The Obama administration is calling its proposed $90 billion bank tax the Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee, and its salesman is Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

The United Nations summit on global warming in Copenhagen is less than a week away, and UN agencies are trying to pre-set the dials with calls for massive funding of various UN projects and programs. Speaking at a conference in Nairobi, Kenya, UN Development Program (UNDP) administrator Helen Clark said the developed nations need to provide between $75 billion and $100 billion a year to help poor nations cope with climate change.

News stories on August 19 reported that Neil Barofsky, Special Inspector General (SIG) of the U.S. treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), had agreed to audit the $301 billion of federal asset guarantees extended to Citigroup Inc. since last November.

Back in February, California politicians and taxpayers received a wake-up call, but, apparently, the alarm wasn't loud enough to wake them.

California, the "Golden State," is not golden anymore. It has the biggest debt, the biggest budget deficit, the lowest bond rating, and (arguably) the highest taxes of any state in the union.

A hundred and eight billion dollars — $108,000,000,000. Not exactly an eye-popping sum anymore, in an era of multi-trillion-dollar annual budgets and multi-trillion-dollar annual deficits. Still, even with government spending streaking into the stratosphere, $108 billion is not mere chump change, especially when it’s leveraged as seed money.

Suppose we had conducted a national opinion poll a few months ago to canvass Americans on their opinions of the G20. Most respondents, it is probably safe to say, would not have had the slightest idea whether you were asking them about a new smart phone, the trendiest fashion footwear, or the latest fat-burner diet drink.

Sometimes one wonders what it will take to wake people up and shake people up. It can become tiresome being labeled a kook, a nutjob, a conspiracy whacko — by both Democrats and Republicans, “liberals” and “conservatives” — all for merely pointing out what is obvious and easily verifiable. Thus, there is a certain satisfying sense of vindication when the labelers finally admit that maybe you weren’t really crazy after all. Maybe your warnings about the dangers of the steady transfers of power and money to an ever-proliferating international bureaucracy weren’t so far out. Maybe the United Nations really is being built into an all-powerful world government. And … maybe we should finally get concerned about all of that!

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has given a nod of approval to China’s call for a global currency to replace the dollar, joining a chorus of international voices that include Russia, a United Nations panel, billionaire investor George Soros, and Kazakhstan — among others. Geithner’s remarks favoring the China proposal, delivered at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) on March 25, surprised many, as the previous day both he and President Obama gave statements disapproving of any move away from the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Is the International Monetary Fund headed toward becoming the Federal Reserve of the world? Although one-world elitists in political and banking circles have been promoting the idea for many years, it has taken the current global economic crisis to provide the appearance of urgency and legitimacy needed to make the Global Fed scheme sellable to the public.