Yes, Goldman Sachs Totally Just Got Away With Raping Us

The NWO Agenda Would Move Forward with This One Simple Act

Howard Beale
Activist Post

I have an eerie feeling that the elite control freaks are preparing something big to make all of their sinister dreams come true in one shot. We know they want war with Iran, control over the Internet, and economic collapse on their own terms. So what would be the one act that could make all this happen?

There is one event that can bring all of this about: a false flag cyber attack on Western banking institutions that they can pin on Iran.

They would be able to blame an economic crash on this attack instead of the problems inherent in the system, while getting all the motive they need to impose draconian Internet controls and justifying war on Iran.  It’s a triple whammy.

A few recent items in the news have sparked this line of thinking. First, the empire’s ‘war on terror’ paradigm is crumbling fast since they can no longer cover up their support for Al Qaeda. They desperately need a distraction from this realization before the masses catch wind of this betrayal. And certainly if they fail to gain support for ousting Assad in Syria, there is no hope of preemptively attacking Iran without irrevocably losing the public’s trust.

Next, nobody is buying the need for cyber security legislation that they’ve been trying to ram through the last few years. Lawmakers know they will be crucified if they pass it, therefore it continues to be voted down.  Again, desperate for a reason to control the Internet, the U.S. and Israel are being implicated in yet more sophisticated state-sponsored cyber attacks in the Middle East.

First there was Stuxnet, then Duqu, and more recently Flame and Gauss have come on the scene. Each more sophisticated than the previous, and conclusively deemed to be state-sponsored cyber attacks with the U.S. and Israel as the primary culprits. The interesting thing about the most recent cyber attack, Gauss, is that it targeted banks.

Is the picture becoming any clearer yet?

Finally, the economy is going to collapse. That which mathematically cannot continue will not continue.  However, the powers-that-be would much rather it collapse on their own terms so that they can offer the solution. If it collapses in a way that implicates their decisions as the cause, they will not be viewed as credible repair men. So, they need an outside force to take the blame for the collapse in order for them to lead the rebuilding phase.

A cyber attack that hits major U.S. banking institutions and Wall Street could provide enough devastating consequences that the controllers need to corral an increasingly cynical public back in line and jump start their sinister agenda once again.

DOJ Will Not Prosecute Goldman Sachs in Financial Crisis Probe

(ABC)   The Justice Department has decided it will not prosecute Goldman Sachs or its employees for their role in the financial crisis, following an investigation by senators  Carl Levin (D-MI) and Tom Coburn (R-OK).  The congressional investigation found problems with the credit rating agencies and poor oversight from regulators, and highlighted abuses by Goldman Sachs and other large investment banks. Senator Levin sent a formal referral to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation in April 2011.

The investigative report by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Levin, found that Goldman Sachs “used net short positions to benefit from the downturn in the mortgage market, and designed, marketed, and sold CDOs in ways that created conflicts of interest with the firm’s clients and at times led to the bank’s profiting from the same products that caused substantial losses for its clients.”

A statement from the Justice Department issued late on Thursday evening noted, “Based on the law and evidence as they exist at this time, there is not a viable basis to bring a criminal prosecution with respect to Goldman Sachs or its employees in regard to the allegations set forth in the report.”

“The department and its investigative partners conducted an exhaustive review of the report and its exhibits, independently gathered and scrutinized a large volume of other documents, and tenaciously pursued potential evidentiary leads, including conducting numerous witness interviews,” the Justice Department’s statement continued. “While the department and investigative agencies ultimately concluded that the burden of proof to bring a criminal case could not be met based on the law and facts as they exist at this time, we commend the hard work of those involved in preparing the report and thank the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for its cooperation in regard to the criminal investigation.”

“We are pleased that this matter is behind us,” Goldman Sachs spokesman David Wells said when contacted by ABC News.

The Justice Department statement noted that if additional information emerges, the cases could be prosecuted in the future.

This most recent decision follows other high-profile investigations that Justice decided not to prosecute: There was the collapse of AIG and the role of the top executive at AIG Financial Products division, Joseph Cassano, and former Countrywide CEO Anthony Mozillo, who was fined by the SEC  in an insider trading case. Citibank and JP Morgan both had multi-million-dollar settlements with the SEC over collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, tied to the U.S. housing market, but Justice has not brought any criminal cases. Freddie Mac was subpoenaed in a grand jury investigation in 2008 but the firm disclosed in an Aug. 8, 2011, SEC filing that the Justice investigation was closed.

Attorney General Eric Holder defended the Justice Department’s record in pursuing high profile financial fraud cases. “There have been, I guess, 2,100 or so mortgage-related matters that we have brought here at United State Department of Justice. Our state counterparts have done a variety of things. The notion that there has been inactivity over the course of the last three years is belied by a troublesome little thing called facts.”

Goldman has faced stiff penalties from the Securities and Exchange Commission. In April 2010 the SEC filed a civil charge against Goldman Sachs and Fabrice Tourre, a vice president, for making misstatements and omissions from financial records in connection with CDOs that Goldman Sachs marketed to their investors. CDOs played a significant part in the financial crisis in 2008.

ABACUS 2007-AC1 was tied to the performance of subprime residential mortgage-backed securities and was composed of  investment choices hedge fund manager John Paulson had a financial interest in selecting, although Tourre never disclosed to potential investors that Paulson & Co. had a short-interest position in seeing ABACUS go down. Investors in ABACUS allegedly lost an estimated $1 billion.

According to the SEC complaint Tourre, who called himself “Fabulous Fab” wrote to a friend in a January 23, 2007, email: “More and more leverage in the system, The whole building is about to collapse anytime now…Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab[rice Tourre] … standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstruosities(sic).”

Goldman Sachs reached a settlement with the SEC in July 2010, paying a $550 million fine for admitting that they should have included information about Paulson’s investment position. Tourre is currently in ongoing litigation with the SEC over the case.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/08/doj-will-not-prosecute-goldman-sachs-in-financial-crisis-probe/

Goldman Sachs Off the Hook – Not Enough Evidence: DOJ

Feds seize Social Security checks to pay off student loans

(SMART MONEY)   It’s no secret that falling behind on student loan payments can squash a borrower’s hopes of building savings, buying a home or even finding work. Now, thousands of retirees are learning that defaulting on student-debt can threaten something that used to be untouchable: their Social Security benefits.

Tens of thousands of retirees have fallen behind on student loans–and the feds are coming after their Social Security benefits. SmartMoney’s AnnaMaria Andriotis has details on Lunch Break.

The amount that the government withholds varies widely, though it runs up to 15%. Assuming the average monthly Social Security benefit for a retired worker of $1,234, that could mean a monthly haircut of almost $190. “This is going to catch an awful lot of people off guard and wreak havoc on their financial lives,” says Sheryl Garrett, a financial planner in Eureka Springs, Ark.

Many of these retirees aren’t even in hock for their own educations. Consumer advocates say that in the majority of the cases they’ve seen, the borrowers went into debt later in life to help defray education costs for their children or other dependents. Harold Grodberg, an elder law attorney in Bayonne, N.J., says he’s worked with at least six clients in the past two years whose problems started with loans they signed up for to help pay for their grandchildren’s tuition. Other attorneys say they’re working with older borrowers who had signed up for the federal PLUS loan — a loan for parents of undergraduates — to cover tuition costs. Other retirees took out federal loans when they returned to college in midlife, and a few are carrying debt from their own undergraduate or graduate-school years. (No statistics track exactly how many of the defaulting loans fall into which category.)

Read More…

Are The Government And The Big Banks Quietly Preparing For An Imminent Financial Collapse?

Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse

Something really strange appears to be happening.  All over the globe, governments and big banks are acting as if they are anticipating an imminent financial collapse.

Unfortunately, we are not privy to the quiet conversations that are taking place in corporate boardrooms and in the halls of power in places such as Washington D.C. and London, so all we can do is try to make sense of all the clues that are all around us.  Of course it is completely possible to misinterpret these clues, but sticking our heads in the sand is not going to do any good either.  Last week, it was revealed that the U.S. government has been secretly directing five of the biggest banks in America “to develop plans for staving off collapse” for the last two years.  By itself, that wouldn’t be that big of a deal.  But when you add that piece to the dozens of other clues of imminent financial collapse, a very troubling picture begins to emerge.  Over the past 12 months, hundreds of banking executives have been resigning, corporate insiders have been selling off enormous amounts of stock, and I have been personally told that a significant number of Wall Street bankers have been shopping for “prepper properties” in rural communities this summer.  Meanwhile, there have been reports that the U.S. government has been stockpiling food and ammunition, and Barack Obama has been signing a whole bunch of executive orders that would potentially be implemented in the event of a major meltdown of society.  So what does all of this mean?  It could mean something or it could mean nothing.  What we do know is that a financial collapse is coming at some point.  Over the past 40 years, the total amount of all debt in the United States has grown from about 2 trillion dollars to nearly 55 trillion dollars.  That is a recipe for financial armageddon, and it is inevitable that this gigantic bubble of debt is going to burst at some point.

In normal times, the U.S. government does not tell major banks to “develop plans for staving off collapse”.

But according to a recent Reuters article, that is apparently exactly what has been happening….

U.S. regulators directed five of the country’s biggest banks, including Bank of America Corp and Goldman Sachs Group Inc, to develop plans for staving off collapse if they faced serious problems, emphasizing that the banks could not count on government help.

The two-year-old program, which has been largely secret until now, is in addition to the “living wills” the banks crafted to help regulators dismantle them if they actually do fail. It shows how hard regulators are working to ensure that banks have plans for worst-case scenarios and can act rationally in times of distress.

Does it seem odd to anyone else that only five really big banks got such a warning?

And why keep it secret from the American public?

Does the federal government actually expect such a collapse to happen?

If federal officials do expect a financial collapse to occur, they would not be the only ones.  An increasing number of very respected economists are speaking about the coming financial collapse as if there is a certain inevitability about it.

For example, check out the following quote from a recent Money Morning article….

Richard Duncan, formerly of the World Bank and chief economist at Blackhorse Asset Mgmt., says America’s $16 trillion federal debt has escalated into a “death spiral,” as he told CNBC.

And it could result in a depression so severe that he doesn’t “think our civilization could survive it.”

A former World Bank executive is warning that our civilization might not survive what is coming?

That is pretty chilling.

Economist Nouriel Roubini says that he believes that the coming crisis will be even worse than 2008….

“Worse because like 2008 you will have an economic and financial crisis but unlike 2008, you are running out of policy bullets. In 2008, you could cut rates; do QE1, QE2; you could do fiscal stimulus; you could backstop/ringfence/guarantee banks and everybody else. Today, more QEs are becoming less and less effective because the problems are of solvency not liquidity. Fiscal deficits are already so large and you cannot bail out the banks because 1) there is a political opposition to it; and 2) governments are near-insolvent – they cannot bailout themselves let alone their banks.The problem is that we are running out of policy rabbits to pull out of the hat!”

Across the pond, many European officials are echoing similar sentiments.

What Nigel Farage told King World News the other day is very ominous….

Today MEP (Member European Parliament) Nigel Farage spoke with King World News about what he described as the possibility of, “a really dramatic banking collapse.”  Farage also warned that central planners want to enslave and imprison people inside of a ‘New Order,’ and he described the situation as “horrifying.”

The situation in Europe continues to get worse and worse.  The authorities in Europe have come out with “solution” after “solution”, and yet unemployment continues to skyrocket and economic conditions in the EU have deteriorated very steadily over the past 12 months.

If all of that was not bad enough, there are an increasing number of indications that Germany is actually considering leaving the euro.

Needless to say, that would be a complete and total disaster for the rest of the eurozone.

Of course there are any number of ways that the financial crisis in Europe could potentially play out.

But all of the realistic scenarios would be very bad for the global economy.

Meanwhile, our resources are dwindling, war in the Middle East could erupt at any moment and our planet is becoming increasingly unstable.  The following is from a recent article by Paul B. Farrell on Marketwatch.com….

Fasten your seat belts, soon we’ll all be shocked out of denial. Some unpredictable black swan. A global wake-up call will trigger the Pentagon’s prediction in Fortune a decade ago at the launch of the Iraq War: “By 2020 … an ancient pattern of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies is emerging … warfare defining human life.”

It is almost as if a “perfect storm” is brewing.

Of course the historic drought that is ravaging food production in the United States this summer is not helping matters either.  Another summer or two like this one and we could be looking at a return of Dust Bowl conditions.

Anyone that is watching what is going on in the world and is not concerned at all about what is happening is simply being delusional.

Recently, a “team of scientists, economists, and geopolitical analysts” examined the current state of the global economic system and the conclusions they reached were absolutely staggering….

One member of this team, Chris Martenson, a pathologist and former VP of a Fortune 300 company, explains their findings:

“We found an identical pattern in our debt, total credit market, and money supply that guarantees they’re going to fail. This pattern is nearly the same as in any pyramid scheme, one that escalates exponentially fast before it collapses. Governments around the globe are chiefly responsible.

“And what’s really disturbing about these findings is that the pattern isn’t limited to our economy. We found the same catastrophic pattern in our energy, food, and water systems as well.”

According to Martenson: “These systems could all implode at the same time. Food, water, energy, money. Everything.”

Hmmmm – it sounds like they have been reading The Economic Collapse Blog.

The truth is that a massive worldwide financial collapse is coming.

It is inevitable, and it is going to be extremely painful.