Forum Post: A UNIFYING MESSAGE (for starters) from an Insider
Posted 13 years ago on Sept. 25, 2011, 9:01 a.m. EST by Insider
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According to the NYT article, there didn't seem to be a unified cause. Well, here's one from a knowledgable insider. INDICT WALL STREET EXECUTIVES WHO TESTIFIED AND LIED TO CONGRESS. Mike Taiibi of Rolling Stone magazine has documented these felonies in detail, yet Congress does nothing. If Roger Clemens is a target for lying about steroid use, WHY NOT WALL STREET EXECUTIVES who blatantly, smugly lied to Congress and the public. Some of you may consider me part of Wall Street, but I can tell you that many of "us" are just as fed up as all of you.
UNIFY THE MESSAGE AND 'WE' WILL MARCH!
Here's the worse part about the misuse of the Fed's repurchase window: The low-interest rate loans to banks, like Goldman Sachs, is supposed to fuel the economy by allowing banks to make loans to businesses, builders, and families. But the money is not being used by Goldman Sachs and others to lend money to stimulate the economy. What are the banks doing with the repo money when they are not loaning it back to the US Government at a higher rate of interest? They are using it to speculate in securities. This is why Goldman Sachs declared a loss for last quarter despite milking the taxpayers of millions of dollars in interest. In other words, the wealth of the country which should be stimulating our economy is going into a rat hole known as futures trading. . Money is disappearing because of bad bets. The economy is imploding. Unless the Fed and the banks start cooperating to lend money rather than use it to buy hedge positions that aren't hedges, that turn into lost money, we are heading for deflation and that means one thing: another Great Depression.
A march on Wall Street is long overdue. Mike Moneybags Bloomberg will do all he can to suppress it.
The goal should not be narrow in scope. The time for policy minutiae is not now. The goal should be to unseat the oligarchy. That is the goal. Too many years of "moderating" our goals and our positions have led us to believe that change is incremental. Rather, we've been taught this by the "experts" and the people "in charge". Change is not realized through a slow, plodding incrementalism. Is an earthquake slow? Is a tornado incremental?
We are exactly as powerful as we think we are. The goal of the movement is to eradicate the corruption that has captured our democracy. The goal is to unseat the oligarchy.
Bring your message to the Square! Your voice is welcome. I don't think we need a single demand. I think we can rally around being the 99% who've seen the problems in our society manifest in our own lives in a variety of ways, so we have a variety of priorities and demands. But the fact remains that there is a common source of corruption that impacts us all and we are rallying around our opposition to that corruption. Your analysis of the corruption is valuable, please bring it to the Square!
The People v Goldman Sachs could well form the basis of a "people's prosecutor's" brief to a "Citizen's Grand Jury" organized in Liberty Plaza, before handing down some Citizen's Indictments.
The 5th amendment does not give the right to convene Grand Juries to the executive. Rather, as explained by Antonin Scalia in United States v. Williams, 504 U.S. 36 at 48 (1992), it is a "constitutional fixture in its own right", assigned to none of the 3 branches of government: "In fact, the whole theory of its function is that it belongs to no branch of the institutional Government, serving as a kind of buffer or referee between the Government and the people."
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=504&invol=36
How do Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the Michael Bloomberg's other Wall Street customers earn their money? By shooting fish in a barrel through the Federal Reserve repo window.
Each day, Goldman borrows millions of dollars from the Fed "window" by pledging securities that they agree to buy back the next day. As a practical matter, this buy-back keeps rolling over indefinitely. Goldman pays the Fed about half a percentage point in interest (0.5%). Goldman then lends the money back to the US Government by purchasing Treasury debt that pays about 1%. The spread of half a percent is pure, risk-free profit to Goldman Sachs every day of the week. It might not sound like much but if one multiplies millions and millions of dollars by 50 basis points (0.5%), the earnings for Goldman are astronomical.
Who pays for Goldman's CEO's (Lloyd Blankfein) millionaire smirk? The taxpayers, of course, in collusion with the Federal Reserve Bank (a privately-owned organization) and the US Treasury Department (which is "owned" by the Fed.) .Wall Street is a fixed game that keeps winning more and more of America's treasure at the expense of hard-working people who can ill-afford to keep anteing up. .
The CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, lied to Congress and Congress knows it, but Goldman has the protection of the Federal Reserve Board, the Treasury Secretary and the President. The special treatment for Goldman Sachs began with the Bush administration's Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsen, who was formerly CEO of Goldman Sachs! Even as he stood aside while a Goldman competitor, Lehman Brothers, self-destructed, he begged for a billion+ dollar bail-out of Goldman Sachs and got it.
Now, Wall Street only has two traditional investment banks, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, whom the Fed and Treasury are compelled to protect if the current "free-market" system is to work. The game is fixed and Blankfein and the other banking pigs can lie to their customers, Congress and the SEC with impunity.
What about.. OUR GOALS ARE:
To end the Wall Street dictatorship and the aristocratic rights to tax exemption,
Creating a real participatory democracy,
Ending the oppression of all marginalized groups, and
Promoting peace, solidarity, and economic justice.
Here a little video with Mike explaining a "crime"
www.democracynow.org/2010/4/12/looting_main_street_matt_taibbi_on
Definitely need a mission statement. I'm not sure whether to support anymore because I can't tell if Anarchy is part of the mission statement. If it is, I don't want anything to do with this. I think some radical reforms are needed - particularly for severing the strangle hold big business has on government among other things but I don't want to live in the lord of the flies.
The strangle hold big business has on government is, in part, due to the lobbying by big businesses, funding politicians' campaigns so they will vote in the interest of big business. If the movement demanded an end to lobbying - legal bribery - honest people could get seats in Washington and start unraveling the tax exemption for the 1%
Totally true - check out theonlinegovernment.org