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| sacredsandwich.com |
According to research by the Center for Responsive Politics, 19 current members of Congress reported holdings in Goldman Sachs during 2010. Whether by coincidence or not, most of these 19 Goldman Sachs investors in Congress are more powerful or more wealthy than their peers, or both.I'll not drop any names
Nine of them sit on either the most powerful committee in their chamber or committees charged with regulating the Wall Street giant. Moreover, seven of them are among the 25 wealthiest members of their respective chambers, according to the Center's research.
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In early 1921 Franklin D. Roosevelt became vice president of the Fidelity & Deposit Company of Maryland and resident director of the company's New York office at 120 Broadway. Fidelity & Deposit of Maryland was an established insurance company specializing in the bonding and surety policies required on government and corporate contracts and a range of individual employments ranging from secretary of a trade union to employees of stock brokerage houses. In fact, a potential for bonding business exists wherever a contractor or employee can violate a fiduciary trust or fail to complete a contract, as in construction projects. In brief, bonding is a specialized field of insurance covering the risk of noncompliance. In 1921 Fidelity & Deposit was the fourth largest such bonding house in the United States, but not to be confused with the Fidelity and Casualty Company of New York, another insurance company, which incidentally had W. Emlen Roosevelt, FDR's cousin, on its board of directors.The question is why was FDR hired as vice president of this important New York office, despite not having any experience? Answer: his last name is Roosevelt and the bonding business is politically dependent. He was hired by Van-lear Black, who also owned the Baltimore Sun, and paid FDR a handsome salary of $25,000 per year, quite a princely sum in 1920s money. What happened here was he used his family connections, as there were a whole lot of Roosevelts working the Street, and is basically how he got bond business traffic to flow to Fidelity.
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| via Pilgrim Hall |
We are living in the age which lies between the two blazing beacons of the Divine appearings and we are called to hasten from one to the other.We're so very close to the second beacon and everything is going as the Book predicted it would. Truly thankful for that Book, it's a true blessing to those of us living in these times.
Seems like CBS is having a change of heart since Saturday’s debate. Three days ago CBS hosted an hour-long foreign policy debate during which Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul had a mere 90 seconds of air time. Less than a week later, the network is muscling competitors out of the way just to get a camera shot of the Texas congressman. Bloomberg’s latest poll numbers show Paul in a statistical tie for the lead in Iowa, causing even the not-so-Ron-Paul-friendly CBS to declare that his candidacy has moved into the “top tier.” Today during Rep. Paul’s appearance at a Cato Institute conference, one CBS cameraman was so determined to get a shot of the GOP candidate that he shoved Daily Caller videographer Direna Cousins. Paul stopped his interview to tell the CBS reporter to stop behaving so aggressively.via The Daily Caller
Gingrich has also backed corporate subsidies of the ethanol industry for decades, and became a paid consultant of the ethanol industry after he left office. The Wall Street Journal noted April 27, 2011 that "Professor Gingrich says his ethanol support is grounded in his lifetime of studying history and intellectual problems, but what about that $312,500 from the ethanol lobby?... We've never suggested Mr. Gingrich has been bought off, though of course there wouldn't be an ethanol lobby to hire Mr. Gingrich if there weren't politicians like Mr. Gingrich willing to prop it up with taxpayer dollars, tariffs and mandates."So if your fuel injectors quit and your gaskets get all leaky, thank Newt, for he wants you to have less and less gas mileage until you can't go anywhere but public transport. The trains await you, mundane!
It appears that more and more members of the House are realizing just how bad SOPA is. Joining Reps. Issa and Bachmann, who had previously spoken out about SOPA, a group of ten House members have signed a letter opposing SOPA. The letter was organized by Rep. Anna Eshoo, the leading Democrat on telco & tech -- but whose committee was not involved in the crafting of this bill for reasons that only make sense if the purpose of the bill was to regulate the internet without input from the industry being regulated.
The letter makes the same points many of us have been raising about SOPA. It's way too broad, does not accurately attack the problem it's trying to address, and will create massive liability for the internet & technology -- one of the few sectors growing today, and which has contributed a tremendous amount to economic growth over the past decade. Basically it makes the simple point: stifling the growing tech industry, to appease a Hollywood that refuses to adapt, is no way to go about managing an economy.
Among those who signed onto the letter are Ron Paul, showing that he continues to be internet savvy and recognizes that regulating the internet is a bad, bad idea. Others who signed on include Reps. Jared Polis, Mike Doyle (the man who introduced Girl Talk to Congress), Doris Matsui, Mike Thompson, Lloyd Doggett, Mike Honda, George Miller and Zoe Lofgren (who's been a vocal opponent to these attempts to stifle innovation from day one). We too often speak about politicians who aren't representing the best interests of the public, but it's great to see more and more elected officials recognize that SOPA is a gross overreach by a few big companies who don't want to adapt to a changing marketplace. Kudos to the Congressional Reps here for taking a stand and protecting jobs and innovation.
"We operate here under directives which emanate from the White House...The substance of the directives under which we operate is that we shalluse our grant making power to alter life in the United States such thatwe can comfortably be merged with the Soviet Union."Of course he was talking about the Ford Foundation's operations to undermine traditional American morality, individualism, and everything that's right about our country and turn it into what Norman Dodd said was "communism with American efficiency". And isn't that what we really have here?
With their five million dollars as a war chest, the Aldrich Plan propagandists waged a no-holds barred war against their opposition. Andrew Frame testified before the House Banking and Currency Committee of the American Bankers Association. He represented a group of Western bankers who opposed the Aldrich Plan:
CHAIRMAN CARTER GLASS: "Why didn’t the Western bankers make themselves heard when the American Bankers Association gave its unqualified and, we are assured, unanimous approval of the scheme proposed by the National Monetary Commission?"
ANDREW FRAME: "I’m glad you called my attention to that. When that monetary bill was given to the country, it was but a few days previous to the meeting of the American Bankers Association in New Orleans in 1911. There was not one banker in a hundred who had read that bill. We had twelve addresses in favor of it. General Hamby of Austin, Texas, wrote a letter to President Watts asking for a hearing against the bill. He did not get a very courteous answer. I refused to vote on it, and a great many other bankers did likewise."
MR. BULKLEY: "Do you mean that no member of the Association could be heard in opposition to the bill?"
ANDREW FRAME: "They throttled all argument."
MR. KINDRED: "But the report was given out that it was practically unanimous."
ANDREW FRAME: "The bill had already been prepared by Senator Aldrich and presented to the executive council of the American Bankers Association in May, 1911. As a member of that council, I received a copy the day before they acted upon it. When the bill came in at New Orleans, the bankers of the United States had not read it."
MR. KINDRED: "Did the presiding officer simply rule out those who wanted to discuss it negatively?"
ANDREW FRAME: "They would not allow anyone on the program who was not in favor of the bill."
CHAIRMAN GLASS: "What significance has the fact that at the next annual meeting of the American Bankers Association held at Detroit in 1912, the Association did not reiterate its endorsement of the plan of the National Monetary Commission, known as the Aldrich scheme?"
ANDREW FRAME: "It did not reiterate the endorsement for the simple fact that the backers of the Aldrich Plan knew that the Association would not endorse it. We were ready for them, but they did not bring it up."
Andrew Frame exposed the collusion which in 1911 procured an endorsement of the Aldrich Plan from the American Bankers Association but which in 1912 did not even dare to repeat its endorsement, for fear of an honest and open discussion of the merits of the plan.
Chairman Glass then called as witness one of the ten most powerful bankers in the United States, George Blumenthal, partner of the international banking house of Lazard Freres and brother-in-law of Eugene Meyer, Jr. Carter Glass effusively welcomed Blumenthal, stating that "Senator O’Gorman of New York was kind enough to suggest your name to us." A year later, O’Gorman prevented a Senate Committee from asking his master, Paul Warburg, any embarrassing questions before approving his nomination as the first Governor of the Federal Reserve Board.
George Blumenthal stated, "Since 1893 my firm of Lazard Freres has been foremost in importations and exportations of gold and has thereby come into contact with everybody who had anything to do with it."
Congressman Taylor asked, "Have you a statement there as to the part you have had in the importation of gold into the United States?" Taylor asked this because the Panic of 1893 is known to economists as a classic example of a money panic caused by gold movements.
"No," replied George Blumenthal, "I have nothing at all on that, because it is not bearing on the question."
A banker from Philadelphia, Leslie Shaw, dissented with other witnesses at these hearings, criticizing the much vaunted "decentralization" of the System. He said, "Under the Aldrich Plan the bankers are to have local associations and district associations, and when you have a local organization, the centered control is assured. Suppose we have a local association in Indianapolis; can you not name the three men who will dominate that association? And then can you not name the one man everywhere else. When you have hooked the banks together, they can have the biggest influence of anything in this country, with the exception of the newspapers."
Appraising the situation in the bitter dawn of a cold morning after, what do we find? We find two thirds of American industry concentrated in a few hundred corporations and actually managed by not more than five human individuals.We find more than half of the savings of the country invested in corporate stocks and bonds, and made the sport of the American stock market.We find fewer than three dozen private banking houses, and stock selling adjuncts of commercial banks, directing the flow of American capital.
In other words, we find concentrated economic power in a few hands, the precise opposite of the individualism of which the President speaksMy, my the more things change the more they stay the same, no?
Hoover, the Republican, was a J. P. Morgan puppet; Smith his democratic opponent, was in the pocket of the Du Ponts, for whom J. P. Morgan & Company was the banker. -Ferdinand Lundburg, The Rich and the Super-RichWhy didn't the banksters stick by their boy Hoover? The answer comes in the form of the Swope Plan, named after the president of General Electric.
Because, as we shall see later, Herbert Hoover would not adopt the Swope Plan created by Gerard Swope, long-time president of General Electric. By contrast, FDR accepted the plan, and it became FDR's National Industrial Recovery Act. So while Hoover was indebted to Wall Street, FDR was much more so.Let's step aside a moment and note that of all the volumes written on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, this is the only one that deeply delves into his career as a Wall Street financier. The "official" biographies give it a mere paragraph or so and totally gloss over the real issue. Our country's economy had recently been savaged by speculation (a contraction in the NY money supply actually) and you don't want to talk about where this FDR guy was during all that?
To be specific, Franklin D. Roosevelt was, at one time or another during the 1920s, a vice president of the Fidelity & Deposit Company (120 Broadway); the president of an industry trade association, the American Construction Council (28 West 44th Street); a partner in Roosevelt & O'Connor (120 Broadway); a partner in Marvin, Hooker & Roosevelt (52 Wall Street); the president of United European Investors, Ltd. (7 Pine Street); a director of International Germanic Trust, Inc. (in the Standard Oil Building at 26 Broadway); a director of Consolidated Automatic Merchandising Corporation, a paper organization; a trustee of Georgia Warm Springs Foundation (120 Broadway); a director of American Investigation Corporation (37-39 Pine Street); a director of Sanitary Postage Service Corporation (285 Madison Avenue); the chairman of the General Trust Company (15 Broad Street); a director of Photomaton (551 Fifth Avenue); a director of Mantacal Oil Corporation (Rock Springs, Wyoming); and an incorporator of the Federal International Investment Trust.
That's a pretty fair list of directorships. It surely earns FDR the title of Wall Streeter par excellence. Most who work on "the Street" never achieve, and probably never even dream about achieving, a record of 11 corporate directorships, two law partnerships, and the presidency of a major trade association.
In probing these directorships and their associated activities, we find that Roosevelt was a banker and a speculator, the two occupations he emphatically denounced in the 1932 Presidential election. Moreover, while banking and speculation have legitimate roles in a free society— indeed, they are essential for a sane monetary system—both can be abused. FDR's correspondence in the files deposited at the FDR Library in Hyde Park yields evidence—and evidence one reads with a heavy heart—that FDR was associated with the more unsavory elements of Wall Street banking and speculation, and one can arrive at no conclusion other than that FDR used the political arena, not the impartial market place, to make his profits.Meet Uncle Fred
A big problem in planning is that of educating the people. If the public only realized that there can be social gains from directed effort, and that the time to accomplish most by planning comes before the need of making changes are manifested, the other problems of planning could be more easily solved.
The above brief classification of the problem involved in planning serves as a basis for indicating the need for both direct and indirect social control. Very few people really know the best use of land for their own advantage, to say nothing of planning its use for the common good. Institutions have done a great deal in educating farmers how to plan individual farms, and yet many of the farms in this country are poorly organized.
An alliance of Wall Street and political office is implicit in this Roosevelt tradition. The policies implemented by the many Roosevelts have tended toward increased state intervention into business, desirable to some business elements, and therefore the Roosevelt search for political office can fairly be viewed as a self-seeking device. The euphemism of "public service" is a cover for utilizing the police power of the state for personal ends, a thesis we must investigate. If the Roosevelt tradition had been one of uncompromising laissez-faire, of getting the state out of business rather than encouraging intervention into economic activities, then our assessment would necessarily be quite different. However, from at least Clinton Roosevelt in 1841 to Franklin D. Roosevelt, the political power accumulated by the Roosevelt clan has been used on the side of regulating business in the interests of restricting competition, encouraging monopoly, and so bleeding the consumer in the interests of a financial élite. Further, we must consider the observation conveyed by Franklin D. Roosevelt to Edward House and cited in the epigraph to this chapter, that "a financial element in the large centers has owned the government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson." Consequently, it is pertinent to conclude this introductory chapter with the 1943 observations of William Allen White, an honest editor if ever there was one, who made one of the best literary critiques on this financial establishment in the context of World War II; this, it should be noted, was after ten years of FDR and at the peak of Roosevelt's political power:
One cannot move about Washington without bumping into the fact that we are running two wars—a foreign war and a domestic one.The domestic war is in the various war boards. Every great commodity industry in this country is organized nationally and many of them, perhaps most of them are parts of great national organizations, cartels, agreements, which function on both sides of the battle front.Here in Washington every industry is interested in saving its own self. It wants to come out of the war with a whole hide and with its organization unimpaired, legally or illegally.One is surprised to find men representing great commodity trusts or agreements or syndicates planted in the various war boards. It is silly to say New Dealers run this show. It's run largely by absentee owners of amalgamated industrial wealth, men who either directly or through their employers control small minority blocks, closely organized, that manipulate the physical plants of these trusts.For the most part these managerial magnates are decent, patriotic Americans. They have great talents. If you touch them in nine relations of life out of ten they are kindly, courteous, Christian gentlemen.But in the tenth relation, where it touches their own organization, they are stark mad, ruthless, unchecked by God or man, paranoics, in fact, as evil in their design as Hitler.They are determined to come out of this war victorious for their own stockholders—which is not surprising. It is understandable also for Hitler to desire to come out of this war at any cost victorious for the German people.But this attitude of the men who control the great commodity industries, and who propose to run them according to their own judgment and their own morals, do not make a pretty picture for the welfare of the common man.These international combinations of industrial capital are fierce troglodyte animals with tremendous power and no social brains. They hover like an old silurian reptile about our decent more or less Christian civilization—like great dragons in this modern day when dragons are supposed to be dead.
If you haven't checked out CL's great and informative post on remote control drone killing, you need to read it now. I'm providing this as a supplemental post to that so that we may better understand the players. This whole thing reminds me of a Star Trek episode. Actually, a lot of what we see today reminds me of various sci fi scenarios. But the one I'm think of today is the notorious "Bearded Spock" episode where Miss Hot Pants tells a confused Kirk he can be rid of Bearded Spock with the push of a little bitty button. Goodbye opposition, we'll be sure to tell everyone what a horrible "threat" you were so you can have the satisfaction of knowing that you were a worthy opponent.Ron Paul is an apostle of traditional American liberty. The vast majority of us are our Founding Fathers’ prodigal sons (and daughters) whom Ron Paul, at 76 years of age, continues to call home. From early on in Christian history, some of its brightest minds have sought to address “the problem of evil,” the problem of reconciling belief in an omnipotent and all-loving God with the presence of evil in the world. Usually, a resolution has been found in some variation or other of “the free will defense.” According to this line of reasoning, God could have created human beings so that they never did evil, but He preferred a creation in which humans were free, for only with free agents could He have a genuine relationship. However, the freedom to accept God’s offer of friendship inescapably entails the freedom to reject that offer. To put it another way, the freedom to do good is also the freedom to do evil.
