tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91141771678001645932023-06-20T21:33:51.457-07:00Freedom DefenderThis blog is about Freedom. Here you will learn about how our Freedoms are constantly being taken away from us. You may see and learn things about biodiesel, becoming self sustainable, etc. Enjoy!rayneberryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01920167866455939380noreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9114177167800164593.post-1917883467470533132009-05-14T09:50:00.001-07:002009-05-14T09:57:24.780-07:00Quote of the Day: "If Obama scews up health care where will the Canadians go?"Subject: NEW CAMPAIGN! The dirty secret about expensive health insurance<br /><br />Do you need health insurance coverage for . . .<br /><br /> * Maternity care, if you're a single male<br /> * Infertility, if you don't want a family<br /> * Alcoholism, if you don't drink<br /><br />If you live in New York state then you (or your employer) must pay for all these things, by law, or go without health insurance.<br /><br />It's even worse in New Jersey, where the law only permits four basic health insurance plans, each with its own cluster of mandatory coverages. As a result, family premiums run from $2,631.41 to $6,467.58, per month. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Health-Care-Crisis-Solved/dp/0470275723/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242214589&sr=1-1">(Source: "America's Health Care Crisis Solved" by J. Patrick Rooney and Dan Perrin, page 113).</a><br /><br />People who can't afford those premiums (and few can) must go without health insurance.<br /><br />Similar situations exist in other states . . .<br /><br /> * In 2008 <a href="http://www.cahi.org/cahi_contents/resources/pdf/TrendsEndsMandatedBenefits2008.pdf">The Council for Affordable Health Insurance found 1,961 examples of state mandated coverage</a><br /> * And there's <a href="http://www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb111/index.html">an excellent list of some of the worst cases in Chapter 16 of The Cato Institute's "Handbook for Policy Makers."</a><br /><br />Health insurance is too expensive because the politicians have made it that way. They've bowed to lobbyists who want to use the coercive power of government to mandate coverage for . . .<br /><br /> * The medical equivalent of oil changes and tire rotations<br /> * Or things like maternity care for single males, infertility treatments for people who don't want families, and alcoholism therapy for people who don't drink.<br /><br />These laws corrupt the very nature of insurance. Insurance is supposed to cover unlikely but expensive procedures, NOT simple blood tests, or massages, or acupuncture, or chiropractic adjustments, or anything else we could afford to pay out of pocket, if only so many of us weren't being gouged by legally inflated insurance premiums.<br /><br />Now the politicians want to redesign the entire American health care system from the top down, in one giant step, to supposedly fix a problem they created in the first place. But, instead of enacting a "grand plan" that will impact, and potentially harm, everyone, and that we may never get rid of once it's in place, the politicians should start by taking a few simple steps to clean up the mess they've made.<br /><br />Fortunately, not all states have mandatory coverage laws as bad as New York and New Jersey. True major medical coverage is still available in many states, but only if you happen to live in one of those places. Congress can fix this problem very easily. They should pass a law permitting you or your employer to buy insurance regulated by other states. This would . . .<br /><br /> * Enable you or your employer to shop for better deals across state lines<br /> * Put pressure on state governments to liberalize their insurance regulations<br /><br /><a href="http://www.downsizedc.org/etp/campaigns/113">Use our quick and easy Educate the Powerful System to tell your Congressional employees to pass such a law.</a><br /><br />Use your personal comments to make some of the points we make in this Dispatch. <a href="http://www.downsizedc.org/etp/campaigns/113">You can cut and paste from the intro text on the campaign page if you want.</a><br /><br />Our goal this month is to pound Congress with more than 31,730 messages. That means we must hit Congress with 1,479 messages today.rayneberryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01920167866455939380noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9114177167800164593.post-49620449339661983222009-03-25T11:05:00.001-07:002009-03-25T11:05:36.728-07:00HR 1207 Update<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/4LmWgp9JIS0&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/4LmWgp9JIS0&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>rayneberryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01920167866455939380noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9114177167800164593.post-51717600962324836042009-03-24T20:29:00.002-07:002009-03-24T20:37:20.690-07:00The Big TakeoverThe global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution <br /><br />It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.<br /><br />The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).<br /><br />So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."<br /><br /><br />Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.<br /><br />Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.<br /><br />People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.<br /><br />The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.<br /><br />The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.<br /><br />I. PATIENT ZERO<br /><br />The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders — people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground — and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people's money would make his dick bigger.<br /><br />That guy — the Patient Zero of the global economic meltdown — was one Joseph Cassano, the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP. Cassano, a pudgy, balding Brooklyn College grad with beady eyes and way too much forehead, cut his teeth in the Eighties working for Mike Milken, the granddaddy of modern Wall Street debt alchemists. Milken, who pioneered the creative use of junk bonds, relied on messianic genius and a whole array of insider schemes to evade detection while wreaking financial disaster. Cassano, by contrast, was just a greedy little turd with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks to Washington's deregulation of the Wall Street casino. "It's all about the regulatory environment," says a government source involved with the AIG bailout. "These guys look for holes in the system, for ways they can do trades without government interference. Whatever is unregulated, all the action is going to pile into that."<br /><br /><br />The mess Cassano created had its roots in an investment boom fueled in part by a relatively new type of financial instrument called a collateralized-debt obligation. A CDO is like a box full of diced-up assets. They can be anything: mortgages, corporate loans, aircraft loans, credit-card loans, even other CDOs. So as X mortgage holder pays his bill, and Y corporate debtor pays his bill, and Z credit-card debtor pays his bill, money flows into the box.<br /><br />The key idea behind a CDO is that there will always be at least some money in the box, regardless of how dicey the individual assets inside it are. No matter how you look at a single unemployed ex-con trying to pay the note on a six-bedroom house, he looks like a bad investment. But dump his loan in a box with a smorgasbord of auto loans, credit-card debt, corporate bonds and other crap, and you can be reasonably sure that somebody is going to pay up. Say $100 is supposed to come into the box every month. Even in an apocalypse, when $90 in payments might default, you'll still get $10. What the inventors of the CDO did is divide up the box into groups of investors and put that $10 into its own level, or "tranche." They then convinced ratings agencies like Moody's and S&P to give that top tranche the highest AAA rating — meaning it has close to zero credit risk.<br /><br />Suddenly, thanks to this financial seal of approval, banks had a way to turn their shittiest mortgages and other financial waste into investment-grade paper and sell them to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies, which were forced by regulators to keep their portfolios as safe as possible. Because CDOs offered higher rates of return than truly safe products like Treasury bills, it was a win-win: Banks made a fortune selling CDOs, and big investors made much more holding them.<br /><br />The problem was, none of this was based on reality. "The banks knew they were selling crap," says a London-based trader from one of the bailed-out companies. To get AAA ratings, the CDOs relied not on their actual underlying assets but on crazy mathematical formulas that the banks cooked up to make the investments look safer than they really were. "They had some back room somewhere where a bunch of Indian guys who'd been doing nothing but math for God knows how many years would come up with some kind of model saying that this or that combination of debtors would only default once every 10,000 years," says one young trader who sold CDOs for a major investment bank. "It was nuts."<br /><br />Now that even the crappiest mortgages could be sold to conservative investors, the CDOs spurred a massive explosion of irresponsible and predatory lending. In fact, there was such a crush to underwrite CDOs that it became hard to find enough subprime mortgages — read: enough unemployed meth dealers willing to buy million-dollar homes for no money down — to fill them all. As banks and investors of all kinds took on more and more in CDOs and similar instruments, they needed some way to hedge their massive bets — some kind of insurance policy, in case the housing bubble burst and all that debt went south at the same time. This was particularly true for investment banks, many of which got stuck holding or "warehousing" CDOs when they wrote more than they could sell. And that's were Joe Cassano came in.<br /><br />Known for his boldness and arrogance, Cassano took over as chief of AIGFP in 2001. He was the favorite of Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, the head of AIG, who admired the younger man's hard-driving ways, even if neither he nor his successors fully understood exactly what it was that Cassano did. According to a source familiar with AIG's internal operations, Cassano basically told senior management, "You know insurance, I know investments, so you do what you do, and I'll do what I do — leave me alone." Given a free hand within the company, Cassano set out from his offices in London to sell a lucrative form of "insurance" to all those investors holding lots of CDOs. His tool of choice was another new financial instrument known as a credit-default swap, or CDS.<br /><br />The CDS was popularized by J.P. Morgan, in particular by a group of young, creative bankers who would later become known as the "Morgan Mafia," as many of them would go on to assume influential positions in the finance world. In 1994, in between booze and games of tennis at a resort in Boca Raton, Florida, the Morgan gang plotted a way to help boost the bank's returns. One of their goals was to find a way to lend more money, while working around regulations that required them to keep a set amount of cash in reserve to back those loans. What they came up with was an early version of the credit-default swap.<br /><br />In its simplest form, a CDS is just a bet on an outcome. Say Bank A writes a million-dollar mortgage to the Pope for a town house in the West Village. Bank A wants to hedge its mortgage risk in case the Pope can't make his monthly payments, so it buys CDS protection from Bank B, wherein it agrees to pay Bank B a premium of $1,000 a month for five years. In return, Bank B agrees to pay Bank A the full million-dollar value of the Pope's mortgage if he defaults. In theory, Bank A is covered if the Pope goes on a meth binge and loses his job.<br /><br />When Morgan presented their plans for credit swaps to regulators in the late Nineties, they argued that if they bought CDS protection for enough of the investments in their portfolio, they had effectively moved the risk off their books. Therefore, they argued, they should be allowed to lend more, without keeping more cash in reserve. A whole host of regulators — from the Federal Reserve to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — accepted the argument, and Morgan was allowed to put more money on the street.<br /><br />What Cassano did was to transform the credit swaps that Morgan popularized into the world's largest bet on the housing boom. In theory, at least, there's nothing wrong with buying a CDS to insure your investments. Investors paid a premium to AIGFP, and in return the company promised to pick up the tab if the mortgage-backed CDOs went bust. But as Cassano went on a selling spree, the deals he made differed from traditional insurance in several significant ways. First, the party selling CDS protection didn't have to post any money upfront. When a $100 corporate bond is sold, for example, someone has to show 100 actual dollars. But when you sell a $100 CDS guarantee, you don't have to show a dime. So Cassano could sell investment banks billions in guarantees without having any single asset to back it up.<br /><br />Secondly, Cassano was selling so-called "naked" CDS deals. In a "naked" CDS, neither party actually holds the underlying loan. In other words, Bank B not only sells CDS protection to Bank A for its mortgage on the Pope — it turns around and sells protection to Bank C for the very same mortgage. This could go on ad nauseam: You could have Banks D through Z also betting on Bank A's mortgage. Unlike traditional insurance, Cassano was offering investors an opportunity to bet that someone else's house would burn down, or take out a term life policy on the guy with AIDS down the street. It was no different from gambling, the Wall Street version of a bunch of frat brothers betting on Jay Feely to make a field goal. Cassano was taking book for every bank that bet short on the housing market, but he didn't have the cash to pay off if the kick went wide.<br /><br /><br />In a span of only seven years, Cassano sold some $500 billion worth of CDS protection, with at least $64 billion of that tied to the subprime mortgage market. AIG didn't have even a fraction of that amount of cash on hand to cover its bets, but neither did it expect it would ever need any reserves. So long as defaults on the underlying securities remained a highly unlikely proposition, AIG was essentially collecting huge and steadily climbing premiums by selling insurance for the disaster it thought would never come.<br /><br />Initially, at least, the revenues were enormous: AIGFP's returns went from $737 million in 1999 to $3.2 billion in 2005. Over the past seven years, the subsidiary's 400 employees were paid a total of $3.5 billion; Cassano himself pocketed at least $280 million in compensation. Everyone made their money — and then it all went to shit.<br /><br />II. THE REGULATORS<br /><br />Cassano's outrageous gamble wouldn't have been possible had he not had the good fortune to take over AIGFP just as Sen. Phil Gramm — a grinning, laissez-faire ideologue from Texas — had finished engineering the most dramatic deregulation of the financial industry since Emperor Hien Tsung invented paper money in 806 A.D. For years, Washington had kept a watchful eye on the nation's banks. Ever since the Great Depression, commercial banks — those that kept money on deposit for individuals and businesses — had not been allowed to double as investment banks, which raise money by issuing and selling securities. The Glass-Steagall Act, passed during the Depression, also prevented banks of any kind from getting into the insurance business.<br /><br />But in the late Nineties, a few years before Cassano took over AIGFP, all that changed. The Democrats, tired of getting slaughtered in the fundraising arena by Republicans, decided to throw off their old reliance on unions and interest groups and become more "business-friendly." Wall Street responded by flooding Washington with money, buying allies in both parties. In the 10-year period beginning in 1998, financial companies spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists. They quickly got what they paid for. In 1999, Gramm co-sponsored a bill that repealed key aspects of the Glass-Steagall Act, smoothing the way for the creation of financial megafirms like Citigroup. The move did away with the built-in protections afforded by smaller banks. In the old days, a local banker knew the people whose loans were on his balance sheet: He wasn't going to give a million-dollar mortgage to a homeless meth addict, since he would have to keep that loan on his books. But a giant merged bank might write that loan and then sell it off to some fool in China, and who cared?<br /><br />The very next year, Gramm compounded the problem by writing a sweeping new law called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that made it impossible to regulate credit swaps as either gambling or securities. Commercial banks — which, thanks to Gramm, were now competing directly with investment banks for customers — were driven to buy credit swaps to loosen capital in search of higher yields. "By ruling that credit-default swaps were not gaming and not a security, the way was cleared for the growth of the market," said Eric Dinallo, head of the New York State Insurance Department.<br /><br />The blanket exemption meant that Joe Cassano could now sell as many CDS contracts as he wanted, building up as huge a position as he wanted, without anyone in government saying a word. "You have to remember, investment banks aren't in the business of making huge directional bets," says the government source involved in the AIG bailout. When investment banks write CDS deals, they hedge them. But insurance companies don't have to hedge. And that's what AIG did. "They just bet massively long on the housing market," says the source. "Billions and billions."<br /><br />In the biggest joke of all, Cassano's wheeling and dealing was regulated by the Office of Thrift Supervision, an agency that would prove to be defiantly uninterested in keeping watch over his operations. How a behemoth like AIG came to be regulated by the little-known and relatively small OTS is yet another triumph of the deregulatory instinct. Under another law passed in 1999, certain kinds of holding companies could choose the OTS as their regulator, provided they owned one or more thrifts (better known as savings-and-loans). Because the OTS was viewed as more compliant than the Fed or the Securities and Exchange Commission, companies rushed to reclassify themselves as thrifts. In 1999, AIG purchased a thrift in Delaware and managed to get approval for OTS regulation of its entire operation.<br /><br />Making matters even more hilarious, AIGFP — a London-based subsidiary of an American insurance company — ought to have been regulated by one of Europe's more stringent regulators, like Britain's Financial Services Authority. But the OTS managed to convince the Europeans that it had the muscle to regulate these giant companies. By 2007, the EU had conferred legitimacy to OTS supervision of three mammoth firms — GE, AIG and Ameriprise.<br /><br />That same year, as the subprime crisis was exploding, the Government Accountability Office criticized the OTS, noting a "disparity between the size of the agency and the diverse firms it oversees." Among other things, the GAO report noted that the entire OTS had only one insurance specialist on staff — and this despite the fact that it was the primary regulator for the world's largest insurer!<br /><br />"There's this notion that the regulators couldn't do anything to stop AIG," says a government official who was present during the bailout. "That's bullshit. What you have to understand is that these regulators have ultimate power. They can send you a letter and say, 'You don't exist anymore,' and that's basically that. They don't even really need due process. The OTS could have said, 'We're going to pull your charter; we're going to pull your license; we're going to sue you.' And getting sued by your primary regulator is the kiss of death."<br /><br />When AIG finally blew up, the OTS regulator ostensibly in charge of overseeing the insurance giant — a guy named C.K. Lee — basically admitted that he had blown it. His mistake, Lee said, was that he believed all those credit swaps in Cassano's portfolio were "fairly benign products." Why? Because the company told him so. "The judgment the company was making was that there was no big credit risk," he explained. (Lee now works as Midwest region director of the OTS; the agency declined to make him available for an interview.)<br /><br />In early March, after the latest bailout of AIG, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner took what seemed to be a thinly veiled shot at the OTS, calling AIG a "huge, complex global insurance company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that was allowed to build up without any adult supervision." But even without that "adult supervision," AIG might have been OK had it not been for a complete lack of internal controls. For six months before its meltdown, according to insiders, the company had been searching for a full-time chief financial officer and a chief risk-assessment officer, but never got around to hiring either. That meant that the 18th-largest company in the world had no one checking to make sure its balance sheet was safe and no one keeping track of how much cash and assets the firm had on hand. The situation was so bad that when outside consultants were called in a few weeks before the bailout, senior executives were unable to answer even the most basic questions about their company — like, for instance, how much exposure the firm had to the residential-mortgage market.<br /><br />III. THE CRASH<br /><br />Ironically, when reality finally caught up to Cassano, it wasn't because the housing market crapped but because of AIG itself. Before 2005, the company's debt was rated triple-A, meaning he didn't need to post much cash to sell CDS protection: The solid creditworthiness of AIG's name was guarantee enough. But the company's crummy accounting practices eventually caused its credit rating to be downgraded, triggering clauses in the CDS contracts that forced Cassano to post substantially more collateral to back his deals.<br /><br /><br />By the fall of 2007, it was evident that AIGFP's portfolio had turned poisonous, but like every good Wall Street huckster, Cassano schemed to keep his insane, Earth-swallowing gamble hidden from public view. That August, balls bulging, he announced to investors on a conference call that "it is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing $1 in any of those transactions." As he spoke, his CDS portfolio was racking up $352 million in losses. When the growing credit crunch prompted senior AIG executives to re-examine its liabilities, a company accountant named Joseph St. Denis became "gravely concerned" about the CDS deals and their potential for mass destruction. Cassano responded by personally forcing the poor sap out of the firm, telling him he was "deliberately excluded" from the financial review for fear that he might "pollute the process."<br /><br />The following February, when AIG posted $11.5 billion in annual losses, it announced the resignation of Cassano as head of AIGFP, saying an auditor had found a "material weakness" in the CDS portfolio. But amazingly, the company not only allowed Cassano to keep $34 million in bonuses, it kept him on as a consultant for $1 million a month. In fact, Cassano remained on the payroll and kept collecting his monthly million through the end of September 2008, even after taxpayers had been forced to hand AIG $85 billion to patch up his fuck-ups. When asked in October why the company still retained Cassano at his $1 million-a-month rate despite his role in the probable downfall of Western civilization, CEO Martin Sullivan told Congress with a straight face that AIG wanted to "retain the 20-year knowledge that Mr. Cassano had." (Cassano, who is apparently hiding out in his lavish town house near Harrods in London, could not be reached for comment.)<br /><br />What sank AIG in the end was another credit downgrade. Cassano had written so many CDS deals that when the company was facing another downgrade to its credit rating last September, from AA to A, it needed to post billions in collateral — not only more cash than it had on its balance sheet but more cash than it could raise even if it sold off every single one of its liquid assets. Even so, management dithered for days, not believing the company was in serious trouble. AIG was a dried-up prune, sapped of any real value, and its top executives didn't even know it.<br /><br />On the weekend of September 13th, AIG's senior leaders were summoned to the offices of the New York Federal Reserve. Regulators from Dinallo's insurance office were there, as was Geithner, then chief of the New York Fed. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who spent most of the weekend preoccupied with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, came in and out. Also present, for reasons that would emerge later, was Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. The only relevant government office that wasn't represented was the regulator that should have been there all along: the OTS.<br /><br />"We sat down with Paulson, Geithner and Dinallo," says a person present at the negotiations. "I didn't see the OTS even once."<br /><br />On September 14th, according to another person present, Treasury officials presented Blankfein and other bankers in attendance with an absurd proposal: "They basically asked them to spend a day and check to see if they could raise the money privately." The laughably short time span to complete the mammoth task made the answer a foregone conclusion. At the end of the day, the bankers came back and told the government officials, gee, we checked, but we can't raise that much. And the bailout was on.<br /><br />A short time later, it came out that AIG was planning to pay some $90 million in deferred compensation to former executives, and to accelerate the payout of $277 million in bonuses to others — a move the company insisted was necessary to "retain key employees." When Congress balked, AIG canceled the $90 million in payments.<br /><br />Then, in January 2009, the company did it again. After all those years letting Cassano run wild, and after already getting caught paying out insane bonuses while on the public till, AIG decided to pay out another $450 million in bonuses. And to whom? To the 400 or so employees in Cassano's old unit, AIGFP, which is due to go out of business shortly! Yes, that's right, an average of $1.1 million in taxpayer-backed money apiece, to the very people who spent the past decade or so punching a hole in the fabric of the universe!<br /><br />"We, uh, needed to keep these highly expert people in their seats," AIG spokeswoman Christina Pretto says to me in early February.<br /><br />"But didn't these 'highly expert people' basically destroy your company?" I ask.<br /><br />Pretto protests, says this isn't fair. The employees at AIGFP have already taken pay cuts, she says. Not retaining them would dilute the value of the company even further, make it harder to wrap up the unit's operations in an orderly fashion.<br /><br />The bonuses are a nice comic touch highlighting one of the more outrageous tangents of the bailout age, namely the fact that, even with the planet in flames, some members of the Wall Street class can't even get used to the tragedy of having to fly coach. "These people need their trips to Baja, their spa treatments, their hand jobs," says an official involved in the AIG bailout, a serious look on his face, apparently not even half-kidding. "They don't function well without them."<br /><br />IV. THE POWER GRAB<br />So that's the first step in wall street's power grab: making up things like credit-default swaps and collateralized-debt obligations, financial products so complex and inscrutable that ordinary American dumb people — to say nothing of federal regulators and even the CEOs of major corporations like AIG — are too intimidated to even try to understand them. That, combined with wise political investments, enabled the nation's top bankers to effectively scrap any meaningful oversight of the financial industry. In 1997 and 1998, the years leading up to the passage of Phil Gramm's fateful act that gutted Glass-Steagall, the banking, brokerage and insurance industries spent $350 million on political contributions and lobbying. Gramm alone — then the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee — collected $2.6 million in only five years. The law passed 90-8 in the Senate, with the support of 38 Democrats, including some names that might surprise you: Joe Biden, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, Dick Durbin, even John Edwards.<br /><br />The act helped create the too-big-to-fail financial behemoths like Citigroup, AIG and Bank of America — and in turn helped those companies slowly crush their smaller competitors, leaving the major Wall Street firms with even more money and power to lobby for further deregulatory measures. "We're moving to an oligopolistic situation," Kenneth Guenther, a top executive with the Independent Community Bankers of America, lamented after the Gramm measure was passed.<br /><br /><br />The situation worsened in 2004, in an extraordinary move toward deregulation that never even got to a vote. At the time, the European Union was threatening to more strictly regulate the foreign operations of America's big investment banks if the U.S. didn't strengthen its own oversight. So the top five investment banks got together on April 28th of that year and — with the helpful assistance of then-Goldman Sachs chief and future Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson — made a pitch to George Bush's SEC chief at the time, William Donaldson, himself a former investment banker. The banks generously volunteered to submit to new rules restricting them from engaging in excessively risky activity. In exchange, they asked to be released from any lending restrictions. The discussion about the new rules lasted just 55 minutes, and there was not a single representative of a major media outlet there to record the fateful decision.<br /><br />Donaldson OK'd the proposal, and the new rules were enough to get the EU to drop its threat to regulate the five firms. The only catch was, neither Donaldson nor his successor, Christopher Cox, actually did any regulating of the banks. They named a commission of seven people to oversee the five companies, whose combined assets came to total more than $4 trillion. But in the last year and a half of Cox's tenure, the group had no director and did not complete a single inspection. Great deal for the banks, which originally complained about being regulated by both Europe and the SEC, and ended up being regulated by no one.<br /><br />Once the capital requirements were gone, those top five banks went hog-wild, jumping ass-first into the then-raging housing bubble. One of those was Bear Stearns, which used its freedom to drown itself in bad mortgage loans. In the short period between the 2004 change and Bear's collapse, the firm's debt-to-equity ratio soared from 12-1 to an insane 33-1. Another culprit was Goldman Sachs, which also had the good fortune, around then, to see its CEO, a bald-headed Frankensteinian goon named Hank Paulson (who received an estimated $200 million tax deferral by joining the government), ascend to Treasury secretary.<br /><br />Freed from all capital restraints, sitting pretty with its man running the Treasury, Goldman jumped into the housing craze just like everyone else on Wall Street. Although it famously scored an $11 billion coup in 2007 when one of its trading units smartly shorted the housing market, the move didn't tell the whole story. In truth, Goldman still had a huge exposure come that fateful summer of 2008 — to none other than Joe Cassano.<br /><br />Goldman Sachs, it turns out, was Cassano's biggest customer, with $20 billion of exposure in Cassano's CDS book. Which might explain why Goldman chief Lloyd Blankfein was in the room with ex-Goldmanite Hank Paulson that weekend of September 13th, when the federal government was supposedly bailing out AIG.<br /><br />When asked why Blankfein was there, one of the government officials who was in the meeting shrugs. "One might say that it's because Goldman had so much exposure to AIGFP's portfolio," he says. "You'll never prove that, but one might suppose."<br /><br />Market analyst Eric Salzman is more blunt. "If AIG went down," he says, "there was a good chance Goldman would not be able to collect." The AIG bailout, in effect, was Goldman bailing out Goldman.<br /><br />Eventually, Paulson went a step further, elevating another ex-Goldmanite named Edward Liddy to run AIG — a company whose bailout money would be coming, in part, from the newly created TARP program, administered by another Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari.<br /><br />V. REPO MEN<br /><br />There are plenty of people who have noticed, in recent years, that when they lost their homes to foreclosure or were forced into bankruptcy because of crippling credit-card debt, no one in the government was there to rescue them. But when Goldman Sachs — a company whose average employee still made more than $350,000 last year, even in the midst of a depression — was suddenly faced with the possibility of losing money on the unregulated insurance deals it bought for its insane housing bets, the government was there in an instant to patch the hole. That's the essence of the bailout: rich bankers bailing out rich bankers, using the taxpayers' credit card.<br /><br />The people who have spent their lives cloistered in this Wall Street community aren't much for sharing information with the great unwashed. Because all of this shit is complicated, because most of us mortals don't know what the hell LIBOR is or how a REIT works or how to use the word "zero coupon bond" in a sentence without sounding stupid — well, then, the people who do speak this idiotic language cannot under any circumstances be bothered to explain it to us and instead spend a lot of time rolling their eyes and asking us to trust them.<br /><br />That roll of the eyes is a key part of the psychology of Paulsonism. The state is now being asked not just to call off its regulators or give tax breaks or funnel a few contracts to connected companies; it is intervening directly in the economy, for the sole purpose of preserving the influence of the megafirms. In essence, Paulson used the bailout to transform the government into a giant bureaucracy of entitled assholedom, one that would socialize "toxic" risks but keep both the profits and the management of the bailed-out firms in private hands. Moreover, this whole process would be done in secret, away from the prying eyes of NASCAR dads, broke-ass liberals who read translations of French novels, subprime mortgage holders and other such financial losers.<br /><br />Some aspects of the bailout were secretive to the point of absurdity. In fact, if you look closely at just a few lines in the Federal Reserve's weekly public disclosures, you can literally see the moment where a big chunk of your money disappeared for good. The H4 report (called "Factors Affecting Reserve Balances") summarizes the activities of the Fed each week. You can find it online, and it's pretty much the only thing the Fed ever tells the world about what it does. For the week ending February 18th, the number under the heading "Repurchase Agreements" on the table is zero. It's a significant number.<br /><br />Why? In the pre-crisis days, the Fed used to manage the money supply by periodically buying and selling securities on the open market through so-called Repurchase Agreements, or Repos. The Fed would typically dump $25 billion or so in cash onto the market every week, buying up Treasury bills, U.S. securities and even mortgage-backed securities from institutions like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, who would then "repurchase" them in a short period of time, usually one to seven days. This was the Fed's primary mechanism for controlling interest rates: Buying up securities gives banks more money to lend, which makes interest rates go down. Selling the securities back to the banks reduces the money available for lending, which makes interest rates go up.<br /><br /><br />If you look at the weekly H4 reports going back to the summer of 2007, you start to notice something alarming. At the start of the credit crunch, around August of that year, you see the Fed buying a few more Repos than usual — $33 billion or so. By November, as private-bank reserves were dwindling to alarmingly low levels, the Fed started injecting even more cash than usual into the economy: $48 billion. By late December, the number was up to $58 billion; by the following March, around the time of the Bear Stearns rescue, the Repo number had jumped to $77 billion. In the week of May 1st, 2008, the number was $115 billion — "out of control now," according to one congressional aide. For the rest of 2008, the numbers remained similarly in the stratosphere, the Fed pumping as much as $125 billion of these short-term loans into the economy — until suddenly, at the start of this year, the number drops to nothing. Zero.<br /><br />The reason the number has dropped to nothing is that the Fed had simply stopped using relatively transparent devices like repurchase agreements to pump its money into the hands of private companies. By early 2009, a whole series of new government operations had been invented to inject cash into the economy, most all of them completely secretive and with names you've never heard of. There is the Term Auction Facility, the Term Securities Lending Facility, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and a monster called the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (boasting the chat-room horror-show acronym ABCPMMMFLF). For good measure, there's also something called a Money Market Investor Funding Facility, plus three facilities called Maiden Lane I, II and III to aid bailout recipients like Bear Stearns and AIG.<br /><br />While the rest of America, and most of Congress, have been bugging out about the $700 billion bailout program called TARP, all of these newly created organisms in the Federal Reserve zoo have quietly been pumping not billions but trillions of dollars into the hands of private companies (at least $3 trillion so far in loans, with as much as $5.7 trillion more in guarantees of private investments). Although this technically isn't taxpayer money, it still affects taxpayers directly, because the activities of the Fed impact the economy as a whole. And this new, secretive activity by the Fed completely eclipses the TARP program in terms of its influence on the economy.<br /><br />No one knows who's getting that money or exactly how much of it is disappearing through these new holes in the hull of America's credit rating. Moreover, no one can really be sure if these new institutions are even temporary at all — or whether they are being set up as permanent, state-aided crutches to Wall Street, designed to systematically suck bad investments off the ledgers of irresponsible lenders.<br /><br />"They're supposed to be temporary," says Paul-Martin Foss, an aide to Rep. Ron Paul. "But we keep getting notices every six months or so that they're being renewed. They just sort of quietly announce it."<br /><br />None other than disgraced senator Ted Stevens was the poor sap who made the unpleasant discovery that if Congress didn't like the Fed handing trillions of dollars to banks without any oversight, Congress could apparently go fuck itself — or so said the law. When Stevens asked the GAO about what authority Congress has to monitor the Fed, he got back a letter citing an obscure statute that nobody had ever heard of before: the Accounting and Auditing Act of 1950. The relevant section, 31 USC 714(b), dictated that congressional audits of the Federal Reserve may not include "deliberations, decisions and actions on monetary policy matters." The exemption, as Foss notes, "basically includes everything." According to the law, in other words, the Fed simply cannot be audited by Congress. Or by anyone else, for that matter.<br /><br />VI. WINNERS AND LOSERS<br /><br />Stevens isn't the only person in Congress to be given the finger by the Fed. In January, when Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida asked Federal Reserve vice chairman Donald Kohn where all the money went — only $1.2 trillion had vanished by then — Kohn gave Grayson a classic eye roll, saying he would be "very hesitant" to name names because it might discourage banks from taking the money.<br /><br />"Has that ever happened?" Grayson asked. "Have people ever said, 'We will not take your $100 billion because people will find out about it?'"<br /><br />"Well, we said we would not publish the names of the borrowers, so we have no test of that," Kohn answered, visibly annoyed with Grayson's meddling.<br /><br />Grayson pressed on, demanding to know on what terms the Fed was lending the money. Presumably it was buying assets and making loans, but no one knew how it was pricing those assets — in other words, no one knew what kind of deal it was striking on behalf of taxpayers. So when Grayson asked if the purchased assets were "marked to market" — a methodology that assigns a concrete value to assets, based on the market rate on the day they are traded — Kohn answered, mysteriously, "The ones that have market values are marked to market." The implication was that the Fed was purchasing derivatives like credit swaps or other instruments that were basically impossible to value objectively — paying real money for God knows what.<br /><br />"Well, how much of them don't have market values?" asked Grayson. "How much of them are worthless?"<br /><br />"None are worthless," Kohn snapped.<br /><br />"Then why don't you mark them to market?" Grayson demanded.<br /><br />"Well," Kohn sighed, "we are marking the ones to market that have market values."<br /><br />In essence, the Fed was telling Congress to lay off and let the experts handle things. "It's like buying a car in a used-car lot without opening the hood, and saying, 'I think it's fine,'" says Dan Fuss, an analyst with the investment firm Loomis Sayles. "The salesman says, 'Don't worry about it. Trust me.' It'll probably get us out of the lot, but how much farther? None of us knows."<br /><br />When one considers the comparatively extensive system of congressional checks and balances that goes into the spending of every dollar in the budget via the normal appropriations process, what's happening in the Fed amounts to something truly revolutionary — a kind of shadow government with a budget many times the size of the normal federal outlay, administered dictatorially by one man, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. "We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this $3 trillion," says Sen. Bernie Sanders. "It is beyond comprehension."<br /><br />Count Sanders among those who don't buy the argument that Wall Street firms shouldn't have to face being outed as recipients of public funds, that making this information public might cause investors to panic and dump their holdings in these firms. "I guess if we made that public, they'd go on strike or something," he muses.<br /><br />And the Fed isn't the only arm of the bailout that has closed ranks. The Treasury, too, has maintained incredible secrecy surrounding its implementation even of the TARP program, which was mandated by Congress. To this date, no one knows exactly what criteria the Treasury Department used to determine which banks received bailout funds and which didn't — particularly the first $350 billion given out under Bush appointee Hank Paulson.<br /><br />The situation with the first TARP payments grew so absurd that when the Congressional Oversight Panel, charged with monitoring the bailout money, sent a query to Paulson asking how he decided whom to give money to, Treasury responded — and this isn't a joke — by directing the panel to a copy of the TARP application form on its website. Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, was struck nearly speechless by the response.<br /><br />"Do you believe that?" she says incredulously. "That's not what we had in mind."<br /><br />Another member of Congress, who asked not to be named, offers his own theory about the TARP process. "I think basically if you knew Hank Paulson, you got the money," he says.<br /><br />This cozy arrangement created yet another opportunity for big banks to devour market share at the expense of smaller regional lenders. While all the bigwigs at Citi and Goldman and Bank of America who had Paulson on speed-dial got bailed out right away — remember that TARP was originally passed because money had to be lent right now, that day, that minute, to stave off emergency — many small banks are still waiting for help. Five months into the TARP program, some not only haven't received any funds, they haven't even gotten a call back about their applications.<br /><br />"There's definitely a feeling among community bankers that no one up there cares much if they make it or not," says Tanya Wheeless, president of the Arizona Bankers Association.<br /><br />Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what should be happening, since small, regional banks are far less guilty of the kinds of predatory lending that sank the economy. "They're not giving out subprime loans or easy credit," says Wheeless. "At the community level, it's much more bread-and-butter banking."<br /><br />Nonetheless, the lion's share of the bailout money has gone to the larger, so-called "systemically important" banks. "It's like Treasury is picking winners and losers," says one state banking official who asked not to be identified.<br /><br />This itself is a hugely important political development. In essence, the bailout accelerated the decline of regional community lenders by boosting the political power of their giant national competitors.<br /><br />Which, when you think about it, is insane: What had brought us to the brink of collapse in the first place was this relentless instinct for building ever-larger megacompanies, passing deregulatory measures to gradually feed all the little fish in the sea to an ever-shrinking pool of Bigger Fish. To fix this problem, the government should have slowly liquidated these monster, too-big-to-fail firms and broken them down to smaller, more manageable companies. Instead, federal regulators closed ranks and used an almost completely secret bailout process to double down on the same faulty, merger-happy thinking that got us here in the first place, creating a constellation of megafirms under government control that are even bigger, more unwieldy and more crammed to the gills with systemic risk.<br /><br /><br />In essence, Paulson and his cronies turned the federal government into one gigantic, half-opaque holding company, one whose balance sheet includes the world's most appallingly large and risky hedge fund, a controlling stake in a dying insurance giant, huge investments in a group of teetering megabanks, and shares here and there in various auto-finance companies, student loans, and other failing businesses. Like AIG, this new federal holding company is a firm that has no mechanism for auditing itself and is run by leaders who have very little grasp of the daily operations of its disparate subsidiary operations.<br /><br />In other words, it's AIG's rip-roaringly shitty business model writ almost inconceivably massive — to echo Geithner, a huge, complex global company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that's been allowed to build up without adult supervision. How much of what kinds of crap is actually on our balance sheet, and what did we pay for it? When exactly will the rent come due, when will the money run out? Does anyone know what the hell is going on? And on the linear spectrum of capitalism to socialism, where exactly are we now? Is there a dictionary word that even describes what we are now? It would be funny, if it weren't such a nightmare.<br /><br />VII. YOU DON'T GET IT<br /><br />The real question from here is whether the Obama administration is going to move to bring the financial system back to a place where sanity is restored and the general public can have a say in things or whether the new financial bureaucracy will remain obscure, secretive and hopelessly complex. It might not bode well that Geithner, Obama's Treasury secretary, is one of the architects of the Paulson bailouts; as chief of the New York Fed, he helped orchestrate the Goldman-friendly AIG bailout and the secretive Maiden Lane facilities used to funnel funds to the dying company. Neither did it look good when Geithner — himself a protégé of notorious Goldman alum John Thain, the Merrill Lynch chief who paid out billions in bonuses after the state spent billions bailing out his firm — picked a former Goldman lobbyist named Mark Patterson to be his top aide.<br /><br />In fact, most of Geithner's early moves reek strongly of Paulsonism. He has continually talked about partnering with private investors to create a so-called "bad bank" that would systemically relieve private lenders of bad assets — the kind of massive, opaque, quasi-private bureaucratic nightmare that Paulson specialized in. Geithner even refloated a Paulson proposal to use TALF, one of the Fed's new facilities, to essentially lend cheap money to hedge funds to invest in troubled banks while practically guaranteeing them enormous profits.<br /><br />God knows exactly what this does for the taxpayer, but hedge-fund managers sure love the idea. "This is exactly what the financial system needs," said Andrew Feldstein, CEO of Blue Mountain Capital and one of the Morgan Mafia. Strangely, there aren't many people who don't run hedge funds who have expressed anything like that kind of enthusiasm for Geithner's ideas.<br /><br />As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.<br /><br />The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.<br /><br />"But wait a minute," you say to them. "No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?"<br /><br />But before you even finish saying that, they're rolling their eyes, because You Don't Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they're on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.<br /><br />Good luck with that, America. And enjoy tax season.<br /><br />[From Issue 1075 — April 2, 2009]<br />MATT TAIBBI Posted Mar 19, 2009 12:49 PMrayneberryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01920167866455939380noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9114177167800164593.post-82552864447578520542009-03-18T10:45:00.000-07:002009-03-18T10:46:28.317-07:00I sure see the logic in this!The late Dr. Adrian Rogers (1931-2005) offered the following observation several years ago and it bears poignant significance today: <br /><br />"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the rich out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply the wealth by dividing it."rayneberryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01920167866455939380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9114177167800164593.post-48835792802147027332009-03-12T12:43:00.002-07:002009-03-12T12:54:32.226-07:00"Audit the Fed" petition<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);font-family:courier new;font-size:85%;" >Dear Friend of Liberty,</span><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);">Right now, you and I are seeing the worst plundering of a nation’s wealth in the history of civilization – all led by the out of control Federal Reserve.</span></span><br /><p style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><span style=";font-family:courier new;font-size:85%;" ><span style="font-weight: normal;font-size:85%;" >If you and I don’t act today, I’m afraid this crisis will end with the economic ruin of every man, woman and child in the United States.</span><br /><br /><u>Just think about the scope of the problem for a minute: The Fed pumps trillions of dollars in fiat currency into a system already overloaded by the massive amount of dollars committed to the economic bailouts in recent months</u>.<br /><br />This TOTALS:<br /><br />More than the socialist New Deal...<br />More than the entire Iraq debacle...<br />More than the 1980’s savings and loan mess...<br />More than the Korean War...<br /></span></p><p style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 102);"><span style=";font-family:courier new;font-size:85%;" ><span style="font-size:100%;">COMBINED.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">Where will it all end?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">It’s time you and I put a stop to an out of control Federal Reserve. And Ron Paul has a bill before Congress to do just that.</span><br /><br /><u>That’s why it’s vital you fill out your personal "Audit the Fed" petition in support of Congressman Paul’s bill</u>.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">Today, $9.7 TRILLION in taxpayer dollars in bailouts and loans have been agreed to by Congress, the Bush and Obama Treasury Departments, and the Federal Reserve.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">Poll after poll shows the American people are fed up and are ready for fresh leadership to make their voices heard in Washington.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">That means it’s a perfect time to unleash the Ron Paul R3VOLUTION on the out of control Fed!</span><br /><br /><u style="font-weight: bold;">Please complete <a style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);" href="http://www.campaignforliberty.com/campaigns/auditthefed.php?projid=16" target="_blank">this petition</a> urging your Congressman to cosponsor and a seek roll-call vote on Ron Paul’s Audit the Fed Bill -- the first step toward ENDING THE FEDERAL RESERVE once and for all</u><span style="font-weight: bold;">!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">As I know you’re aware, the Federal Reserve’s inner-workings are shrouded in secrecy, and their meetings are off-limits to the public.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">Just recently, the Federal Reserve told Congress “NO WAY” when asked to account for TWO TRILLION DOLLARS in taxpayer-backed loans!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">Well, why do you think they refused?</span><br /><br /><u>They know coming clean with Congress and the American people on how they doled out those two TRILLION dollars would result in an anti-Fed firestorm</u>.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">So can you imagine the impact of a full-scale audit?</span><br /><br /><u>You and I will finally be able to show the American people that the Federal Reserve System leads to</u>:<br /><br />*** <u>Constant economic crises</u> -- the housing crisis and the resulting chaos is just one example of an economic bubble created by centrally-planned interest rates and money manipulation;<br /><br />*** <u>The destruction of the middle class</u> -- as fuel, food, housing, medical care and education costs soar, everyone who is NOT on the government dole is forced to make do with less as the value of their money slowly decreases;<br /><br />*** <u>Currency destruction</u> -- history shows us that riots, violence and full-scale police states can result when people finally realize fiat money isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on and REFUSE to accept it.<br /><br />And unless you and I do end the madness in Washington, D.C., <u>we may be closer than we’d like to think to learning that history lesson first hand</u> -- right here on the streets of our towns and cities.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">That’s why your commitment to helping the Campaign for Liberty fight this battle is so vital.</span><br /><br /><u>Just a few months ago, there was no chance of passing any legislation like Ron Paul’s Audit-the-Fed Bill</u>.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">So I guess there has been one “<span style="font-weight: bold;">CHANGE</span>.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">But with the piling up of trillions of dollars in out of control “bailouts” of Wall Street and international bankers, even many politicians in Washington, D.C. want to show you they’re “being responsible”.</span><br /><br /><u>What better way for Congress to do this than by auditing the Federal Reserve to account for the trillions stolen from the U.S. taxpayers</u>?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">There will be many battles you and I must fight over the coming months to take back our country. But this one is set to rage in Congress in just a few short weeks.</span><br /><br /><u>And, it’s a bill we CAN pass</u>!<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">You see, after regulating, taxing, spending, borrowing and printing us into what looks like the worst recession in decades, establishment politicians and power brokers are assuring us they are working hard to “fix” our economic woes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">So they want to do something (anything) to show you they care.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">That’s why Dr. Paul’s bill is positioned to move forward this year.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">And since very few politicians understand the Federal Reserve System, they do not understand the threat this bill poses to the borrow-and-spend system they continually vote for.</span><br /><br /><u>And even if Ron Paul’s Audit-the-Fed Bill is defeated, just forcing a vote is a win/win situation</u>.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">Can you imagine how many politicians will pay the price at the ballot box in 2010 when you and I tell the American people their Congressman somehow lost trillions of taxpayer dollars and voted against even looking for the money?</span><br /><br /><u>Of course, getting a vote won’t be easy, but you know just as well as I do that Ron Paul has proven he’s not afraid of a fight</u>.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">Now, we just need to show Congress that the American people demand action on Ron Paul’s Audit-the-Fed Bill. Here’s how we plan to do that:</span><br /><br /><u>First, we’re already busy contacting up to five million activists nationwide through mail, phones and e-mail to generate petitions to the U.S. Congress demanding action on the bill</u>.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">But that’s just the beginning.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">We’ll work the talk radio stations and grant local media interviews to further turn up the pressure on Congress. And, of course, Ron Paul supporters will own the meet-up groups and social networking sites that first launched our R3volution.</span><br /><br /><u>And a few days before the vote, if we have the resources, we’d also like to run hard-hitting targeted radio, TV and newspaper ads</u>.<br /><br />This entire program is designed to send one, CLEAR message to Congress -- <u>Any politician who votes against the Federal Reserve Audit should look for another job</u>.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">But such a massive effort won’t be easy -- or cheap.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal;">So, along with your petition, I also hope you’ll agree to make a contribution of $250, $100, or $50 to the Campaign for Liberty.</span><br /><br /><u>I know times are hard, but if we don’t take action, the America we see in just a few years could look much different than the one we see today</u>.</span></p><p><span style=";font-family:courier new;font-size:130%;" ><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);font-size:85%;" >Sincerely,<br /><br />John F. Tate<br />President</span><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 102);font-size:85%;" ><br /><br />P.S. <u>Please fill out <a style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);" href="http://www.campaignforliberty.com/campaigns/auditthefed.php?projid=16" target="_blank">this petition</a> DEMANDING your Congressman cosponsor and seek a roll-call vote on Ron Paul’s Audit-the-Fed Bill TODAY</u>!<br /><br /></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);font-size:85%;" >With Congress spending like never before, and TRILLIONS of new dollars flying off the printing presses, it’s never been more important to expose the Federal Reserve System to the American people once and for all.</span><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 102);font-size:85%;" ><br /><br /><u>So along with your petition, please contribute to Campaign for Liberty. Whether you can donate as much as $250 – or $50 or some other amount, please do what you can. I know any amount in these hard times is a sacrifice</u>!<br /><br /></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);font-size:85%;" >Campaign for Liberty operates like government should, meaning we will not go into debt. Only your voluntary contributions permit us to do this work.</span><br /></span></p>rayneberryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01920167866455939380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9114177167800164593.post-57421530618060985402009-03-12T12:35:00.000-07:002009-03-12T12:37:01.909-07:00Back on Uncle Sam's plantationStar Parker - Syndicated Columnist - 2/9/2009 8:00:00 AM<br /><br />Six years ago I wrote a book called <em>Uncle Sam's Plantation</em>. I wrote the book to tell my own story of what I saw living inside the welfare state and my own transformation out of it.<br /><br />I said in that book that indeed there are two Americas -- a poor America on socialism and a wealthy America on capitalism.<p> </p><p><storybody></storybody></p><p align="left">I talked about government programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS), Emergency Assistance to Needy Families with Children (EANF), Section 8 Housing, and Food Stamps.<br /><br />A vast sea of perhaps well-intentioned government programs, all initially set into motion in the 1960s, that were going to lift the nation's poor out of poverty.<br /><br />A benevolent Uncle Sam welcomed mostly poor black Americans onto the government plantation. Those who accepted the invitation switched mindsets from "How do I take care of myself?" to "What do I have to do to stay on the plantation?"<br /><br />Instead of solving economic problems, government welfare socialism created monstrous moral and spiritual problems -- the kind of problems that are inevitable when individuals turn responsibility for their lives over to others.<br /><br />The legacy of American socialism is our blighted inner cities, dysfunctional inner city schools, and broken black families.<br /><br />Through God's grace, I found my way out. It was then that I understood what freedom meant and how great this country is.<br /><br />I had the privilege of working on welfare reform in 1996, passed by a Republican Congress and signed 50 percent.<br /><br />I thought we were on the road to moving socialism out of our poor black communities and replacing it with wealth-producing American capitalism.<br /><br />But, incredibly, we are going in the opposite direction.<br /><br />Instead of poor America on socialism becoming more like rich American on capitalism, rich America on capitalism is becoming like poor America on socialism.<br /><br />Uncle Sam has welcomed our banks onto the plantation and they have said, "Thank you, Suh."<br /><br />Now, instead of thinking about what creative things need to be done to serve customers, they are thinking about what they have to tell Massah in order to get their cash.<br /><br />There is some kind of irony that this is all happening under our first black president on the 200th anniversary of the birthday of Abraham Lincoln.<br /><br />Worse, socialism seems to be the element of our new young president. And maybe even more troubling, our corporate executives seem happy to move onto the plantation.<br /><br />In an op-ed on the opinion page of the <em>Washington Post</em>, Mr. Obama is clear that the goal of his trillion dollar spending plan is much more than short term economic stimulus.<br /><br />"This plan is more than a prescription for short-term spending -- it's a strategy for America's long-term growth and opportunity in areas such as renewable energy, healthcare, and education."<br /><br />Perhaps more incredibly, Obama seems to think that government taking over an economy is a new idea. Or that massive growth in government can take place "with unprecedented transparency and accountability."<br /><br />Yes, sir, we heard it from Jimmy Carter when he created the Department of Energy, the Synfuels Corporation, and the Department of Education.<br /><br />Or how about the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 -- The War on Poverty -- which President Johnson said "...does not merely expand old programs or improve what is already being done. It charts a new course. It strikes at the causes, not just the consequences of poverty."<br /><br />Trillions of dollars later, black poverty is the same. But black families are not, with triple the incidence of single-parent homes and out-of-wedlock births.<br /><br />It's not complicated. Americans can accept Barack Obama's invitation to move onto the plantation. Or they can choose personal responsibility and freedom.<br /><br />Does anyone really need to think about what the choice should be?</p>rayneberryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01920167866455939380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9114177167800164593.post-13659344395395113392009-03-12T12:32:00.001-07:002009-03-12T12:34:55.490-07:00The Durbin Amendment – The New ‘Fairness’ Doctrine with a Kicker<i>Law may allow preemptive, premature rescission of broadcast licenses<br /><br /></i><p>Yesterday by a whopping 87-11 vote, the Senate added as a rider to the passed DC voting rights bill the Broadcaster Freedom Act (BFA). The BFA, if also passed by the House and signed by the President, would kill once and for all the Censorship Doctrine -- also mis-known as the "Fairness" Doctrine. </p> <p>Much Conservative celebration ensued. However, the revelry is misplaced and premature. It means only that the Left means to destroy Conservative and Christian talk radio by other means.</p><p>Because another rider was added via a party-line 57-41 vote. Written by Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, S.160's Purpose is "To encourage and promote diversity in communication media ownership, and to ensure that the public airwaves are used in the public interest."</p><p>Hello, new "Fairness" Doctrine - the regulatory enforcement of "diversity" of radio station ownership, and localism as defined by the "public interest." Liberal censors are now travelling alternative routes to reach their original destination - silencing political speech on the airwaves.</p><table align="right" border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2" width="222" height="96"><tbody><tr align="center"><td valign="undefined"><i><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman, Times, serif;">This is an alternative assault on the radio industry to affect the Left’s desired ideological outcome.</span><span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman, Times, serif;"> </span> </span></span></i></td></tr></tbody></table><p>One tremendous problem with this amendment, with the Censorship Doctrine itself and in fact with virtually every aspect of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s broadcast licensing requirements is that they are all completely nebulous. President Barack Obama's FCC can interpret these regulations in any direction it wishes, which more than likely bodes poorly for free speech on the radio. </p><p>And the worst part of the Durbin Amendment is the possibility that <b>Obama's FCC may now be empowered to prematurely pull the broadcast licenses of radio stations they deem as failing to meet these new "Fairness" Doctrine-esque guidelines</b>. Several lawyers who do this for a living see this rider's wording as amorphous enough to allow for this interpretation. </p> <p>This would be absolutely devastating to talk radio. Stations currently carrying Conservative and Christian talk would be perpetually under the FCC gun - never knowing when the regulatory hammer would fall and crush their businesses. They would feel tremendous pressure to change formats so as to be able to stay on the air. </p> <p>And no one would be able to justify the enormous expense of getting into talk radio if their lifeline - their broadcast license - could be pulled capriciously at any time.</p> <p>These licenses would then be awarded to more "diverse" owners who show a greater desire in meeting the Obama FCC's definition of the "local" and "public interest." You know, ACORN activists and MoveOn.org hosts who couldn't cut the mustard on National Public or Pacifica Radio.</p> <p>This is an alternative assault on the radio industry to affect the Left's desired ideological outcome. By making it untenable for stations to conduct the business of talk radio, the liberal censors will succeed in again silencing political speech on the airwaves - just as if the "Fairness" Doctrine itself were reinstated. Thus is the new "Fairness" Doctrine born. </p> <p>In the real world, the public interest is best served by what the public is interested in. Conservative and Christian talk radio survives and thrives because people listen, and Liberal talk fails because they don't. </p> <p>But none of this matters in this brave new "diverse" world. Liberals never liked the free market with it's equality of opportunity. They have always preferred an equality of outcome - where shows that have listeners are forced to share the airwaves with those that don't. </p> <p>The Durbin Amendment solves the Left's "Fairness" Doctrine dilemma. It gets them what they want - radio free of Conservative and Christian talk - without the political baggage of carrying the "Fairness" Doctrine name. </p> <p>For them, a rose by any other name still smells as sweet if it serves to silence the opposition. </p><i>—Seton Motley is Director of Communications for the Media Research Center.</i><p><br /></p><br /><i></i>rayneberryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01920167866455939380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9114177167800164593.post-83635452643449620482009-03-09T13:10:00.000-07:002009-03-09T13:11:36.342-07:00Land Tilled and Ready for planting March 2009<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/KCgpHuv478s&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/KCgpHuv478s&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/gGT_lMldRzQ&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/gGT_lMldRzQ&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>rayneberryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01920167866455939380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9114177167800164593.post-7306518573767551752009-03-06T11:49:00.000-07:002009-03-06T11:50:32.480-07:00Ben Bernanke RefusesTransparency - TAKE ACTION NOW!<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/kUJIG3JNPk0&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/kUJIG3JNPk0&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>rayneberryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01920167866455939380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9114177167800164593.post-29399749857003502692009-03-06T11:17:00.001-07:002009-03-06T11:20:49.252-07:00To All my friends...a personal message from meLast week I called my grandma's investor.....over time I have been very worried about all of her money being in the stock market. She has been living off of a fixed income of 2,000 a month.<br /><br /><br />When I spoke to her investor...a man I have known since I was 5....he assured me that she would have enough money to last her another 10 - 20 years.....I wasn't quite sure how that was going to be possible if the stock market continued to drop. Not only that but my mother had already informed me that she had already lost about half of what she originally had in there...<br /><br />So I received a message from my mom this morning. She called to let me know that my grandma's investor took ALL of his people's investments out of the stock market....They are meeting with him this morning, so I will have more information later..<br /><br />What happened between last week and today, I have no idea...besides the continuing drop in the stock market...why would he tell me that a week ago...then to pull out all of his investor's money!!<br /><br />Apparently he was also trying to get ahold of Jan Brewer too. AZ's govenor.<br /><br /><br />UPDATE:<br /><br />My mom and grandma have now met with the investor, and he said that it was LAST week that he pulled everyone's money out.<br /><br /><br />REASON: He started doing research on the last time the stock market dropped at this rate, and he said that based on what happened when the depression hit, it would be best to take everyone's money out...He said do not put it in money market's or anything..he said just keep it in your savings....<br /><br />I am not sure how safe that will be anymore either...the FDIC the people who supposedly insure our money in our savings up to 100,000 dollars actually I think it is 250,000 now...has recently borrowed money from the government to have a line of credit of 100 billion dollars to give people their money back when their bank closes....there were 25 bank closures last year that had brought their funds down to 18.9 billion in the 4th quarter....They are trying to get the credit line up to 500 billion...why is this...do they see many more banks closing in the near future?!?!? <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aGewvZuHR3dk&refer=news">http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aGewvZuHR3dk&refer=news</a><br /><br /><br />There have already been 16 banks that have closed this year so far: <a href="http://www.fdic.gov/bank/individual/failed/banklist.html">http://www.fdic.gov/bank/individual/failed/banklist.html</a><br /><br /><br />If you have not taken your money out please do so.....get back in when you see it constantly going back up...it will be safer that way..<br /><br />I feel in the deepest part of my gut that there are going to be rough times ahead...my suggestion to all my friends is that they buy as much food storage as they can afford...This is effecting people....so many people...people close to me, and I am sure it is happening to people close to you...<br /><br />The most valuable thing you can have is food and water....please prepare yourself. Financially, Mentally, Physically, and Emotionally...I am always here if anyone ever needs to talk.<br /><br /><br />This ad is being issued on the radio all the time: issued by HOME LAND SECURITY<br /><a href="www.ready.gov">www.ready.gov</a><br /><br />Another helpful site:<br /><a href="www.beprepared.com">www.beprepared.com</a>rayneberryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01920167866455939380noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9114177167800164593.post-26324369138348441902009-03-03T13:29:00.002-07:002009-03-03T13:43:46.683-07:00Ron Paul the Stoner ;)This video is from the first Episode of this season's Bill Maher show. He interviewed Ron Paul, it is hilarious!<br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/M5lb0l3sYBo&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/M5lb0l3sYBo&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>rayneberryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01920167866455939380noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9114177167800164593.post-46384783961565118382009-03-03T12:14:00.001-07:002009-03-03T12:19:17.467-07:00Is Spending the Answer????Is Spending the Answer?<br />by Congressman Ron Paul<br /><br />This week, Congress and the administration once again showed their lack of economic understanding, as they ramped up spending to record levels. On the surface, maybe it does look to some like the economic crisis is a liquidity problem, that the economy is in trouble because money is not changing hands at the pace it once did in the boom years. They believe that to get back to a booming economy money needs to start changing hands again – and the quickest way to do this is for the federal government to massively expand spending to pump new money into the system. If this is the extent of their understanding, no wonder they call for spending, taxing, bailouts and inflation.<br /><br />If spending was the solution, we never would have had a problem. During the last eight years, we’ve blown up the size of government and certainly had no want of spending on foreign or domestic policy. The Bush administration increased spending almost 20% its first term, and nearly doubled the national debt by the end of the second term. Certainly the case cannot be made that lack of government spending created the problem or can be the solution.<br /><br />This is mirrored in American households. According to CNN private sector debt is 365% of private sector gross domestic product. Many relied simply on steady and continued increase in home values to enable spending and secure more debt. That trend has proven unsustainable and many Americans are adjusting their finances accordingly. For the first time, household debt is beginning to fall as consumers wake up to the realities of paying off debt and living within their means.<br /><br />Wouldn’t it be great if the government would do the same?<br /><br />A lot of capital and liquidity is out there waiting in the wings as the new administration is bringing about government uncertainty, a concept discussed by Robert Higgs as prolonging the Great Depression. In other words, it is a foregone conclusion that government will act. But, like a chicken with its head cut off, no one knows which way it will run, just that it will flail about wildly until it collapses.<br /><br />Why start a business, when businesses could face the brunt of an increase in future taxation? Similarly, why hire a new employee if tax policy will just force you to fire them later on to stay afloat? Why buy a house, when you have no idea how future government meddling in the housing market will affect its value? Why spend at the shopping mall, or buy a new car when you don’t know how tax policy will affect your family budget, or if your job will come under the axe because your employer’s tax burden is increased?<br /><br />I argue these kinds of questions and concerns contribute to the weakening economy. This type of tax policy keeps capital out of third world nations, and now is keeping capital in hiding here in the US. People are concerned about security and savings again, retrenching their household and business budgets. The economy could be helped if the government would just get out of the way and restore sound monetary and fiscal policies.rayneberryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01920167866455939380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9114177167800164593.post-6095480287537608712009-03-02T09:43:00.000-07:002009-03-02T09:52:44.062-07:00What if....<object width="480" height="295"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/jFcQutO5Lgs&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/jFcQutO5Lgs&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="295"></embed></object>rayneberryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01920167866455939380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9114177167800164593.post-91322815730862668662008-04-02T15:54:00.002-07:002008-04-02T16:23:02.296-07:00My Garden<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dzvGU0zKPZz_MdY_OBHMpkSwhcPyoEcikEzNFuqUyAwGayT6dmfbND752DXvg6rj3jLFbCs2PUhyHwosf6o_g' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe>rayneberryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01920167866455939380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9114177167800164593.post-34540075370383197972008-03-28T09:01:00.000-07:002008-03-28T10:03:15.632-07:00Celebrity ApprenticeSo I didn't watch the whole season of this show, but by watching the final episode, it just goes to prove that Donald Trump is truly bought off and that we truly live in a Corporate America that will eventually bring us to our demise.<br /><br />Trump has proven to America, that the American Dream no longer exits. The show came down to two people Piers Morgan and country singer Trace Adkins. Piers is a dirty conniving Brit who has no "Bedside manners". Country singer Trace Adkins is the type of person America needs more of! He is loyal, honest, and sincere. Someone mentioned in the last Episode that America needs Trace to win. I agree. America has lost so many men to greed, power, and corruption. Not to mention that all the money raised by Piers goes to the military, and the injured soldiers, along with another 250,000 Donald Trump is throwing in for the winner! <br /><br />If we didn't live in a Corporate America who only cares about power and control, we may just have been able to help all these kids with severe food alergies most likely passed on through generations of chemically altered people due to the hormones and pesticides that we have been ingesting through our food over the years. <br /><br />After seeing all these chemical imbalances in children, with all their ADD, ADHD, depression, among other health issues, doesn't anyone think that just maybe just maybe all these problems come from the food the government so nicely regulates to us?????<br /><br />Ontop of that problem also due to the power and greed in this country, we are fighting an uncontituional war. These young soldiers never had a chance with our country throwing them out on the battle field! "Here you go kid, it's a gun, you kill people with it". "Why asks the kid" "Well to protect our freedom of course"<br /><br />That is pretty much how it works! Might as well, cause the most of them have no idea what we are really fighting for!<br /><br />Whoever has the power and the money controls the world! Unfortunately! I guess it wouldn't be too bad if the person with the power and the money wasn't corrupt, but where are you going to find that..I'll tell you...in a delusional world that is nonexistent! <br /><br />I almost felt while watching this it was more of a battle between good and bad, kind of like today's Republicans vs Ron Paul! Or should I say Neocons vs Ron Paul!<br /><br />Isn't everyone sick of this yet????<br />Isn't everyone sick of being slaves to the American Government?!?!?<br />Do people really believe that after over 200 years of our country being a country that we should still be at war?<br />Haven't we learned anything from History?<br /><br />I thank God everyday that there is a storm brewing, a storm of people that believe in freedom, peace and prosperity!<br />Where have they all been hiding?<br />I'll tell you where, in la di da America, living the American Dream!<br />The American dream which consists of 1/4 of your income going to the government to support unconstitional wars, illegal wiretapping, conditioning and conditioning to make us believe we live in a world where the government will always take care of us!<br />Well I don't like how they are taking care of us!<br />I don't like this dependency on oil, I don't like these pesticides and genetically altered food, I don't like these big corporate companies that flood our heads with commercials of items I will never need in my life. I will not buy into what they are selling. Luckily since we are such a broke country due to the over spending on our governments part, not many people can afford to buy into this ridiculously unfulfilling bunch of products!<br /><br />People have forgotten what life is all about! Life is about love, freedom, peace, and prosperity! It is about helping people less fortunate then you, and I don't mean by forcing the people to pay for global poverty by taxing fossil fuels! <br /><br />I don't want to live as a slave to my government! Not anymore!rayneberryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01920167866455939380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9114177167800164593.post-87050182923559235582008-03-24T11:29:00.001-07:002008-03-24T11:29:58.711-07:00Not Yours To GiveOriginally published in "The Life of Colonel David Crockett," by Edward Sylvester Ellis.<br /><br />One day in the House of Representatives a bill was taken up appropriating money for the benefit of a widow of a distinguished naval officer. Several beautiful speeches had been made in its support. The speaker was just about to put the question when Crockett arose:<br /><br />"Mr. Speaker--I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the suffering of the living, if there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has not the power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member on this floor knows it.<br /><br />We have the right as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money. Some eloquent appeals have been made to us upon the ground that it is a debt due the deceased. Mr. Speaker, the deceased lived long after the close of the war; he was in office to the day of his death, and I ever heard that the government was in arrears to him.<br /><br />"Every man in this House knows it is not a debt. We cannot without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblance of authority to appropriate it as charity. Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much money of our own as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week's pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks."<br /><br />He took his seat. Nobody replied. The bill was put upon its passage, and, instead of passing unanimously, as was generally supposed, and as, no doubt, it would, but for that speech, it received but few votes, and, of course, was lost.<br /><br />Later, when asked by a friend why he had opposed the appropriation, Crockett gave this explanation:<br /><br />"Several years ago I was one evening standing on the steps of the Capitol with some members of Congress, when our attention was attracted by a great light over in Georgetown. It was evidently a large fire. We jumped into a hack and drove over as fast as we could. In spite of all that could be done, many houses were burned and many families made houseless, and besides, some of them had lost all but the clothes they had on. The weather was very cold, and when I saw so many children suffering, I felt that something ought to be done for them. The next morning a bill was introduced appropriating $20,000 for their relief. We put aside all other business and rushed it through as soon as it could be done.<br /><br />"The next summer, when it began to be time to think about election, I concluded I would take a scout around among the boys of my district. I had no opposition there but, as the election was some time off, I did not know what might turn up. When riding one day in a part of my district in which I was more of a stranger than any other, I saw a man in a field plowing and coming toward the road. I gauged my gait so that we should meet as he came up, I spoke to the man. He replied politely, but as I thought, rather coldly.<br /><br />"I began: 'Well friend, I am one of those unfortunate beings called candidates and---<br /><br />"Yes I know you; you are Colonel Crockett. I have seen you once before, and voted for you the last time you were elected. I suppose you are out electioneering now, but you had better not waste your time or mine, I shall not vote for you again."<br /><br />"This was a sockdolger...I begged him tell me what was the matter.<br /><br />"Well Colonel, it is hardly worthwhile to waste time or words upon it. I do not see how it can be mended, but you gave a vote last winter which shows that either you have not capacity to understand the Constitution, or that you are wanting in the honesty and firmness to be guided by it. In either case you are not the man to represent me. But I beg your pardon for expressing it that way. I did not intend to avail myself of the privilege of the constituent to speak plainly to a candidate for the purpose of insulting you or wounding you.'<br /><br />"I intend by it only to say that your understanding of the constitution is very different from mine; and I will say to you what but for my rudeness, I should not have said, that I believe you to be honest.<br /><br />But an understanding of the constitution different from mine I cannot overlook, because the Constitution, to be worth anything, must be held sacred, and rigidly observed in all its provisions. The man who wields power and misinterprets it is the more dangerous the honest he is.'<br /><br />" 'I admit the truth of all you say, but there must be some mistake. Though I live in the backwoods and seldom go from home, I take the papers from Washington and read very carefully all the proceedings of Congress. My papers say you voted for a bill to appropriate $20,000 to some sufferers by fire in Georgetown. Is that true?<br /><br />"Well my friend; I may as well own up. You have got me there. But certainly nobody will complain that a great and rich country like ours should give the insignificant sum of $20,000 to relieve its suffering women and children, particularly with a full and overflowing treasury, and I am sure, if you had been there, you would have done just the same as I did.'<br /><br />"It is not the amount, Colonel, that I complain of; it is the principle. In the first place, the government ought to have in the Treasury no more than enough for its legitimate purposes. But that has nothing with the question. The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be entrusted to man, particularly under our system of collecting revenue by a tariff, which reaches every man in the country, no matter how poor he may be, and the poorer he is the more he pays in proportion to his means.<br /><br />What is worse, it presses upon him without his knowledge where the weight centers, for there is not a man in the United States who can ever guess how much he pays to the government. So you see, that while you are contributing to relieve one, you are drawing it from thousands who are even worse off than he.<br /><br />If you had the right to give anything, the amount was simply a matter of discretion with you, and you had as much right to give $20,000,000 as $20,000. If you have the right to give at all; and as the Constitution neither defines charity nor stipulates the amount, you are at liberty to give to any and everything which you may believe, or profess to believe, is a charity and to any amount you may think proper. You will very easily perceive what a wide door this would open for fraud and corruption and favoritism, on the one hand, and for robbing the people on the other. 'No, Colonel, Congress has no right to give charity.'<br /><br />"'Individual members may give as much of their own money as they please, but they have no right to touch a dollar of the public money for that purpose. If twice as many houses had been burned in this country as in Georgetown, neither you nor any other member of Congress would have Thought of appropriating a dollar for our relief. There are about two hundred and forty members of Congress. If they had shown their sympathy for the sufferers by contributing each one week's pay, it would have made over $13,000. There are plenty of wealthy men around Washington who could have given $20,000 without depriving themselves of even a luxury of life.'<br /><br />"The congressmen chose to keep their own money, which, if reports be true, some of them spend not very creditably; and the people about Washington, no doubt, applauded you for relieving them from necessity of giving what was not yours to give. The people have delegated to Congress, by the Constitution, the power to do certain things. To do these, it is authorized to collect and pay moneys, and for nothing else. Everything beyond this is usurpation, and a violation of the Constitution.'<br /><br />"'So you see, Colonel, you have violated the Constitution in what I consider a vital point. It is a precedent fraught with danger to the country, for when Congress once begins to stretch its power beyond the limits of the Constitution, there is no limit to it, and no security for the people. I have no doubt you acted honestly, but that does not make it any better, except as far as you are personally concerned, and you see that I cannot vote for you.'<br /><br />"I tell you I felt streaked. I saw if I should have opposition, and this man should go to talking and in that district I was a gone fawn-skin. I could not answer him, and the fact is, I was so fully convinced that he was right, I did not want to. But I must satisfy him, and I said to him:<br /><br />"Well, my friend, you hit the nail upon the head when you said I had not sense enough to understand the Constitution. I intended to be guided by it, and thought I had studied it fully. I have heard many speeches in Congress about the powers of Congress, but what you have said here at your plow has got more hard, sound sense in it than all the fine speeches I ever heard. If I had ever taken the view of it that you have, I would have put my head into the fire before I would have given that vote; and if you will forgive me and vote for me again, if I ever vote for another unconstitutional law I wish I may be shot.'<br /><br />"He laughingly replied; 'Yes, Colonel, you have sworn to that once before, but I will trust you again upon one condition. You are convinced that your vote was wrong. Your acknowledgment of it will do more good than beating you for it. If, as you go around the district, you will tell people about this vote, and that you are satisfied it was wrong, I will not only vote for you, but will do what I can to keep down opposition, and perhaps, I may exert some little influence in that way.'<br /><br />"If I don't, said I, 'I wish I may be shot; and to convince you that I am in earnest in what I say I will come back this way in a week or ten days, and if you will get up a gathering of people, I will make a speech to them. Get up a barbecue, and I will pay for it.'<br /><br />"No, Colonel, we are not rich people in this section but we have plenty of provisions to contribute for a barbecue, and some to spare for those who have none. The push of crops will be over in a few days, and we can then afford a day for a barbecue. 'This Thursday; I will see to getting it up on Saturday week. Come to my house on Friday, and we will go together, and I promise you a very respectable crowd to see and hear you.<br /><br />"'Well I will be here. But one thing more before I say good-bye. I must know your name."<br /><br />"'My name is Bunce.'<br /><br />"'Not Horatio Bunce?'<br /><br />"'Yes<br /><br />"'Well, Mr. Bunce, I never saw you before, though you say you have seen me, but I know you very well. I am glad I have met you, and very proud that I may hope to have you for my friend.'<br /><br />"It was one of the luckiest hits of my life that I met him. He mingled but little with the public, but was widely known for his remarkable intelligence, and for a heart brim-full and running over with kindness and benevolence, which showed themselves not only in words but in acts. He was the oracle of the whole country around him, and his fame had extended far beyond the circle of his immediate acquaintance. Though I had never met him, before, I had heard much of him, and but for this meeting it is very likely I should have had opposition, and had been beaten. One thing is very certain, no man could now stand up in that district under such a vote.<br /><br />"At the appointed time I was at his house, having told our conversation to every crowd I had met, and to every man I stayed all night with, and I found that it gave the people an interest and confidence in me stronger than I had ever seen manifested before.<br /><br />"Though I was considerably fatigued when I reached his house, and, under ordinary circumstances, should have gone early to bed, I kept him up until midnight talking about the principles and affairs of government, and got more real, true knowledge of them than I had got all my life before."<br /><br />"I have known and seen much of him since, for I respect him - no, that is not the word - I reverence and love him more than any living man, and I go to see him two or three times every year; and I will tell you, sir, if every one who professes to be a Christian lived and acted and enjoyed it as he does, the religion of Christ would take the world by storm.<br /><br />"But to return to my story. The next morning we went to the barbecue and, to my surprise, found about a thousand men there. I met a good many whom I had not known before, and they and my friend introduced me around until I had got pretty well acquainted - at least, they all knew me.<br /><br />"In due time notice was given that I would speak to them. They gathered up around a stand that had been erected. I opened my speech by saying:<br /><br />"Fellow-citizens - I present myself before you today feeling like a new man. My eyes have lately been opened to truths which ignorance or prejudice or both, had heretofore hidden from my view. I feel that I can today offer you the ability to render you more valuable service than I have ever been able to render before. I am here today more for the purpose of acknowledging my error than to seek your votes. That I should make this acknowledgment is due to myself as well as to you. Whether you will vote for me is a matter for your consideration only."<br /><br />"I went on to tell them about the fire and my vote for the appropriation and then told them why I was satisfied it was wrong. I closed by saying:<br /><br />"And now, fellow-citizens, it remains only for me to tell you that the most of the speech you have listened to with so much interest was simply a repetition of the arguments by which your neighbor, Mr. Bunce, convinced me of my error.<br /><br />"It is the best speech I ever made in my life, but he is entitled to the credit for it. And now I hope he is satisfied with his convert and that he will get up here and tell you so.'<br /><br />"He came up to the stand and said:<br /><br />"Fellow-citizens - it affords me great pleasure to comply with the request of Colonel Crockett. I have always considered him a thoroughly honest man, and I am satisfied that he will faithfully perform all that he has promised you today.'<br /><br />"He went down, and there went up from that crowd such a shout for Davy Crockett as his name never called forth before.'<br /><br />"I am not much given to tears, but I was taken with a choking then and felt some big drops rolling down my cheeks. And I tell you now that the remembrance of those few words spoken by such a man, and the honest, hearty shout they produced, is worth more to me than all the honors I have received and all the reputation I have ever made, or ever shall make, as a member of Congress.'<br /><br />"Now, sir," concluded Crockett, "you know why I made that speech yesterday. "There is one thing which I will call your attention, "you remember that I proposed to give a week's pay. There are in that House many very wealthy men - men who think nothing of spending a week's pay, or a dozen of them, for a dinner or a wine party when they have something to accomplish by it. Some of those same men made beautiful speeches upon the great debt of gratitude which the country owed the deceased--a debt which could not be paid by money--and the insignificance and worthlessness of money, particularly so insignificant a sum as $20,000 when weighed against the honor of the nation. Yet not one of them responded to my proposition. Money with them is nothing but trash when it is to come out of the people. But it is the one great thing for which most of them are striving, and many of them sacrifice honor, integrity, and justice to obtain it." <br /><br />http://www.ronpaul2008.com/articles/1111/not-yours-to-give/rayneberryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01920167866455939380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9114177167800164593.post-55948285871816141102008-03-24T10:13:00.001-07:002008-03-24T10:13:23.457-07:00Surviving in America!So I watched the movie Sicko by Michael Moore last night, and it made me wonder, " Can America really survive going down our current path?"<br /><br />I started thinking about the war, and I wonder how we ever came to be in this mess, is it really all because of the oil? Is it because we just like to fight? Is it because our government wouldn't be able to sleep at night knowing they don't have power over the people?<br /><br />Everyone in the world knows oil will only last another 50 years or so, and what happens if we don't get off of our dependency? Food will not be delievered, medical supplys will not be delievered, we will not be able to drive to work, to pay for our homes and our food!<br /><br />After learning about other countries medical, it makes me wonder why after over 200 years, we have not found peace, and we have not figured out how to give medical to everyone, and we have not been able to help Americans keep their homes, or rebuild them when they are destroyed by mother nature.<br /><br />The only way this medical for everyone would work, is by having a higher tax on expensive merchandise so that rich people that can afford expensive items, could also afford the expensive tax on these items, and that money would therefore go towards the government paying for everyones medical. This system will never work taxing INCOMES! They also give doctors incentives to get people to quit smoking, and overweight people to keep it under control, this eleviates millions of people returning to the doctors.<br /><br />In America if you don't have heath insurance you are screwed, and if you do have it, you are still screwed. Unless you keep your well paying American big coorporate job, with good insurance, and even then sometimes that is still not good enough.<br /><br />WE LIVE IN COORPRATE AMERICA, and most Americans live in what I call la di da America. WE have been raised to believe that the government will always take care of us, well how can we trust a government that will only take care of us by taxing our income?!?!?<br /><br />All government funded programs are paid for by our INCOME tax! If we continue to want and need the government to protect us and take care of us, it will never work as long as they tax our INCOME!<br /><br />WE as Americans have also been taught to hate CUBA, when in all reality 3 volunteers from 9/11 that have not been able to get health coverage here, have gone there and recieved FREE heathcare! Where one inhaler cost $120.00 here, in CUBA it was 5 cents!!!!!<br /><br />How is this posible??? Because we live in Coorporate America where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. WE continue to fund unconstitutional wars, instead of finding peace with other countries. WE have things like the Global Poverty Act, that obligate us to pay 845 billion dollars to the UN for Global Poverty, by taxing fossil fuels. WE continue to fund the fuel cell and ethonal which will never be better then bio diesel. It takes more fossil fuels to create ethanol then would ever benefit us. * corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.<br /><br />Because of this, we have this price of corn that has gone up, and farmers are killing their cows early, or selling them, cause they can't afford to feed them. Wonder why meat hasn't gone up?!?! Well it will when there are no more cows left cause farmers couldn't afford to keep them alive!<br /><br />Americans spend and spend and spend. The average American household with at least one credit card has nearly $9200 in credit card debt, according to CardWeb.com....that is only credit card debt, not counting car, house, student loans, the insurance you have to pay on your car and for medical...Ontop of this the government takes 10,000 dollars away from my income every year only to give me 700 back?!?!?! WTF!!!<br /><br />We went very wrong somewhere along the lines....what are we supposed to do about all of this. Being an average medium income american, what am I supposed to do? Do I get involved in politics, and vote against the government spending money we don't have? Do I protest the war? Do I stop paying income tax? Do I start growing my own food? Do I start making my own biodiesel fuel? Do I move to a different country entirely? What can we everyday American's do to stop where our country is headed?!?!?<br /><br />We have trillions of dollars in debt in this country. How are generations to come supposed to pay for this?<br />How do we survive?<br />How does America Survive?rayneberryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01920167866455939380noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9114177167800164593.post-67544314890227268242008-01-24T08:02:00.000-07:002008-01-24T13:08:32.260-07:00The beginningThis is my first entry of many blogs. I have decided to start this blog, because I believe that America needs to be educated about the government, and what better way to do it, then blog about it?<br /><br />The first thing I would like to talk about, is America:Freedom to Fascism!<br />If anyone has seen this movie, please feel free to tell me what you think about it.<br />HERE IS THE MOVIE IN PARTS!<br /><br />PART ONE<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/3ueEfRXZCVA&rel=1"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/3ueEfRXZCVA&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="355" width="425"></embed></object><br /><BR><br />PART TWO<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/99d6A3W-2kI&rel=1"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/99d6A3W-2kI&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="355" width="425"></embed></object><br /><BR><br />PART THREE<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/JzCoe2ywJ6I&rel=1"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/JzCoe2ywJ6I&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="355" width="425"></embed></object><br /><BR><br />PART FOUR<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/mbJ1N9Lm__w&rel=1"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/mbJ1N9Lm__w&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="355" width="425"></embed></object><br /><BR><br />PART FIVE<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/cThY1ARHwNM&rel=1"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/cThY1ARHwNM&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="355" width="425"></embed></object><br /><BR><br />PART SIX<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/DaUu3BDTlOU&rel=1"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/DaUu3BDTlOU&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="355" width="425"></embed></object><br /><BR><br />PART SEVEN<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/F484wISJKPY&rel=1"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/F484wISJKPY&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="355" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br><br />PART EIGHT<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/5lfEm66Bp_U&rel=1"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/5lfEm66Bp_U&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="355" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br><br />PART NINE<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/NkhfdzFKqQs&rel=1"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/NkhfdzFKqQs&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="355" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br><br />PART TEN<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Wu_5owIxiSc&rel=1"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Wu_5owIxiSc&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="355" width="425"></embed></object><br /><BR><br />AND FINALLY<br />PART ELEVEN<br /><object height="355" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/NX0ZTZjYFzk&rel=1"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/NX0ZTZjYFzk&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="355" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br />THE IRS TAKES OUT APPROX 1/4TH OF WHAT I MAKE EACH YEAR. HOW MUCH LONGER ARE WE GOING TO PUT UP WITH THIS?<br />ARE WE GOING TO BE OK WHEN THEY WANT HALF OF THE MONEY WE EARN?<br />DO WE WANT TO CONTINUE PAYING FOR ALL THESE GOVERNMENT FUNDED PROGRAMS?<br /><br />I don't know about you, but I don't think it is fair that I pay for illegals education and health care.<br />I also don't think it is fair that I put money into this (IRS) fund that does not benefit me or anyone I know...<br /><br />If you want to say that you benefited from Public Education, then say it, but I know had I attended a school that my parents picked based on how much money they made, considering they got to keep all the money the IRS steals from them, they probably would have been able to afford a better private school for me!<br />There I would have learned how to shorten that previous long sentence into smaller ones that made more sense.....but that is public education for you!<br /><br />Anyways if you haven't already watched these movies, do so, so that you can understand where a 1/4 of your paycheck is going, and how the IRS is completely unconstitutional! <br /><br />WE ARE BEING ROBBED BY OUR GOVERNMENT!rayneberryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01920167866455939380noreply@blogger.com0