*THE GREAT AMERICAN BUBBLE MACHINE*_
/From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they're about to do it again
By MATT TAIBBI/
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup - which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the rear end in a top hat chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibillion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York - which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman - not to mention ...
But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain - an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere - high gas prices, rising consumer-credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth - pure profit for rich individuals.
They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s - and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.
If you want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you have to first understand where all the money went - and in order to understand that, you need to understand what Goldman has already gotten away with. It is a history exactly five bubbles long - including last year's strange and seemingly inexplicable spike in the price of oil. There were a lot of losers in each of those bubbles, and in the bailout that followed. But Goldman wasn't one of them.
/IF AMERICA IS NOW CIRCLING THE DRAIN, GOLDMAN SACHS HAS FOUND A WAY TO BE THAT DRAIN./
*BUBBLE #1 - THE GREAT DEPRESSION*
Goldman wasn't always a too-big-to-fail Wall Street behemoth, the ruthless face of kill-or-be-killed capitalism on steroids - just almost always. The bank was actually founded in 1869 by a German immigrant named Marcus Goldman, who built it up with his son-in-law Samuel Sachs. They were pioneers in the use of commercial paper, which is just a fancy way of saying they made money lending out short-term IOUs to small-time vendors in downtown Manhattan.
You can probably guess the basic plotline of Goldman's first 100 years in business: plucky, immigrant-led investment bank beats the odds, pulls itself up by its bootstraps, makes shitloads of money. In that ancient history there's really only one episode that bears scrutiny now, in light of more recent events: Goldman's disastrous foray into the speculative mania of pre-crash Wall Street in the late 1920s.
This great Hindenburg of financial history has a few features that might sound familiar. Back then, the main financial tool used to bilk investors was called an "investment trust." Similar to modern mutual funds, the trusts took the cash of investors large and small and (theoretically, at least) invested it in a smorgasbord of Wall Street securities, though the securities and amounts were often kept hidden from the public. So a regular guy could invest $10 or $100 in a trust and feel like he was a big player. Much as in the 1990s, when new vehicles like day trading and e-trading attracted reams of new suckers from the sticks who wanted to feel like big shots, investment trusts roped a new generation of regular-guy investors into the speculation game.
Beginning a pattern that would repeat itself over and over again, Goldman got into the investment-trust game late, then jumped in with both feet and went hog-wild. The first effort was the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation; the bank issued a million shares at $100 apiece, bought all those shares with its own money and then sold 90 percent of them to the hungry public at $104. The trading corporation then relentlessly bought shares in itself, bidding the price up further and further. Eventually it dumped part of its holdings and sponsored a new trust, the Shenandoah Corporation, issuing millions more in shares in that fund - which in turn sponsored yet another trust called the Blue Ridge Corporation. In this way, each investment trust served as a front for an endless investment pyramid: Goldman hiding behind Goldman hiding behind Goldman. Of the 7,250,000 initial shares of Blue Ridge, 6,250,000 were actually owned by Shenandoah - which, of course, was in large part owned by Goldman Trading.
The end result (ask yourself if this sounds familiar) was a daisy chain of borrowed money, one exquisitely vulnerable to a decline in performance anywhere along the line; The basic idea isn't hard to follow. You take a dollar and borrow nine against it; then you take that $10 fund and borrow $90; then you take your $100 fund and, so long as the public is still lending, borrow and invest $900. If the last fund in the line starts to lose value, you no longer have the money to pay back your investors, and everyone gets massacred.
In a chapter from The Great Crash, 1929 titled "In Goldman Sachs We Trust," the famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith held up the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah trusts as classic examples of the insanity of leverage-based investment. The trusts, he wrote, were a major cause of the market's historic crash; in today's dollars, the losses the bank suffered totaled $475 billion. "It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination which was implicit in this gargantuan insanity," Galbraith observed, sounding like Keith Olbermann in an ascot. "If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale."
*BUBBLE #2 - TECH STOCKS*
Fast-Forward about 65 years. Goldman not only survived the crash that wiped out so many of the investors it duped, it went on to become the chief underwriter to the country's wealthiest and most powerful corporations. Thanks to Sidney Weinberg, who rose from the rank of janitor's assistant to head the firm, Goldman became the pioneer of the initial public offering, one of the principal and most lucrative means by which companies raise money. During the 1970s and 1980s, Goldman may not have been the planet-eating Death Star of political influence it is today, but it was a top-drawer firm that had a reputation for attracting the very smartest talent on the Street.
It also, oddly enough, had a reputation for relatively solid ethics and a patient approach to investment that shunned the fast buck; its executives were trained to adopt the firm's mantra, "long-term greedy." One former Goldman banker who left the firm in the early Nineties recalls seeing his superiors give up a very profitable deal on the grounds that it was a long-term loser. "We gave back money to 'grownup' corporate clients who had made bad deals with us," he says. "Everything we did was legal and fair - but 'long-term greedy' said we didn't want to make such a profit at the clients' collective expense that we spoiled the marketplace."
But then, something happened. It's hard to say what it was exactly; it might have been the fact that Goldman's co-chairman in the early Nineties, Robert Rubin, followed Bill Clinton to the White House, where he directed the National Economic Council and eventually became Treasury secretary. While the American media fell in love with the story line of a pair of baby-boomer, Sixties-child, Fleetwood Mac yuppies nesting in the White House, it also nursed an undisguised crush on Rubin, who was hyped as without a doubt the smartest person ever to walk the face of the Earth, with Newton, Einstein, Mozart and Kant running far behind.
Rubin was the prototypical Goldman banker. He was probably born in a $4,000 suit, he had a face that seemed permanently frozen just short of an apology for being so much smarter than you, and he exuded a Spock-like, emotion-neutral exterior; the only human feeling you could imagine him experiencing was a nightmare about being forced to fly coach. It became almost a national cliche that whatever Rubin thought was best for the economy - a phenomenon that reached its apex in 1999, when Rubin appeared on the cover of Time with his Treasury deputy, Larry Summers, and Fed chief Alan Greenspan under the headline THE COMMITTEE TO SAVE THE WORLD. And "what Rubin thought," mostly, was that the American economy, and in particular the financial markets, were over-regulated and needed to be set free. During his tenure at Treasury, the Clinton White House made a series of moves that would have drastic consequences for the global economy - beginning with Rubin's complete and total failure to regulate his old firm during its first mad dash for obscene short-term profits.
The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. Companies that weren't much more than pot-fueled ideas scrawled on napkins by up-too-late bong-smokers were taken public via IPOs, hyped in the media and sold to the public for megamillions. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out 50-story windows and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.
It sounds obvious now, but what the average investor didn't know at the time was that the banks had changed the rules of the game, making the deals look better than they actually were. They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-tiered investment system - one for the insiders who knew the real numbers, and another for the lay investor who was invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew were irrational. While Goldman's later pattern would be to capitalize on changes in the regulatory environment, its key innovation in the Internet years was to abandon its own industry's standards of quality control.
"Since the Depression, there were strict underwriting guidelines that Wall Street adhered to when taking a company public," says one prominent hedge-fund manager. "The company had to be in business for a minimum of five years, and it had to show profitability for three consecutive years. But Wall Street took these guidelines and threw them in the trash." Goldman completed the snow job by pumping up the sham stocks: "Their analysts were out there saying Bullshit.com is worth $100 a share."
The problem was, nobody told investors that the rules had changed. "Everyone on the inside knew," the manager says. "Bob Rubin sure as hell knew what the underwriting standards were. They'd been intact since the 1930s."
Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida who specializes in IPOs, says banks like Goldman knew full well that many of the public offerings they were touting would never make a dime. "In the early Eighties, the major underwriters insisted on three years of profitability. Then it was one year, then it was a quarter. By the time of the Internet bubble, they were not even requiring profitability in the foreseeable future."
Goldman has denied that it changed its underwriting standards during the Internet years, but its own statistics belie the claim. Just as it did with the investment trust in the 1920s, Goldman started slow and finished crazy in the Internet years. After it took a little-known company with weak financials called Yahoo! public in 1996, once the tech boom had already begun, Goldman quickly became the IPO king of the Internet era. Of the 24 companies it took public in 1997, a third were losing money at the time of the IPO. In 1999, at the height of the boom, it took 47 companies public, including stillborns like Webvan and eToys, investment offerings that were in many ways the modern equivalents of Blue Ridge and Shenandoah. The following year, it underwrote 18 companies in the first four months, 14 of which were money losers at the time. As a leading underwriter of Internet stocks during the boom, Goldman provided profits far more volatile than those of its competitors: In 1999, the average Goldman IPO leapt 281 percent above its offering price, compared to the Wall Street average of 181 percent.
How did Goldman achieve such extraordinary results? One answer is that they used a practice called "laddering," which is just a fancy way of saying they manipulated the share price of new offerings. Here's how it works: Say you're Goldman Sachs, and Bullshit.com comes to you and asks you to take their company public. You agree on the usual terms: You'll price the stock, determine how many shares should be released and take the Bullshit.com CEO on a "road show" to schmooze investors, all in exchange for a substantial fee (typically six to seven percent of
the amount raised). You then promise your best clients the right to buy big chunks of the IPO at the low offering price - let's say Bullshit.com's starting share price is $15 - in exchange for a promise that they will buy more shares later on the open market. That seemingly simple demand gives you inside knowledge of the IPO's future, knowledge that wasn't disclosed to the day-trader schmucks who only had the prospectus to go by: You know that certain of your clients who bought X amount of shares at $15 are also going to buy Y more shares at $20 or $25, virtually guaranteeing that the price is going to go to $25 and beyond. In this way, Goldman could artificially jack up the new company's price, which of course was to the bank's benefit - a six percent fee of a $500 million IPO is serious money.
Goldman was repeatedly sued by shareholders for engaging in laddering in a variety of Internet IPOs, including Webvan and NetZero. The deceptive practices also caught the attention of Nichol as Maier, the syndicate manager of Cramer & Co., the hedge fund run at the time by the now-famous chattering television rear end in a top hat Jim Cramer, himself a Goldman alum. Maier told the SEC that while working for Cramer between 1996 and 1998, he was repeatedly forced to engage in laddering practices during IPO deals with Goldman.
"Goldman, from what I witnessed, they were the worst perpetrator," Maier said. "They totally fueled the bubble. And it's specifically that kind of behavior that has caused the market crash. They built these stocks upon an illegal foundation - manipulated up - and ultimately, it really was the small person who ended up buying in." In 2005, Goldman agreed to pay $40 million for its laddering violations - a puny penalty relative to the enormous profits it made. (Goldman, which has denied wrongdoing in all of the cases it has settled, refused to respond to questions for this story.)
Another practice Goldman engaged in during the Internet boom was "spinning," better known as bribery. Here the investment bank would offer the executives of the newly public company shares at extra-low prices, in exchange for future underwriting business. Banks that engaged in spinning would then undervalue the initial offering price - ensuring that those "hot" opening price shares it had handed out to insiders would be more likely to rise quickly, supplying bigger first-day rewards for the chosen few. So instead of Bullshit.com opening at $20, the bank would approach the Bullshit.com CEO and offer him a million shares of his own company at $18 in exchange for future business - effectively robbing all of Bullshit's new shareholders by diverting cash that should have gone to the company's bottom line into the private bank account of the company's CEO.
In one case, Goldman allegedly gave a multimillion-dollar special offering to eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who later joined Goldman's board, in exchange for future i-banking business. According to a report by the House Financial Services Committee in 2002, Goldman gave special stock offerings to executives in 21 companies that it took public, including Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang and two of the great slithering villains of the financial-scandal age - Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski and Enron's Ken Lay. Goldman angrily denounced the report as "an egregious distortion of the facts" - shortly before paying $110 million to settle an investigation into spinning and other manipulations launched by New York state regulators. "The spinning of hot IPO shares was not a harmless corporate perk," then-attorney general Eliot Spitzer said at the time. "Instead, it was an integral part of a fraudulent scheme to win new investment-banking business."
Such practices conspired to turn the Internet bubble into one of the greatest financial disasters in world history: Some $5 trillion of wealth was wiped out on the NASDAQ alone. But the real problem wasn't the money that was lost by shareholders, it was the money gained by investment bankers, who received hefty bonuses for tampering with the market. Instead of teaching Wall Street a lesson that bubbles always deflate, the Internet years demonstrated to bankers that in the age of freely flowing capital and publicly owned financial companies, bubbles are incredibly easy to inflate, and individual bonuses are actually bigger when the mania and the irrationality are greater.
/GOLDMAN SCAMMED HOUSING INVESTORS BY BETTING AGAINST ITS OWN CRAPPY MORTGAGES./
Nowhere was this truer than at Goldman. Between 1999 and 2002, the firm paid out $28.5 billion in compensation and benefits - an average of roughly $350,000 a year per employee. Those numbers are important because the key legacy of the Internet boom is that the economy is now driven in large part by the pursuit of the enormous salaries and bonuses that such bubbles make possible. Goldman's mantra of "long-term greedy" vanished into thin air as the game became about getting your check before the melon hit the pavement.
The market was no longer a rationally managed place to grow real, profitable businesses: It was a huge ocean of Someone Else's Money where bankers hauled in vast sums through whatever means necessary and tried to convert that money into bonuses and payouts as quickly as possible. If you laddered and spun 50 Internet IPOs that went bust within a year, so what? By the time the Securities and Exchange Commission got around to fining your firm $110 million, the yacht you bought with your IPO bonuses was already six years old. Besides, you were probably out of Goldman by then, running the U.S. Treasury or maybe the state of New Jersey. (One of the truly comic moments in the history of America's recent financial collapse came when Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey, who ran Goldman from 1994 to 1999 and left with $320 million in IPO-fattened stock, insisted in 2002 that "I've never even heard the term 'laddering' before.")
For a bank that paid out $7 billion a year in salaries, $110 million fines issued half a decade late were something far less than a deterrent - they were a joke. Once the Internet bubble burst, Goldman had no incentive to reassess its new, profit-driven strategy; it just searched around for another bubble to inflate. As it turns out, it had one ready, thanks in large part to Rubin.
*BUBBLE #3 - THE HOUSING CRAZE*
Goldman's role in the sweeping disaster that was the housing bubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren't in IPOs but in mortgages. By now almost everyone knows that for decades mortgage dealers insisted that home buyers be able to produce a down payment of 10 percent or more, show a steady income and good credit rating, and possess a real first and last name. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, they suddenly threw all that poo poo out the window and started writing mortgages on the backs of napkins to cocktail waitresses and ex-cons carrying five bucks and a Snickers bar.
None of that would have been possible without investment bankers like Goldman, who created vehicles to package those lovely mortgages and sell them en masse to unsuspecting insurance companies and pension funds. This created a mass market for toxic debt that would never have existed before; in the old days, no bank would have wanted to keep some addict ex-con's mortgage on its books, knowing how likely it was to fail. You can't write these mortgages, in other words, unless you can sell them to someone who doesn't know what they are.
Goldman used two methods to hide the mess they were selling. First, they bundled hundreds of different mortgages into instruments called Collateralized Debt Obligations. Then they sold investors on the idea that, because a bunch of those mortgages would turn out to be OK, there was no reason to worry so much about the lovely ones: The CDO, as a whole, was sound. Thus, junk-rated mortgages were turned into AAA-rated investments. Second, to hedge its own bets, Goldman got companies like AIG to provide insurance - known as credit-default swaps - on the CDOs. The swaps were essentially a racetrack bet between AIG and Goldman: Goldman is betting the ex-cons will default, AIG is betting they won't.
There was only one problem with the deals: All of the wheeling and dealing represented exactly the kind of dangerous speculation that federal regulators are supposed to rein in. Derivatives like CDOs and credit swaps had already caused a series of serious financial calamities: Procter & Gamble and Gibson Greetings both lost fortunes, and Orange County, California, was forced to default in 1994. A report that year by the Government Accountability Office recommended that such financial instruments be tightly regulated - and in 1998, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a woman named Brooksley Born, agreed. That May, she circulated a letter to business leaders and the Clinton administration suggesting that banks be required to provide greater disclosure in derivatives trades, and maintain reserves to cushion against losses.
More regulation wasn't exactly what Goldman had in mind. "The banks go crazy - they want it stopped," says Michael Greenberger, who worked for Born as director of trading and markets at the CFTC and is now a law professor at the University of Maryland. "Greenspan, Summers, Rubin and [SEC chief Arthur] Levitt want it stopped."
Clinton's reigning economic foursome - "especially Rubin," according to Greenberger - called Born in for a meeting and pleaded their case. She refused to back down, however, and continued to push for more regulation of the derivatives. Then, in June 1998, Rubin went public to denounce her move, eventually recommending that Congress strip the CFTC of its regulatory authority. In 2000, on its last day in session, Congress passed the now-notorious Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which had been inserted into an 1l,000-page spending bill at the last minute, with almost no debate on the floor of the Senate. Banks were now free to trade default swaps with impunity.
But the story didn't end there. AIG, a major purveyor of default swaps, approached the New York State Insurance Department in 2000 and asked whether default swaps would be regulated as insurance. At the time, the office was run by one Neil Levin, a former Goldman vice president, who decided against regulating the swaps. Now freed to underwrite as many housing-based securities and buy as much credit-default protection as it wanted, Goldman went berserk with lending lust. By the peak of the housing boom in 2006, Goldman was underwriting $76.5 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities - a third of which were subprime - much of it to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies. And in these massive issues of real estate were vast swamps of crap.
Take one $494 million issue that year, GSAMP Trust 2006-S3. Many of the mortgages belonged to second-mortgage borrowers, and the average equity they had in their homes was 0.71 percent. Moreover, 58 percent of the loans included little or no documentation - no names of the borrowers, no addresses of the homes, just zip codes. Yet both of the major ratings agencies, Moody's and Standard & Poor's, rated 93 percent of the issue as investment grade. Moody's projected that less than 10 percent of the loans would default. In reality, 18 percent of the mortgages were in default within 18 months.
Not that Goldman was personally at any risk. The bank might be taking all these hideous, completely irresponsible mortgages from beneath-gangster-status firms like Countrywide and selling them off to municipalities and pensioners - old people, for God's sake - pretending the whole time that it wasn't grade-D horseshit. But even as it was doing so, it was taking short positions in the same market, in essence betting against the same crap it was selling. Even worse, Goldman bragged about it in public. "The mortgage sector continues to be challenged," David Viniar, the bank's chief financial officer, boasted in 2007. "As a result, we took significant markdowns on our long inventory positions .... However, our risk bias in that market was to be short, and that net short position was profitable." In other words, the mortgages it was selling were for chumps. The real money was in betting against those same mortgages.
"That's how audacious these assholes are," says one hedge-fund manager. "At least with other banks, you could say that they were just dumb - they believed what they were selling, and it blew them up. Goldman knew what it was doing." I ask the manager how it could be that selling something to customers that you're actually betting against - particularly when you know more about the weaknesses of those products than the customer - doesn't amount to securities fraud.
"It's exactly securities fraud," he says. "It's the heart of securities fraud."
Eventually, lots of aggrieved investors agreed. In a virtual repeat of the Internet IPO craze, Goldman was hit with a wave of lawsuits after the collapse of the housing bubble, many of which accused the bank of withholding pertinent information about the quality of the mortgages it issued. New York state regulators are suing Goldman and 25 other underwriters for selling bundles of crappy Countrywide mortgages to city and state pension funds, which lost as much as $100 million in the investments. Massachusetts also investigated Goldman for similar misdeeds, acting on behalf of 714 mortgage holders who got stuck ho1ding predatory loans. But once again, Goldman got off virtually scot-free, staving off prosecution by agreeing to pay a paltry $60 million - about what the bank's CDO division made in a day and a half during the real estate boom.
The effects of the housing bubble are well known - it led more or less directly to the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG, whose toxic portfolio of credit swaps was in significant part composed of the insurance that banks like Goldman bought against their own housing portfolios. In fact, at least $13 billion of the taxpayer money given to AIG in the bailout ultimately went to Goldman, meaning that the bank made out on the housing bubble twice: It hosed the investors who bought their horseshit CDOs by betting against its own crappy product, then it turned around and hosed the taxpayer by making him payoff those same bets.
And once again, while the world was crashing down all around the bank, Goldman made sure it was doing just fine in the compensation department. In 2006, the firm's payroll jumped to $16.5 billion - an average of $622,000 per employee. As a Goldman spokesman explained, "We work very hard here."
But the best was yet to come. While the collapse of the housing bubble sent most of the financial world fleeing for the exits, or to jail, Goldman boldly doubled down - and almost single-handedly created yet another bubble, one the world still barely knows the firm had anything to do with.
*BUBBLE #4 - $4 A GALLON*
By the beginning of 2008, the financial world was in turmoil. Wall Street had spent the past two and a half decades producing one scandal after another, which didn't leave much to sell that wasn't tainted. The terms junk bond, IPO, subprime mortgage and other once-hot financial fare were now firmly associated in the public's mind with scams; the terms credit swaps and CDOs were about to join them. The credit markets were in crisis, and the mantra that had sustained the fantasy economy throughout the Bush years - the notion that housing prices never go down - was now a fully exploded myth, leaving the Street clamoring for a new bullshit paradigm to sling.
Where to go? With the public reluctant to put money in anything that felt like a paper investment, the Street quietly moved the casino to the physical-commodities market - stuff you could touch: corn, coffee, cocoa, wheat and, above all, energy commodities, especially oil. In conjunction with a decline in the dollar, the credit crunch and the housing crash caused a "flight to commodities." Oil futures in particular skyrocketed, as the price of a single barrel went from around $60 in the middle of 2007 to a high of $147 in the summer of 2008.
That summer, as the presidential campaign heated up, the accepted explanation for why gasoline had hit $4.11 a gallon was that there was a problem with the world oil supply. In a classic example of how Republicans and Democrats respond to crises by engaging in fierce exchanges of moronic irrelevancies, John McCain insisted that ending the moratorium on offshore drilling would be "very helpful in the short term," while Barack Obama in typical liberal-arts yuppie style argued that federal investment in hybrid cars was the way out.
/GOLDMAN TURNED A SLEEPY OIL MARKET INTO A GIANT BETTING PARLOR - SPIKING PRICES AT THE PUMP./
But it was all a lie. While the global supply of oil will eventually dry up, the short-term flow has actually been increasing. In the six months before prices spiked, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the world oil supply rose from 85.24 million barrels a day to 85.72 million. Over the same period, world oil demand dropped from 86.82 million barrels a day to 86.07 million. Not only was the short-term supply of oil rising, the demand for it was falling - which, in classic economic terms, should have brought prices at the pump down.
So what caused the huge spike in oil prices? Take a wild guess. Obviously Goldman had help - there were other players in the physical-commodities market - but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures - agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed.
As is so often the case, there had been a Depression-era law in place designed specifically to prevent this sort of thing. The commodities market was designed in large part to help farmers: A grower concerned about future price drops could enter into a contract to sell his corn at a certain price for delivery later on, which made him worry less about building up stores of his crop. When no one was buying corn, the farmer could sell to a middleman known as a "traditional speculator," who would store the grain and sell it later, when demand returned. That way, someone was always there to buy from the farmer, even when the market temporarily had no need for his crops.
In 1936, however, Congress recognized that there should never be more speculators in the market than real producers and consumers. If that happened, prices would be affected by something other than supply and demand, and price manipulations would ensue. A new law empowered the Commodity Futures Trading Commission - the very same body that would later try and fail to regulate credit swaps - to place limits on speculative trades in commodities. As a result of the CFTC's oversight, peace and harmony reigned in the commodities markets for more than 50 years.
All that changed in 1991 when, unbeknownst to almost everyone in the world, a Goldman-owned commodities-trading subsidiary called J. Aron wrote to the CFTC and made an unusual argument. Farmers with big stores of corn, Goldman argued, weren't the only ones who needed to hedge their risk against future price drops - Wall Street dealers who made big bets on oil prices also needed to hedge their risk, because, well, they stood to lose a lot too.
This was complete and utter crap - the 1936 law, remember, was specifically designed to maintain distinctions between people who were buying and selling real tangible stuff and people who were trading in paper alone. But the CFTC, amazingly, bought Goldman's argument. It issued the bank a free pass, called the "Bona Fide Hedging" exemption, allowing Goldman's subsidiary to call itself a physical hedger and escape virtually all limits placed on speculators. In the years that followed, the commission would quietly issue 14 similar exemptions to other companies.
Now Goldman and other banks were free to drive more investors into the commodities markets, enabling speculators to place increasingly big bets. That 1991 letter from Goldman more or less directly led to the oil bubble in 2008, when the number of speculators in the market - driven there by fear of the falling dollar and the housing crash - finally overwhelmed the real physical suppliers and consumers. By 2008, at least three quarters of the activity on the commodity exchanges was speculative, according to a congressional staffer who studied the numbers - and that's likely a conservative estimate. By the middle of last summer, despite rising supply and a drop in demand, we were paying $4 a gallon every time we pulled up to the pump.
What is even more amazing is that the letter to Goldman, along with most of the other trading exemptions, was handed out more or less in secret. "I was the head of the division of trading and markets, and Brooksley Born was the chair of the CFTC," says Greenberger, "and neither of us knew this letter was out there." In fact, the letters only came to light by accident. Last year, a staffer for the House Energy and Commerce Committee just happened to be at a briefing when officials from the CFTC made an offhand reference to the exemptions.
"1 had been invited to a briefing the commission was holding on energy," the staffer recounts. "And suddenly in the middle of it, they start saying, 'Yeah, we've been issuing these letters for years now.' I raised my hand and said, 'Really? You issued a letter? Can I see it?' And they were like, 'Duh, duh.' So we went back and forth, and finally they said, 'We have to clear it with Goldman Sachs.' I'm like, 'What do you mean, you
have to clear it with Goldman Sachs?'"
The CFTC cited a rule that prohibited it from releasing any information about a company's current position in the market. But the staffer's request was about a letter that had been issued 17 years earlier. It no longer had anything to do with Goldman's current position. What's more, Section 7 of the 1936 commodities law gives Congress the right to any information it wants from the commission. Still, in a classic example of how complete Goldman's capture of government is, the CFTC waited until it got clearance from the bank before it turned the letter over.
Armed with the semi-secret government exemption, Goldman had become the chief designer of a giant commodities betting parlor. Its Goldman Sachs Commodities Index - which tracks the prices of 24 major commodities but is overwhelmingly weighted toward oil - became the place where pension funds and insurance companies and other institutional investors could make massive long-term bets on commodity prices. Which was all well and good, except for a couple of things. One was that index speculators are mostly "long only" bettors, who seldom if ever take short positions - meaning they only bet on prices to rise. While this kind of behavior is good for a stock market, it's terrible for commodities, because it continually forces prices upward. "If index speculators took short positions as well as long ones, you'd see them pushing prices both up and down," says Michael Masters, a hedge-fund manager who has helped expose the role of investment banks in the manipulation of oil prices. "But they only push prices in one direction: up."
Complicating matters even further was the fact that Goldman itself was cheerleading with all its might for an increase in oil prices. In the beginning of 2008, Arjun Murti, a Goldman analyst, hailed as an "oracle of oil" by The New York Times, predicted a "super spike" in oil prices, forecasting a rise to $200 a barrel. At the time Goldman was heavily invested in oil through its commodities-trading subsidiary, J. Aron; it also owned a stake in a major oil refinery in Kansas, where it warehoused the crude it bought and sold. Even though the supply of oil was keeping pace with demand, Murti continually warned of disruptions to the world oil supply, going so far as to broadcast the fact that he owned two hybrid cars. High prices, the bank insisted, were somehow the fault of the piggish American consumer; in 2005, Goldman analysts insisted that we wouldn't know when oil prices would fall until we knew "when American consumers will stop buying gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles and instead seek fuel-efficient alternatives."
But it wasn't the consumption of real oil that was driving up prices - it was the trade in paper oil. By the summer of2008, in fact, commodities speculators had bought and stockpiled enough oil futures to fill 1.1 billion barrels of crude, which meant that speculators owned more future oil on paper than there was real, physical oil stored in all of the country's commercial storage tanks and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve combined. It was a repeat of both the Internet craze and the housing bubble, when Wall Street jacked up present-day profits by selling suckers shares of a fictional fantasy future of endlessly rising prices.
In what was by now a painfully familiar pattern, the oil-commodities melon hit the pavement hard in the summer of 2008, causing a massive loss of wealth; crude prices plunged from $147 to $33. Once again the big losers were ordinary people. The pensioners whose funds invested in this crap got massacred: CalPERS, the California Public Employees' Retirement System, had $1.1 billion in commodities when the crash came. And the damage didn't just come from oil. Soaring food prices driven by the commodities bubble led to catastrophes across the planet, forcing an estimated 100 million people into hunger and sparking food riots throughout the Third World.
Now oil prices are rising again: They shot up 20 percent in the month of May and have nearly doubled so far this year. Once again, the problem is not supply or demand. "The highest supply of oil in the last 20 years is now," says Rep. Bart Stupak, a Democrat from Michigan who serves on the House energy committee. "Demand is at a 10-year low. And yet prices are up."
Asked why politicians continue to harp on things like drilling or hybrid cars, when supply and demand have nothing to do with the high prices, Stupak shakes his head. "I think they just don't understand the problem very well," he says. "You can't explain it in 30 seconds, so politicians ignore it."
Monday, June 29, 2009
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Wake the fark up....
DNA, IQ, Survival Test...
Wouldn't Christine Roemer make a nice schoolmarm?
I mean... where'd they find her? Central casting?
From CNBC this morning:
"Consumer numbers back up our optimism."
"This is how most recessions end."
DNA/IQ/Survival Test:
This is a _________.
1. Recession.
2. Depression.
3. Pre-planned systemic collapse which will result in historic
socio-economic & geopolitical change, that will forever change
America, your life and that of your children.
While the sheeple remain fixated on Kris Allen & Adam Lambert
and an animal spirits manufactured greenshoots rally...
telling themselves that their home values, 401K's and jobs
will come back... all the while stage left... the US Treasury
is being looted and socialism is being installed in broad daylight,
right under their noses.
Set down your lattes, unplug your iPods, turn off American Idol
and wake the F@%# Up people...
You are sleep walking through the End of America.
Did you see this?
This is their contemptuous answer for our public outcry
on Congress passing the $787 Billiond Dollar Stimulus
Bill without reading it.
This is their "middle finger" answer to America, where
they are literally laughing in our face...
Isn't this funny. How cute...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1q1EoglEBY
This will become the final economic death blow to the
American economy. Cap and trade/carbon taxes...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRcq0Lxffwc
Energy & Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman was asked
point blank...
"Did you know that was in this (climate change) bill?"
His answer:
"You asking me? I certainly don't claim to know everything
that's in this bill. We relied very heavily on the scientists
from the IPCC and others... I don't know the details, I rely
on the scientists."
This is yet another U.N. agenda being ram-rodded down our
throats. It will be the final death blow the the American
economy, adding an estimated $3-$4,000 per household in
taxes and fees... and will send US industry, manufacturing
and jobs... running to China and India.
In case you're wondering, they're not even trying to hide
their agenda. It's all in plain sight. But, you won't find it
on American Idol, or ESPN... so here it is:
First, have you noticed how they've changed the "name" from
Global Warming to Climate Change?
Why do you suppose that is?
Maybe because scientist after scientist, and fact after fact,
have shown that there is no global warming?
http://www.heartland.org/full/24851/The_Politics_of_Global_Warming.html
The earth continually goes through warming and cooling cycles.
Over long periods of time climate changes.
Over short periods of time weather changes.
There have been relatively long periods of time when the world
has been colder than it is now.
There have been relatively long periods of time when the world
has been warmer than it is now.
C02 is a trace gas whose presence in the atmosphere can contribute
to an increase in the absorption of thermal radiation.
The increased use of carbon-based fuels has produced significant
increases in the amount of C02 released to the atmosphere,
though still dwarfed by natural sources.
Cooling in the ?20s
Heating in the ?30s and ?40s
Cooling in the ?50s and ?60s and ?70s
Warming in the ?80s and ?90s
And cooling for the past decade
So now, because the cat's out of the bag, it's "climate change."
And watch for yet another change to...
"Sustainability"
Watch how often that word begins to be woven into media talking
points over the coming year.
Let me cut to the chase for the pseudo intellectuals and
the self-absorbed yuppie cognoscenti who've had their
heads up their own self-indulgent asses for the last
twenty years, and who's attention deficit disorder
only allows them to absorb information in 15-30 second
tweets, twitters, and sound bytes...
The U.N. was founded by the old money trusts, international
bankers, and the illuminist & royal families of Europe,
as a front for global government.
John D. Rockefeller donated the land that the United Nations
now sits on. Ironically or, maybe not so... it used to
be the home of a Kosher slaughter house.
From those roots soon grew their foundations and charitable
trusts (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Ford etc) which in turn
funded hundreds (now thousands) of Think Tanks, Roundtables,
and NGO groups, which are now accurately referred to as
the "shadow government."
These are the "Thousand Points Of Light" that George H.W. Bush
referred to in his now (in)famous "New World Order" speech.
Through groups such as Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commision,
and the Council On Foreign Relations... the real governance
of the world is carried out.
This is what Eisenhower warned us about...
A world where generals want to be politicians, and where
politicians want to be generals. Where the lines between
the government and the military-industrial complex become
blurred.
And today, it's not just the lines between government and
the military-industrial complex that have become blurred,
but international borders as well.
J.F.K. not only echoed Eisenhower's warnings, he spoke
directly to "secret socities" (Skull & Bones just one,
among many)and vowed to dismantle the CIA and break it
into a thousand pieces.
So much for dismantling the shadow government and the
power of the military-industrial complex.
He was killed just weeks after uttering those words.
Of course this makes both Presidents conspiracy theorists.
Yet today, through the RIIA in Europe and the CFR in the US,
we see both groups dominate not just key cabinet positions
in government, but policy making as well.
Let's get back to Global Warming... Climate Change...
and Sustainability...
First, do you think Al Gore walked out of his 9,000 sq. ft.
home one morning, got into his limo and and then while
shuttling off across the globe on his private jet, had an
epiphany moment about global warming?
I hate to burst your tree hugging bubble, but Al Gore is
a fraud. He no more invented global warming than he did
the internet.
Al Gore was chosen to become the the pitchman. A frontman for
the globalists. And his Nobel Prize was pre-determined to add
credence and momentum to the cause.
After all...
Who would dare question a Nobel Prize winner?
The Nobel Prize gave global warming a near unquestionable
stamp of legitimacy.
Curious as to how the entire "global warming" issue really
came about?
A roundtable group called "The Club Of Rome" was given a
project by the globalists.
Their mandate was to come up with an agenda that would
accelerate the move to global governance, but also transfer
the shift in power and wealth away from America and into
the hands of the globalist bankers.
Because the scope was international, it couldn't be another
World War - a rally around the flag event. They needed
a common enemy for the entire world. And they found one in
man himself... man being the enemy of mother earth.
And here's how they will achieve their agenda.
They have used this strategy to execute nearly all of their
orchestrated agendas over the last two decades:
-- Announce a disaster
-- Cherry pick some results
-- Back it up with computer modeling
-- Proclaim a consensus
-- Stifle the opposition
-- Take over the process and control the funding
-- Roll the policy makers
Here's why you will soon be paying taxes for eating, breathing
and merely being... to globalist bankers.
Here's the Climate Change/UN agenda in their own words...
?All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is
only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be
overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.?
- Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution
?Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.?
- Sir John Houghton, first chairman of IPCC*
[IPCC - the group noted by Henry Waxman in the You Tube
Video above, who wrote the new carbon tax bill.]
?Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent
middle class - involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels,
appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing - are not
sustainable.?
- Maurice Strong, Rio Earth Summit
?A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United
States. De-development means bringing our economic system into
line with the realities of ecology and the world resource
situation.?
- Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies
?The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not
another United States. We can?t let other countries have the
same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have
in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right
where they are.?
- Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund
?Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent
of giving an idiot child a machine gun.?
- Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
?Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of
the earth is a willful expansion of our dysfunctional
civilization into Nature.?
- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance
?The big threat to the planet is people: there are too many,
doing too well economically and burning too much oil.?
? Sir James Lovelock, BBC Interview
?My three main goals would be to reduce human population to
about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial
infrastructure and see wilderness, with it?s full complement
of species, returning throughout the world.?
-Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!
"One America burdens the earth much more than twenty
Bangladeshes. This is a terrible thing to say in order to
stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people
per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it's just as bad
not to say it."
- Jacques Cousteau, UNESCO Courier
?Isn?t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized
civilizations collapse? Isn?t it our responsibility to bring
that about??
- Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme
America stands alone as the last bastion of capitalism,
freedom, and rugged individualism. The antithesis of
everything the UN globalist agenda stands for.
Yet as America, freedom, and capitalism are being dismantled
right before our eyes, we stand idly by and do nothing.
We stand in apathy.
We sit in denial.
We do nothing.
Nothing, as the wealth of our nation was systematically stolen
by the bankster-gangsters through de-regulation and a ponzi
scheme derivatives bubble.
And they did it systematically and by design through ...
-- The Commodity Futures Modernization Act.
-- The repeal of Glass Steagall.
-- Hank Paulsons' Investment Banker coup of the SEC in allowing
self regulation and the removal of leverage limits on capital.
-- Rubin & Summers gold lease/suppression scheme.
-- Greenspans fiat flood and 1% credit orgy.
-- Turning Fannie & Freddie into toxic waste dumps.
-- The Credit & Bond Rating Agency fraud.
-- A CDO/CDS derivatives house of cards.
-- The Naked Short/Rumor Mongering - Bear Raids on Bear Stearns
and Lehman Brothers.
-- Paulson & Bernake's gun to the head/extortion/martial law
heist of $800 Billion Dollars.
-- AIG being used to launder money to Goldman, offshore
hedge funds, and Euro banks like gold manipulator Deutsche Bank.
-- JP Morgan allowed to be the 800 lbs. Derivatives Geurilla
in the room that no one will talk about.
-- A privately owned Fed that refuses to tell Congress, or the
American people where trillions of dollars went.
And here's the tally of their looting so far...
Unfunded Social Security and Medicare Debt -- $65 trillion
U.S. Treasury Bond Debt -- $12 trillion
Fiscal Year 2009 Budget Deficit -- $2 trillion
Total Debt -- $79 trillion
A debt so large (by design) that it can never be repaid.
Interest payments alone now so large, that Thomas Jefferson's
words have now come true...
"If the American people ever allow the banks to control the
issuance of their currency... the banks and corporations that
will grow up around them will deprive the people of all
property, until their children wake up homeless on the
continent their fathers conquered."
The damage that's done is done.
The final takedown of America is in progress.
Sitting idly bye as another chapter unfolds is not an option.
When will you say - enough?
When will you say - no?
When will you rise up and act?
If not now, when?
And if not soon...
Your fathers will rue your very existence and your children will
curse your name into eternity. That I promise you.
Conspiracy theory?
Exaggeration?
Think one world government is nonsense, think it isn't
unfolding as you read this, think I've lost my mind?
Read on.
And by the way...
They are willing to "spill blood" to achieve their agenda,
are you willing to spill blood to stop it?
"We are not going to achieve a new world order without paying
for it in blood as well as in words and money."
- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Foreign Affairs Magazine (July/August 1995)
"In the 21st century, nations as we know them will be obsolete;
all states will recognize a single, global authority. National
sovereignty wasn't such a great idea after all."
- Strobe Talbot, President Clinton's Deputy Secretary of State,
as quoted in Time, July 20th, l992.
"The Trilateral Commission is intended to be the vehicle for
multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking
interests by seizing control of the political government of
the United States. The Trilateral Commission represents a
skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate
the four centers of power political, monetary, intellectual
and ecclesiastical. What the Trilateral Commission intends is
to create a worldwide economic power superior to the political
governments of the nationstates involved. As managers and
creators of the system, they will rule the future."
- U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater
in his l964 book: With No Apologies.
This present window of opportunity, during which a truly
peaceful and interdependent world order might be built, will
not be open for too long - We are on the verge of a global
transformation. ,b>All we need is the right major crisis and the
nations will accept the New World Order.
- David Rockefeller CFR & Trilateral Commission Founder.
"The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is the American Branch
of a society which originated in England and believes national
boundaries should be obliterated and one-world rule established."
- Carroll Quigley, Professor of History Georgetown University,
in his book "Tragedy and Hope".
"The interests behind the Bush administration, such as the
CFR, the Trilateral Commission - founded by Brzezinski for
David Rockefeller - and the Bilderberg Group have prepared for
and are now moving to implement open world dictatorship within
the next five years."
- Dr. Johannes Koeppl (Former official of the German Ministry
for Defence and advisor to NATO)
"I think there are 25,000 individuals that have used the power
of office, and they are in our Universities and they are in
our Congresses, and they believe in One World Government. And
if you believe in One World Government, then you are talking
about undermining National Sovereignty and you are talking
about setting up something that you could well call a Dictatorship
and those plans are there!"
- Congressman Ron Paul at an event near Austin, Texas
on August 30th, 2003
25,000 of them and 300 million of us.
And yet many of you hide in fear. Afraid to speak up. Afraid
to attend a Tea Party. Afraid of writing an op-ed in your
local newspaper. Afraid of calling your Congressman. Afraid
of getting on a list. Afraid of what someone will think.
Only 5% of Americans supported the American Revolution,
and only 1% fought for it.
While times change, people never do.
The call has now gone out for the 1%.
And the time is now.
S.O.T.B.
Wouldn't Christine Roemer make a nice schoolmarm?
I mean... where'd they find her? Central casting?
From CNBC this morning:
"Consumer numbers back up our optimism."
"This is how most recessions end."
DNA/IQ/Survival Test:
This is a _________.
1. Recession.
2. Depression.
3. Pre-planned systemic collapse which will result in historic
socio-economic & geopolitical change, that will forever change
America, your life and that of your children.
While the sheeple remain fixated on Kris Allen & Adam Lambert
and an animal spirits manufactured greenshoots rally...
telling themselves that their home values, 401K's and jobs
will come back... all the while stage left... the US Treasury
is being looted and socialism is being installed in broad daylight,
right under their noses.
Set down your lattes, unplug your iPods, turn off American Idol
and wake the F@%# Up people...
You are sleep walking through the End of America.
Did you see this?
This is their contemptuous answer for our public outcry
on Congress passing the $787 Billiond Dollar Stimulus
Bill without reading it.
This is their "middle finger" answer to America, where
they are literally laughing in our face...
Isn't this funny. How cute...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1q1EoglEBY
This will become the final economic death blow to the
American economy. Cap and trade/carbon taxes...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRcq0Lxffwc
Energy & Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman was asked
point blank...
"Did you know that was in this (climate change) bill?"
His answer:
"You asking me? I certainly don't claim to know everything
that's in this bill. We relied very heavily on the scientists
from the IPCC and others... I don't know the details, I rely
on the scientists."
This is yet another U.N. agenda being ram-rodded down our
throats. It will be the final death blow the the American
economy, adding an estimated $3-$4,000 per household in
taxes and fees... and will send US industry, manufacturing
and jobs... running to China and India.
In case you're wondering, they're not even trying to hide
their agenda. It's all in plain sight. But, you won't find it
on American Idol, or ESPN... so here it is:
First, have you noticed how they've changed the "name" from
Global Warming to Climate Change?
Why do you suppose that is?
Maybe because scientist after scientist, and fact after fact,
have shown that there is no global warming?
http://www.heartland.org/full/24851/The_Politics_of_Global_Warming.html
The earth continually goes through warming and cooling cycles.
Over long periods of time climate changes.
Over short periods of time weather changes.
There have been relatively long periods of time when the world
has been colder than it is now.
There have been relatively long periods of time when the world
has been warmer than it is now.
C02 is a trace gas whose presence in the atmosphere can contribute
to an increase in the absorption of thermal radiation.
The increased use of carbon-based fuels has produced significant
increases in the amount of C02 released to the atmosphere,
though still dwarfed by natural sources.
Cooling in the ?20s
Heating in the ?30s and ?40s
Cooling in the ?50s and ?60s and ?70s
Warming in the ?80s and ?90s
And cooling for the past decade
So now, because the cat's out of the bag, it's "climate change."
And watch for yet another change to...
"Sustainability"
Watch how often that word begins to be woven into media talking
points over the coming year.
Let me cut to the chase for the pseudo intellectuals and
the self-absorbed yuppie cognoscenti who've had their
heads up their own self-indulgent asses for the last
twenty years, and who's attention deficit disorder
only allows them to absorb information in 15-30 second
tweets, twitters, and sound bytes...
The U.N. was founded by the old money trusts, international
bankers, and the illuminist & royal families of Europe,
as a front for global government.
John D. Rockefeller donated the land that the United Nations
now sits on. Ironically or, maybe not so... it used to
be the home of a Kosher slaughter house.
From those roots soon grew their foundations and charitable
trusts (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Ford etc) which in turn
funded hundreds (now thousands) of Think Tanks, Roundtables,
and NGO groups, which are now accurately referred to as
the "shadow government."
These are the "Thousand Points Of Light" that George H.W. Bush
referred to in his now (in)famous "New World Order" speech.
Through groups such as Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commision,
and the Council On Foreign Relations... the real governance
of the world is carried out.
This is what Eisenhower warned us about...
A world where generals want to be politicians, and where
politicians want to be generals. Where the lines between
the government and the military-industrial complex become
blurred.
And today, it's not just the lines between government and
the military-industrial complex that have become blurred,
but international borders as well.
J.F.K. not only echoed Eisenhower's warnings, he spoke
directly to "secret socities" (Skull & Bones just one,
among many)and vowed to dismantle the CIA and break it
into a thousand pieces.
So much for dismantling the shadow government and the
power of the military-industrial complex.
He was killed just weeks after uttering those words.
Of course this makes both Presidents conspiracy theorists.
Yet today, through the RIIA in Europe and the CFR in the US,
we see both groups dominate not just key cabinet positions
in government, but policy making as well.
Let's get back to Global Warming... Climate Change...
and Sustainability...
First, do you think Al Gore walked out of his 9,000 sq. ft.
home one morning, got into his limo and and then while
shuttling off across the globe on his private jet, had an
epiphany moment about global warming?
I hate to burst your tree hugging bubble, but Al Gore is
a fraud. He no more invented global warming than he did
the internet.
Al Gore was chosen to become the the pitchman. A frontman for
the globalists. And his Nobel Prize was pre-determined to add
credence and momentum to the cause.
After all...
Who would dare question a Nobel Prize winner?
The Nobel Prize gave global warming a near unquestionable
stamp of legitimacy.
Curious as to how the entire "global warming" issue really
came about?
A roundtable group called "The Club Of Rome" was given a
project by the globalists.
Their mandate was to come up with an agenda that would
accelerate the move to global governance, but also transfer
the shift in power and wealth away from America and into
the hands of the globalist bankers.
Because the scope was international, it couldn't be another
World War - a rally around the flag event. They needed
a common enemy for the entire world. And they found one in
man himself... man being the enemy of mother earth.
And here's how they will achieve their agenda.
They have used this strategy to execute nearly all of their
orchestrated agendas over the last two decades:
-- Announce a disaster
-- Cherry pick some results
-- Back it up with computer modeling
-- Proclaim a consensus
-- Stifle the opposition
-- Take over the process and control the funding
-- Roll the policy makers
Here's why you will soon be paying taxes for eating, breathing
and merely being... to globalist bankers.
Here's the Climate Change/UN agenda in their own words...
?All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is
only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be
overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.?
- Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution
?Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.?
- Sir John Houghton, first chairman of IPCC*
[IPCC - the group noted by Henry Waxman in the You Tube
Video above, who wrote the new carbon tax bill.]
?Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent
middle class - involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels,
appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing - are not
sustainable.?
- Maurice Strong, Rio Earth Summit
?A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United
States. De-development means bringing our economic system into
line with the realities of ecology and the world resource
situation.?
- Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies
?The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not
another United States. We can?t let other countries have the
same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have
in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right
where they are.?
- Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund
?Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent
of giving an idiot child a machine gun.?
- Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
?Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of
the earth is a willful expansion of our dysfunctional
civilization into Nature.?
- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance
?The big threat to the planet is people: there are too many,
doing too well economically and burning too much oil.?
? Sir James Lovelock, BBC Interview
?My three main goals would be to reduce human population to
about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial
infrastructure and see wilderness, with it?s full complement
of species, returning throughout the world.?
-Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!
"One America burdens the earth much more than twenty
Bangladeshes. This is a terrible thing to say in order to
stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people
per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it's just as bad
not to say it."
- Jacques Cousteau, UNESCO Courier
?Isn?t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized
civilizations collapse? Isn?t it our responsibility to bring
that about??
- Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme
America stands alone as the last bastion of capitalism,
freedom, and rugged individualism. The antithesis of
everything the UN globalist agenda stands for.
Yet as America, freedom, and capitalism are being dismantled
right before our eyes, we stand idly by and do nothing.
We stand in apathy.
We sit in denial.
We do nothing.
Nothing, as the wealth of our nation was systematically stolen
by the bankster-gangsters through de-regulation and a ponzi
scheme derivatives bubble.
And they did it systematically and by design through ...
-- The Commodity Futures Modernization Act.
-- The repeal of Glass Steagall.
-- Hank Paulsons' Investment Banker coup of the SEC in allowing
self regulation and the removal of leverage limits on capital.
-- Rubin & Summers gold lease/suppression scheme.
-- Greenspans fiat flood and 1% credit orgy.
-- Turning Fannie & Freddie into toxic waste dumps.
-- The Credit & Bond Rating Agency fraud.
-- A CDO/CDS derivatives house of cards.
-- The Naked Short/Rumor Mongering - Bear Raids on Bear Stearns
and Lehman Brothers.
-- Paulson & Bernake's gun to the head/extortion/martial law
heist of $800 Billion Dollars.
-- AIG being used to launder money to Goldman, offshore
hedge funds, and Euro banks like gold manipulator Deutsche Bank.
-- JP Morgan allowed to be the 800 lbs. Derivatives Geurilla
in the room that no one will talk about.
-- A privately owned Fed that refuses to tell Congress, or the
American people where trillions of dollars went.
And here's the tally of their looting so far...
Unfunded Social Security and Medicare Debt -- $65 trillion
U.S. Treasury Bond Debt -- $12 trillion
Fiscal Year 2009 Budget Deficit -- $2 trillion
Total Debt -- $79 trillion
A debt so large (by design) that it can never be repaid.
Interest payments alone now so large, that Thomas Jefferson's
words have now come true...
"If the American people ever allow the banks to control the
issuance of their currency... the banks and corporations that
will grow up around them will deprive the people of all
property, until their children wake up homeless on the
continent their fathers conquered."
The damage that's done is done.
The final takedown of America is in progress.
Sitting idly bye as another chapter unfolds is not an option.
When will you say - enough?
When will you say - no?
When will you rise up and act?
If not now, when?
And if not soon...
Your fathers will rue your very existence and your children will
curse your name into eternity. That I promise you.
Conspiracy theory?
Exaggeration?
Think one world government is nonsense, think it isn't
unfolding as you read this, think I've lost my mind?
Read on.
And by the way...
They are willing to "spill blood" to achieve their agenda,
are you willing to spill blood to stop it?
"We are not going to achieve a new world order without paying
for it in blood as well as in words and money."
- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Foreign Affairs Magazine (July/August 1995)
"In the 21st century, nations as we know them will be obsolete;
all states will recognize a single, global authority. National
sovereignty wasn't such a great idea after all."
- Strobe Talbot, President Clinton's Deputy Secretary of State,
as quoted in Time, July 20th, l992.
"The Trilateral Commission is intended to be the vehicle for
multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking
interests by seizing control of the political government of
the United States. The Trilateral Commission represents a
skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate
the four centers of power political, monetary, intellectual
and ecclesiastical. What the Trilateral Commission intends is
to create a worldwide economic power superior to the political
governments of the nationstates involved. As managers and
creators of the system, they will rule the future."
- U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater
in his l964 book: With No Apologies.
This present window of opportunity, during which a truly
peaceful and interdependent world order might be built, will
not be open for too long - We are on the verge of a global
transformation. ,b>All we need is the right major crisis and the
nations will accept the New World Order.
- David Rockefeller CFR & Trilateral Commission Founder.
"The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is the American Branch
of a society which originated in England and believes national
boundaries should be obliterated and one-world rule established."
- Carroll Quigley, Professor of History Georgetown University,
in his book "Tragedy and Hope".
"The interests behind the Bush administration, such as the
CFR, the Trilateral Commission - founded by Brzezinski for
David Rockefeller - and the Bilderberg Group have prepared for
and are now moving to implement open world dictatorship within
the next five years."
- Dr. Johannes Koeppl (Former official of the German Ministry
for Defence and advisor to NATO)
"I think there are 25,000 individuals that have used the power
of office, and they are in our Universities and they are in
our Congresses, and they believe in One World Government. And
if you believe in One World Government, then you are talking
about undermining National Sovereignty and you are talking
about setting up something that you could well call a Dictatorship
and those plans are there!"
- Congressman Ron Paul at an event near Austin, Texas
on August 30th, 2003
25,000 of them and 300 million of us.
And yet many of you hide in fear. Afraid to speak up. Afraid
to attend a Tea Party. Afraid of writing an op-ed in your
local newspaper. Afraid of calling your Congressman. Afraid
of getting on a list. Afraid of what someone will think.
Only 5% of Americans supported the American Revolution,
and only 1% fought for it.
While times change, people never do.
The call has now gone out for the 1%.
And the time is now.
S.O.T.B.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Who needs TARP?
Think about this one...
Who Needs TARP?
It is August. In a small town on the South Coast of France, holiday season is in full swing, but it is raining so there is not too much business happening. Everyone is heavily in debt.
Luckily, a rich Russian tourist arrives in the foyer of the small local hotel.
He asks for a room and puts a Euro100 note on the reception counter, takes a key and goes to inspect the room located up the stairs on the third floor.
The hotel owner takes the banknote in a hurry and rushes to his meat supplier to whom he owes E100.
The butcher takes the money and races to his supplier to pay his debt.
The wholesaler rushes to the farmer to pay E100 for pigs he purchased some time ago.
The farmer triumphantly gives the E100 note to a local prostitute who gave him her services on credit.
The prostitute goes quickly to a hotel to pay her bill for her hourly room use to entertain clients.
At that moment, the rich Russian is coming down the stairs, greets the prostitute and informs the hotel owner that the proposed room is unsatisfactory and takes his E100 back and departs.
There was no profit or income.
But everyone no longer has any debt and the small townspeople look optimistically towards their future.
Who Needs TARP?
It is August. In a small town on the South Coast of France, holiday season is in full swing, but it is raining so there is not too much business happening. Everyone is heavily in debt.
Luckily, a rich Russian tourist arrives in the foyer of the small local hotel.
He asks for a room and puts a Euro100 note on the reception counter, takes a key and goes to inspect the room located up the stairs on the third floor.
The hotel owner takes the banknote in a hurry and rushes to his meat supplier to whom he owes E100.
The butcher takes the money and races to his supplier to pay his debt.
The wholesaler rushes to the farmer to pay E100 for pigs he purchased some time ago.
The farmer triumphantly gives the E100 note to a local prostitute who gave him her services on credit.
The prostitute goes quickly to a hotel to pay her bill for her hourly room use to entertain clients.
At that moment, the rich Russian is coming down the stairs, greets the prostitute and informs the hotel owner that the proposed room is unsatisfactory and takes his E100 back and departs.
There was no profit or income.
But everyone no longer has any debt and the small townspeople look optimistically towards their future.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Top Mission Statements
Top 25 mission statements of the top tech companies and
websites. These 25 statements listed were all collected from the
official website of the company, while others were found from secondary
sources; some are official mission statements, while others are parts
taken from company overviews or the introduction to a site?s About page.
It was interesting to see that not all companies or sites actually
define their mission clearly to the public.
1. *IBM:* ?At IBM, we strive to lead in the invention, development and
manufacture of the industry?s most advanced information technologies,
including computer systems, software, storage systems and
microelectronics. We translate these advanced technologies into value
for our customers through our professional solutions, services and
consulting businesses worldwide.?
2. *Digg:* ?Digg is a place for people to discover and share content
from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the
most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our
users. You won?t find editors at Digg ? we?re here to provide a place
where people can collectively determine the value of content and we?re
changing the way people consume information online.?
3. *43things.com:* ?Discover what?s important, make it happen, share
your progress.?
4. *Microsoft:* ?At Microsoft, our mission and values are to help people
and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential.?
5. *Cisco:* ?Cisco ? enables people to make powerful connections ?
whether in business, education, philanthropy, or creativity. Cisco
hardware, software, and service offerings are used to create the
Internet solutions that make networks possible-providing easy access to
information anywhere, at any time.?
6. *Google:* ?Google?s mission is to organize the world?s information
and make it universally accessible and useful.?
7. *Wikipedia:* ?Wikipedia ? is a multilingual, web-based, free content
encyclopedia project? Visitors do not need specialised qualifications to
contribute, since their primary role is to write articles that cover
existing knowledge; this means that people of all ages and cultural and
social background can write Wikipedia articles. With rare exceptions,
articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet, simply by
clicking the edit this page link.?
And from the Wikimedia Foundation: ?The mission of the Wikimedia
Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect
and develop educational content under a free license or in the public
domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally. ?the Foundation
provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework
for the support and development of multilingual wiki projects and other
endeavors which serve this mission. The Foundation will make and keep
useful information from its projects available on the Internet free of
charge, in perpetuity.?
8. *Apple:* ?Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation
with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and
professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media
revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes
online store, and has entered the mobile phone market this year with its
revolutionary iPhone.?
9. *Intel:* ?Delight our customers, employees, and shareholders by
relentlessly delivering the platform and technology advancements that
become essential to the way we work and live.?
10. *Dell: *?Dell?s mission is to be the most successful computer
company in the world at delivering the best customer experience in
markets we serve.
11. *Sony:* ?Sony is a leading manufacturer of audio, video,
communications, and information technology products for the consumer and
professional markets. Its music, motion picture, television, computer
entertainment, and online businesses make Sony one of the most
comprehensive entertainment companies in the world.?
12. *Techmeme:* ?? the next big story in technology may reside on a blog
you?ve never heard of or a news site you don?t have time to scan. So I
built a software agent to surface these links in real time and the
result is Techmeme?
13. *Amazon:* ?Our vision is to be earth?s most customer centric
company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover
anything they might want to buy online.?
14. *Ebay:* ?eBay?s mission is to provide a global trading platform
where practically anyone can trade practically anything.?
15. *Twitter:* ?Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers
to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick,
frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing??
16. *Yahoo:* ?To connect people to their passions, their communities,
and the world?s knowledge.?
17. *Facebook:* ?Facebook is a social utility that helps people
communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers.
The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of
information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people?s
real-world social connections.?
18. *Blogger:* ?? focusing on helping people have their own voice on the
web and organizing the world?s information from the personal perspective.?
19. *Sun Microsystems:* ?The Network Is The Computer ? Sun was founded
with one driving vision. A vision of computers that talk to each other
no matter who built them. A vision in which technology works for you,
not the other way around. While others protected proprietary,
stand-alone architectures, we focused on taking companies into the
network age, providing systems and software with the scalability and
reliability needed to drive the electronic marketplace.?
20. *Techcrunch:* ?? dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing
new Internet products and companies. In addition to covering new
companies, we profile existing companies that are making an impact
(commercial and/or cultural) on the new web space.?
21. *StumbleUpon:* ?StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great
websites.?
22. *Del.icio.us: *?? the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your
bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any
computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. ? You can also use
del.icio.us to see the interesting links that your friends and other
people bookmark?
23. *Fark.com:* ?? a news aggregator and an edited social networking
news site ? The idea was to have the word Fark come to symbolize news
that is really Not News.?
24. *Orkut:* ?orkut is an online community designed to make your social
life more active and stimulating. orkut?s social network can help you
maintain existing relationships with pictures and messages, and
establish new ones by reaching out to people you?ve never met before? It
is our mission to help you create a closer, more intimate network of
friends. We hope to put you on the path to social bliss soon.?
25. *Adobe:* ?Our mission is to revolutionize how the world engages with
ideas and information.?
Non Profits
Non-Profit
26 When a Non-Profit organization's purpose is to serve humanity, it is
essential that their Mission Statement clearly defines the services to
be performed and the compassion driving the people who provide those
services.
27Mission Statement
NFF's mission is to serve as a development finance institution for
nonprofit organizations, working to fill their overall need for capital
through financing and advisory services. NFF supports its nonprofit
clients' multi-faceted contributions to communities, advances community
and economic development goals, and works to fill the overall need for
capitalization of organizations in this sector.
28Mission Statement
The mission of the American Antigravity Corporation is to provide online
scientific and educational material and support to the scientific
community and general public, relating to aerospace, renewable energy,
and other scientific disciplines. American Antigravity fosters learning
and academic excellence by working with scientists, educators, and
inventors to create a safe, fulfilling, and academically enriching
environment for breakthrough science.
29Mission Statement
PANPHA represents over 320 nonprofit providers of long-term care and
housing services for 65,000 elderly residents across Pennsylvania. The
Association is committed to helping its members provide quality care
efficiently and effectively for the individuals and families they serve.
In an age of impersonal care, PANPHA members put people before profits.
30Mission Statement
Our mission is simple: To offer education on the wise use of credit.
31Mission Statement
"Provide affordable, educational, and outdoor recreational activities in
a safe, clean, and inviting environment for people of all ages through
sound business and management practices"
32Mission Statement
t is our mission to disseminate timely and useful information, to
perform charitable services, and to conduct research to enhance
productivity and quality of life for amputees in America.
33Mission Statement
To strengthen communities in rural Minnesota, especially the Grand Rapids.
34Mission Statement
Since its formation, the mission of the Foundation has been to improve
the quality of life through a balance between technology and nature.
35Mission Statement
Cottonwood Foundation, a charitable, tax-exempt, 501(c)(3) organization,
is dedicated to promoting empowerment of people, protection of the
environment, and respect for cultural diversity. The foundation focuses
its funding on committed, grass roots organizations that rely strongly
on volunteer efforts and where foundation support will make a
significant difference. At least 90% of Cottonwood Foundation's
expenditures will be for grants to other organizations.
36Mission Statement
The Initiative Foundation's mission is to unlock the potential of the
people of central Minnesota to build and sustain healthy communities.
37Mission Statement
The Jerome Foundation, created by artist and philanthropist Jerome Hill
(1905-1972), makes grants to support the creation and production of new
artistic works by emerging artists, and contributes to the professional
advancement of those artists.
38Mission Statement
"to provide financial assistance to individuals who must eliminate
personal debt in order to pursue their vocation to priesthood or
religious life in the Catholic Church."
39Mission Statement
The Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation seeks to improve
cardiovascular health through education and clinical research.
40Mission Statement
To strengthen and expand philanthropy.
41Mission Statement
The Northland Foundation is a resource for people, businesses, and
communities in Northeast Minnesota working toward prosperity through
economic and social justice. Our purpose is to strengthen families, grow
a sustainable regional economy, cultivate leadership and philanthropy,
and foster respect for all. Through our grants to non-profits, loans to
local businesses, and other special programs, the Northland Foundation
is building a strong foundation for the future of our region.
42Mission Statement
Our mission is to actively serve the people of the East Metro area by
building permanent charitable capital, making philanthropic grants, and
providing services that contribute to the health and vitality of the
community.
43Mission Statement
American Experiment, a nonpartisan think tank, gives voice to
conservative and free market ideas and spotlights their importance in
tackling the most difficult issues facing Minnesota and our nation.
44Mission Statement
To Promote the Creation, Performance, and Appreciation of the Arts in
Region 7W. Awarding arts grants, providing arts services, coordinating
arts advocacy, and generally promoting appreciation and participation in
the arts - all are goals of the CMAB.
45Mission Statement
To provide high-quality, compassionate and comprehensive legal services
to as many low-income persons as possible.
46Mission Statement
Our purpose is to build the capacity of nonprofit organizations to
achieve mission-driven results. Since 1979, we have provided quality,
affordable management consulting and board recruitment services to
thousands of nonprofit groups. MAP for Nonprofits primarily works with
nonprofit organizations in the Greater Twin Cities Metropolitan Area of
Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota.
47Mission Statement
The Minnesota Land Trust permanently protects the lands and waters that
define our communities and enrich our quality of life.
48Mission Statement
The goal of the Norwegian-American Historical Association (NAHA) is to
locate, collect, preserve and interpret the Norwegian-American part of
this whole with accuracy, integrity, and liveliness. In doing so,
Norwegian Americans will have an identifiable position in America's
past, present, and future.
49Mission Statement
The mission of Second Harvest Heartland is to fight hunger through
community partnerships.
50Mission Statement
"The mission of the Women's Cancer Resource Center is to support women
in taking charge of their cancer experience." -- WCRC Mission Statement
51Mission Statement
The YMCA of Greater Saint Paul practices Christian values by providing
opportunities for everyone to build strong kids, strong families, and
strong communities. The mission of the YMCA of Metropolitan Minneapolis
is to develop the total person-spirit, mind and body-through
character-development programs that build strong kids, strong families,
and strong communities.
52Mission Statement
The mission of the Connecticut Association of Nonprofits is to support
and strengthen nonprofit organizations in building and sustaining
healthy communities in Connecticut.
53Mission Statement
The St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology is a non-profit research and
educational institute that promotes life-transforming Scripture study in
the Catholic tradition. The Center serves clergy and laity, students and
scholars, with research and study tools - from books and publications to
multimedia and on-line programming. Our goal is to be a teacher of
teachers. We want to raise up a new generation of priests who are fluent
in the Bible and lay people who are biblically literate. For us, this
means more than helping people to know their way around the Bible. It
means equipping them to enter into the heart of the living Word of God
and to be transformed and renewed by this encounter. We read the Bible
from the heart of the Church, in light of the Church's Liturgy and
living Tradition. In this way, we hope to help people experience the
heart-to-heart encounter that Jesus' disciples experienced on that first
Easter night, when they knew Him in the breaking of the bread: "Did not
our hearts burn within us while He talked to us...while He opened to us
the Scriptures?" (see Luke 24:13-37)
54Mission Statement
SAVE's Mission is to prevent suicide through public awareness and
education, eliminate stigma and serve as a resource to those touched by
suicide.
55Mission Statement
Empowering children and families to achieve lifelong successes
56Mission Statement
The mission of PACER Center is to expand opportunities and enhance the
quality of life of children and young adults with disabilities and their
families, based on the concept of parents helping parents.
57Mission Statement
MHP's mission is to promote homes for all Minnesotans and assist
Minnesota communities in the creation and preservation of housing
affordable to low and moderate income people.
58Mission Statement
The mission of the Minnesota Center Against Violence and Abuse (MINCAVA)
is to support research, education, and access to violence related
resources.
59Mission Statement
In partnerships with public and private organizations, MAAA helps elders
age successfully. It does this by building community capacity,
advocating for aging issues, maximizing service effectiveness and
linking people with information.
60Mission Statement
"Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota expresses the love of Christ for
all people through acts of service."
61Mission Statement
The Junior League of Saint Paul, Inc. is an organization of women
committed to promoting volunteerism, developing the potential of women,
and improving communities through the effective action and leadership of
trained volunteers. Its purpose is exclusively educational and charitable
62Mission Statement
The mission of the Institute is to: 1) provide a center for information
and assembly for all nationalities and races; 2) develop fellowship and
understanding among such persons through group meetings and activities;
3) promote the welfare of our foreign-born population and their
families; and 4) preserve and stimulate intercultural values.
63Mission Statement
Our mission is to create a nurturing, stable, and culturally diverse
family environment which encourages youth with emotional and behavioral
disturbances to become effective, contributing adults.
64Mission Statement
Good in the 'Hood exists to do all the good we can, in all the ways we
can, in all the places we can, at all the times we can, to all the
people we can, as long as we ever can.
65Mission Statement
Our mission is to prevent child abuse and neglect by promoting positive
parenting, healthy families, and homes where children are valued and loved.
66Mission Statement
The mission of the Family Institute for Creative Well-Being is to
enhance the emotional, social, and spiritual health of families who have
members with disabilities or chronic illnesses though therapeutic use of
the creative arts.
67Mission Statement
Connecting people, enriching lives.
68Mission Statement
To empower women and their families to initiate personal and social change.
69Mission Statement
Our Mission is - to help children thrive and to build, strengthen and
sustain individual family and community life.
70Mission Statement
The mission of Catholic Charities is to serve those most in need. We
help individuals and families to reach their full potential as we call
for justice in the community
71Mission Statement
Wilderness Inquiry provides outdoor adventure experiences to inspire
personal growth, community integration and enhanced awareness of the
natural environment. Wilderness Inquiry encourages people to open their
minds and hearts to new possibilities by demonstrating that collectively
and individually they are capable of doing more than they thought possible.
72Mission Statement
The Rivers Council of Minnesota helps people protect, restore and enjoy
the state's 92,000 miles of rivers by building awareness of river
resources, promoting and teaching river health monitoring and fostering
grassroots action to improve and maintain the health of rivers.
73Mission Statement
Mission Statement - The Freshwater Society is dedicated to promoting the
protection and rational management of all freshwater resources.
74Mission Statement
The mission of E-quip Africa is to collect personal computers in the
United States and place them in schools in the West African country of
Ghana.
75Mission Statement
"The Bakken is a center for education and learning that furthers the
understanding of the history, cultural context, and applications of
electricity and magnetism in the life sciences and their benefits to
contemporary society."
76Mission Statement
To protect, improve and promote the enjoyment of the natural
environment through formal and informal education programs and
research; to assist and encourage environmental education programs,
centers, and careers.
77Mission Statement
Our MISSION is to be a Refuge in which Children who are Hurting
Emotionally, Mentally or Physically can find Love, Hope, Peace & Joy.
78Mission Statement
Our mission is to help nonprofits cope with uncertainty. We offer a wide
range of services (from technical assistance to software to training and
consulting help) on a vast array of risk management topics (from
employment practices, to insurance purchasing to internal controls and
preventing child abuse). We do not sell insurance or endorse
organizations that do.
79Mission Statement
Groundspring.org's mission is to improve the effectiveness of the
nonprofit sector by providing information technology solutions that
facilitate and enhance communication and engagement between nonprofit
organizations and their stakeholders. We do this by offering software
tools and services, training, and consulting that help nonprofit
organizations raise funds and communicate with their stakeholders
online, and manage their operations more effectively.
80Mission Statement
To advance the common good by leading, strengthening, and mobilizing the
independent sector.
81Mission Statement
IFPRI's mission is to provide policy solutions that cut hunger and
malnutrition.
82Mission Statement
Ten Thousand Villages provides vital, fair income to Third World people
by marketing their handicrafts and telling their stories in North
America. We work with artisans who would otherwise be unemployed or
underemployed. The income artisans earn helps pay for food, education,
health care and housing.
83Mission Statement
Global Rights is a human rights advocacy group that partners with local
activists to challenge injustice and amplify new voices within the
global discourse. With offices in countries around the world, we help
local activists create just societies through proven strategies for
effecting change.
84Mission Statement
Our mission is to increase access to comprehensive primary healthcare to
the medically uninsured and underserved.
85Mission Statement
BELL was created to dramatically increase the academic achievements,
self-esteem and life opportunities of elementary school children living
in underserved communities by increasing their mastery of the basic
skills of reading, writing and arithmetic; raising children's academic
expectations and self-esteem; empowering parents; and developing
effective mentoring relationships between children and positive adult
role models.
86Mission Statement
Our mission is to prepare young leaders for responsible citizenship and
provide outstanding high school students the chance to explore the
political process firsthand.
87Mission Statement
A leader and innovator in teen pregnancy prevention, Inwood House is
dedicated to helping young people become self reliant, healthy adults.
88Mission Statement
Twenty years from now, when business leaders and policy makers from the
United States and countries of pivotal concern for global peace sit down
at the negotiating table, will they meet as strangers or as colleagues
with a history of cooperation? Network 20/20 is an independent
membership organization that helps prepare next generation leaders in
the U.S. to participate meaningfully in public diplomacy and the
creation and execution of policies promoting global public security. We
do this by means of lectures and educational initiatives here at home
and through a series of trips and exchanges abroad. Network 20/20 fills
two major gaps in U.S. foreign policy: lack of youth participation and
lack of serious input from civil society in general. Network 20/20 helps
to bridge these gaps by assisting mid-career individuals with new and
vigorous ideas drawn from their experiences in the real world of civil
society to refine their foreign policy understandings and share their
insights with their peers. Network 20/20 members come from the business
world, the professions, media, NGOs, think tanks, government and
academia. They are a diverse group that includes talented foreign
nationals living in the U.S. What draws them together is that they are
all "thinking," motivated and disciplined individuals who are
volunteering significant time and energy to improve their understanding
of the world.
89Mission Statement
STITCH is a network of women unionists, organizers, and activists that
builds connections between Central American and US women organizing for
economic justice.
90Mission Statement
Catalyst is the leading research and advisory organization working with
businesses and the professions to build inclusive environments and
expand opportunities for women at work. As an independent, nonprofit
membership organization, Catalyst conducts research on all aspects of
women's career advancement and provides strategic and web-based
consulting services globally. With the support and confidence of member
corporations and firms, Catalyst remains connected to business and its
changing needs. In addition, Catalyst honors exemplary business
initiatives that promote women's leadership with the annual Catalyst
Award. With offices in New York, San Jose, and Toronto, Catalyst is
consistently ranked No. 1 among U.S. nonprofits focused on women's
issues by The American Institute of Philanthropy.
91Mission Statement
To work in partnership with people of faith and conscience around the
world to end poverty and injustice that affect rural communities.
92Mission Statement
Children's Rights' mission is to promote and protect the right of
children who are abused and neglected to grow up in permanent, loving
families. By creating beneficial and lasting change in child welfare
systems, we ensure that children who are dependent on these systems stay
safe, receive quality care and services, and return to their own
families safely or find adoptive families so that they can have healthy
childhoods that lead to productive adult lives.
93Mission Statement
The right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental
health... The right to equality before the law... The right to be free
from torture...
94Mission Statement
The Jane Goodall Institute advances the power of individuals to take
informed and compassionate action to improve the environment of all
living things.
95Mission Statement
The Mission of the St. Albans Community Justice Center is to collaborate
with community members, local agencies and municipal and state
government to identify areas of conflict within our region and undertake
activities that will empower citizens to resolve such conflicts. Focus
areas include: neighborhood conflicts, school/youth conflicts and
conflicts that result when offenders reenter communities.
96Mission Statement
Founded in 1921, the Council on Foreign Relations is an independent,
national membership organization and a nonpartisan center for scholars
dedicated to producing and disseminating ideas so that individual and
corporate members, as well as policymakers, journalists, students, and
interested citizens in the United States and other countries, can better
understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United
States and other governments.
97Mission Statement
Liberty's Promise works to sustain and support young immigrants while
encouraging them to be active and conscientious American citizens. Our
programs of direct assistance and research aim to make the immigrant
experience an affirmative one for young newcomers while instilling in
them a sense of pride and support for American ideals of democracy and
freedom. By doing so, Liberty's Promise seeks to reaffirm our
fundamental egalitarian and democratic traditions for future generations.
98Mission Statement
Angel's Closet reaches out to families in need by providing clothing to
children across the DFW area. Our ministry works with local
organizations, churches, and families to locate children in need. We
rely on the generosity of the community to help reach our goal of
fulfilling those children's needs.
99Mission Statement
Zoo New England is dedicated to teaching wildlife and wildland
preservation through responsible management and exhibition of wildlife.
Our mission is to inspire humankind to respect our natural world. We are
dedicated to caring for and sharing animals and their habitats,
participating in local and global conservation programs, and providing
an experience that fosters an ethic of care and wonder towards the
environment.
100Mission Statement
iMentor's mission is to improve the lives of young people from
underserved communities in New York City through innovative,
technology-based approaches to youth mentoring and education.
101Mission Statement
Through education, advocacy, and citizen empowerment in Indiana, the
Hoosier Environmental Council works to protect and restore the natural
systems upon which life depends.
102Mission Statement
Our mission is to develop academic skills, behaviors, and attitudes in
academically motivated and underserved middle school children to improve
their grades, standardized test scores, attendance, and opportunities:
acceptance to top high school programs.
103Mission Statement
To enhance the economy of the five boroughs of New York City and
maintain the city's position as the center of world commerce, finance
and innovation.
104Mission Statement
To prepare youth for a productive adulthood through entrepreneurship,
technology and life skills education.
105Mission Statement
Emmaus reaches out to build trust with seniors to provide support,
advocacy and services that help them remain active, respected and vital
members of their community.
106 Mission Statement
Creating ownership and economic opportunity for minorities, women, rural
residents and low-wealth families.
107Mission Statement
The Idaho Youth Ranch provides troubled children and families a bridge
to a valued, responsible and productive future.
108Mission Statement
The mission of the American Lung Association(r) is to prevent lung
disease and promote lung health.
109Mission Statement
As the Foundation continues to mature, its mission will remain
steadfast. Wish children of the past, present, and future will have an
opportunity to share the power of a wish(r).
110Mission Statement
The Oregon Water Trust mission is to restore surface water flows for
healthier streams in Oregon by using cooperative, free-market solutions.
Founded in 1993 by a group with diverse water interests, we were the
first water trust in the nation. With our transactional approach, we
focus on streams where small amounts of water provide significant
ecological benefits. The result is healthier streams for fish, wildlife,
and people.
111Mission Statement
Encourage bicycling, walking and public transit as alternatives to
automobile use, and reduce automobile use and its attendant
environmental and social harms.
112Mission Statement
Lifeline's mission is to enhance the positive quality of individual,
family, and community life by providing services that are consistently
available, accessible, and responsive to the needs of individuals,
families, and groups seeking assistance, and to work with the community
to contribute, facilitate, and promote solutions for the enrichment of all.
113Mission Statement
The mission of this non-profit organization is to increase public and
professional awareness about the prevention, detection, and treatment of
skin cancer.
114Mission Statement
Close Up Foundation encourages responsible participation in the
democratic process through educational programs and publications in
government and citizenship. The Foundation is committed to developing
new and better ways for young people, teachers, and a widening circle of
citizens of all ages to gain a practical understanding of how public
policy affects their lives and how individual and collective efforts
affect public policy.
115Mission Statement
Our Mission is to preserve and develop decent, affordable housing to
address the needs of limited income individuals and families and to
strengthen the community.
116Mission Statement
Save the Children is the leading independent organization creating real
and lasting change for children in need in the United States and around
the world. It is a member of the International Save the Children
Alliance, comprising 27 national Save the Children organizations working
in more than 100 countries to ensure the well-being of children. Hot
lunch program in Appalachia, 1930's The history of Save the Children is
a story of positive change and people - millions of people in thousands
of communities around the globe - working together to create
opportunities for the world's children to live safe, healthy, and
fulfilling lives. In January 1932 in a small room in New York City, a
group of concerned citizens gathered to respond to the needs of the
proud people of Appalachia hard hit by the Great Depression. The
inspiration and vision for Save the Children came in great part from the
international children's rights movement begun in England in 1919 by
Eglantyne Jebb, founder of the British Save the Children Fund. From this
early effort in the hills and hollows of Harlan County, Kentucky, grew a
self-help philosophy and practice still at work today in more than 45
countries: providing communities with a hand up, not a handout. This
approach - working with families to define and solve the problems their
children and communities face and utilizing a broad array of strategies
to ensure self-sufficiency - is the cornerstone of all Save the
Children's programs. Through the decades, we have evolved into a leading
international relief and development organization. Countless events and
achievements have shaped the development of our organization and helped
change the lives of the children we serve.
117Mission Statement
Mission: - To raise awareness of domestic and global issues among
students in high school and college. - To provide non-partisan aid to
neglected regions of the world. - To join with students across the
United States to take an active role in promoting the improvement of
global social conditions.
118Mission Statement
SJO's mission is to give the SRJO a secure existence and to enable the
SRJO to perform widely and frequently. This means raising money
(contributions and grants) and connecting to the community through an
active board of directors.
119Mission Statement
Uniting the democracies has been the key international political trend
for the last hundred years. Understanding this trend and enabling it to
continue is the key to world political development
120Mission Statement
The Door's mission is to empower young people to reach their potential
by providing comprehensive youth development services in a diverse and
caring environment. Each year over 7,000 young people, most referred by
their peers, come to The Door for primary health care, prenatal care and
health education, mental health counseling, legal services, GED, ESL,
computer classes, tutoring and homework help, college preparation and
computer classes, career development services and training, job
placement, daily meals, arts, sports and recreational activities.
121Mission Statement
The Equal Justice Society aims to unify and organize those who are
interested in generating, developing, and supporting innovative legal
theories and strategies to eliminate the conservative bias of our legal
system.
122Mission Statement
The Charles River Public Internet Center (CRPIC) is a private 501c3
nonprofit education organization based in Waltham, Massachusetts that
advances technology and Internet literacy for adults and youth by
empowering people with the technical skills necessary for economic success.
123Mission Statement
AIDS Service Center (ASC) is a multi-service community organization that
fulfills its mission of helping many, one by one through dynamic
programming responsive to the needs of diverse communities. ASC's
services include peer education, training and outreach; specialized
women's services; health promotion and harm reduction initiatives; links
to medical care and appropriate housing; translation assistance and
child care support; HIV treatment education; supportive counseling; and
much more. These comprehensive programs promote the well-being,
empowerment, and stability of persons living with and at risk for
HIV/AIDS throughout the City and the neighboring areas.
124Mission Statement
To inspire all girls to be strong, smart and bold SM
125Mission Statement
The Center's mission quickly grew to include consulting work with
jurisdictions across the country and the world. The Center has received
numerous awards for its efforts, including an Innovations in American
Government Award from Harvard University and the Ford Foundation, and
the Prize for Public Sector Innovation from the Citizens Budget Commission.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)