In yet another slap in the face to the American consumer the greed mongers on Wall Street have gotten everything they wanted from the President, the Congress, the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the international central banks, even the two candidates for president Obama and McCain and still they refuse to release the trillions of US dollars they are hoarding while continuing to hold the economy hostage.
Over two trillion dollars in American pension savings have gone up in smoke this year as the forces behind the government have manipulated and raped every treasure trove they could find to protect their precious credit, line their pockets, and demonstrate to the government just who is in charge of the US economy. Such behavior almost borders on criminal if there were any laws that existed to prosecute the predators of lower Manhattan. But thanks to the millions of dollars in special interest contributions poured into the campaigns and pockets of our elected officials no such laws exist.
Is it just circumstance that only two investment houses survived the economic meltdown this year and gobbled up all their competitors, two firms now sitting on billions if not trillions of our funds? Is it circumstance these firms have the power to call accounts in other companies, in other words demand early payment, when there is no money to be had thus driving those competitors out of business?
Is it circumstance that the survivors, Goldman Sachs and J P Morgan owned and controlled the London energy futures market used to drive up the price of oil and devastate our economy and that of the world? Well is it circumstance that these companies have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the campaigns of our elected officials and both were the primary beneficiaries of stunning government actions to rescue the economy?
As of August 31 according to the Center for Responsive Government Barack Obama had raised about $460 million compared to about $230 million for McCain. Obama is the first federal candidate in our history to refuse public financing even though he pledged to take the public financing which would have greatly reduced his spending in the campaign.
Goldman Sachs temple in Wall Street.
So what financial interest did Goldman Sachs have in Barack Obama? Since the beginning of his campaign the boys at Goldmans have been the biggest contributors to Obama and helped bring in millions from the Wall Street establishment. Goldman executives alone have given Obama $739,521 and have helped raise the following from Wall Street firms for Obama. CitiGroup - $492,548, J P Morgan - $475,112, UBS - $419,550, Lehman Brothers - $391,774, Morgan Stanley - $341,380 and various amounts from Bear Stearns, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and Merrill Lynch.
What could be Obama's fascination with Goldman Sachs? Well it goes back as Bloomberg News reported Obama was the featured speaker at the Goldman's annual partners meeting in 2006 in Chicago. This was a junior member of the US Senate who had not even been in office two years yet he was speaking to the top executives of one of the most powerful investment houses in the world. There is something very strange about the circumstance.
The story only gets better. On May 3, 2007, Barack Obama attended an event at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan that was not on his public schedule and is only now surfacing. The exclusive private dinner was for Goldman Sachs traders and featured a discussion on issues moderated for the Wall Street firm by NBC's Tom Brokaw. Once again the circumstances are strange as a year later Brokaw would be moderating the second presidential debate between Obama and McCain and the economy and Wall Street were the main points of discussion. Of course the debate commission and McCain were unaware that Obama and Brokaw had already held a practice session the year earlier when Obama was facing a withering attack from Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in the democratic primary.
Now that is three most unusual encounters between Obama and Goldman Sachs. Then comes the economic chaos and the president calls a meeting of Congressional leaders, Treasury and Federal Reserve staff and the presidential candidates. Obama, who was staying away from Washington during the crisis got the call and at the meeting was the only person to talk about a Republican alternative proposal for the crisis, a proposal that had not even been made public at the time.
It was later learned that a Treasury staff member reviewing the confidential proposal from Republicans was able to smuggle the information to Goldman Sachs employees who emailed it to Obama staff and it was given to him before the White House meeting, thus enabling him to pre-empt McCain from offering the new Republican proposal. Of course the Secretary of the Treasury was a former Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs.
Do we really know anything about the relationship between Obama and Goldman Sachs other than their massive fund raising for him? Since he has been secretly guided and financed by Goldman people from the very beginning of his presidential campaign were they influential in his economic platform. While he now admits things have changed and many of his proposals might be delayed or dropped, he still proposed a tax on the rich which would seem to be opposed to the Goldman executives.
Yet it was convenient that Goldman faced billions in losses from the sub-prime mortgage mess and they helped trigger the economic collapse with the manipulation of oil futures driving the world into a credit crisis, a crisis that helped them make billions of dollars through spiraling oil prices. Most convenient of all, the $700 billion Wall Street bailout plan was approved just before a new president was elected so the new president would not be blamed for anything that went wrong.
Obama never questioned the role of Goldman in the sub-prime fiasco nor in manipulating the oil futures prices. When Goldman specialists tried to drive the price of oil up to $200 a barrel Obama never said a word. His meetings with them over the years were in secret and his actions were a wall of silence as the boys from Wall Street destroyed the economic system forcing a historic bailout by Congress that gave Wall Street nearly unlimited access to the US Treasury. Now did all of these incidents slip his mind as well as if his secret meetings with Goldman had nothing to do with the economy. I hope he can explain to the public just what has been going on and what, if anything he promised them in return.
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