FREEDOMPOST, a lawyer's commentary

THE SUPREME COURT MUST BE DECOMPRESSED

GEORGE W. BUSH in all of his "un-americanism" has appointed two Supreme Court Justices who will destroy the fabric of American Society as we know it. W is the most vilified man in the world in the mold of Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin. As Obama travels the world to reset the belief in America among the constituents of the World, he us constantly met with the Bush Doctrine of Ignorance and Tyranny.

 

He, during his lifetime, has appointed two Justices who will dominate the Court for at least one more decade. The first is Roberts, a very clever robot, and the second is Alito, a not so clever ideologue.

 

That is the reason America needs the confirmation of Justice Sonia Sontamayor as a Justice of the Supreme Court. Ginsberg is lonely up there and she just tolerates that obnoxious arrogant Justice by the name of Antonin Scalia. Antonin sounds foreign to me and to Sarah Palin.

 

We need hot latin blood on this very dull court. Confirm Sonia.

 

Martin S. Friedlander, Esq.

WHY GM IS IN BANKRUPTCY

Big 01l controls GM's stock by Wall St. investment trusts that own hundreds of $B (B as in Billion) of oil stocks. No one can buy control of GM -- because they won't sell -- it is a tool to increase / maintain oil sales. Meet your (oil) pimp -- we are the (oil) junkies.

Big O1l killed the electric car and promoted gas guzzlers. _That_ is why GM has gone from $200B capitalization to $1.2B, ER -- correction -- MINUS $60B, in ten years. While Toyota has gone from $20B to $200B.

"There is a $100T (T as in Trillion) worth of business still to be done." - Wally Rippel - Who Killed the Electric Car. One Trillion barrels of oil still in the ground, at $100 a barrel. See WKTEC, below.

Doug Korthof - WKTEC - liveoilfree youtube - http://www.youtube.com/liveoilfree

Who Killed The Electric Car - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FDmmJm9vSA

What we are up against -- http://exiledonline.com/class-war-101-meet-the-reptiles-who-are-making-meat-out-of-you/

OBAMA NEEDS TO FINISH OFF THE GUYS ON THE ROPES

One thing that I learned as a kid from the Bronx trying to survive. If  you get into a street brawl with your enemies, once you have them on the ropes, you finish them off. Obama had the entire Republican Party in dissaray and on the ropes. Bush and Cheney were bruised and battered. Rush Limbaugn was their leader going nowhere except to narcotic hell. Instead Obama gets into a debate with Cheney and loses. He doesn't release the pictures. He does not close Guantanamo and send the detainees to a Federal Prison to be held for trial or release. Instead he states he is going to retain the military trial forum that the American People voted to close down. He looks forward and not backwards. This lets Cheney off the hook from prosecution for war crimes. Hell, if Cheney got on national TV that he hung dozens of detainees without a trial or some semblance of military justice, Cheney would not be prosecuted. Cheney, having heard that has gone on national TV and confessed to war crimes, and gets applauded by the criminals in our society.

 

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE.

 

Obama, you will never bring the people together unless you show the determination of Lincoln whom you admire.

Martin S Friedlander, Esq.

THIS IS NOT THE OBAMA I VOTED FOR. FORCE HIM TO ADDRESS IRAQ AND BUSH.

Obama Can’t Turn the Page on Bush

By FRANK RICH

Published: May 16, 2009

TO paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions. 

That’s why the president’s flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse photos — whatever his motivation — is a fool’s errand. The pictures will eventually emerge anyway, either because of leaks (if they haven’t started already) or because the federal appeals court decision upholding their release remains in force. And here’s a bet: These images will not prove the most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come.

There are many dots yet to be connected, and not just on torture. This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.

Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)

What’s up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary’s actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world’s apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout “would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”

The GQ article isn’t the only revelation of previously unknown Bush Defense Department misbehavior to emerge this month. Just two weeks ago, the Obama Pentagon revealed that a major cover-up of corruption had taken place at the Bush Pentagon on Jan. 14 of this year — just six days before Bush left office. This strange incident — reported in The Times but largely ignored by Washington correspondents preparing for their annual dinner — deserves far more attention and follow-up.

What happened on Jan. 14 was the release of a report from the Pentagon’s internal watchdog, the inspector general. It had been ordered up in response to a scandal uncovered last year by David Barstow, an investigative reporter for The Times. Barstow had found that the Bush Pentagon fielded a clandestine network of retired military officers and defense officials to spread administration talking points on television, radio and in print while posing as objective “military analysts.” Many of these propagandists worked for military contractors with billions of dollars of business at stake in Pentagon procurement. Many were recipients of junkets and high-level special briefings unavailable to the legitimate press. Yet the public was never told of these conflicts of interest when these “analysts” appeared on the evening news to provide rosy assessments of what they tended to call “the real situation on the ground in Iraq.”

When Barstow’s story broke, more than 45 members of Congress demanded an inquiry. The Pentagon’s inspector general went to work, and its Jan. 14 report was the result. It found no wrongdoing by the Pentagon. Indeed, when Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize last month, Rumsfeld’s current spokesman cited the inspector general’s “exoneration” to attack the Times articles as fiction.

But the Pentagon took another look at this exoneration, and announced on May 5 that the inspector general’s report, not The Times’s reporting, was fiction. The report, it turns out, was riddled with factual errors and included little actual investigation of Barstow’s charges. The inspector general’s office had barely glanced at the 8,000 pages of e-mail that Barstow had used as evidence, and interviewed only seven of the 70 disputed analysts. In other words, the report was a whitewash. The Obama Pentagon officially rescinded it — an almost unprecedented step — and even removed it from its Web site.

Network news operations ignored the unmasking of this last-minute Bush Pentagon cover-up, as they had the original Barstow articles — surely not because they had been patsies for the Bush P.R. machine. But the story is actually far larger than this one particular incident. If the Pentagon inspector general’s office could whitewash this scandal, what else did it whitewash?

In 2005, to take just one example, the same office released a report on how Boeing colluded with low-level Pentagon bad apples on an inflated (and ultimately canceled) $30 billion air-tanker deal. At the time, even John Warner, then the go-to Republican senator on military affairs, didn’t buy the heavily redacted report’s claim that Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were ignorant of what Warner called “the most significant defense procurement mismanagement in contemporary history.” The Pentagon inspector general who presided over that exoneration soon fled to become an executive at the parent company of another Pentagon contractor, Blackwater.

But the new administration doesn’t want to revisit this history any more than it wants to dwell on torture. Once the inspector general’s report on the military analysts was rescinded, the Obama Pentagon declared the matter closed. The White House seems to be taking its cues from the Reagan-Bush 41 speechwriter Peggy Noonan. “Sometimes I think just keep walking,” she said on ABC’s “This Week” as the torture memos surfaced. “Some of life has to be mysterious.” Imagine if she’d been at Nuremberg!

The administration can’t “just keep walking” because it is losing control of the story. The Beltway punditocracy keeps repeating the cliché that only the A.C.L.U. and the president’s “left-wing base” want accountability, but that’s not the case. Americans know that the Iraq war is not over. A key revelation in last month’s Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees — that torture was used to try to coerce prisoners into “confirming” a bogus Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link to sell that war — is finally attracting attention. The more we learn piecemeal of this history, the more bipartisan and voluble the call for full transparency has become.

And I do mean bipartisan. Both Dick Cheney, hoping to prove that torture “worked,” and Nancy Pelosi, fending off accusations of hypocrisy on torture, have now asked for classified C.I.A. documents to be made public. When a duo this unlikely, however inadvertently, is on the same side of an issue, the wave is rising too fast for any White House to control. Court cases, including appeals by the “bad apples” made scapegoats for Abu Ghraib, will yank more secrets into the daylight and enlist more anxious past and present officials into the Cheney-Pelosi demands for disclosure.

It will soon be every man for himself. “Did President Bush know everything you knew?” Bob Schieffer asked Cheney on “Face the Nation” last Sunday. The former vice president’s uncharacteristically stumbling and qualified answer — “I certainly, yeah, have every reason to believe he knew...” — suggests that the Bush White House’s once-united front is starting to crack under pressure.

I’m not a fan of Washington’s blue-ribbon commissions, where political compromises can trump the truth. But the 9/11 investigation did illuminate how, a month after Bush received an intelligence brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on his and Cheney’s watch. If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.

BUSH AND HIS CREW SHOULD BE INVESTIGATED AND PROSECUTED FOR TORTURE. THAT IS MY IDEA OF LOOKING FORWARD

Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past." So declared President Obama, after his commendable decision to release the legal memos that his predecessor used to justify torture. Some people in the political and media establishments have echoed his position. We need to look forward, not backward, they say. No prosecutions, please; no investigations; we’re just too busy.

And there are indeed immense challenges out there: an economic crisis, a health care crisis, an environmental crisis. Isn’t revisiting the abuses of the last eight years, no matter how bad they were, a luxury we can’t afford?

No, it isn’t, because America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. "This government does not torture people," declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.

And the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.

What about the argument that investigating the Bush administration’s abuses will impede efforts to deal with the crises of today? Even if that were true — even if truth and justice came at a high price — that would arguably be a price we must pay: laws aren’t supposed to be enforced only when convenient. But is there any real reason to believe that the nation would pay a high price for accountability?

For example, would investigating the crimes of the Bush era really divert time and energy needed elsewhere? Let’s be concrete: whose time and energy are we talking about?

Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to rescue the economy. Peter Orszag, the budget director, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to reform health care. Steven Chu, the energy secretary, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to limit climate change. Even the president needn’t, and indeed shouldn’t, be involved. All he would have to do is let the Justice Department do its job — which he’s supposed to do in any case — and not get in the way of any Congressional investigations.

I don’t know about you, but I think America is capable of uncovering the truth and enforcing the law even while it goes about its other business.

Still, you might argue — and many do — that revisiting the abuses of the Bush years would undermine the political consensus the president needs to pursue his agenda.

But the answer to that is, what political consensus? There are still, alas, a significant number of people in our political life who stand on the side of the torturers. But these are the same people who have been relentless in their efforts to block President Obama’s attempt to deal with our economic crisis and will be equally relentless in their opposition when he endeavors to deal with health care and climate change. The president cannot lose their good will, because they never offered any.

That said, there are a lot of people in Washington who weren’t allied with the torturers but would nonetheless rather not revisit what happened in the Bush years.

Some of them probably just don’t want an ugly scene; my guess is that the president, who clearly prefers visions of uplift to confrontation, is in that group. But the ugliness is already there, and pretending it isn’t won’t make it go away.

Others, I suspect, would rather not revisit those years because they don’t want to be reminded of their own sins of omission.

For the fact is that officials in the Bush administration instituted torture as a policy, misled the nation into a war they wanted to fight and, probably, tortured people in the attempt to extract "confessions" that would justify that war. And during the march to war, most of the political and media establishment looked the other way.

It’s hard, then, not to be cynical when some of the people who should have spoken out against what was happening, but didn’t, now declare that we should forget the whole era — for the sake of the country, of course.

Sorry, but what we really should do for the sake of the country is have investigations both of torture and of the march to war. These investigations should, where appropriate, be followed by prosecutions — not out of vindictiveness, but because this is a nation of laws.

We need to do this for the sake of our future. For this isn’t about looking backward, it’s about looking forward — because it’s about reclaiming America’s soul.

OBAMA MUST FIRE EVERY FORMER MEMBER OF THE CLINTON AND BUSH ADMINISTRATIONS IN ORDER TO GAIN CREDIBILITY

I take issue with Obama for hiring the most unscrupulous promotors of the "Ponzi Scheme" called "Wall St." Summers must go. Geithner must go. All their staff purloined from the financial meltdown boys during the Bush and Clinton administrations must be "canned".

 

Frankly, I don't give a damn, if all the big houses fail. It is time we get rid of the "fat cats" and level the playing field. Summers is a loudmouth that must be fired immediately. Leave Geithner as head of Treasury with "overseers". Geithner is a wimp. He does not have the will to take charge by firing the worst of the worst.

 

We need non-politicians and non-businessmen in charge of the day to day running of the economy. I wrote a personal letter to Bob Rubin, who at that time was "Vice Chairman" of Citigroup to do us a favor by his resignation and retirement. I wrote this letter over one year ago.

 

The United States is run by major corporations who fund both parties with billions in cash. It makes no difference which party is in power as they are all bought and paid for. Obama had the opportunity to take charge but he squandered that opportunity by appointing the very people who ruined this economy. Let them all go broke.

 

Martin S. Friedlander, Esq.

A PAIN IN THE AIG THAT CAN BE CURED BY THE LEGAL PROCESS OF BANKRUPTCY

 

One of the main reasons the federal government had to intervene and use billions of taxpayer dollars to prop up the nation's financial institutions is that they were considered to be "too big to fail." In other words, these companies had become so massive that their collapse would send shockwaves throughout the U.S. and global economies. No company has come to symbolize this problem more than insurance giant AIG, in which taxpayers now have an 80 percent stake after the federal government committed $170 billion to rescue it from bankruptcy. "Given the systemic risk AIG continues to pose and the fragility of markets today, the potential cost to the economy and the taxpayer of government inaction would be extremely high," wrote the Treasury and Federal Reserve in a joint statement on March 2. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has explained, "AIG is in trouble because it wrote many credit default swaps, in effect guaranteeing others against losses it lacked the resources to cover. We, the taxpayers, are now covering those losses. ... But this means that US taxpayers have now assumed the downside risks for all of AIG's counterparties." AIG has proved to be in no rush to repay this favor, highlighting the risk in the government's current strategy.

BONUS OUTRAGE: On Saturday, AIG revealed that it still planned to pay $165 million in bonuses to executives in its financial products unit, the same unit "that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year." As the New York Times pointed out, these awards "are in addition to $121 million in previously scheduled bonuses for the company's senior executives and 6,400 employees." After finding out about the scheduled payments, Geithner called AIG chief Edward Liddy to tell him that they were "unacceptable and had to be renegotiated." In a letter on Saturday, Liddy replied that AIG was legally bound to "proceed" with the bonuses, and he did not want employees to "believe that their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury." This response set off a wave of outrage from Obama administration officials, even though many of them have opposed tougher restrictions on CEO pay. Yesterday on ABC's This Week, National Economic Council Chairman Lawrence Summers said, "There are a lot of terrible things that have happened in the last 18 months, but what's happened at AIG is the most outrageous." House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA) also said that AIG was "abusing the system."

FINDING OUT WHERE THE MONEY IS GOING: Yesterday, AIG also revealed the names of dozens of the big banks it has paid off with the bailout money. The Washington Post reports, "The disclosure, which the company said was made after consulting the Federal Reserve, revealed that AIG paid more than $75 billion in the final months of 2008 to numerous domestic and foreign banks, as well as to various U.S. municipalities." Major recipients included Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America. Approximately $12 billion also "went to pay off municipalities in dozens of states for whom the firm had created complex investment agreements." The disclosure was an "about-face" for AIG, which had been resisting lawmakers' calls for increased transparency. In fact, all firms that have received money under the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) have been able to escape with inadequate oversight. Bailed-out CEOs have retained their corporate jets and refused to answer questions about how they are spending taxpayer money. Just last week, a House oversight subcommittee grilled TARP watchdog Neil Barofsky on questionable investments made by bailed-out firms and what influence lobbyists have exerted. Barofsky promised officials that he would provide that information when he releases his report.

THE RATIONALIZATION FOR NATIONALIZATION: What this weekend's disclosures highlight is the shortcomings of the Treasury's current strategy to prop up the financial system. Basically, the federal government continues to pump billions of dollars into these institutions without receiving full control over how taxpayer dollars are spent in return. Bank nationalization has been floated by people such as Krugman and NYU economist Nouriel Roubini, to former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Geithner, however, has so far refused to say that nationalization is on the table. But it should be. "The American taxpayer would be ill-served to receive anything less for putting in the vast amount of money needed to restructure and recapitalize [the banks]," explained Adam Posen, Deputy Director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "And the American taxpayer, just like any acquirer of distressed assets, deserves to reap the upside from their eventual resale." Geithner has put forward a plan to subject the country's 20 biggest banks to "stress tests," in order to assess whether they have the resources to survive. Krugman has explained that these tests could be the key for an administration move toward nationalization, by "not hid[ing] the results when a bank fails the test, making a takeover necessary." As the Wonk Room's Pat Garofalo has written, "Geithner's public-private investment fund may get toxic assets off the banks' books," but it also depends on Wall Street "being willing to buy the junk currently clogging up the banks. And the longer nationalization is delayed, the longer the solvency of the entire banking system will be in question. Thus, more good banks will get dragged down into the mud with the bad."

OPEN LETTER TO GRETCHEN MORGENSON OF THE NEW YORK TIMES ON AIG AND WHAT CAN BE DONE

Dear Gretchen:

 

The double speak coming from the Whitehouse spokesmen and Obama himself is deafening. AIG is a disgrace. There is a remedy, not only to recover the bonuses, but to recover the $180 billion in payouts on these "gambling contracts" that were legalized by legislation a few years ago.

 

I am a bankruptcy lawyer. The US owns 80% of AIG. They are the controlling stockholder. The US can unilaterally put the London subsidiary into chapter 11. All contracts can be "broken" (rejected) in chapter 11. If the bonuses were paid, all preferential payments within the past 90 days can be recovered. All fraudulent transfers within 4 years can be set aside.

 

Frankly, I believe that all "naked" Credit Default Swaps should be rejected. This was a roll of the dice. By setting aside all of the "naked" swaps trillions of dollars will be saved.

 

There is a deep dark secret as to why the beneficiaries of the bailout to AIG have not been disclosed. The disclosure of these names will cause riots in the streets against Wall St as the broken Americans who have lost their jobs and house are subordinated to foreign sovereign wealth funds and the "friends" of Rubin, Sommers, Geitner are rewarded. How much is Obama inebted to these "fat cats"?

 

Gretchen, you have been very vocal in your comments and articles on CDOs for the past 2 years with righteous indignation. Lets take on Wall Street.

 

Martin S. Friedlander, Esq.

OPEN LETTER TO FRANK RICH ON THE REPUBLICAN STONEWALLERS AND TRAITORS

Dear Frank Rich of the NY Times:

 

    You are right on the money as usual. The thing that bothered me the most was Daschel's under cover lobbying activities. Since being voted out of office he has lived the life as a fat cat lobbying for health care insurers such as United Health. He was the symbol of the "revolving door" mentality that Obama criticized. I also agree with your comments about Rubin, Summers, and Geithner. They also were "fat cats" linked to Wall St.

    Even though I have been a major shareholder of Citigroup, in September I personally wrote Bob Rubin to step down as Vice Chair of Citigroup. He was a major player in the derivative gambling with "other peoples money". He, Summers, and Geithner supported and sponsored "securitization" that has caused the "meltdown" of the world economic system.

    I personally voted with my pocketbook by ordering my financial advisor ("broker") to buy Federal Agency Bonds with the monies I had on deposit with the various Citibank franchises. Citibank was also one of the biggest pivate lenders to students through their student loan program. My son, who had no financial statment or income, was able to borrow $90,000 from one of the Citibank franchises. I cannot name this franchise since Citibank is unable to prove to my legal satisfaction that they are the "owner" of these alleged loans.

    I call these loans "alleged" since all my son signed was a document entitled Loan Application that he downloaded from the web. He never signed any actual note, yet they claim he is bound by the terms of a note that he never saw and that his lawyer, me, never reviewed. That is an alleged "predator lending" as it is an alleged "deceptive practice".

 

    In fact they were one of the leading lenders to mail out pre-approved credit cards at "teaser" rates to students in college to lead them into the life of "sucker dumb". Citi predated the young and vulnerable to "pump out bonuses" and "salaries" to the "ilk" of Bob "the far cat" Rubin. Charm will get you everywhere. It got him hundreds of millions in fees and earning.

    I have written Senator Boxer, my Senator, and Congressman Waxman, my Congressman, to enact bankruptcy reform legislation to enable students to discharge "private" student loans in bankruptcy. This is not like an obligation to the government, as taxes and government student loans. It is a Citibank note, allegedly deceptively procured from young men and women desperate to attend colleges with outrageous matriculation charges. Citi's in house emphasized in a letter to me that it was in fact a private loan not guaranteed by Sallie Mae.

    Wall St and their "camp followers" in Congress just do not get it. They are either "tone deaf" or they received campaign donations from the loan industry. I still remember Vice President Biden, when he was still a Senator from Delaware, standing on the floor of the Senate, urging his fellow Senators to enact the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005. Gues what? He was lobbied by lenders headquartered in Delaware such as MNBA, one of largest credit card issuers in the USA. Biden was bought and paid for.

 

    This reform act has been described by me in print as the American replica of the "Indentured Servant" legislation of our former "master", England. Under English law in the 1700s debtors were either imprisoned, sent to Australia as prisoner, or sold to an American "master" for 7 years of "indentured servitude".

    I thank Prime Minister William Pitt of England as being instrumental in abolishing England's role in the remunerative "slave trade" where English ships were used to transport "black slaves" from Africa to the colonies, one of those being America.

    I thank our founding fathers for writing the constitution granting Congress specific power to enact laws regarding bankruptcy to enable "honest" debtors to gain a "fresh start" in life..

    Our Congress, and President Bush, have peverted the Bankruptcy Code with the "servitude" amendments enacted into law during the Bush administration in 2005. It should be noted that President Clinton vetoed this "reform" act several times, but "Mad King George Bush" signed it into law in 2005.

    Then I castigate our "empty black robed Supreme Court" for selecting Bush in 2000 in that "infamous" Bush v Gore decision where the Supreme Court chose politics to cut off the ongoing recount in Florida.

 

Thereafter the US Supreme Court overturned the California Supreme Court decision in Smiley v Citibank (yes that very same unsrupulous" Citibank) and held that under applicable law a Bank can charge any rate of interest under any terms, and that law "trumped" California's law regarding usury. I know usury when it is charged as I have a published decision in that area.

 

     Since that decision, usury has become endemic in the US. The poorest of the poor are being charged interest at rates over 30% compounded since they are adding unpaid interest to principal. Our government is guilty as charged. Government should pay their penance to receive absolution by Congress enacting a "new" nationwide usury law prohibiting interest over 10% simple interest per annum. Join my crusade.

    In conclusion, I commend certain writers at the NY Times, such as Frank Rich and Gretchen Morgenson for "telling the truth to power".

    That is what's wrong about America and that is the reason why America elected Obama to be President over overwhelming odds with overwhelming numbers. Obama was elected to change America, not rubber stamp the same old, same old. Put the nay sayers in their place. Vote them out of office where they belong.

 

    I support the debtor revolution both in the courts and in politics.
Give me a call at (310) 435 1519 if you want payback.

What say ye?

Martin S. Friedlander, Esq.

www.freedompost.typepad.com

OBAMA WILL RISE FROM THE ASHES AND EXERCISE CONTROL AFTER ADMITTING HE "GOT SCREWED".

There are 2 governments involved in the BAC situation. The 1st is the government of Bush and the 2nd is the government of Obama. The Bush government was reckless and waited until the last minute to reveal the systemic situation of the American banking system.; Through "back channels" we have ascertained that Bush knew about the problem at least one year prior to that fateful meeting between Paulson and the Congressional leaders. That is why Paulson initially tried to get Congress to sign off on a 3 page document over a weekend. Then a more official looking Bill was drawn up and it failed to pass the House.

 

Bush concealed from Congress what he knew and when he knew it. TARP was nothing but a coverup of the truth, which is typical Bush dogma. Paulson was a Bush Secretary and not an Obama Secretary. Bush was hoping to pass this mess on to the next President whether it be Obama or McCain. He had no love for either. Both campaigned against his record. Bush only loved himself and his image and his love was delusional. Cheney's remarks today were outrageous and delusional.

 

Lewis got screwed by Thain twice. The first time was on the original deal and the second time was when Thain paid out the bonuses to his "friends" to save a "franchise" that was a "zombie". There was nothing to save. Then, allegedly, Lewis got screwed by Paulson on Bush's orders.

 

The American people got screwed by Lewis, Thain, and Bush. We are now into a "depression" that is spiraling out of control due to the lack of leadership by Pelosi and Reid and the Republican hardliners who are prepared to filibuster Congress into a deeper depression. We are a house divided which cannot stand unless the Obama administration wrests control from Congress by declaring a "National Emergency" under the Homeland Security Act put into place by Bush. Lincoln declared martial law when the draft riots took place in NY City. The Irish were forced to go into the Army of the North to fight the South because they were starving in Ireland.

 

The bottom line is that we got screwed by the regulators, Bush and Cheney, the Republican and Democrat "free traders" and the two Treasury Secretaries appointed by Clinton. Rubin resigned in disgrace from Citigroup and Obama appointed Rubin's clone Larry Sommers to be his chief economic advisor, both of whom knew yet perpetrated the CDOs and CDS on American and the World secured by "garbage" credit obligations.

 

Obama finally "smelled the coffee" except the smell was coming from the "rotting" purveyors of worthless assets. Obama admitted that his loss in New Hampshire was a wake up call to make him work harder and to use his God given brains to become the first "black" President. Obama took another "hit" when the Daschle disaster hit. Obama, contrary to the Bush Doctrine, admitted he "screwed up" and then attended his daughter's class to get out of the White House away from his "advisors" that led him down the wrong path with his appointments. Remember that Lincoln fired General after General until he appointed Grant and Sherman who led the North to victory in that horrible Civil War.

 

Obama's greatness is his ability to rise like Phoenix from the ashes, admit his mistakes, and then take control over the situation, and move on to a victory that the empty suit Bush could never achieve. He will now take charge over his appointments and ram through legislation in both Houses. He has the brains, political skill, and determination of will to do so.

 

We will have to bear a stiff upper lip to survive this depression. The greedy can go to hell where they belong. Ethics is Obama's brand and so long as the American people believe in his "truth" he will have the power of the people to lead. He is the "hope" that the people elected, not the square headed "just say no" people of the Limbaugh disaster.

 

Martin S Friedlander, Esq.