouraged executives to serve in U.S. government positions. Now they are world famous for the amount of influence their former employees have over government policy.
For example, according to the New York Times, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (also a former Goldman CEO) spoke with the current CEO of Goldman Sachs about two dozen times during the week of the bailout, although Paulson says that he obtained an "ethics waiver" before doing so.
So does an "ethics waiver" make everything okay?
But the sad thing is that is not an isolated example.
It turns out that Goldman benefited greatly from a number of decisions made by their former CEO while he was Treasury Secretary....
*Goldman greatly benefited when Paulson elected not to save rival Lehman Brothers from collapse. Paulson certainly stepped in to help Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG, but apparently had no problem with letting Lehman Brothers fall apart.
*Under Paulson's direction, Goldman ended up receiving bailout money (which they may or may not have needed) from the U.S. government and has since paid back much of that money with interest. So why didn't Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers get the bailout funds that they needed?
*Goldman greatly benefitted when Paulson organized a massive rescue of American International Group while in constant telephone contact with Goldman CEO Blankfein. AIG ultimately ended up using $12.9 billion taxpayer dollars to pay off every single penny that it owed to Goldman.
But it is not just Paulson who has had significant influence in Washington.
On October 16th, Adam Storch, a Goldman Sachs vice president, was named managing executive of the SEC's enforcement division. What do you think the odds are that he will crack down hard on Goldman?
In addition, former Goldman Sachs lobbyist Mark Patterson is the chief of staff for current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
In fact, ex-Goldman employees are seemingly everywhere. According to Vanity Fair, at one G-7 meeting an anonymous source identified at least 24 out of 32 finance officials in attendance as ex-Goldman employees.
The influence of Goldman Sachs even reaches to the White House. Goldman was Barack Obama's number one campaign donor, and its employees gave $981,000 to his campaign.
If you don't think that kind of money does not buy influence then you are delusional.
Goldman used some of that powerful influence to get the U.S. government to bail out AIG so that AIG could pay off the bets that Goldman had made with them. In a recent article, Vanity Fair described part of what went down....
After the government bailout of A.I.G., in order to end the collateral calls on the insurance giant, the New York Federal Reserve—whose chairman at the time was former Goldman chairman Steve Friedman—decided to purchase a slew of the securities that A.I.G. had insured, including $14 billion of those on which Goldman had purchased insurance. The government—meaning taxpayers—did so at full price, although according to a recent Bloomberg story, there had been negotiations with A.I.G. to do so at a 40 percent discount. Goldman says that the New York Fed broached the topic of a discount only once. The firm’s response: a flat no. While no one will ever know what would have happened had A.I.G. gone under, the essence of what did happen is perfectly clear. As a recent report by the Office of the Special Inspector General for tarpput it, the decision to pay full price “effectively transferred tens of billions of dollars of cash from the Government to A.I.G.’s counterparties.” Or to put it another way: because Goldman felt it was owed its billions by A.I.G., the firm took it from taxpayers instead.
So what about all of the thousands of small businesses that are failing and what about the millions of Americans that are losing their jobs and homes?
Do they get bailouts?
Of course not.
But the U.S. government definitely made sure that AIG and Goldman were taken care of.
Step 4: Collect the profits - Goldman Sachs is having their "most successful year" and will end up reporting approximately $50 billion in revenue for 2009.
Goldman Sachs ranks #1 in annual net income when compared with 86 peers in the investment services sector. They are on course for their best year ever.
Yes, they are having a really good "crisis".
Goldman Sachs is on course to surpass $50 billion in revenue in 2009 and to pay its employees more than $20 billion in year-end bonuses.
20 billion just in bonuses?
That would mean that the average bonus for all Goldman employees would be over $700,000.
No wonder everyone wants to work for them.
It's good to be on the winning side.
So just how are they making so much money?
In their recent article, Vanity Fair described it this way....
But because so many of Goldman’s competitors were gone or disabled, spreads—the difference between the price at which you sell and buy a variety of securities—were wider than they had been in years, meaning that Goldman could practically mint money. By acting at the moment it did, with Lehman out and Merrill Lynch down for the count, the government enabled this situation.
The other reason for Goldman’s profits is that the government has flooded the system with money, not just the money it used to rescue the financial system but hundreds of billions more in stimulus, in support of the housing market, and in the Federal Reserve’s purchases of securities.
But all of this success has not come without controversy. In fact, Goldman executives are very much aware of the growing backlash against the firm.
Senior officials at Goldman Sachs have reportedly loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a "populist uprising" against the bank.
In addition, Goldman Sachs employees are now not allowed to gather in groups of 12 or more outside the office. The firm very much discouraged "holiday parties" as they most definitely did not want to be seen as celebrating the downfall of the U.S. economy.
But the truth is that Goldman Sachs won because so many others lost.
In his very revealing article on Goldman Sachs in Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi described how Goldman keeps making money from the bursting of these economic bubbles....
They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.
The truth is that in this latest economic collapse there were millions of losers and just a few winners.
Goldman Sachs was one of those winners.
So will they lose next time?
Not likely.
In their recent article, Vanity Fair quoted an anonymous source in the financial industry as saying the following....
"Are they the Yankees? No, the Yankees actually lose! Goldman never loses."
Share and Enjoy:
Investment banking giant Goldman Sachs has become perhaps the most prominent symbol for everything that is wrong with the U.S. financial system, but most Americans cannot even begin to explain what they do or how they have made tens of billions of dollars from the economic collapse of America. The truth is that what Goldman Sachs did was fairly simple, and there may not have even been anything "illegal" about it (although they are now being investigated by the SEC among others).
The following is how Goldman Sachs made tens of billions of dollars from the economic collapse of America in four easy steps....
Step 1: Sell mortgage-related securities that are absolute junk to trusting clients at vastly overinflated prices.
Step 2: Bet against those same mortgage-related securities and make massive bets against the U.S. housing market so that your firm will make massive profits when the U.S. economy collapses.
Step 3: Have ex-Goldman executives in key positions of power in the U.S. government so that bailout money can be funneled to entities such as AIG that Goldman has made these bets with so that they can get paid after they win their bets.
Step 4: Collect the profits - Goldman Sachs is having their "most successful year" and will end up reporting approximately $50 billion in revenue for 2009.
So is it right for the biggest fish on Wall Street to make tens of billions of dollars by betting that the U.S. housing market will collapse?
You see, when you are talking about a financial giant the size of Goldman Sachs, the line between "betting that something will happen" and "making something happen" gets blurred very quickly.
Not that Goldman Sachs was the only one betting against the housing market.
According to the New York Times, firms like Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley also created mortgage-related securities and then bet that they would fail.....
Goldman was not the only firm that peddled these complex securities — known as synthetic collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s — and then made financial bets against them, called selling short in Wall Street parlance. Others that created similar securities and then bet they would fail, according to Wall Street traders, include Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley, as well as smaller firms like Tricadia Inc.
But certainly Goldman Sachs was the most prominent financial player involved in this type of activity.
In fact, without mentioning specifics, Goldman has even admitted publicly to wrongdoing. On November 17th, 2008 Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein even issued a public apology....
"We participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret."
But complicated financial transactions are something that most Americans simply do not understand, so the public outrage towards Goldman Sachs and others has been somewhat limited. But that does not change the very serious nature of the activities that Goldman was involved in....
"The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen," Sylvain Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R & R Consulting in New York, recently told The New York Times. "When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson."
But the sad thing is that many Americans do not even understand what Goldman Sachs is. Goldman Sachs was founded in 1869 and has forged a reputation as one of the elite financial institutions in the entire world. They only hire "the best and the brightest" and Ivy League graduates flock to the firm. Of the five major investment banks that dominated Wall Street before the crash, only Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have survived. Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns were severely damaged by the crash and ended up being purchased by retail banks and Lehman Brothers ended up folding.
There are persistent rumors that Goldman played a major role in the collapse of Bear Stearns and that ex-Goldman CEO Hank Paulson could have done much more to bail out Lehman Brothers, but perhaps nobody will ever know the full truth. All we do know is that at the end of the crash several of Goldman's competitors were destroyed and Goldman found itself in a more dominant position than ever.
The truth is that Goldman is a financial shark and they do not apologize for it.
An article in Rolling Stone recently put it this way....
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
So how did Goldman Sachs prosper so greatly in an environment that destroyed their competitors?
The following is an extended breakdown of just how Goldman Sachs was able to reap tens of billions of dollars in profits from the collapse of the U.S. housing market....
Step 1: Sell mortgage-related securities that are absolute junk to trusting clients at vastly overinflated prices.
In late 2006, Goldman Sachs made some fundamental changes in the way that they were approaching the U.S. housing market. According to a McClatchy report, Goldman spokesman Michael DuVally said that the firm decided at that time to reduce its mortgage risks by selling off subprime mortgage-related securities and by purchasing credit-default swaps to hedge against a serious downturn in the U.S. housing market.
The key moment came in December 2006. After "10 straight days of losses" in Goldman's mortgage business, Chief Financial Officer David Viniar called a meeting of key Goldman personnel.
Vanity Fair described the results of that meeting this way....
After a now famous meeting in David Viniar’s office on December 14, 2006, Goldman’s traders began to protect the firm against further declines in the market. Just as you can short the S&P 500, the traders took short positions in an index that tracked the price of mortgage-backed securities. They also either sold assets they owned to others at losses or dramatically marked down the price on their own books. In the aftermath of the crisis, criticism erupted that Goldman had continued to sell mortgage-backed securities to its clients while betting against those very securities for its own account. Clearly, in the simplest terms possible, this is true: while Goldman was never the biggest underwriter of C.D.O.’s (collateralized debt obligations—Wall Street’s vehicle of choice for mortgage-backed securities), the firm did remain in the top five until the summer of 2007, when the market crashed to a halt.
So Goldman Sachs proceeded to sell approxmiately $39 billion of its own mortgage securities in 2006 and 2007 and they sold at least $17 billion more mortgage securities for others, but they never told the buyers of those securities that Goldman was secretly betting that a significant drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those mortgage securities plummeting.
These sales and the massive clandestine wagers placed by Goldman enabled the firm to pass most of its potential losses on to others prior to the collapse of the U.S. housing market.
But many of the investors who got the short end of the stick were not pleased. When they discovered that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were actually a bunch of garbage, many of them were absolutely furious.
"The Securities and Exchange Commission should be very interested in any financial company that secretly decides a financial product is a loser and then goes out and actively markets that product or very similar products to unsuspecting customers without disclosing its true opinion," said Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff. "This is fraud and should be prosecuted."
One of the victims of this fraud was the state of Mississippi....
Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, whose state has lost $5 million of the $6 million it invested in Goldman's subprime mortgage-backed bonds in 2006, said the state's funds are likely to lose "hundreds of millions of dollars" on those and similar bonds.
Another one of the victims of this fraud was California's retirement system for public employees....
California's huge public employees' retirement system, known as CALPERS, purchased $64.4 million in subprime mortgage-backed bonds from Goldman on March 1, 2007. While that represented a tiny percentage of the fund's holdings, in July CALPERS listed the bonds' value at $16.6 million, a drop of nearly 75 percent, according to documents obtained through a state public records request.
So who is left holding the bag in cases such as these?
The taxpayers.
And that is just fine with Goldman Sachs. Just as long as they keep raking in huge profits.
Vanity Fair was even more blunt regarding this injustice....
"Goldman’s management team was almost flawless in its execution. But how many people needed government help because of the things Goldman sold them?"
The truth is that a lot of people needed help because of the things Goldman sold them, but up until now Goldman has completely gotten away with it.
Step 2: Bet against those same mortgage-related securities and make massive bets against the U.S. housing market so that your firm will make massive profits when the U.S. economy collapses.
Not only did Goldman sell mortgage-related securities that were absolute junk to investors at vastly overinflated prices, they also placed massive bets that the U.S. housing market would absolutely collapse.
The New York Times recently described how Goldman used a new index known as the ABX to make many of these bets....
A handful of investors and Wall Street traders, however, anticipated the crisis. In 2006, Wall Street had introduced a new index, called the ABX, that became a way to invest in the direction of mortgage securities. The index allowed traders to bet on or against pools of mortgages with different risk characteristics, just as stock indexes enable traders to bet on whether the overall stock market, or technology stocks or bank stocks, will go up or down.
Goldman, among others on Wall Street, has said since the collapse that it made big money by using the ABX to bet against the housing market. Worried about a housing bubble, top Goldman executives decided in December 2006 to change the firm’s overall stance on the mortgage market, from positive to negative, though it did not disclose that publicly.
These bets would only make money for Goldman Sachs if the U.S. housing market declined.
So if the biggest giant on Wall Street has a huge financial incentive to see the U.S. housing market fail, what do you think the odds are that they are going to do anything to support it?
Step 3: Have ex-Goldman executives in key positions of power in the U.S. government so that bailout money can be funneled to entities such as AIG that Goldman has made these bets with so that they could get paid.
For years, Goldman Sachs has encouraged executives to serve in U.S. government positions. Now they are world famous for the amount of influence their former employees have over government policy.
For example, according to the New York Times, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (also a former Goldman CEO) spoke with the current CEO of Goldman Sachs about two dozen times during the week of the bailout, although Paulson says that he obtained an "ethics waiver" before doing so.
So does an "ethics waiver" make everything okay?
But the sad thing is that is not an isolated example.
It turns out that Goldman benefited greatly from a number of decisions made by their former CEO while he was Treasury Secretary....
*Goldman greatly benefited when Paulson elected not to save rival Lehman Brothers from collapse. Paulson certainly stepped in to help Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG, but apparently had no problem with letting Lehman Brothers fall apart.
*Under Paulson's direction, Goldman ended up receiving bailout money (which they may or may not have needed) from the U.S. government and has since paid back much of that money with interest. So why didn't Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers get the bailout funds that they needed?
*Goldman greatly benefitted when Paulson organized a massive rescue of American International Group while in constant telephone contact with Goldman CEO Blankfein. AIG ultimately ended up using $12.9 billion taxpayer dollars to pay off every single penny that it owed to Goldman.
But it is not just Paulson who has had significant influence in Washington.
On October 16th, Adam Storch, a Goldman Sachs vice president, was named managing executive of the SEC's enforcement division. What do you think the odds are that he will crack down hard on Goldman?
In addition, former Goldman Sachs lobbyist Mark Patterson is the chief of staff for current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
In fact, ex-Goldman employees are seemingly everywhere. According to Vanity Fair, at one G-7 meeting an anonymous source identified at least 24 out of 32 finance officials in attendance as ex-Goldman employees.
The influence of Goldman Sachs even reaches to the White House. Goldman was Barack Obama's number one campaign donor, and its employees gave $981,000 to his campaign.
If you don't think that kind of money does not buy influence then you are delusional.
Goldman used some of that powerful influence to get the U.S. government to bail out AIG so that AIG could pay off the bets that Goldman had made with them. In a recent article, Vanity Fair described part of what went down....
After the government bailout of A.I.G., in order to end the collateral calls on the insurance giant, the New York Federal Reserve—whose chairman at the time was former Goldman chairman Steve Friedman—decided to purchase a slew of the securities that A.I.G. had insured, including $14 billion of those on which Goldman had purchased insurance. The government—meaning taxpayers—did so at full price, although according to a recent Bloomberg story, there had been negotiations with A.I.G. to do so at a 40 percent discount. Goldman says that the New York Fed broached the topic of a discount only once. The firm’s response: a flat no. While no one will ever know what would have happened had A.I.G. gone under, the essence of what did happen is perfectly clear. As a recent report by the Office of the Special Inspector General for tarpput it, the decision to pay full price “effectively transferred tens of billions of dollars of cash from the Government to A.I.G.’s counterparties.” Or to put it another way: because Goldman felt it was owed its billions by A.I.G., the firm took it from taxpayers instead.
So what about all of the thousands of small businesses that are failing and what about the millions of Americans that are losing their jobs and homes?
Do they get bailouts?
Of course not.
But the U.S. government definitely made sure that AIG and Goldman were taken care of.
Step 4: Collect the profits - Goldman Sachs is having their "most successful year" and will end up reporting approximately $50 billion in revenue for 2009.
Goldman Sachs ranks #1 in annual net income when compared with 86 peers in the investment services sector. They are on course for their best year ever.
Yes, they are having a really good "crisis".
Goldman Sachs is on course to surpass $50 billion in revenue in 2009 and to pay its employees more than $20 billion in year-end bonuses.
20 billion just in bonuses?
That would mean that the average bonus for all Goldman employees would be over $700,000.
No wonder everyone wants to work for them.
It's good to be on the winning side.
So just how are they making so much money?
In their recent article, Vanity Fair described it this way....
But because so many of Goldman’s competitors were gone or disabled, spreads—the difference between the price at which you sell and buy a variety of securities—were wider than they had been in years, meaning that Goldman could practically mint money. By acting at the moment it did, with Lehman out and Merrill Lynch down for the count, the government enabled this situation.
The other reason for Goldman’s profits is that the government has flooded the system with money, not just the money it used to rescue the financial system but hundreds of billions more in stimulus, in support of the housing market, and in the Federal Reserve’s purchases of securities.
But all of this success has not come without controversy. In fact, Goldman executives are very much aware of the growing backlash against the firm.
Senior officials at Goldman Sachs have reportedly loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a "populist uprising" against the bank.
In addition, Goldman Sachs employees are now not allowed to gather in groups of 12 or more outside the office. The firm very much discouraged "holiday parties" as they most definitely did not want to be seen as celebrating the downfall of the U.S. economy.
But the truth is that Goldman Sachs won because so many others lost.
In his very revealing article on Goldman Sachs in Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi described how Goldman keeps making money from the bursting of these economic bubbles....
They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.
The truth is that in this latest economic collapse there were millions of losers and just a few winners.
Goldman Sachs was one of those winners.
So will they lose next time?
Not likely.
In their recent article, Vanity Fair quoted an anonymous source in the financial industry as saying the following....
"Are they the Yankees? No, the Yankees actually lose! Goldman never loses."
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Colorado's Minimum Wage Becomes 1st In US To Drop
Colorado's Minimum Wage Becomes 1st In US To Drop
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