Tuesday, 4 August 2009

traite de lisbonne: l'ue gagne le droit a la guerre

.

source: réseau voltaire

http://www.voltairenet.org/article161475.html

previous article:

constitutional court: sovereignty lies in berlin

Le Traité de Lisbonne est un cheval de Troie

3/8/09

par Titine Kriesi et Gisbert Otto

L’arrêt de la Cour constitutionnelle allemande sur le Traité de Lisbonne clarifie le débat juridique. Les magistrats ne se sont pas contentés de noter que ce nouveau texte impliquait des abandons de souveraineté —ce qui est une tautologie— , elle a établi que sa philosophie est incompatible avec les principes démocratiques. En conséquence, elle a ordonné que sa ratification soit bordée par la réaffirmation de principes supérieurs par le Parlement allemand. Mais d’autres États n’ont pas eu la même sagesse.

Dans leur arrêt du 30 juin 2009 sur le Traité de Lisbonne, les juges suprêmes allemands attirent l’attention sur le déficit démocra-tique structurel du Traité et également sur le fait que l’Allemagne ne doit pas abandonner sa souveraineté. En même temps, ils se contredisent car ils déclarent que le Traité n’implique pas cet abandon. En réalité, en contradiction avec la Loi fondamentale, il crée de facto une nouvelle constitution. Aussi le peuple allemand devrait-il être consulté car une nouvelle constitution ne peut entrer en vigueur que sur une décision du peuple (art. 146 de la Loi fondamentale). En raison des défauts constatés par la Cour constitutionnelle, il aurait été logique que celle-ci refuse le Traité. Cependant, elle n’avait pas l’indépendance nécessaire pour s’opposer au projet politique «EU» dans sa forme actuelle, qui est contraire à la Constitution… et avec quelles conséquences effroyables: Ainsi, le Traité va jusqu’à octroyer à l’UE un droit à la guerre! Une des rares personnes qui se soient permises de révéler le véritable contenu du Traité avec toutes ses conséquences dévastatrices pour la vie quotidienne des citoyens est le professeur de droit Karl Albrecht Schachtschneider. Il fonde son refus du Traité sur le droit et la vérité. Nous présentons ci-dessous quelques-unes de ses critiques les plus importantes.

Le Traité de Lisbonne aggravera encore le caractère antidémocratique et antisocial de l’Union européenne (UE). Les États-nations transfèrent presque tous leurs droits à l’UE. Ses quelque 500 millions de citoyens perdent presque toute possibilité de participation démocratique. L’UE interviendra dans tous les domaines de leur vie. L’écart entre riches et pauvres se creusera. Cette évolution est en contradiction avec l’article premier de la Loi fondamentale allemande qui affirme que la dignité de l’homme est intangible et fait à l’Allemagne une obligation de respecter les droits de l’homme.

Caractère fondamentalement antidémocratique du Traité

Une constitution ne peut être légitimée que par le peuple. C’est ce que stipule la Loi fondamentale : « Tout pouvoir d’État émane du peuple » (art. 20-2) et « La présente Loi fondamentale qui, l’unité et la liberté de l’Allemagne ayant été parachevées, vaut pour le peuple allemand tout entier, devient caduque le jour de l’entrée en vigueur d’une constitution adoptée par le peuple allemand en pleine liberté de décision. » (art. 146). En conséquence, seul un « peuple européen » pourrait légitimer la Constitution, or il n’existe pas de « peuple européen ». Un « État européen » impliquerait qu’elle soit approuvée par les peuples d’Europe.

Seuls les citoyens ont le droit de décider si et dans quelle mesure ils souhaitent transférer le pouvoir étatique à l’UE. En violation de la Loi fondamentale, on a évité une consultation populaire relative au Traité parce que le gouvernement sait pertinemment que la majorité des citoyens auraient voté « non ». Le fait de ne pas consulter le peuple est pourtant contraire à l’art. 79-3 de la Loi fondamentale : « Toute modification de la présente Loi fondamentale qui toucherait à l’organisation de la Fédération en Länder, au principe du concours des Länder à la législation ou aux principes énoncés aux articles 1 et 20, est interdite. »

Cependant les élites politiques ignorent consciemment ce principe fondamental. Elles essaient d’induire les citoyens en erreur. En manipulant l’opinion de nombreuses manières, elles veulent imposer leurs objectifs politiques. Il ne doit pas y avoir de débats publics et parlementaires. Cette aspiration au pouvoir va à l’encontre de la Loi fondamentale en tant qu’elle affirme l’humanité de l’homme, par exemple à l’article premier (« La dignité de l’homme est intangible ») et à l’article 20 (« Fondements de l’ordre étatique, droit de résistance »). Ces articles se situent à juste titre en dehors de toute politique afin de garantir la dignité de l’homme et de « protéger les fondements naturels de la vie » pour tous dans la liberté générale et sur la base de la vérité.

Sans démocratie, il n’y a pas d’État de droit

Le projet d’intégration antidémocratique des États dans l’UE fait retourner les peuples à l’époque antérieure à la Révolution française. Les principes fondamentaux de l’État de droit sont sapés, notamment et avant tout la séparation des pouvoirs qui protège les citoyens contre les abus de pouvoir. Il est irresponsable de sacrifier en grande partie cette protection juridique.

Dans le domaine de l’économie en particulier, les effets seront encore plus catastrophiques qu’actuellement. Par exemple, dans la Charte des droits fondamentaux de l’Union européenne contenue dans le Traité de Lisbonne, le « droit au travail », tel qu’il est stipulé dans la Déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme de 1948 est absent, de même que le droit de l’homme « à une rémunération équitable et satisfaisante » de son travail « lui assurant ainsi qu’à sa famille une existence conforme à la dignité humaine » (art. 23). En revanche, pour la première fois dans l’histoire des droits fondamentaux, la Charte reconnaît la « liberté d’entreprise ».

La toute-puissance de l’Union européenne n’est pas déclarée ouvertement

À l’origine, il était prévu que l’UE ne pourrait agir que lorsqu’elle y était expressément autorisée (principe d’« habilitation ponctuelle limitée »). Contrairement à l’arrêt de la Cour constitutionnelle, ce principe est enfreint en raison des habilitations considérables de l’UE. Afin d’atteindre ses objectifs, l’UE est autorisée par le Traité de Lisbonne à agir sans la participation des parlements nationaux. Elle est même autorisée à lever des impôts européens comme elle l’entend. En outre, grâce à une « procédure de révision simplifiée », elle est autorisée, par décision du Conseil européen, à modifier presque entièrement ou partiellement l’ensemble du Traité (mise à part la politique extérieure et de sécurité). Le Traité devient ainsi une loi d’habilitation. L’UE abandonne définitivement les principes constitutionnels fondamentaux à la base de la culture européenne. Il faut démasquer cette tromperie qui aura des conséquences considérables pour la vie quotidienne des individus.

Le capitalisme débridé devient constitutionnel

L’UE est une région du capitalisme global. La base en est constituée par les cinq « libertés » fondamentales (liberté d’établissement, libre circulation des marchandises, des services, des capitaux et des personnes) qui sont exposées en détail dans le Traité. Ce système d’« économie de marché ouverte où la concurrence est libre et non faussée » qui ne prend en considération les aspects sociaux que de manière secondaire, déterminera notre vie quotidienne.

En revanche, le principe d’État social, selon lequel la vie économique est non seulement déterminée par des critères d’efficacité mais aussi par des aspects sociaux, est ancré dans l’ordre économique allemand. L’économie ne doit revendiquer qu’une fonction subordonnée dans la société. Or le Traité renverse complètement ce principe. La libre concurrence n’est rien d’autre que le libéralisme qui s’exerce au détriment des aspects sociaux et permet d’exploiter les hommes.

Ce qu’on demande en Allemagne aux quelque 8 millions de bénéficiaires de Hartz IV est scandaleux [1]. L’ordre économique néolibéral du marché et la concurrence ne permettent pas une politique étatique de l’emploi efficace et conduit à la tyrannie du capitalisme débridé.

Le principe du pays d’origine ruine les économies nationales

Le principe du pays d’origine, qui a des effets extrêmement néfastes sur l’économie intérieure, est un exemple extrême de concurrence impitoyable. Ce principe autorise les entreprises étrangères à effectuer des travaux en Allemagne aux conditions valables dans leur pays. Par exemple, une firme polonaise peut effectuer des travaux avec des ouvriers polonais et ukrainiens moyennant des salaires situés bien en dessous des salaires allemands. Et les autres conditions en vigueur dans le pays d’origine constituent également une base juridique (notamment les normes de qualité et les obligations de garantie). La concurrence impitoyable ainsi instaurée menace avant tout les moyennes entreprises ainsi que la participation au sein des entreprises en Allemagne. Encore davantage d’entreprises devront fermer. Mais les multinationales sont également concernées, par exemple les groupes alimentaires : elles risquent d’offrir des aliments de moindre qualité pour obtenir, avec des prix inférieurs, des parts de marché plus importantes.

La protection des droits fondamentaux est affaiblie

Avec le Traité de Lisbonne, la Charte des droits fondamentaux de l’UE est reconnue obligatoire. Mais elle n’impose aucune obligation sociale au capital. La propriété ne doit pas être au service du bien commun, contrairement à ce que stipule la Loi fondamentale allemande. Même le droit au travail, droit élémentaire selon l’article 23 de la Déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme, est absent.

L’Union européenne s’octroie un droit à la guerre

Les États membres perdent en grande partie leur souveraineté en matière de défense du fait de l’intégration des forces armées dans la défense commune. En outre, le Traité oblige les États membres de l’UE non seulement à développer leur armement mais leur prescrit le droit de faire la guerre, en particulier pour lutter contre le terrorisme dans le monde entier comme dans les États membres [2]. Ainsi, l’interdiction de mener des guerres offensives de l’art. 26-1 de la Loi fondamentale allemande est écartée.

Sauvegarde de la démocratie

Les structures démocratiques actuellement en vigueur sont la seule protection contre les décideurs intellectuels malhonnêtes qui obéissent délibérément au capital et aux pouvoirs dominants.

Malheureusement, nous vivons à une époque où le droit est bafoué en permanence. Les belles paroles, sinon les mensonges sont à l’ordre du jour. C’est ainsi que l’engagement des soldats allemands en Afghanistan n’est pas, selon l’interprétation du gouvernement, un engagement militaire, alors que c’est bien le cas. De tels mensonges doivent êtres dénoncés. De même que le procédé de politique hégémonique qui a présidé à l’élaboration du Traité de Lisbonne qui vise à abolir la démocratie.

Les peuples d’Europe ont le droit de vivre en citoyens souverains dans la paix et la liberté d’une véritable démocratie.

Article initialement paru dans Horizons et débats du 3 août 2009.


[1] De 2003 à 2005, le gouvernement du chancelier Gerhard Schröder (SPD) a introduit en Allemagne une vaste réforme du droit du travail, dite réforme Hartz. Son quatrième volet (Hartz IV) a rencontré une forte opposition, particulièrement en ex-RDA, avec des manifestations hebdomadaires à l’été 2004. Elle prévoit, entre autres, la réduction des indemnités versées aux chômeurs de longue durée qui refuseraient d’accepter des emplois en-dessous de leur qualification.

[2] « Le Traité constitutionnel européen et la Guerre », par Diana Johnstone, Réseau Voltaire, 18 avril 2005.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.horizons-et-debats.ch/index.php?id=1702

L’arrêt de la Cour constitutionnelle allemande sur le Traité de Lisbonne

par Karl Müller

Cinq semaines après la publication, le 30 juin, de l’arrêt de la Cour constitutionnelle fédérale allemande sur le Traité de Lisbonne, les réactions qu’il a suscitées montrent qu’il est interprété de diverses manières. Il existe des partisans et des adversaires du Traité qui voient leurs opinions confirmées par l’arrêt et il y a également des partisans et des adver­saires qui le critiquent.
Cela ne s’explique pas seulement par le débat politique dans lequel chaque camp cherche des arguments. L’arrêt lui-même offre à chacun suffisamment de motifs.
Nous ne pouvons pas proposer ici un examen détaillé de ses aspects constitutionnels et politiques, quand bien même certains le souhaiteraient. Cependant, il convient de prendre connaissance des points essentiels de l’arrêt (cf. encadré) qui sont importants car ils ont force obligatoire.

L’article 23 fixe des critères précis pour la participation à l’UE

L’article 23 de la Loi fondamentale de la RFA (cf. encadré) auquel la Cour se réfère constamment a été introduit en 1992 et selon les commentateurs, il s’agit ici de la «définition des objectifs poursuivis par une Europe unie» (commentaire du Centre fédéral de formation politique relatif à la Constitution [2003]). Mais la plupart du temps, on oublie de mentionner le fait que la première phrase de cet article met pour condition à l’obligation d’intégration que l’Union européenne en voie d’édification obéisse «aux principes fédératifs, sociaux, d’Etat de droit et de démocratie», principes auxquels, selon l’arrêt, l’Union européenne, même avec le Traité de Lisbonne, ne satisfait manifestement pas. Ainsi l’article 23 ne contraint pas l’Alle­magne à s’intégrer dans l’UE.

Pas d’adhésion à l’UE à n’importe quel prix

Considérer que l’article 23 constitue une obligation d’adhérer à l’UE à tout prix, comme le pensent certains commentateurs, ne correspond ni au termes ni au contexte général de la Loi fondamentale. En particulier, on ne peut, en interprétant l’art. 23, négliger l’art. 20. Cet article fixe les «fondements de l’ordre étatique», l’obligation faite à l’Etat allemand d’être «un Etat démocratique, fédéral et social» pratiquant la séparation des pouvoirs, le contrôle du pouvoir par le peuple et garantissant le «droit de résister à quiconque entreprendrait de renverser cet ordre».
Certes l’art. 23 a été introduit – sans que l’opinion s’en rende compte et donc sans débat – pour que l’Allemagne rende compatibles avec la Constitution les compétences toujours plus étendues de l’UE prévues à l’époque par l’oligarchie des partis. Mais cela ne change rien au fait que l’adhésion de l’Allemagne à L’UE doit se laisser mesurer à l’aune des principes formulés aux articles 23 et 20.

La Cour constitutionnelle n’a pas examiné la situation réelle dans l’UE

L’arrêt de la Cour, de même que d’autres arrêts précédents, n’examine pas la situation véritable dans l’UE. Dans les attendus, après des considérations d’ordre constitutionnel en général pertinentes, on ne trouve pas de subsumption des conditions de vie réelles dans l’UE mais des formulations vagues et évasives. La Cour ergote souvent, mais elle ne se demande pas comment l’UE se présente politiquement aujourd’hui. Elle ne se demande pas non plus si l’UE réelle satisfait aux conditions des articles 20 et 23, sans parler de l’excellent article premier (cf. encadré) qui fait obligation à l’Etat allemand de respecter et de protéger la dignité de l’être humain.
Aussi, on ne s’étonnera pas que, quelques jours après la publication de l’arrêt, le président de la Cour Andreas Vosskuhle ait concédé à Joschka Fischer que la porte restait ouverte à un Etat fédéral européen. (Neue Juristische Wochenschrift du 7 juillet). Alors qu’il était ministre des Affaires étrangères, Fischer avait appelé de ses vœux un tel Etat européen, ce que la Cour a souligné dans son arrêt. Dans un article paru le 9 juillet dans l’hebdomadaire Die Zeit, il est parti en guerre contre la Cour en affirmant que son arrêt était «passéiste et irréaliste» parce qu’il n’était pas tout à fait conforme à sa ligne politique.
L’arrêt montre qu’il est certes toujours important de ne rien négliger pour faire triompher le droit mais qu’en Allemagne aussi le droit est malmené dans la jurisprudence de la Cour suprême. Aussi faut-il se demander très sérieusement comment les hommes peuvent faire valoir leurs droits et avant tout quelle culture politique est nécessaire pour cela.

La Cour n’a pas tiré les conséquences des «déficits structurels de démocratie» de l’UE

L’arrêt ne nous avance pas à ce sujet. Certes, il précise que le Traité de Lisbonne ne rend pas l’UE démocratique bien que sa teneur en donne l’impression, qu’il induit en erreur. Mais cette constatation n’entraîne pas de conséquences convaincantes. Certes la Cour constate d’une part que «le droit des citoyens d’avoir prise personnellement et concrètement sur l’action politique par des élections et des consultations populaires est le principe élémentaire de la démocratie, [que] le droit à participer au pouvoir politique dans la liberté et l’égalité est ancré dans la dignité de l’homme.» Mais de sa constatation que l’UE réelle ne répond pas structurellement à ces conditions, il ne tire pas la seule conclusion juridique correcte, c’est-à-dire qu’en vertu précisément de l’article 23 de la Loi fondamentale, la RFA ne peut pas s’intégrer juridiquement à l’UE.
Mais la Cour identifie l’UE réelle – sans référence aux déficits structurels de démocratie ni au fait que les Etats importants de l’UE participent à des guerres, également en Europe! – à l’objectif de «maintien de la paix» et d’«efforts pour surmonter les antagonismes destructeurs entre Etats européens». Selon la Cour, l’Allemagne n’a donc même pas le droit de décider librement de son adhésion à l’UE car – en dépit du caractère antidémocratique de l’UE – les organes allemands prévus par la Constitution n’ont apparemment pas la possibilité d’«opter ou non en faveur d’une intégration dans l’UE».

On néglige le pouvoir politique réel de l’UE

Au vu de l’acquis communautaire (ensemble de textes juridiques comprenant actuellement 85 000 pages réparties en 31 volumes), qui règlemente déjà de manière complète les conditions de vie des habitants de l’UE et étant donné les nouvelles compétences, considé­rables, que lui attribue le Traité de Lisbonne, par exemple dans les domaines de la politique commerciale (compétence exclusive de l’UE dans toutes les négociations menées dans le cadre de l’OMS, du GATS et du TRIPS) de la justice et de la défense, il est grotesque de parler, comme le fait la Cour, de la «nécessité pour l’Allemagne de conserver une marge de manœuvre suffisante en matière de politique économique, culturelle et sociale».
La Cour va jusqu’à prétendre qu’il est sans importance que 80% des lois allemandes soient fixées par l’UE aussi longtemps qu’il restera une marge «suffisante» (?) pour la législation allemande. Elle ne tient pas compte du fait que les différents domaines politiques sont étroitement imbriqués, que, par exemple, aucune politique sociale n’est plus possible lorsque l’Etat se voit retirer la possibilité d’organiser l’ordre économique, tendance que le Traité de Lisbonne accentuerait.
La Cour insiste plusieurs fois sur le fait que l’UE n’a pas la «compétence de la compétence», c’est-à-dire qu’elle n’a pas la compétence de s’attribuer de nouvelles compétences indépendamment des décisions des parlements nationaux, qu’elle ne peut agir que «dans les limites des compétences» que lui attribuent les Etats membres. Au moyen de ce «mensonge fondateur» (selon le constitutionnaliste Karl Albrecht Schachtschneider), la Cour essaie d’occulter le fait que ces «compétences limitées» sont déjà considérables, qu’elles ont déjà été largement commentées, en particulier par la Cour de justice européenne et que le Traité de Lisbonne va bien au-delà des traités précédents.

L’Allemagne a besoin d’une nouvelle culture politique

De fait, l’Allemagne souffre de plus en plus d’un défaut de culture politique. Comment peut-on y remédier? Cela ne se fera pas sans la société civile. Si l’on réussit à aborder franchement, librement et dans un esprit d’égalité tous les sujets qui concernent l’Allemagne et si l’on réalise, dans la réflexion comme dans l’action, la «souveraineté» là où elle est déjà possible maintenant, cela aura un effet très positif. Cela reviendra à poser la première pierre d’une démocratie directe en Alle­magne. On établira ainsi les fondements de ce que la Cour a écrit sans y donner suite: «Le droit des citoyens d’avoir prise personnellement et concrètement sur l’action politique par des élections et des consultations populaires est le principe élémentaire de la démocratie. Le droit à participer au pouvoir poli­tique dans la liberté et l’égalité est ancré dans la dignité de l’homme.»

Commencer par formuler des réserves sur le Traité de Lisbonne

Toutefois chacun doit être conscient du fait que le Traité de Lisbonne, s’il entrait en vigueur, ne pourrait pas facilement être abrogé malgré le droit, explicitement affirmé dans le Traité, pour un pays de sortir de l’UE. La marge de liberté sera très ténue. Aussi convient-il de se demander ce que l’on peut faire concrètement au cours des prochaines se­maines afin que les conditions de la participation de la société civile au développement d’une meilleure culture politique soient plus satisfaisantes qu’avec le Traité de Lisbonne. On peut évoquer ici l’arrêt de la Cour en prenant au sérieux les limites de l’UE, que du moins l’arrêt formule, et ce qu’il dit de la démocratie et de la souveraineté de l’Alle­magne, et en énonçant clairement des réserves à l’endroit du Traité, réserves relevant du droit constitutionnel et du droit international.
A la fin août-début septembre, le Bundestag allemand va adopter, après un débat, une nouvelle loi d’accompagnement au Traité. Ce serait l’occasion de formuler clairement des réserves. L’Allemagne ne serait pas le seul pays à le faire. La Grande-Bretagne et la Pologne l’ont également fait. C’est tout à fait possible au regard du droit international. Les députés au Bundestag montreraient ainsi que le Parlement ne veut plus être seulement un organe exécutif en matière d’UE mais qu’il commence à prendre à nouveau au sérieux la démocratie et la souveraineté, c’est-à-dire à être constitué de véritables représentants du peuple.•

..........................................................................................................................................................................

Points essentiels de l’arrêt relatif au Traité de Lisbonne

Karl Müller

Les points essentiels suivants de l’arrêt qu’a rendu la Cour constitutionnelle d’Allemagne à propos du Traité de Lisbonne ont force obligatoire et sont donc particulièrement importants. Toutefois, ils prouvent également que la Cour trompe l’opinion publique. En effet, celui qui connaît la réalité de l’UE déduira des conclusions de droit public tirées par la Cour de manière souvent pertinente que le Traité Lisbonne est anticonstitutionnel – ce que la Cour se garde bien de proclamer.

Le premier point essentiel est la constatation que l’appartenance de l’Allemagne à une UE fédération d’Etats (et non pas à Etat fédéral!) qui exerce des pouvoirs publics est certes compatible avec la Loi fondamentale de la République fédérale. même temps, la Cour affirme cependant que les Etats membres restent souverains et que seules des décisions des citoyens des Etats de l’UE pourraient légitimer démocratiquement l’action de l’UE. que font les citoyens? Qu’on leur demande ce qu’ils pensent de leur influence l’action de l’UE! – En outre, toute subsumption (attribution de faits à une norme juridique) de l’UE aux principes fédératifs, sociaux, d’Etat de droit et de démocratie de la Loi fondamentale (art. 23, al. 1, phrase) fait défaut.

Le deuxième point essentiel exige la participation du Bundestag et du Bundesrat à toute extension des compétences l’Union, même s’il n’y a pas de modification de traité. Cependant, l’arrêt ne
prononce pas sur la légalité des larges compétences actuelles de l’UE, bien que le principe d’attribution restreinte de compétences ne soit pas du tout respecté en raison de la portée étendue des normes juridiques européennes.

Le troisième point essentiel souligne que les Etats membres de l’UE doivent conserver une marge de manoeuvre suffisante en matière de politique économique, culturelle et sociale. – En toute logique, les termes utilisés par la Cour signifient que l’Allemagne devrait sortir de l’Union réelle.

Le quatrième point essentiel affirme que la Cour examinera à l’avenir également si l’UE transgresse ses compétences. Mais la Cour n’a encore jamais fait de telle constatation, bien qu’elle en eût souvent l’occasion. De plus, il n’y a pas de critères clairs à cet égard.

1. Par son art. 23, la Loi fondamentale habilite la République fédérale à concourir à l’édification et au développement de l’Union européenne conçue comme fédération. La notion de fédération
implique une relation étroite et à long terme d’Etats demeurant souverains.

Cette fédération exerce l’autorité des pouvoirs publics sur la base de traités, son cadre fondamental est à la seule disposition des Etats membres et les peuples, c’est-à-dire les citoyens des Etats membres, restent les sujets de la légitimation démocratique.

2. a) Dans la mesure où les Etats membres élaborent leur droit des traités de sorte qu’une modification de ce droit peut, en cas de continuité fondamentale du principe d’attribution restreinte de compétences, être effectuée sans procédure de ratification, une responsabilité particulière incombe, outre au gouvernement fédéral, aux Chambres, dans le cadre du concours d’organes qui, en droit interne allemand, doit satisfaire aux exigences de l’art. 23, al. 1, LF (responsabilité en matière d’intégration) et peut être exigé en entamant une procédure de droit constitutionnel.

b) Une loi conforme à l’art. 23, al. 1, 2e phrase, LF n’est pas nécessaire pour autant que les clauses passerelles spéciales se limitent à des domaines déjà suffisamment déterminés par le Traité de Lisbonne. Dans ce cas, il incombe cependant au Bundestag et – si les compétences
législatives des Länder sont concernées – au Bundesrat d’assumer leurs responsabilités d’intégration de manière adéquate.

3. L’unification de l’Europe établie sur la base d’une union par traités d’Etats souverains
doit être réalisée de manière à ménager aux Etats membres une marge de manoeuvre suffisante dans leur politique économique, culturelle et sociale. Il en va notamment ainsi des domaines qui influent sur la vie des citoyens, de la sphère privée empreinte de responsabilité personnelle et protégée par des droits fondamentaux ainsi que de la sécurité personnelle et sociale, et des décisions politiques qui dépendent particulièrement de concepts culturels, historiques et linguistiques préalables et qui se développent lors de discussions dans le cadre, rempli par les partis et le parlement, d’une opinion publique politique.

4. La Cour constitutionnelle examinera si les actes juridiques des institutions et organes
européens restent dans les limites des droits souverains qui leur ont été accordés
par attribution restreinte, en respectant le principe de subsidiarité du droit des Communautés et de l’Union. Elle examinera de surcroît si l’intangibilité de l’identité constitutionnelle de la Loi fondamentale qui ressort de l’art. 23, al. 1, 3e phrase, LF en combinaison avec l’art. 79, al. 3, LF est préservée.

L’exercice de ce droit d’examen constitutionnel découle du principe de bienveillance de la Loi fondamentale envers le droit européen et n’est donc pas contraire au principe de coopération loyale (art. 4, al. 3, du TUE de Lisbonne); autrement, les structures fondamentales politiques et constitutionnelles d’Etats membres reconnues par l’art. 4, al. 2, 1ère phrase, du TUE de Lisbonne ne pourraient pas être maintenues si l’intégration progressait.

Dans l’espace juridique européen, le respect de l’identité constitutionnelle nationale va donc de pair en droit constitutionnel et en droit de l’Union.
.........................................................................................................................................................................

Article 23 de la Loi fondamentale allemande

(1) Pour l’édification d’une Europe unie, la République fédérale d’Allemagne concourt au développement de l’Union européenne qui est attachée aux principes fédératifs, sociaux, d’Etat de droit et de démocratie ainsi qu’au principe de subsidiarité et qui garantit une protection des droits fondamentaux substantiellement comparable à celle de la présente Loi fondamentale. A cet effet, la Fédération peut transférer des droits de souveraineté par une loi approuvée par le Bundesrat. L’article 79, al. 2 et 3 est applicable à l’institution de l’Union européenne ainsi qu’aux modifications de ses bases conventionnelles et aux autres textes comparables qui modifient ou complètent la présente Loi fondamentale dans son contenu ou rendent possibles de tels compléments ou modifications.
(2) Le Bundestag et les Länder par l’intermédiaire du Bundesrat concourent aux affaires de l’Union européenne. Le gouvernement fédéral doit informer le Bundestag et le Bundesrat de manière complète et aussi tôt que possible.
(3) Avant de concourir aux actes normatifs de l’Union européenne, le gouvernement fédéral donne au Bundestag l’occasion de prendre position. Dans les négociations, le gouvernement fédéral prend en considération les prises de position du Bundestag. Les modalités sont réglées par la loi.
(4) Le Bundesrat doit être associé à la formation de la volonté de la Fédération dans la mesure où son concours serait requis au plan interne pour une mesure analogue ou que les Länder seraient compétents au plan interne.
(5) Dans la mesure où des intérêts des Länder sont touchés dans un domaine de compétence exclusive de la Fédération ou lorsque la Fédération a à un autre titre le droit de légiférer, le gouvernement fédéral prend en considération la prise de position du Bundesrat. Lorsque des pouvoirs de législation des Länder, l’organisation de leurs administrations ou leur procédure administrative sont concernés de manière prépondérante, l’opinion du Bundesrat doit être prise en considération de manière déterminante lors de la formation de la volonté de la Fédération ; la responsabilité de la Fédération pour l’ensemble de l’Etat doit être préservée. Dans les affaires susceptibles d’entraîner une augmentation des dépenses ou une diminution des recettes de la Fédération, l’approbation du gouvernement fédéral est nécessaire.
(6) Lorsque des pouvoirs exclusifs de législation des Länder sont concernés de manière prépondérante, l’exercice des droits dont jouit la République fédérale d’Allemagne en tant qu’Etat membre de l’Union européenne doit normalement être transféré par la Fédération à un représentant des Länder désigné par le Bundesrat. L’exercice de ces droits a lieu avec la participation du gouvernement fédéral et de concert avec lui; la responsabilité de la Fédération pour l’ensemble de l’Etat doit être préservée.
(7) Les modalités relatives aux alinéas 4 à 6 sont réglées par une loi requérant l’approbation du Bundesrat.

.........................................................................................................................................................................

«Il y a plus de 50 ans, Karl Jaspers prédisait un passage ‹de la démocratie à l’oligarchie des partis puis de l’oligarchie des partis à la dictature›. L’arrêt de la Cour constitutionnelle ouvre la voie à une dictature de l’UE. Il n’y a plus maintenant qu’une solution: un changement radical de cap. L’opposition à l’Etat centraliste qu’est l’UE doit s’unir. Une alternative est nécessaire au Bundestag. Cette opposition pourrait profiter de ce que l’arrêt demande une participation parlementaire en matière de politique européenne. Son objectif ne serait certes pas de collaborer à l’élaboration de cet Etat centraliste. Il s’agirait plutôt de ceci: Un peuple qui veut construire une Europe européenne doit demander une sortie de l’UE et imposer de nouveaux traités. Seuls les peuples sont qualifiés pour réaliser le droit. Une poli­tique d’envergure nécessite des consultations populaires.»

Karl Albrecht Schachtschneider, lors d’une interview accordée à Jürgen Elsässer et publiée dans kopp-exklusiv
.........................................................................................................................................................................

Article 1, Loi fondamentale allemande

(1) La dignité de l’être humain est intangible. Tous les pouvoirs publics ont l’obligation de la respecter et de la protéger.
(2) En conséquence, le peuple allemand reconnaît à l’être humain des droits inviolables et inaliénables comme fondement de toute communauté humaine, de la paix et de la justice dans le monde.

Article 20, Loi fondamentale allemande

(1) La République fédérale d’Allemagne est un Etat fédéral démocratique et social.
(2) Tout pouvoir d’Etat émane du peuple. Le peuple l’exerce au moyen d’élections et de votations et par des organes spéciaux investis des pouvoirs législatif, exécutif et judiciaire.
(3) Le pouvoir législatif est lié par l’ordre constitutionnel, les pouvoirs exécutif et judiciaire sont liés par la loi et le droit.
(4) Tous les Allemands ont le droit de résister à quiconque entreprendrait de renverser cet ordre, s’il n’y a pas d’autre remède possible.

Monday, 3 August 2009

ecuador coca chewing towards un legal status

.
http://www.bolpress.com/print.php?Cod=2009073007

Los 54 países del ECOSOC aceptaron debatir enmiendas en el artículo 49 de la Convención de Estupefacientes

Comienza el trámite en la ONU para despenalizar el masticado de coca

El gobierno de Bolivia propuso modificar los incisos c y e del Artículo 49 de la Convención Única de Estupefacientes de Naciones Unidas de 1961 que prohíben la masticación de coca a partir de 2001. El Consejo Económico y Social de las Naciones Unidas (ECOSOC) decidió por consenso someter a consulta de los países signatarios la despenalización del acullico.

"La enmienda que proponemos no es para que todos estén de acuerdo con el masticado o que lo practiquen, sino para que los países donde tenemos esta práctica desde hace siglos podamos preservarla sin que quienes la practican sean considerados delincuentes que violan una norma internacional... El masticado de la hoja de coca en mi país es una práctica que se remonta a tres mil años antes de Cristo", explicó la embajadora de Bolivia en Ginebra Angélica Navarro.

En la Sesión Substantiva celebrada en Ginebra, Suiza el 30 de julio, los 54 países miembros del ECOSOC, incluidos la Unión Europea, Japón, Rusia, China, Estados Unidos, Brasil, Canadá, Francia, Malasia, entre otros, aceptaron la solicitud boliviana.

En un periodo de 18 meses, los países signatarios de la Convención deberán pronunciarse sobre la enmienda propuesta. Si no se presentan objeciones, la enmienda entraría en vigor; caso contrario el Consejo del ECOSOC podría llamar a una Conferencia Internacional para debatir el tema.

En febrero de 2009, la Junta Internacional de Fiscalización de Estupefacientes (JIFE) acusó a Bolivia de incumplir la resolución de la Convención.

Según el Presidente Evo Morales, mantener la Convención tal como fue gestada en 1961 es "un atentado a los derechos de los pueblos indígenas". No hay que olvidar que la Declaración Universal de los derechos de los Pueblos Indígenas aprobada por la ONU en 2007 reconoce el derecho a "proteger y desarrollar" sus patrimonios culturales, conocimientos tradicionales, manifestaciones científicas y tecnológicas, recursos humanos y genéticos.

En marzo de 2009, el Presidente Morales solicitó formalmente al Secretario General de las Naciones Unidas Ban Ki Moon una gestión diplomática internacional en defensa del masticado de coca, "una práctica sociocultural, ritual y milenaria de los pueblos indígenas andinos" que no puede ser prohibida.

Morales afirma que esta práctica de millones de personas en Bolivia, Perú, el norte de Argentina y Chile, Ecuador y Colombia no causa daños a la salud humana ni provoca "trastorno ni adicción", y "ayuda a mitigar las sensaciones de hambre, da energía durante largas jornadas laborales y mejora el desarrollo del metabolismo en la altura".

El mandatario boliviano explicó que "mascar coca no significa consumir cocaína", ya que "el alcaloide de la cocaína que se encuentra en proporciones inferiores al 0,8% en la hoja de coca y que se ingiere por vía oral a través de la masticación no es estable en un medio ácido como el estómago y se hidroliza en su interior".

el 2009-07-30 a horas: 18:48:10

© Bolpress.com 2009

Sunday, 2 August 2009

goldman sachs: organized greed vs. democracy

.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ae3d459a-7f8e-11de-85dc-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=rss&nclick_check=1

Goldman Sachs’ reputation tarnished

By Greg Farrell in New York

August 2 2009 23:04

Goldman Sachs’ reputation among both the general public and financially sophisticated Americans has been damaged by the events of the past year, according to research conducted for the Financial Times.

In a survey of 17,000 Americans, Brand Asset Consulting found that Goldman’s stature – as measured by several gauges of brand strength – had suffered in 2008 and 2009.

“Goldman Sachs still has that Gordon Gekko look to it among the general public,” said Anne Rivers, who oversaw the survey, referring to the villain of the 1987 film Wall Street.

Goldman’s long-time rival, Morgan Stanley, also suffered a decline in stature in the survey. But respondents liked and respected Morgan Stanley more than Goldman, a reversal of respondents’ sentiment in 2006.

Yet among those familiar with the two businesses, Goldman still led Morgan Stanley in a category known as “energised differentiation”, a measure that translates into pricing power, Ms Rivers said .In other categories, including relevance and esteem, Goldman lagged or was tied with Morgan Stanley.

Brand Asset Consulting , owned by WPP, the marketing services group, surveys a group of 17,000 people about major brands at least four times a year. Its surveys have a statistical accuracy of 95 per cent, according to the group.

Goldman declined to comment on the findings.

In recent months, Goldman has faced an unprecedented spate of negative publicity as a variety of lawmakers, corporate governance experts and magazines have accused the bank of causing last year’s financial crisis, vilified its plans to pay bonuses on a par with those handed out in the frothy days of 2006 and 2007, and claimed Goldman was relying on its alumni network in Washington to insulate it from the consequences of the failure of AIG, the insurance group.

The onslaught of criticism began slowly following the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the rescue of AIG last September, built gradually over the intervening months as the US plunged into the worst recession in decades, and reached a crescendo in recent weeks after Goldman paid back its taxpayer rescue funds and posted record profits, thus positioning the firm to ladle out bonuses as though last year’s financial crisis had never occurred.

In Rolling Stone last month, Goldman was described as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”. The headline on the cover of New York magazine last week asked: “Is Goldman Sachs evil? Or just too good?” The subsequent article argued in favour of the former, with a tip of the cap to the latter.

The bank has been approached by a gaggle of crisis public relations firms promoting ways for Goldman to improve its image.

Eric Dezenhall, a crisis communications expert, thinks Goldman should steer clear of such approaches. “A lot of these image campaigns don’t do anything to convince the public that company is a cuddly koala bear”, he says.

However, some marketing professionals say the storm will pass. “All of this giant squid language they can pretty much brush off,” said William Barker of Brand Finance. “My guess is that their customers are probably very happy with them.”

In July, Goldman reported record quarterly profits of $3.44bn on revenues of $13.8bn.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

source: Rolling Stone

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_bubble_machine

Back to The Great American Bubble Machine

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

MATT TAIBBI

Posted Jul 13, 2009 1:49 PM

For more on Wall Street's march on Washington, read Taibbi's "The Big Takeover."

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 asshole 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 multibilliondollar 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 goldenparachute payments as his bank was selfdestructing. 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 bailedout 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 pumpanddump 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 consumercredit rates, halfeaten 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.

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 soninlaw Samuel Sachs. They were pioneers in the use of commercial paper, which is just a fancy way of saying they made money lending out shortterm IOUs to smalltime vendors in downtown Manhattan.

You can probably guess the basic plotline of Goldman's first 100 years in business: plucky, immigrantled 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 precrash 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 etrading attracted reams of new suckers from the sticks who wanted to feel like big shots, investment trusts roped a new generation of regularguy investors into the speculation game.

Beginning a pattern that would repeat itself over and over again, Goldman got into the investmenttrust game late, then jumped in with both feet and went hogwild. 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 leveragebased 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 topdrawer 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, "longterm 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 longterm 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 'longterm 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 cochairman 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 babyboomer, Sixtieschild, 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 clichè 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 potfueled ideas scrawled on napkins by uptoolate bongsmokers were taken public via IPOs, hyped in the media and sold to the public for mega-millions. 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 littleknown 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 daytrader 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 Nicholas Maier, the syndicate manager of Cramer & Co., the hedge fund run at the time by the now-famous chattering television asshole 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 firstday 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! cofounder 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.

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 global 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 shit out the window and started writing mortgages on the backs of napkins to cocktail waitresses and excons 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 shitty 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 shitty ones: The CDO, as a whole, was sound. Thus, junkrated mortgages were turned into AAArated investments. Second, to hedge its own bets, Goldman got companies like AIG to provide insurance — known as creditdefault swaps — on the CDOs. The swaps were essentially a racetrack bet between AIG and Goldman: Goldman is betting the excons 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 11,000-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 housingbased 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 mortgagebacked 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 2006S3. Many of the mortgages belonged to secondmortgage 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 gradeD 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 hedgefund 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 holding 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 fucked the investors who bought their horseshit CDOs by betting against its own crappy product, then it turned around and fucked the taxpayer by making him pay off 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.

But it was all a lie. While the global supply of oil will eventually dry up, the shortterm 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 shortterm 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 physicalcommodities market — but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the oncesolid 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 Goldmanowned commoditiestrading 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.

"I 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 longterm 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 hedgefund 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 commoditiestrading 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 of 2008, 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 presentday 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."

BUBBLE #5 Rigging the Bailout

After the oil bubble collapsed last fall, there was no new bubble to keep things humming — this time, the money seems to be really gone, like worldwide-depression gone. So the financial safari has moved elsewhere, and the big game in the hunt has become the only remaining pool of dumb, unguarded capital left to feed upon: taxpayer money. Here, in the biggest bailout in history, is where Goldman Sachs really started to flex its muscle.

It began in September of last year, when then-Treasury secretary Paulson made a momentous series of decisions. Although he had already engineered a rescue of Bear Stearns a few months before and helped bail out quasi-private lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Paulson elected to let Lehman Brothers — one of Goldman's last real competitors — collapse without intervention. ("Goldman's superhero status was left intact," says market analyst Eric Salzman, "and an investmentbanking competitor, Lehman, goes away.") The very next day, Paulson greenlighted a massive, $85 billion bailout of AIG, which promptly turned around and repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. Thanks to the rescue effort, the bank ended up getting paid in full for its bad bets: By contrast, retired auto workers awaiting the Chrysler bailout will be lucky to receive 50 cents for every dollar they are owed.

Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson announced his federal bailout for the financial industry, a $700 billion plan called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and put a heretofore unknown 35yearold Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari in charge of administering the funds. In order to qualify for bailout monies, Goldman announced that it would convert from an investment bank to a bankholding company, a move that allows it access not only to $10 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole galaxy of less conspicuous, publicly backed funding — most notably, lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve. By the end of March, the Fed will have lent or guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion under a series of new bailout programs — and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret.

Converting to a bank-holding company has other benefits as well: Goldman's primary supervisor is now the New York Fed, whose chairman at the time of its announcement was Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Friedman was technically in violation of Federal Reserve policy by remaining on the board of Goldman even as he was supposedly regulating the bank; in order to rectify the problem, he applied for, and got, a conflictofinterest waiver from the government. Friedman was also supposed to divest himself of his Goldman stock after Goldman became a bankholding company, but thanks to the waiver, he was allowed to go out and buy 52,000 additional shares in his old bank, leaving him $3 million richer. Friedman stepped down in May, but the man now in charge of supervising Goldman — New York Fed president William Dudley — is yet another former Goldmanite.

The collective message of all this — the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bankholding conversion, the TARP funds — is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn't a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege. "In the past it was an implicit advantage," says Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and former official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. "Now it's more of an explicit advantage."

Once the bailouts were in place, Goldman went right back to business as usual, dreaming up impossibly convoluted schemes to pick the American carcass clean of its loose capital. One of its first moves in the postbailout era was to quietly push forward the calendar it uses to report its earnings, essentially wiping December 2008 — with its $1.3 billion in pretax losses — off the books. At the same time, the bank announced a highly suspicious $1.8 billion profit for the first quarter of 2009 — which apparently included a large chunk of money funneled to it by taxpayers via the AIG bailout. "They cooked those firstquarter results six ways from Sunday," says one hedgefund manager. "They hid the losses in the orphan month and called the bailout money profit."

Two more numbers stand out from that stunning first-quarter turnaround. The bank paid out an astonishing $4.7 billion in bonuses and compensation in the first three months of this year, an 18 percent increase over the first quarter of 2008. It also raised $5 billion by issuing new shares almost immediately after releasing its firstquarter results. Taken together, the numbers show that Goldman essentially borrowed a $5 billion salary payout for its executives in the middle of the global economic crisis it helped cause, using halfbaked accounting to reel in investors, just months after receiving billions in a taxpayer bailout.

Even more amazing, Goldman did it all right before the government announced the results of its new "stress test" for banks seeking to repay TARP money — suggesting that Goldman knew exactly what was coming. The government was trying to carefully orchestrate the repayments in an effort to prevent further trouble at banks that couldn't pay back the money right away. But Goldman blew off those concerns, brazenly flaunting its insider status. "They seemed to know everything that they needed to do before the stress test came out, unlike everyone else, who had to wait until after," says Michael Hecht, a managing director of JMP Securities. "The government came out and said, 'To pay back TARP, you have to issue debt of at least five years that is not insured by FDIC — which Goldman Sachs had already done, a week or two before."

And here's the real punch line. After playing an intimate role in four historic bubble catastrophes, after helping $5 trillion in wealth disappear from the NASDAQ, after pawning off thousands of toxic mortgages on pensioners and cities, after helping to drive the price of gas up to $4 a gallon and to push 100 million people around the world into hunger, after securing tens of billions of taxpayer dollars through a series of bailouts overseen by its former CEO, what did Goldman Sachs give back to the people of the United States in 2008?

Fourteen million dollars.

That is what the firm paid in taxes in 2008, an effective tax rate of exactly one, read it, one percent. The bank paid out $10 billion in compensation and benefits that same year and made a profit of more than $2 billion — yet it paid the Treasury less than a third of what it forked over to CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who made $42.9 million last year.

How is this possible? According to Goldman's annual report, the low taxes are due in large part to changes in the bank's "geographic earnings mix." In other words, the bank moved its money around so that most of its earnings took place in foreign countries with low tax rates. Thanks to our completely fucked corporate tax system, companies like Goldman can ship their revenues offshore and defer taxes on those revenues indefinitely, even while they claim deductions upfront on that same untaxed income. This is why any corporation with an at least occasionally sober accountant can usually find a way to zero out its taxes. A GAO report, in fact, found that between 1998 and 2005, roughly twothirds of all corporations operating in the U.S. paid no taxes at all.

This should be a pitchforklevel outrage — but somehow, when Goldman released its post-bailout tax profile, hardly anyone said a word. One of the few to remark on the obscenity was Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat from Texas who serves on the House Ways and Means Committee. "With the right hand out begging for bailout money," he said, "the left is hiding it offshore."

BUBBLE #6 Global Warming

Fast-forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.

Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's cohead of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade.

The new carboncredit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.

Here's how it works: If the bill passes, there will be limits for coal plants, utilities, natural-gas distributors and numerous other industries on the amount of carbon emissions (a.k.a. greenhouse gases) they can produce per year. If the companies go over their allotment, they will be able to buy "allocations" or credits from other companies that have managed to produce fewer emissions. President Obama conservatively estimates that about $646 billion worth of carbon credits will be auctioned in the first seven years; one of his top economic aides speculates that the real number might be twice or even three times that amount.

The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the "cap" on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison's sake, the annual combined revenues of all electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion.

Goldman wants this bill. The plan is (1) to get in on the ground floor of paradigmshifting legislation, (2) make sure that they're the profitmaking slice of that paradigm and (3) make sure the slice is a big slice. Goldman started pushing hard for capandtrade long ago, but things really ramped up last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues. (One of their lobbyists at the time was none other than Patterson, now Treasury chief of staff.) Back in 2005, when Hank Paulson was chief of Goldman, he personally helped author the bank's environmental policy, a document that contains some surprising elements for a firm that in all other areas has been consistently opposed to any sort of government regulation. Paulson's report argued that "voluntary action alone cannot solve the climatechange problem." A few years later, the bank's carbon chief, Ken Newcombe, insisted that capandtrade alone won't be enough to fix the climate problem and called for further public investments in research and development. Which is convenient, considering that Goldman made early investments in wind power (it bought a subsidiary called Horizon Wind Energy), renewable diesel (it is an investor in a firm called Changing World Technologies) and solar power (it partnered with BP Solar), exactly the kind of deals that will prosper if the government forces energy producers to use cleaner energy. As Paulson said at the time, "We're not making those investments to lose money."

The bank owns a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded. Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utahbased firm that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great demand if the bill passes. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, who is intimately involved with the planning of cap-and-trade, started up a company called Generation Investment Management with three former bigwigs from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Their business? Investing in carbon offsets. There's also a $500 million Green Growth Fund set up by a Goldmanite to invest in greentech … the list goes on and on. Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot. Will this market be bigger than the energyfutures market?

"Oh, it'll dwarf it," says a former staffer on the House energy committee.

Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won't we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe — but capandtrade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and-trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private taxcollection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it's even collected.

"If it's going to be a tax, I would prefer that Washington set the tax and collect it," says Michael Masters, the hedgefund director who spoke out against oilfutures speculation. "But we're saying that Wall Street can set the tax, and Wall Street can collect the tax. That's the last thing in the world I want. It's just asinine."

Cap-and-trade is going to happen. Or, if it doesn't, something like it will. The moral is the same as for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to 2009. In almost every case, the very same bank that behaved recklessly for years, weighing down the system with toxic loans and predatory debt, and accomplishing nothing but massive bonuses for a few bosses, has been rewarded with mountains of virtually free money and government guarantees — while the actual victims in this mess, ordinary taxpayers, are the ones paying for it.

It's not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there's a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years. You can't really register the fact that you're no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you're no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you can still sort of feel things that are no longer there.

But this is it. This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework till the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch. It's a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can't be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay. And maybe we can't stop it, but we should at least know where it's all going.

Watch Matt Taibbi break down the Great American Bubble Machine in our exclusive video, and for more on how Wall Street is taking over Washington, read his "The Big Takeover."

chinese glasnost in the making

.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/KH01Ad02.html

Aug 1, 2009

Clouds over China's 'Sunshine' law

By Stephanie Wang

CHANGSHA, China - In a renewed effort to curb increasingly rampant official corruption, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plans to introduce into law so-called "Sunshine" regulations, which require that all officials' open up their personal assets and incomes to public scrutiny.

The "Sunshine" policy will be debated, and possibly approved, at the Central Committee's annual plenary session, scheduled for September. Under the plan, officials must fully declare their assets as well as those of close relatives. The information is then posted on websites or public notice boards run by local anti-corruption agencies.

In 2007, the government ordered officials, from the central government down to the county level, to declare personal and family incomes before taking office - the inner-party directive was dubbed the "Sunshine" policy in the media. With corruption seemingly spiraling out of control, the government has decided to make the policy a nationwide law.

The CCP formally launched a countrywide campaign to curb official corruption in 1998. It has renewed the crackdown from time to time, but with little effect. The number of officials caught has grown each year, while the rank of the corrupt officials is more senior and the average size of bribes has increased.

According to statistics from the Supreme People's Court, about 50,000 officials have been convicted of corruption annually since 2003. The average size of bribes also increased from 2.53 million yuan (US$370,000) in 2007 to 8.84 million yuan ($1.29 million) in 2008, according to the Fazhi Wanbao (Legal Evening News).

In the past six years, at lease 39 ministerial- or provincial-level officials and 1,111 at a prefecture-level (prefecture-level are regarded as senior cadres in the CCP hierarchy) have been jailed for corruption. The most senior was former Shanghai party secretary and politburo member Chen Liangyu, who was sentenced to 18-years imprisonment last year for taking bribes.

So last month's sudden arrest of Shenzhen mayor Xu Zhongheng, a deputy-ministerial level official, surprised no one. Reports say Xu was taking huge bribes from developers and then using these funds to bribe higher-ranking officials to ensure the safety of his political career.

Almost all of the cases have been uncovered by the party's anti-graft watchdog, with hardly any being exposed by the media or the public. But the public still believe they have resulted from political struggles and not the anti-corruption campaign.

Apparently, no matter how successful the crackdown may appear (as suggested by the above data), and no matter how many laws have been written (there are currently more than 1,200 anti-corruption laws, rules, and directives), the government's anti-corruption campaign is still a lost cause.

From this perspective, it is big progress for the CCP to adopt the "Sunshine" policy. But there remain fears that its implementation will be twisted by local officials, leaving the policy toothless. The policy's test-runs in some regions have seen less than satisfactory results.

The "Sunshine" policy requires that all government meetings, decisions and records be made available to the public. It is universally agreed that disclosure of officials' property assets, as part of sunshine laws, is a potent weapon against corruption.

As early as 1766, Swedish citizens had access to the tax reports of civil servants and politically appointed officials, right up to the prime minister. Since then, the disclosure system has been introduced to many countries and regions. For example, the policy has improved governance in South Korea and Taiwan.

In China, a similar motion was first tabled in 1988. Seven years later, the CCP launched the first internal regulations requiring officials of prefecture-level and above to declare their income. Another six years later (2001), the CCP's Central Commission for Disciplinary Inspection (CCDI) and Central Organization Department jointly laid out more internal regulations with 15 articles requiring officials of ministerial level to disclose their family properties.

These internal regulations may be regarded as stepping stones towards the "Sunshine" policy to be unveiled in September. But in them were loopholes that local officials easily made use of. First, they were party disciplinary regulations instead of laws. Second, they covered only salaries and other incomes excluding family properties and other non-labor incomes.

Thirdly, officials were only required to disclose their assets to personnel departments, and the information was kept out of the public's reach. Lastly and most importantly, there is no stipulation on how an official who provides false information would be punished.

Despite of all this, apparently to prepare for the introduction of the "Sunshine" policy, the power center has asked regions to make bold experiment on declaration of properties by officials.

Early experiments were initiated at the beginning of this year in Cixi city of Zhejiang province and Aletai district in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, they have attracted wide attention. Cixi posted declarations of assets on public-notice boards of the municipal government, local court, and other government agencies. Aletai chose to go online - boosting the number of viewers of the official website of the local anti-graft watchdog to over 100,000 a day from previously less than 100. Journalists have flocked in to the two localities to cover the reforms.

Praiseworthy as their pioneering spirit may be, the results of the experiments remain in doubt. For a start, there is no guarantee that the information disclosed is genuine. For example, every single one of the 1,056 officials in the Aletai district reported that they had received no gifts. This is simply too clean to be true.

The information disclosed also may not present the genuine picture. In Cixi, the required disclosure only covers the regular incomes of officials and their spouses and children, excluding their bank deposits, trust funds, stocks, and securities. The requirement in Aletai is even more limited, covering only the salaries and bonuses of officials themselves.

Public accessibility to the disclosed information has also been questioned. In Cixi, the asset-declarations of officials were posted for no more than three days, while the Aletai website was blocked during the July 5 violence in Xinjiang province. In neither place have specific supporting measures been introduced, for instance how to identify false information and how to punish those who submit false information.

But one obvious result of the compulsory disclosure has been in the account set-up by the Aletai anti-graft watchdog for officials to turn in bribes offered to them. Before May 2008, the account's balance was zero. After the disclosure mechanism was introduced, it increased to 800,000 yuan.

Last month Gaoxian, a county in Sichuan province, followed suit though in a much distorted version of the "sunshine" rules. First, compulsory disclosure was required only for middle-ranking officials. Second, instead of making the disclosed information public, all the information was classified as "confidential". In many aspects, the Gaoxian experiment is a total mockery of its two predecessors. If the disclosure mechanism is a touchstone of the political will to fight corruption, Gaoxian has doubtless failed the test.

On the positive side, the test runs have provided experiences for Beijing to work out a more effective "Sunshine" policy. But loopholes must be plugged up and penalties introduced for officials who give false declarations if Beijing genuinely wants the "Sunshine" policy to work.

Stephanie Wang is a freelance contributor based in Changsha, China.

(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd