The Real Agenda...

The real agenda of the Obama Administration is control: this underscores how they are pursuing it.

It is the abandonment of the rule of law, giving power to nameless, uncontrolled bureaucrats who will be heavily influenced by special interest groups from both sides, resulting in a regulatory nightmare that will result in extensive uncertainty for everyone except for those companies who can successfully manipulate the process by lobbying (aka corrupting the process). It's called the Doff-Frank Bill, named for two Congressmen who are amongst the most corrupt in the nation.

Don't think so? Consider this:

Now, the legislation hands off to 10 regulatory agencies the discretion to write hundreds of new rules governing finance. Rather than the bill itself, it will be this process—accompanied by a lobbying blitz from banks—that will determine the precise contours of this new landscape, how strict the new regulations will be and whether they succeed in their purpose. The decisions will be made by officials from new agencies, obscure agencies and, in some cases, agencies like the Federal Reserve that faced criticism in the run-up to the crisis.

This is, of course, the Chicago school of corruption: divide and conquer, play one constituency off another, ensure that decisions are made not according to the rule of law, but rather by the rule of men.

The legislation creates a council of regulators to monitor economic risks; establishes a new agency to police consumer financial products; and sets new standards for the way derivatives are traded. "These reforms will benefit the prudent and constrain the imprudent," Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said in a press conference. "Strong banks, the well-managed financial innovators, will adapt and thrive under the new rules of the road."

Secretary Geithner isn't being entirely parsimonious with the truth: what he is really saying is that strong banks, the well-managed financial innovators, are those who will know who to pay off at the end of the day so that they can continue to operate at the whim of their political masters. Those new masters are the "council of regulators" who are neither vetted nor elected, outside of the control of the Congress.

This establishes the rule of men and not the rule of law.

The finance overhaul will be implemented in a volatile environment. Profits on Wall Street are soaring, with J.P. Morgan reporting $4.8 billion in net profit in the second quarter. But the banking sector is contracting, with close to 300 banks failing since January 2008. Many businesses and borrowers are struggling to obtain loans.

While some might see a contradiction here, with many banks failing and some banks making money hand over foot, the reality is that the Democrats are hand-picking the banks that they want to survive, re-writing the market so that their fat-cat cronies will continue to pay their tithe to their masters, the Democratic Party. This is about as transparent and appalling attempt to institutionalize corruption in the best Chicago tradition as one can imagine. It is all about destroying independent operators in a field of business and making sure that your cronies are operating the companies left: I fail to see the difference between this and organized crime, to be bluntly and brutally honest.

Treasury Department officials have taken initial steps to prepare the new consumer agency, called the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection and housed within the Federal Reserve. Regulators are in the process of creating a system so that large, complex and failing financial companies can be broken up and liquidated without disrupting markets.

Right. Sorry: you cannot break up large, complex and failing financial companies without disrupting markets. This is like saying you can take bricks out of a building without ever endangering the building itself: in short time, the building will collapse, just as markets will collapse.

But that is the whole point: the goal is not to have markets, but rather to control the banks and ensure that financial activity only flows to the politically correct.

Despite creating the new consumer watchdog, the bill leaves America's patchwork regulatory framework largely intact, and most of the players will be familiar. That has irked critics on the left and right who say one of the bill's key flaws is that it relies on the judgment of officials rather than hard rules.

Bingo: it replace the rule of law - the hard rules, the inflexible rules - with judgment calls, with the law of men deciding what the law will be and imposing it.

"The same regulators who ignored consumer advocates' warnings about predatory lending have veto power over the consumer agency," said John Taylor, chief executive of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. "That club of regulators is very insular, and usually in agreement."

In other words, the regulators have been, are and will continue to be compromised.


Fundamentally, the problem is that this opens the entire banking system to abuse: regulators will have enormous powers that can be abused at will, and which will be abused at will. This will be, bluntly, a nightmare for the country, because rooting out the corruption that will result will be extremely difficult.

The quotes above are from the link.

I'm still on the road and will be for some time, but seeing this being passed: what a nightmare.

It shows the true agenda of the Obama Administration: bringing the kind of institutional corruption that the citizens of Chicago "enjoy" in order to have basic services delivered in a timely manner to the entire United States. I've said it before and I'll say it again: this is the true agenda of the Obama Administration.

The result?

We're entering a period of serious instability, with classic correction methods failing. Inflation, exchange rates, interest rates are all failing to correct massive instabilities, leading to even more massive instabilities building up.

For the US to correct its current economic situation, it needs to massively devalue the dollar and wipe out the savings of a generation by inflating its way out of the debt trap it is in. This isn't happening. Interest rates need to move up strongly in order to dry up cheap credit that led to massive, truly epic failures in allocation of capital: this isn't happening.

If the control mechanisms fail, the result is going to be ... interesting at best and truly dismal at worst.