"It is the theory that decides what we can observe."~ Albert Einstein
This is also true in the dismal science of economics.
"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation,
and I care not who makes its laws." ~ Mayer Amschel Rothschild
The Federal Reserve System Bank, a member of the foreign owned Rothschild banking dynasty, in fact, issues and controls the money of the United States of America. They own the money, they print it, they put their private bank name on the bills, (across the top of the face of the bill, it says "Federal Reserve Note").
It is not actually money it is credit/debt notes. Money, historically, is gold, silver, copper or paper notes backed by these valued metals.
Where do our tax dollars go?
Our federal income taxes do not fund next year's fiscal budget, nor last year's, nor the budget of any year! That is not the way it works, though we have certainly been allowed to believe that, if not led to believe it, if not out and out intentionally dis-informed to believe that our taxes pay for our government services directly, as they should, obviously. But that is not the simple, logical, straightforward, transparent way that it works. No, there is a criminal bank credit racket, much like the credit cards, involved here.
In fact, the Internal Revenue Service was, illegally, made legal and instituted specifically for one purpose - to forcibly procure extorted income tax revenue to pay the ever accumulating interest on credit extended by the foreign owned and very unAmerican Federal Reserve System Bank. Sound far fetched? You just don't know your early 20th century American history.
The whole income tax system, the whole infernal revenue system, is actually just a "legalized" mafia style criminal extortion scheme made legal, illegally. International criminal banking elements manipulated corrupt politicians in our corrupted government to set up the Federal Reserve System and the I.R.S..
The whole racket is to generate profits by charging interest on the credit extended, unnecessarily, to the government to fund the fiscal budget instead of funding the budget directly with our tax dollars. The personal income tax was instituted for the sole purpose of paying this unnecessary interest on the bank credit extended unnecessarily to our government to fund the fiscal budget! Sound far fetched? Again, you just don't know your early 20th century American history, by design.
This sad chapter is not in those history books provided by the criminal, corrupt government for the proper indoctrination of American school children to the official version of history. No mystery there! Even though we pay for them, on credit with ridiculous interest rates, those books are the very tools of our own enslavement by the government to the banking elite with an open lie and hidden truth! We pay for our own intellectual chains of bondage! And we are kept busy working to pay taxes so we never have time to read history and discuss the reality of our sad situation with our mad neighbors. Once we ever do, the jig is up, the racket will have run its course, the scam will be over because people can't be scammed when they know it is a scam.
By omitting the still controversial history of the illegal chartering of the Federal Reserve, which is buried now, by decades of financial crisis after financial crisis and bail out after bail out, all part of the "long con", they are able to dumb us down about one of the biggest crimes ever committed against America.
But the truth is there in many books on American history available online and in bookstores and libraries. Just google "corrupt federal reserve system" you will find plenty to read and evaluate for yourself. Satisfy your own curiosity, you don't have to tell your fellow Republicrats that you disobeyed your corporate masters.
It is not actually money it is credit/debt notes. Money, historically, is gold, silver, copper or paper notes backed by these valued metals.
Where do our tax dollars go?
Our federal income taxes do not fund next year's fiscal budget, nor last year's, nor the budget of any year! That is not the way it works, though we have certainly been allowed to believe that, if not led to believe it, if not out and out intentionally dis-informed to believe that our taxes pay for our government services directly, as they should, obviously. But that is not the simple, logical, straightforward, transparent way that it works. No, there is a criminal bank credit racket, much like the credit cards, involved here.
In fact, the Internal Revenue Service was, illegally, made legal and instituted specifically for one purpose - to forcibly procure extorted income tax revenue to pay the ever accumulating interest on credit extended by the foreign owned and very unAmerican Federal Reserve System Bank. Sound far fetched? You just don't know your early 20th century American history.
The whole income tax system, the whole infernal revenue system, is actually just a "legalized" mafia style criminal extortion scheme made legal, illegally. International criminal banking elements manipulated corrupt politicians in our corrupted government to set up the Federal Reserve System and the I.R.S..
The whole racket is to generate profits by charging interest on the credit extended, unnecessarily, to the government to fund the fiscal budget instead of funding the budget directly with our tax dollars. The personal income tax was instituted for the sole purpose of paying this unnecessary interest on the bank credit extended unnecessarily to our government to fund the fiscal budget! Sound far fetched? Again, you just don't know your early 20th century American history, by design.
This sad chapter is not in those history books provided by the criminal, corrupt government for the proper indoctrination of American school children to the official version of history. No mystery there! Even though we pay for them, on credit with ridiculous interest rates, those books are the very tools of our own enslavement by the government to the banking elite with an open lie and hidden truth! We pay for our own intellectual chains of bondage! And we are kept busy working to pay taxes so we never have time to read history and discuss the reality of our sad situation with our mad neighbors. Once we ever do, the jig is up, the racket will have run its course, the scam will be over because people can't be scammed when they know it is a scam.
By omitting the still controversial history of the illegal chartering of the Federal Reserve, which is buried now, by decades of financial crisis after financial crisis and bail out after bail out, all part of the "long con", they are able to dumb us down about one of the biggest crimes ever committed against America.
But the truth is there in many books on American history available online and in bookstores and libraries. Just google "corrupt federal reserve system" you will find plenty to read and evaluate for yourself. Satisfy your own curiosity, you don't have to tell your fellow Republicrats that you disobeyed your corporate masters.
The Federal Reserve System, itself, can only be described as anti-American. Here is what Woodrow Wilson who signed the legislation into law, chartering the bank, said about the Federal Reserve System, years later, when he saw what he had done, he wrote: "I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is now controlled by its system of credit. We are no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government of a small group of dominant men." ~ Woodrow Wilson (1919)
Let's jump ahead to today and the latest tax system rip-off, besides income tax itself, the latest round of government bail-outs of Wall Street and the banks who were simultaneously foreclosing on Americans while still getting paid, via bail-out, for their incredible incompetence and/or insatiable criminality. The video, below, reveals how these banksters have set the nation up like bowling pins and are now knocking 'em down at an extremely heavy cost to homeowners and taxpayers!
This excerpt from Schechter gets to the criminal meat of the matter....
Even after the markets melted down, even after Wall Street bonus scandals and bailout disgraces, Wall Street has hardly been humbled. It is still spending a fortune on PR and political gun slinging with 25 lobbyists shadowing every member of Congress to scuttle real reform. Its arrogance is evident in an email the Financial Times reported was “pinging around” trading desks. It reads in part:“We are Wall Street: It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable… Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours.
… We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive.”’
Perhaps it’s not surprising, that in an act of preemptive anticipation, some years ago, Wall Street firms began financing companies that built and ran privatized prisons. As long as they can avoid incarceration, they can profit from the mass jailing of the poor....
Perhaps it’s not surprising, that in an act of preemptive anticipation, some years ago, Wall Street firms began financing companies that built and ran privatized prisons. As long as they can avoid incarceration, they can profit from the mass jailing of the poor....
This short but extremely informative video is from Danny Schechter's documentary:
"Plunder, The Crime of Our Time"
Your Bank's Crimes Crashed the Economy
I offer deep, incisive analysis from Danny Schechter, "the news dissector", whose investigation and video documentation of Wall St. criminal systems are strategically vital. He truly provides must-read and must-see material for all Americans. He wisely focuses on the whole Wall St./Federal Reserve Banks criminal enterprise from a wholistic perspective. He doesn't demonize the "players" like Bernie Madoff. Instead he reveals the historically entrenched system of corruption in its full, pervasive scope, the whole "long con" game.
He understands that going after an individual player is a wild goose chase that takes us away from the true target of our concern. These "bad guys" like Madoff serve as lightning rods for public anger which mis-directs this righteous anger away from where it belongs - but is not wanted by the "man behind the curtain". Now isn't that exactly where we want our anger to go? As Aristotle said:
"Anyone can become angry--that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way--that is not easy." ~ Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics
I offer deep, incisive analysis from Danny Schechter, "the news dissector", whose investigation and video documentation of Wall St. criminal systems are strategically vital. He truly provides must-read and must-see material for all Americans. He wisely focuses on the whole Wall St./Federal Reserve Banks criminal enterprise from a wholistic perspective. He doesn't demonize the "players" like Bernie Madoff. Instead he reveals the historically entrenched system of corruption in its full, pervasive scope, the whole "long con" game.
He understands that going after an individual player is a wild goose chase that takes us away from the true target of our concern. These "bad guys" like Madoff serve as lightning rods for public anger which mis-directs this righteous anger away from where it belongs - but is not wanted by the "man behind the curtain". Now isn't that exactly where we want our anger to go? As Aristotle said:
"Anyone can become angry--that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way--that is not easy." ~ Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics
So we should hate the game, not the players! It is important for all of us to study some history. We would all do well, for our grandchildren's sake, to read some books, to verify for ourself that there actually exists a trans-generational manipulation of the governments, economies and militaries of the world! I used to get so angry at LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and then I started seeing the pattern and the matrix started to crystallize in my vision. Oh, I still enjoy blaming W and Barack but I now know and understand that, at least since Poppy Bush, all of our presidents have been reared in CIA developmental programs as quasi-manchurian candidates.
Let us see if we cannot see the Game allegedly being run on humanity for centuries, over and over and over, while we have had our focus intentionally misdirected to players who seem like the villains of wrestling, Khadafi in Libya, Saddam in Iraq, Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler, Lee Harvey Oswald, Bernie Madoff . . . . the list is endless. Bad guys like Saddam and former CIA cocaine cowboy and Panamanian President, Manuel Noriega, are set up as minor kingpins, to be knocked down when it fits the agenda of the elite mammonists running this "long con." Hey, kingpins are still pins, right, and pins are meant to be set up just to be knocked down! And so it goes.... Or, conversely, if you cannot allow yourself to do something that you will will make you feel silly, then read the books and analyze the evidence and please explain your evidence, your proof, to me, please?
( a great presentation here: http://www.wtv-zone.com/Mary/BIGGESTSCAMINHISTORY.HTML )
"The whole government is a Ponzi scheme." ~ Bernie Madoff
Danny Schechter opened this blog with an aside, a remark about the Academy Awards which had just been presented the night before this blog published. So here's Danny . . . .
Also, an envious but sincere right-on to Charles Ferguson for his documentary Inside Job which covers some of the same ground–with some real difference–as my Plunder, and for his saying before the Academy and the billions watching:
Let us see if we cannot see the Game allegedly being run on humanity for centuries, over and over and over, while we have had our focus intentionally misdirected to players who seem like the villains of wrestling, Khadafi in Libya, Saddam in Iraq, Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler, Lee Harvey Oswald, Bernie Madoff . . . . the list is endless. Bad guys like Saddam and former CIA cocaine cowboy and Panamanian President, Manuel Noriega, are set up as minor kingpins, to be knocked down when it fits the agenda of the elite mammonists running this "long con." Hey, kingpins are still pins, right, and pins are meant to be set up just to be knocked down! And so it goes.... Or, conversely, if you cannot allow yourself to do something that you will will make you feel silly, then read the books and analyze the evidence and please explain your evidence, your proof, to me, please?
( a great presentation here: http://www.wtv-zone.com/Mary/BIGGESTSCAMINHISTORY.HTML )
"The whole government is a Ponzi scheme." ~ Bernie Madoff
Also, an envious but sincere right-on to Charles Ferguson for his documentary Inside Job which covers some of the same ground–with some real difference–as my Plunder, and for his saying before the Academy and the billions watching:
“Oscar Winner Notes Nobody Has Served Jail Time For Financial Meltdown"
That, just by chance is what I write about today in a commentary that first appeared on AlJazeera.net. As of this morning 1318 people recommended it.
QUOTE OF THE DAY: Before you read it, check out the latest from Bernie Madoff in today’s New York Times:
“After asserting to The New York Times in a recent interview that unidentified banks and hedge funds were somehow “complicit” in his elaborate fraud, Bernard L. Madoff goes on record again, this time with New York magazine in a series of collect calls.
The convicted Ponzi schemer says he isn’t the only one who should have been convicted, and that the bigger crime is that more people should have been prosecuted for the financial crisis: “It’s unbelievable, Goldman . . . no one has any criminal convictions. he whole new regulatory reform is a joke. The whole government is a Ponzi scheme.”
Mr. Madoff also says that his therapist told him he’s not a sociopath: “You’re absolutely not a sociopath. You have morals. You have remorse.”
The Ten Reasons The Banksters Get Away With It
The Wall Street Crime Syndrome Goes Deeper Than We Think …
Q: Why no jailings?
A: It’s the system, not just the prosecutor
Hats off to writer Matt Taibbi for staying on the Wall Street crime beat, asking in his most recent report in Rolling Stone: “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?”
“Financial crooks,” he argues, “brought down the world’s economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them.”
True enough, but that’s only part of the story. The Daily Kos called his investigation a “depressing read” perhaps because it suggests that the Obama Administration is not doing what it should to rein in financial crime.
Many of the lawyers he calls on to act come from big corporate law firms and buy into their worldview. They have no appetite to go after executives they know and naively hope will help speed our economic “recovery.”
Kos should be more depressed by the failure of the progressive community—his own readers– to focus on these issues, and for not pressing the government to do the right thing. Without pressure from below, there is often little action from above.
There is no doubt that Administration policy gave crooks great latitude, as financial journalist Yves Smith explains, “The overly generous terms of the TARP, and the failure of Team Obama to force management changes on the industry in early 2009 was a fatal error. It has embedded and emboldened a deeply corrupt plutocracy.”
There is, however, much more to this story. It’s also more about institutions than individuals, more about a captured system that enables and covers up crime and, then, deflects attention away from the deeper problem.
Ten Problems
You could see that when Television host Bill Maher pressed Taibbi to name the biggest Wall Street crooks, on his weekly political comedy show, he didn’t fully understand what we are really up against.
Here are ten factors that help explain the procrastination and rationalization for inaction. The government is not just to blame either. Several industries working together, through their firms and associations, associates, and well-paid operatives, collaborated over years to financialize the economy to their own benefit.
Personalizing bad guys makes for good TV without offering a real explanation.
When financial institutions and services became the dominant economic sector, they, effectively, took over the political system to fortify their power. It was a done incrementally, over years, with savvy, foresight and malice.
First, many of those who might later be charged with financial crimes and criminal fraud invested in lobbying and generous political donations to insure that tough regulations and enforcement were neutered before the housing bubble they promoted took off.
They did so in the aftermath of the jailing of hundreds of bankers after the S&L crisis, to guarantee that could never happen again when the next crisis hit.
In effect, their deregulation strategy also deliberately “decriminalized” the environment to make sure that practices that led to high profits and low accountability would be permissible and permitted.
Presto: The once illegal soon became “legal.”
The cops and watchdogs were taken off the beat. Anticipating and restraints, they engineered a low-risk crime scene in the way the Pentagon systematically prepares its battlefields. This permitted illicit practices, to be encouraged by CEO’s in a variety of control frauds to keep profits up so that the executives could extract more revenue with obscene bonuses and compensation schemes.
Today’s proposed Republican cutbacks for the funding of regulatory bodies aims to undercut recently passed financial reforms. Warns one Commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, if the budget is slashed, “there would essentially be no cop on the beat… we could once again risk another calamitous disintegration.” He added, according to a New York Times report, “the process will mean nothing, squat, diddley … if we get cut we’re going to be in a world of hurt.” The GOP knows exactly what the intended consequences of its plans are.
Second, the industry invented, advertised and rationalized exotic financial instruments as forward looking “innovation” and “modernization” to disguise their intent while enhancing their field or maneuver. This was part of creating a shadow banking system operating below the radar of effective monitoring and regulation. There was no focus on controlling the out of control power of the leverage-hungry gamblers at unregulated hedge funds.
Third, the industry promulgated economic theories and ideologies that won the backing of the economics profession which largely did not see the crisis coming, making those who favored a crackdown on fraud appear unfashionable and out of date. As economist James Galbraith testified to Congress:
“…The study of financial fraud received little attention. Practically no research institutes exist; collaboration between economists and criminologists is rare; in the leading departments there are few specialists and very few students. Economists have soft-pedaled the role of fraud in every crisis they examined, including the Savings & Loan debacle, the Russian transition, the Asian meltdown and the dot.com bubble. They continue to do so now.”
Foxes guarding the chicken coop
Fourth, prominent members of the financial services industry were appointed to top positions in the government agencies that should have cracked down on financial crime, but instead looked the other way. The foxes were indeed guarding the chicken coop guiding institutions that tolerated, if not enabled, an environment of criminality.
Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke were repeatedly warned by underlings at the Federal Reserve Bank about pervasive predatory practices in the mortgage and Subprime markets and they chose to do nothing. Now Greenspan acknowledges pervasive fraud but decries the lack of enforcement while Bernanke wants to run a Consumer Protection Agency after ignoring consumer complaints for years. Even as the FBI denounced “an epidemic of mortgage fraud” in 2004, their white-collar crime units were downsized.
Fifth, the media was complicit, seduced, bought off and compromised. As the housing bubble mushroomed in the very period that the media was forced to downsize, dodgy lenders and credit card companies pumped billions into advertising in radio, television and the internet almost insuring that there would no undue media investigations. Financial journalists increasingly embedded themselves in the culture and narrative of Wall Street by hyping stocks and wealthy CEOs.
The “guests” routinely chosen by media outlets to explain the crisis were often part of it, charges Jim Hightower, “Many of the ‘experts’ whom I read or see on TV seem clueless, full of hot air. Many of their predictions turn out wrong even when they seem so self-assured and well-informed in making them.”
His advice: “Don’t be deterred by the finance industry’s jargon (which is intended to numb your brain and keep regular folks from even trying to figure out what’s going on.”
Sixth, politicians and corporate lawyers fashioned settlements of abuses that were exposed rather than prosecutions.
The government benefited by getting large fines while businessmen avoided jail. When exposed, this led to practices such as the deliberate engineering of mortgages to fail being written off as a cost of doing business.
Financial executives were often rewarded with bonuses and huge compensation for practices that skirted or crossed the line of criminality.
Intentional violations of the spirit and letter of laws were justified because “everyone does it” by high priced legal firms that often doubled as lobbyists. Conflicts of interest were sneered at. Judges, dependent on industry donations for reelection looked the other way.
Seventh, as the economy changed and industries that were once separated began working together, regulations were not changed. In A FIRE economy, financial institutions worked closely with Insurance companies and real estate firms. Yet law enforcement did not recognize this new reality.
Financial crime was still seen almost entirely under the framework of securities laws that are designed to protect investors, not workers or homeowners who suffered far more in the collapse. Cases are framed against individuals with a high standard of proving intent, not under RICO laws used to prosecute organized crime and conspiracies.
By defining crimes narrowly, prosecutions became few and far between, reports Reuters:
“Cases against Wall Street executives can be difficult to prove to the satisfaction of a jury because of the mind-numbing volume of emails, prospectuses, and memos involved in documenting a case.”
Criminal minds
Convicted financial criminal Sam Antar who appears in my film Plunder is contemptuous of how government tends to proceed in these cases, in part because they don’t seem to understand how calculated these crimes and their cover-ups are. He told me. “Our laws— innocent until proven guilty, the codes of ethics that journalists like you abide by limit your behavior and give the white-collar criminal freedom to commit their crimes, and also to cover up their crimes.
“We have no respect for the laws. We consider your codes of ethics, and your laws, weaknesses to be exploited in the execution of our crimes. So the prosecutors, hopefully most prosecutors, are honest if they’re playing by the set of the rules; they’re hampered by the illegal constraints. The white-collar criminal has no legal constraints. You subpoena documents, we destroy documents; you subpoena witnesses, we lie. So you are at a disadvantage when it comes to the white-collared criminal. In effect, we’re economic predators. We’re serial economic predators; we impose a collective harm on society; time is always on our side, not on, not on the side of justice, unfortunately.”
Eighth, even as the economy globalizes, and US financial firms spread their footprint worldwide, there was little internationalization of financial rules and regulations. Today, even as the French and the Germans propose such rules, Washington still opposes a tough and coordinated global regime of enforceable codes of conduct to insure ethical standards.
Overseas, in Greece and England, and other parts of Europe, there’s been an indictment of American corporate predators, especially Goldman Sachs. They are being denounced as “financial terrorists” and discussed in terms of their links to various elite business formations like the Bilderberg Group.
Ninth, with the exception of a few polite inquiries by a softball Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, there has been no hard-hitting intensive investigation in the United States of these crimes. While Senator Levin of Michigan did spend a day aggressively grilling Goldman Sachs on one deceptive practice, their defense was more telling about the real nature of the problem: ‘everyone did it.” (Almost ten times as much money was spent investigating Bill Clinton’s sex scandal.)
The case for criminality as a key cause of the crisis has still not achieved critical mass as an issue or become a dominant explanation for why the economy collapsed.
In fact, the “crime narrative” is still being sneered at or ignored even as the public in many surveys feel they have been robbed.
Finally, tenth, a big disappointment in my countdown, is the role of the progressive critics of the crisis who also largely ignore criminality as a key factor and possible focus for a populist organizing effort.
They treat the crisis as if they are at a financial seminar at Harvard, focusing on the complexities of derivatives; credit default swaps and structured financial products in language that ordinary people rarely can penetrate. They argue that banks that should not be too big to fail, but rarely they are not too big to jail.
Few of the progressive activist groups stress the immorality of these practices, much less its criminality after all these years! There is little active solidarity even in the progressive community with the newly homeless or jobless.
Where are the active empathy, compassion and the caring for the many victims of financial crimes?
The response to the crisis has been muted. There is little pressure from below in part because unions stress their own issues and tail after the Administration. The talk about the American dream, not Wall Street’s scheme. The financial crimes task force that the Administration set up seems to mostly go after small fries.
It is as if this crime crisis within the financial crisis does not exist.
Curiously, even as most media outlets and politicians refuse to discuss the pervasive fraud that did occur, the Administration is using the threat of prosecutions as a way of pushing a “global settlement” of all housing fraud to get the issue off the table. They are proposing a $20 billion dollar deal to bury the problem.
The banks are saying this will hurt their investors and not bring relief to those facing the highest foreclosure rate in recent history. At the same time, as a quid pro quo, there will be no major trials.
What should be done? By all means, workers should rally to protect their rights to have unions as they have in Wisconsin, but they should also realize that it is the banks that are ultimately to blame for the financial pressures behind the attacks they face. Pension funds have lost billions because of Wall Street scams. State governments have taken a big hit. The unions didn’t cause the problem.
At the same time, why have the unions and left groups been mostly silent on the deeper issues? They are fighting to keep what they have. That is certainly important, but a failure to press for economic justice for everyone makes the issue seem to be one only of self-interest.
Ironically, the economic justice issues appeals to the anger in many diverse constituencies and could enlarge a real movement for financial accountability.
Even after the markets melted down, even after Wall Street bonus scandals and bailout disgraces, Wall Street has hardly been humbled. It is still spending a fortune on PR and political gun slinging with 25 lobbyists shadowing every member of Congress to scuttle real reform. Its arrogance is evident in an email the Financial Times reported was “pinging around” trading desks. It reads in part:
“We are Wall Street: It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable… Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours.
… We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive.”’
Perhaps it’s not surprising, that in an act of preemptive anticipation, some years ago, Wall Street firms began financing companies that built and ran privatized prisons. As long as they can avoid incarceration, they can profit from the mass jailing of the poor...
When will we call a crime a crime? When will we demand jail-out, not just more bailouts? Unless we do, and until we do, the people who created the worst crisis in our time will, in effect, get away with the biggest plunder in history.
News Dissector Danny Schechter made the film Plunder The Crime of our Time. (Plunderthecrimeofourtime.com) Parts of this essay appear in his companion book The Crime of Our Time (Disinfo Books) Comments to Dissector@mediachannel.org
William Lerach, Huffiington Post: Blame Wall Street, Not Hard Working Americans, for the Pension Funds Fiasco
Danny has done his homework. He cuts close to the bone on this issue. I leave you with this great quote from a wise guy, Carl Sagan:
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.)" ~ Carl Sagan
Danny has done his homework. He cuts close to the bone on this issue. I leave you with this great quote from a wise guy, Carl Sagan:
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.)" ~ Carl Sagan
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