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Romania Protests Bailout and Government Cuts in Spending | Newsflavor
Romania protests over bailout.-
- mygoditsfullofdoom
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Iceland: Banksters Face Jail, Not “Bailout” : Veterans Today
REYKJAVIK — More than a year and a half after Iceland’s major banks failed, all but sinking the country’s economy, police have begun rounding up a number of top bankers while other former executives and owners face a two-billion-dollar lawsuit.
Since Iceland’s three largest banks — Kaupthing, Landsbanki and Glitnir — collapsed in late 2008, their former executives and owners have largely been living untroubled lives abroad.
But the publication last month of a parliamentary inquiry into the island nation’s profound financial and economic crisis signaled a turning of the tide, laying much of the blame for the downfall on the former bank heads who had taken “inappropriate loans from the banks” they worked for.
On Wednesday, the administrators of Glitnir’s liquidation announced they had filed a two-billion-dollar (1.6-billion-euro) lawsuit in a New York court against former large shareholders and executives for alleged fraud.
“I think this lawsuit is without precedence in Iceland,” Steinunn Gudbjartsdottir, who chairs Glitnir’s so-called winding-up board, told reporters in Reykjavik.
“It is about higher figures than we have ever seen,” she said, adding that she expected Glitnir to file more lawsuits going forward, but that “it is unlikely any will be this big.”
Glitnir said it was suing “Jon Asgeir Johannesson, formerly its principal shareholder, Larus Welding, previously Glitnir’s chief executive, Thorstein Jonsson, its former chairman and other former directors, shareholders and third parties associates with Johannesson for fraudulently and unlawfully draining more than two billion dollars out of the bank.”
The bank also said it was “taking action against its former auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) for facilitating and helping to conceal the fraudulent transactions engineered by Johannesson and his associates, which ultimately led to the bank’s collapse in October 2008.”
Glitnir’s suit, filed in the New York state Supreme Court on Tuesday, blamed most of the bank’s woes on “Johannesson and his co-conspirators,” who had “conspired to systematically loot Glitnir Bank in order to prop up their own failing companies.”
Johannesson, the former owner of the now-defunct Baugur investment group with stakes in a number of British high street stores including Hamleys, Debenhams and House of Fraser, said he was shocked by the lawsuit.
“The distortions and the nonsense in the lawsuit are incredible,” he told the Pressan news website.
Glitnir’s administrators “can get a 10-year-prison sentence for misusing US courts in this manner,” he insisted.
The bank’s chief administrator Gudbjartsdottir took his comments in stride.
“I didn’t expect him to be happy with the lawsuit,” she said.
In addition to its New York suit, Glitnir said it had “secured a freezing order from the High Court in London against Jon Asgeir Johannesson’s worldwide assets, including two apartments in Manhattan’s exclusive Gramercy Park neighbourhood for which he paid approximately 25 million dollars.”
Gudbjartsdottir said Johannesson had just 48 hours to come up with a satisfactory list of his assets.
“If he does not give the right information he faces a jail sentence,” she said.
Four former Kaupthing executives, who all live in Luxembourg, have meanwhile been arrested in Iceland in the past week and Interpol has issued an international arrest warrant for that bank’s ex-chairman, Sigurdur Einarsson.
Former head of the bank’s domestic operations, Ingolfur Helgason, and former chief risk officer Steingrimur Karason were arrested late Monday on arrival from Luxembourg, just days after former Kaupthing boss Hreidar Mar Sigurdsson, along with Magnus Gudmunsson, who headed the bank’s unit in Luxembourg, were taken into custody.
The 49-year-old Einarsson, who lives in London, said late Tuesday he had no plans to travel to Iceland to be arrested.
“I’m absolutely flabbergasted about the latest news,” he told the Frettabladid daily.
“There is in my opinion no need for the arrests or custody rulings, and I will not of my own free will take part in the play that it appears is being staged to soothe the Icelandic people,” he said.
“I’ll put the human rights I enjoy here in Britain to the test and will not therefore come home (to Iceland) to these conditions without being forced,” he added.REYKJAVIK — More than a year and a half after Iceland’s major banks... more-
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Bill Clinton: Goldman Sachs Did Nothing Illegal
Former President Bill Clinton says it is "time to lower the rhetoric and talk about the facts," in reference to the government's scrutiny of Wall Street.
In an exclusive interview with Maria Bartiromo, Clinton noted that while many financial firms are being questioned by the Securities and Exchange Commission, he does not believe that Goldman Sachs or CEO Lloyd Blankfein did anything illegal, based on what he's seeing.
The SEC has been probing the mortgage operations of major banks, but so far has only charged Goldman with civil fraud. The firm has said it will fight the charges and has vigorously denied any wrongdoing.
Clinton says "what we ought to do is have an honest conversation about what really happened, how to fix it, and how to get what's best about vital capital markets."
more at link...
An "honest conversation about what really happened" just came out of the mouth of Bill Clinton, a guy who made his career by being the best liar in the business. I guess Ponzi schemes and financial terrorism is standard practice. How about raping and pillaging? Obviously treason is legal; how else are all the same cast of Benedict Arnolds still walking around, making billions by stealing our money.
It was under Bill Clinton in 1999 when his cronies, Larry Summers, Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, which is the most important Post-Depression safeguard and protector of the citizen's cash. From that point forward, the floodgates were opened for the banking oligarchs to further bankrupt this nation.
Who's running the Obama white house from behind the scenes? Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers with his puppet, little Timmy Geithner. Even Elena Kagan, Supreme Court nominee, worked for Goldman Sachs as a top adviser, where she gave "expert advice to clients." Also, she was at Harvard with Larry Summers. Are you kidding me?
End the Fed...its a private, banking cartel that is purposefully tanking our currency b/c its leaders want a New World Order and a corporate-fascist dictatorship across the globe. Bill Clinton and everyone else in Washington works for Goldman Sachs b/c they have a monopoly on the issuance of currency via the mafioso institution known as the Federal Reserve.Former President Bill Clinton says it is "time to lower the rhetoric and talk... more-
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- 2 years ago
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Irish Protesters Storm Parliament Over Bailout | Newsflavor
Irish protesters storm parliament, protesting bailouts.-
- mygoditsfullofdoom
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- 2 years ago
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Ron Paul 5/10/2010 On Greece Bailout & Paper (Fiat) Currency
5/10/2010 Ron Paul on the global financial bailout of Greece and the American taxpayer.-
- shanklinmike
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- 2 years ago
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Coffee Party -- Wall St. Emergency: Stand Up for Main St.
The vote on financial reform looks like it will be incredibly close.
The time to act is now. Coffee Party USA is delivering a message to
our Senators: Please wake up and smell the coffee: Americans want
strong financial reform. We want our voices on Main St to be heard
over Wall St's even though the Big Bailed-Out Banks are spending 1.4m
a day employing 35 lobbying firms on K St to stop reform.
Shot at Showdown on Wall St Rally on April 29, 2010. Video directed/shot/cut by George Sosa. Music by Jon Lancelot. Featuring Jon Lancelot and Bob Pargament, Coffee Party NY organizers.The vote on financial reform looks like it will be incredibly close. The time to act... more-
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Greece Just Got Blackmailed by The International Monetary Fund (Imf) | Newsflavor
IMF Greece bailout.
http://newsflavor.com/world/europe/greece-just-got-blackmailed-by-the-international-monetary-fund-imf/IMF Greece bailout.... more-
- mygoditsfullofdoom
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Too bad you're not part of the now world order like me!
While the world squirms from the mindbending moral hazards of giving banks the money to short (sell/bet against) government bonds- then giving the governments the money to pay off the banks with all of this compounded interest. The real liar loans have been the banks using worthless securities (toxic assets) based on manufactured liar loans for real loans from the government via the NOT federal NOT A reserve. It's the end of sovereignty, I don't mean that as a hyperbole these things end and get replaced and so does this. Single world currency and single production governance. They have already existed and the time has been spent acclimating the public to central banks working in concert, the UN security council armies wearing the same helmet from a global army, the imf which has forced nations around the world to privatize(into the hands of this corporate cartel) all production and natural rights, such as water ownership and crop production. Will WE rule the world? we already do, you and the rest of the peons will simply adjust to a new normal. Look at people in the streets begging us to turn the debt burden machines of "credit" back on. Don't worry you will get your blue pill back(matrix reference not the limp dick pill) and you and your children will wake up and work off all this debt we manufactured during the "crisis." There will be new gadgets and mindnumbing shows to watch and overpriced trinkets produced in pisspoor countries to clutter your house with before long. But first we have to let you know who the boss is and after we collect up all the property and assets and depress wages then we'll start the negotiations. In the future all jobs will be paid at the lowest level GLOBALLY. That means if I can get some poor rice stomping chinamen to look at x-rays 100 per hour for $5 an hour then that's what you have to compete with. Same for surgeries, home care, car manufacturing the lowest bidder GLOBALLY wins. All you fat pasty motherfuckers won't be livin' high on the hog at the expense of us generous and selfless rich folk. You'll have to work, I mean WORK!! not that shit you've been passing off as work calling in sick, flirting with co-workers, surfing porn and bullshitting around the watercooler work, REAL WORK. KUNTA, JOSE migrant farmer slavery type work. You basterds have been taking the kindness of us rich folk for weakness and it's time for a payback. We'll own all the property from the mass foreclosures, the corporations from the lines of credit to bankruptcy's and of course these puppet governments, whose job it is to sell you on the idea that serving us is in your best interest (oh god I can't stop laughing). Ha Ha vote conservative a bunch of career politicians don't represent the special interest, they represent you...the fool...er uh the common man. Well gotta go my yacht is here to take me to my private helicopter that will drop me off at my private jet. God bless whatever your country USED to be called.While the world squirms from the mindbending moral hazards of giving banks the money... more-
- aid4families
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Hey Alan Greenspan, BP, Catholic Church — Don’t Worry, Only the “Little People” Ever Face Accountability « SpeakEasy
This is damning stuff:
As top Federal Reserve officials debated whether there was a housing bubble and what to do about it, then-Chairman Alan Greenspan argued that the dissent should be kept secret so that the Fed wouldn’t lose control of the debate to people less well-informed than themselves.
“We run the risk, by laying out the pros and cons of a particular argument, of inducing people to join in on the debate, and in this regard it is possible to lose control of a process that only we fully understand,” Greenspan said, according to the transcripts of a March 2004 meeting.
Only he now says that he was the one who didn’t fully understand:
“I have found a flaw” in free market theory, Greenspan said under intense questioning by Representative Henry Waxman, the Democratic chairman of the Government Oversight Committee of the House of Representatives. “I don’t know how significant or permanent it is,” Greenspan added. “But I have been very distressed by that fact.”
“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” Greenspan said.
Waxman pushed the former Fed chief, who left office in 2006, to clarify his explanation.
“In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Waxman said.
“Absolutely, precisely,” Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”
After listening to the BP executives pretty much say the same thing, can we now see the pattern of elite corruption and malfeasance? How about the Catholic Church? Or the CIA?
It’s not like there aren’t, in every case, people who dissent:
At the same meeting, a Federal Reserve bank president from Atlanta, Jack Guynn, warned that “a number of folks are expressing growing concern about potential overbuilding and worrisome speculation in the real estate markets, especially in Florida. Entire condo projects and upscale residential lots are being pre-sold before any construction, with buyers freely admitting that they have no intention of occupying the units or building on the land but rather are counting on ‘flipping’ the properties–selling them quickly at higher prices.”
Had Guynn’s warning been heeded and the housing market cooled, the financial collapse of 2008 could have been avoided. But his comment was kept secret until Friday, when the central bank released the transcripts of Federal Open Market Committee meetings for 2004 and CalculatedRisk spotted it. The transcripts for 2005 to the present are still secret.
They didn’t want to spoil the party. After all a lot of people were making a lot of money. And nobody wanted the “little people” who don’t understand how the world works interference. Like the congress:
In little-noticed statements to reporters over the last few weeks, Pelosi has alleged that the Bush administration knew well in advance of its intervention that the financial crisis would hit, and that Congress would need to authorize a historic and unpopular bailout – but that top officials, including then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, told her that they had been barred from briefing Congress about true extent of the crisis.If accurate, the allegation could constitute a major indictment of the Bush administration, which may have worsened the crisis and resulting economic fallout by delaying the call for congressional action. Pelosi says the admissions from Bush administration officials that they had kept Congress in the dark came in private conversations between her and those officials in person and by phone. None of the other parties to those conversations would comment for this story. Nor is it clear if the Administration’s alleged decision not to brief Congress earlier was a calculated strategy to avoid spooking the already shaky financial markets thus hastening the crisis or, as Pelosi suggests, a political calculation in advance of the 2008 presidential elections, or a combination of the two.
Read on.
But whatever we do, let’s not look in the rearview mirror and hold anyone responsible for anything. That would be counterproductive. Accountability is for the little people.This is damning stuff: As top Federal Reserve officials debated whether there... more-
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“Hey Dad, Why do we save Billionaires, but not Teachers?” « SpeakEasy
This week thousands of New Jersey public school students walked out of class to protest draconian school budget cuts. “Save my teacher,” their signs read. In a state that is home to a bevy of high finance billionaires, with the highest per capita income in the nation, teachers are being sacked left and right. In our town half the student body protested outside the high school. Perhaps the protesters should turn their eyes towards the twenty-five top hedge fund honchos who took in $25 billion in 2009. Their “earnings” alone could fund 658,000 entry level teachers.
It’s ironic that the battlefield in this war over resources is public education. Because the public remains entirely uneducated about the connection between those billionaires and school budget cuts. We are clueless about what the Wall Street billionaires do to earn their riches and whether it’s of any value. We might be able to understand “weapons of mass destruction,” but financial weapons of mass destruction are way beyond us.
The new earning reports are good, we read. The giant financial institutions are back to making billions through “trading.” So are these bankers grown-up versions of kids trading baseball cards–or are they robber barons? Are they enriching our society or siphoning off its wealth? Maybe the marching students of New Jersey could ask Governor Christie to explain.
Here’s what we do know for sure. Our modern financial honchos are very different from the robber barons of old. Everybody knew that Rockefeller meant oil, Ford meant cars and Carnegie meant steel.
Yes, today, we know that Gates and Jobs mean computers. But who the hell is David Tepper, and what does he produce with his Appaloosa hedge fund? He must have done something pretty impressive to earn $4 billion (not million) in 2009, the worst financial year since the Great Depression, with 29 million Americans unemployed or forced into part-time work. Then again, how much would he have “earned” had we not provided more than $8 trillion in bailout funds, loans and guarantees to the collapsed financial sector?
Mr. Tepper lives in New Jersey where the governor has gone to war with the teachers, hoping to break the union and balance the budget on the backs of our students. But Governor Christie’s enthusiasm for a balanced budget only goes so far: HeRThis week thousands of New Jersey public school students walked out of class to... more-
- Monkey_Films
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Why the recession in Denver (and everywhere else) just won't go away
Why the recession just won't go away-
- richrblake
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- 2 years ago
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Weekly Audit: How Deregulation Fueled Goldman Sachs’ Scam
by Zach Carter, Media Consortium blogger
Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed fraud charges against Goldman Sachs and underscored what most Americans have believed for some time: Wall Street has rigged the economy in its own favor, and will stop at nothing—not even outright theft—to boost its profits. What’s worse, Goldman’s scam could have been completely prevented by better regulations and law enforcement.
Goldman’s heist
Let’s be clear. “Financial fraud” means “theft.” Goldman Sachs sold investors securities that were stocked with subprime mortgages and had been cherry-picked by a hedge fund manager named John Paulson. Paulson believed these mortgages were about to go bust, so he helped Goldman Sachs concoct the securities so that he could bet against them himself.
Goldman Sachs, like Paulson, also bet against the securities. But when Goldman sold the securities to investors, it didn’t tell them that Paulson had devised the securities, or that he was betting on their failure. By withholding crucial information from investors, Goldman directly profited from the scam at the expense of its own clients. If ordinary citizens did what the SEC’s alleges Goldman did, we’d call it stealing.
As Nick Baumann emphasizes for Mother Jones, the SEC’s suit against Goldman is just the tip of the iceberg. During the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s, literally thousands of bankers were jailed for financial fraud. Today’s crisis was much larger in scope, yet the Goldman allegations are among the first serious charges of legal wrongdoing to emerge (other complaints have been filed against Regions Bank and former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo). If the SEC or the FBI are doing their jobs, we should see many more of these cases.
Bust ‘em up.
How do banks get away with these kinds of shenanigans and still secure epic taxpayer bailouts? It’s all about their political clout, as Robert Reich notes for The American Prospect. So long as banks are so enormous that they can ruin the economy with their collapse, the institutions will always carry tremendous political clout.
Even in the case of Goldman Sachs, which is too-big-to-fail by any reasonable standard, the SEC’s fraud case is being filed three years after the company’s alleged offense. That’s well after the company rode to safety on the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the AIG bailout and billions more in other indirect assistance—and only after multiple journalists made Goldman’s offensive transactions general public knowledge.
If we don’t break up the big banks, politically connected Wall Street titans will make sure they get bailed out when the next crisis hits, regardless of whatever laws we have on the books.
Fix the derivatives casino
If Congress doesn’t soon pass a bill to break up behemoth banks, it will be neglecting the gravest problem in our financial system today. But several other reforms are needed if Wall Street is ever going to serve a useful economic function again.
As Nomi Prins emphasizes for AlterNet, much of the Wall Street profit machine has been divorced from the economy that the rest of us live in. These days, banks make most of their money from securities trades and derivatives deals. Their actual lending business is taking a beating. That means big banks have very little incentive to promote economic well-being for every day citizens. We need to create these incentives by banning economically essential banks from engaging in securities trades, and make sure all derivatives transactions are conducted on open, transparent exchanges, just like ordinary stocks and bonds.
Better derivatives regulations could help protect against fraud. If Goldman Sachs’ sketchy subprime deal had been subject to market scrutiny on an exchange, it’s very unlikely that any investor would have bought into it. Goldman Sachs almost got away with it because the deal was secretive and beyond the scope of most regulatory oversight.
Protect whistleblowers
The Goldman case also raises significant questions about the government’s enforcement of existing financial fraud laws. Bradley Birkenfeld, a banker for Swiss financial giant UBS, helped the Department of Justice bring the largest tax fraud case in history against his company, which was helping rich Americans hide money from the IRS in offshore bank accounts.
For his cooperation, Birkenfeld was rewarded with a four-year prison sentence, even though nobody else at UBS—nobody—has been sentenced to prison over the scam. As Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman emphasize for Democracy Now!, Birkenfeld’s imprisonment could have something to with who exactly is hiding money with UBS.
Gonzalez discusses an interview with Birkenfeld, in which the former banker notes that the bank had a special office to handle the accounts of “politically exposed persons”— American politicians. Moreover, the top brass at UBS includes key advisors to top politicians in both parties. This is exactly the kind of influence smuggling that breaking up the banks would help fix. UBS is a multi-trillion-dollar institution with no less than 27 U.S. subsidiaries.
But protecting Birkenfeld would accomplish still more—by jailing him, the Justice Department is actively discouraging others from coming forward, and making it more difficult for regulators to enforce the law.
Greenspan’s failure
It’s abundantly clear that almost every major regulatory agency charged with curtailing financial excess failed to prevent the Crash of 2008. But that failure doesn’t mean that effective regulation is impossible—it only shows that the regulators in power failed. The top bank regulator in the U.S., John Dugan, was a former bank lobbyist.
As Christopher Hayes demonstrates for The Nation, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has never had any interest in regulation whatsoever. After the crash, Greenspan insisted that nobody could have seen it coming. But as Hayes notes, many people did—Greenspan simply didn’t listen to them. These days, Greenspan is revising his story, claiming that he did in fact see the crisis coming, but that nobody could have prevented it. That is simply not credible.
Hayes draws a useful parallel Hurricane Katrina, a problem sparked by a natural event that became a catastrophe when regulators failed to take the necessary precautions. The lesson from both Katrina and the financial crash is not that government always screws up—we have plenty of examples of government preventing floods and economic calamity. The lesson we should learn is that people who don’t believe in government will never do a good job governing. As Hayes notes:
If Greenspan couldn’t figure things out, that doesn’t mean others can’t. In fact, developing systems for doing just that is called—quite simply—progress, and Alan Greenspan continues to be one of its enemies.
That is exactly the task that now presents itself before Congress: Developing a system to prevent and constrain economic destruction wielded by Wall Street. The U.S. had a system that did exactly this for more than fifty years. For the last thrity years, it has been systematically dismantled. How well Congress lives up to that challenge will define much of our economic future for decades to come.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.by Zach Carter, Media Consortium blogger Last week, the Securities and Exchange... more-
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To Organize Against Wall St., We Need a Narrative Focusing on Crime and Massive Fraud | | AlterNet
How we can be experiencing the largest economic meltdown in decades with no real mass mobilization or ongoing response from the progressive world?
In politics, it’s always all about the narrative, about how issues are framed.
How we can be experiencing the largest economic meltdown in decades with millions out of work, and millions more losing their homes, and yet, with no real mass mobilization or ongoing response from the progressive world?
To understand this paradox, we need to reflect on how most of us define the problem.
To this day, there has not been an aggressive investigation of who and what brought down the system, ala the Pecora Commission appointed by FDR. Instead, we have a wimpy ineffectual body that can’t get its act together. The New York Times, which hailed its appointment, now buries its defacto obit way back in the business section, noting it has “been hobbled by delays and internal disagreements and a lack of focus.”
At the same time, the bookshelves are filling up with volumes of complicated treatises on the complexities of derivatives, risky profit models and credit default swaps. The practitioners of the “dismal science” of economics are having a field day with longwinded dissertations that fail to engage the popular imagination.
We had a word for this when I worked in network television—MEGO, standing for “My Eyes Glaze Over!”
More popular writers are spinning catchy “yarns” like “The Big Short,” which put it all down with psychologically-driven, character-based storytelling to how deluded everyone on Wall Street was. That leaves us feeling superior to the dunderheads who lost us trillions and, then, laughed all the way to their mansions in the Hamptons.
Hahaha.
Missing is a hardnosed look at the financial crisis as a crime story—an approach that allows for morality as well as indignation, and resonates with public anger. It touches the nerve that most people feel.
This is why former Bank Examiner William Black focuses on looting and CEO fraud. He helped send over a thousand bankers to prison during the S&L crisis in the l980s.
And, this is also why Senator Ted Kaufman of Delaware, the state where most of our corporations are registered, says categorically the whole crisis rests on a foundation of crime.
Even Alan Greenspan admitted in his all too polite exchange with that government financial inquiry that resembles a Princeton seminar, “if you don’t have enforcement, and a lot of that stuff was just plain fraud, you’re not coming to grips with the issue.” Of course, this “maestro” didn’t go into detail on “a lot of that stuff.”
Mostly, what we are watching is an obtuse debate about banks that are “too big to fail,” not too big to jail. Very little of the discourse speaks in terms of the victims—the millions of families now without breadwinners or homes.
Most of the coverage looks up at CEOs, not down at the people who they –and their businesses—robbed by design, as Bob Dylan once put it, “not with a gun but a fountain pen.”
Sometimes, we don’t see what’s in front of our faces. No one who has followed the details of the catastrophe can deny that a financial failure was facilitated by the media failure to follow its trajectory and detail its criminality, causing inattention and denial within a distracted public, including its activist wing.
When most of us think of crime, we think of gangsters, not banksters, wrong-doers who can be shamed, named and if possible prosecuted. Conditioned by years of movie-going and TV watching, we look for bad guys, individuals, not institutions with well elaborated schemes designed to transfer your wealth to their vaults.
In that respect, Bernie Madoff was the perfect villain, a poster child for financiers gone wild. Who doesn’t want to kick a “Ponzi King” when he’s down? Alas, Madoff’s $65 billion dollar fraud was child’s play when compared to what the bigger firms pulled off.
There is another frame, which has yet to be adopted by the left or the mainstream media. It was articulated simply by Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, a publication more at home with Groucho Marx that Karl. He wrote of the meltdown “[This] may well turn out to be greatest non-violent crime against humanity in history … never before have so few done so much to so many.”
This is the way I came to see the problem, as I followed the money and examined how it was made. We are talking about what’s known as a criminal enterprise, a cabal, not simply a few high profile marauders.
It is the kind of crime that needs to be prosecuted under the Rico laws that not only recognize, but go after real world, not imaginary, criminal conspiracies.
As I explain in my film “Plunder: The Crime of Our Time” (Disinfo Films) and more detailed companion book, “The Crime Of Our Time” (Disinfomation) there were three interconnected rings in this circus.How we can be experiencing the largest economic meltdown in decades with no real mass... more-
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The GOP Strategy on Obstructing Financial Reform: Make Democrats Look Like Patsies for the Street
Senate Republicans today debuted their new strategy for financial reform: Refuse to cooperate with Democrats on grounds that the Dems are too willing to give Wall Street what it wants.
I’m not making this up.
In a Senate floor speech Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Republicans couldn’t support the legislation that emerged from Chris Dodd’s banking committee because it “institutionalizes” future taxpayer bailouts of the Street, giving the Federal Reserve “enhanced emergency lending authority that is far too open to abuse.” Senator Bob Corker, a senior Republican on the committee who had spent many weeks negotiating the bill with Dodd, huffed that Dodd’s final bill provides “the ability to have bailouts.”
Sen. Lamar Alexander, a member of the Senate Republican leadership, blasted Dodd for partisanship — “Dodd jerked the rug out from under Sen. Corker and went back into a partisan bill” — that is, partisanship toward Wall Street. Alexander said Republicans will hold out for a plan “that would end the practice of too big to fail and that would make certain that we don’t perpetually use taxpayer dollars to bail out Wall Street.”
Republicans have been looking for a way to oppose Senate Dems on financial reform without looking like patsies for the Street. And now they think they’ve found it — by trying to make Democrats look like patsies for the Street. The strategy is surely the handiwork of Republican pollster Frank Luntz who for months has been telling Republicans “the single best way to kill any legislation is to link it to the Big Bank Bailout.” (See Luntz’s memo.)
Let’s be clear: The Dodd bill doesn’t go nearly far enough to rein in the Street. It allows so-called “specialized” derivatives to be traded without regulatory oversight; its capital requirements are weak; it gives far too much discretion to regulators, who, as we’ve seen, can fall asleep at the switch; it does nothing about conflicts of interest within credit rating agencies that rate the issues of the companies that put food on their plates; it puts a consumer protection agency inside the Fed whose consumer bureau didn’t protect consumers; it doesn’t do anything to control the size of banks; it delays dealing with other hard issues by assigning them to vaguely-defined “studies;” and, yes, it preserves the possibility that the Fed could launch another bank bailout.
But the Street thinks the Dodd bill goes way too far, and wants its Republican allies to water it down with more loopholes, studies, and regulatory discretion. Republicans figure they can accommodate the Street by refusing to give the Dems the votes they need unless the Dems agree to weaken the bill — while Republicans simultaneously tell the public they’re strengthening the bill and reducing the likelihood of future bailouts.
It’s a bizarre balancing act for the Republicans, reflecting the two opposing constituencies they have to appease — big business and Wall Street, on the one hand, and the emerging Tea Partiers, on the other. The Tea Partiers hate the Wall Street bailout as much as the left does. It was the bailout that “really got this ball rolling,” says Joseph Farah, publisher of WorldNetDaily, a website popular among Tea Party adherents. “That’s where the anger, where the frustration took root.”
The awkward fact, of course, is that the bank bailout originated with George W. Bush and a Republican congress. “Without this rescue plan,” Bush told the nation in September 2008, “the costs to the American economy could be disastrous.” New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg, the leading Republican negotiator of the bailout bill, warned that without the bank bailout, “the trauma, the chaos, and the disruption to everyday Americans’ lives would be overwhelming.”
Republicans figure the public’s attention span is so short they won’t remember, and that the public understands so little about the details of financial reform that Republicans can weaken the Dodd bill without leaving any fingerprints.
I have a suggestion for Senate Democrats: Don’t let them get away with it. Smoke the Republicans out. Respond to their criticism that the Dodd bill leaves open the possibility that some future bank will become too big to fail by amending the bill to limit the size of banks to $100 billion of assets — so no bank can become too big, period. Challenge the Republicans to join you in voting for the amendment. If they decline, force them to explain themselves to their local Tea Partiers.Senate Republicans today debuted their new strategy for financial reform: Refuse to... more-
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USA Falls Behind in Solar Technology
If you still have a job you might be able to afford Chinese solar panels to power your main-street USA shanty home.
Quote from article: "Take Massachusetts-based Evergreen Solar, Inc (Nasdaq: ESLR). In 2008, it used $58 million in government aid to open a new Massachusetts factory to build silicon wafers and cells and assemble solar panels. But in November 2009, it announced the assembly of solar panels would be moved to Wuhan, China, where solar panel manufacturing will cost far less than in the United States."
I guess we still have a corporate greed problem in this country.... go figure.
Whole article here: http://www.nuwireinvestor.com/articles/united-states-renewable-energy-sector-is-falling-behind-the-rest-54977.aspxIf you still have a job you might be able to afford Chinese solar panels to power your... more -
US Received 8.5% Return From Bailouts: Report
U.S. taxpayers earned an annualized 8.5 percent return from the government's bailout of 49 financial firms, underscoring efforts by the industry to speed up repayments and warrant repurchases, according to a report by SNL Financial.
Firms such as Citigroup [C 4.245 0.065 (+1.56%) ], which still has common shares held by the U.S. Treasury Department, and rivals that have made partial redemptions were excluded from the analysis, SNL Financial said in a statement Monday.
Proceeds from Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) warrant repurchases and auctions led to a surge in returns through March 30, SNL said.
So far, since the start of the program in late 2008, 64 institutions have fully repaid government aid.
For months, taxpayers balked at government efforts to help banks, which they saw as the main culprit behind the worst U.S. recession since the 1930s, as the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers shook global financial markets in late 2008.
The biggest banks, such as Goldman Sachs [GS 172.71 2.49 (+1.46%) ], repaid the money they owed the Treasury last year and earlier this year. Still, more than 600 smaller banks are left in the program, and owe roughly $130 billion to taxpayers.
Goldman alone produced a return of 20 percent to taxpayers at the time of repayment in July last year, according to SNL.
Overall, firms that have exited the programs, plus those 18 that have fully redeemed their TARP preferred stock but still have their warrants held by the Treasury, returned 7.6 percent in the period, SNL Financial noted.U.S. taxpayers earned an annualized 8.5 percent return from the government's... more-
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Top 10 stories of 2009: Obama, Afghanistan, Pirates, and more (Video)
I know the year's not over yet, but it's close enough to call-out the top ten news stories. In this video round-up I focused on the big stories and the stories that will impact 2010 and beyond. Think I missed one? Want to get your bets in early on top stories of 2010? Hit us up in comments.
Top 10 News Headlines of 2009 (Video)
Recently on the Current News Blog:
- Copenhagen round-up: Walkouts, Wind farms, Monckton, Climategate and Video
- Uganda's new laws: Anti-gay and FGM
- The Beast of Kandahar and conducting war via remote
- Spiral light over Oslo, Norway - Mystery SOLVED!
- Climategate: Gates that are not gates (a new series)I know the year's not over yet, but it's close enough to call-out the top... more-
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Have the bank bailouts worked?
News came out yesterday that the US government (and taxpayers) may actually make some money off of the TARP loans to banks. Now it's too soon to call the whole program profitable - these are only the banks that are able to repay now - and there are still a bunch left to come back.
But what if they all come back profitable? Should we call the TARP program a success? Does it mean that bailing out banks was the right plan for avoiding another Great Depression?
What do you think? Get involved in the conversation over here.News came out yesterday that the US government (and taxpayers) may actually make some... more-
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Floods in Rhode Island, Snowmageddon, and Other Disasters May Create Next Bailout Beggars
A couple weeks ago, Swiss Reinsurance Co. warned, “Natural disasters may cost insurers as much as $110 billion worldwide in 2010, five times more than last year when the U.S. escaped hurricane damage.” That was before the new round of massive flooding in the Northeastern US which has devastated Rhode Island.
The new floods are considered the worst in decades. This follows on the heels of Snowmageddon which dumped record-busting snow on the Northeastern US.
“The year is off to a very bad start from a loss perspective for the industry,” Michael Paisan of Stifel Nicolaus & Co. Will this deliver governments another bailout beggar at the steps of capitals across the world?
I can hear the argument already, “Congressman, we are simply too big to fail. If we don’t pay all our claimants, local economies will be destroyed.”
The next wave of corporate panhandlers is on their way …
http://wallstcheatsheet.com/breaking-news/floods-in-rhode-island-snowmageddon-and-other-disasters-may-create-next-bailout-beggars/?p=8892/A couple weeks ago, Swiss Reinsurance Co. warned, “Natural disasters may cost... more-
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Weekly Audit: How Superhero Hilda Solis is Winning the Fight for Workers’ Rights
By Zach Carter, Media Consortium blogger
While the poor judgment of top-level officials at Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget frequently makes the news, there is another, unrecognized economic crew doing terrific work: Officials at the Department of Labor are restoring workers’ rights after nearly a decade of neglect.
To top it all off, President Barack Obama appears ready to make another set of strong, though less high-profile, economic appointments that will help rein in Wall Street excess.
DoL All-Stars
As Esther Kaplan documents in a masterful piece for The Nation, the Department of Labor (DoL) has been transformed from an agency that enabled corporate excess to one that holds companies accountable. In less than a year, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and her team of deputies significantly leveled the playing field between ordinary workers and high-flying executives.
For decades, when conservatives have attempted to confront social problems, they’ve relied on the mantra of enforcement. If we had more cops, we’d fix everything. But as Kaplan documents, under President George W. Bush and his Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, the DoL simply stopped enforcing worker protection laws. From wage theft to mine safety, the Department essentially allowed corrupt employers to do anything they wanted.
That neglect has already ended. Armed with a budget of just $1.5 billion—that’s roughly 0.2% of the Troubled Asset Relief Program—Solis and company have cultivated a list of economic accomplishments that seemed impossible when they took office. As Kaplan details:
“Facing badly depleted enforcement ranks, Solis hired 710 additional enforcement staff, including 130 at OSHA and 250 for the crucial wage-and-hour division, upping inspectors by more than a third. Another hundred will come on next year to staff a crackdown on the misclassification of millions of employees as “independent contractors”–a dodge to avoid paying taxes and benefits–a move that has set off enormous buzz on business blogs. Her team took a plunger to the stagnant regulatory pipeline, moving forward new rules on coal mine dust, silica, and cranes and derricks. She restored prevailing wages for agricultural guest workers and is poised to restore reporting rules on ergonomic injuries.”
Fixing the Fed
Obama also appears ready to make another slate of strong economic appointments at the Federal Reserve, an agency stuffed with free-marketers who helped engineer both an economic catastrophe and resulting bailouts. Obama’s rumored picks—economists Janet Yellen and Peter Diamond and bank regulator Sarah Bloom Raskin—are aggressive about making the economy work for everyday citizens, as I emphasize for AlterNet.
If Congress passes financial reforms similar to what Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) has proposed, the Fed’s regulatory responsibilities will actually expand, despite its failures over the past decade. The Fed has never effectively regulated anything and it’s not very concerned with unemployment as an economic problem.
That makes Obama’s pending slate of officials who prioritize bank regulation and broader employment very important. Raskin, in particular, stands out with her strong record as a state banking regulator. If Obama ultimately nominates her, she’ll be the first pure regulator ever appointed to the Fed. The potential picks don’t make up for Obama’s reappointment of bailouteer Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve Chairman, but they do show that the President is capable of sound judgment.
Strengthening the Dodd bill
But the strength of Obama’s potential Fed nominees doesn’t justify the weakness of Dodd’s financial regulation bill. As Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now! reveal in interviews with economist Robert Johnson and ColorLines Editorial Director Kai Wright , the bill leaves plenty to be desired. Dodd is currently making the rounds and declaring that his bill will end the abuses giant banks deployed against the broader economy, but the truth is, the bill has largely been gutted by bank lobbyists. Here’s Johnson:
“We’re engaged in a Kabuki theater right now, hoping the material is too complex for the American people to understand, declaring victory, and yet basically encoding into law current practices of the banks. Every one of your listeners should ask the question, given this legislation, if the President, House and Senate pass it, will we be in a place where AIG couldn’t have happened, Lehman Brothers couldn’t have happened, Bear Stearns couldn’t have happened, and, more importantly, nine, ten percent unemployment caused by the banking crisis couldn’t have happened? I argue this bill does very little.”
The importance of trust-busting
So Dodd’s bill needs to be substantially strengthened as it moves through the Senate. But there’s plenty of other economic work to be done outside of Wall Street. As Barry C. Lynn and Phillip Longman explain for The Washington Monthly, the steady expansion of corporate monopolies has resulted in a fundamentally unstable economy.
The U.S. simply does not create jobs at the rate it once did, and companies aren’t held accountable to market forces like competition. Many of our monopolies are hidden, as Lynn and Longman note. Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s seem like competitors, but they’re owned by the same holding company. The same dynamic holds true in auto manufacturing, banking, pet food, health care and IT. Consumers think they’re choosing between competing goods and services, when in fact they’re shopping in different divisions of the same corporate Goliath.
All hope is not lost. As Laura Flanders emphasizes for GRITtv, the passage of health care reform proves that the Obama administration and Congress can make substantive progressive changes when they put their minds to it. The question is whether Obama is willing to limit his economic accomplishments to lower-level issues, or go big and take on the deep-pocketed corporate campaign contributors.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.By Zach Carter, Media Consortium blogger While the poor judgment of top-level... more-
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