For those interested, this is what I sent out to my email lists this morning.
NOTE: I videotaped this interview this morning, myself. (scroll down to the video Judge Andrew Napolitano Accuses Government / Treasury Department of Extortion linked below)
I’ll say it again, as I said when it first happened last September: The naive G.W. Bush - (who unlike the savvy Clinton, didn’t fire his political enemies when he came into office, and lived to regret it a thousand times over) - was duped by Paulson into going along with the taxpayer “bail-out” remedy under the guise of a “crisis”. Hank Paulson - a Democrat, and a banker from Wall Street (Goldman Sachs), was bound and determined that his banking friends here and around the world, would not have to suffer for their crimes, but would instead be bailed out by you and me and OTHER banks and lending institutions who weren’t even in on any of those shenanigans.
The biggest joke of all is when you hear these liars in Congress blaming a “lack of regulation” as the reason for the melt-down. BULL. The bank “regulators” and the SEC who were charged with overseeing things, either deliberately looked the other way or were incompetent and complacent. We needed regulators to watch over the regulators.
PLUS: The regulations that were already in place that would have prevented this _inevitable result_ in the first place, WERE LIFTED by ‘RAT President Jimmy Carter in the 70’s.
I know, because I was in Real Estate in PA when, under the threat of being accused of “racial discrimination (red-lining), he (government-intervention) forced the banks (private businesses) to make loans to people that no sane person would lend money to, ie: people who couldn’t afford to repay it and/or had bad credit histories. This was called, “CRA” (Community Reinvestment Act) No responsible (conservative) bank would ever knowingly lend its depositor’s money to bad risk borrowers. (See second biggest joke below)
When Clinton became president, he put the CRA program on steriods with the help of his other Democrat friends, Franklin Raines, et.al., at FannyMae & FreddiMac, and Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Barak Obam, et.al., in Congress. Add in Paulson at Goldman Sachs and his buddies in the other “investment banks”, here and around the world who bought the bad loans in “bundles”from Fannie and Freddie, and the resulting “derivatives” disaster was only a matter of time.
In fact, if you were paying attention at the time, there were lots of people waving red flag warnings about the eventual collapse of “derivatives” over the past several years. Just google the word and note the dates of the warnings and how far back they go. For instance, FinancialSense.com posted plenty of warnings over a lot of years.
(Co-incidently (??? - we’ll never know for sure) - surprise, surprise - the collapse just happened to occur barely a month before the ‘08 election just as the McCain / Palin campaign was gaining momentum and had jumped to that 3-point lead in the “historically-most-accurate poll” - Rasmussen)
The second biggest joke is the fact that the very same people named above, whose policies are most responsible for the banking/economic melt-down, have the nerve to blame it all on “CAPITALISM”. As long a we have government INTERFERENCE, INTERVENTION & MEDDLING in the private sector, we do not have “Capitalism”.
What we have is “INTERVENTIONISM” - not Capitalism. If you don’t understand that, you have been mis-educated and need to get up to speed. Here’s a good start:
“Only capitalism operates on the basis of respect for free, independent, responsible persons. All other systems in varying degrees treat men as less than this. Socialist systems above all treat men as pawns to be moved about by the authorities, or as children to be given what the rulers decide is good for them, or as serfs or slaves. The rulers begin by boasting about their compassion, which in any case is fraudulent, but after a time they drop this pretense which they find unnecessary for the maintenance of power. In all things they act on the presumption that they know best. Therefore they and their systems are morally stunted. Only the free system, the much assailed capitalism, is morally mature.” ~ Dr. Ronald H. Nash Excerpted from: In Defense of Capitalism http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1352736/posts
Judge Andrew Napolitano Accuses Government / Treasury Department of Extortion
Watch video here:
http://conservativenation.net/2009/04/01/judge-andrew-napolitano-accuses-government-treasury-department-of-extortion/
April 2nd, 2009 1:14 PM Eastern
Our Government Engaged In EXTORTION With Our Banks!
By Judge Andrew Napolitano
FOX News Senior Judicial Analyst
http://foxforum.blogs.foxnews.com/2009/04/02/napolitano_fdic/
The Federal government committed extortion and they’re not being held accountable. What’s next? Listen to this: I recently met with the Chair and CEO of one of the country’s top 10 bank holding companies. His bank is worth in excess of $250 billion, has no bad debt, no credit default swaps, no liquidity problems, and no subprime loans. He told me that he and others were forced by Treasury and FDIC threats to take TARP funds, even though he did not want or need them.
There is simply no authority in the U.S. Constitution for Congress to exercise the level of control it now seeks over private industry.
The FDIC with Treasury backing threatened to conduct public audits of his bank unless his board created and issued a class of stock for the Feds to buy. The audit, which he is confident his bank would survive, would cost it millions in employee time, bad press, and consequent lost business.
He pleaded with the Feds to leave his successful bank alone. He begged his board to let him tell the Feds to take a hike. But they gave in. The Feds are now just a tiny shareholder, but want to begin asserting more and more control. This is a classic extortion: Controlling someone’s free will by threatening to perform a lawful act. (Blackmail is the threat is to perform an unlawful act in order to control someone else’s free will.) There are no exceptions in the statutes prohibiting extortion for government persons
This happened in September 2008, but the demands for more control are more recent. It sounds to me like Paulson, Geithner, Bernanke, and Sheila Blair have all read a biography of Benito Mussolini. I guess they skipped the last chapter.
There is simply no authority in the U.S. Constitution for Congress to exercise the level of control it now seeks over private industry. In fact, this level of control will wind up costing the businesses that took TARP (voluntarily or involuntarily) money since they will lose key employees who will go to work elsewhere and because the reporting requirements will take time and time is money. The Constitution basically says that if the government wants to take time or freedom or money from someone or something, it must sue for it. It cannot just give itself the authority to do so via legislation.
Our liberties are slipping away right before our eyes.
Bingo.