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 ...

Robin Hood would not be happy if he happened upon our incredibly top-heavy modern world. But the new campaign to levy a tax on speculative trading would most certainly have him smiling.

The most lavishly paid bank CEO in America, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, sashayed back to Capitol Hill last Tuesday for still another congressional hearing on JPMorgan’s billions in speculative trading losses this past spring.

Dimon didn’t have much trouble fending off the few tough questions that came his way from lawmakers on the House Financial Services Committee. But Dimon and his fellow Wall Streeters may have much more trouble handling a new campaign — for taxing financial speculation — that launched the same day Dimon testified.

The goal of this new “Robin Hood” campaign: a tiny tax on the ever-churning financial transactions that have made the Jamie Dimons of our time fabulously wealthy.

This Robin Hood campaign for a financial transaction tax actually began two years ago in the UK and quickly spread to over a dozen other nations. The U.S. branch of the campaign launched last week comes with some high-profile champions.

Actor Mark Ruffalo — a star in the hit film The Avengers — introduced the campaign on Tuesday with a video now bouncing all around the online world.

A follow-up came Thursday, when over 50 top financial industry professionals from around the world endorsed the financial transaction tax notion in a letter to the leaders of the world’s 20 top nations economically.

The volume of global speculative trading, these financial industry experts pointed out, now exceeds — by 70 times — the size of the entire real global economy, the actual goods and services that people use everyday.

This massive speculation endangers the entire world. ...

Eric Schneiderman was right.

New York State's Attorney General told an audience at the Take Back the American Dream Conference that we need a "transformational politics" that will change the way we look at ourselves, our society, and our economy.

The wealthy have amassed an ever-greater share of our national income through conscious policy choices, said Schneiderman, not through an act of God. They’ve been able to divert our nation from a production economy to a financial-speculation economy the same way.

Schneiderman was suggesting that political action should help us change the way we view our economic world.

Free Your Mind, Arrests Will Follow

I couldn't agree more. Thanks to an expensive and intensive decades-long campaign of propaganda and political influence-peddling, many Americans re-adopted a mythology about wealth that had been discredited and abandoned by most of the world (including the United States) in the 20th Century. We need to transform ourselves, remove the blinders, and see things as they really are.

Schneiderman's distinction between "transformational" and "transactional" politics was also valid: Voters don't just want to see a legislative accomplishment - any accomplishment - regardless of its impact. They want to see accomplishments that reflect who we are as a people, and which advance us as a society.

But transformation will need some involvement from the world of "transactional" activity, too. As I told the group, I can't think of any single act that would be more "transformative" that the arrest of a senior Wall Street executive.

Wall Street: CSI

The occasion was a panel discussion on "Taking On Wall Street" moderated by MSNBC's Alex ...

There's a march and demonstration taking place tomorrow (Wednesday, June 20) to protest money's corrupting influence in our political process. We'll be marching on the headquarters of Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS organization in Washington DC to protest the corrupting, debasing, and anti-democratic influence of money in politics.

I'll be there, and you should be too. Why?

I'm glad you asked.

Hey, I marched when I was in junior high school. Like many other people, I thought those days were over. Maybe you did did too. News flash: They're not. Maybe you're like me and rediscovered the power of protest by joining the Occupy movement. Or maybe you're still sitting on the fence.

If you've got doubts about whether or not to join us, here are twenty questions (and answers) that should help you make up your mind.

1. March? Really? On foot? That's so retro, so sixties! Weren't demonstrations just something that was fashionable when guys wore Nehru jackets and women wore granny skirts?

Actually, no. Public demonstrations for "redress of grievances" are as old as the Republic itself - older, in fact. Nonviolent demonstrations defeated the British Empire in India. They triggered the American Revolution. They gave working people their rights, created the middle class, and led to the greatest prosperity in our history during the 20th Century.

More recently, public demonstrations helped bring down the Iron Curtain and sparked the Arab Spring, a fight that's still underway but which has already changed the political landscape of the Middle East.

Protest marches are a pure form of democracy in action. That's something that never goes out of fashion.

2. But don't we do all ...

It had to happen sooner or later: Jamie Dimon, the bank CEO who's become the public face for our greedy and corrupt banking system, is openly backing the austerity plan pushed by former Senator Alan Simpson, the arrogant and abusive voice of our country's bought-and-sold elite "bipartisan" consensus. Will the Democratic Party led by Barack Obama stand up to that corporate consensus, or submit to it?

The "Simpson Bowles" plan is designed to force the American people to pay for the wealth, greed, and criminality of the banking class that Jamie Dimon has chosen to represent. The day after Dimon's testimony another institution announced that it was planning to impose the Simpson Bowles austerity plan on us: the Presidential Administration of Barack Obama, as represented by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

What did Jamie know?

The Senators dutifully made a show of their concern about JPMorgan Chase's multibillion dollar losses. They were shocked - shocked! - that gambling was gong on in his establishment.

That hearing should have focused on the need for tougher bank regulations, which Dimon has been vigorously fighting, and on the epidemic of criminal behavior and mismanagement within his own bank. The Senators should have grilled Dimon on the disparity between his public statements about his bank's financial conditions and risk controls and what we now know was really going on behind the scenes.

It's not only wrong to intentionally make misleading statements of that kind - it's also a crime. Yet the Senators never raised the question that should have been at the core of their hearing:

What did Jamie know and when did he know it?

The Committee never asked Dimon about his statement that the unit behind these trades, the "CIO," had been using a "new risk management model" that reduced its daily risk of potential losses by ...

On a recent Meet the Press face-off between Democrats and Republicans, a politician claimed we urgently need to cut government spending. He embraced a plan to slash vital government programs and gut retirement security, while actuallycutting taxes for the rich. The only tax hikes in his plan were targeted toward the already-devastated middle class.

Then it was time for the Republican to speak.

Who'd have thought it? Progressive stalwarts like Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Dick Durbin are pushing the same radical austerity plan as Jamie Dimon, CEO of troubled megabank JPMorgan Chase, and Robert Rubin, the Clinton ...

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, ...

There’s a lot we have yet to learn about the story of Sen. Mike Lee, Tea Party Republican of Utah, and America's largest bank. But we already know something’s very, very wrong:

Why is it that most Americans can’t get a principal reduction from Chase or any other bank, but JPMorgan Chase was so very flexible with a sitting member of the United States Senate?

The hypocrisy from Sen. Lee and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon overfloweth. But does the Case of the Senator’s Short Sale rise to the level of full-blown corruption? We won’t know until we get some answers.

People should be demanding those answers now.

When Jamie Met Mike

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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 ...

More and more people are calling for Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, to resign from the Board of the New York Federal Reserve.

His latest scandal, combined with Dimon's hypocrisy and relentless self-promotion, make him an obvious target. But Dimon isn't alone. Bankers dominate the Fed at the regional and national levels, and most of the other outside seats are held by executives from large corporations. (Remember Herman Cain?)

Should Dimon resign? They all should.

The Board Member With No Name

The scary thing is that Dimon may not be the Fed's most inappropriate board member. That honor may belong to the individual I call the Board Member With No Name. (I don't to want inflame the situation by identifying her, and what she represents is more important than who she is.)

Shouldn't a résumé that includes being the top bank lobbyist and working for the firm that laundered a third of a billion dollars for Mexican drug cartels disqualify someone from serving at the Fed?

Before she became the banking industry's chief lobbyist, the Board Member With No Name was an executive at scandal-plagued Wachovia Bank, an institution whose egregious mismanagement led to its collapse and a government rescue. Wachovia's many scandals and crimes included: deceptively packaging its toxic subprime mortgage backed securities; rigging municipal bond bids, which led to a$148 million fine; and, worst of all, laundering $378 billion in drug money for the Mexican cartels that have murdered at least 60,000 people.

The legislators who passed the Federal Reserve Act of ...

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 ...

Most observers are missing the point. When CEO Jamie Dimon announced that JPMorgan Chase had incurred at least $2 billion in losses from risky, unsecured, derivatives-types trading, it uncovered the scandal of our time once and for all.

The Chase disaster gives us a much-needed a glimpse into our corrupt political system, its Wall Street paymasters, and the media voices that allow people like Dimon to escape scrutiny.

The JPMorgan Chase story is the story behind the financial crisis that has thrown millions of people out of work. It's the story behind our ever-growing wealth inequity. It's the story behind Washington's inability to prosecute criminal bankers, regulate reckless ones, and propose the economic solutions the rest of us urgently need.

Predictably, the pundits who aid and abet people like Jamie Dimon are dismissing this story's importance, pointing out that $2 billion (it could become much more) pales against the $19 billion in profit Chase reported last year.

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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 ...

Another way that the rich are different from you and me is that their bankers serve them freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies.

The über-rich, of course, are used to such coddling, but now a class of customers that bankers have dubbed the "mass affluent" get cookies, too. Think you might qualify? You do... if you have a minimum of $500,000 to open one of these mass-affluent accounts. Otherwise, you fall into a category called "lower-margin" customers — so go get in the ATM line, Bucko.

This half-million-dollar-and-up bunch are not the 1-percenters. Instead they are the 10-percenters, and they've suddenly become hotly coveted by JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and other big chain banks. To reel in these mid-level richies, bankers are offering to pamper them lavishly.

For example, rather than having to breathe the same air as the riff-raff, they get to bank in cushy, private lounges. The carpets are plush, the cookies fresh, and a nice touch of wine and cheese might be available. There are no lines and no tellers to deal with – instead, these affluent swells get "relationship managers" who cater to their banking needs, including being available after hours. And here's something completely astonishing: one bank president says of her advantaged clients, "We'll come to you. If you want us to meet you in your home on a Sunday, we'll do that."

The chain bankers are opening hundreds of these posh, new banking nests for the affluent in upscale neighborhoods across the country, even as they are feverishly inventing new fees and coldly shrinking services for you and me. It's another move by the Powers That Be to wall off the good fortunes of the privileged few from even having to be in the same room as America's non-affluent majority. Indeed, they're creating their own exclusive America.

Forgery. Perjury. Investor fraud. Bribery. Money laundering. The body of evidence against individuals at the nation’s biggest banks is overwhelming. Nothing speaks louder about the banks’ guilt than this evidence - nothing, that is, except the billions they’ve paid to settle the charges.

The Administration reacted indignantly this week to suggestions it’s still slow-walking its investigation. And then, despite all this evidence, the Treasury Secretary of the United States proclaimed that no laws had been broken. And the White House wonders why its word is no longer enough?

A source in the office of a key figure in the investigation has denied a new story that they’re ruled out criminal prosecutions. But the burden of proof has shifted. Nothing will convince the public now except action.

Straw Men

Whether it’s JPMorgan Chase settling bribery charges in Alabama, Wells Fargo settling charges of laundering drug-cartel money in Mexico, or the nation’s five largest banks buying their way out of widespread foreclosure fraud and tax evasion, never in history has so much evidence led to so little action. Investigators pinpointed the fraudulent activity of individual accountants in GE Capital’s settlement with the SEC, only to be dumbfounded to discover that no criminal indictments were handed down.

So it was nothing short of astonishing to hear the Secretary of the Treasury assert yesterday that no crimes were committed by America’s banks, saying that “most financial crises are caused by a mix of stupidity and greed and recklessness and risk-taking and hope” and adding “you can't legislate away stupidity and risk-taking and greed and recklessness.”

That’s a ...

Buried in the sweeping mortgage settlement with banks, for which final documents were filed this week, are five whistleblower cases that shed light on the litany of foreclosure abuses by the banks.

According to one suit, Bank of America allegedly passed bad loans on to the Federal Housing Administration. According to another, the bank allegedly denied qualified homeowners access to HAMP, the government's loan modification program.

The suits were all settled as part of the overall $25 billion mortgage deal. They were filed under the False Claims Act, which provides incentives for whistleblowers to come forward in cases in which someone has defrauded the government. Whistleblowers can net up to 25 percent of the total settlement from False Claims suits, and in some of these cases, the reward is in the millions.

Details are available for four of the cases; documents in a fifth, against JPMorgan Chase, have not yet been filed in Massachusetts. While the cases were settled as part of the overarching agreement, they still have to be accepted by the courts in which they were originally filed. In reaching the settlements, none of the banks admits or denies the lawsuits' allegations.

We've laid out the details of each case.

Countrywide Defrauded the FHA

Kyle Lagow worked at LandSafe, a contractor of Countrywide, which Bank of America bought in 2008. He brought a suit in 2009 alleging that the company systematically undermined the appraisal process for home loans in order to approve as many as possible: