Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One

William Black, a product of the Kansas City School of Economics, and who helped bust Keating during the S&L crisis, is just awesome in this round
of interviews.  He exposes the financial fraud in the recent bailouts, and shows Obama’s complicity.

Government Can Have Budget Deficits and Financial Surpluses at The Same Time

What are Government surpluses?

Government surpluses are funds that are not required or needed for the operation of all government operations, funds, accounts, agencies, etc., directly or indirectly, for the year(s) covered by the budget which is usually one year. Theoretically, at the end of every fiscal year, governments should have little or no cash/investments on hand. But what we have found is that most governments have huge amounts of cash and investments on hand at the end of the fiscal year. And somehow these cash and investments are not being recycled back through the budget process the next year, but are being held year-after-year.

A Government Can Have Budget Deficits/
Shortfalls, and Financial Surpluses at The Same Time.

This is the most deceiving topic that governments, politicians, and the news media have conveyed to the public about governmental financial matters. In realty, a government can simultaneously have a budget shortfall and a financial surplus of the taxpayers’ money. The problems are focused in the following areas:

1. The budget only covers a small portion of the State’s financial condition. There are a group of funds not part of the budget process. The complete list of funds and budgetary requirements are found in the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR). This report depicts the complete financial status of the State. The budget only covers a portion of the financial resources of the government. The CAFR typically includes the following categories.

Governmental Funds involve activities of the government including most basic services such as environmental resources, general government, transportation, education, health and human services, and protection of persons and property. Most of the cost of these activities are financed by taxes, fees , and federal grants.

Proprietary Funds are used when a government charges customers for the services it provides, whether to outside customers or to other agencies with the state. For example, Enterprise Funds, a component of proprietary funds, are for activities that provide goods and services to outside (non-government) customers, which includes the general public. Fees, charges for services or goods, assessments, fines, licenses, etc. are the major revenue sources.

Fiduciary Funds are activities in which the state acts as a trustee or fiduciary to hold resources for the benefit of others. These funds are pension trust funds, investment trusts, and agency funds (which are for assets held for distribution by the government as an agent for other governmental units, other organizations, or individuals).

Component Units reportedly are legally separated organizations for which the government is financially accountable. Usually fees, charges for services or goods, assessments, fines, penalties, licenses, etc. are the major revenue source.

The budget, as commonly known to the public, only involves the Governmental Funds and may not even include all of the governmental-type funds. The remainder of the Funds shown above are not part of the budget and are commonly called “off-budget” items.

2. Next year’s budget consists only of next year’s estimated revenues and next year’s estimated expenditures. Previous years’ revenues not used (spent) are normally not considered in the next year’s budget, but should be. In other words, the previous years’ revenues (as shown in the CAFR) are not recycled back to the budget process.

Historically, a budget consists of three parts: 1) Funds brought forward (funds not previously spent); 2) Next year’s estimated revenues; and 3) Next year’s estimated expenditures.

But somewhere along the way the funds brought forward category was lost. In accounting, the previous years’ revenues are no longer called revenue but have been converted to Cash and Investments. Since they no longer called Revenues governments have forgotten about them to the public. They are there but not considered in the budget process, but should be.

3. The budgeted items and non-budgeted items (off budget) should be budgeted to zero (usually referred to as zero-based budgeting). In addition, the government should be on a pay-as-you-go basis, no reserves for future years. What this means is that you budget to have a zero fund balance. If you plan to spend $100 you budget for $100 with no excess or reserve allowed.

For example, the State of California Special Revenue Funds (Governmental Funds), considered part of the budget, have fund balances of $8.6 billion that probably will not be considered in the yearly budget. The total cash and investments, funds that were not used during the current year, was $ 8.5 billion (surplus) and should be part of the next year’s budget. So if there is a “budget deficit” ask about these funds not being considered or used.

4. Budgeted expenditures should be last year’s expenditures (as shown in the CAFR) with an adjustment for increase in requirements (costed out) or reductions in requirements. In most cases the CAFR expenditures are not considered in the next year’s budget because the CAFR in many cases is published after next year’s budget is considered and sometimes approved.

Running Surpluses is Stealing

Although taxation is legitimate, running a government surplus isn’t. It represents a taking by the state, because it exceeds the government’s contract with the community. It is no different than if a federal agency were to take a person’s land or possessions without just compensation (an activity barred by the Fifth Amendment). Excess taxation isn’t what the people bargained for.

In presuming entitlement or authority not ceded by the community, the state abrogates its moral pact with those it governs. Its power is no longer derived from the people, whose rights to liberty and property it boldly denies.

“Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery” – Calvin Coolidge

Reprinted from:
http://cafrman.com/Articles/Art-CA-S1.htm

White House Pushed for World Government

White House Announces World Economic Community (1972)

On February 7, 1972, there was held a White House Conference on the Industrial World Ahead, which was called:

“A Look at Business in 1990.”

On May 18, 1972, Roy Ash (Chairman of the President’s Advisory Council on Executive Organization) and his fellow White House panelists — multinational industrialists, international bankers, government appointees — tell American businessmen that a [B]World Economic Community will be in operation by 1990, that “some aspects of national sovereignty will be given over to supranational authority,” that the IMF will be “the source of all of the primary reserves of all of the banking systems of the world,” and that the Socialist countries of the world will join in the creation of this New World Society, and finally, that this is “natural, inexorable, and beneficial.”

On September 1, 1972, the Wall Street Journal of published a leading editorial which labeled as fantasy, hallucination and big lie, the charge that there is “a long-time conspiracy financed by the Rockefeller family and programmed through the Council on Foreign Relations, aimed at imposing a one-world Socialist government.”

On September 8, 1972, Don Bell reported in his weekly commentary what Roy Ash told the Los Angeles conference audience regarding the White House directives (excerpt of Ash’s speech is quoted below).

The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce,
in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Commerce
and the White House Staff, is presenting The White House Conference.

The world Ahead, A Look at Business in 1990.
Thursday, May 18, 1972.
Los Angeles Hilton.
3 :00-6:30 p.m.

It’s a privilege to be with you this afternoon and, together, to peer into the future toward 1990. Some of you may have wondered why the White House conferees were advised to direct their prognostications to the year 1990, rather than to some other specific date in the decades ahead. Unfortunately, there is little I can provide in the way of edification; I rather wondered about it myself. Alright, I reasoned, George Orwell long ago appropriated 1984. Herman Kahn more recently laid claim to 2000. So there were not many good numbers left. Possibly 1990 was selected for the benef it of the panelists. They will all be retired and safe from harm if their predictions are wrong.

At the White House conference held earlier this year my fellow panelists and I discussed the subject of world business and the economy of 1990. Our particular panel, I should add, was comprised of Jean Frere, Managing Partner of Banque Lambert, Brussels, Belgium; Robert V. Roosa, partner of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., United States; Roberto Campos, president of the International Bank, Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Peter G. Peterson, then Assistant to President Nixon for International Economic Affairs and Executive Director of the Council on International Economic Policy, and now the Secretary of Commerce.

While we did not always achieve unanimity, our conclusions on the general subject of the future of world business tended, for the most part, to be strikingly similar. In the time alloted me today, I will attempt to summarize those conclusions . However, in all fairness to Messrs. Frere, Roosa, Campos and Peterson — none of whom are here to cry foul if their panel chairman goes astray — I will hedge by saying that what follows represents essentially my own views, reinforced where appropriate with their comments .

The threshhold question is, why is world business so important to us anyway? Why don’t we just concentrate on improving the U .S. business and economy? Isn’t that enough challenge?

The answer is that increasing economic and business interdependence among nations is the keynote of the next two decades of world business — decades that will see major steps toward a single world economy evolve out of today’s increasingly interacting, but still separate, national economies. As city, state and regional economies in this country have become melded into a single and highly interacting national economy, so individual national economies will meld into a single world economic system . And as the economic development of the United States made obsolete self-contained U .S. state, or even regional, economies, so the natural development of the world between now and 1990 will make obsolete a free standing French economy, a Japanese one, and even a U.S. economy in isolation from others.

Such an evolution is natural and inexorable — and beneficial. For an intelligent civilization always has and always will seek more and more efficient, and thus productive, means of converting its limited resources, energy and manpower into useful products and services. More highly integrated economic structures — based on specialization of its many elements and on interdependency among the specialized parts-is the inevitable answer. A single world economy is that higher order integration for the decades ahead.

The obstacles and hazards in the way of realizing a beneficially functioning single world economy are many. More effective multilateral governmental institutions must be developed and brought into operation. Some aspects of individual sovereignty will be given over to supranational authority. Even as critical, the relative roles of the world’s governments, on the one hand, and of globe circling business enterprises on the other, need to be worked out. Some have likened the upcoming issues between sovereign nations and multinational business to the test of earlier times between church and state.

We need only look at the long road the European Common Market countries have taken, and are still on, as they step by step reconcile national interests with the mutual advantages of a more broadly based economy, and as they embrace the activities of multinational business, to visualize the even more complex issues as we move toward a single world economy. But the Common Market countries are all industrialized and all operate under the private enterprise system. In embracing all the countries of the world, special attention needs to be given to the less industrialized countries and how they relate to the already industrialized ones, and to the place of the socialist countries in a developing world economy.

Roberto Campos, of the panel, maintains that great strains will arise in embracing within a single world economy countries of widely disparate development levels . He sees a strong bipolarity of interests and objectives. One of the bilateral poles of the future, as he sees it, will be comprised of emerging post-industrial, mass consumption societies — the largely developed societies — by 1990 perhaps 30 per cent of the world’s population when taken together. The industrial-transitional and pre-industrial societies, representing over 70 per cent of the world’s population, would constitute the other pole. And, as he notes, these two groups will greatly differ in the nature of their priorities and in the range of options available, thus a continuing source of international tension. Campos foresees, in the post-industrial societies, a humanistic revolt against technology and the surfeit of materialism it has produced; and in the developing nations, a technological revolt against hedonistic humanism — because for them the most urgent concern is the eradication of poverty — through stepped up “materialism.”

As importantly, international agreements between the socialist and the private property economies add a different dimension to the problems for which solutions need be found over the years ahead. But as Jean Frere forecasts, the socialist countries will take major steps toward joining the world economy by 1990 . He goes so far as to see them becoming members of the International Monetary Fund, the sine qua non for effective participation in multilateral commerce. Then also, by 1990 an imaginative variety of contractual arrangements will have been devised and put into operation by which the socialist countries and the private capital countries will be doing considerable business together, neither being required to abandon its base ideology. (The economic theories of Adam Smith and Karl Marx are not without their common points.)

These special dimensions of the next economy — the economy of the world, as it first permeates the industrial countries and then reaches out to embrace both the pre-industrial and socialistic ones — present challenging tasks for the next two or more decades. . . .

The industrial world ahead . . . will turn increasingly on the use of massive amounts of capital, the development and application of a cascading flow of new technologies, and highly professionalized management . Yet these relatively scarce resources are not equally available to all the world’s countries. Thus the role for the multinational company.

For, the fundamental reasons the multinational corporations are here to stay and will conduct much of the world’s business of the future, are simple ones. These powerful factors of production — that is, capital, technology and management — will be fully mobile, neither contained nor containable within national borders. They can be employed wherever in the world they will be most productive . World-wide transportation systems — extensive, economic and rapid — will make the world smaller in 1990 than California was in 1920. New management techniques, aided by computer processed data and instant communications, will allow as effective direction and control of world-around business activities in 1990 as a fifty man factory was controlled by the on-the-floor visual supervision of 1920.

The multinational corporation will be the natural outgrowth of the driving force of industrial enterprise that continually seeks out ways of producing and distributing more goods at lower cost to the consumer. Having a world perspective and operating in conducive national environments, it will combine labor, materials, capital, technology and management in the most productive combinations and distribute the fruits of this combination to world markets . Such maximum efficiency in the use of all the world’s productive resources is essential for the demanding period ahead . The multinational corporation — domestic in all countries, foreign in none — will become the mechanism to realize the potentials of world business for all the world’s citizens.

Yet the very scale and dimension of the multi- national corporation will require new forms of relationships between business and national governments. To reflect this need for reconciling the roles of sovereign nations and multinational corporations, Robert Roosa is convinced we are going to have to develop and apply clear “rules of the road.” It cannot now be predicted whether they will come about from case by case development in the courts of international law or by treaty among major nations. In any event, effective international rules of the road are as essential for the world economy ahead as they are for Los Angeles traffic.

As a framework for their development and application will be the establishment of more effective supranational institutions to deal with intergovernmental matters, and matters between governments and world industry . A key intergovernmental institution that needs to work well in a world economy is the International Monetary Fund. Roosa predicts that the IMF will reach new capabilities and dimensions. It will become, in Bob’s words, the most advanced embodiment of the aspirations that so many have for a world society, a world economy. The IMF, he forecasts for 1990, is going to be the source of all of the primary reserves of all the banking systems of the world.

Jean Frere observes that monetary stability is going to be as critical for the 1990 world economy as the finer standards for distance, weight and time that are now required by modern technology. To bring this about is no small task; inflation must be licked and gold restored its rule; he concludes.

It would be my own forecast that within two decades the institutional framework for a World Economic Community will be in place and operating just as today’s European Economic Community structure provides the strong supranational framework for the European economy.

So, as we look ahead to the world economy of 1990 we already see some parts falling into their places. World business already is rapidly increasing. Multinational corporations are increasingly a fact of world business. Governments are beginning to perceive the meaning, problems and opportunities of a world economy. High on official agendas, world-around between now and then, will be programs to reconcile national interests, the forces of world business, and international objectives.

For, in the final analysis, we are commanded by the fact that the economies of the major countries of the world will be interlocked. And since major economic matters in all countries are also important political matters in and between countries, the inevitable consequence of these propositions in that the broader and total destinies — economic, political and social — of all the world’s nations are closely interlocked. We are clearly at that point where economic issues and their related effects can be considered only in terms of a total world destiny, not just separate national destinies, and certainly not just a separate go-it-alone destiny for the United States.

In simpler words: We shall have World Government whether we like it or not. And the oligarch’s who say this know whereof they speak; because they have their plan, it has been put into operation, and it is now working and being worked at every level of society: international, national, regional and at State, County, City and Community levels.

Is Max Keiser Shilling for the Globalists?

During the first 15 minutes of Max & Stacy’s June 13th podcast, while discussing the recent arrest of two men travelling with $134B in bonds in a double-bottom briefcase, they present the concept that “no one does global accounting on CUSIP Numbers” (ie. Bonds) so therefore “peek-a-boo accounting” games can continue unabaited at corporations across the globe seeking to mislead auditors as to the strength of their corporate balance sheets. What is needed to stop this and other financial frauds is a “global accounting system,” proclaims Keiser.

Play Max & Stacy’s June 13th Podcast

Download Audio (MP3)

What Max & Stacy are doing is helping to strengthen the establishment’s creation of a global dialectic, whereby the problem (ie. affirmation) is an unregulated global system and the response (ie. negation) is destablization, fraud, theft, global poverty, etc. The solution Max & Stacy propose (ie. negation of the negation) is a globlal system of checks and balances.

In fact, Max goes so far as to say, “if you are against the global system you are against global accounting.” The setup is now complete and the appropriate frames (ie. dialectics) established. Hence, if the public wants to clean up this global financial mess, irrespective of who created it, there is only ONE way, and that is to establish a global accounting and auditing system. To be against this solution is to be for continued fraud, theft, poverty and destabilization of society.

It’s a perfect setup! The public must now support a global infrastructure of checks and balances in order to stop the economic madness. We’re now just one more step closer to a full spectrum globalist system. But doesn’t that support the global oligarchs, and I though Max and Stacy were for the public and opposed to the global oligarchs? Hmmm.

Aristotle said…

“People that can’t think dialectically aren’t really human beings at all, they just look like human beings.”

Perhaps it is time for the public to heed and respond to Artistotle.