Obama Administration Seeks to Expand Big Brother’s Monitoring of Private Citizens’ Financial Affairs

Despite the U.S. government’s recent posturing on the issue of foreign bank accounts and tax havens, more than a few retirees are asking a fundamental question: Where in the U.S. Constitution is the Federal government granted the power to know all about our financial affairs in a Big Brother-like fashion?

Like the Feds’ penchant for warrentless wiretaps, this recent attempt to expand surveillance of private citizens strikes many American citizens as patently illegal. At the very least, it may strike a backlash against the Obama Administration’s increasingly totalitarian expansion of government.

Many people maintain foreign bank accounts, not for tax evasion, but for convenience, safety and privacy: They simply don’t think it’s the U.S. government business (or anyone else’s!) to know what they do with their money. Once they’ve paid their income taxes, why should the U.S. government monitor where their money is?

As is well known, the doctrine of enumerated powers found in the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly states that “[t]he powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Of course, the Feds have gradually ignored the Tenth Amendment through an ever-widening application of the Commerce Clause, the article of the Constitution that grants to the Federal government the right to regulate interstate commerce. Now we are at the point where the Feds believe they can demand that free citizens, living abroad, report every penny they have in every bank account, anywhere in the world, regardless of where that money was earned – or face criminal charges and years in prison. Thanks to the tax-happy Obama Administration and Sen. Carl Levin (D-Michigan) – desperate to raise trillions in new taxes to pay for socialist programs — the Feds are about to create a new slate of laws making the reporting requirements even more onerous than they already are.

But as it usually the case, the Feds’ new crusade against productive citizens will simply backfire. Banks are already reporting record numbers of people withdrawing cash to maintain in home safes. More and more people are choosing to avoid the government-controlled banking system altogether.

Dow Breaks Record of 1929 Crash and Closes Week Down 18.1%!

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The Dow closed down 18.1% for the week — the greatest one-week wipeout in history!

It’s actually worse than the Great Crash of Black Monday, October 28, 1929, when the Dow closed the week “only” down 14.4%.

It’s worse than the 1987 crash when the Dow, after plunging 22% in a single day, closed the week down 13.1%. In the past 12 months, the Dow has lost 40% of its value while the S&P 500 has lost 42.5%. Markets in Asia, Europe and the Middle East are losing just as much, if not more.

The last time the S&P 500 crashed like this, in the aftermath of 9/11, it took FIVE YEARS to finally recover and only with the help of $400 trillion worth of bank-created derivatives.

That money is now gone forever and will never be created again.

We’re now back to where we were a decade ago – only this time, we’re facing MASSIVE government debts… two unresolved wars… a sinking global economy… a global banking system that is collapsing… and the likelihood of a president with ZERO financial or executive experience.


The market will come back. Historically, it always has. But we’re in for a prolonged period of economic uncertainty. Early retirees should use their “off the grid” skills to simplify their lives, relocate to less expensive areas (preferably outside the U.S.) and buckle down.

Big Brother Wants National Fingerprint Database

OpenMarket.org, the blog of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is one of the few media sources reporting on a new secret plan to create a national fingerprint database of non-criminals, beginning first with loan originators:

Fingerprints are considered to be among the most personal of information, and fingerprint databases created and proposed in the name of national security have generated much debate. Recently, “Server in the Sky” — a proposed international database of the fingerprints of suspected criminals and terrorists to be shared among the U.S., U.K. and Canada — has ignited a firestorm of controversy. As have cavalier comments by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that fingerprints aren’t “personal data.”

Yet earlier this week, a measure creating a federal fingerprint registry totally unrelated to national security passed a U.S. Senate committee almost without notice. The legislation would require thousands of individuals working even tangentially in the mortgage and real estate industries — and not suspected of anything — to send their prints to the feds. The database and fingerprint mandates were tucked into housing and foreclosure assistance bills that on Tuesday passed the Senate Banking Committee by a vote of 19-2.

The measure the committee passed states that “an indvidual may not engage in the business of a loan originator without first … obtaining a unique identifier.” To obtain this “identifier,” an individual is requiredto “furnish” to the newly created Nationwide Mortgage Licensing System and Registry “information concerning the applicant’s identity, including fingerprints for submission” to the FBI and other government agencies.

The fingerprint provisions are contained in a “manager’s amendment” that was hammered out by committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn, and Ranking Member Richard Shelby, R-Ala., on Monday and attached the next day to a broader housing bailout bill that had been scheduled for a comittee vote. That bill, the “Federal Housing Finance Regulatory Reform Act of 2008,” expands the lending authority of the Federal Housing Administration and the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to refinance the mortgages of troubled borrowers and banks.

It’s a chilling reminder of just how far Americans have gone in losing their cherished freedoms. Both Democrat and Republican leaders no longer even pretend to care about civil liberties. You can read the rest of the article by clicking here.