How's Our Banking System Now?

Now that we have far fewer but far bigger banks than just one year ago, are we better off? Not according to the Inspector General of the TARP Fund, Neil Barofsky. He says, "I think we may be in a far more dangerous place today than we were a year ago."

He monitors several bailout-related programs and has launched about three dozen investigations since December 2008. He has said since last July that he intended to demand transparency from everyone, including the US Treasury.

According to The Huffington Post, Barofsky claims:

1. Hundreds of banks can track their use of the TARP money, no matter what the U.S. Treasury claims.
2. The TARP rescue, intended to increase lending by banks, has failed in that respect.
3. The U.S. financial system is shakier than ever.

The New United States of Goldman Sachs

If you're not angry about the role Goldman Sachs is playing in our country, then you just don't know all the facts yet. On Monday, we covered the "magical" 2009 third quarter earnings for GS of $3,400,000,000 after they had received $70,000,000,000 from the taxpayers just a year ago.

Amazingly, no one has demanded anything be done about this "windfall" profit. There have been no screaming headlines or news specials about making a record $3.4 billion in one quarter. Their executives are not hounded by protestors around their homes nor do they face sarcastic reporters yelling questions as they try to leave their offices.

Today, we discovered that the government and Goldman Sachs have been too close for comfort at least since the Bush administration. His Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, held a secret meeting with the board of Goldman Sachs in a Moscow hotel in 2008 between the demise of Bear Stearns and the fall of Lehman Brothers (former competitor with GS). It was supposed to be a purely social occasion for the former Goldman Sachs CEO. But he ended up telling his old friends all about his upcoming big speech and the gathering storm at Treasury -- quite a conflict of interest. For the whole story of the meeting, see the Business Insider article below.
This week Adam Storch, VP of Goldman Sachs Business Intelligence Group, was named the SEC as the Chief Operating Officer for enforcement. So we began researching other Obama administration executives with ties to Goldman Sachs. The list so far includes:

* Pete Coneway, Ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein

* Diana Farrell, Deputy director of Obama's National Economic Council

* Michael Froman, Obama adviser and former assistant to Robert Rubin

* Jason Furman, Obama Campaign Economic Policy Director

* Tim Geithner, Current Treasury Secretary

* Gary Gensler, Chairman of Commodity Futures Trading Commission

* Bob Hormats, Under Secretary of State for Economic, Energy, and Agricultural Affairs

* James A Johnson, Fannie Mae

* Reuben Jeffery III, Undersecretary of State for Economic, Energy, and Agriculture

* Neel Kashkari, Treasury official in charge of TARP

* James C Langdon Jr., Treasury, US Mint, Department of Public Debt

* Philip D Murphy, Ambassador to Germany-Designate

* Mark Patterson, Chief of Staff to Tim Geithner

* Karthik Ramanathan, Acting Assistant Secretary for Financial Markets

* Robert E Rubin, Former Treasury Secretary, Transition Advisory Board

* Faryar Shirzad, Global Head of Government Affairs

* Robert K Steel, Under Secretary of Treasury

* Larry Summers, Director of the National Economic Council

* John Whitehead, Advisor

* Robert Zoellick, US Trade Representative and World Bank president

Why isn't someone calling for a thorough investigation of the penetration of Goldman Sachs into Obama's administration, especially at Treasury? What about the Federal Reserve? Is it not unfair for this privileged bank to be making record profits without repaying their creditors (the US taxpayers)? This does not sound like free market capitalism to me.

Can You Hear Us Now?

This sign was seen on State highway 15-501 at the Lamm's Grove intersection near Durham, NC.  

None of us know what the current administration and the Congressional Clowns learned from the 9-12 protests in Washington, DC and in hometown rallies all across the land.
But the basic message was:
1. Get rid of the corruption in the White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and all organizations feeding at the public trough like ACORN
2. Don't spend another dime
3. Read and understand the bills before voting on them
4. No sweeping health care bills -- We only need to sweep up the trash, not burn the house down and rebuild

It's not Republican versus Democrat; it's American Patriots versus those who merely want to manipulate the system for their own advantage. The patriots outnumber the users, but the manipulators currently hold the levers of power.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights given to us by God. We must not let them slip through our fingers.

Read The Bill before Voting!

Last Friday, Investors Business Daily took up my July 8 battle cry to make it illegal for Congressional Clowns to vote on bills they had not read. IBD goes into a lot more detail than I did, but our conclusions are the same, proving, no doubt, that great minds run together.

Let Freedom Ring is sponsoring a pledge drive to get all Senators and Representatives to sign that they will not vote on health care reform if they have not personally read the bill. I think that's great, but it should apply to all legislation. To do otherwise is fraudulent and should be grounds for impeachment.

Transparency (Obama Style)

During the endless campaign of 2008, numerous people raised questions about Obama’s birth certificate and his eligibility to become president of the US. Many others took note, but presumed that there was nothing to the concern.

With time, his refusal to present a valid, long form birth certificate has grown more problematic. The version made public would not be sufficient proof of American citizenship in Hawaii, the state that provided it. If everything is all right, then why the continued secrecy? Ordinarily a birth certificate has to be one of the most innocuous documents possible. The cover-up itself provides fuel to keep the lawsuits going and the innuendos growing in intensity.

But, that’s just part of the story. He hasn’t even allowed his kindergarten documents to be made public. The school he said he attended released a photo of two teachers and five students and a statement that he had attended in 1966-67, but no official records. Ordinarily a copy of the birth certificate is required to register at the school.

His high school records from Punahou in Honolulu have been declared off limits. Even though he attended the exclusive school for eight years on scholarship, no records of what type of scholarship he won have been released. The concern is that his scholarship was one granted to foreign students.

Nor has he allowed Occidental College in Los Angeles to provide information about his scholarship for the first two years of college there. The school has hidden behind the FERPA Act to keep from replying to a lawsuit demanding information about the scholarship, his grades, and classes taken.

True to his established pattern, little is known about his last two years of college at Columbia. He refused to publish his transcript and cannot remember the names of any friends or classmates there. Fox News could not find one classmate out of the 400 they contacted who remembered him. He supposedly wrote a major thesis on Soviet disarmament his senior year, but no copy has been made available either by Obama or the school. A 1983 program lists him as a graduate, but not one with any honors.

That makes one wonder how he got into Harvard Law School without someone, somewhere pulling some strings. He and his staff have carefully guarded his SAT and LSAT scores. They’re remained mum about his grades although he buckled down enough to graduate magna cum laude. He did become the first black to serve as president of Harvard Law Review, but during the entire year, he published no articles.

While modern presidential candidates have made full disclosures of their complete medical records, Obama merely released six paragraphs from his physician, with no supporting documentation, that covered 21 years of treatment. McCain, on the other hand, released 1200 pages of medical records.

His passport is something else that remains off limits to the public. Three times during the campaign, someone in the State department made unauthorized searches of his file, but no one has revealed what they discovered. These files could have contained citizenship information and basic biographical information. However, the one person who was cooperating with the authorities in the investigation was found shot to death in his car in Washington, DC.

Other non controversial records that have been requested, but denied are:
• Baptismal certificate
• Complete files and schedules of his years as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004
• Obama's client list from during his time in private practice with the Chicago law firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill and Gallard
• Illinois State Bar Association records
• Obama/Dunham marriage license
• Obama/Dunham divorce documents
• Soetoro/Dunham marriage license
• Adoption records

But Watch What He Does

Yesterday, President Obama loudly proclaimed that he was NOT trying to take over the American health care system and he had no intention of instituting socialized medicine here. It's just this tiny matter of increasing competition by forcing private insurance companies to compete with the federal government. His statements make Orwell's Newspeak in the novel, 1984, look completely straightforward.

He was almost as emphatic as when he said he did not want to run the automobile industry just hours before he fired one CEO and hired another at GM before the government bought them out. He told Chrysler they had to merge with Fiat. He arranged for his union friends to get preferred treatment in both bankruptcy proceedings ahead of the legal creditors. He promised that running GM would be "temporary," but gave no exit strategy. (Amtrack was supposed to be temporary too.) And although he arranged for union leaders and government bureaucrats to sit on the board, he swore that the government would not get involved with decisions about minutiae -- just the important decisions.

If I remember correctly, he didn't want to take over the banks either, then tried to keep them from backing out and returning the money when they found how many strings were attached. This week, he "allowed" them to pay the money back to the government, not to reduce the deficit or repay the taxpayers, but to allow the government to "give away" more money.

Governing by Stealth

In the six weeks that Obama has been governing, a pattern of trickery has evolved.

• Last week, several official spokesmen clearly announced that there would be no nationalization of banks. But on Friday, the statement was made that the US government was trading their Citibank Preferred Stock (usually non voting stock) for common stock (voting stock). Now the federal government, as a single entity with almost 40% of the votes in each corporate decision, will control the actions of the large bank. It’s not officially nationalization, but it’s darn close to it.
• Facing growing criticism about the possibility of the FOCA bill, apparently the decision has been made to do it piecemeal. Last week, Obama rescinded the Bush executive order that had allowed health care providers to opt out of certain practices like abortion, embryonic stem cell research, or euthanasia, if the actions conflicted with their conscience. No enforcement has yet taken place, but the foundation is in place.
• Also, facing criticism about the Fairness Doctrine from free speech advocates, an amendment to the DC voting rights bill was passed (87-11) last week that stated that the Fairness Doctrine would not be resurrected. The media presented the news with great fanfare, disdainfully telling conservatives that it had never been an issue anyway. Many sighed with relief. But the same bill also carries the Durbin amendment (57-41) that attacks syndicated talk radio shows by forcing the FCC to take actions to promote diversity of communication ownership. When implemented, it will hurt many small radio stations that depend on syndicated programs for revenue and will pave the way for ACORN or similar groups to get their own stations at bargain basement prices.
• I have already written about some of the provisions of the “Stimulus Bill” that effectively encourage, if not establish, socialized medicine. That has passed and has been signed into law. See Health Care for Me, But Not for Thee and Now We Know.

Transparency? About As Clear As Mud

My mother always taught me to beware of salesmen who spent more time stressing the urgency of the purchase than they did extolling its benefits. That alone makes me very worried about the "Stimulus" Bill. We've been told much more about the need for immediate action than about what's actually in the bill.

So our noble leaders have come up with legislation that is reportedly more than 1000 printed pages. They intend to vote at 1 PM today on an agreement that was only reached last night. So much for the new era of transparency and the promise of having every piece of legislation on the Internet for at least 48 hours before the final vote.

To compound the problem, the lobbyists on K Street received their copies before Congressional staffers, according to U.S. News and World Report. No matter who got the bill first, no representative can possibly have read it, much less reflected on its implications, before the vote. And, as usual, those of us who have to pay for this, are left out in the dark -- until the tax bill comes.