Matt Taibbi & William Black on Bailout Secrets & How New Foreclosure Deal Spares Banks from Justice
Taylor
Published: Sunday 13 January 2013
Four years after the massive bailout that rescued Wall Street, we look at the state of the financial sector with Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi and former financial regulator William Black

Four years after the massive bailout that rescued Wall Street, we look at the state of the financial sector with Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi and former financial regulator William Black. In a new article for Rolling Stone, Taibbi argues the government did not just bail out Wall Street, but also lied on the financial sector’s behalf, calling unhealthy banks healthy and helping banks cover up how much aid they were getting. The government’s approach to the banks came under new scrutiny this week after it reached an $8.5 billion settlement for improprieties in the wrongful foreclosures on millions of American homeowners, including flawed paperwork, robo-signing and wrongly modified loans. The settlement will end an independent review of all foreclosures, meaning the banks could be avoiding billions of dollars in further penalties, in addition to criminal prosecution.

Transcript:

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to look at the state of Wall Street four years after the massive bailout and the news of this week’s mortgage settlements with the major banks. Matt Taibbi has just written a new piece for  READ FULL POST 3 COMMENTS

Extremely Rich Wall Street CEO Wants Americans to Work Longer
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 20 November 2012
“Maybe working until a later age is fine for a Wall Street CEO whose net worth is $450 million, but it’s simply nonsense to assert that the retirement age needs to go up because Social Security is no longer affordable.”

Lloyd Blankfein — evidently taking a break from doing “god’s work” as the CEO of Wall Street behemoth Goldman Sachs — told CBS News’ Scott Pelley that he believes the retirement age needs to be raised because “in general, entitlements have to be slowed down and contained”:

BLANKFEIN: You’re going to have to undoubtedly do something to ...

The Incestuous Relationship Between Bankers, Business and Congress
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 9 November 2012
“Looking closer, Jon Corzine may simply be the most poignant symbol of the incestuous relationship between bankers, business and Congress that is systemic in today’s political system.”

If you look up the individual "Jon Corzine" on Wikipedia, the first sentence you encounter is “Jon Stevens Corzine is an American finance executive and political figure.”

Those two positions strung together in the same sentence may make some people uneasy, but the fact is that you can apply this description to many people in Congress. Looking closer, Jon Corzine may simply be the most poignant symbol of the incestuous relationship between bankers, business and Congress that is systemic in today's political system.

Recently, Jon Corzine — CEO of MF Global from 2010 to 2011, CEO of Goldman Sachs from 1994 to 1999, Senator of New Jersey from 2001 to 2006 and Governor of New Jersey from 2006 to 2010 — was subpoenaed before a House committee to answer questions regarding the loss of approximately $1.6 billion of citizens' money.

The "honorable" Jon Corzine, as his name tag so colorfully and inaccurately described him, claimed he did not know where the funds went. The House committee asked him, along with other MF Global executives: "Where is the money?” His response: “I don’t know.”

“OK,” replied the committee.

Could lawmakers' passivity possibly be attributed to the amount of money those committee members received from financial agencies and trading groups to keep their mouths shut? Given the evidence, it's a worthwhile question.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Committee chairman Spencer Bachus has received $262,177 from securities and investment firms, $78,677 of which was individual donations, the other $183,500 from PACs. He has also received $259,400 from commercial banks and $241,960 from insurance companies, a blend of PACs and individual contributions.

Occupy Wall Street’s Next Move: Bailing Out the People, One at a Time
Taylor
Published: Thursday 1 November 2012
The debt resisters of Occupy Wall Street mobilize arts, education, and media for a “People’s Bailout.”

 

 

Sung in unison by 50 voices and accompanied by the melancholic twang of a banjo, these lines echoed throughout the otherwise vacant Deutsche Bank atrium at 60 Wall Street last Sunday:

Every day, several times a day, a thought comes over me.

I owe more debt than I can pay back, more money than I’ll ever see.

The lines were taken from the Depression-era Woodie Guthrie song “ READ FULL POST 4 COMMENTS

Meet Romney’s Economic Hit Man
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 20 October 2012
Hubbard is the ideological hit man instrumental in justifying the mortgage derivatives bubble that caused the Great Recession during the George W. Bush years.

 

Mark the name of R. Glenn Hubbard, the man who will make your life miserable if Mitt Romney is elected president. Unless, that is, you happen to be one of the swindlers who has profited mightily from the nation’s economic pain. 

Hubbard is the ideological hit man instrumental in justifying the mortgage derivatives bubble that caused the Great Recession during the George W. Bush years. He now serves as Romney’s key economic adviser and is the front-runner to be the next Treasury secretary should the Republican win.

“Romney’s Go-To Economist” read the headline on a New York Times profile of the dean of Columbia University’s Business School, which notes that “During a stint as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for President George W. Bush, from 2001 to 2003, Mr. Hubbard was known as the principal architect of the Bush tax cuts.” In that capacity, and after returning to Columbia, Hubbard was also the chief cheerleader for a runaway derivatives market that spiraled out of control and left the Great Recession in its wake.

While pocketing millions in fees from the financial industry that he was ostensibly studying as a neutral academic, Hubbard was an enthusiastic backer of the virtues of a burgeoning unregulated capital market that sold toxic derivatives to the world. In a landmark paper that he co-wrote in November 2004 with William C. Dudley, at the time the chief U.S. economist at Goldman Sachs, it was asserted, “The capital markets have helped facilitate a major transformation of the U.S. mortgage financing system over the past 25 years. … The result has been a dramatic decline in the cyclical volatility of housing activity.” 

Their study was published by the Global Markets Institute of Goldman Sachs at the very time that Goldman, a leader in the capital market, was packaging and selling some of the toxic mortgage-based derivatives that ...

Five Ways Deregulation is Ripping America Apart
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 15 October 2012
“The lack of regulation in the financial industry allowed hedge fund manager John Paulson to conspire with Goldman Sachs in a plan to create packages of risky subprime mortgages and then short-sell (bet against) the sure-to-fail financial instruments.”

 

Conservatives believe that enriching individuals will eventually enrich society, and that government should not get in the way of the process. This is what happens as a result:

 

(1) The tax loss from one scheming businessman could have paid the salaries of 30,000 nurses

 

The lack of regulation in the financial industry allowed hedge fund manager John Paulson to conspire with Goldman Sachs in a plan to create packages of risky subprime mortgages and then short-sell (bet against) the sure-to-fail financial instruments. The ploy paid him $3.7 billion. Deregulation in the tax code allowed him to call his income "carried interest," which is taxed at a 15% rate. More deregulation allowed him to defer his profits indefinitely.

 

The lost taxes of $1.3 billion (35% of $3.7 billion) could have paid the salaries of 30,000 LPNs, 10 nurses for every county in the United States. Instead, one clever businessman took it all.

 

 

(2) The 10 richest Americans made enough money last year to feed every hungry person on earth for a year

 

The richest 10 Americans increased their wealth by over $50 billion in one year. That's enough, according to 2008 estimates by the Food and Agriculture Organization and the UN's World Food Program, to feed the 870 million people in the world who are lacking sufficient food.

 

But should anyone be blamed for this imbalance? Didn't the rich people EARN their money through hard work and innovation? No, they didn't. 60 percent of the income for the Forbes 400 came from capital gains. A lot more of it came from other forms of deregulatory subterfuge. CEOs have used carried interest, performance-related pay, stock ...

Who Hijacked the World’s Greatest Economy?
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 14 October 2012
“What we are currently witnessing looks worryingly like the end of the American Dream for most of us and, in a real sense, the last act in the America Revolution.”

Revolutions typically start with a theory and talk and transition into practice and political action.  They almost always end in disaster for the societies they disrupt and the economies they destroy.  That's the story of the French Revolution and Russia's October Revolution, but not the American Revolution, which had a happier ending – until now. 

   

What we are currently witnessing looks worryingly like the end of the American Dream for most of us and, in a real sense, the last act in the America Revolution.  What started back in 1776 remained a work in progress until a) the Civil War freed the slaves; and b) women and African-Americans finally won the right to vote after World Wars I and II, respectively.   But, within a decade of extending the franchise, preparations to undermine its effects – and prevent the wider distribution of wealth it implied – were in full swing.   

       

It started with two University of Rochester business-school professors, Michael Jensen and William Meckling, and a theory – the so-called "Theory of the Firm" published in the obscure,  academic Journal of Financial Economics in 1976.  It debunked the old corporate model as unsuited to the new realities of the emerging global economy; and it offered a new model that called for a wholesale restructuring of the corporate commanding heights of the economy.  The declining competitiveness of US business and industry was proof the old model was no longer working.  It found the separation of ownership and management to be at the heart of the problem and the underlying cause of poor strategic planning and operations. CEOs were too quick to make concessions to unions, not cost-conscious enough, and too reluctant to streamline operations, adopt new ...

The Enemy of My Enemy is My President
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 14 October 2012
Ever since Bill Clinton appointed Goldman honcho Robert Rubin to be his Treasury secretary, the firm has been the top corporate supporter of the Democrats, according to the authoritative Center for Responsive Politics.

Maybe I have been too harsh in judging Barack Obama’s economic performance. Instead of following George W. Bush’s lead in bailing out the bankers first, I wanted Obama to do more for beleaguered homeowners and less for the Wall Street swindlers who trafficked in toxic mortgages. But the president must have done something right, or the hucksters at Goldman Sachs wouldn’t hate him so. 

Ever since Bill Clinton appointed Goldman honcho Robert Rubin to be his Treasury secretary, the firm has been the top corporate supporter of the Democrats, according to the authoritative Center for Responsive Politics. And the investment paid off big time when Clinton followed Rubin’s lead and teamed up with congressional Republicans to reverse the sensible restraints on Wall Street that had kept the economy sound for six decades. Thanks to that decision, Goldman, a high-rolling investment house, was allowed to suddenly become a commercial bank and avail itself of the cheap money provided by the Federal Reserve to bail out troubled banks.

The financiers thought the fix was in once again when Obama turned to Rubin protégé Lawrence Summers as his key economic adviser in the 2008 campaign. Summers had replaced Rubin as Clinton’s Treasury secretary and had been even more vigorous in destroying the regulations that had maintained a stable financial system for 60 years. Wall Street turned against the GOP and its candidate John McCain, much preferring Obama. It should burnish the president’s reputation in the eyes of ordinary voters that those merchants of greed now feel so betrayed. 

As The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday: “When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, no major U.S. corporation did more to finance his campaign than Goldman Sachs Group Inc. This election, none has done more to defeat him.”

The high rollers at Goldman have given $900,000 to ...

Goldman Sachs CEO: Some Wall Street Reforms May Be ‘Inadequate’
Satra Kit
Published: Wednesday 3 October 2012
“A lot of the reforms contained in Dodd-Frank look good to me and some of them look excessive and some of them may even turn out to be inadequate.”

Wall Street has spent millions lobbying to weaken many features of Dodd-Frank financial reform law that are not yet in place. Goldman Sachs, for instance, has spent $15 million lobbying since 2009.

CEO of Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein, who has said before that he thinks the “vast bulk” of the Wall Street reform law is good, suggested there are even parts of Dodd-Frank that might not go far enough:

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Romney’s Backers, Romney’s Brain: The Money, the Thinking, the Plan
Amanda Rae
Published: Friday 21 September 2012
“To know the man you must know his money. That means a new report listing his chief campaign contributors can also give us insight into Romney’s mind, and those of his powerful backers.”

In a 1994 science-fiction novel called Interface, a Presidential candidate has an electronic chip in his brain that links his mind to real-time polling data. His words, deeds, even his thoughts are immediately responsive to the public mood. Mitt Romney seems a lot like that - except that Romney's chip is connected to money.

That money's Romney's own, along with that of his contributors and his entire financial class. His economic arguments may be incomprehensible but his motives are easily understood. In the words of Snoop Dogg, "he's got his mind on his money and his money on his mind."

To know the man you must know his money. That means a new report listing his chief campaign contributors can also give us insight into Romney's mind, and those of his powerful backers.

Backers

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The Real Reason the Middle East is Rioting
Taylor
Published: Thursday 20 September 2012
Food prices, more than some lousy video, are to blame for the violence sweeping the Middle East.

Within hours of the killings this week of four Americans diplomats, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, in Libya, more than a dozen blog posts popped up around the internet asking, “Who is Sam Bacile?” It was a natural question to pose: “Bacile” is the pseudonym of the filmmaker behind The Innocence of Muslims, an American-made video whose insulting depiction of the prophet Mohammed appears, at this point, to have incited anti-U.S. riots in Benghazi, Cairo, Tehran, and Sana’a, Yemen. It now appears, however, that the attack on the diplomatic mission in Libya was a planned assault by religious extremists, who used the protests as cover to murder the four Americans. As truly awful as his film is, “Sam Bacile” appears to be at least something of a patsy. Moreover, there’s another important way in which the American media and political classes, in their focus on The Innocence of Muslims, have missed the forest for the trees.  READ FULL POST 3 COMMENTS

Romney’s Breakfast of Billionaires
Satra Kit
Published: Wednesday 19 September 2012
“Paulson, a much followed hotshot hedge-fund manager, would announce that he was betting big on the recovery of the U.S. housing market.”

Friday, Governor Mitt Romney had breakfast with billionaires.

JOHN PAULSON, Paul Singer and Ken Langone have dropped more than a million dollars each into the Romney “Super-PAC” Restore Our Future. As Butch said to Sundance, “Who ARE these guys?”

Singer's known as "The Vulture" on Wall Street. Langone's database company came up with the list of innocent Black voters that Katherine Harris wiped off the voter rolls of Florida in 2000. But who is Paulson, a guy so dark and devious he doesn't even have a nick-name?

I tried to join them ("Sorry, sir") just to ask why Romney was chowing down with the nation's most notorious billionaires and ballot bandits.

Here is just a bit about Breakfast Billionaire #3: John Paulson from my new book, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps—An investigation of Karl Rove, the Koch Gang and their Buck-Buddies. There's a comic book inside by Ted Rall with an introduction by Bobby Kennedy Jr. Get it here now.

It was just released today and already hit NUMBER ONE NON-FICTION PAPERBACK in the USA. (Barnes & Noble)

In August 2007, billionaire John Paulson walked into Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, with a billion-dollar idea. Paulson’s brainstorm had all the elements that Goldman found enchanting: a bit of fraud, a bit of flimflam, and lots and lots of the ultimate drug: OPM—Other Peoples’ Money.

Paulson’s scheme was simple. ...

When Accountants Go Bad: Scandal-Plagued Firms Turn Out For Romney
Taylor
Published: Thursday 30 August 2012
Don’t count on; the GOP to do it, but it’s time to hold accounting firms - you should forgive the choice of words -accountable.

The presence of scandal-ridden accounting firms on Mitt Romney's fundraising list got me to thinking: What do they expect to get for their money? And why does the accounting profession seem to be so riddled with corruption? And it reminded me of something that happened years ago.

I thought I'd seen it all. As a teenager in pre-punk rock and roll bands I'd been hustled by junkies and serenaded by drag queens from coast to coast. As a political activist I'd been beaten up by goons. As the housemate of a witness to the Patty Hearst kidnapping I'd been wiretapped.

But nothing had prepared me for the world of accountants gone wrong.

Bad Accountant

I was a financial analyst in my early thirties when I was suddenly confronted with a demand from a CEO known as "the meanest boss in America." His corporation's accounting firm, ...

Corporate Crime Does Pay
Satra Kit
Published: Wednesday 29 August 2012
“A 2011 New York Times analysis of enforcement actions during the last 15 years found at least 51 cases in which 19 Wall Street firms had broken anti fraud laws they had agreed never to breach.”

Almost daily we read about another apparently stiff financial penalty meted out for corporate malfeasance. This year corporations are on track to pay as much as $8 billion to resolve charges of defrauding the government, a record sum, according to the Department of Justice. Last year big business paid the Securities and Exchange Commission $2.8 billion to settle disputes.

Sounds like an awful lot of money. And it is, for you and me. But is it a lot of money for corporate lawbreakers? The best way to determine that is to see whether the penalties have deterred them from further wrongdoing.

The empirical evidence argues they don’t. A 2011 New York Times analysis of enforcement actions during the last 15 years found at least 51 cases in which 19 Wall Street firms had broken anti fraud laws they had agreed never to breach.

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, among others, have settled fraud cases by stipulating they would never again violate an anti fraud law, only to do so again and again and again. Bank of America’s securities unit has agreed four times since 2005 not to violate a major anti fraud statute, and another four times not to violate a separate law. Merrill Lynch, which Bank of America acquired in 2008, has separately agreed not to violate the same two statutes seven times since 1999.

Outside the financial sector the story is similar. Erika Kelton at Forbes reports that Pfizer paid $152 million in 2008; $49 million a few months later; a record-setting $2.3 billion in 2009 and $14.5 million last year. Each time ...

The Unrepentant and Unreformed Bankers
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 26 August 2012
“A June survey of 500 senior financial services executives in the United States and Britain turned up stunning results.”

Money laundering. Price fixing. Bid rigging. Securities fraud. Talking about the mob? No, unfortunately. Wall Street.

These days, the business sections of newspapers read like rap sheets. GE Capital, JPMorgan Chase, UBS, Wells Fargo and Bank of America tied to a bid-rigging scheme to bilk cities and towns out of interest earnings. ING Direct, HSBC and Standard Chartered Bank facing charges of money laundering. Barclays caught manipulating a key interest rate, costing savers and investors dearly, with a raft of other big banks also under investigation. Not to speak of the unprecedented wrongdoing that precipitated the financial crisis of 2008.

Evidence gathered by the 

Attorney General to US: Nothing to See on Wall Street, Folks, Just Move Along
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 11 August 2012
“Holder was on the defensive yesterday, a sign that the mounting criticism of his inaction is getting his attention.”

 

Yesterday the Justice Department announced that once again it's not going to pursue evidence of Wall Street crimes which has been sent its way. It has already failed to act on information sent to it by sources whose investigators are apparently more dogged than its own, including several other government agencies and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Now the bipartisan committee which was led by Senators Carl Levin and Tom Coburn can be added to the list of sources whose leads weren't pursued by Attorney General Eric Holder and his staff.

Holder was on the defensive yesterday, a sign that the mounting criticism of his inaction is getting his attention. He was also scornful of that criticism, saying that it's belied by "a troublesome little thing called facts."

There's something troublesome here, all right, but it isn't the facts.

A Justice Department press release announced that there will be no prosecutions based on the Levin/Coburn report:

“After a careful review of the information provided in the report and more than a year of thorough investigation, the Department of Justice ... the FBI and the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (and other agencies) have determined that, based on the law and evidence as they exist at this time, there is not a viable basis to bring a criminal prosecution with respect to Goldman Sachs or its employees in regard to the allegations set forth in the report."

The press release goes on to say that "the department and its investigative partners conducted an exhaustive review of the report and its exhibits, independently gathered and scrutinized a large volume of other documents, and tenaciously pursued potential evidentiary leads, including conducting numerous witness interviews."

The DoJ also boasts that "Since FY 2011, the Department of Justice’s ...

Justice Dept. Ends Investigation into Goldman Sachs Mortgage Abuses Without Pressing Charges
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 10 August 2012
In a statement Thursday, Goldman said: “We are pleased that this matter is behind us.”

After a year-long investigation into Goldman Sachs, the bank singled out by a Senate investigative committee for its abusive mortgage practices in the run-up to the financial crisis, the Justice Department announced Friday that it would not press charges against the bank. Goldman Sachs became of the face of widespread mortgage fraud and abuse that led to the subprime mortgage crisis when evidence that it had made trades described by its own bankers as “shitty deals” came to light during a Senate investigation in 2011.

The Department of Justice, however, concluded that it did to meet the “burden of proof” required for charges, the Wall Street Journal reports:

“Based on the law and evidence as they exist at this time, there is not a viable basis to bring a criminal prosecution with respect to Goldman Sachs or its employees in regard to the allegations set forth in the report,” the statement read. [...]

In a statement Thursday, Goldman said: “We are pleased that this matter is behind us.”

DOJ’s investigation began after an April 2011 report from the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations revealed that Goldman Sachs had pushed its clients to make trades on risky mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps even as the bank was betting the same securities would lose value. Though Goldman Sachs was “doing God’s work,” according to chief executive Lloyd Blankfein, other bankers described pushing “shitty deals” on customers. In March of this year, a ...

Corporate Lobbyists Threaten Democracy
Satra Kit
Published: Wednesday 8 August 2012
One blatant example of this “corporate capture” of the U.N. is the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell, which, thanks to senior executive representatives in several corporate lobbying groups, was omnipresent during the Rio+20 negotiations.

Over a month has passed since the United Nations summit on sustainable development concluded in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, but the world still appears to be unaware of one of the most important statements made during the conference that drew some 50,000 delegates from all over the world.

Louise Kantrow, permanent representative of the International Chamber of Commerce, received thunderous applause when she told her audience on Jun. 19 that “businesses are taking the lead” in global negotiations on climate change and sustainable development.

For many observers, Kantrow’s blunt words highlighted just how strong of a grip private multinational companies have upon supposedly democratic processes.

In a statement aptly titled ‘Reclaim the U.N. from corporate capture’, the environmental organization Friends of the Earth (FoE) complained that, “There are … real concerns about the increasing influence of major corporations and business lobby groups within the U.N.”

The report went on to detail the extraordinary level of businesses’ influence over the positions of national governments in multilateral negotiations.

“Business representatives dominate certain U.N. discussion spaces and some U.N. bodies; business groups are given a privileged advisory role; U.N. officials move back and forth (from) the private sector; and – last but not least – U.N. agencies are increasingly financially dependent on the private sector.”

One blatant example of this “corporate capture” of the U.N. is the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell, which, thanks to senior executive representatives in several corporate lobbying groups, was omnipresent during the Rio+20 negotiations.

Shell sent delegates to the discussions and round tables of the above-mentioned International Chamber ...

The Next Frontier in Prison Privatization?
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 5 August 2012
“The recidivism rate at Rikers currently stands at 66 percent and far outstrips the New York state average, which has hovered around 40 percent for the last decade.”

Jamaican-born cultural theorist Stuart Hall once said that “you don’t need to have a fight about privatization, [so long as you] erode the distinction between public and private.”

Goldman Sachs’s most recent philanthropic foray into the rehabilitation of youth offenders surely brings Hall’s portension to life.

 

Goldman Sachs—the fifth largest U.S. financial institution—recently announced its intention to invest $2.4 million in MDRC (Manpower Research Demonstration Corporation), a non-profit social services provider overseeing a program housed at New York City’s Rikers Prison aimed at reducing the recidivism rate among male inmates aged 16 to 18 by ten percent over the next four years. Mayor Bloomberg’s personal foundation—Bloomberg Philanthropies—has agreed to chip in another $7.2 million.

 

Recidivism refers to the rate at which prisoners re-enter or return to jail/prison three years or less after their release. The recidivism rate at Rikers currently stands at 66 percent and far outstrips the New York state average, which has hovered around 40 percent for the last decade.

 

So just how magnanimous is Goldman Sachs? You decide. In Q2 Goldman reported a profit of $962 million.

 

Goldman Sachs’s loan to MDRC is a new type of U.S. investment instrument called a “social impact bond” whose purpose is to employ market incentives to garner private funding for public social challenges.

 

Here’s how it works:

 

Goldman Sachs plans ...

Exhaustive Study Finds Global Elite Hiding up to $32 Trillion in Offshore Accounts
Satra Kit
Published: Wednesday 1 August 2012
“Mitt Romney has failed to make an economic disclosure that every president and candidate for president has made in the last 36 years.”

A new report reveals how wealthy individuals and their families have between $21 and $32 trillion of hidden financial assets around the world in what are known as offshore accounts or tax havens. The actual sums could be higher because the study only deals with financial wealth deposited in bank and investment accounts, and not other assets such as property and yachts. The inquiry was commissioned by the Tax Justice Network and is being touted as the most comprehensive report ever on the "offshore economy." It also finds that private banks are deeply involved in running offshore havens, with UBS, Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs handling the most assets. We’re joined by the report’s author, James Henry, a lawyer and former chief economist at McKinsey & Company.

 

Transcript

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to a new report that reveals how wealthy ...

The Careerists
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 24 July 2012
“It was the careerists who made possible the genocides, from the extermination of Native Americans to the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians to the Nazi Holocaust to Stalin’s liquidations.”

The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions.

Good. Evil. These words do not mean anything to them. They are beyond morality. They are there to make corporate systems function. If insurance companies abandon tens of millions of sick to suffer and die, so be it. If banks and sheriff departments toss families out of their homes, so be it. If financial firms rob citizens of their savings, so be it. If the government shuts down schools and libraries, so be it. If the military murders children in Pakistan or Afghanistan, so be it. If commodity speculators drive up the cost of rice and corn and wheat so that they are unaffordable for hundreds of millions of poor across the planet, so be it. If Congress and the courts strip citizens of basic civil liberties, so be it. If the fossil fuel industry turns the earth into a broiler of greenhouse gases that doom us, so be it. They serve the system. The god of profit and exploitation. The most dangerous force in the industrialized world does not come from those who wield radical creeds, whether Islamic radicalism or Christian fundamentalism, ...

Titanic Banks Hit LIBOR Iceberg: Will Lawsuits Sink the Ship?
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 22 July 2012
“Billions of dollars were skimmed from cities all across America by colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion.”

At one time, calling the large multinational banks a “cartel” branded you as a conspiracy theorist.   Today the banking giants are being called that and worse, not just in the major media but in court documents intended to prove the allegations as facts.  Charges include racketeering (organized crime under the U.S. Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act or RICO), antitrust violations, wire fraud, bid-rigging, and price-fixing.  Damning charges have already been proven, and major damages and penalties assessed.  Conspiracy theory has become established fact.

 

In an article in the July 3rd Guardian titled “Private Banks Have Failed – We Need a Public Solution”, Seumas Milne writes of the LIBOR rate-rigging scandal admitted to by Barclays Bank:

 

It's already clear that the rate rigging, which depends on collusion, goes far beyond Barclays, and indeed the City of London. This is one of multiple scams that have become endemic in a disastrously deregulated system with inbuilt incentives for cartels to manipulate the core price of finance. 

 

. . . It could of course have happened only in a private-dominated financial sector, and makes a nonsense of the bankrupt free-market ideology that still holds sway in public life.

. . . A crucial part of the explanation is the unmuzzled political and economic power of the City. . . . Finance has usurped democracy. 

Bid-rigging and Rate-rigging

Growing Beyond Growth for True Democracy
Taylor
Published: Thursday 5 July 2012
When democracy is not determined by economic power, it is possible to imagine alternatives to “growth” and “austerity.”

 

“Growth” is, once again, the buzzword of the moment among Europe’s politicians, thanks to Francoise Hollande, the milquetoast Socialist recently elected to succeed Nicolas Sarkozy as President of France. “My mission now,” Hollande told supporters on the night of his electoral victory, “is to give European construction a growth dimension.” President Obama praised Holland at Camp David, telling reporters he would urge “other G8 leaders” to adopt a “strong growth agenda.” The previous buzzword, “austerity,” is meanwhile in decline.

Considering this shift a victory for the anti-austerity movements occupying Europe’s historic plazas over the course of the last two years mistakes both what the elites mean when they say “growth” and what the dissidents want instead of austerity. It is similar to the way liberal commentators in the United States reliably recite the official line that Occupy Wall Street “changed the conversation” on “income inequality” (which we grown-ups will take care of now from our D.C. office buildings, so please shut up now).

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Bernie Sanders: The American People are Angry
Taylor
Published: Thursday 28 June 2012
“What the American people are angry about is they understand that they did not cause this recession.”

Madam President, the American people are angry.  

They are angry because they are living through the worst recession since the great depression. 

Unemployment is not 8.2%, real unemployment is closer to 15%. 

Young people who are graduating high school and graduating college, they're going out into the world, they want to become independent, they want to work, and there are no jobs. 

There are workers out there 50, 55 years old who intended to work the remainder of their working lives, suddenly they got a pink slip, their self-esteem is destroyed, they're never going to have another job again and now they're worried about their retirement security. 

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Father, Son And Holy Joe
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 26 June 2012

God, Jesus, Joseph Smith, Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs), Jamie Dimon (J.P. Morgan), and Mitt Romney  welcome the Mormon Church with Angel Moroni and horn to the financial district.

Romney and the Rise of the Superpredator Corporate Class
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 25 June 2012
“Society and government are supposed to discourage people from from acting on their worst impulses, and when it comes to the corporate class they - and we - have failed.”

 

Remember the "superpredators"? They were the supposedly super-violent youngsters of dark complexion that conservatives kept screaming about in the 1990s. We were told they were about to unleash an unprecedented wave of vicious crime any day now.

Those superpredators don't exist, and never did. But the myth of the "superpredator" offers us a new (and, admittedly, partially ironic) lens through which to view today's corporate executives, a class of people which is apparently remorseless about the harm it causes in the pursuit of self-enrichment.

Let's be clear: No group of human beings is uniquely predisposed toward evil. But society and government are supposed to discourage people from from acting on their worst impulses, and when it comes to the corporate class they - and we - have failed.

Now the rise of the Corporate Superpredator Class could culminate in the election of one of its own to the highest office in the land.


Fear of Children

The myth of the juvenile "superpredator" was promoted by conservatives in the 1990s and 2000s. As Fairness and Accuracy in Media reported in 1998, politicized professors and mainstream commentators were terrifying the public with stories about the "remorseless brutality" we can expect to see from the "teenaged time bomb" that TIME Magazine's scare piece described as follows: "They are just four, five and six years old now, but already they are making criminologists nervous."

But those superpredator children never existed. In fact, juvenile crime rates have declined "significantly" since the early 1990s, according to FBI statistics. But the fear engendered by ...

The Myth of the Free Market
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 25 June 2012
“The Big Lie that is destroying the American economy, the middle class, and the good character of a once-great country.”

 

As numbing news of multibillion dollar boondoggles, scandals and swindles becomes a daily occurrence, now is the time to take a close look at the right-wing propaganda machine’s favorite canards about capitalism and the free market. In the wake of the worst banking crisis since the Great Depression and in the throes of a prolonged recession brought on by rogue financial institutions operating outside a regulatory system supposedly designed to prevent the very kind of reckless behavior and profiteering that led to the current doldrums, here is a short list of myths perpetrated by the corporate greed-is-good culture – myths that taken together add up to The Big Lie that is destroying the American economy, the middle class, and the good character of a once-great country.

 

Let’s begin with an axiom the US Chamber of Commerce, Koch Industries, Inc., Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Company, and Bain Capital, to name but a few, would all wholeheartedly endorse:  state interference (“regulation”) is inimical to economic growth, job creation, and prosperity.  And this corollary:  a free Market is the best and only way to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number.

 

Myth #1: There is no such thing as a free market, never has been, never will be. All markets are regulated, but some markets are regulated in the interest of the many and others in the interest of the few. The American economy is now clearly and indisputably regulated by the few and for the few who now control the wealth of the nation.

 

Proof: The top 20% own all but about 15% of the privately held money and assets in this country. The top 10% of taxpayers owns roughly 72% of the wealth and over 90% of the stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. Between 1981 and 2005, federal taxes on ...

A New Europe is Possible, So Why Go Back to the Old One?
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 19 June 2012
“Considering this shift a victory for the anti-austerity movements occupying Europe’s historic plazas over the course of the last two years mistakes both what the elites mean when they say “growth” and what the dissidents want instead of austerity.”

“Growth” is, once again, the buzzword of the moment among Europe’s politicians, thanks to Francoise Hollande, the milquetoast Socialist recently elected to succeed Nicolas Sarkozy as President of France. “My mission now,” Hollande told supporters on the night of his electoral victory, “is to give European construction a growth dimension.” President Obama praised Holland at Camp David, telling reporters he would urge “other G8 leaders” to adopt a “strong growth agenda.” The previous buzzword, “austerity,” is meanwhile in decline.

Considering this shift a victory for the anti-austerity movements occupying Europe’s historic plazas over the course of the last two years mistakes both what the elites mean when they say “growth” and what the dissidents want instead of austerity. It is similar to the way liberal commentators in the United States reliably recite the official line that Occupy Wall Street “changed the conversation” on “income inequality” (which we grown-ups will take care of now from our D.C. office buildings, so please shut up now).

The dissidents do express antipathy toward austerity, of course, but that doesn’t imply a desire for what Hollande means when he says “growth.” Both “austerity” and “growth” are  cognates of capitalism — “growth” is the Keynesian form, “austerity” the Hayekian — and the dissident movements have by and large rejected the confines of this debate, challenging us to imagine alternatives to either. “Another world,” as they say, “is ...

Why Cory Booker got Bain Capital so Wrong
Taylor
Published: Thursday 31 May 2012
“But whatever he says about capital, the Newark mayor also knows that it takes a lot of money to win public office, like the U.S. Senate seat that may be in his future.”

Cory Booker's emotional televised plea to “stop attacking private equity” may have been the single greatest service he could perform for the Romney campaign. His immediate attempt to revise his remarks on behalf of President Obama, for whom he is supposed to act as a surrogate, only highlighted his earlier insistence that the harsh campaign ...

Who Needs Wall Street Giants?
Satra Kit
Published: Wednesday 30 May 2012
“This month has brought us yet another screaming example of a big-shot Wall Street banker who got too big for his britches — a story revealing the inevitable excess that comes from banks that are simply too big.”

JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and the handful of other behemoths of Wall Street that dominate American banking — who needs them?

After enduring years of insatiable greed by the slick-fingered hucksters who run these gambling houses; after watching in dismay as their ineptness and avarice drained more than $19 trillion from America's household wealth since 2007 and plunged our real economy into the worst financial crisis since the 1930s Depression; after witnessing their shameful demands for trillions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts to save their banks and their jobs; and now after seeing them return immediately to business as usual, including paying multimillion-dollar bonuses to themselves — we have to ask: Huh!?!

Oh, no-no, cry the banking titans, don't even think of looking behind the curtain! Trust us, say these Wall Street alchemists, for we are essential to juicing the economy with our complex abracadabra investment schemes.

In fact, however, those schemes just move money around, spiraling real investment capital from the grassroots up to superrich global profiteers who create nothing but more wealth for themselves. Shell games at carnival sideshows are more honest than big-bank trading houses, for the hustles of such hucksters as JPMorgan, Goldman, B of A, etc. are based on financial illusions, off-the-books accounting, illegally leveraged borrowing, ridiculous tax subsidies and hide-the-pea secrecy.

The obvious truth is that these high-flying, high-tech, high-speed emporiums of high finance serve themselves, not us — so we have no obligation or need to keep serving them. Of course we need banks — to lend to us consumers and our productive businesses, to handle our commercial transactions, to manage our savings and provide financial advice, etc. But that's not what the leviathans of Wall Street do. Rather than keep protecting them, ...

10 Reasons to be Suspicious About Wall Street’s Facebook Fiasco
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 27 May 2012
“Zuckerberg promptly sold his 30.2 million shares, netting a quick billion dollars and change. That tells you what he thinks of this investment.”

Three of Wall Street biggest and best-known financial institutions handled the Facebook IPO, so why were people immediately suspicious when the stock soared and then promptly tanked? Easy answer: Because three of Wall Street biggest and best-known financial institutions handled the Facebook IPO.

Each of them - Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase - has a history of exactly the kinds of unethical and/or illegal behavior that might, just might, explain what happened with Facebook.

Mark Gongloff offers a good overview of Mr. Zuckerberg's Wild Ride, in which a stock that was offered at an IPO price of $38 soared to $45 and then plunged to its current (as of this writing) price of $31. A lot of people lost money - which means a lot of people made money, too.

Zuckerberg promptly sold his 30.2 million shares, netting a quick billion dollars and change. That tells you what he thinks of this investment.

Here are ten reasons why it makes sense to be suspicious of the Facebook IPO, starting with the fact that any overview of the three institutions which handled it might best be described as "rounding up the usual suspects":

1. Morgan Stanley has a history - and a culture - of tricking their own clients into making lousy investments.

It was Morgan Stanley's brokers who, in one notorious account, loved to brag "I ripped his face off!" after convincing one of the firm's own clients to buy a stock that the firm knew was lousy. (See Frank Portnoy's account in Fiasco.)

CNBC reports that "Morgan Stanley may have spent billions of dollars to support the (Facebook) stock price by buying shares in the market." This kind of market manipulation is common. They do these things to ...

If Facebook Falls on its Face
Satra Kit
Published: Wednesday 23 May 2012
“Of course Facebook is unlikely to go out of business, but it is certainly possible that its business model is not sufficiently robust to justify a position among corporate America’s elite in market capitalization. A year or two down the road it may well turn out that its share price ends up at half or less of its IPO price.”

It is way too early to tell whether Facebook shares will end up being a good buy, but the reaction to the initial public offering (IPO) on the first day of trading should serve as a serious warning. While the website may have hundreds of millions of users worldwide, it is not clear that this will translate into profits for the company.  Facebook could follow in the footsteps of Pets.com, Webvan and other end-of-the-century start-ups that quickly collapsed following multi-billion dollar IPOs.

Of course Facebook is unlikely to go out of business, but it is certainly possible that its business model is not sufficiently robust to justify a position among corporate America’s elite in market capitalization. A year or two down the road it may well turn out that its share price ends up at half or less of its IPO price.

In this case there will have been an enormous transfer of wealth from the purchasers of Facebook stock to those able to cash out following the IPO. This will make many of those on the inside of the company fantastically wealthy. However, much of their wealth would not result from making a good product that society valued; rather it came from being part of a successfully hyped company.

These insiders benefitted from the ability of Mark Zuckerberg and his colleagues to convince investors that Facebook had much more profit potential than in fact was true. This ability to hype a product, in this case company stock, can be an incredibly valuable skill, but it provides nothing of value to society. In that way it is similar to the skills of Fabrice Tourre (a.k.a. "Fabulous Fab"), who was apparently very skilled in putting together complex mortgage derivatives for Goldman Sachs that were designed to fail.   

In the last two decades the economy seems to have created many openings for people whose primary skill is lifting money out ...

The European Stabilization Mechanism, or How the Goldman Vampire Squid Just Captured Europe
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 20 May 2012
“In September 2008, Henry Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, managed to extort a $700 billion bank bailout from Congress.”

 

The Goldman Sachs coup that failed in America has nearly succeeded in Europe—a permanent, irrevocable, unchallengeable bailout for the banks underwritten by the taxpayers.

In September 2008, Henry Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, managed to extort a $700 billion bank bailout from Congress. But to pull it off, he had to fall on his knees and threaten the collapse of the entire global financial system and the imposition of martial law; and the bailout was a one-time affair. Paulson’s plea for a permanent bailout fund—the Troubled Asset Relief Program or TARP—was opposed by Congress and ultimately rejected.

By December 2011, European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, former vice president of Goldman Sachs Europe, was able to approve a 500 billion Euro bailout for European banks without asking anyone’s permission. And in January 2012, a permanent rescue-funding program called the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) was passed in the dead of night with barely even a mention in the press. The ESM imposes an open-ended debt on EU member governments, putting taxpayers on the hook for whatever the ESM’s Eurocrat overseers demand.

The bankers’ coup has triumphed in Europe seemingly without a fight. The ESM is cheered by Eurozone governments, their creditors, and “the market” alike, because it means investors will keep buying sovereign debt. All is sacrificed to the demands of the creditors, because where else can the money be had to float the crippling debts of the ...

Romney Defends JP Morgan’s $3 Billion Trading Debacle After Collecting Millions From the Financial Industry
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 18 May 2012
“Overall, of course, Romney has shown little interest in diagnosing or addressing the causes of the 2008 financial crisis, and the role of the nation’s biggest banks in nearly sinking the global economy.”

2012 presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney this week defended JP Morgan Chase’s $3 billion trading debacle as just “the way America works.” He denied that the episode makes the case for stronger regulations to rein in banks’ risky trading.

Overall, of course, Romney has shown little interest in diagnosing or addressing the causes of the 2008 financial crisis, and the role of the nation’s biggest banks in nearly sinking the global economy. And the banks surely appreciate it, considering that employees of the biggest financial, as the Boston Globe noted today:

When the head of JPMorgan Chase met with shareholders to answer for a trading loss of more than $2 billion Tuesday, it was against an evolving political backdrop: Donors from big banks are betting on Mitt Romney to defeat President Obama and repeal new restraints on risky, large-scale investments.

The top five donor groups in Romney’s campaign are individuals and political action committees associated with large financial institutions, led by Wall Street giants Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, according to information compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group that tracks campaign donations.

The Globe actually got it a bit wrong: the top six donors to Romney come from the biggest banks— Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and Citigroup. And the finance/insurance/real estate industry is far and away the largest donor to Romney’s campaign, giving him $18 million. Of course, banks also throw ...

Colonized by Corporations
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 15 May 2012
“We have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized. We are controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty to the nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism are traitors.”

In Robert E. Gamer’s book “The Developing Nations” is a chapter called “Why Men Do Not Revolt.” In it Gamer notes that although the oppressed often do revolt, the object of their hostility is misplaced. They vent their fury on a political puppet, someone who masks colonial power, a despised racial or ethnic group or an apostate within their own political class. The useless battles serve as an effective mask for what Gamer calls the “patron-client” networks that are responsible for the continuity of colonial oppression. The squabbles among the oppressed, the political campaigns between candidates who each are servants of colonial power, Gamer writes, absolve the actual centers of power from addressing the conditions that cause the frustrations of the people. Inequities, political disenfranchisement and injustices are never seriously addressed. “The government merely does the minimum necessary to prevent those few who are prone toward political action from organizing into politically effective groups,” he writes.

Gamer and many others who study the nature of colonial rule offer the best insights into the functioning of our corporate state. We have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized. We are controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty to the nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism are traitors. They strip us of our resources, keep us politically passive and enrich themselves at our expense. The mechanisms of control are ...

Five Facts That Put America to Shame
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 14 May 2012
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses...I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” These words, from poet Emma Lazarus, were inscribed on the Statue of Liberty over 100 years ago.

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses...I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" These words, from poet Emma Lazarus, were inscribed on the Statue of Liberty over 100 years ago. Today the golden door has a lock on it, paid for with record profits from the health care, education, and financial industries.



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.



A related 2009 OECD study generally agreed, placing the U.S. 24th out of 30 OECD countries for children's health and safety. It also showed the devastating effects of inequality in our country. Despite having the second-highest average income for children among the 30 OECD countries, the U.S. ranked 27th out of 30 for child poverty (percentage of children living in households that are below 50% of the median income).
 


2. We've betrayed the young people who were advised to stay in school


Over 40% of recent college graduates are living with their parents, dealing with government loans that average $27,200. The unemployment rate for young people is about 50%. More than 350,000 Americans with advanced degrees applied for food stamps in 2010.


As Washington lobbyists endeavor to kill a proposed bill to reduce the interest rates on student debt, federal loans remain readily available, and so colleges go right on increasing their tuition.


Meanwhile, corporations hold $2 trillion in cash while looking for investments and employees in foreign countries, and American students are forced to accept menial positions. Yet delusions persist about our new generation of would-be workers. Conservatives are all bubbly about today's young ...

Why America’s Rich People Are Better Than Everyone Else’s
Amir Gholi
Published: Monday 7 May 2012
“The stock market has doubled since March 2009, while corporate profits and exports have surged to records.”

A remarkable story appeared in Newsweek recently, a celebration by author Daniel Gross of America's re-emergence as the strongest economy and best darn nation in the world. An underlying theme in the article, implicit in the grandiose descriptions of our post-recession growth, is that all American lives must be improving because of the magic of our "resilient and nimble private sector." The Newsweek reader might have been reminded of the wisdom of Goldman Sachs chairman Lloyd Blankfein: "Everybody should be, frankly, happy...the financial system led us into the crisis and it will lead us out."



It sure is nice to feel good about ourselves. But it's more important to be thorough with the facts. Only a small percentage of Americans have benefited from the economic resurgence. The people with money are congratulating themselves while remaining disdainfully isolated from the real world all around them.
 


The article starts with the prideful assertion that "The stock market has doubled since March 2009, while corporate profits and exports have surged to records." That's all good for about 1% of us. The Americans in this elite group captured a stunning 93% of the income gains in the first year of recovery.



The 'recovery' itself is largely a resumption of the pattern seen over the past twenty years, during which the richest 5% of Americans have steadily increased their already sizable (70% of the total) stock market holdings.



And how about those corporate profits? Something to be proud of? Here are the disturbing

Geithner’s World, Part 1: Three Years of Immunity for Bad Bankers
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 5 May 2012
In 2009 there was a very compelling argument for a Federal takeover over these failing institutions, which had been so negligently (and very possibly criminally) mismanaged could no longer survive on their own.

 

Here's a walk down memory lane that's worth taking, even if it makes your blood pressure spike a little: Three years ago Tim Geithner was in the position of having to explain why the Federal government wasn't going to nationalize the nation's failing banks. In 2009 many people expected that to be part of the government's bank rescue plan.

Only three years. It seems so long ago, doesn't it?

In 2009 there was a very compelling argument for a Federal takeover over these failing institutions, which had been so negligently (and very possibly criminally) mismanaged could no longer survive on their own. And while nationalization wasn't the only course worth considering, this snapshot from our national past reflects the gravity of the crisis caused by bankers.

It's also a useful reminder of the extent to which bank CEOs failed to pass even the most basic test of executive competence - namely,  READ FULL POST 15 COMMENTS

War, Money, and Moral Hazard
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 29 April 2012
The moral issue comes into play when the risk-taking individual or enterprise does not have to pay the consequences – when taxpayers, for example, are forced to bail out banks after they make colossal “casino” bets that fail.

Moral hazard.  Economists define it as a problem arising from a tendency to take big risks where the potential rewards are great – hence the hazard.  The moral issue comes into play when the risk-taking individual or enterprise does not have to pay the consequences – when taxpayers, for example, are forced to bail out banks after they make colossal "casino" bets that fail.

 

Where there's no incentive to correct the offending behavior, there's every likelihood that it will happen again.  And here's the kicker:  the "it" isn't necessarily an economic crisis; it can be any crisis or catastrophe, including armed conflict. 

 

In the wake of the US bank-induced 2008 global financial crisis, policy makers, pundits, and economists suddenly rediscovered moral hazard in the under-regulated "free-market economy" both as a theoretical concept and as an existential danger.  Nobody was more ardent in pushing this idea than then Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, who served in that position from 2006 to 2009.  His highest qualification for that high position was his former role as CEO of Goldman Sachs (1999-2006).  Goldman Sachs, of course, was one of the 20 or so massive commercial banks that were deemed too big to fail, one of the banks that private investors and the general public trusted to manage risks – and paid countless billions of dollars in transaction fees precisely for that purpose.

 

Moral hazards, however, exist outside the sphere of economics, too.  In fact, they arise in virtually all areas of our private and public life – including love and war where, despite the old bromide, all is definitely not fair.

 

Consider the case of Army Captain D.J. Skelton from my home state of South Dakota.  Severely ...

The Big Empty: Eating Cheetos With the Hungry Ghosts of the Corporate State
Amir Gholi
Published: Thursday 26 April 2012
“How is it that a trillion dollars can be spent on military weaponry, but the collective psyche of this nation continues to be gripped by nebulous fear?”

Due to the consolidation of wealth and privilege into fewer and fewer hands, thus requiring escalating amounts of officially mandated surveillance and brutality to maintain social order, the natural trajectory of unregulated capitalism tends towards hyper-authoritarian excess, even towards fascism. Moreover, by the standards of capitalist ideology, and exacerbated by the rigged nature of economic and social arrangements -- large segments of society are deemed losers, and, resultantly, will grow restive, if scapegoats aren't invented to mitigate a sense of humiliation and displace rage. Accordingly, rightist demagogic fictions can seize the psyches of large segments of the general public: immigrant interlopers wreck the economy; minority layouts suck-up public funds; gays and women, possessed of dubious morality, destroy the nation's moral fabric; lefties are driven to challenge the system, but only because of their spite, borne of jealousy.

 

The "purer" the form of capitalism the faster the rise of fascism. There is a dark and bitter grace to this: Fascism is the deranged agency that sends the capitalist machine into systemic runaway, thus the system crashes and burns -- and out of its ashes and debris…a more humane system can come into being.

 

Although the yearning for freedom is inborn, as is the case with the development of any skill or talent, one must open oneself to its promise by discipline and practice. Otherwise, attempts at exercising freedom -- free will's dance with resistant and changing circumstance -- can be an ugly sight to behold.

 

Witness the following litany of the lost evinced by us, the denizens of late-stage capitalism: The dismal air haunted and minds distracted … cluttered by the ceaseless chatter of those dim ghosts of human discourse known as text messages and tweets; the parade of preening narcissists and prattling sub-cretins that is celebrity ...

A History of the World, BRIC by BRIC
Amir Gholi
Published: Thursday 26 April 2012
“Neoliberal Dragons, Eurasian Wet Dreams, and Robocop Fantasies.”

Goldman Sachs -- via economist Jim O’Neill -- invented the concept of a rising new bloc on the planet: BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). Some cynics couldn’t help calling it the “Bloody Ridiculous Investment Concept.”

Not really. Goldman now expects the BRICS countries to account for almost 40% of global gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050, and to include four of the world’s top five economies.

Soon, in fact, that acronym may have to expand to include Turkey, Indonesia, South Korea and, yes, nuclear Iran: BRIIICTSS? Despite its well-known problems as a nation under economic siege, Iran is also motoring along as part of the N-11, yet another distilled concept. (It stands for the next 11 emerging economies.)

The multitrillion-dollar global question remains: Is the emergence of BRICS a signal that we have truly entered a new multipolar world?

Yale’s canny historian Paul Kennedy (of “imperial overstretch” fame) is convinced that we either are about to cross or have already crossed a “historical watershed” taking us far beyond the post-Cold War unipolar world of “the sole superpower.” There are, argues Kennedy, four main reasons for that: the slow erosion of the U.S. dollar (formerly 85% of global reserves, now less than 60%), the “paralysis of the European project,” Asia rising (the end of 500 years of Western hegemony), and the decrepitude of the United Nations.

The

The Middle Class Hasn’t Disappeared. It’s Just Sliding Toward the Bottom
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 23 April 2012
“Today, 400 individuals have as much wealth as an entire HALF of America.”

It used to be that the average American resided halfway between two extremes:

 


 --- Steven Schwarzman's home was being partially replicated in a Park
Avenue hall for his gala $5 million 60th birthday party. The guest of
honor's full-length portrait greeted the invitees as they proceeded past
rows of orchids and palm trees to the dining area, where they feasted on
lobster, filet mignon, baked Alaska, and the finest of wines. Martin
Short provided the laughs, and the music came compliments of Marvin
Hamlisch, Patti LaBelle, and Rod Stewart.


 --- Eloise Pittman's home had been purchased in the 1950s by her mother,
who washed dishes to pay off the mortgage. In 1985 the younger Ms.
Pittman, a schoolteacher, went to Chase Bank and took out a loan on the
house. It was a predatory loan with balloon payments, and Ms. Pittman was
forced to borrow more and more money to keep from defaulting. When she
died in November 2011, she was $400,000 in debt. A week after her death
her family received an eviction notice.


There's no 'average' anymore, in the sense of a normal curve with most of
the people and most of the money in the middle.


Today, 400 individuals have as much wealth as an entire HALF of America.


Yet it's still argued by some conservatives that in real life the two
extremes are split by a substantial group of average Americans in the
middle. The income of the middle quintile, we are told, grew by over 35%
percent between 1979 and 2007. But, as Jared Bernstein points out, 35%
over 28 years is 1.1% per year, over a period when productivity grew at
twice that rate. Census data shows that the inflation-adjusted salary of a
full-time male worker in 2010 was almost exactly the same as in 1979.


In real life just 2 percent of Americans own HALF of all wealth ...

The European Stabilization Mechanism, Or How the Goldman Vampire Squid Just Captured Europe
Amir Gholi
Published: Thursday 19 April 2012
“The Goldman Sachs coup that failed in America has nearly succeeded in Europe—a permanent, irrevocable, unchallengeable bailout for the banks underwritten by the taxpayers.”

In September 2008, Henry Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, managed to extort a $700 billion bank bailout from Congress. But to pull it off, he had to fall on his knees and threaten the collapse of the entire global financial system and the imposition of martial law; and the bailout was a one-time affair. Paulson’s plea for a —the Troubled Asset Relief Program or TARP—was opposed by Congress and ultimately rejected.

By December 2011, European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, former vice president of Goldman Sachs Europe, was able to approve a for European banks without asking anyone’s permission. And in January 2012, a permanent rescue funding program called the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) was with barely even a mention in the press. The ESM imposes an open-ended debt on EU member governments, putting taxpayers on the hook for whatever the ESM’s Eurocrat overseers demand.

The bankers’ coup has triumphed in Europe seemingly without a fight. The ESM is cheered by Eurozone governments, their creditors, and “the market” alike, because it means investors will keep buying sovereign debt. All is sacrificed to the demands of the creditors, because where else can the money be had to float the crippling debts of the Eurozone governments?

There is another alternative to debt slavery to the banks. But first, a closer look at the nefarious underbelly of the ESM and Goldman’s silent takeover of the ECB . . . .

The Dark Side of the ESM

a permanent rescue facility slated to replace the temporary European Financial Stability Facility and European Financial Stabilization Mechanism as soon as Member States representing 90% of the capital commitments have ratified it, something that is expected to happen in July 2012. A December 2011 youtube video titled , originally posted in German, gives such a revealing look at the ESM that it is worth quoting here at length. It ...

The Latest SEC/Goldman Sachs Sweetheart Deal is the Worst One Yet
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 14 April 2012
“The SEC has the power to shut Goldman Sachs down for what it did, and the offenses it describes are felonies. But they just gave out another slap on the wrist - no, make that a pat on the wrist - with today's announcement.”

The sweetheart deals just keep coming. Lawbreakers at one bank after another are let off the hook as their shareholders write a check. And then they go out and repeat the illegal behavior they promised not to do in the last settlement.

It shouldn't be surprising that this keeps happening over at the SEC - especially as long as Robert Khuzami continues to serve as Director of the Commission's Division of Enforcement.

But while each of these deals has been shameful, destructive, and outrageous, the $22 million agreement with Goldman Sachs which the SEC announced today - another one in which the guilty party "neither confirms nor denies wrongdoing" - looks like the worst one yet.

The SEC has the power to shut Goldman Sachs down for what it did, and the offenses it describes are felonies. But they just gave out another slap on the wrist - no, make that a pat on the wrist - with today's announcement.

The Worst Thing

It's not just the fact that the SEC continues to ignore the public's outrage by letting bankers off scott-free. And it's not just that this kind of irresponsible behavior ensures that the law breaking will continue. Its not just that crooked bank executives are allowed to "neither admit nor deny wrongdoing."

It's not even the fact that this time around the SEC has worded its announcement in a clumsy attempt to obscure the criminal behavior of Goldman's employees - although that's one of this agreement's worst features.

No, what makes this deal the worst we've seen in a long while is the timing. Most of the other recent sweetheart deals dealt with crimes that led up to - and created - the 2008 financial crisis. But this time Goldman Sachs is walking away from crimes its bankers committed as recently as last year.

That's been the SEC's pattern under both the last ...

A Lesson in Defection From Goldman Sachs
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 14 April 2012
The trouble is, Smith didn’t really echo any of the Occupy movement’s concerns.

Just about in time for Occupy Wall Street’s half-birthday last month, there was what might ostensibly seem to be a fitting reason to celebrate: Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith quit his job and, to massive fanfare, penned a New York Times op-ed denouncing what his company has become. With those 1,300 words, Goldman’s stock price dropped 3.4 percent, vanishing more than $2 billion from its worth and necessitating a commiserative house call from the mayor of New York.

The trouble is, Smith didn’t really echo any of the Occupy movement’s concerns. There was no mention of the company’s habit of self-serving market manipulation, contributing to downturns from the Great Depression to the Great Recession, or its present hijacking of the very political system tasked with regulating it. The word “bailout” does not appear. What really seemed to disturb Smith, rather, was that this institution was putting its own interests before those of its obscenely wealthy clients. (He had personally worked with “two of the largest hedge funds on the planet, five of the largest asset managers in the United States, and three of the most prominent sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia.”) The company from which he’d once learned that obscenely wealthy clients come first was betraying that solemn trust so as to enrich its obscenely wealthy self. This was unconscionable, in Smith’s view, so he decided to give his longtime employer a big kick in the shins — all, it seems, in the service of a hope that Goldman Sachs might once again defraud the universe in a more gentlemanly fashion.

As Occupy-six-months-on has become the subject of dutiful retrospectives, the thought of Smith’s article keeps weighing on me as a big reminder of what the movement might seek ...

When Bankers Rule the World
Amanda Rae
Published: Saturday 31 March 2012
How we can call out the myths, restructure the banking system, shut down the con game, and take back America.

The tell-all defection of Greg Smith, a former Goldman Sachs executive, provided an insider’s view of the moral corruption of the Wall Street banks that control of much of America’s economy and politics. Smith confirms what insightful observers have known for years: the business purpose of Wall Street bankers is to maximize their personal financial take without regard to the consequences for others.

Wall Street’s World of Illusion 

Why has the public for so long tolerated Wall Street’s reckless abuses of power and accepted the resulting devastation? The answer lies in a cultural trance induced by deceptive language and misleading indicators backed by flawed economic theory and accounting ...

Why Leaving Goldman Sachs Breaks the Rules of the Game
Moderator
Published: Friday 23 March 2012
“Defector Greg Smith has been called dishonest, unprofessional, and self-serving. But what might he be telling us about how to do business responsibly?”

In his transformative 1978 essay, "The Power of the Powerless," Czech dissident Václav Havel explains how one person “living in truth” can shine a light on unspoken questions, revealing the automatism of our usual assumptions: “When a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game—everything suddenly appears in another light.”

With his March 14 New York Times op-ed, "Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs," now former Executive Director Greg Smith broke many rules of the game. He has been called unprofessional. Sanctimonious. Dishonest. Self-serving. Disgruntled. Naïve.

Public moral acts are always disruptive, and defectors of any type are likely to be labeled as malcontents.

Like any defector, Greg Smith was disloyal.  He aired dirty laundry, describing how Goldman Sachs had lost the client focus that once defined its culture. “It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off,” he said. Why would he so publicly denounce his employer? And after twelve years? He must, detractors speculate, not have been happy with his bonus. He must have been bypassed for promotion.  He must be planning to write a book.

All of this is possible.

But sometimes people are more motivated by their values than we assume.

Every day, people do outrageously responsible things. Linda Almonte is risking personal financial ruin to ensure JP Morgan Chase’s robo-signing practices and inaccurate recordkeeping don’t send its clients into debt-collection hell.  As Reinhold Niebuhr explains in Moral Man and Immoral Society, public moral acts are always disruptive, and defectors of any type are likely to be labeled as malcontents.

So while we are understandably skeptical, we ...

Banker Hubris Knows No Bounds
Satra Kit
Published: Wednesday 21 March 2012
“Are these one-percenters actually worth their bonus checks, even at this year’s discounted level?”

Have you heard about the earthquake that has shaken Wall Street to its very core? Well, brace yourself, for this really is a shocker: Bonus payments are down.

Yes, the exorbitant bonus checks pocketed each year by the Goldman Sachers, Citigropers and other financial tinkerers have been cut by about 25 percent this year, and — oh! — you should hear the Wall Streeters moaning the hard-times, down-and-out banker blues.

"It's a disaster," sobbed one. "The entire construct of compensation has changed."

Many Americans, of course, will say ... "Good! About time!" And it is difficult in these times of middle-class collapse and rising poverty to get teary-eyed over a few financial swells getting a trim. But, come on, Wall Street bankers are human, too (aren't they?) — so open your hearts to their pain.

A hedge-fund manager, for example, says he'll now have to strain to pay his $7,500 annual dues to remain a member of the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester. Plus, he worries about food, health care and boarding. Not for him and his family, but for his two dogs — he's been laying out $17,000 a year for upkeep ...

Lack of Leadership at the Top of Corporate Ladder
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 19 March 2012
“Smith wrote that he decided to leave Goldman-Sachs because it had veered so far from the company he had joined straight out of college that he could no longer say in good conscience “that I identify with what it stands for.”

As I was reading former Wall Street executive Greg Smith’s bombshell of an Op-Ed in the New York Times last week, I mentally inserted the names of the big for-profit health insurers — two of which I worked for — in place of Goldman Sachs, where Smith worked until resigning on the day his column was published.

Smith wrote that he decided to leave Goldman-Sachs because it had veered so far from the company he had joined straight out of college that he could no longer say in good conscience “that I identify with what it stands for.”

He put the blame squarely on Goldman’s current CEO and president.  It was during their watch, he wrote, that “the firm changed the very way it thought about leadership.

“Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing.  Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.”

Had Smith been an executive at any one of the big investor-owned insurers that have come to control the U.S. health care system, he could have written the same thing.

Like Smith, I came to realize toward the end of my career that the companies I had worked for had changed so much during my two decades with them that I could not in good conscience continue to serve as an industry cheerleader and spokesman.

Shortly before I turned in my notice in 2008, the human resources manager who had hired me nearly 15 years earlier turned in his as well.  He told me that in his exit interview, his boss, the head of HR, told him — not with regret but with pride — that the company he was leaving was not the company he had joined.  He was right, which is why that HR manager and I and many other former colleagues have left in recent years, dismayed at what the leaders of health insurance companies have come to value more than ...

If You Took the Greed Out of Wall Street, All You’d Have Left is Pavement: Why Greg Smith’s Critique is Way Too Narrow
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 17 March 2012
“Wall Street’s shenanigans have convinced a large portion of America that the economic game is rigged.”

 

Greg Smith, a Goldman Sachs vice president, resigned his post Wednesday with a stinging public rebuke of the firm on the oped page of the New York Times — accusing it of no longer putting its clients before its own pecuniary goals.            

But if Mr. Smith believes his experience at Goldman is something new, he doesn’t know history. In 1928, Goldman Sachs and Company created the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation, which promptly went on a speculative binge, luring innocent investors along the way. In the Great Crash of 1929, Goldman’s investors lost their shirts but Goldman kept its hefty fees.

If Mr. Smith believes such disregard of investors is unique to Goldman, he doesn’t know the rest of Wall Street. In the late 1920s, National City Bank, which eventually would become Citigroup, repackaged bad Latin American debt as new securities which it then sold to investors no less gullible than Goldman Sachs’s. After the Great Crash of 1929, National City’s top executives helped themselves to the bank’s remaining assets as interest-free loans while their investors and depositors were left with pieces of paper worth a tiny fraction of what they paid for them.

The problem isn’t excessive greed. If you took the greed out of Wall Street all you’d have left is pavement. The problem is endemic abuse of power and trust. When bubbles are forming, all but the most sophisticated investors can be easily duped into thinking they’ll get rich by putting their money into the hands of brand-named investment bankers.

Moreover, finance has become so complex that investors don’t even know when they’re being taken for a ride, and so can’t possibly hold a brand-name bank responsible for their losses – or for gains that are a fraction of what they might otherwise have ...

At Last, Some Decency on Wall Street
Amir Gholi
Published: Friday 16 March 2012
“Goldman’s executives could have been rounded up Wednesday morning on organized-crime charges.”

By the time you read this, the PR hacks of Goldman Sachs will be vigorously pressing their efforts to destroy the reputation of whistle-blower Greg Smith, a former Goldman executive director whose exposé in Wednesday’s New York Times Op-Ed page was so devastating that the 143-year-old firm might actually, finally, be held accountable.

Smith, a wunderkind who spent the 12 years after he graduated from Stanford University rising through the ranks at Goldman, has revealed the firm’s culture to be so fundamentally venal that were financial industry shenanigans not generally exempt from effective legal regulation, Goldman’s executives could have been rounded up Wednesday morning on organized-crime charges.

The law that exempted what would have been illegal trading in the murky derivatives that the Smith article denounced was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, enthusiastically signed by Bill Clinton in the waning months of his administration. The legislation shielded from any regulatory law the very activities that led to the financial meltdown from which Americans are still reeling.

Back in the Clinton era, it fell to the president’s last press secretary, Jake Siewert, to justify the freeing of Wall Street investment houses to do their worst, and in one of those delicious ironies Siewert was appointed as a managing director and the global head of corporate communications for Goldman Sachs the day before the devastating Smith exposé broke.

Who better to hastily concoct a strategy of explaining away Goldman’s deceit in the sale of those derivatives? Predictably there was the quickly leaked memo by Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein shooting Smith, the previously highly valued young messenger, as a “disgruntled” employee for daring to describe the culture within Goldman ...

The View From Muppetland
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 16 March 2012
“Former Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith takes a rare look at modern-day investment banking.”

Former Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith takes a rare look at modern-day investment banking.  His description of the profit-first culture should prompt investigation into bank practices and serious questioning by clients – from individuals to pension funds to universities – as to their advisors’ ethics and priorities.


Smith’s Wednesday’s New York Times op-ed, written as he left his employer of 12 years, describes the firm’s environment as “as toxic and destructive as he’s ever seen it”.  It rewards dumping unprofitable Goldman-owned investments and getting clients to trade what brings in the most profit for the bank.  It often ignores interests of clients, referred to by managing directors as “Muppets”.  “The decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long term survival,” he writes.  If character is destiny, banks’ path ahead will be littered with obstacles more deadly than exploded swaps.


Banks relentless search for profits has racked up immense “collateral damage”.  Investment banks have injured individuals and institutions of every stripe.  Institutions include the country Greece whose books Goldman cooked; Jefferson County, Alabama, and many European cities devastated by risky derivatives; colleges like the University of Virginia and Harvard who have held cut-rate sales on private equity; and pension funds and others who sued for fraudulent trades.  Hurt individuals include veterans overcharged by JP Morgan Chase, Occupy Wall Street protestors unfairly arrested after JP Morgan’s huge donation to local police; millions abused in foreclosure and mortgage scams; and hundreds of millions globally impoverished by the crisis.  Bank profits and bonuses hit all time highs, even after inflicting this widespread harm.


Of course, the ...

13 Reasons Goldman’s Quitting Exec May Have a Point
Amir Gholi
Published: Thursday 15 March 2012
“We decided to look at just one aspect of their record: SEC charges levied against Goldman and its employees over the past decade.”

An executive at Goldman Sachs left the firm today with a bang, penning a New York Times op-ed accusing the company of increasingly putting profits ahead of clients. Greg Smith started as an intern 12 years ago and last headed a derivatives department. Not surprisingly, Goldman quickly and strongly disagreed with his take.

There have obviously been plenty of unflattering headlines about Goldman in the past few years. We decided to look at just one aspect of their record: SEC charges levied against Goldman and its employees over the past decade.

April 2003: SEC charges Goldman Sachs over conflicts of interest among its research analysts. The company eventually settled for $110 million in fines and disgorgements.

November 2003: Former Goldman economist John Youngdahl pleads guilty to insider trading. The firm had to pay the SEC $4.2 million over profits it gained from the illegal dealings.

July 2004: Goldman settles with the SEC for $10 million over charges it improperly promoted a stock sale involving PetroChina.

January 2005: Goldman settles with the SEC for $40 million over charges that it violated securities law in promoting initial public offerings.

April 2006: Two former Goldman employees are charged with running an international insider-trading ring while they were at the firm. Eugene Plotkin and David Pajcin, both in their 20s, paid off insiders at other firms and stole early copies of Business Week to get an edge. They also tried (unsuccessfully) to use strippers to get information. Both eventually served jail time.

March 2007: A Goldman subsidiary, Goldman Execution and Clearing, settles with the SEC for $2 million over allegations that faulty oversight that allowed customers to make illegal trades.

March 2009: Goldman Execution and Clearing settles with the SEC for $1.2 million over improper proprietary trading by employees.

July 2009: The SEC charges a former Goldman Sachs trader Anthony Perez and ...

WikiLeaks: Emails Leak Exposes Inner Workings of Private Intel Firm Stratfor, a “Shadow CIA”
Amanda Rae
Published: Wednesday 29 February 2012
“WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said the files implicate some of the world’s largest firms in corporate espionage.”

The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has begun publishing what it says are 5.5 million emails obtained from the servers of Stratfor, a private U.S.-based intelligence-gathering firm known to some as a "shadow CIA" for corporations and government agencies. The emails were reportedly obtained by the hackers group, Anonymous. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said the files implicate some of the world’s largest firms in corporate espionage. Firms with ties to Stratfor include Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs, Dow Chemical, and sectors of the U.S. government, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Marine Corps and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Coke asked Stratfor to keep tabs on the protest plans of the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. "We’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the stories based on the material. They will come out in the next coming days and weeks," said Kristinn Hrafnsson, a WikiLeaks spokesperson who has been a key member of the project to release the Stratfor emails. "What we were doing yesterday was introducing the project, the nature of Stratfor and how they operate and their ties."

Transcript:

AMY 

REVEALED: Romney’s Top Funders Made Billions on Auto Bail-Out
Amanda Rae
Published: Thursday 23 February 2012
“John Paulson of Paulson & Co and Paul Singer of Elliott International, known on Wall Street as ‘vulture’ investors, have each written checks for one million dollars to Restore Our Future, the Super PAC supporting Romney’s candidacy.”

Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney called the federal government’s 2009 bail-out of the auto industry, “nothing more than crony capitalism, Obama style... a reward for his big donors to his campaign."  In fact, the biggest rewards ­­– a windfall of more than two billion dollars care of U.S. taxpayers ­­­–– went to Romney's two top contributors. 

 

John Paulson of Paulson & Co and Paul Singer of Elliott International, known on Wall Street as “vulture” investors, have each written checks for one million dollars to Restore Our Future, the Super PAC supporting Romney’s candidacy.

 

Gov. Romney last week asserted that the Obama Administration’s support for General Motors was a, “payoff for the auto workers union.” However, union workers in GM’s former auto parts division, Delphi, the unit taken over by Romney’s funders, did not fair so well.  The speculators eliminated every single union job from the parts factories once manned by 25,200 UAW members. 

 

The two hedge fund operators turned a breathtaking three-thousand percent profit on a relatively negligible investment by using hardball tactics against the U.S. Treasury and their own employees.

 

Under the control of the speculators, Delphi, which had 45 plants in the U.S. and Canada, is now reduced to just four factories with only 1,500 hourly workers, none of them UAW members, despite the union agreeing to cut contract wages by two thirds.

 

It wasn’t supposed to be quite so bad.  The Obama Administration and GM had arranged for a private equity investor to provide half a billion dollars in new capital for Delphi, but that would have cut the pay-out to Singer and Paulson.  The speculators blocked the Obama-GM plan, taking the entire government bail-out hostage.  Even ...

How Greece Could Take Down Wall Street
Anna Gilliam
Published: Wednesday 22 February 2012
“The Houses of Morgan, Goldman and the other Big Five are justifiably worried right now, because an ‘event of default’ declared on European sovereign debt could jeopardize their $32 trillion derivatives scheme.”

In an article titled “Still No End to ‘Too Big to Fail,’” William Greider wrote in The Nation on February 15th:

Financial market cynics have assumed all along that Dodd-Frank did not end "too big to fail" but instead created a charmed circle of protected banks labeled "systemically important" that will not be allowed to fail, no matter how badly they behave.

That may be, but there is one bit of bad behavior that Uncle Sam himself does not have the funds to underwrite: the $32 trillion market in credit default swaps (CDS).  Thirty-two trillion dollars is more than twice the U.S. GDP and more than twice the national debt. 

CDS are a form of derivative taken out by investors as insurance against default.  According to the Comptroller of the Currency, nearly 95% of the banking industry’s total exposure to derivatives contracts is held by the nation’s five largest banks: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, HSBC, and Goldman Sachs.  The CDS market is unregulated, and there is no requirement that the “insurer” actually have the funds to pay up.  CDS are more like bets, and a massive loss at the casino could bring the house down.

It could, at least, unless the casino is rigged.  Whether a “credit event” is a “default” triggering a payout is determined by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA), and it seems that the ISDA is owned by the world’s largest banks and hedge funds.  That means the house determines whether the house has to pay. 

The Houses of Morgan, Goldman and the other Big Five are justifiably worried right now, because an “event of default” declared on European sovereign debt could jeopardize their $32 ...

The Definition of Insanity: Deregulating Over and Over and Expecting Different Results
Brian Walker
Published: Monday 20 February 2012
“Citizens for Tax Justice reports that the 280 most profitable U.S. corporations sheltered half their profits from taxes between 2008 and 2010.”

A cynic might argue that business leaders and their friends in Congress weren't expecting different results.

In either case, we've become a bipolar nation, 1% manic and 99% depressive. Our affliction is caused by a 30-year experiment in the dismal economics of delusion. Deregulation for corporations and tax cuts for the wealthy have defined conservative policy since the 1970s, when University of Chicago economist Arthur Laffer convinced Dick Cheney and other Republican officials that lowering taxes on the rich would generate more revenue.

Ronald Reagan complied in the 1980s by dramatically reducing the top marginal tax rate. And while declaring government "the problem" he eased a half-century of protective regulations on mortgage lending.

In the Clinton years, Larry Summers and Alan Greenspan and Phil Gramm and others lobbied against regulations on the derivatives that evolved into toxic assets a decade later. A lonely voice of opposition, Commodities Trading Commission head Brooksley Born, was denounced by the powerful Treasury men, who were shocked by her affront to the nation's "financial stability."

The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 removed long-held protections for commercial bank deposits, as the newly liberated financial institutions now coveted the unprecedented profits in high-risk investments. Soon after, the 2000s brought us the Bush tax cuts, which have cost the nation over two trillion dollars, and a further assault on the Securities and ...

Occupying Corporations: How to Cut Corporate Power
Anna Gilliam
Published: Thursday 9 February 2012
“In order to cut corporations down to size, the people must strip corporations of the special artificial legal protections they have created for themselves.”

 

“Corporations are people, my friend.” Mitt Romney at Iowa State Fair

 

Corporations are obviously not people.  But Romney is accurate in the sense that corporations have hijacked most of the rights of people while evading the responsibilities. An important part of the social justice agenda is democratizing corporations.  This means we must radically change the laws so people can be in charge of corporations.  We must strip them of corporate personhood and cut them down to size so democracy can work.  People are taking action so democracy can regulate the size, scope and actions of corporations.

 

One of the most basic roles of society is to protect the people from harm.  The massive size of many international corporations makes democratic control over them nearly impossible.

 

Corporate crime is widespread.  The New York Times, ProPublica and others have revealed Wall Street giants like JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs have been charged with fraud many times only to get off by paying hundreds of millions.  Professors at University of Virginia have documented hundreds of corporations which have been found guilty or pled guilty in federal courts.

 

Corporate abuse is even more widespread.  For example, Corporate Accountability International named six to its Corporate Hall of Shame, including: Koch Industries for spending over $50 million to fund climate change denial; Monsanto for mass producing cancer causing chemicals; Chevron for dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Ecuadorian Amazon; Exxon Mobil for being the worst polluter; Blackwater (now Xe) for killing unarmed Iraqi civilians and hiring paramilitaries; and Halliburton, the nation’s leading war profiteer.

 

Making corporations responsible to democracy of the people is challenging considering Wal-Mart, the ...

The Pathology of Inequality
Anna Gilliam
Published: Thursday 26 January 2012
“High-priced schemers and swindlers and scoundrels roam free on Wall Street, while the downtrodden are condemned for trying to survive.”

Inequality is a disease of society, a cancer growing out of control at one end of the body while the rest of it withers away.

It's not just about the money, although income and wealth inequality have never been worse in the United States. It's also the pathological adherence to free market principles that have not worked for most of the country. And a bizarre idolization of the 'innovators' who have rigged the financial system in their favor.

High-priced schemers and swindlers and scoundrels roam free on Wall Street, while the downtrodden are condemned for trying to survive. "If you steal $10 from a man's wallet," observed former Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel, "you're likely to get into a fight, but if you steal billions from the the commons, co-owned by him and his descendants, he may not even notice."

If you steal $10 from a man's wallet...

-- Leandro Andrade is serving a life sentence in California for stealing five videotapes from a K-Mart. He was convicted under the state's three strikes law, after convictions for petty theft, burglary, and possession of marijuana. Justice David Souter noted that Andrade "committed theft of trifling value...with no violent crimes against the person."

-- Sisters Jamie and Gladys Scott received double life sentences in 1994 for an $11 armed robbery, the first criminal offense for either of them. They spent 17 years in jail.

-- 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.

If you steal billions from the commons...

-- The savings and loan fraud cost ...

Thank You for Standing Up
Anna Gilliam
Published: Tuesday 24 January 2012
“The real debate, the debate raised by the Occupy movement about inequality, corporate malfeasance, the destruction of the ecosystem, and the security and surveillance state, is the only debate that matters.”

I spent Friday morning sitting on a wooden bench in a fourth-floor courtroom in the New York Criminal Court in Manhattan. I was waiting to be sentenced for “disturbing the peace” and “refusing to obey a lawful order” during an Occupy demonstration in front of Goldman Sachs in November.

Those sentenced before me constituted the usual fare of the court. They were poor people of color accused of mostly petty crimes—drug possession, thefts, shoplifting, trespassing because they were homeless and needed a place to sleep, inappropriate touching, grand larceny and violation of probation. They were escorted out of a backroom by a police officer, stood meekly before the judge with their hands cuffed behind them, were hastily defended by a lawyer clutching a few folders, and were sentenced. Ten days in jail. Sixty days in jail. Six months in jail. A steady stream of convictions.  My sentence, by comparison, was slight. I was given an ACD, or “adjournment in contemplation of dismissal,” which means that if I am not arrested in the next six months my case is dismissed. If I am arrested during this period of informal probation the old charge will be added to the new one before I am sentenced.

The country’s most egregious criminals, the ones who had stripped some of those being sentenced of their homes, their right to a decent education and health care, their jobs, their dignity and their hope, those wallowing in tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, those who had gamed the system to enrich themselves at our expense, were doing the dirty business of speculation in the tall office towers a few blocks away. They were making money. A few of these wealthy plutocrats were with the president, who was in New York that day to attend four fundraisers that took in an estimated $3 million. For $15,000 you could have joined Barack Obama at ...

Death, Taxes, and Alcatraz
Brian Walker
Published: Friday 20 January 2012
“Administering the death penalty is also far more expensive than imprisoning an ‘offender’ for life.”

(The following piece has been adapted from a talk given at Alcatraz in January, 2012.)

 

I find it more than a bit serendipitous that we gather here today in the immediate wake of FOX’s inauguration of Alcatraz, the TV drama. The program --whose rights are owned by Warner Brothers, a company that paid not a single cent in federal corporate income tax from 2001-2003—further mystifies an already mysterious and misunderstood place.

 

Alcatraz’s plot revolves around one detective’s incorrigible quest to find a barbarous flock of killers that were said to have escaped from the facility in the 1960’s. Amidst the pursuit of merciless serial murderers audiences also discover that the U.S. government has been surreptitiously renovating “the Rock” since its closure in 1963 with plans of revival imminent. I’m convinced that were the late German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche alive today he might wish to describe FOX’s fictionalized rendering of Alcatraz as ideological. Nietzsche once famously wrote that “ideology is the lie we call truth.”  That is, peppering a mythical TV drama with dispatches from history smudges the ink and blunts the link between fact and fiction. Tethering a counterfeit tale to an actually existing historical site renders credible a story that does little to transgress our taken-for-granted assumptions about the relationship between retribution and justice, crime and punishment, and social symptoms and diseases.

 

As curators, educators, and interpreters of the U.S. carceral system we’re obligated to challenge our most deeply held beliefs about justice and criminality by acknowledging that what we once assumed to be nothing more than a neutral form of entertainment is anything but impartial on questions of ...

Leasing Through the Back Door: The Private Financing of “Public” Prisons
Brian Walker
Published: Saturday 31 December 2011
“AB900 allows the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to authorize $7.8 billion in lease-revenue bonds to fund the addition of 53,000 new prison and jail beds while bypassing the electorate.”

Nearly 130,000 bodies are currently caged in for-profit or privately managed “correctional” facilities in the United States, a figure that accounts for 16.4% of federal and 6.8% of state populations.

Since 2000, moreover, the number of extant for-profit and privately contracted penal institutions has skyrocketed by approximately 120% during a time in which the population of “public” federal and state facilities has grown four times as slowly. And although federal and state expenditures on prisons have mushroomed by72% over the last decade and now cost taxpayers $74 billion per annum, the two largest private prison companies, Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections Corporation), have together “earned” over $2.9 billion in profits since 2000.

While in recent years much public attention has rightly been devoted to illuminating the “industrial” operations associated with the proliferation of private prison facilities—from the tumesced pocketbooks of private prison operators to the profits generated by telecommunications companies by way of no-bid phone contracts—surprisingly scant attention has been paid to the private financiers of “public” prison projects who earn a profit each time a prison is built. And unlike those who collect revenue on prison operations, firms that purchase bonds for prison construction needn’t have a personal stake in the eventual utility or solvency of any given facility. Their coffers will grow whether or not prison beds are occupied.

But a two-decade long declension in public support for prison expansion has thwarted traditional options for financing new prison construction and has resulted (as it usually does) in new opportunities for cadres of ...

Wall Street’s Bad Romance With Romney
Brian Walker
Published: Friday 30 December 2011
“Romney’s long history of acrobatic flip-flopping and the palpable dishonesty of his pandering to the Tea Party actually help him in this context, because his wealthy supporters don’t think he actually means the nonsense he spouts.”

Throughout the 2012 election cycle Republican candidate Mitt Romney has made ham-handed efforts at playing a populist. His standard applause line on the stump is an appeal to nationalism, that he will “never apologize for America.” He criticizes President Obama for “taking advice from the Harvard faculty lounge,” even though Romney himself holds law and business degrees from Harvard and counts Harvard professors among his economic and foreign policy advisers.

But from a funding standpoint, Romney’s campaign looks more like a third world oligarchy than a populist insurgency. Jetting to fundraisers in Manhattan and London, Romney has raked in donation from the most elite of financial institutions. His support from Wall Street has allowed him to build a sizable cash advantage, which pays for the expansive field organizing and advertising that should enable him to outgun his opponents through the primaries.

With the exception of Texas Governor Rick Perry, no other candidate has comparable corporate support. Through the second quarter of 2011, before Perry entered the race, Romney raised $17.6 million, more than all his GOP opponents combined. In the third quarter, ending on September 30, Romney piled on an additional $13.9 million. In December he  READ FULL POST 2 COMMENTS

Occupy Christmas
Brian Walker
Published: Saturday 24 December 2011
“The Jesus who turned water into wine was undercutting the official clergy, telling his followers that every individual could have a personal experience with the transcendent.”

It doesn't matter whether or not you believe in God or which faith you follow if you do. Here's a question worth asking this holiday season: Would Jesus be an Occupy demonstrator?

The Bible suggests that He would.

Radio Free Heaven

A few years ago I was driving through the back roads of Alabama listening to Christian radio and I heard a preacher say that "Satan's name in the world today is 'God As I Understand Him.'

" Oh, yes, people," the preacher said, "You hear his name on a lot of people's lips: 'God As I Understand Him' loves everybody. 'God As I Understand Him' hates prejudice. 'God As I Understand Him' will ...

Loom of the Jackboot: Obama Gives Military Extreme Powers
Brian Walker
Published: Friday 23 December 2011
“A company owned by, say Goldman Sachs, could enjoy delegated powers to arrest any U.S. citizen here within the borders of the USA”

Too bad Kim Jong-il kicked the bucket last weekend. If the divine hand that laid low the North Korean leader had held off for a week or so, Kim would have been sustained by the news that President Obama had signed into law a bill that puts the United States not immeasurably far from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in contempt of constitutional protections for its citizens or constitutional restraints upon criminal behavior sanctioned by the state.

At least the DPRK doesn't trumpet its status as the least-best sanctuary of liberty. American politicians, starting with the president, do little else.

A couple of months ago, came a mile-marker in America's steady slide downhill towards the status of a Banana Republic with Obama's assertion that he has the right as president to secretly order the assassination, without trial, of a U.S. citizen he deems to be working with terrorists. This followed his 2009 betrayal of his pledge to end the indefinite imprisonment without charges or trial of prisoners in Guantanamo.

After months of declaring that he would veto such legislation, Obama has now crumbled and will soon sign a monstrosity called the Levin/McCain detention bill, named for its two senatorial sponsors, Carl Levin and John McCain. It's snuggled into the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.

Economic Conflicts with China and Class War in the United States
Anna Gilliam
Published: Tuesday 13 December 2011
The way in which China keeps its currency down against the dollar (or keeps the dollar up against its currency) is by buying huge amounts of U.S. government bonds.

The Commerce Department’s release of trade figures last week showed another large deficit with China for October, albeit slightly lower than the record hit the previous month. This figure will renew the calls for stronger action against China.

Unfortunately the debate over China is often buried in confusion, leading to a situation that is not conducive to effective action. A major reason for this confusion is that there is not a common U.S. interest against China. The interests of the 99 percent differ greatly from the interests of the 1 percent. Until this fact is recognized more generally, there is no possibility that our economic relations with China will change in a way that benefits the vast majority of working people in the United States.

The central issue with China is the fact that the dollar is over-valued against the Chinese currency. This over-valuation is the result of the explicit Chinese policy of pegging its currency against the dollar.

The peg is often referred to as “manipulation,” but it doesn’t really fit the bill for two reasons. First, it is an official policy. China targets the value of its currency quite openly; it is not doing it in the middle of the night when no one is looking.

The second reason is that China’s mechanism for targeting the value of its currency is something that on alternate days our Treasury actually requests. They buy up U.S. government debt.

If this seems absurd, it should because it is. The way in which China keeps its currency down against the dollar (or keeps the dollar up against its currency) is by buying huge amounts of U.S. government bonds.

The media often tells us that we need China to buy our debt. This is not true. There are plenty of other potential investors, including the Federal Reserve Board. However we cannot both want China to buy U.S. government debt and then complain about China’s currency manipulation. This is how they ...

The People vs. ‘Europe’
Moderator
Published: Saturday 3 December 2011
“Crisis is often invoked as the midwife of revolutionary change, and here are Greece, Italy, Spain and even France at various levels of crisis, with political orthodoxy and the normal order of things increasingly discredited.”

It looks as though the eurozone may be in a decisive meltdown, which is just fine in my book. The sooner we get back to francs, lire, punts, drachmas and the rest of the old sovereign currencies, the better.

It used to be as much a part of going to France to change money and be handed a bundle of notes featuring the devious Cardinal Richelieu as choking on Gauloise smoke. Instead, those francs are now replaced by the characterless but somehow always expensive euros.

The argument against the eurozone is that hard-faced Euro-bankers — their killer instincts honed at Goldman Sachs, Wall Street's School of the Americas — have the power to act as the bully-boys of international capital and impose austerity regimes from Dublin to Athens, scalping the poor to bail out the rich.

Now the end of the eurozone does not mean the end of the European Union. They're different. There are 17 nations in the former, 27 in the latter. Britain, for example, has never been in the eurozone, which is why the currency exchange in London will, in return for your worthless dollars, hand you bank notes with the Queen's portrait on them.

At the moment, the European Union has virtually no tax collecting powers. Its annual haul is about 1 percent of the EUs gross domestic product. By comparison, the U.S. government collects about 20 to 24 percent of GDP.

Throughout the entire Eurocrisis, there has been a basso profundo chorus from the Eurocrats that what's needed is a lot more centralizing. In the words of Wolfgang Munchau at the Financial Times on Nov. 28, the EU needs "a fiscal union": "This would involve a partial loss of national sovereignty, and the creation of a credible institutional framework to deal with fiscal policy, and hopefully wider economic policy issues as well."

I've read many editorial paragraphs with this same bullying timbre — that what the whole European enterprise needs is an ...

The Greatest Hoax in the History of Money: The Fed, the Banks, the Lies
Moderator
Published: Friday 2 December 2011
We now know that the Fed’s secret $7.7 trillion lending program wasn’t just the most massive bank bailout ever seen, and it wasn’t just free money for mega-bankers - though it was certainly both of those things.

It took the journalists at Bloomberg News two years - and presumably lots of legal fees - to pry information out of the Federal Reserve that should have been made public long ago. We now know that the Fed's secret $7.7 trillion lending program wasn't just the most massive bank bailout ever seen, and it wasn't just free money for mega-bankers - though it was certainly both of those things. It was also the greatest hoax in stock market history.

No, scratch that. It was the greatest hoax in the history of money. And it was built on lies. How many? Let us count the ways.

Here's the first one: The banks paid back all the money back that they were given. No, they didn't. They paid back the principal on these loans. But by obtaining loans at rates far below market value, we now know they received the equivalent of $13 billion in cash giveaways.

Here's another lie: Fed economists support a free-market economy.

Ben Bernanke is a conservative economist who claims to support a free-market system. But we now know that the Federal Reserve lent astonishing sums to US banks in secret, and Bernanke fought with all the resources at his disposal to ensure that this information didn't become public. He didn't just want it to be held back to avoid a panic during the crisis. He wanted it kept secret forever.

I don't know what you call somebody like that, but I know what you don't call him: A capitalist. Free markets need transparency, so that investors and customers can make informed decisions and 'the wisdom of the market' can prevail. Nobody wanted the market to do its job. When it came to banks, they wanted it to be blind, deaf, and dumb, unable to make sound judgments about their financial ...

As the World Crumbles: the ECB Spins, FED Smirks, and US Banks Pillage
Moderator
Published: Wednesday 23 November 2011
“Now we’re just barely in the second quarter of the game of thrones, where the big banks are the kings, the ECB, IMF and the Fed are the money supply, and the populations are the powerless serfs.”

Often, when I troll around websites of entities like the ECB and IMF, I uncover little of startling note. They design it that way. Plus, the pace at which the global financial system can leverage bets, eviscerate capital, and cry for bank bailouts financed through austerity measures far exceeds the reporting timeliness of these bodies.

That’s why, on the center of the ECB’s homepage, there’s a series of last week’s rates – and this relic - an interactive Inflation Game (I kid you not)  where in 22 different languages you can play the game of what happens when inflation goes up and down. If you’re feeling more adventurous, there’s also a game called Economia, where you can make up unemployment rates, growth rates and interest rates and see what happens.

What you can’t do is see what happens if you bet trillions of dollars against various countries to see how much you can break them, before the ECB, IMF, or Fed (yes, it'll happen) swoops in to provide “emergency” loans in return for cuts to pension funds, social programs, and national ownership of public assets. You also can’t input real world scenarios, where monetary policy doesn’t mean a thing in the face of tidal waves of derivatives’ flow. You can’t gauge say, what happens if Goldman Sachs bets $20 billion in leveraged credit default swaps against Greece, and offsets them (partially) with JPM Chase which bets $20 billion, and offsets that with Bank of America, and then MF Global (oops) and then…..you see where I’m going with this.

We're doomed if even their board games don’t come close to mimicking the real situation in Europe, or in the US, yet they supply funds to banks torpedoing local populations with impunity. These central entities also don’t bother ...

Another MF Global / Goldman Puzzle Piece: Rule 606: Order Flow
Moderator
Published: Saturday 19 November 2011
“So, according to MFG’s third quarter non-directed routing report, guess what vendor showed up prominently? Yep - Goldman Sachs Execution and Clearing LP.”

As we await the results of a probe into MF Global and its missing clients’ funds that will no doubt be conducted with the same tactical zeal with which authorities across the country arrested over 4000 Occupy Wall Street protestors it’s interesting to note another component of the MF Global - Goldman Relationship. Beyond the past-leadership of Goldman Sachs by former MF Global head, Jon Corzine, and fact he was brought to the helm by former Goldman buddy, Christopher Flowers, there was also a nice little execution business-sharing going on between the firms. An examination of those transactions, each less than $200,000 , could be illuminating.

Under Rule 606 (formerly SEC Rule 11Ac1-6), as part of its strategy to rely on the companies it is supposed to be regulating to reveal whatever part of their hand they want to, the SEC requires a quarterly report  from brokerage firms on  their order-routing services. Specifically, the report covers ‘non-directed’ orders, or ones that customers haven’t specifically requested go through a particular vendor for execution.  The report has four sections: one each for securities listed on the New York Stock Exchange, The Nasdaq Stock Market, the American Stock Exchange and 'Other' exchange-listed options, and indicates the venues most often selected.

So, according to MFG's third quarter non-directed routing report, guess what vendor showed up prominently? Yep - Goldman Sachs ...

California Refuses to Accept Obama’s Banking Sellout
Moderator
Published: Friday 11 November 2011
“The deal has been stalled by the refusal of California Attorney General Kamala Harris to accept this sellout.”

There is no three-strikes law for crooked bankers, not even a law for a fifth strike, as The New York Times reported in the case of Citigroup, cited last month in a $1 billion fraud case. Unlike the California third-striker I once wrote about whom a district attorney wanted banished forever to state prison for stealing a piece of pizza from the plate of a person dining outdoors, Citigroup executives get off with a fine and by offering a promise not to do it again, and again and again.

As the Times reported when Citigroup agreed to settle SEC charges last month: “Citigroup’s main brokerage subsidiary, its predecessors or its parent company agreed to not violate the very same antifraud statue in July 2010. And in May 2006. Also as far back as March 2005 and April 2000.”

Not that the bankers face prison time, since the Justice Department has refused to act in these cases, and the Securities and Exchange Commission is bringing only civil charges, which the banks find quite tolerable. This time, the fine against Citigroup was $285 million, which may sound like a lot except that the bank raked off as much as $700 million on this particular toxic securities deal. As the Bloomberg news service editorialized, “... there should be only one answer from Jed S. Rakoff, the federal judge in New York assigned to weigh the merits of the agreement: You’ve got to be kidding.”

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Finding Freedom in Handcuffs
Moderator
Published: Tuesday 8 November 2011
“I placed myself at the feet of these commodity traders to call for justice because the dead, and those who are dying in slums and refugee camps across the planet, could not make this journey.”

Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges, an activist, an author and a member of a reporting team that won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize, wrote this article after he was released from custody following his arrest last Thursday. He and about 15 other participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement were detained as they protested outside the global headquarters of Goldman Sachs in lower Manhattan.

Faces appeared to me moments before the New York City police arrested us Thursday in front of Goldman Sachs. They were not the faces of the smug Goldman Sachs employees, who peered at us through the revolving glass doors and lobby windows, a pathetic collection of middle-aged fraternity and sorority members. They were not the faces of the blue-uniformed police with their dangling cords of white and black plastic handcuffs, or the thuggish Goldman Sachs security personnel, whose buzz cuts and dead eyes reminded me of the East German secret police, the Stasi. They were not the faces of the demonstrators around me, the ones with massive student debts and no jobs, the ones whose broken dreams weigh them down like a cross, the ones whose anger and betrayal triggered the street demonstrations and occupations for justice. They were not the faces of the onlookers—the construction workers, who seemed cheered by the march on Goldman Sachs, or the suited businessmen who did not. They were faraway faces. They were the faces of children dying. They were tiny, confused, bewildered faces I had seen in the southern Sudan, Gaza and the slums of Brazzaville, Nairobi, Cairo and Delhi and the wars I covered. They were faces with large, glassy eyes, above bloated bellies. They were the small faces of children convulsed by the ravages of starvation and disease.

I carry these faces. They do not leave me. I look at my own children and cannot forget them, these other children who never had a chance. War ...

Cornel West and Chris Hedges at Goldman Sachs Mock Trial
Moderator
Published: Tuesday 8 November 2011
The People vs. Goldman Sachs mock trial people’s hearing held at Zuccotti Park.

The People vs. Goldman Sachs mock trial people’s hearing held at Liberty aka Zuccotti Park with fiery commentary by Dr. Cornel West, eloquence by Chris Hedges, and testimonies from people directly affected by Goldman Sach policies. Chris Headges states: “Goldman Sachs, which received more subsidies and bailout related funds than any other investment bank because the Federal Reserve permitted it to become a bank hodling company under it’s emergency situation has used billions in tax payer money to enrich itself and reward its top executives. ”

Chris Hedges’ Speech in Front of Goldman Sachs Leads to Arrest
Moderator
Published: Friday 4 November 2011
“Since the formal mechanisms of power refuse to restore the rule of law, then we, the 99 percent, will have to see that justice is done.”

Chris Hedges made this statement in New York City’s Zuccotti Park on Thursday morning during the People’s Hearing on Goldman Sachs, which he chaired with Dr. Cornel West. The activist and Truthdig columnist then joined a march of several hundred protesters to the nearby corporate headquarters of Goldman Sachs, where he was arrested with 16 others.

Goldman Sachs, which received more subsidies and bailout-related funds than any other investment bank because the Federal Reserve permitted it to become a bank holding company under its “emergency situation,” has used billions in taxpayer money to enrich itself and reward its top executives. It handed its senior employees a staggering $18 billion in 2009, $16 billion in 2010 and $10 billion in 2011 in mega-bonuses. This massive transfer of wealth upwards by the Bush and Obama administrations, now estimated at $13 trillion to $14 trillion, went into the pockets of those who carried out fraud and criminal activity rather than the victims who lost their jobs, their savings and often their homes.

Goldman Sachs’ commodities index is the most heavily traded in the world. Goldman Sachs hoards rice, wheat, corn, sugar and livestock and jacks up commodity prices around the globe so that poor families can no longer afford basic staples and literally starve. Goldman Sachs is able to carry out its malfeasance at home and in global markets because it has former officials filtered throughout the government and lavishly funds compliant politicians—including Barack Obama, who received $1 million from employees at Goldman Sachs in 2008 when he ran for president. These politicians, in return, permit Goldman Sachs to ignore security laws that under a functioning judiciary system would see the firm indicted for felony fraud. Or, as in the case of Bill Clinton, these politicians pass laws such as the 2000 ...

Wall Street is Still Playing Us for Suckers
Moderator
Published: Wednesday 2 November 2011
“Why not a single major banker has been cuffed and frog-marched to some Financial District Guantanamo is unclear.”

As a mere youth, I bought a used car in New York to drive to California to be with the woman of my dreams. Inexplicably, she decided to rush back to New York, so I promptly took the car back to the dealer. He made a shockingly low offer. The car had been in an accident, he explained. The chassis was bent. I was flabbergasted. I had just bought the car from him. If the chassis was bent, it was bent when I bought it. The salesman offered me a take-it-or-leave-it shrug. He probably now works on Wall Street.

That the morality of the used car lot has been adopted by Wall Street is now abundantly clear. Citigroup recently settled a civil complaint in which it was accused of selling mortgage-related investments that it knew were dogs. It was so certain that the investments were the financial equivalent of my used car that it bet against them — heads I win, tails you lose — and even selected the investments themselves, choosing from a cupboard of depleted and exhausted financial instruments. An investment in the Brooklyn Bridge would have been safer.

These investments are known as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and they consisted of the sort of mortgage securities that nearly sunk the U.S. financial system. According to federal regulators, they were sold with the full knowledge that they were careening toward worthlessness and that, by deduction, their buyers were patsies. The bank made substantial profits on them. But when the Securities and Exchange Commission decided to act, it got Citigroup to pony up a mere $285 million fine that, to presumed chuckles, will doubtlessly be taken out of petty cash. The bank last quarter reported a profit of $3.8 billion.

Mirth must have turned to guffaws when Citigroup read on. It did not even have to admit guilt — “without admitting or denying” is the language the SEC ...

Goldman Sachs and Occupy Wall Street’s Bank: The Real Story
Moderator
Published: Friday 28 October 2011
“When Goldman got huffy at a credit union honoring OWS and pulled its anniversary dinner funding, much more was at stake.”

Mega-bank Goldman Sachs (assets $933bn), has declared war on one of the smallest banks in New York (assets $30m), the customer-owned community bank that happens to also be the banker for Friends of Liberty Plaza, Inc, also known as Occupy Wall Street. And you thought Goldman didn't care.

The trouble began three weeks ago when the occupiers suddenly found their donation buckets filling with thousands of dollars, way more than needed for their pizza dinners. Suddenly, the anti-bank protesters needed a bank. Citibank and Chase certainly wouldn't fit. So OWS opened an account at the not-for-profit Lower East Side Peoples Federal Credit Union. Peoples has a unique federal charter – designated to open accounts for low-income folk from all over NewYork, available to those families earning less than $38,000 per year. (Disclosure: the CEO of the Peoples bank is my dearly beloved ex. But that's another story.)

Goldman Sachs had also joined up with the Peoples bank. Goldman partners reportedly earn a bit more than $38k per annum, yet Goldman's association so far was limited to giving the credit union $5,000 toward the little bank's 25th anniversary celebration dinner. Goldman's largesse was acknowledged on the dinner invites – along with the night's honoree: Occupy Wall Street.

When a Goldman exec saw its gilded name next to Occupy Wall Street, the financial giant expressed much displeasure. In fact, my sources say, Goldman threatened legal action unless the credit union gave up the $5,000 and reprinted the invite sans the Sachs moniker. Goldman ...

What’s Happened to the Big Players in the Financial Crisis
Taylor
Published: Thursday 27 October 2011
“With the financial crisis back in the nation‘s spotlight, take a look at where the people who got us here are.”

 

Widespread demonstrations in support of Occupy Wall Street have put the financial crisis back into the national spotlight lately.

So here’s a quick refresher on what’s happened to some of the main players, whose behavior, whether merely reckless or downright deliberate, helped cause or worsen the meltdown. This list isn’t exhaustive -- feel welcome to add to it.

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Goldman Sachs v. Occupy Wall Street
Moderator
Published: Thursday 27 October 2011
“Greg Palast investigates the story behind Goldman Sachs’ recent decision to pull out of a fundraiser for the Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union in New York City after it learned the event was honoring the protesters at Occupy Wall Street.”

A controversy in the banking community has arisen around the Occupy Wall Street movement. Greg Palast investigates the story behind Goldman Sachs’ recent decision to pull out of a fundraiser for the Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union in New York City after it learned the event was honoring the protesters at Occupy Wall Street. The investment bank withdrew its name from the fundraiser and also canceled a $5,000 pledge. Was the $5,000 a Goldman Sachs donation or actually American taxpayer bailout money Goldman set aside for community banks?

Transcript: 

MY GOODMAN: We turn now to a controversy in the banking community around the Occupy Wall Street movement. Recently, the financial giant Goldman Sachs pulled out of a fundraiser for a small Lower East Side bank that caters to poor people after it learned the event was honoring the protesters at Occupy Wall Street. The investment bank withdrew its name from the fundraiser and also canceled a $5,000 pledge.

But did Goldman Sachs actually use U.S. taxpayer bailout money to attack Occupy Wall Street’s not-for-profit community bank? Investigative reporter Greg Palast filed this report from Wall Street.

GREG PALAST: Downtown New York, near Wall Street, these are the towers of Goldman Sachs, the mega-bank. With over $933 billion in assets, nearly a trillion dollars, Goldman has ...

Revealed: Former Goldman Sachs VP Turned Issa Staffer Supervised Scheduling Of Elizabeth Warren Incident
Moderator
Published: Wednesday 24 August 2011
“Evidence that suggests that Haller’s employment under Issa is more akin to a bank lobbyist than a public servant entrusted with protecting the public interest.”

Last week, ThinkProgress revealed that Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) hired Peter Haller, a former Goldman Sachs vice president, as one of his top aides. Haller, who adopted his mother’s maiden name in 2008 and had escaped public scrutiny until now, coordinated an Oversight Committee letter to regulators demanding that they justify new Dodd-Frank rules impacting investment banks like his old employer, Goldman Sachs. After publication of our story, the Project on Government Oversightdiscovered more of Haller’s Oversight Committee letters, again on issues directly related to Goldman Sachs.

ThinkProgress has now obtained ...

Goldman Sachs VP Changed His Name, Now Advances Goldman Lobbying Interests
Moderator
Published: Friday 19 August 2011
“Issa’s demand to regulators is exactly what banks have been wishing for.”

Has Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) turned the House Oversight Committee into a bank lobbying firm with the power to subpoena and pressure government regulators? ThinkProgress has found that a Goldman Sachs vice president changed his name, then later went to work for Issa to coordinate his effort to thwart regulations that affect Goldman Sachs’ bottom line.

In July, Issa sent a letter to top government regulators demanding that they back off and provide more justification for new margin requirements for financial firms dealing in derivatives. A standard practice on Capitol Hill is to end a letter to a government agency with contact information for the congressional staffer responsible for working on the issue for the committee. In most cases, the contact staffer is the one who actually writes such letters. With this in mind, it is important to note that the Issa letter ended with contact information for Peter Haller, a staffer hired this year to work for Issa on the Oversight Committee.

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