Robert Scheer on Libor: Modern international bankers form a class of thieves the likes of which the world has never before seen - on a scale that is almost impossible to comprehend

how massive does the fraud have to be, how many trillions of dollars does it have to involve, how many millions of people have to be ripped off, and how many more of these mega-crimes have to surface before these global criminals are stopped, and by stopped, i mean arrested, indicted, convicted and put away...?

robert scheer in truthdig...

The current Libor interest rate scandal, involving hundreds of trillions in international derivatives trade, shows how the really big boys play. And these guys will most likely not do the time because their kind rewrites the law before committing the crime.

Modern international bankers form a class of thieves the likes of which the world has never before seen. Or, indeed, imagined. The scandal over Libor—short for London interbank offered rate—has resulted in a huge fine for Barclays Bank and threatens to ensnare some of the world’s top financiers. It reveals that behind the world’s financial edifice lies a reeking cesspool of unprecedented corruption. The modern-day robber barons pillage with a destructive abandon totally unfettered by law or conscience and on a scale that is almost impossible to comprehend.

here's more from al jazeera...



and here's a longer treatment of the scandal from al jazeera's inside story with economist bill black making a guest appearance...




and, finally, this from current tv's viewpoint...

"Viewpoint" host Eliot Spitzer, Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone contributing editor, and Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of Better Markets, analyze the Libor interest rate--rigging scandal engulfing the banking industry.

Barclays CEO Bob Diamond recently resigned after the bank was fined $453 million for its part in the scandal, which involved manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor), a key global benchmark for interest rates, by essentially "faking their credit scores," according to Taibbi. And as Taibbi explains, Barclays couldn't have acted alone.

"It can't just be Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland. In fact, it can't even be four banks or even five banks," he says. "Really, in the end it's probably going to come out that it's going to be all of them ... involved in this. And that's what's critical for people to understand: that this is a cartel-style corruption."

Kelleher argues that the Libor scandal is proof that the financial industry "is corrupt and rotten to its core." "The same executives [using] the same business model that crashed the entire financial system in '08 are still running these banks," he says.

 

why does accountability and the rule of law only apply to the peasants...?

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

The 1% is a social darwinist force bent on destroying the essential social contract

i've said since i started posting on this blog back in 2005 that there is nothing our 1% desires more fervently than to drive a stake through the heart of any explicit or implied social contract... they are truly the champions of the "you're on your own" society, a dystopian, randian, survivalist nightmare that would turn a blind eye to any effort to support the common good...

robert scheer equates the 1% with the republicans, an equivalency i believe is less than accurate, particularly given the lack of any discernible daylight between the repubs and the dems...

It is with chilling certainty that one can predict that a single Romney appointee to the Supreme Court would seal the coup of the 1 percent that already is well on its way toward purchasing the nation’s political soul. Romney is the quintessential Citizens United super PAC candidate, a man who has turned avarice into virtue and comes to us now as a once-moderate politician transformed into the ultimate prophet of imperial hubris, blaming everyone from the Chinese to laid-off American workers for our problems. Everyone, that is, except the Wall Street-dominated GOP, which midwifed the Great Recession under George W. Bush and now seeks to blame Obama for the enormous deficit spawned by the party’s wanton behavior.

[...]

[T]he Republicans refuse to take ownership of the collapse resulting from their longstanding advocacy of radical financial deregulation that led to the derivatives bubble, hundreds of trillions of dollars of toxic junk, now a permanent, nightmarish feature of the world’s economy. Romney, who made his fortune through such financial finagling, even has the effrontery to call for more of the same and blame Obama’s tepid efforts at establishing some sane speed limits for the financial highway as a cause of our ongoing crisis.

scheer's conclusion is that we have no choice but to re-elect obama...

The Republicans are a sick joke, and their narrow ideological stupidity has left rational voters no choice in the coming presidential election but Barack Obama.

it was good to hear obama use the term "social darwinism" in his speech the other day... it's about damn time somebody in our national leadership dared to say it... unfortunately, however, even though i've used the term a million times myself, it's somewhat misapplied... darwinian theory claims that only the fittest survive, but in our current context, the 1% is massively underwritten by national policies designed to benefit them and their interests, the most egregious example being the massive bankster bailout...

predictably, obama's use of the term has spawned controversy...

the huffpo takes issue with obama's use of social darwinism...

For language expert Kathleen Hall Jamieson, social Darwinism seems like a risky term to use for political ammunition.

She says most people are familiar with Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution by natural selection – survival of the fittest.

But Jamieson, a political communication authority at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Center, explains that social Darwinism is a concept, an extension of Darwinism, that essentially says that those who are innately superior, often biologically superior, are advantaged in the conflict among or between groups.

She doesn't think that is what Obama is suggesting when he uses the term. Instead, what he is probably trying to convey is that he thinks Republicans subscribe to a theory that each person is on his own – no help from others, no government help.

The term is loaded with all sorts of negative historical associations. It has ties in the past to the rationalization of inequality, says Jamieson, as well as to the eugenics movement and the idea that those who are unfit should not be allowed to propagate.

And that's probably not what the president intends to suggest.

jonathan chait has a different take...

I happen to think "social Darwinist" captures the prevailing Republican philosophy pretty well. The point of the label, created by historian Richard Hoftsadter, is that a species of laissez-faire economics treated the market the way Darwinians treat natural selection — as the sole natural and correct mechanism for distributing rewards. You do not have to venture into the Republican fever swamps to find evidence of this belief. Greg Mankiw, an economist, adviser to Mitt Romney, and relative moderate within the party, has written:

People should get what they deserve. A person who contributes more to society deserves a higher income that reflects those greater contributions. Society permits him that higher income not just to incentivize him, as it does according to utilitarian theory, but because that income is rightfully his.

Now, I suspect that right-wingers object to the term "social Darwinist" because it can be understood to imply a more literal application of Darwinism — that the poor should be killed off so they cannot reproduce. Almost none of them would take the theory quite so far. But the more symbolic application of Darwinism to the market, as a morally optimal tool for allocating rewards, seems appropriate. Republicans may prefer a more positive-sounding label, but in politics you don't always get to pick your label.

the biggest piece of work that needs to be done in this country is for all of us to wake up to the fact that we are ALL in this goddam boat together and that it takes ALL of us to make it work... and that realization will never come about as long as the 1% insists they are at the top of the economic ladder as a result of their own inherent self-worth... such a misbegotten notion is at the fetid, rotting core of what we so proudly extol as our "capitalist free market" while completely ignoring the dynamics of a system specifically built to empower the rich...

p.s. it's interesting to see both commentators eschew eugenics... believe me, even though - thankfully - it's not part of the national dialogue, for those who are convinced that they have achieved their lofty status in society as a result of their superior genetic attributes, the concept of eugenics is only a small step away...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

Robert Scheer: Our elections are a hoax

so very, very sad...

robert scheer writing in truthdig...

Our own elections, the ones our government has modeled for the world, are a hoax. What other word should we use to describe this year’s presidential election, whose outcome will turn on which party’s super PACs gets the most generous bribes from billionaires? The Republicans, enabled by decisions of a Supreme Court they still control, were the first out of the gate and are far more culpable in destroying our system of popular governance. But the Democrats, no less committed to winning at any cost to political principle, have now jumped in.

The generally reserved New York Times editorial page responded to the Obama campaign’s decision to seek super PAC funding with a scathing editorial headlined “Another Campaign for Sale.” The Times reminded that Barack Obama, in his State of the Union speech two years ago, called out the Supreme Court justices sitting before him over their decision to free special interests from campaign spending limits. “I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests,” Obama said then. “They should be decided by the American people.” But sadly, as the Times editorial noted this week, “On Monday, the President abandoned that fundamental principle and gave in to the culture of the Citizens United decision that he once denounced as a ‘threat to our democracy.’ ”

[...]

Once again he has failed to take that case for economic justice to the American people and instead validated the Republican assault on what remains of our democracy.

and, with breakneck speed, we are headed to yet another presidential election where the choices are not really choices at all... i'm both angry and embarrassed that i actually thought 2008 presented a choice... silly me...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

A direct threat to the freedom of the American people every bit as menacing as any we face from foreign enemies

and a happy holiday to all...

robert scheer...

The defense authorization bill that Congress passed and President Obama had threatened to veto will soon become law, a fact that should be met with public outrage. Human Rights Watch President Kenneth Roth, responding to Obama’s craven collapse on the bill’s most controversial provision, said, “By signing this defense spending bill, President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.” On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney claimed “the most recent changes give the president additional discretion in determining how the law will be implemented, consistent with our values and the rule of law, which are at the heart of our country’s strength.”

What rubbish, coming from a president who taught constitutional law. The point is not to hock our civil liberty to the discretion of the president, but rather to guarantee our freedoms even if a Dick Cheney or Newt Gingrich should attain the highest office.

Sadly this flagrant subversion of the constitutionally guaranteed right to due process of law was opposed in the Senate by only seven senators, including libertarian Republican Rand Paul and progressive Independent Bernie Sanders.

That onerous provision of the defense budget bill, much discussed on the Internet but far less so in the mass media, assumes a permanent war against terrorism that extends the battlefield to our homeland. It reeks of a militarized state that threatens the foundations of our republican form of government.

[...]

What’s alarming is ... the ease with which an otherwise deadlocked Congress that can’t manage minimal funding for job creation and unemployment relief can find the money to fund at Cold War levels a massive sophisticated arsenal to defeat an enemy that no longer exists.

Throwing $662 billion, plus hundreds of billions more in non-Pentagon “security” programs, at what that other great-general-turned-president, Dwight Eisenhower, condemned as the “military-industrial complex,” with its tentacles in every congressional district, is an act of absurdity in a world bereft of a serious military challenge to the United States. Not even the best-funded terrorists can afford aircraft carriers.

[...]

We had every right to expect President Obama to stick to his word and veto this bill, not as a means of forcing a much needed bigger cut in government waste, but more urgently because its assault on the Constitution’s requirement of due process represents a direct threat to the freedom of the American people every bit as menacing as any we face from foreign enemies.

feeling that holiday spirit yet...?

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

We're suckers for the lesser evil and choose to forget just how much Bill Clinton is responsible for our current mess

robert scheer delivers a teach-in at occupy la...



scheer doesn't shy away from putting a good share of the blame where it belongs, right at the feet of bill clinton...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 2 comments

Yes, I'm thrilled at even the faint smell of social justice

truth be told, i've been a champion of social justice since i can remember... i've bridled at the incredible IN-justices i've witnessed over my half-century plus of observing such things and have come close to despairing that there would ever be an accounting... maybe this is it and maybe it isn't... lord knows, we're still a long way from a real accounting but i'm going to grab some optimism where i see it... i just hope it's not of the obama variety...

robert scheer...

How can anyone possessed of the faintest sense of social justice not thrill to the Occupy Wall Street movement now spreading throughout the country? One need not be religiously doctrinaire to recognize this as a “come to Jesus moment” when the money-changers stand exposed and the victims of their avarice are at long last offered succor.

[...]

With 25 million Americans unsuccessfully looking for full-time work, 50 million experiencing mortgage foreclosure and an all-time high of 46.2 percent living in poverty, including 22 percent of all children, isn’t it logical that the faux populism of the tea party be confronted with a progressive alternative?

the tea party emitted a bad odor from the very start... i could never believe that people so impassioned about getting government out of our business could be so totally blind to those who are calling the shots behind the governmental curtain...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

Political pornography

bill moyers...

There’s an interesting study out from the University of Michigan about how people don’t want to listen to the facts. Even if they know a fact is authentic, if they know it’s true, but if it offends their—or insults or undermines their belief system, they don’t want to, they don’t accept it; they reject it. That’s one reason, the explanation for the solid support the right-wing and conservative media have. Unless there’s an alternative to Fox News, to Rush Limbaugh—unless there are guys like you [Robert Scheer], Thom Hartmann and Amy Goodman out there, continuing to press the evidence to the contrary, continuing to do forensic journalism, deeply researched journalism—really we’re going to live in that smog of propaganda, sentimentality and frankly, pornography, which has—political pornography has transformed our discourse into an ugly and grotesque version of what should be a good conversation of democracy.

there's a lot of folks that i run across who fall in to the "don't want to listen to the facts" category... i have to say, however, that there's always somebody who surprises me...

this 28 year-old aussie private security company guy who has been helping out at the place i live in kabul is one of those... he only has a high school degree (level of education, as i learned long ago, is FAR from an indicator of intelligence) but his level of intellectual curiosity is remarkable... he knows more about what's going on in the world than a lot of much older, much more highly educated people and, what's more, he has a knack for putting the pieces together, an even rarer ability... it always gives me hope to unexpectedly find somebody like that...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 3 comments

Fuck Barack Obama, his super-rich, elite clients and...

the horse he rode in on...

i rarely resort to crudity in my post headlines but i am SO-O-O-OOO sick of this shit...

robert scheer...

There is currently no shortage of corporate profits or excessive executive compensation to explain away the failure of the private sector to create jobs. On the contrary, as The New York Times reports, “In the fourth quarter, profits at American businesses were up an astounding 29.2 percent, the fastest growth in more than 60 years. Collectively, American corporations logged profits at an annual rate of $1.678 trillion.” And to add insult to injury, the top executives, who seem unable or unwilling to create jobs or adequately reward their workers, have increased their own compensation by a whopping 12 percent over the previous year, setting the median pay at $9.6 million per year for those in control of the leading 200 companies. The Times adds that “C.E.O. pay is also on the rise again at companies like Capital One and Goldman Sachs, which survived the economic storm with the help of all of those taxpayer-financed bailouts.”

[...]

[O]ur debt now looms so large because the government had to bail out many of those same corporations, quite a few of which, like General Electric and AIG, pay no taxes and have no problem paying truly obscene amounts to their top executives.

[...]

Continued tax breaks for the 1 percent of the population that controls 40 percent of the nation’s wealth will do nothing to restore the confidence of the other 99 percent of consumers who are suffering so.

This at least Obama seems to understand, but count on him to betray his own better instincts by once again following the advice of his treasury secretary and the Wall Street crowd that contributed so lavishly to his first presidential campaign and whose support he seeks once again.

meanwhile, here i sit in kabul, afghanistan, where good people are struggling every day just to survive while u.s. money leaves the country for dubai by the millions every day in the briefcases of crooks...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 2 comments

We are drowning in a bipartisan cesspool of corruption

robert scheer...

Behind the wonderfully engaging smile of this president there is the increasingly disturbing suggestion of a cynical power-grabbing politician whose swift rise in power reflects less the earnestness of his message and far more the skills of a traditional political hack.

[...]

The more one learns about the political roots of our economic meltdown, the more the Democratic Party stands revealed as an equal partner with the Republicans at the center of corruption. ... We are drowning in a bipartisan cesspool of corruption, and the sooner we grasp that fact the better.

the awakening can't come soon enough for me...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

Wall Street and our government are one and the same and are destroying the rest of us

robert scheer talking with amy goodman at democracy now about how the unfettered greed of our super-rich, elite overlords is destroying the very fabric of our society, particularly among those who have worked the hardest to carve their place in it and are the most vulnerable to economic shenanigans...

This is not a game. It’s not a political game. It’s not a mathematics game. They’re real human beings who invest their whole life putting shelter over their family, caring about their family. And when you go out in these communities—and I’ve done some of that—you know, it’s so depressing. You know, I mean, I talked to people in Riverside who cleaned office buildings, you know, in Long Beach and commuted to Riverside so their kids could live in a better neighborhood. And they bought this house, and they made the payments. They made the payments. They did everything they were supposed to do. And the neighborhood went into the toilet, and they lose everything. They lose everything. And that story is repeated millions of times in America.

And the guys who did it to us, they weren’t those vicious right-wingers. And, you know, it wasn’t all the people that we liberals like to attack. It was our friends. Let’s get that straight, you know? When I call this the Clinton bubble, you know, I mean it very seriously. It was our friends. It was people, you know, like the heads of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who claim to be liberal Democrats. But they were being rewarded with enormous bonuses. You know, enormous bonuses. They made out just as well as the people running Citigroup. These were not government agencies. These were actually traded on the stock market, but posing as government-supported agencies. And the fact of the matter is that the damage that was done to us was done by people who talk a very good game. You know, Robert Rubin contributed money to the Harlem dance group, you know? Jesse Jackson even supported the reversal of Glass-Steagall. There’s a whole chapter in my book, you know? The people who acted in a very bad way, in this book, were people who we would probably be more comfortable talking to, you know, over a drink somewhere than the others. So, you know, my book, you know, it’s called "How Reagan Democrats—Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street and Mugged Main Street." And the Clinton Democrats, who now control the Obama administration, are—you know, this is turning the henhouse over to the foxes. And I would say the record of Obama on this has been abysmal. He has been a frontman for Wall Street, and it is shocking.

my heart has always been solidly connected to issues of social justice and it pains me beyond words to see common, ordinary, decent, hard-working folks screwed over by those who are only interested in accumulating more money and power for themselves... but, sad to say, i see it everywhere... regardless of the country or the culture, billions of decent people are being used and manipulated by those who only want to enrich themselves and don't give a flying shit for the common good...

i visited a friend in macedonia this past weekend and he was showing me photos of the trip he and his wife took to bucharest, romania, to visit his wife's sister... among the photos were several of the palace built by former dictator nicolae ceauşescu... now, i knew ceauşescu was an ego-maniacal despot, but, even with that knowledge, the size and grandiosity of the palace was stunning, only the pentagon in the u.s. is larger... the palace was built with forced labor... all the premier artisans and craftsmen from around the country were rounded up and moved to bucharest and put to work on the project - without pay - just so dear leader could look around and say, "look how great i am and how much power i have"...


Ceauşescu Palace, Bucharest, Romania


View from Ceauşescu Palace, Bucharest, Romania

we tut-tut and cluck-cluck over that kind of person and that kind of excess but it's going on right under our noses in our very own country... but when it's one of our own, we just choose to look the other way...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

License to steal

yes, i've been posting extensively on the rape and pillage of the economy and the rapidly-disappearing middle class being conducted by our super-rich elites... i'm not sure it's possible to give too much exposure to the outright coup that's been taking place for years but has escalated dramatically in the past few years...

robert scheer...

They do have a license to steal. There is no other way to read Tuesday’s report from the New York state comptroller that bonuses for Wall Street financiers rose 17 percent to $20.3 billion in 2009. Of course that is less than the $32.9 billion for bonus rewards back in 2007, when those hotshots could still pretend that they were running sound businesses.

The economy is anything but sound, but you would hardly know that from looking at the balance sheets of the big investment banks. The broker-dealer firms on Wall Street made a record profit, estimated at greater than $55 billion by the comptroller, and the only thing holding back even more grotesque bonuses was concern over criticism from a public that was hardly doing as well.

The enormous rewards last year come not from their having righted the ship of finance by lowering the rate of mortgage foreclosures for ordinary folks, one of four who are now “underwater” on their loans. Consumer confidence this month is the lowest in 27 years, and unemployment is expected to hover near 10 percent for the next two years. No, they get bonuses because the Federal Reserve, backed by the Treasury, bought the toxic mortgage securitization packages that Wall Street banks were left holding. They, and they alone, were made whole.

The way the scam worked is that the Treasury deposited taxpayer dollars with the Federal Reserve, which in turn purchased a whopping $1.25 trillion in toxic mortgages. That’s the figure after the Treasury on Tuesday committed to depositing $200 billion more with the Fed to increase spending on this program—one that was ostensibly designed to increase credit availability to small businesses and others but has hardly accomplished that goal. Credit is still very tight because the big financiers have used the low-cost cash they received from those charitable government programs to solidify their own positions through acquisitions and the like.

those of us privileged to live in the united states (and i say "privileged" because, despite the abominations taking place in my country, it's still a much better place to live overall than so many other places, places such as kosovo, for example, where i am currently sitting, writing this post) are understandably loath to face facts when they undermine the glorious image of our country that's been pounded into our heads from the time we learned to talk... but, it's a fact... we're being robbed, virtually at gunpoint, as mr. scheer rightly points out... however, we must also understand that it's not just us getting the shaft... these same people are perpetrating the same financial and economic devastation around the world... what's more, they serve as role models for such behavior... how, for instance, can i do effective work here in kosovo, a country awash in corruption and self-serving behavior from its leaders, when everyone can see what's happening in the very country that's preaching ethics and responsible behavior... it's maddening...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

Robert Scheer echoes Jim on James Madison

yesterday, i pulled jim's comment, in which he quoted james madison about the dangers of an imperial presidency, and bumped it into a full post... today, i find this from robert scheer, the excellent former la times columnist (who, sadly, was replaced by that dipshit extraordinaire, jonah goldberg)...

George W. Bush is the imperial president that James Madison and other founders of this great republic warned us about. He lied the nation into precisely the "foreign entanglements" that George Washington feared would destroy the experiment in representative government, and he has championed a spurious notion of security over individual liberty, thus eschewing the alarms of Thomas Jefferson as to the deprivation of the inalienable rights of free citizens. But most important, he has used the sledgehammer of war to obliterate the separation of powers that James Madison enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

With the "war on terror," Bush has asserted the right of the president to wage war anywhere and for any length of time, at his whim, because the "terrorists" will always provide a convenient shadowy target. Just the "continual warfare" that Madison warned of in justifying the primary role of Congress in initiating and continuing to finance a war -- the very issue now at stake in Bush's battle with Congress.

In his "Political Observations," written years before he served as fourth president of the United States, Madison went on to underscore the dangers of an imperial presidency bloated by war fever. "In war," Madison wrote in 1795, at a time when the young republic still faced its share of dangerous enemies, "the discretionary power of the Executive is extended ... and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force, of the people."

scheer seizes on the very quote from madison that grabbed jim's attention...

Bush betrayed Congress, which in turn betrayed the American people -- just as Madison feared when he wrote: "Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it compromises and develops the germ of every other."

< sigh > we gotta get rid of 'em... we just gotta... every single day i wake up and think, my god, we simply CAN'T tolerate another day with that gang of criminals in office, and every night i go to bed thinking exactly the same thing...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments