Column by Doug Herman.
Exclusive to STR
Just before the holidays, I walked into my local Wells Fargo bank to cash a small birthday check one of my sisters gave to me. Imagine my surprise when the teller informed me my small savings account was closed. I told her she was mistaken, and asked her to please check again; I knew I had about $800 in the account and I never use the ATM and don’t even have an ATM card. So she looked again and said she was sorry.
Empty. Damn.
So I went home and called my brother who shared the account. He looked up the account online and said all $800 was withdrawn and that a lien was put against my hard-earned dollars by the state of California, allegedly for back taxes owed in 1998. At the time, I lived in California but never worked there. I worked in Alaska, so I wondered how California felt entitled to go into my account and just take my money. Later I got my paper statement from Well Fargo and this is what it said.
11/ 9 Ending Daily Balance: $805.87
11/ 16 Legal Order To Withhold: $705.87
11/ 16 Legal Processing Fee: $100.00
Ending Balance on 11/ 30: $0.00
DAMN.
About a week later, I found myself in California visiting relatives. As I drove along I-405, I noticed a huge billboard for Wells Fargo. “You’ll Know When You’ve Been Bad or Good.” I smiled to myself. The Too Big to Fail Banks are also home to the Too Big To Jail bankers and their DC enablers. People are robbed blind every day, in broad daylight, as they say.
After WF allowed the plunder of my account, they sent me lots of nice letters in the mail. One even stated: “With you when the season calls for celebrating” and assuring me that they were on my side to keep my credit rating strong, etc.
I like California, I really do. A great, golden state with lots of upside, California is part of our mythical, historical, myth-making America. Unfortunately, like a lot of states, California is basically bankrupt.
About the same time California got the legal “right” to empty my account, one of California’s public officials, decided to pepper spray peaceful protestors at the University of California at Davis. Seems the campus police chief, Annette Spicuzza, who is basically a taxpayer-subsidized public servant for a bankrupt state, earns $140,000 PER YEAR. So in a way, my stolen $800 went to pay Annette the equivalent of 1-2 days of her salary. Must be tough fighting crime at a California campus. Not long after that incident, Annette was put on suspended (paid) leave. No money was taken from her account.
They Stole His Money Too
About the same time my account was emptied to pay police chief Annette, somebody decided to steal more than a billion dollars from the private, segregated accounts of 600,000 investors at MF Global. One of those allegedly secure accounts belonged to Gerald Celente. Seems Gerald was about to take delivery of a large amount of precious metal, which he had paid in full to acquire. Instead, at the last moment, his money and his metal disappeared, along with the so-called secured funds of some 600,000 other investors at MFG.
Seems the head of MF Global, Jon “The Don” Corzine, simply pleaded ignorance and washed his hands of the entire, blatant, broad-daylight embezzlement. Much like Jerry Sandusky washed his hands of the whole pedophile scandal at Penn State University. Corzine and Sandusky got away with screwing little people, unlike Bernie Madoff, who swindled the wrong BIG people. Corzine has BIG, connected friends and so Corzine continues to walk free today. In a Kleptocracy, you can steal with impunity IF you steal from powerless little people and are protected by other powerful BIG people like yourself.
What? You didn’t realize you and your kids are being robbed and raped daily? Eisenhower stated it in pure English for those trusting Americans who have a difficult time understanding their native language: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
Theft.
So my meager $800 goes to pay the SWAT team of pepper sprayers at UC Davis, uniformed officers who should have called in with “blue flu.” Meanwhile, YOUR hard-earned taxpayer dollars goes to pay the $2 billion for the Egyptian thugs who beat up the “blue bra girl” and killed hundreds of other peaceful protestors. And your children’s accounts are emptied of $2 billion to pay for the Israeli special forces who killed some peaceful protestors on a ship heading to Gaza, still in international waters. Your stolen tax payer dollars also pay for the SWAT team that killed an American veteran here in Tucson, Arizona. Shot dozens of times in cold blood and left to die. Theft and murder on a grand scale in broad daylight and no one held accountable.
They Stole Her Money Too
When a Kleptocracy spins completely out of control, as this American Kleptocracy appears to be doing, ordinary people begin to lose ALL confidence in the swindle no matter what political party the swindlers claim to represent. Once the confidence is lost, once the Con game is open and exposed, the game collapses. Soon, enough people begin to sound the alarm, the rigged game is over. Swindler’s List suddenly becomes a blacklist of con artists to avoid.
About the same time Gerald’s account was stolen, along with another half million investors, a woman named Ann Barnhardt, a small trader in agricultural futures, wrote her clients this letter.
“Dear Clients, Industry Colleagues and Friends of Barnhardt Capital Management. It is with regret and unflinching moral certainty that I announce that Barnhardt Capital Management has ceased operations. After six years of operating as an independent introducing brokerage, and eight years of employment as a broker before that, I found myself, this morning, for the first time since I was 20 years old, watching the futures and options markets open not as a participant, but as a mere spectator.
“The reason for my decision to pull the plug was excruciatingly simple: I could no longer tell my clients that their monies and positions were safe in the futures and options markets – because they are not. And this goes not just for my clients, but for every futures and options account in the United States. The entire system has been utterly destroyed by the MF Global collapse. Given this sad reality, I could not in good conscience take one more step as a commodity broker, soliciting trades that I knew were unsafe or holding funds that I knew to be in jeopardy.”
Their money was stolen. Her livelihood was stolen. Your children’s future was stolen. In a kleptocracy, theft is the First Commandment. Denial of justice is the Second.
The single silver lining in this whole litany of theft is that the Powers That Be have probably picked the two best worst people to swindle. Gerald and Ann resemble a couple of pit bulls, and you can hear and heed their words on a hundred videos. At least until the kleptocrats shut the Internet down completely.
Postscript: The huge concerted effort to discredit Constitutionalists and sound money advocates like Ron Paul continues on a regular basis. Recently, one columnist named Kevin Drum went so far as to accuse Ron of being "a full-bore crank" and in favor of "gold-buggery" (sic). As if Ron was a sidekick of Jerry Sandusky in the pedophile scandal. Gold buggery = boy buggery, right?
I'm surprised the mainstream media hasn't somehow linked Ron Paul to Jon Benet Ramsey's disappearance or the Bernie Madoff missing billions. Give them enough time and they might.
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