Posted on 06/29/2009 6:21:19 PM PDT by Polarik
June 29, 2009: His name has become synonymous with investment fraud. He has bilked untold millions of people with enticements and promises of quick returns. His message was simple: Do it now or lose the opportunity forever. He seemed to be a bright, intelligent man going places, who hobnobbed with millionaires and billionaires, whose promises almost sounded too good to be true. And, today marks the day of reckoning. The engineer of the most famous Ponzi scheme in history got served a full plate of justice to the tune of 150 years in federal prison. However big Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme really was, it literally is overshadowed into nonexistence by the world's biggest and most costly Ponzi scheme that is operating right under our noses. The Master of this monetary manipulation who makes Madoff seem like a pauper, is none other than the "Leader of the Free World," Barack Hussein Obama, who's no stranger to scamming Americans.
Now, I don't know about you, but I always thought of the word, "Bailout," as being a last chance effort to avoid something terrible, like having to parachute out of a flaming airplane going into a death spiral. Obama and the Dem'Rats (with RINOS sucking at their heels) gave, "Bailout," a whole, new meaning. Instead of a parachute coming out of the pack when you've made that last-second jump, you get a big sign that says "Hope and Change." Remember that trillion dollar billion bailout that Obama forced lawmakers to pass so that our investment banks would not go down in flames?
It turns out that it's our tax burden now, and the tax burdens of our future generations, that are going down in flames.
According to F.M Perry, the only difference between Madoff's scheme and Obama's, is that Mr.Madoff conducted his in secret and Mr. Obama is conducting his scheme in the full sight of the investors, the American taxpayers:
"Moreover, Mr. Obama’s scheme (involving much more money than Mr. Madoff’s scheme) is being imposed openly on present and future taxpayers for many years to come. The money for tax payer investment is not yet in hand and must be borrowed by the government in behalf of the future taxpayers. Mr. Obama’s scheme appears to be a multi generational Ponzi scheme in which future generations are to be left holding the empty bag from a fraudulent investment for which Congress made them responsible. A seemingly mesmerized Congress is “falling for” or “promoting” Mr. Obama’s scheme “hook, line, and sinker.”
Writer Sidney E. Wing agrees, "The parts are all there: investment, promise, bait-and-switch, deceit, misappropriation, and return crumbs.":
Investment. A Ponzi scheme is defined as an investment operation that pays returns to investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors rather than from any actual profit or results achieved. Obama’s investors are us, the tax payers. His only investment treatment is to selectively tap bank accounts of the most productive, keeping the number of his biggest victims to a digestible few, not to include or upset his electorate.
Promise. Through well documented fear-mongering Obama has framed our national economic challenge as a crisis that only government can resolve. His rhetoric promises to invest our tax dollars through his stimulus plan to create millions of jobs, restore real estate values for financially responsible home owners, and restore confidence in public markets.
Bait and Switch. Obama and team are consistent in their temerity, “Never allow a good crisis to go to waste.” Therein lay conclusive evidence that Obama’s budget priorities are a great bait-and-switch. He promises to fix the financial crisis, but his actions are devoted to his long-standing liberal agenda on healthcare, energy and education as the solution, diverting resources and focus from real downturn causes.
Deceit. His scheme is now exposed in the face of his now disclosed social agenda and absence of identifiable strategies and implementations that support the original vision he pontificated. Having already taken a nose-dive from the ethical highground by blatantly reneging on his oath to eliminate ear-marks, he compounds his masquerade with a disingenuous claim that his signing of an ear-mark laden bill was last year’s business. But therein lays sleight of hand.and underlying dishonesty, so endemic to artful confidence men.
Misappropriation. As investors, we the people have little influence in the near term as our wealth is commandeered and misdirected by Obama and his congressional conspirators for social engineering. The indications were there, obfuscated by an adoring media. Too few picked up on his socialist slips of tongue, and too many discounted his past associations and career-work priority, community organizing. Socialism appears so ingrained that it’s the core of the man. In his righteous conviction, he’s tone-deaf to the damaging effects of his policies.
Return Crumbs. Recovery of jobs, mortgage relief, and stock market values will undoubtedly occur over time to some extent as free market forces begin to take hold, notwithstanding Obama’s assault on the private sector. However slim the results, you can be sure he will rush to the front of any popular recovery parade in an attempt to pose as its leader, recall the direct funding (for one year) of 25 Cleveland police officers, an Obama media event!
Wing notes that The Ponzi scam requires an ever-increasing flow of money from investors in order to extend the scheme. Obama’s clearly has frittered away America’s future to an unsustainable extent. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher stated in 1975, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money," a truth even more poignant today."
Obama’s lure to his investors, We the people, is his so-called to do everything he can to keep the economy from falling into a Depression worse than the Great Depression. Obama just needs our tax monies "temporarily" along with the power of Congress to pull off the scam. Make no mistake, the "looming economic disaster" of which the Supreme Leader warns, has already happened, and not caused by Wall Street or Main Street, but by "Easy Street": Independence and Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC. Rather than preventing a Depression, Obama and his power-mad Dem'Rats are on the fast track to manufacturing a Depression, gobbling up assets, left and right, with no return intended to go to the taxpayer at any time in the future.
"Large-scale depressions do not just 'happen,'" as blogger Petrarch explains:
"Contrary to the mainstream media, they are not the natural result of excessive cutthroat capitalism. They certainly aren't caused by a failure of government to regulate.There have always been booms and busts since long before governments understood enough economics to even attempt to regulate them. This is what was known as the "business cycle", and various economists, among them John Maynard Keynes, argued that governments can and should use their power to try to "smooth out" the business cycle so as to moderate both the extreme highs and the extreme lows."
What's not commonly understood is that this actually worked. In fact, it still does work large-scale depressions do not just "happen." Contrary to the mainstream media, they are not the natural result of excessive cutthroat capitalism. They certainly aren't caused by a failure of government to regulate. As its name would imply, capitalism runs on capital. For capitalism to work - not just to work well, but also to work at all - capital has to be available for investments both large and small, both short-term and long. The scarcer, more expensive, and less readily available capital is, the less investment will take place - and the fewer jobs, the less salaries to spend, and the weaker the economy.
The problem is that if there is no capital on offer, perfectly healthy businesses can't function. In the normal course of payments and receipts, virtually all businesses need to borrow small amounts of money to make payroll before checks from their customers arrive. If these loans can't be had, the business will abruptly fail through no fault of its own, and while still possessing a fundamentally healthy ledger. This is not only unfair, it's obviously devastating to the economy.
This should be obvious to everyone except the American public who's been force-fed a daily dose of Democrat crap. Obama and his lap-dog media fancied himself as the new FDR, and unfortunately, not only does that horrible shoe fit, but he's also the new Hoover as well. During the Depression, FDR established the NRA, which gave special privileges to companies that complied with his liberal programs. This led to economic inefficiency; companies could prosper better by being "politically correct" than by competing efficiently in the open market. Obama has done the same thing, except for a different reason: global warming, aka global governance. The job killing, Cap & Trade Bill, the largest and most destructive, tax hike in history, is cleverly disguised as a climate bill that Gore and his enviro-Nazis could only dream about.
Back in March, months before the Waxman-Markey monstrosity hit the House floor, a number of guests on “Forbes on Fox” had already compared Obama to Madoff, remarking that the Obama's administration is destroying businesses, especially small businesses with new taxes on capital, the lifeblood of our economy, and wasting tens and hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions. In effect, Obama will do more economic harm than Bernie Madoff could ever imagine. He’s taking money from people not even in the system, taxpayers not even in the system, and he’s going to scourge them for money down the road. In the name of regulating carbon dioxide, Obama will be stealing from Peter to pay Paul:
Mike Ozanian, Forbe's national editor, accused Obama of running a $2 trillion Ponzi scheme through his economic spending strategy. Ozanian, national editor of Forbes, explained, “Madoff’s scam is about $20 billion. Barack Obama’s Ponzi scheme is $2 trillion. And if you look at how they work the schemes, they’re very similar. Both falsify their returns, Obama has overinflated what the GDP is gonna be, the economy, how much it’s gonna grow. Even the Congressional Budget Office has said Obama’s numbers are way inflated. And to pay for that, he’s gotta bring in a lot of other scamsters through, Obama does, which in this case really are taxpayers.” As an example of government swindle, Asman cited the annual $50 billion of fraud and waste in Medicare – the same dollar amount Madoff scammed from investors. “One government program wastes as much as Bernie Madoff,” he pointed out.
Meanwhile, the liberal Left is so deaf, dumb, and blind as to what the Obama administration has done that, after hearing the Forbes/Ozanian interview, they attacked FOXNEWs for the Madoff comparison. According to one of them, "If this isn't yellow journalism, I don't know what is. How do you feel about this? Outraged? Annoyed? Or maybe you're like me and are just getting sick of Fox pretending to be a news organization. If this is how the Conservative movement continues to answer the positive message that Obama carried to victory, they'll be in for a shock the next election."
Well, my reply is that we're nauseated by everything the liberal Left says and does, the way that MSNBC and ABC News have permanently locked their lips on Obama's posterior, and the sheer criminality of Obama and his tax-cheating, scum-sucking Administration that we're ready for some payback in 2010. If Bernie Madoff had the kind of slobbering support and lawless leeway that Obama has, he'd be living high on the hog, long after having his charges dropped by or Justice Department, just as it did for the three New Black Panther thugs. Positive message? Sure, that's exactly what Wing noted when he listed, Promise, as Step Two in his Presidential Ponzi scheme.
In January 2008, in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Obama told the editors that his policies would make energy prices “skyrocket” as the energy industry passed along the exorbitant costs of his cap-and-trade policy (Watch the video here):
"The problem is not technical, uh, and the problem is not mastery of the legislative intricacies of Washington. The problem is, uh, can you get the American people to say, “This is really important,” and force their representatives to do the right thing? That requires mobilizing a citizenry. That requires them understanding what is at stake. Uh, and climate change is a great example.
You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, uh, you know — Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it — whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumer."
You, the besieged taxpayer, does not have to look very far to spot a Ponzi scheme all unto itself: the GM buyout by Obama. According to Redstate.com:
About a year ago, all of GM’s common stock put together was worth maybe $2 billion, give or take, depending on the day. Go back three years, when things were merely bad instead of catastrophic for them, and people laughed at me whenever I said that GM was going to die. Back then, the stock was worth about $20 billion. For contrast, Toyota Motor at that time was worth more than $200 billion. That’s not a typo.
What would it have taken to buy GM out of bankruptcy, right now? Three years ago...the answer would have been in the range of $75 billion. A few months ago, you could have done it for considerably less, depending on how far you could cram down the debt.
But now, We The Taxpayers have gotten suckered into buying the thing as a turnaround play. Barack Obama solved the debt problem by simply killing the bondholders, so he could have gotten the company for next to nothing, as opposed to the 20 to 40 billion dollars it might have cost a private syndicate. (That’s not to say, of course, that you’d ever find private investors stupid enough to do that.)
Instead, we’ve now put $50 billion in cold hard cash into this pig, with a lot more to come. And that’s to buy an asset the market has recently valued at a tiny fraction of that. So when Obama says he’s going to sell GM back out to the public “very shortly,” what will the price be? Just to break even on his (actually, YOUR and MY) investment in 60% of the company, it’ll have to be almost $100 billion, and that’s ignoring the time value and opportunity cost. To get any kind of a decent return, it’ll have to be way more than $100 billion.
For how long can Obama and the Dem'Rats keep this shell game going? Probably when the core of the Dem'Rat party finds that life has been made intolerable by what "their" Government has done, they'll start feeling the heat, and it won't be coming from CO2. Bernie Madoff received 150 years for bilking hundreds of investors over ten years. It took Obama all of six months to bilk hundreds of millions of American taxpayers out of $3 trillion. What do you imagine Obama's sentence would be if there is still justice in the world and enough people with the stones to pursue it?
Are there any bets on whether the Day of Reckoning will come sooner for Barack than for Bernie?
References:
http://blog.stayredkansas.com/2009/06/23/obamas-ponzi-scheme.aspx?ref=rss
http://www.faithhopelove.net/notes/?p=178
http://www.conservatismtoday.com/my_weblog/2009/04/obamas-ponzi-scheme.html
http://www.businessandmedia.org/printer/2009/20090317160346.aspx
http://thinkingrevised.blogspot.com/2009/03/fox-says-obama-administration-worse.html
Ping!
How did Obama force Congress to pass the bailouts?
BTTT
How can all of this be illegal when we don’t know if Obama is legal?
I have no disagreement with the meat of this article but it’s an error in thinking IMHO to ascribe this strictly to only democrat or only republican politicians. And it does little good to blame dems for 60% and reps for 40% or whatever percentage you’d like to come up with.
No worries.
Oblahblah will fix everything in his fifth term.
The world have definitely turned and we are headed backwards in time.
Just as an aside WARNING: I called my credit card company Bank of America to see if they could lower my interest on a $3400 balance and they cut my credit line from $20,300 to $3700 instead. DO NOT CALL.
You feel bad for the investors up to the point where you realize that the investors gave Madoff their money with the expectation of extraordinary return on their investments. They were the elite investors where a guru with insider knowledge was to make them richer than their friends. The Madoff investors chose to eschew mainline guaranteed and insured investments for the Madoff promise.
I think we are collectively getting our punishment from
Heaven. The bubble burst because we aborted, birth controlled
and PC’ed to smaller families. 25 years latter we wonder where the first time home buyers are?
We let the education system dumb down students to the point where they expect to get something for nothing. Now as adults, they really believe it and feel entitled.
Heaven help us? I think those in heaven think we are getting our just reward.
This is not a sustainable political doctrine, and they know it.
The end game is to destroy, and rebuild the system.
Enjoy yourself, you’re living through history, although you probably won’t be able to tell your grandchildren about it.
Excellent, impressive article, Polarik! The truth is truly painful-—a pain that will last for decades.
Republicans In Name Only.
There are Republicans who consistently voted against the Democraps' madness, even if their party is currently not as well-organized as are the Democraps.
Perhaps I’m just having a ‘nostalgic moment’, but it seems that at in times gone by, thieves where hanged for stealing a guys horse. Today it seems they are after the entire herd, your house, your land and anything you might have ever wanted.
Stealing a mans horse in those days could be very tough to live through, but I wonder how that compares to stealing the dreams, aspirations and futures of millions.
When will our countrymen wake up and see the seriousness of the attack we’re under?
Don’t get the idea that I equate “force” with “choice.”
The lawmakers always had a choice, but there was force used, nevertheless by Obama and the Democraps screaming ar Republicans that this has to be done NOW or the economy will collapse.
This is more than force. This is extortion.
Pushing a 1,000 page bill with virtually no time to read is what I call, “forcing.”
Yes, that’s not an excuse as to why a majority of members of Congress voted for TARP, because there were many Republicans and many Democrats who voted against TARP.
But, clearly, the Republicans were totally shut out of the process of drafting the bill itself. Same-same for PORKULUS. It was put together by the Dems, who neglected to let the Republicans participate. Then they rushed it through in a few hours, so that nobody had any time to read it.
They did it again with the 1,200 page “Cap & Trade” Bill, this time dumping a 300-page Amendment in the hopper at 3:09am.
This is force being applied regardless of how a lawmaker votes.
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