In the altercation between armed federal BLM agents and peaceful local residents which took place on Wednesday, one cowboy managed to stand tall in the face of brute force.
Residents and supporters of embattled cattle rancher Cliven Bundy confronted a federal convoy with questions regarding reports of disposing of their animals. In a show of force, US Dept. of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) agents drew their weapons all at once, and along with German Shepherd attack dogs, set upon the public before man-handling at least one 57 year old mother to the ground. Angry bystanders who went to help were met with a barrage of taser shots at members of the crowd (see video at bottom of article). One local rancher Ammon Bundy was shot by federal agents at close range no less than 4 times, and incredibly, he could be seen ripping away taser chains with his bare hands – never once losing his footing.Bundy sustained some surface injuries and bleeding.
Speaking the following day to a CNN news crew Bundy described the incident, explaining, “I’ve never been tasered before. They are amazing weapons, and I hope I never have to go through that again – but I will if I have to.”
Video of the incident was shot by GMN two days ago at the Riverside encampment, adjacent to the Bundy Ranch. Following federal agents’ unprovoked assault on one 57 year old mother who was violently thrown to the pavement, members of the public moved in and panicked BLM agents began firing taser guns at local residents. Watch:
In days previous, another Bundy son, 37 year old Dave Bundy (photo, below) was roughed-up by heavily armed BLM agents and arrested him for stepping out of his vehicle near his family home along the state highway in northeast Clark County on Sunday.
Bundy has opposed his arrest on the grounds that he was standing on the side of Route 170 in a state ‘right-of-way’. Occupying BLM forces stationed at Bunkerville have stated that any ‘right-of-way’ is under their jurisdiction now, and therefore closed to the public.
Dave’s crime was that he was taking photos with his iPad. Authorities had cited him misdemeanor charges of “refusing to disperse” and “resisting arrest”.
Listen to Wednesday and Thursday’s episodes of The Pete Santilli Show on GMN – as we join Pete and the Bundy Family live on the ground from the Bundy Ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada, with the latest breaking news and commentary on the week long occupation by armed US Federal Bureau of Land Management agents – as they attempt to lock-down public land surrounding the ranch of Cliven Bundy, and rustle away Cliven’s prize herd of cattle. Host Patrick Henningsen sits in for Pete, alongside co-host Susannah Cole. Listen here:
By now you’re familiar with the standoff between the federal government, i.e. the Bureau of Land Management, and 67 year-old rancher Cliven Bundy. (If not, check the backstory and my radio interview with him here.) The BLM asserts their power through the expressed desire to protect the endangered desert tortoise, a tortoise so “endangered” that their population can no longer be contained by the refuge constructed for them so the government is closing it and euthanizing over a thousand tortoises. The tortoises, the excuse that BLM has given for violating claims to easements and running all but one lone rancher out of southern Nevada, is doing fine. In fact, the tortoise has lived in harmony with cattle in the Gold Butte, Clark County Nevada for over a hundred years, or as long as Cliven Bundy’s family has lived on the land as ranchers. In fact, the real threat to it is urbanization, not cattle.
A tortoise isn’t the reason why BLM is harassing a 67 year-old rancher. They want his land. The tortoise wasn’t of concern when Harry Reid worked BLM to literally change the boundaries of the tortoise’s habitat to accommodate the development of his top donor, Harvey Whittemore. Whittemore was convicted of illegal campaign contributions to Senator Reid. Reid’s former senior adviser is now the head of BLM. Reid is accused of using the new BLM chief as a puppet to control Nevada land (already over 84% of which is owned by the federal government) and pay back special interests. BLM has proven that they’ve a situational concern for the desert tortoise as they’ve had no problem waiving their rules concerning wind or solar power development. Clearly these developments have vastly affected a tortoise habitat more than a century-old, quasi-homesteading grazing area. If only Clive Bundy were a big Reid donor.
BLM has also tried to argue that the rules have changed, long after Bundy claims he secured rights and paid his dues to Clark County, Nevada. BLM says they supersede whatever agreement Bundy had prior; they demanded that he reduce his living, his thousand-some-odd head of cattle down to a tiny herd of 150. It’s easy for the government to grant itself powers of overreach, but it doesn’t make it right. Many bad things are done in the name of unjust laws. Just look at Obamacare. This heavy-handed tactic has run the other ranchers from the area and now Bundy is the last one. He’s the last one because he stood up to the federal government.
So why does BLM want to run Bundy off this land and is Reid connected?
I discussed this on “Kelly File” tonight, video via Jim Hoft.
"Engineering Evil" is a documentary recently shown on the Military History channel. It's a story of Nazi Germany's murder campaign before and during World War II. According to some estimates, 16 million Jews and other people died at the hands of Nazis (http://tinyurl.com/6duny9).
Though the Holocaust ranks high among the great human tragedies, most people never consider the most important question: How did Adolf Hitler and the Nazis gain the power that they needed to commit such horror? Focusing solely on the evil of the Holocaust won't get us very far toward the goal of the Jewish slogan "Never Again."
When Hitler came to power, he inherited decades of political consolidation by Otto von Bismarck and later the Weimar Republic that had weakened the political power of local jurisdictions. Through the Enabling Act (1933), whose formal name was "A Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich," Hitler gained the power to enact laws with neither the involvement nor the approval of the Reichstag, Germany's parliament. The Enabling Act destroyed any remaining local autonomy. The bottom line is that it was decent Germans who made Hitler's terror possible -- Germans who would have never supported his territorial designs and atrocities.
The 20th century turned out to be mankind's most barbaric. Roughly 50 million to 60 million people died in international and civil wars. As tragic as that number is, it pales in comparison with the number of people who were killed at the hands of their own government. Recently deceased Rudolph J. Rummel, professor of political science at the University of Hawaii and author of "Death by Government," estimated that since the beginning of the 20th century, governments have killed 170 million of their own citizens. Top government killers were the Soviet Union, which, between 1917 and 1987, killed 62 million of its own citizens, and the People's Republic of China, which, between 1949 and 1987, was responsible for the deaths of 35 million to 40 million of its citizens. In a distant third place were the Nazis, who murdered about 16 million Jews, Slavs, Serbs, Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians and others deemed misfits, such as homosexuals and the mentally ill.
We might ask why the 20th century was so barbaric. Surely, there were barbarians during earlier ages. Part of the answer is that during earlier times, there wasn't the kind of concentration of power that emerged during the 20th century. Had Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong and Hitler been around in earlier times, they could not have engineered the slaughter of tens of millions of people. They wouldn't have had the authority. There was considerable dispersion of jealously guarded political power in the forms of heads of provincial governments and principalities and nobility and church leaders whose political power within their spheres was often just as strong as the monarch's.
Professor Rummel explained in the very first sentence of "Death by Government" that "Power kills; absolute Power kills absolutely. ... The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects." That's the long, tragic, ugly story of government: the elite's use of government to dupe and forcibly impose its will on the masses. The masses are always duped by well-intentioned phrases. After all, what German could have been against "A Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich"? It's not just Germans who have fallen prey to well-intentioned phrases. After all, who can be against the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act"?
We Americans ought to keep the fact in mind that Hitler, Stalin and Mao would have had more success in their reign of terror if they had the kind of control and information about their citizens that agencies such as the NSA, the IRS and the ATF have about us. You might ask, "What are you saying, Williams?" Just put it this way: No German who died before 1930 would have believed the Holocaust possible.
An area just outside of the little town of Bunkerville, Nevada, with a population of around a thousand people, may go down in history. This little spot in the desert may be compared with Lexington, Massachusetts, the site of the “shot heard round the world” – the first shot fired in the American Revolution. Because it looks like the second American Revolution may start there…and soon.
Yesterday, The Daily Sheeple reported that tensions were running high outside of Bunkerville. It seems that the US government, in all of their infinite wisdom, has declared war on a cattle rancher named Cliven Bundy.
In a stand-off that has been likened to Ruby Ridge and Waco, the federal government has now deployed armed agents in a case of what the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has deemed “trespass cattle,” escalating a 20-year battle over grazing rights and what actually constitutes “public land” use in Southern Nevada.
Cliven Bundy, a 67-year-old rancher says his family has worked the 600,000-acre Gold Butte area since the late 1800s and that they were there well before the government’s Land Management Bureau ever came along. (source)
Armed federal officers have arrived to steal Bundy’s cattle and close down the land he is using. What’s more, they have declared a zone around the area to be free of the restrictions of the Constitution, specifically, the First Amendment right to assemble and speak freely. They’d like to keep their reprehensible actions quiet and out of the public eye. It’s really difficult to mow down a bunch of protesters ala Waco with the whole world watching.
Yesterday, tensions began to rise even further and numerous protestors were tazed and assaulted. (You can see the actions of those brave BLM officers on this video HERE).
It looks like tensions will rise even further because Americans have had enough.
Militias have been mobilised. It’s going to get real.
Bundy may be facing down a bunch of armed federal thugs but he’s going to be backed up by militia members from across the country.
This is the day that Patriots have been talking about and training for. They will not stand down.
CBS reports that militias from Texas, Montana, Utah, New Hampshire, and Florida will be standing with Bundy against the Bureau of Land Management.
If you aren’t a combatant, this doesn’t mean that you can’t participate in this revolt against tyranny. This is a call to action.
Here are the pertinent email addresses and phone numbers:
Share information in support of these people who refuse to stand idly by while theft, violence, and tyranny occurs at the hands of the government. If we all spread the word, there is no way that another Ruby Ridge or Waco can quietly occur. We can combat the disinformation spouted by the mainstream media by publishing REAL photos, REAL videos, and REAL accounts of what is happening. We can keep the communication open and tell the world what the United States government is doing to its own people.
Share this and other stories through email, through social media, through links in the comments sections of mainstream news sites. Whatever you do, don’t wait for someone else to take action. Now is the time to speak up for liberty. Make this story too viral for the mainstream to ignore. Do not allow these brave people staring down the barrel of a gun to do so without our support.
The Bureau of Land Management has picked up a snake by the tail, and it looks like that snake is going to bite.
A revolution without a shot fired is possible, and for those that have been wringing their hands over what they have been watching happen to the US and wondering what a single person can do about it, there is plenty.
Quick recap: Cliven Bundy is a racher who in the early 1990s was told that the area he allowed his cattle to graze was all of a sudden off limits, as dictated by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), in order to save some tortoises. He refused to comply since his family had been using that area for longer than the BLM even existed.
After a long, drawn out battle, now the federal government has come in, surrounded the family, set up de facto martial law, assualted his son, stolen his cattle, killing many in the process, set up a “First Amendment free speech area,” and have terrorized the whole community in Nevada in the process.
BIN friends and contributor Pete Santilli is there, militias are vowing to go stand with Mr. Bundy, the community is standing with him, and in the video below we see that Blaine Cooper and friends are heading there as well.
For those that cannot travel to stand with them against this brutal regime of federal agents, there is quite a bit that can be done.
SHARE – Every story, every video of the confrontation needs to be shared far and wide, write about it, comment, email those that have not heard, post to Facebook groups, Twitter, and all the other social networking sites.
CALL – The Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval issued a statement of concern over the “free speech” area set up by the fedeal government, Rangers, BLM and other agents, but he hasn’t got off his behind to show up in support of Mr. Bundy….. call his office and express your outrage over what these terrorists in the US government are doing to him.
Call the Senator, the sherriff’s office, every media outlet you can think of that is NOT reporting this situation.
EMAIL: Follow up with emailing all of the above entities, encourage your friends and family to do the same.
Brian Sandoval Email Contact Form- http://gov.nv.gov/Contact/Governor/ Brian Sandoval – Carson City Phone # - (775) 684-5670 Brian Sandoval Las Vegas Phone # -(702) 486-2500 Senator Dean Heller Contact Form - http://www.heller.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/contact-form Phone #’s For Heller – Reno: 775-686-5770/ Las Vegas: 702-388-6605/ Washington: 202-224-6244 Sheriff Douglas Gillespi - (702) 828-3231 or (702) – 828 – 3111 Email: Sheriff@lvmpd.com Steny Hoyer: Phone – (202)- 225-4131 Steny Hoyer Email Contact Form - https://hoyer.house.gov/email-steny
Now is the time to stand up and be heard because one person can make a difference when one person becomes two, two becomes four, four becomes eight, and so on……..
Now is the time for a Revolution……. now is the moment we say enough…….not through violence, but with sheer numbers.
Last week, National Intelligence Director Gen. James R. Clapper sent a brief letter to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in which he admitted that agents of the National Security Agency (NSA) have been reading innocent Americans’ emails and text messages and listening to digital recordings of their telephone conversations that have been stored in NSA computers, without warrants obtained pursuant to the Constitution. That the NSA is doing this is not newsworthy — Edward Snowden has told the world of this during the past 10 months. What is newsworthy is that the NSA has admitted this, and those admissions have far-reaching consequences.
Since the Snowden revelations first came to light last June, the NSA has steadfastly denied them. Clapper has denied them. The recently retired head of the NSA, Gen. Keith Alexander, has denied them. Even President Obama has stated repeatedly words to the effect that “no one is reading your emails or listening to your phone calls.”
The official NSA line on this has been that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court has issued general warrants for huge amounts of metadata only, but not content. Metadata consists of identifying markers on emails, text messages and telephone calls. These markers usually identify the computer from which an email or text was sent or received, and the time and date of the transmission, as well as the location of each computer. Telephone metadata is similar. It consists of the telephone numbers used by the callers, the time, date and duration of the call, and the location of each telephone used in the call.
American telecommunications and Internet service providers have given this information to the NSA pursuant to warrants issued by secret FISA court judges. These warrants are profoundly unconstitutional, as they constitute general warrants. General warrants are not obtained by presenting probable cause of crime to judges and identifying the person from whom data is to be seized, as the Constitution requires. Rather, general warrants authorize a government agent to obtain whatever he wants from whomever he wants it.
These general warrants came about through a circuitous route of presidential, congressional and judicial infidelity to the Constitution during the past 35 years. The standard that the government must meet to obtain a warrant from a FISA court judge repeatedly has been lessened from the constitutional requirement of probable cause of crime, to probable cause of being a foreign agent, to probable cause of being a foreign person, to probable cause of talking to a foreign person. From this last category, it was a short jump for NSA lawyers to persuade FISA court judges that they should sign general warrants for all communications of everyone in America because the NSA was not accessing the content of these communications; it was merely storing metadata and then using algorithms to determine who was talking to whom.
This was all done in secret — so secret that the president would lie about it; so secret that Congress, which supposedly authorized it, was unaware of it; and so secret that the FISA court judges themselves do not have access to their own court records (only the NSA does).
It was to further this public façade that Clapper lied to the Senate Intelligence Committee last year when he replied to a question from Wyden about whether the NSA was collecting massive amounts of data on hundreds of millions of Americans by saying, “No” and then adding, “Not wittingly.” The stated caveat in the NSA façade was a claim that if its agents wanted to review the content of any data the NSA was storing, they identified that data and sought a warrant for it.
This second round of warrants is as unconstitutional as the first round because these warrants, too, are based on NSA whims, not probable cause of crime. Yet, it is this second round of warrants that Clapper’s letter revealed did not always exist.
Snowden, in an act of great personal sacrifice and historic moral courage, directly refuted Clapper by telling reporters that the NSA possessed not just metadata but also content — meaning the actual emails, text messages and recordings of telephone calls. He later revealed that the NSA also has the content of the telephone bills, bank statements, utility bills and credit card bills of everyone in America.
In his letter to Wyden last week, Clapper not only implicitly acknowledged that Snowden was correct all along, but also that he, Clapper, lied to and materially misled the Senate Intelligence Committee, and that the NSA is in fact reading emails and listening to phone calls without obtaining the second warrant it has been claiming it obtains.
One wonders whether Obama was duped by Clapper when he denied all this, or whether he just lied to the American people as he has done in the past.
One also wonders how the government could do all this with a straight face. This is the same government that unsuccessfully prosecuted former New York Yankees pitcher Roger Clemens twice for lying to a congressional committee about the contents of his urine. Shouldn’t we expect that Clapper be prosecuted for lying to a congressional committee about the most massive government plot in U.S. history to violate the Fourth Amendment? Don’t hold your breath; the president will protect his man.
Yet, Congress could address this independent of a president who declines to prosecute his fellow liars. Congress could impeach Clapper, and the president would be powerless to prevent that. If Congress does that, it would be a great step forward for the rule of law and fidelity to the Constitution. If Congress does nothing, we can safely conclude that it is complicit in these constitutional violations.
If Congress will not impeach an officer of the government when it itself is the victim of his crimes because it fears the political consequences, does it still believe in the Constitution? Reprinted with the author’s permission.
Over a dozen bankers commit suicide…billions of rounds of ammunition are solicited by federal agencies…thousands of armored SWAT vehicles are being delivered to American cities…aU.S. Army manual describes internment camps for American citizens…Germany demands its 374 tons of gold stored in the FED depository (but so far only gets less than 10% of it). What is going on?
As we have described in past articles, Washington D.C. has been operating organized crime for 152 years. A counterfeiting operation always ends when it is exposed; yet this one was exposed over 20 years ago, and still continues.
The only reason the FED cartel and debt-based fraudulent banking system has not been busted, with a return to honest banking and lawful (silver and gold) U.S. money as stipulated in our Constitution — is that such a return to honest money and banking will bring a more devastating deflationary crash than humanity has ever experienced.
Yet, biblical and economic fundamentals demand that this crash is coming, whether we like it or not. Our only question in days ahead should be: now, what will We The People do *after* this cataclysm, to end the cartels’ control?
But first, let us consider what we will be facing soon. I have read articles, blog posts, and books suggesting that when inevitable financial collapse hits America, Civil War II will follow. I do not believe that position is supportable from history. Mad Max, or Jericho?
To understand what life may be like for a period after a truly massive national disaster, see the TV series Jericho. In that series, the enemy (viewers don’t learn who the enemy is until the end of Season 1) destroys 23 major U.S. cities, including Washington D.C., using nuclear bombs in steel drums. Though the nuclear scenario is far-fetched, the producers realistically depict the law of the jungle to be expected after a widespread collapse of society.
If you’re a reader, a much more realistic scenario is painted by Mark Goodwin in his book American Exit Strategy: Book One of The Economic Collapse Chronicles. Mark is a national treasure for our day. Even if you think the ‘prepper’ movement is nuts, go to Mark’s website, Prepper Recon, and read a few of his blog posts. Goodwin is a rational, godly American; you should study his work and consider it.
Civil war and massive financial collapse are very different. They stem from different causes, employ different rules of engagement, involve different players, strategies, and tactics — and are distinct in terms of escalation, resolution, and probable outcome.
Several other authors’ and website owners’ theory is that Congress’ 150-year counterfeiting racket is coming to a cataclysmic end. I agree, but I’d like to offer a scenario that is more supportable from history than a second civil war. I think we face the scenario portrayed in Mark Goodwin’s book — and we have an opportunity to make the story end very well for us, and very badly for the ‘money powers’ that have run Washington D.C. from behind the scenes for 175 years. Big Brother is Looking Down on You
The federal government seeking to employ domestic aerial drones is a shocking development. A common news item on Infowars for years, it was brought to light for most Americans by Senator Rand Paul’s March 2013 filibuster, reminiscent of countless speeches by his father, former Congressman Ron Paul, on the floor of the U.S. House. The younger Paul’s speech opened the eyes of many Americans about the federal police-state buildup.
For more information on government drones — including swarms of drones the size of a quarter — read Goodwin’s book. This is real, and it is ominous; but it need not end badly. We The People hold all the lawful power, and we have the numbers too. Government Hoarding Ammo and Building Camps
Then there is the federal government’s contracts to purchase over two billion rounds of hollow-point ammo. Jack Swint raised the issue last August in an article; Alex Jones and Infowars ran a series of articles for several weeks last year and again earlier this year on the subject.
Then consider the recently exposed U.S. Army Field Manual FM 3-39.40 entitled Internment and Resettlement Operations, that mentions taking prisoners’ Social Security numbers – demonstrating that it is meant for domestic internment camps. In an early 2013 video, the YouTube channel called StormCloudsGathering demonstrated that per paragraphs 2-39 and 2-40, it does apply to detainment of U.S. citizens. Reviewing paragraph 7-16, it is obvious that Infowars has been correct in its reporting on this issue; these camps are meant for Americans: Individual identification photographs are taken of all prisoners. The prisoner’s last name, first name, and middle initial are placed on the first line of a name board, and the prisoner’s social security number is placed on the second line. A prisoner registration number may be added on the third line. Two front and two profile pictures are taken of the prisoner. Fingerprints are obtained according to AR 190-47.
Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes takes the civil war position in a recent article, as does author Daxton Brown in his book Surviving Civil War II. Dozens of other dystopian guidebooks and novels also adopt the thesis that a civil war must follow the collapse of Congress’ 150-year-long counterfeiting of ‘U.S. Dollars’ and defaulting on its $122 trillion ocean of ’entitlement’ pork.
The Civil War II theorists propose that the TEA Party movement and other constitutionalists will be on one side, but they pose different ideas of who will comprise the other side. Just the ‘evil government,’ or perhaps an alliance of predators, parasites, and communists…Occupy Wall Street, unions, bureaucrats, welfare and Social Security recipients, and more. In Surviving Civil War II, the author suggests a shooting war using guerrilla tactics — but I think these scenarios are unrealistic in light of our 19th and 20th century history.
These facts are not in dispute:
federal agencies are buying billions of rounds of hollow-point ammunition;
federal government does have a disaster plan that includes internment camps.
My point is that these two facts do not necessarily demand that Civil War II be the result. If my position is correct — that Great Depression II is coming, instead — then the ammunition orders and internment camps can be put in perspective. Again, I recommend watching the TV series Jericho for a plausible depiction of the breakdown of social order that would follow the failure of the Federal Reserve’s scam. Add in a national shortage of food and/or power and/or water – and especially in urban zones, law of the jungle kicks in fast.
Property owners will want law and order to be maintained; but maintaining order in a civil war scenario is a very different set of challenges from restoring lawful money, banking, and civil government after arresting organized crime whereby government bred and fed a parasite class and corporate predator class. Who are the Good and Bad Guys?
Our domestic enemy that presents a clear and present danger to the security of the United States is thus organized crime in the U.S. Congress.
Not all members of Congress are corrupt, but many of them are. Their organized crime operations are clear, as I detailed in this comprehensive blog article. Since 1862, Congress has overseen the largest financial crime in history. We The People face not a civil war, but law enforcement challenges; we must apply penal sanctions, then restore the Constitution’s lawful form of U.S. money: gold and silver coin. Below, I’ll explain one scenario for lawful money transition.
Restoring lawful U.S. money and credit is an Article I, Section 8, Clause 15 law enforcement mission of the Citizen Militia, organized and mustered by the legislatures of the sovereign States. If it comes to force of arms in these United States, no one else can lawfully assume the mission. That’s the law. It Will Not Be Civil War II
So. Restoring Rule of Law in America is not war; it’s a law enforcement mission of the Citizen Militia organized and equipped by the legislatures and governors of the States. But most American gun owners are not trained in warfare — and only one State Legislature out of 50 (Arizona) even has a Militia statute as required by the Constitution. So when the wheels come off, 200 million idiotic American sheep will become deadly serious overnight. They’ll want heads to roll, and they’ll demand resumption of constitutional order, yet will be unequipped to do their duty as stipulated in the Constitution.
For local, county, and State peace officers from constables up to State Guard, perhaps tens of millions of rounds of ammo will be needed to stop starving looters, rapists, carjackers, arsonists, and murderers that would swarm across America in the worst case. That will be a 21st century re-enactment not of the Great Depression, but of Mad Max. Jack Swint, Daxton Brown, Stewart Rhodes, and many others paint this bleak picture, and with no recovery plan in place, the Federal Reserve scam’s collapse will make a very bleak life for all of us.
But the worst part needn’t last more than a year or two if we can force our Lawful U.S. Money and Banking Act into law. It is designed to make the transition to lawful money in the shortest time possible, finally ending Congress’ 151-year counterfeiting crime. AmericaAgain! will be vital, and I think CSPOA and Oath Keepers will be vital also. As long as a few million sane, righteous citizens exist, America can avoid civil war in favor of long-overdue law enforcement. The Vital Role of Citizen Militia
Citizen Militia, per Article I, Section 8, Clause 15 of the Constitution, must ”execute the laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections…”.
But as constitutional scholars Edwin Vieira and Jon Roland have maintained for decades: Citizen Militia has never been a gaggle of autonomous vigilante groups; always ’well-regulated’ by the States, the legislatures close to and accountable to the People.
Swint, Brown, Rhodes, and countless other “Civil War II” prophets suggest that the TEA Party will square off against the State and be treated as rebels; the opposite of what the Constitution stipulates. By law, the Citizen Militia regulated by its State government is the top of America’s law enforcement and military defense system.
The first Great Depression gives us an idea of the shattering social upheaval and family ruin in our future; but most likely, Great Depression II will be far bloodier and shorter. If properly-regulated Citizen Militia does not jump in and fill the void in public order, government agencies will – because someone has to.
In a constitutional regime of national defense and law enforcement, forces are predominantly State Militia under officers appointed by the State Legislatures. National armies are only called up for two years at a time, for declared wars, with a demonstrable purpose to defend these United States.
Arresting organized crime will bring vital catharsis for the Constitution and for American ethics and virtue. The battle space will be the Internet, the State criminal courts, and the court of public opinion. Since some in Congress do not support this organized crime, we can’t accurately label the coming cataclysm as “the People vs. the government”.
It is law enforcement. It must be undertaken by a coalition of the willing – local and county law enforcement and State Guard, but primarily Citizen Militia forces performing our duty for the first time in 175 years. Read the Constitution; this is what the law stipulates. The Painful Death of American Marxism
Years of law enforcement and public education will be necessary to re-condition tens of millions of communist parasites that there exists no such thing as a free lunch. I refer not only to the parasitic poor; millions of middle-class and upper-class parasites and predators exist as well. The parasite and predator classes do not produce anything useful to the market, yet some of them are the wealthiest and most honored members of society. As in the first Great Depression, many of them will find themselves in humbling, menial jobs.
The breakdown of Rule of Law requires that basic social order be first restored: Do not murder. Do not steal. The second thing is productivity; people must produce, rather than live off the production of others. In other words, a return to the Protestant work ethic that characterized us for three centuries.
As was necessary after the fall of the USSR, the oldest two generations will continue to demand their government giveaways even when it is obvious that they’re illegal and nonexistent. These people will no longer be able to traipse across America in their RV, or go to Vegas or on cruises. They will either get to work, or find support from their kids and grandkids, or plug into churches and social circles…or have a very hard end in life. No more illegal, communist ‘safety net’ in Washington, D.C. – back to the American way for 300 years before Woodrow Wilson. Life After Great Depression II
The responsible citizenry – those who will rebuild America – will be what I call We The People: the citizen that produces more than he consumes; who employs others and takes risks, rather than seeking a cushy life. There are still tens of millions of Americans who meet that description. In tough times, they will hire at least a few others (in some cases, they’ll hire hundreds). They will make products that Americans really need – and we will buy American more than ever before (all countries will become more protectionist after the collapse).
The hardest hit sector will be the world’s largest gambling casino: the financial industry. By definition, an industry must actually be industrious; must actually produce something of value. The American banker, financial dealer and trader, and brokers do not fit the description. Who knows what will become of all those fancy little branch bank buildings when only one in ten survives?
Much else will change, too. Washington, D.C. will figure very small in your life. The Medicare and Social Security scams will die; every American will once more be responsible for his or her own life and future as the founders intended. Most other federal agencies will be defunded, and life will return to what it was four generations ago. This will be a very good thing for America’s future and for American character. Arresting Congress’ 150-year Counterfeiting Crime
Sooner or later, Americans will return to using lawful U.S. money as stipulated in the U.S. Constitution; this is a basic fact of life. So what will happen when silver and gold U.S. money as demanded by law, is restored? I’ll offer a scenario that is realistic, unlike the silly $1 trillion platinum ‘debt coin’ idea floated by Obama supporters recently, in an effort to “pay off the national debt”.
First, assume the stated government gold reserves (ca. 8,100 metric tons) do exist. Second, assume that all gold held privately in America, is left out of the calculation for now, as an offsetting assumption.
Third, assume that only one-third of the estimated 25,000 metric ton domestic silver mine reserves are monetized in the near-term. Fourth, leave out all of the existing publicly minted coins and private coin or bullion reserves of silver; another offsetting assumption.
Using those assumptions and U.S. Base Money Supply of $8 trillion and M3 (total long-term CDs in US banks) at $10 trillion, Congress could restore lawful U.S. money and ’regulate the value’ of silver to $4,300 per troy ounce and gold to $64,500 per troy ounce for monetary use.
That is of course a very unrealistic number — at least twice what the market would allow. This is because when Congress resumes lawful U.S. money consisting of 100% gold and silver backing for all bank transactions and U.S. Dollar paper bill print runs, domestic and foreign holders of silver and gold will beat a path to the U.S. market to sell their ounces of precious metal for thousands or tens of thousands of honest new U.S. Dollars. Thus, I think a more realistic new peg would be something like $1300/oz silver and $20,000/oz gold.
If you think this is preposterous because large gold and silver holders would become insanely wealthy, consider that for the past century and more, the insanely wealthy have been those holding large amounts of casino paper – Federal Reserve Notes (counterfeit “U.S. Dollars”) and all derivatives of that scam and the other scam called ’fractional reserve’ loans. Is that arrangement more ethical than obeying the U.S. Constitution’s stipulations for lawful money, allowing value to flow once more to real assets and labor?
The staggering financial crime is a financial ‘industry’ enabled and supported by Congress to steal hundreds of trillions of dollars in labor and assets from America’s productive class. To exacerbate the destruction, Congress for the past century has then used this ‘air money’ to bloat its bureaucracy and an American socialist parasite horde that now threatens our electoral process. The ancient counterfeiting crime must be arrested; our perfect opportunity is the inevitable collapse of the U.S. ‘dollar’ and the financial casino.
Speaking of bloat: financial mega-shocks are by nature deflationary so a period of deflation is to be expected. Retailers and stockholders always resist deflation at all costs. In the coming cataclysm, they will be powerless to resist. Think cancer surgery.
Incidentally, when you think of lawful U.S. money (backed 100% by gold and silver specie) don’t envision carrying around huge amounts of precious metal coins. The U.S. Mint manufactures over 12 billion base metal, partial-silver, silver, and gold coins every year; that would continue and most transactions will still be electronic, paper checks, or U.S. Dollar silver certificates but the difference will be that all transactions will be backed by 100% vault reserves and audited perhaps monthly, weekly, or even as frequently as daily, depending on the robustness of the auditing software and hardware. Don’t let the financial industry conjurers blow smoke in your eyes; this is easily accomplished and computers are very efficient. We The People merely have to hold the U.S. Congress accountable under the law — with zero tolerance for fraud and embezzlement. Downsizing the Federal Leviathan
The wise and diligent will prosper; the foolish and slothful will live hard lives. Amusement-oriented industries will die within months, as we realize how many careers have been wasteful and foolish in the extreme. The 700+ military installations around the world will be eliminated, since not one of them meets the Constitution’s stipulations for military defense.
The automotive and petroleum Gargantua will die in its present form as consumption drops to half of today’s levels (and as the Peak Oil theory of ‘the end of the world as we know it’ is shoved off the stage by new data theorizing almost unlimited oil from abiotic deep-earth processes).
American economic activity in some areas will drop to the level of Europe; many Europeans will slide to Asia’s level; much of Asia will slide back into the Third World for a time. In place of today’s Gargantua will be a much more efficient transportation industry – a good thing, unless you work in that industry.
In Leviticus 25 and 27, every fiftieth year is the yobel – the Jubilee when slaves are set free, debt is wiped out, and property returned to its original owners. In our context, tax slaves have their bill wiped out, bureaucrats are forced to find real work, and banks lose their exalted positions over owners of assets that were earned by real work of borrowers. A New Way of Life: AmericaAgain!
AmericaAgain! will bring three salutary things to American life:
The AmericaAgain! Indictment Engine™ will be the mechanism for Americans to assure this can never happen again since every member of Congress can be indicted for attempting to revert;
AmericaAgain! Legislative Action reforms are 19 mega-changes that will cut federal government back to only its 17 lawful powers, and cuts all imperial emoluments to members of Congress;
AmericaAgain! Minutemen is a plan to restore the Citizen Militia; citizen service for local, county, and State emergencies and defense that was sundered by Lincoln in 1861 with his federal army.
When ‘the Big One’ comes this time, We The People won’t wander about aimlessly as we did in the 1930s. This time, a tactical remnant of We The People will assure that when the organized crime cancer surgery is over, it won’t begin again as soon as the smoke clears.
We have identified and isolated the enemies of our Republic; we have developed tactical and strategic defenses equal to, and appropriate for, the threat. We have swept away the false flags and now see the battle space with unclouded eye.
A presently unseen force of millions of Americans will move into action after the first shocks hit and a harsh new reality sets in. Americans showed the world what we could do when driven by contrived world wars — how much more can we do when our own republic is on the brink of destruction from within?
AmericaAgain! is preparing for reality in the light of history, rather than the scenarios painted by most dystopian novels.
It is true — Great Depression II is inevitable, and Americans should be preparing for it. This time, however, a critical mass of Americans can be sincerely repentant and diligent before God, to lead the most exciting period in six American generations.
Remember this, when that morning dawns and Great Depression II has begun. How it ends, will be up to us. SourceDelivered by The Daily Sheeple
All the Presidents' Bankers: the Secret History of Washington-Wall Street Collusion Nomi Prins
With U.S. inequality at its highest point since 1928 and Wall Street bonuses hitting pre-2008 levels, we look at the 100-year history of secret collusion between Washington and the financial industry. In her new book, "All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power," financial journalist Nomi Prins explores how a small number of bankers have played critical roles in shaping a century’s worth of financial, foreign and domestic policy in the United States.
Prins examines how these relationships have influenced events from the creation of the Federal Reserve, the response to the Great Depression, and the founding of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Now a senior fellow at Demos, Prins is a former managing director at Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs, and previously an analyst at Lehman Brothers and Chase Manhattan Bank.
Transcript
AARON MATÉ: Well, if you go by the balance sheet, the last four years have been a time of economic growth in the United States. Corporate profits and stock prices have mostly recovered and, in many cases, surpassed their levels from before the financial crisis. On Wall Street, bonuses are now the highest they’ve been since before the 2008 crash. Just last year, payouts increased 15 percent to $26.7 billion. That’s enough money to more than double the pay of every minimum-wage worker in the country. That’s because, for most Americans, the recovery has been elusive. Inequality is now at its highest point since 1928, and the wages for lower-income Americans are stagnant.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we now turn to a new history that explains how this disparity has come to be. In her new book, All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power, financial journalist Nomi Prins traces the hundred-year history of collusion between Washington and Wall Street. Prins reveals how a small number of bankers have played critical roles in shaping a century’s worth of financial, foreign and domestic policy in the United States. These relationships have influenced events from the creation of the Federal Reserve, the response to the Great Depression, and the founding of the IMF and the World Bank.
For a good part of the 20th century, bankers and presidents presided over a financial system that was relatively stable. But as Wall Street grew increasingly outside of Washington’s control, financial speculation has exploded, leading to the financial crisis of 2008. And even though the economy may now be on the mend, Nomi Prins ends her book with a stark warning, writing, "Either we break the alliances, or they will break us."
Nomi Prins is a former managing director at Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs and previously an analyst at Lehman Brothers and Chase Manhattan Bank, now a senior fellow at Demos and author of this new book, All the Presidents’ Bankers.
Nomi, it’s great to have you with us. Talk about the inspiration for the book.
NOMI PRINS: Well, actually, we were on the show a few years ago; I was talking about a novel I had written, a historical novel on the 1929 crash called Black Tuesday. And what had happened as one of the segments in that book was that six bankers had gotten together at the behest of the acting chairman of the Morgan bank, who was Thomas Lamont at the time, and they had so been afraid of losing all of the money and all of their reputations and their institutions at the time that they got together and decided to pool their own money to save the markets—stark difference from what happened more recently, which was that the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and everyone else from the government decided to work with them to save themselves. But the impetus for the book really came from those big six bankers. We still have big six bankers today. And I looked into the relationships that they had with all of the presidents going forward and backward from that time to come up with this All the Presidents’ Bankers analysis.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about that. Talk about who they were and the companies they represented, and go back.
NOMIPRINS: Yeah, so, in 1929, the men that sat in the room at Morgan was Tom Lamont, who was the acting chair of Morgan, as I mentioned; Charles Mitchell, who was the chairman of National City Bank, which has now grown into Citigroup; Al Wiggin, who was the head of the Chase Bank, which is now part of the Chase—JPMorgan Chase constellation; and a couple of other bankers. And they basically have morphed into some of the six banks we have today. The ones that were absent were Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, but they came in through other avenues and personal connections to bankers, from FDR and forward since that time.
And what I did was I went backwards from the crash in 1929 and noticed that J.P. Morgan, who is arguably—not even arguably, who is the most powerful banker this country has ever known and the most powerful political, financial actor—he died a hundred years ago, but his legacy, his family and what he created and the constellation of relationships between him and, at the time, Teddy Roosevelt, as far back as 1907, through Jamie Dimon’s relationship with Obama more recently, has been a very apparent apparatus in the connection of politics and finance, which I believe has no separation line.
AARON MATÉ Well, on that absent separation line, talk about the creation of the Federal Reserve.
NOMIPRINS: So, this panic in 1907 happened. Teddy Roosevelt, who historically we know as the great trust buster, didn’t bust banks—busted a lot of other companies, a lot of other industries, not banks. And the reason for that was he truly believed—and he says this in documents and memoirs that I looked through—he truly believed that J.P. Morgan, the man, and his bank and his friends could save New York and the country from a greater catastrophe after the panic of 1907. And J.P. Morgan got together with a bunch of people at the Hotel Manhattan at midnight, didn’t have the president there, didn’t have the treasury secretary there, told them later what they would do. And what they would do is save their friends. And that’s what they did, with some of their own money, little bit of Treasury money, saved their friends, saved the Trust Company of America, because they had interests in that. They decided they didn’t want to really have that kind of scare again, so they continued to push for this idea of a central bank, which was the Federal Reserve.
They had help with a senator, Nelson Aldrich, who was head of the Senate Finance Committee at the time, after—a year or so after that under President Taft. Nelson Aldrich took a group of bankers in 1910 to Jeckyll Island. He almost didn’t make that meeting. He got hit by a trolley car up on Madison Avenue, was convalescing with his son, Winthrop Aldrich, who became the head of Chase later, and took a bunch of representatives from J.P. Morgan’s bank—J.P. Morgan was not there, and that’s power: you don’t go, you send your lieutenants—to Jeckyll Island for 10 days. They hunted. They shot pheasants. They did all sorts of things. But they came out also with the impetus for the Federal Reserve. On the way back, the train back to Washington, Nelson Aldrich had to present this plan. He was still convalescing. Two bankers that came from that meeting went in his place to Washington to put up the plans. Now, it wasn’t passed under Taft; it was passed under the Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson. But a lot of those same individuals were friends with Woodrow Wilson, as well, into his presidency, and in fact helped campaign and raise money for his presidency.
AMY GOODMAN: Go—
NOMI PRINS: And it was—sorry—and the Federal Reserve Act was ultimately passed in the end of 1913 under Wilson.
AMYGOODMAN: What were the most famous—or not as well known, but you uncovered them—bromances between top bankers and presidents?
NOMIPRINS: Right, so this—one of them was Tom Lamont, who, I mentioned, was around in 1929. But he started his life moving up the chain of Morgan after the panic in 1907 in things called the Pujo trials, which were in 1912, which, at the time, looked at what bankers had done to cause the panic of 1907. He was a young lawyer at the time. He had gone to Harvard with FDR. But as a young man, he was also hanging out—living in the house of FDR up on 65th Street, renting it for several years while FDR was the assistant Navy secretary under Woodrow Wilson. They chose Tom Lamont to go with Wilson to France for six weeks. Wilson was in France. It was the longest time a U.S. president was outside of U.S. soil and the first time a U.S. president was outside of U.S. soil. But the banker that was by his side was Tom Lamont. He was a Republican. He went across his party lines to come back with Woodrow Wilson to fight for the League of Nations to try to preserve peace after World War I, which was defeated.
But Tom Lamont and Woodrow Wilson developed this relationship. And their letters are crazy. They’re like—they’re like so full of gratuity and love and just, you know, "thank you for being there by my side, and I couldn’t have done it without you," because when Woodrow Wilson then got a stroke and it was difficult for him to go around the country to, after the war, fight for the League of Nations, which the Senate didn’t want to pass and ultimately did not pass, Tom Lamont took it up in his newspapers that he owned, the Saturday Review, went before—you know, backdoors in terms of the senators that he knew, and really tried to push it. And the two of them really worked very closely together and had this bromance. And, of course, Woodrow Wilson ultimately did die from complications of those strokes.
AARON MATÉ If we look back on the Great Depression, it’s understood that Wall Street was hostile in many ways to the New Deal, but how did Wall Street work with Roosevelt, and why?
NOMIPRINS: So, one of the men, Winthrop Aldrich, who I mentioned before was the son of the founder of the Fed, one of the founders of the Fed, Senator Nelson Aldrich, was also friends with the Roosevelts. He was friends with FDR. And he also knew, from a business perspective, he wanted to outdo the Morgans. So he said, you know, Chase has some trading, some speculation, that went miles wrong in the crash of 1929, and he believed that for the stability of the economy and for his bank going forward, so he could sort of walk and chew gum at the same time—see the public interest as well as his bank’s interest—worked with FDR to pass the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated the speculative activities from the depositors that had their money entrusted to banks at the time, including at Chase. And, actually, Carter Glass, whose name is on that act, wanted a slightly weaker version of the act than Winthrop Aldrich pushed inside of Washington with the alliance of FDR. So that was a very, very different time. You cannot imagine today Jamie Dimon pushing with President Obama to separate his bank in such a way that it decreases its risk to depositors and taxpayers. It’s just unimaginable.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, talk about the relationship today. You have said that the relationships between bankers and presidents, those in power, is more dangerous today. And maybe you can use the example of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon’s relationship. I mean, it’s hard to forget him going before a Senate committee when there are so many questions, even the question of would he be criminally prosecuted, and they are on bended knee to him. And you’re just looking at senators, one by one, and though the TV corporate networks weren’t showing it, you know, the ch-ching, how many millions his bank and him were responsible for giving to these senators, Republican and Democrat.
NOMIPRINS: Well, yeah, and I actually remember being up that 4:30 or so in the morning and all night talking about Jamie Dimon bold-faced lying to those committees and then—yeah, and then turning over and saying, "Well, can you give us advice about the economy?" It was kind of ridiculous. This was after the London Whale trade, after they had lost billions in dollars, in money that should have been separated from speculation, to begin with.
So, the relationship is much more dangerous also because those big six banks today—again, slight derivations of the big six banks in 1929, but today—own 85 percent of deposits of all the commercial banks, 84 percent of assets of all the commercial banks, and control 96 percent of all of the derivatives that financial institutions that are backed by the government utilize today, and 45 percent of the world’s derivatives. Six banks control so much capital and have so much power as to the laws around that capital. And the administration—and this started in Reagan, through Bush, through Clinton, into Obama—this is not new—but the reaction of the administrations has been to allow this to happen, to allow the concentration of this capital, of this power, to do nothing in the face of the financial crisis of 2008, which I believe is still ongoing, just in a different manifestation, because this risk still exists and because these numbers are worse than they were before the crisis of 2008.
AMY GOODMAN: JFK, his relationship with the bankers?
NOMI PRINS: JFK was interesting. Of course, he wasn’t, you know, president for a long time.
AMYGOODMAN: You say he could have been president of a bank.
NOMIPRINS: I think—one of the things I look at in the book is sort of the pedigree and the social stature of a lot of the bankers and presidents, and also their connections. In the case of JFK, for example, he was in London in 1938 because his father, Joe Kennedy, who was the first appointed SEC head under FDR, because they were friends, because he helped with that campaign—met David Rockefeller in London at this gala coming-out party for JFK’s sister Kathleen. And David Rockefeller even briefly dated his sister Kathleen. So there were just so many social ties, as well.
But the other side of JFK is that his personal relationship, despite the social background, was a little more stilted. He just came off as a little more trying to do his own thing. So, even when—and because he had this long-standing relationship with David Rockefeller, they started to really diffuse. Rockefeller started saying disparaging things in public, in particular in this really interesting Life magazine article that came out in 1962, that were going against what JFK was trying to do. JFK, for example, in Latin America was trying to allow those countries to be more independent, to not have more private debt imposed upon them, which is what Rockefeller and the other bankers wanted to do at the time as a new source of making money. And this really disturbed Rockefeller, in particular, who was trying to expand the bank into those areas.
So, on the one side, they had a very strong social connection, and on the other side, JFK really tried to go about in a way to make external countries a little bit more independent financially from the United States, whereas that was a point where things started going in separate directions, and Rockefeller and Walter Wriston, who ran National City Bank at the time, really wanted to dump them with debt and to privatize and do all sorts of things that have gotten worse since then.
AARON MATÉ
So what happens since the 1970s? You have, at least for the bulk of the 20th century, banks and the government working together. Since the ’70s, though, Wall Street kind of goes rogue. So, what accounts for this shift, and how do we fix it now?
NOMIPRINS: Yeah, so, it’s a little bit—started when they found they could do a foreign policy that was separate from U.S. policy, that was an expansion of banks in a foreign capacity. And then LBJ tried to rein some of that back. He had some friends that he basically said, "You know, you guys, I know you want to do your own thing, but I have a Great Society vision coming on board, so you need to back me." So there was a little, still, quid pro quo there.
By the time the ’70s came along, with Nixon, who had less personal relationships and also ultimately took the country off the gold standard, which he did because the bankers pushed him to do it, because at this point they wanted two things. They saw that there was Middle East oil, and they could go in there and start to forge relationships and branches in the Middle East and utilize those petrodollars to recycle—it was a huge thing in the early ’70s—into Latin America and other countries. So they started operating more internationally and independently of their connections to the president.
And the minute they discovered all that money and they dumped all of that debt into the Third World, that manifested in a huge Third World debt crisis in the 1980s. And that was the first very large instance of a bailout. There was a small bailout for Penn Central, which was a railroad constellation in the '70s. But in the ’80s, under Reagan and under Bush, the idea of bailing out the banks, who had now refunneled all of this debt into Latin America, was a very epic decision, and it was one in which the bankers gave nothing back to the government. They were like, "We're going to use your money to bail us out." They were in Washington talking about the catastrophe that would happen to America if that didn’t happen. They got the government to basically push the World Bank and the IMF to work on the areas where they had the most risk and they had the most interest in retrieving it, and then in the ’90s just compiled that with the Mexican peso crisis, where Clinton also worked with Robert Rubin to save Mexican interests for Goldman and other U.S. banks, and then the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999. And then all of this idea of consolidation of risk and power just exponentially grew from there.
AMY GOODMAN: Nomi Prins, you talk about Goldman Sachs and that it wasn’t always as powerful as it is today.
NOMI PRINS: Yeah, Goldman Sachs almost died in 1928. Or, well, basically between 1928 and 1929, they had a trading partnership, "partnership," in which investors invested money, and the stock of that trust went up to $320-something, and then it subsequently went down to $1. And there were a lot of angry investors around the street and so forth. But a man named Sidney Weinberg, who was the chairman of Goldman at the time, who actually joined Goldman in the panic of 1907 as sort of an underling, decided that if he could befriend FDR in such a manner as to help him run his 1932 campaign, he would kind of have a seat at the table. And so, the legitimacy of Goldman with respect to FDR also allowed FDR to create the first Business Council, that Sidney Weinberg pushed in Washington to forge relationships between the business financial community and Washington and so on. Sidney Weinberg also was behind LBJ’s choice of Henry Fowler as a treasury secretary, who then joined Goldman Sachs after being a treasury secretary. And, of course, we had Henry Paulson, who did the other way—Bush picked him to be the treasury secretary, George W. Bush. And then, of course, Clinton picked Robert Rubin, coming from Goldman Sachs, to be the treasury secretary in his administration. So, but it started with Sidney Weinberg and FDR.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion. Then we’re going to be speaking with the Vermont congressman, Peter Welch. He wants to expose the budgets of the 16 intelligence agencies. When we come back, though, Nomi Prins will talk about her favorite story in the book. She’s the author of the new book, All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power.
In a moment, we’ll be speaking with Vermont Congressmember Peter Welch, but right now we’re continuing with Nomi Prins, the author of All the Presidents’ Bankers. She’s a former managing director at Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs and previously an analyst at Lehman Brothers and other places. But we want to go to a clip right now of President Obama in 2009, 60 Minutes. He lashes out at what he calls the "fat cat bankers" of Wall Street.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of, you know, fat cat bankers on Wall Street. The only ones that are going to be paying out these fat bonuses are the ones that have now paid back that TARP money and aren’t using taxpayer loans.
STEVE KROFT: Do you think that’s why they paid it back so quickly?
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I think, in some cases, that was a motivation, which I think tells me that the people on Wall Street still don’t get it. They don’t get it. They’re still puzzled: Why is it that people are mad at the banks? Well, let’s see. You know, you guys are drawing down $10-20 million bonuses after America went through the worst economic year that it’s gone through in decades, and you guys caused the problem, and we’ve got 10 percent unemployment—why do you think people might be a little frustrated?
AARON MATÉ That’s President Obama speaking in 2009. I’m wondering if there’s been any break in the symbiotic relationship between Wall Street and Washington that you document. Certainly with Obama’s second term, when he ran against Romney, his donations from Wall Street dropped. It was something like $16 million, went down to $6 million. So, do you see any change of course in this pattern of symbiosis that you trace in your book?
NOMIPRINS: Well, of course, Wall Street was very primary in getting him elected, to begin with. And I think also Wall Street doesn’t really particularly care who is in office, so there was a time during that campaign period where they just believed Romney had a better shot. It wasn’t so much necessarily a negative on Obama. I think they were just playing their bet, and they happened to have lost, which they usually haven’t over the many of elections. Who Wall Street backs tends to be who wins. But sometimes that backing gets a little bit split.
But in that clip, and in a lot of what Obama has said, you know, what is said publicly and what actually happens inside the private office and with respect to what’s going on with bankers, you know, shows up in the reforms. It shows up in the structures. It shows up in the minions of lobbyists and lawyers that continue to funnel money, and little chips away at even very weak but existing rules. And Obama has allowed that to happen. He’s never come out and named a name against a banker. He talks about Wall Street "fat cats" as some sort of like big, broad category. He has not named names. He has not said what Wall Street needs to done. It’s just sort of fluffy rhetoric.
AMYGOODMAN: Would he even say what he said in 2009, talking about the fat cat bankers, today?
NOMIPRINS: No. You know why? Because he believes—or he says—I shouldn’t say "believes," I don’t know—but that the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act was somehow sweeping reform, and he characterizes it as being relative to FDR’s reform when he did the Glass-Steagall Act and the New Deal and created the SEC and all sorts of things. And it simply wasn’t. As I mentioned before, banks got bigger. Their concentration of our deposits and assets and risk got bigger. Nothing was fixed by that, quote, "reform" act. And so, he would— he doesn’t need to say that now. He said it kind of in the beginning to consolidate his base, to get elected, whatever it was. But many presidents—and, actually, Democrats are a little bit more guilty of this than Republicans, because I think they feel they need to do this—from Wilson on, have always bashed the bankers in their campaign speeches, and then when it comes right down to it, most of them have been very helpful and very symbiotic with them after they have been in office. So it tends to get said to the public, and then when you look at what actually occurred, it’s a completely different matter, because they are connected.
AMYGOODMAN: Well, Nomi Prins, we want to thank you for being with us. All the Presidents’ Bankers is her book, The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power. You can read an excerpt of that book on our website at democracynow.org. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Aaron Maté.
Residents and supporters of embattled cattle rancher Cliven Bundy confronted a federal convoy with questions regarding reports of disposing of their animals. In a show of force, US Dept. of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) agents drew their weapons all at once, and along with German Shepherd attack dogs, set upon the public before man-handling at least one 57 year old mother to the ground. Angry bystanders who went to help were met with a barrage of taser shots at members of the crowd (see video at bottom of article). 
With U.S. inequality at its highest point since 1928 and Wall Street bonuses hitting pre-2008 levels, we look at the 100-year history of secret collusion between Washington and the financial industry. In her new book, "All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power," financial journalist Nomi Prins explores how a small number of bankers have played critical roles in shaping a century’s worth of financial, foreign and domestic policy in the United States.