Willie Nelson

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“Above all, he was amazed to hear me talk of a mercenary standing Army in the midst of Peace, and among a free People. He said, if we were governed by our own Consent in the Persons of our Representatives, he could not imagine of whom we were afraid, or against whom we were to fight…” from Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

The United States government is afraid of We the People of the United States of America. They are afraid because they themselves would not have stood for the long train of abuses suffered by We the People through the repeated betrayal of trust in the United States government.

The government and their police forces certainly seem to expect a significant public backlash against the Paulson bailout schemes designed so powerful interests can grow more powerful and do it with taxpayer dollars. We the People elected Mr. Obama on the basis of his campaign slogan of “Change We Can Believe In.”

I hope everyone draws up a list of items they would have to see happen for Mr. Obama to live up to his campaign slogan. Karl Denninger wrote an open letter to Mr. Obama with his list on change we can believe in regarding our current financial situation.

1. You will send up a bill that enacts a full repeal of Gramm-Leach-Bliley. This was the law that repealed the Glass-Steagall act (the majority of it, anyway).
2. You will send up a bill that reinstates the leverage limit of 12:1 that used to apply to investment banks (the dropping of which is the proximate cause of this mess, and which Henry Paulson was directly responsible for through his lobbying and requests) and apply it to all institutions doing business in The United States.
3. You will send up a bill that repeals the 2005 “Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention” act - an act you voted no on originally. This one should be a no-brainer, since you didn’t support it originally.
4. You will send up a bill that repeals the TARP/EESA, and will vow to do everything in your power to stop the expenditure of any further funds under the existing law, and you will direct Treasury on January 20th to reverse the tax changes that granted $150 billion in “preferences” without a vote of Congress or even public notice.
5. You will send up a bill that requires the SEC, OTS, and OCC to compel all assets and liabilities to be consolidated upon a firm’s balance sheet and directs that all marking methods, formulas and variables along with each asset held be disclosed accurately for every firm that operates in the United States.
6. You will direct The Federal Reserve by executive order to comply with the FOIA filed by Bloomberg and disclose, immediately and forever into the future, all loans issued, to whom, the specifics of the collateral pledged, and the discount or “haircut” applied. Such information will be published via The Web at the point of issuance of Fed Credit and all actions taken by The Federal Reserve or any of its district banks shall be undertaken in the full sunshine of the public view. If The Fed should refuse, you will pledge to send up to Congress a bill to repeal The Federal Reserve Act of 1913, and replace The Federal Reserve system entirely with an entity that will under penalty of federal law operate 100% “in the sunshine.”

Unfortunately, my expectation is that Mr. Obama will do nothing to harm his core constituency, his powerful Wall Street backers. We are living in a system where survival of the most corrupt seems to be the rule instead of survival of the fittest/smartest.

At the center of the United States’ corruption, income inequity, narcotic trafficking, money laundering, warfare state, loss of civil liberties, imperial over-reach, racism, and the constant recourse to violence as a tool of domestic and international policy is an oil economy bound to militarism by the petrodollar money system.

We have to make our departure from where we are right now. A good beginning would be to shift the debt burden from debtors to creditors with lenders required to eat the losses on deceptive loans they never should have made in the first place.

Seeking a peaceful revolution does not require anyone to buy in to any specific ideology. Ultimately no ideology can contain or define the social revolutionary impulse without falsifying it.

Peace is always for all or none.

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