New revelations of the Federal Reserve’s duplicity and secrecy justify some objections of the OWS movement, but not all

By Seth Richardson

We’ve always been left to wonder why the bailout of the Big Six banks, including JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup,Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley were so painless for the banks and how they were able to weather the financial tsunami that has devastated our economy and indirectly the economy of the world and instead flourish.

Turns out it’s all Ben Bernanke’s and the Federal Reserve’s fault.

A story in Tuesday’s Denver Post by Bloomberg News reporters Bob Ivry, Bradley Keoun and PHil Kuntz illuminates just how it is that these six firms avoided their natural free-market fate of bankruptcy. It was the Federal Reserve that saved them, and it was the Federal Reserve, in collusion with the Big Six, that kept taxpayers in the dark, deliberately, about how much the Big Six were getting from taxpayers. The staggering total is far, far more than the $700 billion in TARP funds. When it’s all said and done, the Big Six took 63 percent of the funds you and I will be paying for, and worse, through secrecy, chicanery and manipulation they managed not just to avoid bankruptcy, they all managed to grow substantially, collectively by some $2.5 trillion dollars, or 39 percent, between 2006 and 2011, while innocent homeowners who had never missed a payment had their homes foreclosed upon merely because local property values made their homes worth less than the balance remaining on their mortgages.

The maths are complex, and I refer you to the article for a good explanation of exactly how it happened, but the upshot is that the Big Six banks that should have been shut down by the Federal Reserve and the FDIC because they were failing and genuinely under-capitalized, were instead not just saved at public expense, but were given preeminent position in our banking economy, at the cost of many thousands of small, independent banks that were, and continue to be shut down by the government because their loan portfolios and cash capitalization are sub-par, in large part due to the machinations and malfeasance of the Big Six and the Federal Reserve itself. No bank bailouts for your local bank who, through no fault of their own now hold precarious or non-performing loans. Just arrogant FDIC auditors walking in and shutting the bank down without notice and selling its assets to a bigger bank.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: It is reasonably clear that this administration is attempting to concentrate all US banking in the Big Six and perhaps a few other interstate and international large banking networks, at the expense of local banking, in order to consolidate the Progressive-in-Chief’s power and control over the economy. The Federal Reserve is complicit in this centralization of banking because it’s the non-governmental, immune-from-scrutiny, un-audited controller of, quite literally, the entire economy of the world. When the Federal Reserve speaks, nations listen. It’s easier for the Fed and the Progressives to control a few large banks, and consequently the economy, than the tens of thousands of local banks we have in our independent banking network.

So I come to common cause with the Occupy Wall Street protesters insofar as they argue that the Big Six should be put out of business as punishment for their fiscal malfeasance, their officers (and Ben Bernanke) prosecuted for fraud and collusion, the Federal Reserve should be either disincorporated or placed under the close scrutiny and direct control of Congress and required to be fully transparent and its officers identified and held personally accountable for their actions, and that people should immediately withdraw all their money and investments from all of the Big Six and place them in their locally-owned banks and credit unions, as a way to protect our nation from the devastating evil of central banking.

Perhaps the OWS movement should change its name to “Kill the Big Six and the Fed.” With that agenda I completely agree.

© 2011 Altnews

State Supreme Court wisely rejects gerrymandering attempts to dilute Republican strongholds, but unwisely embeds “competitiveness” as a valid redistricting criteria in the law.

By Seth Richardson

The purpose of the Republic, and its political division into sovereign states operating under a central government of expressly limited powers was intended to ensure that people are free to choose the social and political atmosphere in which they would like to live. The fundamental constitutional right of freedom of association, and it’s implicit companion, freedom of disassociation, are embodied in the concept that if one does not agree with the policies and politics of a particular state, one is free to travel to another state where the legislative climate is more salubrious to one’s needs and desires.

This was the original intent of the Founders, but it didn’t take long for the federal government to begin interfering in internal state matters to deny voters the right to “vote with their feet.” After more than 30 years of oftentimes-controversial bickering over the morality of Mormon polygamy in the East, Brigham Young and his band of Mormons fled Nauvoo, Illinois for the west, settling in the Salt Lake valley, hoping to found the state of Deseret in what was technically Mexican territory captured by the United States in the Mexican-American War.

Mormons simply wanted to be left alone to practice their religious beliefs in peace, but the government of the United States, for several reasons, including competing religious beliefs that polygamy was “sinful,” refused to abide by the principles the Founders embraced in creating a Constitutional Republic comprised of sovereign states where governance and law would best serve the people of an individual state by remaining close to the source of its power: the People. In 1862 Congress passed the Morrill Act, which outlawed polygamy, and which lead to open rebellion and warfare in Utah as Mormons fought to preserve their First Amendment religious rights in the face of implacable moral opprobrium and physical attack on the part of the federal government, which was intent on suppressing the practice at any cost. Utah and the Mormon church finally capitulated, at least on the surface, in 1890. But polygamy has endured in Utah, and elsewhere, despite the best efforts of state and federal regulators to interfere in religious practice and substitute their own moral and religious beliefs for those of the Mormons.

Since the beginning, the ideals of the Founders regarding political and social freedom through state sovereignty and the right of free association (and disassociation) have been progressively eroded by the ever-expanding usurpation of state sovereignty by the federal government, and the entirely unconstitutional notion that it is within the power of the central government to closely regulate the lives of individuals within the states. Worse, this oppressive notion has trickled down to the state and local level.

This is seen in the present attempts to reapportion the state that has just been rejected by the state Supreme Court. Democrats have been trying to insist that republican strongholds be divided up to create “competitive” districts, which is ProgressiveSpeak for “enhance Progressive inroads on conservative voting blocs.” In other words, court-approved gerrymandering.

Fortunately for us all the Colorado Constitution erects substantial barriers to gerrymandering attempts by either party by specifying that all districts shall be physically “as compact as possible.” Combined with constitutional requirements that “communities of interest, including ethnic, cultural, economic, trade area, geographic, and demographic factors, shall be preserved within a single district wherever possible,” Colorado has long resisted the sort of back-east and down-south gerrymandering that disenfranchises minorities or makes minorities out of geographic majorities in order to dilute their voting power.

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that “[a]lthough reapportionment is not without political considerations, these considerations are not among the constitutional criteria, and the commission may not allow them to outweigh the constitutional criteria.” What this means is that “competitiveness” (which is to say the deliberate gerrymandering of districts to prevent or break up voting blocs) is actually an unconstitutional criteria for redistricting.

Or at least it was, until this week, when the liberal Supreme Court ignored the state Constitution and its own prior rulings in holding that “other nonconstitutional considerations, such as the competitiveness of a district are not per se illegal or improper.”

While the Court rejected the redistricting commission’s maps, it did so by holding that the redistricting did not pay proper attention to county boundaries, and it then inserted a knife straight into the heart of representative democracy by opening the door to “competitive” gerrymandering, if it can fit within the other constitutional constraints, which is nothing more than an unconstitutional elevation of minority political power intended to dilute the voting power of members of the public who have “voted with their feet” by moving to, and voting in districts and communities that best represent their political and social interests.

In the time of the Founders, if one did not like the political atmosphere of Virgina, one could move to New York or South Carolina to find communities and people of like mind and interest, and in doing so improve the chances that the majority opinion (within appropriate constitutional boundaries) would prevail and be preserved.

In contemporary Colorado we clearly see this effect at work by examining El Paso and Boulder counties. Boulder County is intensely liberal/progressive, to the point of being socialist or worse, and is so notorious in it’s bloc voting power that it’s a standing joke to refer to it as “The People’s Republic of Boulder.” Liberals and Progressives, granola-heads, Marxists, Communists and idealistic college students move to Boulder to enjoy both the great beauty and satisfying, if micromanaging and intrusive, political climate. As they have every right to do. We should never dream of trying to break up Boulder County to make it more “competitive” because to do so is to disparage the right of free association that brought people of like mind together in political harmony. If you don’t like Boulder’s politics, then move somewhere else. That’s what Thomas Jefferson would say.

On the other hand, people, including this writer, find that sort of liberal/progressive intrusiveness and bureaucratic arrogance and disdain for, in particular, private property rights, to be intolerable and a violation of our right to be free of obsessive and intrusive government bureaucracy, so we vote with our feet and move to places like El Paso County, where our political interests and needs are better respected and served. That is our right, and we should demand that it be respected as well.

This physical migration to find a salubrious political climate is the very essence of the fundamental structure of our nation from the very beginning. If you like liberty and Libertarian values and government, move to Wyoming or Idaho. If you like strict government control and central planning, move to California. It’s your constitutional right to do so.

But what the Democrats have attempted, and will certainly attempt again and again until they succeed, is to divide up El Paso County and other conservative strongholds in ways that marginalize the voting power of the people who moved and live here precisely because they like the conservative values and respect for liberty of their neighbors and wish to consolidate their political power here so that their values and beliefs will prevail, just as liberal/progressive values prevail in Boulder County. We must not allow them to do so, because that defies everything that the Founders, the U.S. Constitution, and our State Constitution stand for.

Given the recent Court ruling, there is now a dire need for a state constitutional amendment expressly prohibiting the use of “competitiveness” as a criteria in redistricting.

© 2011 Altnews

Violence emanating from Occupy Wall Street protests is inevitable and planned.

By Seth Richardson

“This thing has to escalate so people see the violence and who is protecting the interests of corporations, said Dwayne Hudson, an Occupy Wall Street protester in Denver, according to the Associated Press story in Friday’s Denver Post.

“It has to be nonviolent, or else it will just end. We won’t get support. That doesn’t mean you can agitate people. But you can’t also be breaking windows and burning,” said OWS protester Bob Norkus in Boston in the same story.

One is a Marxist agitator and one is a useful idiot. I leave it to you to decide which is which, but here’s a little background from Marx himself:

“The abolition of bourgeois [known today as "corporate"] individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at… you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend… The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, … all capital from the bourgeoisie …. Of course… this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois [today, "corporate"] production.” Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

Protest is an old and honorable right under our system of government. Those who protest “corporate greed” have a right to peaceably assemble and petition their government for redress of grievances. And there are many legitimate grievances that need to be redressed, but they are by and large grievances against the government itself, and specific bad actors in the private sector, not against capitalism generally.

Hudson says that people need to see “who is protecting the interests of corporations,” which is a valid enough demand, but one that doesn’t require violence. It’s society that is protecting the interests of corporations because society, as a whole, and I mean globally, recognizes that corporations are the business form that’s predominately used to create wealth and jobs in a capitalist, free market system. And “corporations” are not, as OWS protesters suggest, some sort of alien being that has infested the planet, they are, in fact, groups of ordinary people banding together in what socialists should laud as a highly democratic form of communal participation.

Corporations are legal entities comprised of shareholders who have voluntarily given “according to their ability” to a collective that is, by law, democratically operated by the shareholders. Corporate law requires that all corporations hold annual meetings at which shareholders may speak and express themselves, and at which they may vote, in person or by proxy, for the Board of Directors who guide the policies of the organization and hire and fire those responsible for the day-to-day operations of creating wealth for the collective.

It’s about as close to Marx’s ideal of the workers “owning the means of production” as you can get, since the shareholders own the corporation and all its assets, collectively.

That some corporations are wildly successful, generating massive wealth and profits for those who own it is a function of capitalism and good business. That successful corporate CEOs make huge salaries is an exercise in highly-socialistic democracy. That shareholders allow such salaries is nothing more than a collective decision to recognize that the purpose of a corporation is not “social justice” it’s to provide to each shareholder in direct proportion to his investment in the company. A successful corporation is not taking anything from anyone that they are not willing to give in return for value exchanged. This includes investors, customers and workers. This is unlike government, particularly socialist government, which inevitably takes from the productive class and gives to the dependent class against the will of those who are being stripped of the fruits of their individual labor.

Both Norkus and Hudson fail to understand that the Marxist dialectical claim that for the wealthy bourgeoisie (corporations and presumably CEOs) to be wealthy, that wealth must be extracted first from the working-class proletarian, and that this is inherently unfair, is utterly false and deceptive. This is what’s known as a “zero-sum fallacy” that claims that there is a limited pool of wealth available, and that the enhancement of one person’s wealth must diminish the wealth of another.

The truth is that wealth, in a capitalist system, is essentially unlimited, and however much wealth one person (like Warren Buffet or George Soros) may have does not negatively affect the ability of anyone else to create wealth of their own, they are in fact limited in their ability to improve their economic and social status only by their own personal limitations and incapacities. And the presence of large corporations, who are enormous consumers of adjunct, support and manufacturing services, actually substantially enhances the opportunity for any individual with a good idea who is willing to work hard to find venture capital investment and create even more wealth.

This is proven by the fact that in the United States, while the rich are indeed getting richer, so are the poor. According to the Macinac Center for Public Policy, citing the Wall Street Journal, “IRS tax return data shows that individuals in the bottom one-fifth back in 1996 experienced income growth of 91 percent by 2005. In contrast, individuals in the highest one-fifth saw their incomes increase just 10 percent over the same period. Incomes of households in the top 5 percent and 1 percent actually declined, by 7 percent and 24 percent, respectively.”

So it’s not that the poor are actually getting poorer, they aren’t. It’s just that the rich are getting richer faster than the poor, and Marxists don’t like this because they think it’s unfair that the rich aren’t being taxed “according to their ability” to absorb the demands for dependent-class support and equality of outcomes that Marxists insist is “fair.” This Marxist canard ignores the fact that it is the rich who provide the companies and the jobs that the poor use to improve their economic status, and that without those corporations, the poor would have no opportunity to share the American dream or prosper.

So when Norkus and Hudson rail against “corporate greed” they are in fact railing against their own inadequacies, incompetence and fears, not any inherent flaw in capitalism. Pogo’s famous declaration “we have met the enemy, and he is us” has never been truer than when applied to the ignorance of OWS protesters, who largely have the leisure to sit in a park somewhere and complain because Mommy and Daddy went about the business of creating wealth for their scion so that they could attend Marxist propaganda-dominated universities and take time off from their studies to protest that which they only dimly understand in an unfocused and ill-defined manner that insults even Karl Marx and the Communists, who at least were open about their intentions and clear in their message.

And they are all useful idiots that the true hard-line Marxists are using as dupes and shills to advance the plan of violent revolutionary overthrow of the United States and capitalism worldwide that has been the agenda of Marxists all along, as Marx himself said.

Fortunately, most hard-working Americans know that capitalism is not to blame for our economic crisis, government overreach and corruption are, and that Marxism and socialism are not viable alternative sociopolitical systems that can, or should replace free-market capitalism. This is why mainstream America is increasingly marginalizing and ignoring the OWS protests and is beginning to insist that if we are going to tolerate the OWS protests, which we certainly should, we should only do so as long as the useful idiots of OWS behave themselves, obey the law, and don’t constitute a public nuisance.

© 2011 Altnews