Rag Hand

Read this story in the New York Times then see if you can find anybody in a position of power willing to talk about it.

NYT – The Swaps That Swallowed Your Town:

Like the credit default swaps that hid Greece’s obligations, the instruments weighing on our municipalities were brought to us by the creative minds of Wall Street. The rocket scientists crafting the products got backup from swap advisers, a group of conflicted promoters who consulted municipalities and other issuers. Both of these camps peddled swaps as a way for tax-exempt debt issuers to reduce their financing costs.

Now, however, the promised benefits of these swaps have mutated into enormous, and sometimes smothering, expenses. Making matters worse, issuers who want out of the arrangements — swap contracts typically run for 30 years — must pay up in order to escape.

That’s right. Issuers are essentially paying twice for flawed deals that bestowed great riches on the bankers and advisers who sold them. Taxpayers should be outraged, but to be angry you have to be informed — and few taxpayers may even know that the complicated arrangements exist.

There you have it in a nutshell. Your school district uses swaps, courtesy of our good friends on Wall Street, to reduce debt, but what the “swap advisers” didn’t tell them was that they all worked on commission and the only way they got paid was if there was a transaction and the bigger the transaction the bigger their commission.

Now our cities are drowning in debt and the people who conned them into the deal are making nothing but money, because of early termination fees in the millions of dollars. -Makes Verizon look kindly, generous and honorable doesn’t it?

The part of this whole fiasco that rankles is, as pointed out in the article, nobody has bothered to inform the people who invariably get stuck with the bill -the taxpayers- exactly what arraignments exist and why their counties, school districts, and cities are suddenly facing bankruptcy.

Oh no. Under no circumstances should the common man be allowed to know about the deals that were made. To make this public would risk our elected officials and their cronies being held accountable and we can’t have that.

In the mean time the robber barons of Wall Street get fatter and richer, with nothing to show for destroying our economy and in fact the economy of entire countries, except huge bonuses.

Do you still delude yourself into thinking that we are a sovereign nation? Read this explanation of the ACTA treaty(Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement).

In it you will find that they are trying to standardize copyright laws. On the surface the idea sounds good, but when you read it you find that the Draconian ideals of the RIAA and MPAA are to be enforced with an iron fist, with special treatment given to the music industry.

Our president and his cohorts have placed staunch supporters of the RIAA in the justice department and issued public statements that the absurd penalties for downloading or uploading a few songs demanded by the recording industry are perfectly legitimate. Now they are working to make it an international offense. –Complete with a different rules concerning due-process.

The people we elected are selling our constitution and bill of rights to the highest bidder. In this case the music industry.

Since when did the United States of America allow other countries to write our laws?

This is an excerpt from Doug Hanchard’s blog titled:
How did Congress pass extension of U.S. Patriot Act? Ask your doctor

And then the roof caved in, H.R. 3961 – Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act of 2009 -was going through the House. Everyone in the House knew about the expiry of the existing extensions of the Patriot Act and thus was slipped as amendments to H.R. 3961. It was either that or watch H.R. 3961 face an uphill battle getting passed on the floor. According to the record, here is how the extension came to the floor as an amendment to H.R. 3961;

I won’t go in to the rest of the details, but I would advise you to read his entire post.

The problem I have with the process is the inherent deceit and dishonesty that our so called representatives use without hesitation, and without any sign of remorse that their bill is so unpopular that it can’t be passed on it’s own merit.

The patriot act is a violation of everything I would consider patriotic. It denies us rights, it assumes guilt and is abused by the police state.

Yes I used the phrase “POLICE STATE.” What else would you call it when an American citizen can be thrown in prison simply because someone didn’t like his name? What else would you call it when the police, in their myriad uniforms, have no oversight?

When the investigatory agencies find a violation of the law by various and sundry police agencies and can’t find a way to bury it, they announce it publicly. And by God they’ll step up and say the law has been violated again if it doesn’t stop.

The law has no teeth; after all, how do you punish an entire agency?

On top of everything else, the NSA / AT&T debacle shows that even if it can be proven that the law has been deliberately violated and names can be provided, the Whitehouse will protect that agency or company. This is done in the name of “national security.”

We have a constitution and a bill of rights that are supposed to protect our freedoms. –Instead they are twisted, ignored or made exception to, because some politician or group of politicians has an agenda.

The bills congress passes are not for our benefit. They are to feed the egos, further the agendas or profit the friends of those in power. And most importantly, they are there to tax and control the peasants.

Ethics Committees: Proving congress has a sense of humor.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The House ethics committee on Friday cleared seven lawmakers of improperly or illegally considering campaign contributions when steering earmarks amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars in mostly no-bid contracts to some 40 companies.

In a 305-page report, the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct said its nine-month investigation revealed a widespread perception among corporations and lobbyists that campaign contributions provided enhanced access to lawmakers or a greater chance of getting earmarks.

In reality, members of Congress “by and large, take great care to separate their official and campaign functions, particularly with respect to earmark requests,” it said in a unanimous decision.

Taxpayers for Common Sense and other watchdog groups criticized the ethics committee’s decision to clear the lawmakers, but said it was not surprising.

Members of the ethics committee themselves obtained $200 million in earmarks either by themselves or with other lawmakers, Taxpayers said on its web site.

When congress “forced” representatives to put their name on earmarks -saying that it would decrease earmarks-, they knew full well that earmarks would become something politicians could openly brag about.

The “Ethics panel” found no wrongdoing. Maybe that is because they are as guilty as the people they “investigated.”

The politicians we elect have become so used to doing favors for “friends,” who in turn contribute to the campaigns to make sure that their friends can stay in office so they can do more favors, that they are apparently oblivious to what appears to the rest of us to be rampant corruption.

People adapt to their environment, and in any political situation doing favors for golfing buddies by folding pork into an unrelated bill is the norm, and our elected representatives see nothing wrong with this, therefore there is no ethics violation, because that’s just the way things work around there.

Crooked politician is redundant.

Political Nevada is actually active and has three posts up.
(According to a mutual friend the reason for the delay wasn’t slowness of the authors writing but a technical problem that interfered with his ability to post.)

In his post “Two Party System?” the author makes it clear that he is a big fan of multiple parties, coalition governments, and governments collapsing and being forced to start over.

Currently our simple two-party government is stagnating because there is absolutley no cooperation between them. Those in power seem to feel that they can delay votes and laws until the next election when they might have a larger percentage of the total membership(house or senate) to force their will.

If they had to deal with multiple political groups, maybe they wouldn’t waste so much time, maybe they would get more work done; maybe it’s about time that we have more than our sacred two-party system?

For the most part I agree with him, and as long as the Constitution says nothing about this being a two party system, I see no reason not to go with the European model of a multi-party government.

Our current electoral system can accommodate as many parties as needed without requiring any major modifications. This change might even force this country to become a democracy instead of a republic.

However the real problem, and the real power, lies in the cost of getting elected. The major political contributors are not going to support anyone they don’t see as a winner, meaning someone who can get elected within the existing structure and can be controlled by them. Any change to the status quo will either threaten their established relationships or make it prohibitively expensive to buy politicians except on a local level.

On top of that, the constant competition would leave the politicians subject to continual scrutiny, and therefore make them accountable to the voters in real time. For this reason alone the two 800lb gorillas are never going to allow any changes to the status-quo.

If you think that either party will allow more than lip service when it comes to change, just remember all the promises the Democrats made before they were elected and how many real changes they made once they had the power.