Probes of Wall Street Now Need to Go Criminal

April 29, 2010 (LPAC) — 62 members of Congress thus far, led by Ohio Democrat Marcy Kaptur, are demanding that the SEC charges and Congressional hearings on Wall Street investment banks, turn into criminal prosecution of those financial institutions which created and then collapsed the bubble economy. And Goldman Sachs is not the only target on Wall Street in a letter which Rep. Kaptur delivered to Attorney General Eric Holder today.

The letter, also backed by 140,000 petition signatures, summarizes the civil securities fraud case initiated by the Securities and Exchange Commission against Goldman Sachs (the bank known more recently as "Goldman Sucks"). It says such practices as Goldman's "contributed to the recent financial crisis — which cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars" in bail-outs. In addition, $10 trillion in household wealth was destroyed. The Congressmen say the DOJ "has the power to file criminal actions against those who commit financial fraud," and demands, "If the DOJ is not currently looking into this particular case, we respectfully ask you to ensure that the U.S. Department of Justice immediately open a case on this matter and investigate it with the full authority and power that your agency holds. The American people both demand and deserve justice in the matter of Wall Street banks whom the American taxpayers bailed out, only to see unemployment and housing foreclosures rise."

The letter specifies that they want the DOJ to look into "this case and similar cases to further investigate and prosecute the criminals involved in this, and other financially fraudulent act[s]." [emphasis added]

The hearings this week by Sen. Carl Levin in his Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, demonstrated in graphic, documented detail that Goldman — Wall Street's current epitome — drew investors all over the world into the monstrous 2003-2007 financial bubble in hyperinflated mortgage securities and parasitical "financial derivatives." And that it made many billions, using other derivatives, by making early bets for its own account against the same securities and investors, as that bubble imploded and took away their wealth and their jobs.

Sen. Claire McCaskill introduced evidence suggesting additional, clear, criminal securities fraud by Goldman. These internal Goldman emails concerned the bank's own analysis of large "bundles" of mortgages issued by the long-since-exploded Century Financial Corp. and Long Beach Mortgage Corp. Despite these companies' known toxic mortgage-lending practices, Goldman was much in the business of "slicing and dicing" piles of their mortgages into debt securities, and selling those around the world. The internal analysis described in the emails, indicated that Goldman had already found 38% of Century Financial's mortgages, and 20% of Long Beach's, to be frauds — "ID theft, broker misrepresentation, straw buyer, falsification of information, false origination documents," etc. — not to mention borrowers' inability to pay the mortgage debts. McCaskill's evidence was in Exhibit 77 of the Senate PSI Committee's volume.

Confronted with this, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein professed ignorance, although Century Financial and Long Beach were two of its biggest providers of mortgages to securitize; he had to agree to document for the Committee that the bank did, or did not sell securities worldwide based on mortgages and brokers already shown by its own "due diligence" to be committing fraud.

"How is President Obama going to handle this one?" asked Lyndon LaRouche. "Knowing him, he'll play the role of Louis XVI."

Rep. Issa Questions Why FDIC Waited to Close Broadway Bank

April 29, 2010 (LPAC)—While Barack Obama was campaigning for Alexi Giannoulias in Illinois, Rep. Issa wrote a letter to Sheila Bair, Chairman of the FDIC inquiring as to why the Broadway Bank run by Giannoulias's family was not closed down earlier. As reported previously, the Broadway Bank loaned $20 million to two organized crime-linked felons while Alexi Giannoulias was the senior loan officer of the bank. The bank also serviced Tony Rezko, the godfather of both Rod Blagojevich and Barack Obama, who is now in jail awaiting sentencing on fraud charges. Alexi Giannoulias, a former basketball buddy of Obama, was elected state Treasurer thanks to Obama's support, despite the questionable connections of his bank, and is now the Democratic candidate to fill Obama's old U.S. Senate seat.

The point that Issa makes is that according to the FDIC the cost of Broadway's failure will be $394.3 million. This is a loss of approximately 36% to the FDIC. "The amount of the Broadway loss, both in dollars and as a percentage of total deposits, is significantly higher than those figures for the other six Illinois banks closed on April 23, 2010. These figures suggest that the FDIC may have waited longer than it should have to act to prevent foreseeable losses in the case of Broadway Bank."

"As early as the end of 2008, there were signs that Broadway bank was in serious trouble. The ratio used to determine the health of banks is a widely used industry metric called the Texas ratio. Banks with a Texas ratio above 50% are considered in need of additional capital. Broadway Bank had a Texas ratio of 94% at the end of 2008. The Bank's profits had likewise decreased by more than 94% from 2007 to 2008."

Rep. Issa then further discloses that "On January 26, 2010, Broadway Bank entered into a consent order with the FDIC and the Illinois Division of Banking, requiring the bank to raise tens of millions in capital. The consent order served as a warning to Broadway and Mr. Giannoulias that the bank was on the verge of collapse. Weeks later, on or about March 9, 2010, a meeting took place at the White House between Senior Advisor to the President David Axelrod and Mr. Giannoulias, who is a candidate for the U.S. Senate from Illinois.

"The fact that senior White House officials such as David Axelrod were meeting with Mr. Giannoulias at the time the FDIC is covering hundreds of millions in losses at Broadway Bank raised a red flag."

Rep. Issa then asks: "Why did the FDIC wait so long to close Broadway Bank? Were any creditors benefited by the delay in closing down Broadway Bank? The high losses in the case of Broadway Bank suggest there may be a bias in the way the FDIC evaluates when to take action on a distressed bank. Was Mr. Giannoulias' candidacy for the United States Senate considered when the FDIC was deliberating about whether to take action on the Broadway Bank?"

Dvorkovich and Lord Jacob Rothschild's London Set

April 29, 2010 (LPAC)—The network of bungling monetarists and worse who are out to wreck what is left of the Russian economy, have deep London roots, including directly into the Inter-Alpha Group apparatus, through none other than Lord Jacob Rothschild. Arkady Dvorkovich, the top economic aide to Russian President Medvedev, is part of an apparatus of young, British-linked economists, centered out of the New Economic School and the Centre for Economic and Financial Research in Moscow. The New Economic School was established in 1992 to "train a new generation of economists for Russia." In 2000, a group of NES graduates founded the CEFIR, "an independent economic policy research institute," according to their own website. Now, the two outfits have merged and form part of a consortium of think tanks and training schools, led by the Stockholm Institute for Transition Economics (SITE) at the Stockholm School of Economics, and the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London. CEFIR is also affiliated with The Global Institute, a larger research consortium, jointly run by SITE and the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Arkady Dvorkovich is a member of the board of directors of CEFIR. Other board members include: Maxim Boycko, Chairman of the Board of Video International Group, a Russian public relations firm partnered with WPP, the London-based multinational public relations and advertising cartel; Erik Berglof, the Chief Economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), who formerly was the Director of SITE, and was a visiting professor at both Stanford and MIT; Professor Barry Ickes, professor at Penn State University and president of American Friends of NES; and Lisbet Rausing.

Rausing's role in CEFIR is of particular note. Her foundation, the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Trust, now called the Arcadia Trust Charitable Fund, is the only listed source of funding for CEFIR. The Swedish-born Rausing is the heiress to the second largest fortune in Britain (the family relocated to Britain in the 1970s); she is a director of the Rothschild family's Yad Hanadiv fund, which is the largest and most secretive charitable trust in Israel, and lists Lord Jacob Rothschild on the board of her Arcadia Trust. She is vice-chair of the Flora and Fauna Society, teaches at the Imperial College in London, and is on the Board of Overseers of Harvard University, where she got her graduate degree and taught for eight years. She is married to Peter Baldwin, Professor of History at UCLA.

While claiming to be just a simple Swedish country girl, raised in the university town of Lund, Lisbet Rausing owns a 48,000 acre Scottish estate with a castle valued at 20 million British pounds sterling. The Scottish property is held by a Cayman Islands shell company, so the whole family enterprise avoids paying British taxes. Same for sister Sigrid Rausing, who owns a 40,000 acre Scottish estate and also dodges taxes. When the whole scandal erupted after their father, Hans Rausing, sold his 50% stake in the family company, Tetra Pak, in 1996, and managed to avoid paying taxes on his 4.9 billion pound sterling windfall, which made him temporarily the wealthiest man in Britain (since surpassed by Russian mafiosi Roman Abramovich), Lord Jacob Rothschild penned a signed article in the Guardian in 2002, warning that any attempt to tax wealthy expatriots residing in Britain would destroy their ability to lead the charitable world. God save the fondi!

LaRouche on Eurozone Meltdown: You Cannot Bail This Thing Out!

April 29, 2010 (LPAC)—Panic is spreading across international financial markets as the Eurozone debt crisis is escalating, with Spain joining Greece and Portugal on the list of countries whose sovereign debt has been downgraded by Standard & Poors, and some analysts are asking the question, is Italy next?

When you add up the demanded bail-outs of the bank creditors of these countries, Lyndon LaRouche commented, you are talking about something in the range of $1 trillion. If you consider the insane derivatives built on top of this quicksand — in typical Goldman Sachs style — you are in the range of a quarter quadrillion dollars, or more. "You cannot bail this thing out," LaRouche asserted. You have to get the passengers off the boat, not try to bail out the Titanic—and hopefully there will be enough boats to do that.

The British Empire's media outlets and experts, looking at this situation, are urging an exactly contrary policy to LaRouche's: a second TARP-style mega bail-out. Barclays Capital economist Piero Ghezzi is cited in the New York Times saying that, in order to satisfy "the markets" — i.e., the predator financial institutions that created the problem in the first place — "the number would be huge. Ninety billion euros for Greece, 40 billion for Portugal and 350 billion for Spain — now we are talking real money." The Times article then calls for a TARP-style bail-out of Europe to be launched. "What a growing number of investors suggest is really needed is a 'shock and awe' figure ... something similar to the Bush administration's decision to provide $700 billion to shore up America's financial institutions in the peak of the 2008 crisis." Bloomberg.com concurred: "Europe may need to come up with a plan equivalent to the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program deployed by the U.S. after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc."

The head of the OECD, Angel Gurria — in Berlin to survey the damage along with the top dogs of the IMF, the World Bank, the ECB, and the ILO — was openly hysterical: "It's not a question of the danger of contagion. Contagion has already happened. This is like Ebola. When you realize you have it, you have to cut your leg off in order to survive."

Blankfein: You Destroyed Glass-Steagall, and You Got Us!

April 29, 2010 (LPAC) — The April 27 "Goldman Sucks" hearing of Sen. Carl Levin's Permanent Investigations Subcommittee succeeded completely in demonstrating — before the eyes of every news outlet in the nation — that Wall Street investment banks, even if not currently illegal, are thoroughly parasitical institutions for looting economies and people. Levin stated that there may have been an era, under the direct impact of the 1934 "Pecora hearings" into bank crimes and FDR's 1934 Glass-Steagall Act, when Wall Street investment houses brought capital together with businesses that needed it. But today there is no redeeming social value or purpose to the Wall Street casinos, with their 35-1 or 40-1 debt leveraged securities: "Goldman Sachs did well when its clients lost money. Its conduct brings into question the whole function of Wall Street," Levin stated.

Lyndon LaRouche has stated that Wall Street should disappear altogether, as part of a bankruptcy reorganization of the U.S. and international financial system, based on Glass-Steagall standards.

Ironically, even Goldman Sucks CEO Lloyd Blankfein had to put his finger on the elimination of the Glass-Steagall principle (it was weakened repeatedly by Alan Greenspan's Fed in the 1980s and 1990s, and finally repealed under Treasury Secretary Larry Summers' pressure in 1999) as the cause of his bank's behavior. Delaware Democratic Sen. Ted Kaufman asked Blankfein:

"Is it fair to say, in the last 30 years, that Goldman has focused more and more of its own resources and gained more and more of its revenue from trading on its own account, without the need for clients?

BLANKFEIN: We have focused more — we have focused more and more in trading as a principle....

KAUFMAN: But it's evolved away from kind of the classic investment banking and gotten more and more to trading?

BLANKFEIN: Well, I would say that increasingly — and this is a change in the sociology of the business that took place over the last 15 or 20 years — I'm not sure if it was precipitated by the fall of Glass- Steagall or it caused Glass-Steagall to fall, as U.S. institutions had to become more competitive with global institutions."

The killing of the Glass-Steagall principle plunged the bigger commercial banks into casino-like speculations and securitizations, as they merged with investment firms and insurance companies and issued financial derivatives that mounted to the hundreds of trillions. And for the Wall Street investment firms, it handed them previously unheard-of ability to borrow and leverage themselves, to blow up the speculative "junk" operations of the financial casino.

The principle of Glass-Steagall needs to be reimposed, and the actions of Wall Street's Goldman Sachs shut down — globally.

Saving the Planet Now!: A Global "Glass Steagall"

Saving the Planet Now:

A GLOBAL 'GLASS-STEAGALL'

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.February 8, 2010

For any actually competent economist today, a global equivalent of a "Glass Steagall" reform was implicit in President Franklin Roosevelt's basing his 1944 fixed- exchange-rate Bretton Woods system. It was the contrary actions of President Harry Truman, made as concessions to Winston Churchill, and to Wall Street, after Roosevelt's death, which sent the world careening, step, by step, by step, into the direction of the presently terminal phase of decline gripping the world today.

The ultimate consequence of the Truman administration's concessions to London and Wall Street is, today, that all recipes known to me, for a so-called "new Bretton Woods" contrary to my efforts, have been fraudulent in effect, whether this was the intended effect, or not. Such has been today's outcome of the official suppression of President Franklin Roosevelt's anti-Keynes, Bretton Woods intention for the post-war world.

Today, without a kind of Glass Steagall reform, which would virtually wipe out the monetarist features of both Wall Street's and of the City of London's systems, the chances for escaping an already oncoming, planet-wide, "new dark age,"were virtually "zilch"!

The stunningly poor performance of the British empire's nominally Spanish, and largely Brazil-based, Banco Santander during this past week, has confronted the Euro system as a whole with a crisis for which that institution has no visible remedy in sight. After all the ifs, ands, and buts available to London's phrase-mongers have been spent, the fact persists that the present Euro system has no remedy for its presently existential crisis within the obvious present means at hand.

In fact, there is only one essential remedy, disband the present Euro system under its just recently installed, present rules. Return to a Europe of respectively sovereign nation-states, including immediate steps to reestablish the Deutschemark, and break up the conditionalities which were imposed upon Germany under the intentionally ruinous terms jointly dictated to Germany by the heads of state and government Margaret Thatcher, President Francois Mitterand, and a rather silly, but mean- spirited President George H.W. Bush.

These and related, specific measures required to rescue western and central Europe from the present failures of British domination can not be successful installation without putting all of western and central Europe under the U.S. equivalent of a Roosevelt-era designed "Glass- Steagall" reform.

This past week's exposure of the problematic features of much of the assets within the so-called Inter- Alpha Group, such as Banco Santander, shows clearly that those parts of the banking and related claims on which the claimed financial strength of the Euro system had depended for its authority have been of a quality either similar to, or, probably even much poorer than the 2007- 2010 U.S.A. under the mismanagement of U.S. Presidents George W. Bush, Jr. and Barack Obama. The crisis of Europe exposed by last week's developments around the Inter-Alpha Group's environment, are, by their nature, far less manageable than for a U.S.A. under its constitutional system.

Those facts concerning the present international financial situation taken into account, if the European continent returned to a status quo ante situation prior to the installation of the present Euro system, as by restoring the Deutschemark, a Glass-Steagall approach to reform there, would permit immediate economic and financial reforms of the credit-systems needed for launching the agro-industrial recapitalization of the economies of Germany and its continental neighbors. Otherwise, without a "Glass- Steagall" type of reform, executed in the spirit of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's approach, there is little hope that Europe generally could overcome the general form of general economic-breakdown crisis now mustering its forces for a general breakdown of the existing European system.

The time has come to leave former British Prime Minister Tony Blair's smelly scalp drying in the breezes surrounding the flagpole on which it hangs.

The Hopeful Option

 

During my January 30th International LPAC Webcast, I emphasized that the monetary-financial aspects of the present collapse of the European Union's economy, is interlinked with the collapse of the physical economy of western and central Europe due, chiefly, to the influence of "green policies." I emphasized the fact, that as of the present time, the economic existence of Europe is being doomed by the accelerating effect of so-called "green" policies which have been largely premised on the demonstrably failed cult of "global warming," whereas it is the parts of the world which had rejected such so-called "green policies" which are currently benefitting from vigorous investment in high- technology progress in such basic economic infrastructure as mass transportation and vigorous investment in nuclear power.

However, I am confident that once the citizens of European nations recognize that a shift back to modern technology of capital-intensive investment in basic economic infrastructure, industry, and agriculture is the wave of a return to the future, the "green resistance" to European survival will, like "an old soldier," "fade away."

THE TRIPLE CURVE.

 

 

"The Ides of March 2010"      Watch This !

China Accuses Goldman Sachs of "Evil Intentions"

April 28, 2010 (LPAC)—Goldman Sachs, despite extremely close relations with China and several of China's top leaders, has been denounced for selling derivatives to government-backed companies which threatened to cost the companies billions of dollars in losses — except, the government has refused to pay.

Late last year, China's State Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) intervened on behalf of several Chinese companies in legal actions against foreign banks (mostly Goldman) on derivatives deals. For example, Goldman, through a subsidiary J. Aron, sold derivatives to the Shenzhen Nanshan Power company at the peak of the oil price fluctuations, leaving the company with $80 million in losses when the price of fuel fell sharply.

Li Wei, SASAC vice president, claimed that the companies lost $1.7 billion on $18 billion worth of derivative contracts, and that the losses were "closely associated with the intentionally complex and highly leveraged products that were fraudulently peddled by international investment banks with evil intentions."

The Telegraph says that Goldman declines to comment, but that the issue is still active.

Pecora Process Underway !

April 28, 2010 (LPAC)—Here, out of Washington, Senator Levin has mopped the floor with Goldman Sachs in good prosecutorial fashion. What we have, as Lyn said, is the Pecora Commission process going on right now. It's broken out. Many people are hard-put to explain it, but it is a key feature of the dynamic, which we can understand.

Levin convicted Goldman Sachs of swindling their clients out of billions, not just in the one CDO which was the subject of the SEC suit, but three others, which in turn stood for numerous others. They were selling packages of mortgage-backed CDO's in order to bet that these very packages would fail, as they all did,— and their gains from these gambling bets against their own products, matched their clients' losses. On the bigger scale, the firm was betting up to $13 billion against the whole residential mortgage market throughout 2007, while actively peddling mortgage-backed securities themselves, including from many of the most notorious fraudulent lenders, like New Century and WaMu. And they were aggressively bundling not only mortgage-backed securities, which are bad enough, but mortgage-backed CDO's, which, being derivatives, multiply the systemic risk many times over. And synthetic CDO's, a level even beyond that. Thus, they made a major contribution to bringing down the whole system, and destroying the whole economy just as they destroyed their own clients.

The first panel, of five lower-level executives, were under instructions to run out the clock with delaying tactics and refuse to answer questions, which the Senators duly noted. In this way, they convicted themselves in the face of reams of documentary evidence, often from their own e-mails, of what they had done.

Sen. Claire McCaskill summarized, "Synthetic CDOs were created purely to bet. This is the lala-land of ledger entries. It's pure gambling. You are the bookie and you are the house. You had less oversight than a pit boss in Las Vegas. You think you're so smart? No street gambler would ever place a bet with the likes of you!"

The final panel was CEO Blankfein by himself. After the catastrophe of the first panel, Blankfein tried to appear reasonable and friendly, but he, too, was caught in a big lie when his insistence that Goldman had not played the "big short" was disproved by numerous official Goldman documents. And he continually insisted on Goldman's right to sell its clients booby-trapped securities designed to fail, while enriching itself by betting against its own products via credit-default swaps.

The Pecora process is on!

The Collapse of the Eurozone is On

April 28, 2010 (LPAC)—With the chaos they have unleashed in their attempt to force through a so-called Greek rescue package, the British have pushed the Eurozone into a terminal collapse.

Interest on two-year Greek treasury bonds shot up 3 percentage points Monday to 13%, and yesterday another 2 percentage points to 15%. These are highest rates for short-term bonds in the world, according to Brown Brothers Harriman as reported in the Financial Times. "Contagion" is now spreading, with Portuguese two-year bond yields having shot up from 3.051% to 3.985%. The FT article has graphs underneath the article to show the rise of Greek bond yields, the Portugese bond yields, and the Euro-dollar rate — not set in years, months or days but set in hours over the course of Monday, as if it were Weimar Germany, 1923.

The system can't stand this sort of wrenching strain. The present Eurozone crisis has justly been compared to the Kreditanstalt collapse of 1931, in its unleashing a next yawning gulf of collapse in the trans-Atlantic system.

It is clear that the issue is not whether the deal will go through, but that even if it does go through, it will not solve the problem, since Portugal, Ireland, and above all, the main act, Spain and Britain, are waiting in the wings.

Bloomberg reports that credit default swaps for Portugal's sovereign debt are trading at rates worse than those for Lebanon and Guatemala. While Portugal's public debt is 77% of GDP, its private debt is 236%. This compares with 205% in Italy, and 195% in Greece. Only 17% of its public debt is held by Portuguese; the rest is held by foreigners, a huge amount. The country also has had virtually no growth in the past 10 years and has no prospect for growth in the future.

Bloomberg also reports that not only are credit default swaps for Portugal, Spain, and Ireland increasing, but the crisis is having a spillover effect on the commercial bond market where CDS rates are also rising.

In an effort to convince the Bundestag to fork over EU8.5 billion for the EU45 billion cement-shoe "rescue" package, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn and European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet have been asked to address the Bundestag tomorrow.

They should have listened to LaRouche.

THE TRIPLE CURVE. WATCH THIS !

 

"The Ides of March 2010"

http://www.icelandcrash.com/how-bad-will-this-get.html 

Jóhanna Total Evrópa 14 Júní 2004 !

 Hvað Sagði Jóhanna Total Evrópa í Fréttum í Gærkvöldi ?

Það er kominn tími til að að hún taki vitleysuna með sér í langt frí.

Og hlífi þjóðinni við Sovét Sósílaisma.

"14. júní 2004

Halldór, Davíð og þingræðið

ÞAÐ ER beinlínis hlægilegt að hlusta á ráðamenn hafa áhyggjur af þingræðinu nú - menn sem stjórnað hafa þjóðinni með ráðherraræði í hartnær áratug. Lýðræðið er, engu síður en þingræðið, hornsteinn og grundvallarregla íslenskrar stjórnskipunar. Það er því ekki verið að vega að þingræðinu með því að beita lýðræðinu á þann hátt að fólkið fái sjálft í þjóðaratkvæðagreiðslu að leggja dóm á mál sem forseti Íslands hefur kosið að vísa til þjóðarinnar. Með ákvörðun um þjóðaratkvæðagreiðslu er á lýðræðislegan hátt verið að færa valdið í hendur fólksins, sem þjóðkjörnir fulltrúar sækja umboð sitt frá. Það að slíkur réttur skuli vera fyrir hendi veitir þingræðinu og ekki síður framkvæmdavaldinu nauðsynlegt aðhald, sem styrkir lýðræðið.

Ráðherraræðið víkur nú fyrir lýðræðinu og styrkir því þingræðið  
Í stjórnartíð Davíðs Oddssonar hefur framkvæmdavaldið styrkst gífurlega á kostnað bæði þingræðis og lýðræðis. Mörgum hefur fundist stjórnarhættir oddvita stjórnarflokkanna minna meira á tilskipanir einræðisherra en lýðræði, enda hafa ákvarðanir þeirra iðulega endað fyrir dómstólum. Ekki er hikað við að keyra í gegnum þingið lög sem beinist að þeim sem standa ekki og sitja eins og valdstjórnin vill. Nægir þar að nefna fjölmiðlalögin og niðurlagningu á Þjóðhagsstofnun. Meirihlutinn í þinginu er iðulega barinn til hlýðni og mál sett í endanlegan búning fyrir þingið af oddvitum ríkisstjórnar og eftir atvikum ríkisstjórn, án samráðs við meirihlutann á Alþingi, sem ráðherrarnir styðjast við. Þetta er ekki þingræði, heldur ráðherraræði. Svo langt var gengið að enginn var spurður og ekkert samráð haft ekki einu sinni við þann þingmeirihluta sem þessir tveir stjórnarherrar styðjast við á Alþingi, þegar Davíð og Halldór bundu þjóðina í hóp þeirra þjóða sem fylgdu Bandaríkjamönnum í Íraksstríðinu. Nú eru þessir sömu menn fullir vandlætingar og tala um atlögu að þingræðinu, þegar forseti lýðveldisins beitir málskotsrétti sínum, sem honum er tryggður í stjórnarskránni og vísar umdeildu máli til þjóðarinnar. Nei - svo oft hafa núverandi valdhafar misboðið þingræðinu og lítilsvirt það, að það fer þeim illa að bera á þessum tímamótum fyrir sig umhyggju fyrir því. Í reynd hefur lýðræðið nú vikið til hliðar ráðherraræðinu og í framhaldinu gæti þetta átt eftir að styrkja þingræðið.

Þjóðaratkvæðagreiðsla brýn hér á landi
Viðbrögð oddvitanna einkennast nú af hefnd vegna þess að forsetinn setti valdið í hendur fólksins. Þeir vilja taka málskotsréttinn af forsetanum sem gengur gegn lýðræðinu og mun treysta enn frekar í sessi ráðherraræðið á Íslandi. Lýðræðinu hér er í raun miklu meiri takmörk sett, en í ýmsum löndum sem við berum okkur saman við, því samsteypustjórnir eru mun algengari hér en t.d. annars staðar á Norðurlöndum. Þannig veit fólk sjaldnast hvaða ríkisstjórnir það er að kjósa yfir sig, auk þess sem það auðveldar flokkum í samsteypustjórnum að semja sig frá loforðum og kosningastefnuskrám. Mörg mál koma því uppá borðið sem keyrð eru í gegn og koma kjósendum stjórnarflokka gjörsamlega í opna skjöldu, eins og iðulega hefur gerst hér á landi. Þess vegna er málskotsréttur forseta mikilvægur að ekki sé talað um rétt fólks almennt til að krefjast þjóðaratkvæðagreiðslu. Í mörg ár hef ég ásamt fleiri þingmönnum lagt til á Alþingi að fimmtungur kosningabærra manna í landinu geti krafist þess að þjóðaratkvæðagreiðsla fari fram um lagafrumvarp sem Alþingi hefur samþykkt. Einnig flutti ég á árinu 1995 frumvarp um að efnt yrði til sérstaks stjórnlagaþings til að fjalla um breytingar á stjórnarskránni, eins og mannréttindi, kosningar og kjördæmaskipan, þingrof, setningu bráðabirgðalaga, lög um ráðherraábyrgð, skil löggjafarvalds og framkvæmdavalds og þjóðaratkvæðagreiðslur. Tillögur stjórnlagaþings átti síðan að bera undir þjóðaratkvæðagreiðslu.

Þjóðin lýsi afstöðu til endurskoðunar stjórnarskrárinnar
Ef stjórnarherrunum er alvara í því að ætla að leggja til að afnema málskotsrétt forsetans þá er rétt og eðlilegt að um leið og þjóðin gengur til atkvæða nú í sumar um fjölmiðlalögin þá verði hún einnig spurð um afstöðu til málskotsréttar forseta Íslands og hvort heimila eigi að tilskilinn hluti þjóðarinnar geti krafist þjóðaratkvæðagreiðslu. Niðurstaðan gæti verið mjög gagnleg og ráðgefandi ef ráðast á í endurskoðun á ákvæðum stjórnarskrárinnar. Full ástæða er líka til að festa í lög, að allar ákvarðanir um breytingar á stjórnarskránni eigi að fara í þjóðaratkvæðagreiðslu. Þar á æðsta vald að vera í höndum þjóðarinnar sjálfrar, sem styrkir mjög grundvöll lýðræðisins.

Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, alþingismaður (Mbl. júní 2004)

Mbl. 8. júní 2004"

http://www.althingi.is/johanna/greinar/safn/001306.shtml

Nánar: http://www.icelandcrash.com/antisocial-personality.html