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Bill Black: Geithner’s Single Most Revealing Sentence
Latest comments on Tim Geithner from Bill Black and his blog "New Economic Perspectives" -- Chris
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2014/05/geithners-single-revealing-se...
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2014/05/geithners-ad-hominem-attacks-...
Geithner’s Single Most Revealing Sentence
William K. Black
Timothy Geithner has a great deal of competition for the title of worst Treasury Secretary of the United States, but he has swept the field as worst President of Federal Reserve Bank of New York (NY Fed). Geithner is a target rich environment for critics and he has a gift for saying things that are obviously depraved, but which he thinks are worthy of a public servant.
He did vastly more harm to the Nation as the President of the New York Fed than he did as Treasury Secretary. He was supposed to regulate most of the largest (and most criminal) bank holding companies – and failed so completely that he testified to Congress that he had never been a regulator and that the problem in banking leading up to the crisis was excessive regulation. His statement that he was never a regulator was truthful – but you’re not supposed to admit it, and you’re certainly not supposed to be proud of it. Geithner, Greenspan, and Bernanke are the three Fed leaders who could have prevented the entire crisis by being even modestly effective regulators.
Instead of regulating the banks, Geithner relied on the banks self-regulating through “stress tests.” The stress tests were (and remain) farcical. AIG, Fannie, Freddie, Lehman, the Irish banks, and the big three Icelandic banks all passed stress tests shortly before they collapsed. It is a measure of Geithner’s goofiness that he has entitled his book “Stress Test.”
As Treasury Secretary, Geithner made his infamous “foam the runways” comment. He admitted that while the way he ran the programs putatively designed to help distressed homeowners was causing them to fail frequently to help homeowners it was succeeding in easing the bank crashes.
Geithner repeatedly claimed as Treasury Secretary that he never worked for Wall Street (and as he left congratulated himself on not joining Wall Street – a few months before he did). As New York Fed President Geithner worked for Wall Street for five years and was handsomely rewarded for that service. As he has admitted, virtually bragged, he did not work for the American people as a regulator though that is what he was supposed to do.
Geithner’s Most Revealing Sentence
Geithner’s failure to regulate as President of the NY Fed was far more harmful than the anecdote I am about to relate and his “foam the runways” comment confirms that Geithner continued to work for the banks rather than the American people once he became Treasury Secretary. His service to the banks and contemptuous disregard of homeowners are even more appalling than the incident I will discuss. The sentence this article discusses, however, is the most revealing about a broader range of Geithner’s character. Each of the facets of Geithner’s character revealed by the sentence demonstrates his unfitness for office.
The sentence’s very existence demonstrates two facets of these character failures, for Geithner went out of his way in his book to craft the sentence. The context is that he is trying to settle a score with Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Assets Relief Program (SIGTARP), because Barofsky audited, and often criticized TARP. It would be perfectly fine for Geithner to provide his arguments about why he thought Barofsky’s criticisms proved inaccurate. That could be a productive debate. But Geithner took the policy criticism personally and is out to hurt Barofsky through ad hominem attacks rather than to win a policy debate on the merits. People with Geithner’s vindictive mindset should never hold power.
Second, Geithner’s three primary ad hominem attacks on Barofsky are self-damning and boost Barofsky’s already stellar reputation. Geithner’s tone is deliberately snide, every word choice is slanted in clumsy attempts to demean Barofsky and his staff, and the attacks on Barofsky’s person are facially silly. In his effort to wound Barofsky Geithner has only further revealed his character defects. I will deal in this first article with only one of these ad hominem attacks. Geithner is outraged that Barofsky: “would requisition firearms and bulletproof vests for his antifraud troops.” Not content with trying to insult Barofsky, in the next sentence Geithner gratuitously and insultingly refers to Barofsky’s “well-armed team.”
Here’s why Geithner’s sentence is so revealing along so many disturbing dimensions.
• He is ignorant of law enforcement and fraud. Barofsky was personally responsible for protecting the health and lives of his staff of law enforcement officers (LEOs). That staff was required in the normal course of their duties to question criminal suspects and potentially arrest. Geithner obviously thinks it is silly that law enforcement officers who deal with financial fraud would (in modern America with massive gun ownership) be prepared to defend themselves against attacks. I worked frequently with FBI Special Agents that investigated fraud – they always had a side arm with them at work (including at lectures where I was one of the trainers on how to identify, investigate, and prosecute elite financial frauds). Indeed, FBI rules mandate that they have a side arm with them when they are working.
Had Geithner become Treasury Secretary before March 2003 he would have been in charge of the Secret Service. The Secret Service describes its investigative function in these terms:
“The Secret Service usually works criminal cases that are related to the nation's financial security. The Secret Service was originally founded in 1865 to suppress counterfeit money and while the agency still spends a lot of time investigating counterfeit money both in the United States and overseas, today's agents also investigate a variety of other financial crimes, including credit card fraud, computer fraud and bank fraud.”
Secret Service agents are LEOs. When they conduct these investigations they have side arms and vests (except in some undercover operations).
• Barofsky purchased vests and side arms for his LEOs (which Geithner tries to spin as “requisition[ing]” as if it were some high-handed and unprincipled act) because that is what virtually every other American leader of LEOs does to protect his people. (Note that the vest only moderately reduces risk. LEOs can be killed while wearing their vests.)
• Geithner seems to think that people who engage in fraud never engage in violence. As a criminologist and a former financial regulator I would like to inform him he is wrong. Regular readers know from prior columns that even as S&L regulators we were the subjects of threats of violence (including murder) from controlling S&L officers – and we had no arrest powers and no power to conduct the form of investigations in the subject’s home that can lead to attacks on LEOs.
• Try this hypothetical: Barofsky did not provide his LEOs with the minimal forms of defense against assault that are provided routinely to all U.S. LEOs – protective vests and side arms – and one of his LEOs was assaulted by a fraud suspect and seriously harmed or killed. What would Geithner have said in his book about Barofsky if that hypothetical had come to pass? He would have denounced Barofsky as incompetent and indifferent to the safety of his staff. (Indeed, Geithner would not have waited for the book had this hypothetical occurred.
His book makes clear that Geithner viewed Barofsky as a thorn in his side that he hated. He would have jumped at the opportunity to remove that thorn by demanding that Barofsky resign.)
• Geithner was in charge of the TARP. The SIGTARP’s LEOs were his people risking their lives to help protect TARP from fraud. That means that they were protecting Geithner from the criticism he would have received if such frauds had not been detected and investigated by the TARP LEOs. Geithner, TARP’s leader, mocks those LEOs as Barofsky’s “well-armed team.” He repays their professionalism and their enormous success against those who sought to defraud TARP – which protected Geithner’s program and reputation – with mockery and contempt. Geithner’s actions are shameful. He was unworthy of those he mocks as Barofsky’s “well-armed” “antifraud troops.”
• Geithner reveals in this sentence and the overall paragraph his indifference to the frauds by the elite bank officers that caused the financial crisis and exposed TARP to further losses. He makes clear repeatedly his view that he never took elite bank fraud seriously or sought to hold the officers culpable. Instead, as the recent leaks by the Department of Justice (DOJ) reveal, it was Geithner and his subordinate officials at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC – a bureau within Treasury) who led the chorus of alarm that led an already cowardly DOJ to adopt the infamous “too big to prosecute” doctrine that Attorney General Eric Holder is now desperately seeking to walk back. Every reference by Geithner to elite bank fraud is designed to mock anyone (i.e., Barofsky) that would take it seriously and try to hold the elite bank officers accountable for their crimes. Geithner makes his childish, sneering tone on the subject obvious to even the most casual reader with phrases such as “Barofsky's desire to prevent perfidy” in addition to mocking the entire concept that fraud was important enough to warrant providing SIGTARP’s LEOs with even the most basic, essential forms of personal protection to reduce the risk that they would be maimed or killed in the performance of their duties.
If Geithner wants to start a journey of personal redemption he should forget Barofsky and all the imagined slights and make it his mission to meet personally with every SIGTARP LEO and apologize unreservedly for these passages – and then to apologize to them and the people of America in a very public publication.
The fact that Geithner would launch an ad hominem attack on Barofsky for taking the elementary protections any official must take to safeguard the LEOs who work for him establishes three reasons why he is unfit for leadership. He took an auditor’s professional criticisms of a program personally and seeks to settle a score through a personal attack on the auditor. That indicates he is too thin skinned to hold office and does not understand and value the essential function of internal audit. Geithner should have taken his own advice in his book: “The inconvenient truth of financial-crisis response is that the actions that feel right are often wrong.”
The inconvenient truth of writing a book for the purpose of launching ad hominem assaults on the auditors is “the actions that feel right are often wrong.” Geithner tried to settle a score with Barofsky through an attack on his safeguarding his LEOs and instead scored an “own goal” of epic proportions.
His attack on Barofsky for protecting his people demonstrates that Geithner never took even a moment to learn about the function of SIGTARP or the nature of fraud. That he failed to do so while supposedly dealing with the aftermath of the three most destructive epidemics of accounting control fraud and the financial crisis they drove demonstrates why we have no successful prosecutions of the elite Wall Street criminals whose frauds drove the crisis.
That Geithner used Barofsky’s entirely normal and praise worthy protection of his LEOs as the basis for condemning Barofsky and his LEOs demonstrates that Geithner has sunk to the level of loathsome. But the fact that Geithner’s substantive criticisms of Barofsky were so pitiful that he felt he had to rely instead on mocking Barofsky and his LEOs as cowards because they were American law enforcement officers who wanted to have a side arm and a protective vest proves that Geithner has nothing but facially absurd ad hominem insults to levy at Barofsky even after years of plotting his revenge in his book.
Conclusion
The title of Geithner’s book that he wrote to settle these petty personal scores is a sad testament to his abject failure as a regulator while the NY Fed’s President. He relied on the delusion that banks would self-regulate themselves to safety and soundness through stress tests designed to ensure that even the most fraudulent bank could easily pass the faux stress test. In his book, Geithner was unable to present any action he took as an anti-regulator to warn the Nation about the three fraud epidemics, any effective action he took to stop those frauds, or any action he took to prosecute those frauds. He failed each of the three real “stress tests” that confronted him. Had he passed either of the first two tests we could have avoided the financial crisis. Had he passed the third test at least the fraudulent elite bank CEOs would have been imprisoned and their fraudulent proceeds confiscated so that it was clear that crime did not pay.
Bailing out banks is not hard when a nation has a sovereign currency and the banks’ debts are denominated in that currency. Bernanke, not Geithner, delivered the vast bulk of the real bailout that transferred the banks’ losses on the fraudulent assets to the Fed and allowed Geithner to claim that TARP was “profitable.”
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"... the fate of the ship is now sealed.
Yes. World stacking gold, not petro dollars.
While Geithner is identified as a piece of shit according to Black- based on his hatred of Barofsky- I note the presence of the same time honored hate cops theme that so many people seem to bitch about. That Black sees Barofsky as an extension of himself is no surprise.
Screw Geithner- he was a chump. The real criminal is Hank Paulson. That he walks among us- a free man- infuriates me.
The real criminals are Bill Clinton, Bob Rubin, Larry Summers, Alan Greenspan, Charles Prince and John Reed. Why the Brooksley Born story has never received the attention it deserves just shows how crimminal the whole operation is!
So, you want to leave out Phil Gramm, Dick Armey, Tom Delay, and a whole host of Banking shills in the Congress? Did the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act just write itself? How about the Commodities Trading Act?
From H.R. 4541 to the CFMA[edit]Senator Phil Gramm
After the House passed H.R. 4541, press reports indicated Sen. Gramm was blocking Senate action based on his continued insistence that the bill be expanded to prevent the SEC from regulating swaps, and the desire to broaden the protections against CFTC regulation for “bank products.”[65]Nevertheless, with Congress adjourned for the 2000 elections, but scheduled to return for a “lame duck” session, Treasury Secretary Summers “urged” Congress to move forward with legislation on OTC derivatives based on the “extraordinary bipartisan consensus this year on these very complex issues.”.[66]
When Congress returned into session for two days in mid-November, the sponsor of H.R. 4541, Representative Thomas Ewing (R-IL), described Senator Gramm as the “one man” blocking Senate passage of H.R. 4541.[67] Senator Richard G. Lugar (R-IN), the sponsor of S. 2697, was reported to be considering forcing H.R. 4541 to the Senate Floor against Senator Gramm’s objections.[68]
After Congress returned into session on December 4, 2000, there were reports Senator Gramm and the Treasury Department were exchanging proposed language to deal with the issues raised by Sen. Gramm, followed by a report those negotiations had reached an impasse.[69] On December 14, however, the Treasury Department announced agreement had been reached the night before and urged Congress to enact into law the agreed upon language.[70]
The “compromise language” was introduced in the House on December 14, 2000, as H.R. 5660.[71] The same language was introduced in the Senate on December 15, 2000 as S. 3283.[72] The Senate and House conference that was called to reconcile differences in H.R. 4577 appropriations adopted the “compromise language” by incorporating H.R. 5660 (the “CFMA”) into H.R. 4577, which was titled “Consolidated Appropriations Act for FY 2001”.[73] The House passed the Conference Report and, therefore, H.R. 4577 in a vote of 292-60.[74] Over "objection" by Senators James Inhofe (R-OK) and Paul Wellstone (D-MN), the Senate passed the Conference Report, and therefore H.R. 4577, by “unanimous consent.”[75] The Chairs and Ranking members of each of the five Congressional Committees that considered H.R. 4541 or S. 2697 supported, or entered into the Congressional Record statements in support of, the CFMA. The PWG issued letters expressing the unanimous support of each of its four members for the CFMA.[76] H.R. 4577, including H.R. 5660, was signed into law, as CFMA, on December 21, 2000.[77]
There is plenty of blame to go around.
Agree, they should be added as probably most of the legislative branch.
Excellent!
Lets play the guess the world notional value of all derivatives game! The winner (who guesses closest) gets an all expense paid realization to "fucked for eternity" the greatest theme park experience anyone can imagine!
man-on-the-street interview of Bill Black during OWS.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XJe7O-3QBc&feature=player_embedded
Fire Geitner, Holder and ask for BB's resignation. (OCT2011)
"Bernanke and Geitner were re-upped BECAUSE they were failures as regulators and indeed the most abject failures in the history of regulation" (!)
Are my eyes going bad or am I correct that Bill Black never actually cites the specific quote by Geithner that he is referencing in this long winded article?
I couldn't find it either.
English Composition 101;
Don't bury your needle in a haystack, poke your reader with it immediately!
Don't bury your needle...
I got the impression this article was a clipping by rcwhalen from a larger blog. There's reference to covering more in subsequent writings.
As for the "sentence" itself, the point was made in the 2 quotes: Geithner is outraged that Barofsky: “would requisition firearms and bulletproof vests for his antifraud troops.” Not content with trying to insult Barofsky, in the next sentence Geithner gratuitously and insultingly refers to Barofsky’s “well-armed team.” that Timmy didn't realize the dangerous nature of law enforcement.
I would've much rather the judicious and possible surgical use of sidearms protecting legitimate law enforcement agents to the ropes, pitchforks, hot tar and top floor swan dives that the general populace employs when justice fails.
jmo.
That's what I got out of it as well. Though, I don't think it means much of anything concerning his character, (as compared to everything else he says/does). I merely see that as typical divide and conquer rhetoric (criticize your opponent, yet fail to attack the substance of their argument against you, choosing instead to rely upon emotional appeal).
Black Could be an awesome champion of cleaning up this mess, if only he'd get over his affliction with Statism. To me, this article displays that Black is still a water-boy to the powerful, and it does none of us any good, as it's a distraction from what really matters.
Honestly, I think a lawyer should've been able to see Geithner's words for WHY they were uttered, not for WHAT they say.
NotApplicable - People attempt reform within the government first which is what our founding fathers did and enouraged us to do first before a revolution. Wise too, because the people as attrocities mount get to see there may be no other way out and not be combatants against the movement. Attempt to address grievances first is what Bill Black has been trying to do.
What's with this drive-by attack on Bill Black?
If you want to accuse someone of Satan worship, how about a little evidence. This is just bullshit, and I would expect better from you.
I agree, but we seem to be in the minority
Geithner was cut from the same bolt of cloth as the bankers he was charged with regulating. Moreover, there is serious structural corruption when government takes to itself the power to create near-infinite debt in order to finance near-infinite government. To move the paper, it must have the support of banks that are big enough, and it must have a supportive central bank. It must be remembered that the "independent" central bank is the acme of examples of "regulatory capture" because its shares are entirely owned by its "member financial institutions". Not a single share is owned by the US government. This is collusion, cronyism and corruption all the way from top to bottom.
OK - It appears everyone - or nearly everyone - on ZH is firmly in the camp that the entire ruling class is corrupt and unsalvagable. And that they have so perverted the systems as to make them totally useless. So what are we going to do about it? Probably just keep on writing our frustrations out in snipets in the ZH comments sections.
The only thing to be done is to walk away from The Beast and let it collapse under its own weight. Any other action only further feeds/empowers The Beast as it legitimizes its existence.
dontgoforit
You underestimate the power of knowledge.
Thanks to all of you. Great advice and direction. Special thanks to OC Sure.
You're welcome. It is my pleasure that you liked my reply.
What Can Be Done?
1) Reduce, eliminate and avoid debt. This will not only free you of the burden of supporting parasites, it will contribute to the starvation of the parasite class.
2) Educate and inform others how the banking system works. There is stunning ignorance around this topic. When people understand that the debt burden they carry is created by a keystroke, it begins the journey that eventually leads to disgust with the corruption that surrounds us.
3) Counter both leftist theology and neocon war mongerlng. There will come a tipping point of disgust and non-participation, but what will be on the other side of that tipping point is to be determined. We must argue that war is NOT the answer, that government is NOT the answer, and that self reliance and self determination are not only possible, but the only path to true liberty, and that such a people are capable of enormous generosity.
When discussing banking, please explain that the essence of "modern" banking is counterfeiting, that the system is designed for those who produce nothing to usurp power and steal from those who produce anything, that the decline of the middle class is directly related to the banking system because the counterfeiting decreases the purchasing power of the dollar and thus increases the middle class's cost of living, that the banking system's counterfeiting is the lifeblood of the current tyranny that saturates us, that we live in tyranny, that the terms of tyranny control the thoughts of the citizens and thus their actions which are to get numb and succumb, that inflation is not good; it is theft, that deflation is not bad; it is replenishment...
"A man is free, we say, who lives for his own sake and not another's."
Aristotle
"So what are we going to do about it?"
When I first arrived here, I immediatley thought where is the link on this site to this site of the petition for a redress of grievances per the 1st amendment. A list of grievances just like those shown candidly to the world in the Declaration of Independence exposing the King for his despotism. Here is a good start:
1. ZeroHedge posts a permanent main page link to a petetion for a redress of grievance as a means of acknowledging our 1st amendment rights and gathering patriots.
2. Keep communicating your frustrations here and everywhere else elucidating the fact that *we live in tyranny. Especially, do this outside of your comfort zones. It is of little use to preach to the choir. Thousands and thousands of rational humans read ZH everyday so most likely there are many fence sitters viewing.
3. Tell two friends to tell two friends.
4. Personally, continue to prepare for the worst.
* Do you have trouble communicating the fact that we live in tyranny? If so, simply ask your audience this question:
If we do not live in tyranny, then what is the cause of the USA being over 50 trillion dollars in debt (off budget items are budget items), having about 100 million citizens unemployed, and the atrophy of the middle class? ...That should get the conversation rolling.
dontgo, try reading on buddhist thought, one important idea is that you avoid the life of politics and power,
and try to free sentient beings around you, otherwise we end up killing each other.
"So what are we going to do about it? Probably just keep on writing our frustrations out in snipets in the ZH"
Geithner is a Nazi -- a pure unadulterated Fascist. He GLADLY did the bidding of his Fascist masters (Rubin, Summers etc), decimated the rule of law, obliterated sanctity of contracts, replaced money with fraud, and undermined USA labor. It will be decades if not generations for Spineless-Geithner-doctrine to run the course, but the damage was done while he could hide behind Fascist money printing and incorporated enemies of the USA. The man is flacid and anti-American. He is the definition of financial terrorist and big-money corruption is his only shield. Fascism is the only thing that ever rewarded the weak Tim Geithner and he drips of its corrupt musk. History will not reflect kindly to the tax-cheat Fascist.
Should he and I ever cross paths one of us will get the tar beat out of us so bad their baby teeth will be sticking out of the back of their worthless excuse of a head.
Pray we never cross paths, Tim, because I am praying we do - "no one will see it coming," especially you.
"...he drips of its corrupt musk..."
A+ wordsmithing!
Hopefully you are at the bookstore buying a calendar, on the day of one of his book signings.
The weak never leave the city.
He won't sign any books, he won't even go outdoors. Fascists don't do "public" appearances. The only place Fascists (cowards) show up is radio/TV for their selfless propaganda - expect no less from shameless gutter-Geithner and financial terrorism Inc.
Our currency may be "sovereign" , but it is not franchised to the Dept. of the Treasury. Instead , it is franchised to a partnership that includes the US Govt. as a partner. The spigot of money , thus power , is controlled by the other partners in the gigantic scam - those banks and individual banking families who created the Federal Reserve System. G. Edward Griffin is right about one thing: the govt. will lose out to the private parties' interests when SHTF. It's laughable that Mr. Black chose that word s-o-v-e-r-e-i-g-n in his last paragraph. Schoolyard turf war by assholes it is.
Nevermind anything that he said and instead just look at what he chose to do.
He chose to perpetuate the myth, hoax, and crimes of USA's third central bank.
Counterfeiters are thieves and should be held accountable for their actions.
I'm guessing he had been told in no uncertain terms to 'play nice and everything will be fine - or screw up and go the way of JFK.'
If that is so, then that should be the subject of the commentary.
It is hard to say enough bad things about Geithner, but this does not make Bernanke any better. Both are to blame and when history looks back we will be shocked that the world let this happen.
Back in December of 2012 I was surprised to find that William K Black, a man that I learned of back in 2009 during the depth of the banking crises had written an article in the left leaning Huffington Post saying that cutting back government spending and unraveling the safety net is a terrible thing. It appears that Black, a Democrat is unhappy about the goal of addressing the budget through a so called "Grand Bargain", he sees this as more of a betrayal of the people.
In 2009 Black was one of the very few really informed as to the facts. A lawyer, academic, author, and a former bank regulator, his expertise is in white collar crime, public finance, regulation, law, and economics. He developed the concept of "control fraud", in which a business or national executive uses the entity he or she controls as a "weapon" to commit fraud. I found it interesting that Black and I interpret what is going on with the debate to control runaway entitlements in Washington and the solution from totally different perspectives.
His flaw may be thinking that "government is the answer", my flaw hoping that the Republicans care more about the American people then their own self interest. In the end Black and I agree on one thing, the government and financial system is corrupt. Below is more on the subject of "Grand bargan or Grand Betrayal" an issue Washington never did address.
http://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2012/12/grand-bargain-or-great-betrayal.h...
[William K. Black's] flaw may be thinking that "government is the answer"
Perfectly put. And he is in line with Yves and all the folks at NC with that.
How long does it take intelligent people to realize that this problem has no "solution" in the common mathematical way of thinking, as one cannot sustainably target outcomes for a larger group of people, but only can look to evenly enforce a simple set of rules.
The way I look at these cunts (Paulson, Turbo Tax Timmy and Bubblez Ben) is eventually they will have done a favour with the world. If they would have let the banks fail in 2008 the Powers That Be might have been able to hold on to power for the forseeable future, as they did in the Savings & Loan Crisis. Heroic incorruptable people like Bill Black actually sent fraudsters to jail in the S & L Crisis, which perversely gave Americans hope that American Justice still existed, and that the system was still salvageable.
This most certainly did not happen in 2008. And that ironically might be the undoing of the whole system. As we go forward with further fraud and no-one going to jail for said fraud, it will become clear even to the dumbest of dumb Americans, that these people are the real criminals. The more TPTB double down on fraud and injustice, the sooner you will see the return of pitchforks and guillotines in the street.
The Nevada Standoff, Civil War in Ukraine, Secession Movements all over the World, the continuing Arab Spring, rebellions in China etc etc. It's all coming to a head. I predict that the interwebz and crypto-currencies will be the weapons of the masses against these kleptocrat cunts. Never forget that The Powers That Be are a parasite that live off productive members of society. Without monopoly issue over fiat currencies to fund the MIC, the Surveillance State and corrupt cops, they are essentially powerless.
Let the games begin, wwwhhhhheeeeeyyyooooo!
" The Powers That Be" are "The Parasites That Are"
The games have started. Just watch as the Internet is evermore controlled. I believe you are correct in that the Interwebz are undermining TPTB's ability to control, but they see it, too, and the essentially free Internet we enjoy today has a rapidly declining life expectancy.
Literally in real time, the head of the FCC is "changing his mind" about new Internet regulations now, and new rules are coming in a few weeks. Just watch.
http://www.thenewsherald.com/articles/2014/05/11/opinion/doc5368e8224237...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-12/fcc-chief-changes-web-fast-lane...
And there is this, lifted from comments section on Bloomberg:
The Contentious Otter • 2 hours ago
Ever since the first ruling which suggested that ISPs might be able to segregate content, conservative Christian groups all over the US have been urging their followers to buy up shares of Internet Service Providers, with the ultimate strategy of blocking all web-traffic that they find objectionable, and taking an argument to the Supreme Court that the Citizens United ruling grants corporations Free Speech rights, and that not allowing owners of ISPs to block content they find objectionable is a violation of Corporate First Amendment rights. This isn't something that "might happen" at some point in the future, it's something that's already well under way, and is guaranteed to show up in a court-room near you within the next year or so. The worst case scenario that net neutrality advocates have posited is already well under way.
Ironically (if not sadly), the Jesus who walked the earth 2000 years ago would reject the whole religious movement that was founded through his teaching....
Meshnet will see to that
http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2013/08/13/meet-the-meshnet-a-new-wave-of-d...
http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2013/11/15/the-rise-of-the-decentralized-we...
The market will always find a way
If one were to try to reduce a pile of shit to its elemential fabric, he would be left with Geithner.
A pile of shit brings maggotts - -shit plus maggotts = Geithner
Quit insulting shit.
Bravo! The thin line between abject corruption and those who try to prevent it has never been more important. Thank you for expose Timmy the Tax Cheat and for your years of service to save the American public from these crooks in suits.
I would love to hear your views on Holder, who I believe it one of the greatest threats to our Republic since its founding, perhaps only surpassed by his puppet boss.
Allowing banks to fail, go bankrupt, is the only regulation that matters.
And removing the perpetrators of the fraud.
Instead he rewarded them, and allowed them to continue, and required thousands of others to go along with the fraud.
Read further:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/05/neil-barofsky-geithner-forthcomin...
and this:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/05/andrew-ross-sorkin-timothy-geithn...
I've said it before and I will say it again: FUCK Geithner. he is the bankers best friend and gives not a shit about Main Street.
A good start.
Also, the system that attracts and encourages the fraud has to be dismantled thereby stifling the lifeblood of tyranny.
Abolish the Fed; it is the source of the fraud.