tagged w/ Banking
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Until they are held accountable, we cannot rest...
The President says he understands the frustration behind the Occupy Wall Street movement. That's nice. But the anger will keep growing as long as the government keeps handing out free passes instead of perp walks to bankers at serial corporate criminals like Citigroup.
The Administration is finally talking the talk, but without criminal investigations it's not walking the walk. Iit's still not too late. While the SEC's latest deal should outrage you, the Administration can makes things right with two decisive actions.
Get-Out-of-Jail Free Card
The SEC announced yesterday that Citigroup agreed to pay $285 million to settle charges that it misled (synonyms for that word include deceived; lied to; tricked and defrauded) investors in a mortgage securities deal, telling them it was a good investment when it knew otherwise and was secretly betting it would fail.
That's not just slimy. As the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission found in other instances, that kind of behavior is also illegal.
Here are five reasons you should be outraged. Warning: If you have high blood pressure, you should probably stop reading:
1. Once again, nobody had to confess.
2. Once again the criminals won't pay for their crimes - you will.
3. Criminals who aren't punished commit more crimes.
4. Bank CEOs keep getting rich while misdeeds happen on their watch - and are still treated like respectable people.
5. Citigroup was "conceived in sin" by government officials - some of whom got very rich there afterwards.
Read the whole article here...
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2011104220/another-seccitigroup-sweetheart-deal-5-reasons-be-outragedUntil they are held accountable, we cannot rest...
The President says he... more
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We have received a privacy claim by agents of the FED. They are threatening to remove the video and take down the channel within 36 hours if we don't bow down to their demands. Alex is preparing a video response later and will talk about this more on the (Monday Edition) of the Alex Jones Show. Alex is also looking at taking legal action against the Privately owned Federal Reserve for violating his crews first amendment rights when they were shooting film at a world war one memorial back in April 2009.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UqcY8lGUUE&feature=player_embeddedWe have received a privacy claim by agents of the FED. They are threatening to remove... more
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There is something else that goes unrecognized. Few Americans are willing to acknowledge that Occupy Wall Street and the tea party movement are two manifestations of the same explosive American anger at the American government and the modern corporate system.
Both movements blame “the bankers” for what has happened. Both also blame “the politicians in Washington.” They just blame different politicians. The tea party people identify the enemy as liberals, Democrats, mainstream journalists, people who live in Washington, New York and Los Angeles, and are in one way or another in league with banking, international finance and cosmopolitan society.
The OWS people hate “the bankers” whom they identify with greed, financial manipulation (often crooked) and the oppression of the rest of their countrymen. They see their enemies as rightists: the tea party, fundamentalist Protestants, cultural conservatives, Republicans, warmongers, and self-righteous and xenophobic patriots. These days, a lot of them have saved some hate, or grief, for Barack Obama, who, they believe, has betrayed them.
Both sides are obsessed with the other and cannot recognize what they have in common, which is victimization by a finance- and corporate-dominated American business establishment in effective control of the United States government, whose elected officials now are themselves victims of a system of campaign contributions, upon which their careers depend. They have only themselves to blame—politicians of both parties, and their Supreme Court—having deliberately removed all regulation or limit from what is now a fundamentally corrupt electoral finance system.There is something else that goes unrecognized. Few Americans are willing to... more
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This cartoon from 1912 tried to warn America of the Vampire Squid "wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money" as Matt Taibbi so elequently put it.
So as long as Americans think that they can hide from this monster by covering their face like a two year old, we're going to keep having these economic problems.This cartoon from 1912 tried to warn America of the Vampire Squid "wrapped around... more
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The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is arguably one of the main think-tanks that ushered in many of the policy changes to the global economy that has caused this international financial crisis.
The editorial "American Politics and the Second Gilded Age" from earlier this year is from Foreign Affairs, the CFR's monthly publication for America's
It's a long article, but here's a quick summary:
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The U.S. economy appears to be coming apart at the seams. Unemployment remains at nearly ten percent, the highest level in almost 30 years; foreclosures have forced millions of Americans out of their homes; and real incomes have fallen faster and further than at any time since the Great Depression. Many of those laid off fear that the jobs they have lost -- the secure, often unionized, industrial jobs that provided wealth, security, and opportunity -- will never return. They are probably right.
This is what the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson call the "winner-take-all economy." It is not a picture of a healthy society. Such a level of economic inequality, not seen in the United States since the eve of the Great Depression, bespeaks a political economy in which the financial rewards are increasingly concentrated among a tiny elite and whose risks are borne by an increasingly exposed and unprotected middle class. Income inequality in the United States is higher than in any other advanced industrial democracy and by conventional measures comparable to that in countries such as Ghana, Nicaragua, and Turkmenistan. It breeds political polarization, mistrust, and resentment between the haves and the have-nots and tends to distort the workings of a democratic political system in which money increasingly confers political voice and power.
It is generally presumed that economic forces alone are responsible for this astonishing concentration of wealth. Technological changes, particularly the information revolution, have transformed the economy, making workers more productive and placing a premium on intellectual, rather than manual, labor. Simultaneously, the rise of global markets -- itself accelerated by information technology -- has hollowed out the once dominant U.S. manufacturing sector and reoriented the U.S. economy toward the service sector. The service economy also rewards the educated, with high-paying professional jobs in finance, health care, and information technology. At the low end, however, jobs in the service economy are concentrated in retail sales and entertainment, where salaries are low, unions are weak, and workers are expendable.
The dramatic growth of inequality, then, is the result not of the "natural" workings of the market but of four decades' worth of deliberate political choices. Hacker and Pierson amass a great deal of evidence for this proposition, which leads them to the crux of their argument: that not just the U.S. economy but also the entire U.S. political system has devolved into a winner-take-all sport. They portray American politics not as a democratic game of majority rule but rather as a field of "organized combat" -- a struggle to the death among competing organized groups seeking to influence the policymaking process. Moreover, they suggest, business and the wealthy have all but vanquished the middle class and have thus been able to dominate policymaking for the better part of 40 years with little opposition.
IT'S THE GOVERNMENT, STUPID
Hacker and Pierson refreshingly break free from the conceit that skyrocketing inequality is a natural consequence of market forces and argue instead that it is the result of public policies that have concentrated and amplified the effects of the economic transformation and directed its gains exclusively toward the wealthy. Since the late 1970s, a number of important policy changes have tilted the economic playing field toward the rich. Congress has cut tax rates on high incomes repeatedly and has relaxed the tax treatment of capital gains and other investment income, resulting in windfall profits for the wealthiest Americans.
Labor policies have made it harder for unions to organize workers and provide a countervailing force to the growing power of business; corporate governance policies have enabled corporations to lavish extravagant pay on their top executives regardless of their companies' performance; and the deregulation of financial markets has allowed banks and other financial institutions to create ever more Byzantine financial instruments that further enrich wealthy managers and investors while exposing homeowners and pensioners to ruinous risks.
In some cases, these policy changes originated on Capitol Hill: the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush tax cuts, for example, and the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a repeal that dismantled the firewall between banks and investment companies and allowed the creation of powerful and reckless financial behemoths such as Citigroup, were approved by Congress, generally with bipartisan support. However, other policy shifts occurred gradually and imperceptibly.The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is arguably one of the main think-tanks that... more
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The American Revolution, in no small part, was a repudiation of the central banking tyranny exported to the New World by the Bank of England. Few legacies have grown more despotic than the consequences of living under the rule of fractional reserve banking. Many good willed conservatives understand that the system is imploding. Some envision a second American Revolution that expels the remnant Tories that have hijacked our Federalism separation of powers form of government. Woefully, the prospects for a States Rights revolt are slim. However, the scenario of a domestic French Revolution style carnage is brewing with every escalation of the pompous arrogance worthy of a Jean-Joseph, marquis de Laborde or the manipulative usury of the House of Rothschild. http://www.batr.org/totalitariancollectivism/100911.htmlThe American Revolution, in no small part, was a repudiation of the central banking... more
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Cue the violins....
For 13 days, hundreds of demonstrators have encamped themselves on Wall Street in New York City, hoping to call attention to the financial sector’s greed and inequities in the American economic system.
This morning, while on local radio host John Gambling’s show, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg was asked about the demonstrations on Wall Street. Bloomberg condemned the protests, claiming that the protesters are targeting people who making “$40-50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet.” He then went on to say people are focusing too much on the causes of the financial crisis and that we need to be nicer to the banking industry so that it starts lending again. He concluded by saying that we are “blaming the wrong people” by “blaming the banks” for the recession:
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GAMBLING: Mr. Mayor, let’s talk about Zuccoti Park and the protesters. How do you end that thing?
BLOOMBERG: The protesters are protesting against people who make $40-50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet. That’s the bottom line. Those are the people that work on Wall Street or on the finance sector. [...] People in this day and age need support for their employers. We need the banks, if the banks don’t go out and make loans we will not come out of our economy problems, we will not have jobs. And so anything we can do to responsibly help the banks do that, encourage them to do that is waht we need. I think we spend much too much time worrying about how we got into problems as to how we go forward. [...] Also we always tend to blame the wrong people. We blame the banks. They were part of it, but so were Frddie Mac and Frannie Mae and Congress.
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Actually, the median salary for stockbrokers is approximately $88,000 a year. But that is besides the point. The demonstrators are not targeting the individuals who work on Wall Street, they are targeting the financial institutions and practices they represent.
Recall, the banks were the primary actors who set off the global recession, and that recession plunged 60 million people into extreme poverty worldwide. By protesting in favor things like a financial transactions tax, Americans can hope to get some of that wealth back from financial institutions that are anything but “struggling to make ends meet.”Cue the violins....
For 13 days, hundreds of demonstrators have encamped themselves... more
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Preface: This essay is not intended as an endorsement (or non-endorsement) of Ron Paul. Rather, it is intended to demonstrate why Ron Paul is becoming so popular, despite being virtually ignored by the mainstream media. Had Obama followed the American people’s wishes – as revealed by the poll numbers cited below – he would easily win re-election.
Americans: Rein In the Federal Reserve
CNN notes:
“We are seeing a level of enthusiasm for Ron Paul that can be compared with President Obama in 2008″, said Eric Brakey, Media Coordinator for NYC Liberty HQ, the grassroots organization hosting the rally for the candidate. “Congressman Paul’s youth support is different now than it was during his last presidential campaign. It’s more organized and it’s picking up steam and continues to grow”.
As the longtime congressman from Texas stepped onto the stage, the crowd screamed with enthusiasm. The audience’s biggest reaction came when he spoke about ending the Federal Reserve. “The country has changed in the last four years, but my message hasn’t changed” Paul said. “The country is ripe for a true revolution”.
At least 75% of the American people want a full audit of the Fed, and most were against reconfirming Bernanke.
Indeed, as Bloomberg noted last December:
A majority of Americans are dissatisfied with the nation’s independent central bank, saying the U.S. Federal Reserve should either be brought under tighter political control or abolished outright, a poll shows.
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Americans across the political spectrum say the Fed shouldn’t retain its current structure of independence. Asked if the central bank should be more accountable to Congress, left independent or abolished entirely, 39 percent said it should be held more accountable and 16 percent that it should be abolished. Only 37 percent favor the status quo.
Americans Are Sick and Tired of Never-Ending War
Ron Paul is also gaining popularity because he is against the never-ending War On Terror, and wants to bring the troops home. Americans are sick of the never-ending, ever-creeping war. See this, this and this.
As Talking Points Memo reported earlier this month:
“…Only about a quarter say the wars in Iraq (26%) and Afghanistan (25%) have lessened the chances of terrorist attacks in the United States,” the Pew report reads. “In both cases majorities say the wars either have increased the risk of terrorism in this country or made no difference.”
Top American military leaders agree, saying that the war on terror has weakened our national security.
Americans Want Our Liberties Back
Mr. Paul also speaks alot about the importance of liberty.
And Americans have become much less tolerant of the wholesale destruction of our constitutional freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism.
As Talking Points Memo notes:
On the eve of the ten year anniversary of 9/11, the Pew Research Center has released new data on Americans’ reaction to the attacks, and the foreign and national security policies pursued in the post 9/11 era. They show a country with views that have evolved on the relationship between civil liberties and the tools given to government to fight terrorism, and a disbelief that the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan helped to lessen the chance there will be another terrorist attack on the United States.
The Pew survey showed a large shift in the number of Americans who are willing to see some of their civil liberties go out the window in the name of fighting terrorism. Directly after 9/11, Americans were willing to make the deal, as 55 percent thought it was necessary, against 35 percent who felt the opposite. Now, only 40 percent felt that giving up some civil liberties is necessary to curb terrorism, with 54 percent against.
Hundreds of Millions of Americans Can’t Be StoppedPreface: This essay is not intended as an endorsement (or non-endorsement) of Ron... more
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With the protests going on there has been growing talk about occupying more cities and places, it's time to make a stand against Wall Street and corporate America. We deserve good jobs, we deserve a fair non-predatory banking system. It's time we stand up to the evils of Capitalism and say no now. We urge everyone to go and form peaceful protests our voices will no longer be squelched, organize and let Corporate America, big buisness and the banking system know that we will not stand for this anymore. We need to fix it now. As they grow richer, we grow poorer.
We can see what the power of the people is already bringing and brought to many other countries. It's time we set our country straight.
http://occupytogether.org/
People should not be afraid of their governments.
Governments should be afraid of their people.
No more should we allow the rich to take what is not theirs from us let's put an end to it now.
About the movement:
"Welcome to OCCUPY TOGETHER, a hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall St. As we have followed the news on facebook, twitter, and the various live feeds across the internet, we felt compelled to build a site that would help spread the word as more protests organize across the country. We hope to provide people with information about events that are organizing, ongoing, and building across the U.S. as we, the 99%, take action against the greed and corruption of the 1%.---"
^-- continues
Our message is clear. News agencies are clearly being told to shut down this movement.
Stand up now.
Let's put an end to this together we can tell the media is corrupt and our government bought.
No more.
Freedom from oppression. Freedom from social intolerance and injustice.
These are peaceful protests.With the protests going on there has been growing talk about occupying more cities and... more
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ScYx
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8 months ago
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A great collection of photos from Cryptome on documenting the Occupy Wall Street Protests
Also more Occupy Wall Street photos and videos at link
Occupy Wall Street Video 25 Sept 2011 Day 9
Occupy Wall Street Photos 23 September 2011
Occupy Wall Street Video 23 September 2011
Occupy Wall Street Video 21 September 2011
Occupy Wall Street Photos 21 September 2011
Occupy Wall Street Photos 19 September 2011
Occupy Wall Street Photos 18 September 2011A great collection of photos from Cryptome on documenting the Occupy Wall Street... more
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INTERNATIONAL SECURITY STUDIES PROGRAM
Fletcher School Tufts University
Dr. Daniel I. FineResearch AssociateMining and Minerals Resources Institute, MIT
LUNCHEON LECTURETUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 201111:00AM – 1:00PMCABOT 703
“Shale Gas War: The Geopolitics of U.S.Self-Sufficiency”
Dr. Daniel Fine
is a Research Associate at the Mining and Minerals Resources Institute,MIT. Dr. Fine is also a current Policy Adviser on Non-Conventional Oil and Gas. He isco-editor of
Resource War in 3-D: Dependence, Diplomacy and Defense, and has contributed to Business Week , the Engineering and Mining Journal and theWashingtonTimes
. Dr. Fine participated in the Atlantic Council Workshop on Central Asian Policyand the Hudson Institute Russia-United States Relations Project. He has given testimonyon strategic natural resources before the U.S. Senate Committees on Foreign Affairs andthe Energy and Natural Resources. Dr. Fine was a member of the Domestic EnergyProduction Issue Team of the Center For The Study Of The Presidency and Congress“Strengthening America’s Future Initiative.” He has participated as a panelist on energy public policy at the Rocky Mountain Global New Energy Summit.
Register to attend this event at
http://www.danielfine.eventbrite.com
Business Casual Attire Required
http://www.scribd.com/doc/64842008/Shale-Gas-Wars-Flyer-9-20-11INTERNATIONAL SECURITY STUDIES PROGRAM
Fletcher School Tufts University
Dr. Daniel... more
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I have always been dead set against the federal reserve. I think the cartel should be completely abolished. Today. The banks that make up the federal reserve have done nothing but take the wealth of the nation and used it to destroy the lives of millions of people around the world and their day has come. We need to go back to the days of the "greenback" of Lincolns day and send the federal reserve packing.
That's where this gets really weird. On a whim I Googled "glenn beck federal reserve" and I found this video where Glenn Beck came out with the facts about the fed. I can't believe Faux News let this go out on the air.
I really hate Glenn Beck and his general agenda but he hit the nail on the head with this. I'm still wondering why he did this and how it actually got on the air with the Murdoch family running the show.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eChJd9DobbwI have always been dead set against the federal reserve. I think the cartel should be... more
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Day0
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For the American economy – and for many other developed economies – the elephant in the room is the amount of money paid to bankers over the last five years. For banks that have filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the sum stands at an astounding $2.2 trillion. Extrapolating over the coming decade, the numbers would approach $5 trillion, an amount vastly larger than what both President Barack Obama’s administration and his Republican opponents seem willing to cut from further government deficits.
That $5 trillion dollars is not money invested in building roads, schools, and other long-term projects, but is directly transferred from the American economy to the personal accounts of bank executives and employees. Such transfers represent as cunning a tax on everyone else as one can imagine. It feels quite iniquitous that bankers, having helped cause today’s financial and economic troubles, are the only class that is not suffering from them – and in many cases are actually benefiting.
Mainstream megabanks are puzzling in many respects. It is (now) no secret that they have operated so far as large sophisticated compensation schemes, masking probabilities of low-risk, high-impact “Black Swan” events and benefiting from the free backstop of implicit public guarantees. Excessive leverage, rather than skills, can be seen as the source of their resulting profits, which then flow disproportionately to employees, and of their sometimes-massive losses, which are borne by shareholders and taxpayers.
In other words, banks take risks, get paid for the upside, and then transfer the downside to shareholders, taxpayers, and even retirees. In order to rescue the banking system, the Federal Reserve, for example, put interest rates at artificially low levels; as was disclosed recently, it also has provided secret loans of $1.2 trillion to banks. The main effect so far has been to help bankers generate bonuses (rather than attract borrowers) by hiding exposures.
Taxpayers end up paying for these exposures, as do retirees and others who rely on returns from their savings. Moreover, low-interest-rate policies transfer inflation risk to all savers – and to future generations. Perhaps the greatest insult to taxpayers, then, is that bankers’ compensation last year was back at its pre-crisis level.......
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/taleb1/EnglishFor the American economy – and for many other developed economies – the... more
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In an article in The New York Times on August 19th titled “The North Dakota Miracle,” Catherine Rampell writes:
Forget the Texas Miracle. Let’s instead take a look at North Dakota, which has the lowest unemployment rate and the fastest job growth rate in the country.
According to new data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics today, North Dakota had an unemployment rate of just 3.3 percent in July—that’s just over a third of the national rate (9.1 percent), and about a quarter of the rate of the state with the highest joblessness (Nevada, at 12.9 percent).
North Dakota has had the lowest unemployment in the country (or was tied for the lowest unemployment rate in the country) every single month since July 2008.
Its healthy job market is also reflected in its payroll growth numbers. . . . [Y]ear over year, its payrolls grew by 5.2 percent. Texas came in second, with an increase of 2.6 percent.
Why is North Dakota doing so well? For one of the same reasons that Texas has been doing well: oil.
Oil is certainly a factor, but it is not what has put North Dakota over the top. Alaska has roughly the same population as North Dakota and produces nearly twice as much oil, yet unemployment in Alaska is running at 7.7 percent. Montana, South Dakota, and Wyoming have all benefited from a boom in energy prices, with Montana and Wyoming extracting much more gas than North Dakota has. The Bakken oil field stretches across Montana as well as North Dakota, with the greatest Bakken oil production coming from Elm Coulee Oil Field in Montana. Yet Montana’s unemployment rate, like Alaska’s, is 7.7 percent.
A number of other mineral-rich states were initially not affected by the economic downturn, but they lost revenues with the later decline in oil prices. North Dakota is the only state to be in continuous budget surplus since the banking crisis of 2008. Its balance sheet is so strong that it recently reduced individual income taxes and property taxes by a combined $400 million, and is debating further cuts. It also has the lowest foreclosure rate and lowest credit card default rate in the country, and it has had NO bank failures in at least the last decade.
If its secret isn’t oil, what is so unique about the state? North Dakota has one thing that no other state has: its own state-owned bank.
Access to credit is the enabling factor that has fostered both a boom in oil and record profits from agriculture in North Dakota. The Bank of North Dakota (BND) does not compete with local banks but partners with them, helping with capital and liquidity requirements. It participates in loans, provides guarantees, and acts as a sort of mini-Fed for the state.......
Continue at:
http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/the-north-dakota-miracle-not-all-about-oilIn an article in The New York Times on August 19th titled “The North Dakota... more
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Wasn't this company involved in some other kind of financial criminal activity with one of it's employees or something as well?
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Ironic, isn’t it? When Warren Buffett penned that op-ed demanding he be taxed more, we assumed that meant he had actually paid his taxes. Not quite the case. Buffett’s famed company, Berkshire Hathaway, owes taxes that are nearly a decade old.
Oh, and they’re not denying it. Berkshire is freely owning up to the fact that it owes taxes from as far back as 2002. Right now, it looks like there are outstanding taxes from 2002-2004 as well as from 2005-2009. They promise they’ll work it out with the IRS within the next year. Can’t Buffett just take a little out of his piggybank and pay up? For a man who so actively preaches honesty and integrity, we’re a little baffled as to why Berkshire won’t just fork over what it owes.Wasn't this company involved in some other kind of financial criminal activity... more
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President Barack Obama has relied more on well-connected Wall Street figures to fund his re-election than he did four years ago when he campaigned as an outsider and an underdog.
One-third of the money Obama's elite fund-raising corps has raised on behalf of his re-election has come from the financial sector, according to a new Center for Responsive Politics analysis.
Individuals who work in the finance, insurance and real estate sector are responsible for raising at least $11.8 million for Obama's campaign and the Democratic National Committee, according to the Center's research. All of Obama's bundlers have raised a minimum of $35 million so far this year.
During his entire 2008 presidential bid, bundlers who worked in the finance, insurance and real estate sector were responsible for a minimum of $16.1 million, according to the Center's research. That's about 21 percent of the $76.5 million estimated minimum amount that these top fund-raisers brought in for Obama's presidential campaign.
The Center also found:
•Bundlers within the securities and investment industry have been particularly active this year, as have the traditional staple of lawyers.
•None of Obama's bundlers are active lobbyists, but seven are former lobbyists, who collectively raised at least $1.35 million.
•Obama has also raised a minimum of $2.2 million from openly gay and lesbian individuals who were not bundlers for his presidential campaign four years ago.
•About 60 percent of Obama's 244 re-election bundlers did not bundle for his 2008 presidential campaign. New bundlers brought in about half of the money raised by bundlers so far.President Barack Obama has relied more on well-connected Wall Street figures to fund... more
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July 22 2011. A date for humanity to remember. NATO hit the Libyan water supply pipeline. It will take months to repair. Then on Saturday they hit the pipeline factory producing pipes to repair it. The Libyan leader Moammar Al Gaddafi informed members of the Security Council in his message that the alliance decided to carry out mass murder against the Libyan people by targeting their only drinking water source, where billions were invested and without it life stops in Libya. He wondered what's the relation between this factory and the protection of civilians that NATO claims it is carrying out? http://www.makeahistory.com/index.php/recent-news/42990-nato-attack-great-man-made-riverJuly 22 2011. A date for humanity to remember. NATO hit the Libyan water supply... more
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worrg
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10 months ago
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Why should we the PEOPLE, the legitimate owners of everything in the United States, pay for a debt that banking and commerce ran up for their own personal financial gain?
We know that everything about the Iraq War and the subsequent international financial collapse was due to the direct and indirect action of the military industrial complex.
We don't have to accept their terms and conditions. We can write and impose our own. Let's reject the debt and extract a tax from banking and commerce and force them to pay off the debt owed to themselves. It's their debt and it's owed to them, so let's make them pay themselves in a way that says: "Don't fuck with us boys, this isn't our first time at the rodeo!"
http://current.com/community/93358346_are-we-broke-yet.htmWhy should we the PEOPLE, the legitimate owners of everything in the United States,... more
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If we knock down all the flimsy screens of artifice and obscuring complexity, what we see in Europe is a continent of debt-serfs, indentured to the banks under the whip of the European Union and its secular religion, the euro.
I know this isn't the pretty picture presented by the EU Overlords, of a prosperity built not just on debt, but on resolving the problem of debt with more debt, but it is the reality behind the eurozone's phony facade of economic "freedom."
What else can we call the stark domination of the big banks other than Neo-Feudalism? In one way or another, every one of the 27-member nations' citizens are indentured to the big international banks at risk in Europe, most of which are based in Europe.
Amidst the confusing overlay of voices and agendas, there is really only one agenda item: save the big European banks. Everything else is just mechanics. The banks are the new feudal manor houses, the bankers are the new feudal lords, and the politicians of the EU and its influential member nations are the servile vassals who enforce the "rule of law" on the serfs.
Here is the fundamental fact: there are trillions of euros of debt which can never be paid back. In a non-feudal system, one in which the banks were not the Masters, then this fact would be recognized and acted upon: something like 50% of the debt would be written off in one fell swoop, all the banks whose assets had just been wiped out would be declared insolvent and liquidated, the remaining debt would be sized to the economic surplus of each debtor nation, and a new, decentralized banking sector of dozens of strictly limited, smaller banks would be established.
To the degree that is "impossible," Europe is nothing but a Neo-Feudal Kleptocracy serving its Banker Lords.
The Greek worker whose pay has been slashed in the "austerity" demanded by the banks serves the Banker Lords, as does the German worker who will be paying higher taxes to bail out Germany and France's Banker Lords. Though the German is constantly told he is bailing out Greece, the truth is Greece is just the conduit: he's actually bailing out the EU's Banker Lords.
We can clear up much of the purposeful obfuscation by asking: exactly what tragedy befalls Europe if all the sovereign debt in the EU was wiped off the books? The one and only "tragedy" would be the destruction of the "too big to fail" banks, not just in Europe but around the world. As the big European banks imploded, then their inability to service their counterparty obligations on various derivatives to other big banks would topple those lenders.
While the political vassals call that possibility a catastrophe, it would actually spell freedom for Europe's 500 million debt serfs......
Continue at:
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly11/EU-debt-serfs-6-11.htmlIf we knock down all the flimsy screens of artifice and obscuring complexity, what we... more
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