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"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."
- Noam Chomsky
Yes, it's been one of those don't really give a shit periods
seems to happen every few weeks... other than a few more criminal bankers being arrested (see here) - which is always a good thing - there just hasn't been much going on other than the usual shit, and pardon me if i don't give a rat's ass about mitt, barack or the olympics... besides, i've been busy so deal with it...
This corruption is not an accident. It is the product of years of
very patient work. It has been brought about through expensive lobbying,
relentless propaganda, agnotology. You can see it in this election cycle, where 196 Americans — 0.000063% of the population — have given more than 80% of Super PAC dollars.
Is it democracy or plutocracy when less than 200 people drive election spending in a nation of 300 million?
Previously, we have pointed out how brazen the lobbying has been to
actually cut the SEC enforcement budget. This has created an agency that
is defective by design. Take a guess who loses in the battle between you, the individual taxpayer versus the corporation.
Wall Street has taken advantage of the crisis and morphed into a cartel.
The tragedy is the only entity that is large and powerful enough to
offset their wealth and power are national governments. Yet where ever
we look, we see that government has been corrupted and rendered neutered
by corporations:
-The Federal Reserve Zero Interest Rate policy is a balm
to banks whose balance sheets still have so much bad real estate
exposure that higher rates will cause corporate bankruptcy;
-The SEC brings minor insider trading cases while enormous financial crimes go unpunished;
-The Supreme Court has granted natural rights to corporations —
rights previously reserved for living and breathing Human Beings;
-The CFTC no longer does the sort of daily audits that can prevent
fraud like MF Global and PeregrineFG;-The US Attorney’s office has been
captured by the Treasury department, which in turn was captured by large
Banks long ago;
-Laws that used to be written by Congressional staffers and academics are now drafted by the regulated industry itself;
-The Attorneys General offices of the states are too timid to sue
these same banks for obvious perjury;-Tax loopholes allow wealthy
companies to pay very little taxes relative to profits;
-Copyrights that should be in the public domain are retained by
companies who have changed intellectual property laws by corrupting
legislators.
-The Minerals Management Service (MMS) gives away oil leases and
mineral rights for pennies on the dollar.-Money has somehow been equated
to speech, turning the idea of “One Person, One vote” on its head.
To function properly, all of these agencies need budgets, a career path for a motivated staff. Yet most of that has been gutted.
We see this throughout government, a product of even a debate that has been corrupted. The framework is not “How can me make government more effective, efficient responsive?“ Instead, the debate has degenerated into “How can we get government out of the way? How can we make taxes lower?”
Its not that I want big government, I want effective regulations. Its not that I want to pay higher taxes, I want efficient government that can accomplish things. I don’t want to live in a corporatocracy, I want to live in a nation where there is a Rule of Law.
The only way to make this happen is to change the campaign finance
laws. Without that, we are a plutocracy governed by lobbyists.
Hence: Its the bankers world, we just live in it . . .
A $7 BILLION loss at JPMorgan? WHEN are our criminal bankers going face some real accountability?
the crap keeps flowing nonstop and these guys keep walking the streets with zero consequences for fraud, malfeasance, mismanagement, lying, and outright theft... meanwhile, you or i could be literally tossed in jail over a minor traffic violation... when is this shit going to cease...?
JPMorgan Chase which reported its second-quarter results on Friday, disclosed that
the losses on a soured credit bet could mount to more than $7 billion,
as the nation’s largest bank indicated that traders may have
intentionally tried to conceal the extent of the red ink on the
disastrous position.
Amid a swirl of questions about how the
traders marked their bets, JPMorgan also said Friday that it would be
forced to restate its first-quarter results.
If the trades, made
out of the powerful chief investment office unit in London, had been
properly valued, the bank said it would have lost $1.4 billion on the
position in the first quarter.
Jamie Dimon, the bank’s chief executive who has consistently reassured investors
that the losses would be contained, announced that the bank lost $4.4
billion on the botched trade in the second quarter. So far this year,
the bank says it has lost $5.8 billion on the trades in credit
derivatives.
In a statement, JPMorgan said that “the firm has
recently discovered information that raises questions about the
integrity of the trader marks and suggests that certain individuals may
have been seeking to avoid showing the full amount of the losses in the
portfolio during the first quarter.”
Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, discuss why nobody is freaking
about LIBOR in America, while JP Morgan caught doing an Enron on US
energy markets and GlaxoSmithKline pays 10% of their ill-gotten gains
for bribing doctors and scientists across America. In the second half of
the show Max talks to Kevin Sara of the TuNur solar export project of
Tunisia about solar exports from the Middle East and toxic derivatives
exports from the City of London.
as far as i'm concerned, the libor scandal is the last straw... many trillions of dollars have been literally stolen from people around the world and if this goes unpunished, we might as well kiss our asses goodbye because we will be forever owned by our super-rich elites and the criminal bankers...
The harsh light of the Libor rate-fixing scandal has crossed the
Atlantic, with both Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase saying regulators and
investigators have requested information from them in a so-far
preliminary probe of the case.
Share prices for both — as well as Bank of America, which has not
said if it was asked for information — have fallen sharply this week
amid worries they could be in line for the type of heavy fines laid on
Britain’s Barclays Bank, at the center of the scandal.
break out the rakes and hoes... it's time to go on the attack...
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...?
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.
"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...?
The LIBOR manipulation story has exploded into a major scandal overseas. The CEO of Barclays, Bob Diamond, has resigned in disgrace;
his was the first of what will undoubtedly be many major banks to walk
the regulatory plank for fixing the interbank exchange rate. The Labor
party is demanding a sweeping criminal investigation. Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, responded the way a real public official should (i.e. not like Ben Bernanke), blasting the banks:
It is time to do something about the banking system…Many people in
the banking industry are hardworking and feel badly let down by some of
their colleagues and leaders. It goes to the culture and the structure
of banks: the excessive compensation, the shoddy treatment of customers,
the deceitful manipulation of a key interest rate, and today, news of
yet another mis-selling scandal.
The furor is over revelations that Barclays, the Royal Bank of
Scotland, and other banks were monkeying with at least $10 trillion in
loans (The Wall Street Journal is calculating that that LIBOR affects $800 trillion worth of contracts).
The banks gamed LIBOR for two semi-overlapping reasons. As noted here last week,
there were instances of Barclays traders badgering the LIBOR submitters
to "push down" rates in order to fatten their immediate bottom lines,
depending on what they were trading or holding that day. They also
apparently rigged LIBOR downward in order to produce a general
appearance of better health, essentially tweaking their credit scores a
few ticks upward.
Most intriguingly, or perhaps disturbingly, there were revelations last week that Bank of England deputy Governor Paul Tucker had a conversation
with Diamond at the peak of the crisis in 2008. The conversation
reportedly left Diamond, and subsequently his traders, with the
impression that the bank had carte blanche to rig LIBOR downward in
order to help allay spiraling public fears about the banks’ poor
financial health.
British officials, and Tucker individually, deny that Tucker gave
Diamond permission to rig rates. But a report by British regulators did
conclude that the two were talking about Barclays LIBOR submissions on
October 29, 2008, and that as a result of that conversation, Diamond
came away with a “misunderstanding.” The Daily Mail quotes the Financial Services Authority report:
However, as the substance of the telephone conversation was relayed
down the chain of command at Barclays, a misunderstanding or
miscommunication occurred.
This meant that Barclays’ submitters believed mistakenly that they
were operating under an instruction from the Bank of England (as
conveyed by senior management) to reduce Barclays’ Libor submissions.
That is explosive stuff. Members of Parliament will be grilling
Tucker tomorrow about those events in what is sure to be a far more
combative and entertaining legislative inquiry than the Jamie Dimon dog-and-pony show we just went through here in the states in recent weeks.
The implications of that part of the story should be particularly
chilling to Americans, who in recent years have been party to a number
of revelations about strange and seemingly inappropriate contacts
between senior regulatory officials and big bankers during the heat of
the crisis.
We know that American officials in 2008-2009 were extremely concerned
about the appearance of weakness in the financial markets, so much so
that they may have resisted pursuing criminal prosecutions
against big banks, and we also know that they spent a lot of time
commiserating with Wall Street figures before and during the crisis.
If Bob Diamond and Paul Tucker were having these talks about LIBOR,
is it fair to wonder what else Hank Paulson and Lloyd Blankfein were
talking about in the 24 discussions they had in the six days following the AIG disaster? When Paulson had a secret meeting with the entire board of Goldman Sachs
in, of all places, his hotel suite in Moscow, in June of 2008? Or what
other material nonpublic information was exchanged when Paulson met with a gang of hedge fund chiefs
at the offices of Eton Park management in July 2008, and laid out for
them a possible scenario for putting Fannie and Freddie into
receivership?
[...]
This story is so outrageous that it shocks even the most cynical Wall
Street observers. I have a friend who works on Wall Street who for years
has been trolling through the stream of financial corruption stories
with bemusement, darkly enjoying the spectacle as though the whole
post-crisis news arc has been like one long, beautifully-acted,
intensely believable sequel to Goodfellas. But even he is just
stunned to the point of near-speechlessness by the LIBOR thing. “It’s
like finding out that the whole world is on quicksand,” he says.
evidently, with the latest breaking scandal involving barclays and the manipulation of the libor rate, joseph stiglitz has had enough...
Nobel Prize winner and former World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz has
called recent revelations that Barclays and other large banks colluded
to defraud their costumers by artificially leveraging international
interest rates a "textbook illustration" of how banks use privileged
information and lax oversight to reap rewards for themselves while
savaging the wider societies in which they operate.
In an interview with The Independent
on Monday, Stiglitz argued (with Barclay's as just the most recent
example) that bankers -- without threat of prosecution or jail time --
would continue to use their elevated status to exploit weak regulations,
consolidate power, and avoid accountability.
The scandal at Barclays claimed the resignation on Sunday of Chairman
Marcus Agius after traders at the bank admitted manipulating Libor, a
baseline interest rate used by banks to set lending costs around the
world and which acts as the benchmark, according to an estimate by Reuters, on $350 trillion in derivatives and other financial products.
Stiglitz argues, in paraphrase by interviewer Ben Chu, "that breaking
the economic and political power that has been amassed by the financial
sector in recent decades, especially in the US and the UK, is essential
if we are to build a more just and prosperous society. The first step,
he says, is sending some bankers to jail."
the lack of accountability and the wholesale refusal to apply the rule of law to our criminal super-rich elites is nothing less than outrageous...
yes, indeed, the american people ARE angry and rightfully so... we've been screwed sixteen ways from sunday by our super-rich elites, their criminal banker colleagues and their bought-and-paid-for government officials... it's all part of the grand plan to control all the world's money and resources while keeping the peasant class in thrall to keep it all running to their benefit...
If you can find 25 minutes or so this weekend, I can’t recommend highly
enough this segment from this week’s Bill Moyers program, with Yves
Smith and Matt Taibbi, discussing the increasingly corrupt banking
industry and the multiple ways the U.S. Government continues to prop it
up.
[T]his just-completed trial in downtown New York against three faceless
financial executives really was historic. Over 10 years in the making,
the case allowed federal prosecutors to make public for the first time
the astonishing inner workings of the reigning American crime syndicate,
which now operates not out of Little Italy and Las Vegas, but out of
Wall Street.
The defendants in the case – Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg and
Peter Grimm – worked for GE Capital, the finance arm of General
Electric. Along with virtually every major bank and finance company on
Wall Street – not just GE, but J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS,
Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia and more – these three Wall
Street wiseguys spent the past decade taking part in a breathtakingly
broad scheme to skim billions of dollars from the coffers of cities and
small towns across America. The banks achieved this gigantic rip-off by
secretly colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business
worth $3.7 trillion. By conspiring to lower the interest rates that
towns earn on these investments, the banks systematically stole from
schools, hospitals, libraries and nursing homes – from "virtually every
state, district and territory in the United States," according to one
settlement. And they did it so cleverly that the victims never even knew
they were being cheated. No thumbs were broken, and nobody ended up in
a landfill in New Jersey, but money disappeared, lots and lots of it,
and its manner of disappearance had a familiar name: organized crime.
In fact, stripped of all the camouflaging financial verbiage, the
crimes the defendants and their co-conspirators committed were virtually
indistinguishable from the kind of thuggery practiced for decades by
the Mafia, which has long made manipulation of public bids for things
like garbage collection and construction contracts a cornerstone of its
business. What's more, in the manner of old mob trials, Wall Street's
secret machinations were revealed during the Carollo trial
through crackling wiretap recordings and the lurid testimony of
cooperating witnesses, who came into court with bowed heads, pointing
fingers at their accomplices. The new-age gangsters even invented an
elaborate code to hide their crimes. Like Elizabethan highway robbers
who spoke in thieves' cant, or Italian mobsters who talked about
"getting a button man to clip the capo," on tape after tape these Wall
Street crooks coughed up phrases like "pull a nickel out" or "get to the
right level" or "you're hanging out there" – all code words used to
manipulate the interest rates on municipal bonds. The only thing that
made this trial different from a typical mob trial was the scale of the
crime.
One advantage of being a huge Wall Street bank is you get bailed out
by the federal government when you make dumb bets. Another is you can
choose where around the world to make the dumb bets, thereby dodging
U.S. regulations. It’s a win-win.
Wall Street would like to keep it that way.
For two years now, squadrons of Wall Street lawyers and lobbyists
have been pressing the Treasury, Comptroller of the Currency, Commodity
Futures Trading Commission, SEC, and the Fed to go easier on the Street
for fear that if regulations are too tight, the big banks will be less
competitive internationally.
Translated: They’ll move more of their business to London and Frankfurt, where regulations are looser.
Meanwhile, the Street has been warning Europeans that if their
financial regulations are too tight, the big banks will move more of
their business to the US, where regulations will (they hope) be looser.
[....]
If Wall Street banks demand a free rein overseas, the least we should demand is they be broken up here.
our super-rich elites will fight to their last breath to maintain their power over us and their ability to command the world's resources and reservoirs of capital...
For several reasons, Assange has long feared that the US would be
able to coerce Sweden into handing him over far more easily than if he
were in Britain. For one, smaller countries such as Sweden are generally
more susceptible to American pressure and bullying.
For another, that country has a disturbing history of lawlessly handing over suspects to the US. A 2006 UN ruling found Sweden
in violation of the global ban on torture for helping the CIA render
two suspected terrorists to Egypt, where they were brutally tortured
(both individuals, asylum-seekers in Sweden, were ultimately found to be
innocent of any connection to terrorism and received a monetary
settlement from the Swedish government).
[...]
Assange's fear of ending up in the clutches of the US is plainly
rational and well-grounded. One need only look at the treatment over the
last decade of foreign nationals accused of harming American national
security to know that's true; such individuals are still routinely
imprisoned for lengthy periods without any charges or due process. Or
consider the treatment of Bradley Manning, accused of leaking to WikiLeaks: a formal UN investigation found that
his pre-trial conditions of severe solitary confinement were "cruel,
inhuman and degrading", and he now faces capital charges of aiding
al-Qaida. The Obama administration's unprecedented obsession with
persecuting whistleblowers and preventing transparency – what even generally supportive, liberal magazines call "Obama's war on whistleblowers" – makes those concerns all the more valid.
No
responsible person should have formed a judgment one way or the other
as to whether Assange is guilty of anything in Sweden. He has not even
been charged, let alone tried or convicted, of sexual assault, and he is
entitled to a presumption of innocence. The accusations made against
him are serious ones, and deserve to be taken seriously and accorded a
fair and legal resolution.
But the WikiLeaks founder, like everyone else, is fully entitled to
invoke all of his legal rights, and it's profoundly reckless and
irresponsible to suggest, as some have, that he has done anything wrong by doing so. Seeking asylum on the grounds of claimed human rights violations is a longstanding and well-recognized right in
international law. It is unseemly, at best, to insist that he forego
his rights in order to herd him as quickly as possible to Sweden.
the u.s. could much better use its resources to indict and prosecute the criminal bankers who are plundering our country and the planet...
On The Young Turks yesterday, Cenk Uygur spoke about two different approaches to the economic bailout.
There's
the US m.o., where we gave "everything to the banks, and nothing to the
homeowners" and are, predictably, still struggling. Then there's the
divergent example of Iceland, where initial efforts at complete
deregulation failed and the government switched course by indicting
those who had "caused the mess" and bailing out the middle class
instead.
Take a look at what they did, and how it worked.
*Coals to Newcastle - Something brought or sent
to a place where it is already plentiful; it is a reference to the
English town of Newcastle upon Tyne, historically a major coal exporter.
1. We're near the bottom of the developed world in children's health and safety
According to a 2007 UNICEF report,
the U.S. ranked last among 21 OECD nations in an assessment of child
health and safety. The assessment measured infant mortality,
immunization, and death from accidents and injuries.
[...]
2. We've betrayed the young people who were advised to stay in school
3. The main source of middle-class wealth has been largely wiped out
American homeowners owe almost as much as the students, with $700 billion of debt over and above the value of their homes.
[...]
4. We give prison sentences for smoking marijuana, but not for billion-dollar fraud
About half of our world-leading prison population is in jail for non-violent drug offenses. Americans have also been arrested for handing out free food in a park. Mothers in Ohio and Connecticut were jailed for enrolling their kids in out-of-district schools. As of 2003 in California there were 344 individuals serving sentences of 25 years or more for shoplifting as a third offense, in many cases after two non-violent offenses.
[...]
5. You can have health care, if you pay for it
A recent Commonwealth Fund
study compared U.S. health care spending to 12 other OECD countries.
The data shows that reducing our costs to the median level of spending
among the OECD countries would save us $1.5 trillion a year, more than
our entire deficit.
Citigroup’s shareholders rejected the bank’s plan to award its chief executive, Vikram S. Pandit, $15 million in compensation, in a show of frustration about Wall Street pay.
At the bank’s annual meeting Tuesday in Dallas, a majority of investors voted against a proposal on executive compensation, which included approving Mr. Pandit’s pay package.
The advisory vote comes amid widespread furor over Wall Street pay. At a time when profits and stocks are slumping, bank chiefs are collecting multimillion-dollar payouts.
Last year, Mr. Pandit’s compensation included a $1.67 million salary and a $5.3 million cash bonus. In addition, he received a retention package valued at $40 million. In 2009 with the bank on the edge of failure, Mr. Pandit accepted only a $1 salary.
unfortunately, the shareholder vote is not binding...
Citi doesn’t have to act on the vote, which isn’t binding. Still, it speaks to shareholders’ issues. Only 45 percent of shareholders supported the plan.
“Citi’s board of directors takes the shareholder vote seriously, and along with senior management will consult with representative shareholders to understand their concerns,” said Jon Diat, a spokesman for Citi.
It’s now a near certainty that Wall Street executives committed felonies.
[...]
So what can be done about it? We can change the behavior in the financial service industry for a full generation in just seven days. [emphasis added]
[...]
My seven day plan is based on a simple premise: When criminal laws are egregiously violated, the guilty parties should face appropriate punishment. Here’s the plan:
Day One: Read the HUD Inspector General’s reports and the public records of past mortgage foreclosure cases from across the nation.
Day Two: Meet with the team at the Office of the Inspector General at HUD that prepared the audits. Obtain the names of all the bank officials, lawyers, and notaries whose behavior, as cited in the audit reports or otherwise known to the investigators, represent clear and unquestionable criminal violations. Add to this list other individuals who have similarly demonstrated or testified to behavior unquestionably constituting criminal acts, as indicated by the public records of the mortgage foreclosure cases reviewed in day one.
Day Three: Indict all of the individuals on the list compiled on day two.
Day Four: Indict banks and financial institutions on criminal charges where criminal behavior by employees (as demonstrated by day three indictments) appears to be endemic. The Justice Department guidelines for prosecuting firms include: (1) the pervasiveness of such activity, (2) the compliance procedures in place, (3) attempts by the corporation to end bad behavior, and (4) cooperation with federal investigators. In 2008, the Justice Department adopted a policy of accepting “deferred prosecutions,” involving agreements to change corporate behavior without damaging innocent third parties through prosecution.
Corporations receive the benefits of “legal persons,” as demonstrated by Citizens United. But they must also bear the responsibilities of these privileges. A reading of the HUD reports, and other public records, suggests several banks should clearly be prosecuted.
Day 5: Discuss plea bargains with indicted lower-level officials in return for cooperating in investigations of higher-level officials.
Day 6: Consider plea bargains with indicted banks, which require the removal of all remaining officers and directors who were serving when egregious criminal activity occurred, as well as senior officials who were in a position to exercise appropriate supervisory responsibility but chose to look the other way.
Day 7: Indict any senior Wall Street officials implicated by new cooperative testimony resulting from activities on day five. Adopt and announce a policy that future criminal violations will be prosecuted in a similar fashion.
Federal investigators examining the final days at MF Global and how customer money went missing are poring over scores of wire transfers in and out of the brokerage firm, including the possible movement of $325 million that may have belonged to customers, according to people briefed on the matter.
The suspicious transfer, which until now has not been made public, was first discovered in the early hours of Oct. 31, the day the firm filed for bankruptcy. Initially, the firm attributed a shortfall of more than $1 billion in customer money to an “accounting error,” records show. But after hours of searching, executives acknowledged to regulators in the firm’s offices in Chicago that the shortfall was real — and may have been caused in part by the $325 million transfer, said one of the people briefed on the matter.
It remains unclear where that money went, or even if it belonged to customers. But it is one of many significant wire transfers that federal authorities — including the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation — have spent months reviewing to piece together MF Global’s final days.
When a billion bucks or so goes "missing" it isn't due to complexity, or accounting errors, or those crazy moments right before the firm went bankrupt. It's theft. The money was stolen from customers and then given to somebody else. Precisely why, by who, and to whom are questions that should be answered, but the underlying issue shouldn't be obscured. People were robbed. [emphases added]
seems to be a lot of thievery goin' around these days...
i won't even bother posting snippets from the above article... suffice it to say, summers starts out by sounding the alarm about "entitlements," social security, medicare, etc., and then goes on to suggest the plenary solution to everything that ails us is to revisit the catfood commission (simpson-bowles)...
however, the most galling piece of information to come my way this past week is that summers' name is actually being floated by obama as a replacement for zoellick at the world bank... fuck... what do we have to do to get rid of these dangerously evil people...?
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