What Bank Did Your City Sell Out To?

The local government in Oakland, California, sold out to Goldman Sachs for some quick cash, and has been imposing austerity measures ever since to repay them.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/15/a-toxic-system/#

But Goldman Sachs is only the fourth largest dealer in derivatives in the US. Chances are that every large city in the country has sold out to one of the big banks or another.

It isn't the fault of the banks--they're in business to make money.

And it isn't really the fault of local governments--they were corrupted by the power that voters gave them, which enabled them to do whatever they wanted.

Why did voters give local government a blank check? What did they expect would happen?

Every city needs to find out which bank their local government put them in hock to, and repudiate those debts.

People need to stop voting. To vote is to hand federal, state, and local governments a blank check. It is irresponsible, apathetic, and against the best interests of the voters themselves.

But people are starting to wake up. Tomorrow, the 18th, at the Left Forum in New York, at least 50 people will be attending a panel on boycotting the 2012 election:

http://www.facebook.com/events/386287631383445/

And 50,000 people have seen the first video here, although only 12,000 have seen the second, more important one:

http://counterpsyops.com/2012/03/15/u-s ... man-sachs/

If a 15-year election official can't tell that an election has been stolen, how could an ordinary voter? In real elections, not even the elections officials have any way to verify the results printed out by the central tabulators (the gadget called "GEMS" in the 2nd video), so there's no way to "stay on top of it." It can't be done, and more than 92% of votes in the US are tallied by those unverifiable, easily hacked central tabulators.

Plus, of course, Goldman Sachs controls the election results reports and has every reason to ensure that corrupt officials are "elected."

This is a great time to be an anarchist in the US. The political operatives are having a hard time convincing people that they need to keep the government in power in order to retain the jobs, homes, and other benefits they no longer have.

I think the woman crying in the second video may be Vickie Karp. I've never met her but I was on her radio show once. I've met Bev Harris, of course, and she even banned me from her website. She's one of many election integrity activists who encourage people to vote in rigged elections. And the woman holding the videocam is Kathleen Wynne, who I knew online for several years in forums and mailing lists and have spoken with on the phone. We were all called conspiracy theorists and crazy when we started telling people that the elections were rigged. But I was the only one of the bunch who began urging people not to vote in rigged elections.

Occupy has been having quite a bit of success with protests against the banks, like Fight BAC against Bank of America, and targeting different banks on different days. At this point every Occupy needs to find out exactly which bank holds their city's debt and focus on that specific bank. And to understand that local governments operate by majority rule, so that even if they could elect a few honest people, they wouldn't be able to block future derivatives deals or repudiate the old ones, because they'd be overruled by the majority.

I keep trying to think of reasons why people who vote to give governments the power to bash their heads in, don't deserve to have their heads bashed in, but haven't come up with anything.

 

If you were a US American, your vote for Vermin Supreme would either go uncounted, or would be counted as a vote for the Republican or Democratic nominee. And you'd never know it and have no way of proving it.

I remember after one stolen election they had a big meeting of people who believed their votes had been stolen. One woman got up and said that she believed her vote had been stolen because she had voted for David Cobb (the Green Party nominee) and her precinct results showed that there had been no votes for Cobb.

The zombie apocalypse has already happened here. Many of the votes counted in US elections belong to registered voters who have been dead for many years. They only seem to rise from their graves at election time.

 

Did you watch the videos here, Butcher? http://counterpsyops.com/2012/03/15/u-s ... man-sachs/

I wish I could embed them, but I haven't figured out how to embed videos on APN.

I think the reason they rig elections is just because they always have:

Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, an American Political Tradition-1742-2004

http://www.amazon.com/Deliver-Vote-Elec ... 078671591X

The Framers of the Constitution set up the US electoral system to make sure that the popular vote would never be the final say, in order to ensure that those who owned the country would always run the country. They don't always need to intervene because in most elections the 1% spends enough on media campaigns to get the outcome they want, but sometimes, as in 2000 and 2004, when Rockefeller wanted his man's easily manipulable son in office rather than equally manipulable morons who hadn't served him as well (but who won the popular vote), it comes in handy. Think of the US as a corporation where the owner might want to promote a loyal employee's son, but other employees happen to be more qualified and more popular. The owners need to have ways to ensure that they control their human resources, particularly those in management. That aspect of capitalism is usually called crony capitalism.

Thanks, Mar, I'm very glad we met also, and I'm still learning stuff every day that I probably wouldn't have otherwise. There is certainly some rising social awareness in Brazil, but then look at Greece and Spain where the social awareness is there but the fascists still control the government and sold out the same way that Oakland did. Just about every local, state, and federal government in the capitalist world did the same thing, as the original article I linked to explains. They agreed to incur bad debts in return for short term cash and empty promises, leaving the workers to pay the bill. In doing so, they expected and were prepared to repress rebellions.

Voting is the act of declaring oneself incompetent and appointing guardians to manage one's affairs. Even if you got lucky and managed to appoint an honest and competent guardian, why declare yourself incompetent? A lot of people may think that they're incompetent, and may appear to be incompetent, but if they're competent to stand trial, they're competent to manage their own affairs--they just don't know it.

 

That';s the way, chief sevenleaf. But agreements, settlements, partial restitution, or breaking up the big banks into smaller ones (remember the AT&T "break-ups"?) won't accomplish very much.

We'd have all been much better off if the cities had borrowed money from the Mafia instead of from banks. When the vigorish isn't paid, the Mafia goes after the individual borrowers, not the entire community.

Capitalism must die. It's us or the system, and while we may be fucked up, we're nowhere near as fucked up as the capitalist system is. We're also not as stupid.

And as mighty as the US capitalist imperialist system may appear to be, it has never won a war against an armed foe since WWII, and from what I've been reading, the US public isn't even out-gunned. There was a discussion on Twitter about some guy who killed his wife by firing a cannonball into their house, and I asked, rhetorically, how many people in the US owned cannons. One of my Tweeps in Washington State wrote back that her next door neighbor had two, and provided the street address so that they could be seen in google view. That'll teach me to ask dumb questions.

 

An excellent example of how radicals tend to bristle at anything that sounds the least bit progressive. I've been on the other side of that argument with Mar, me saying that Cuba and Venezuela have some good social programs, and Mar saying that doesn't excuse them as governments that persecute anarchists.

 

I don't think I understand, butcher. Are they trying to make it like here, where either you can afford to rent, buy, or build a structure that meets prohibitively expensive building codes, or you're not legally allowed any shelter from the elements at all? Forcing people in the favelas to become homeless?

"Development," I recognize. Like "progress," it is usually a euphemism for genocide.