MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
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Go to http://www.MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com and read articles and comments from other Americans on what they’ve witnessed in their communities around the country. While most of the population of California is now ILLEGAL, the problems, costs, assault to our culture by Mexico is EVERYWHERE. copy and pass it to your friends.
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OBAMA’S BANKSTER DONORS HAVE DESTROYED THE LIFE SAVINGS, AS INFESTED IN THEIR HOMES, OF MOST OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. NOT EVEN ONE HAS GONE TO PRISON. IN FACT, THESE BANKSTERS HAVE CONTINUED TO MAKE STAGGERING PROFITS, PAY OUT STAGGERING BONUSES, BUY NO REAL REGULATION, AND OWN THIS BANKSTER PRESIDENT!
FROM THE FLOOR OF THE SENATE, RIGHT IN THE FACE OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE:
“I’m not here to punish banks” BARACK OBAMA
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OBAMA HAS TWO AGENDAS. SERVICING BANKSTER DONORS, AND PUSHING OUR BORDERS OPEN FOR MORE ILLEGALS. HE KNOW WE WON’T BE PUNKED BY HIS PERFORMANCES THE SECOND TIME AROUND!
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“Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”
Posted on Tue, Feb. 15, 2011
Critics: Goldman should give back $2.9 billion to taxpayers
Greg Gordon
McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: February 15, 2011 07:50:45 PM
WASHINGTON — Irked that Goldman Sachs appears to have reaped a $2.9 billion taxpayer-aided windfall on an investment of a mere $20 million, some experts and watchdogs say the Wall Street giant should return the money to the U.S. Treasury.
"It's a very simple call to make," said Sylvain Raynes, a frequent Goldman critic who's an expert in the kinds of deals in which the investment bank landed an apparent jackpot. "They should never have been given this money, and they should give it back."
The assessment by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission also exposed a potentially huge regulatory omission in the rescue of the insurance giant American International Group, which was the conduit for more than $90 billion in tax dollars to U.S. and European banks.
It's now clear that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which quarterbacked the hurried, $182 billion bailout of AIG to avoid a meltdown of global financial markets, did little to guard against windfalls for major banks and investment banks.
The financial crisis panel's final report late last month found that Goldman's $2.9 billion payout came on "proprietary" trades — investments in which the firm used its own money rather than the more typical deals completed on behalf of clients.
The panel, inquiring into a McClatchy report last June, said that Goldman got $1.9 billion of the payoff after the taxpayer bailout of AIG began.
Critics say that in the rush to save AIG and avert systemic collapse of the financial markets, regulators treated Goldman like everyone else. But Goldman was different.
While most banks that got billions of dollars from AIG simply relayed the money to clients they'd insured against losses, Goldman got to collect a more than 100-fold return on a number of securities that soured, because none of its clients was involved.
The prospect of a repayment by Goldman — the firm that drew the most outrage over Wall Street's role in the financial crisis — would be welcome news now as President Barack Obama has been forced to propose huge cuts in federal programs as a way of dealing with a $1.6 trillion budget deficit for fiscal 2012.
Steve Ellis, of the government waste watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense, said that "It's up to the federal government to demand accountability and transparency" regarding Goldman's payout.
"We can't afford to shell out cash without asking hard questions and demanding that the very same actors that got the economy into this mess take some of the burden on themselves," he said.
Congress could try to impose a tax on banks' profits from the bailout or adopt some other legislation to "claw back" the money, but it would be difficult because Goldman received it unconditionally, said Michael Greenberger, a University of Maryland law professor who specializes in complex securities. The New York Fed attached no strings to the money and let AIG decide how much Goldman would get.
Goldman, which paid a whopping $31.6 billion in employee bonuses in the past two years, denies that the trades in question were proprietary, signaling that it has no plans to send more money back to Washington.
In 2009, Goldman was quick to repay a $10 billion loan from a Treasury Department program to bail out banks. Last summer, the firm paid an additional $550 million to settle a related civil fraud suit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Goldman spokesman Michael DuVally rejected the characterization of the AIG payment as a windfall.
"We used the money we received from AIG to meet our obligations to clients with whom we hedged on the other side of these trades," he said.
Joseph Mason, a finance professor at Louisiana State University-Baton Rouge who has advised federal banking regulatory agencies, said that most large banks manage their risks with so many contrary trades that assertions they profited from a particular deal "can be obviated very quickly."
The issue, however, goes to the heart of the controversy over whether any of the megabanks that helped cause the crisis got sweetheart deals as part of the bailout.
"In the heat of the moment, the Treasury and the Fed weren't worried about who was participating in the housing bubble . . . or their level of involvement" when they shelled out money, Mason said.
"You run up the market, you cause a nationwide crisis and you're given money to continue. That sounds to me like an incentive to go out and do it again."
The New York Fed said in a statement that the bailout protected Americans, as well as AIG's policyholders and trading partners "from the catastrophic consequences of AIG's disorderly failure during the worst financial crisis in generations, (and) allowed AIG to meet its contractual obligations without discrimination." A New York Fed spokesman declined to comment on whether taxpayers backstopped any other proprietary trades
Greenberger, however, sharply criticized the handling of the AIG bailout, naming Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke; Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the former New York Fed president; and Larry Summers, until recently Obama's chief economic adviser.
"This wasn't rocket science, what was going on," said Greenberger, who was a senior staffer at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission during the Clinton administration. "Anybody who understood this market knew that there was the potential for Goldman to later unwind proprietary trades. But the Obama administration and the Fed simply never inquired.
"They had all the power at that point. Goldman needed that money. They were on their knees, and that was the point at which hard bargaining should have been taking place."
However, Greenberger said he worries less about recovering taxpayer money than about preventing a future financial meltdown, because the banking industry is lobbying fiercely against rules implementing recent congressional overhauls by improving market transparency and limiting risk-taking.
AIG's big debts to Wall Street emanated from the decision of its highflying London-based Financial Products unit to write insurance-like protection for major banks and investment banks on some $78 billion in offshore securities, most backed by subprime or similarly dicey home loans. In many cases, the banks had written identical insurance protection for the buyers of the securities.
When the housing crash sank the securities' value, AIG was sent reeling toward bankruptcy by a chorus of banks demanding payment of tens of billions of dollars under the terms of the contracts, known as credit-default swaps.
Geithner, Treasury secretary Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke elected to save AIG from bankruptcy, partly to keep banks afloat. As part of the rescue, the New York Fed directed AIG to cover the full face value of $62 billion of most of its swap contracts with Goldman and other U.S. and European banks.
Goldman, which collected $14 billion of those funds, said it merely forwarded the money to investors for whom it had written the same protection.
But the inquiry panel concluded that Goldman cashed in on another $5 billion in more exotic bets on so-called synthetic securities that weren't back-to-back trades. With AIG Financial Products unworried about a housing downturn, Goldman paid 0.1 percent of the securities' face value, or about $5 million annually, to bet in 2005 and 2006 on the default of a set of securities that neither party owned.
DuVally, the Goldman spokesman, said that the deals "were client-related, not proprietary transactions," emphasizing that, "The idea that we received a . . . windfall is wrong."
DuVally declined to detail the hedges — bets in the opposite direction — and wouldn't say whether Goldman had anything close to $2.9 billion at stake.
Another $1 billion in Goldman-AIG trades had yet to be unwound as of July.
It's still unclear whether other banks also collected windfalls for proprietary bets.
The French colossus Societe Generale, investment bank Merrill Lynch (now owned by Bank of America) and Germany's Deutsche Bank collected a combined $22 billion from AIG as part of the 2008 settlements. Deutsche Bank also insured billions of dollars in securities backed by commercial real-estate loans.
Spokesmen for AIG and all three banks declined to comment.
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MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
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Go to http://www.MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com and read articles and comments from other Americans on what they’ve witnessed in their communities around the country. While most of the population of California is now ILLEGAL, the problems, costs, assault to our culture by Mexico is EVERYWHERE. copy and pass it to your friends.
THE CON JOB THAT IS BARACK OBAMA!
WSWS.org get on their free no ads E-NEWS!
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The media and Obama: Image and reality
28 December 2010
For the past two weeks the US media has been pumping out admiring commentaries on the “comeback” of Barack Obama. As if on signal, the man widely portrayed before and immediately after the November midterm elections as presiding over a failing presidency is being depicted as the protagonist of a political tour de force that has turned defeat at the polls into a triumph of reform legislation.
The key to this remarkable turnabout, according to the media narrative, is Obama’s turn to bipartisan collaboration with the Republicans, who will control the House of Representatives and have a larger presence in the Senate in the incoming 112th Congress. The stroke of genius that set the stage for ensuing legislative victories in the outgoing “lame duck” Congress was Obama’s announcement December 6 of a deal with the Republican leadership in the Senate to extend Bush-era tax cuts for the rich.
Many commentaries go even further, equating the measures enacted by Obama and the Democratic-led 111th Congress—fiscal stimulus, overhaul of health care, financial regulatory reform, repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t tell” in the military—with the major social reforms enacted under Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s and Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s.
All of this media mythmaking is ludicrously at odds with reality. Ignored is the fact that Obama has embraced a whole series of measures that he himself previously denounced as boondoggles to big business and the rich, including health care “reform” that excludes a public option and the extension of tax cuts to the top 2 percent of American earners.
The actual content of Obama’s supposedly newfound bipartisanship—in reality, Obama has sought from the day of his election to rehabilitate the Republican Party—is his wholesale capitulation to the demand of the ruling class for even bigger cuts in its taxes.
The historical analogies to Roosevelt and Johnson are absurd. All of Obama’s “reform” measures are, in fact, aimed at rolling back the social reforms passed in the 1930s and 1960s. His health care overhaul, for example, will slash health coverage for tens of millions of working people and reduce Medicare spending by $500 billion. It will boost the profits of the insurance companies by compelling people to purchase insurance on the private market.
Roosevelt, under the pressure of an explosive growth of working class struggles, sought to save the discredited capitalist system by instituting massive public works programs that hired hundreds of thousands of workers. He won the hatred of large sections of his own class by establishing government-owned and run enterprises such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, which brought electrical power to large sections of the South and Appalachia.
Obama and the Democratic leadership have adamantly rejected any government hiring programs and insisted on the primacy of the “free market.”
The financial regulatory reforms that Roosevelt instituted have since been dismantled, and nothing in Obama’s overhaul restores them, leaving the big banks free to continue their speculative activities.
One fact says a great deal about the reality of Obama’s policies: the reduction in the estate tax included in his tax-cut deal with the Republicans brings the tax on inherited wealth to its lowest level since 1931, prior to Roosevelt’s coming to power. Roosevelt during World War II pushed for the tax rate on the highest income tax bracket to be raised to 91 percent and imposed a cap on executive salaries.
Obama’s measures will provide an estimated $70 billion a year in tax breaks for the rich and hand over an additional $23 billion in estate tax cuts to 6,600 families.
The shift on Obama exemplifies the ceaseless efforts of the corporate-owned and controlled media to artificially create political realities by means of image making. Obama’s election was largely the result of a media marketing operation, backed and financed by sections of the ruling class that saw the need for a change in image and personnel after the foreign policy disasters of the Bush years and in the face of public hatred for Bush and the Republicans.
Now, the media is seeking to repackage and repair the badly discredited Obama administration. Why? Because it is dutifully doing the bidding of the financial aristocracy.
Obama is presently being built up because he has made clear that his cave-in on tax cuts for the rich is only the prelude to a further shift to the right on social policy. Appearing Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program, Obama aide Valerie Jarrett, a multimillionaire Chicago real estate investor who is described as Obama’s liaison to business, said Obama would focus in the immediate future on reining in the deficit and improving his relationship with American business.
The administration has already called for a freeze on non-defense discretionary spending and federal employee pay and backed proposals for cuts in Social Security benefits, increased taxes on consumption, and a broad “reform” of the tax system that will sharply reduce income taxes for the rich as well as corporate taxes.
The content of Obama’s so-called rebound is an accelerated attack on ever-broader sections of the working class.
Not accidentally, the media has in recent days largely dropped the Tea Party movement. Built up by the media in the pre-election period as a mass movement on the right reflecting popular angst over budget deficits and coercive government interference in the market, the Tea Party was used to shift Obama and the Democrats further to the right and engineer the Republican victory in November.
For the present at least, with that mission having been accomplished and Obama making all of the right moves, the Tea Party is being pushed to the background. It stands ready to be revived by the media when the ruling elite deems it politically expedient to do so.
Barry Grey
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ONE OF OBAMA’S GREATEST SUCCESSES FOR HIS WALL ST. BANKSTER PAYMASTERS IS MAKING SURE THERE WOULD BE NO REAL BANKSTER REFORM! ERGO FROM HIS FIRST DAY OBAMA HAD BUSH’S ARCHITECT FOR BANKSTER WELFARE, TIM GEITHNER ON BOARD, AND TWO OF THE BANKERS’ BIGGEST SLUTS, BARNEY FRANK AND CHRIS DODD HAMMERING OUT THE NO REAL REGULATION!
FROM THE FLOOR OF THE SENATE, RIGHT IN THE FACE OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE:
“I’m not here to punish banks” BARACK OBAMA
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OBAMA HAS TWO AGENDAS. SERVICING BANKSTER DONORS, AND PUSHING OUR BORDERS OPEN FOR MORE ILLEGALS. HE KNOW WE WON’T BE PUNKED BY HIS PERFORMANCES THE SECOND TIME AROUND!
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“Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”
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FROM CREOLE FOLKS
Obama Seeks Brother of "Chicago Mob Boss" for Top White House Post
The roaches and con-artist, fake journalist on cable news are all lying about William Daley being all this and all that, this man is an open borders, down with America, free trade globalist. MSNBC and Gretta "the Scientology" Van Susteren from Fox News are knowingly deceiving the public about D. Issa & his letter to "business owners"=which they made into such a BIG DAM DEAL, but no one says anything whenBarrack Hussein Obama, comes around with all of these shady bankers, hedge fund managers and Wall St. Tycoons, which he puts in his cabinet. All of Obama's meeting with Wall Street asking, "What can I do for you?" is never something covered by Keith Oberman or Rachel Maddow.
(Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama is considering naming William Daley, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive and former U.S. Commerce secretary, to a high-level administration post, possibly White House chief of staff, people familiar with the matter said.
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Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses
BY TIMOTHY P CARNEY
Editorial Reviews
Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?
Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers. In Obamanomics, investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics.
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Next year, I hope to do a better job of annoying ideologues; the people who got rich from doing things that created our financial problems, but are still in power; and Wall Street types who whine about how unfair it is to criticize their eight- and nine-digit pay packages from institutions that wouldn't be alive today were it not for taxpayer support.
Looking back at 2010, writing more about financial 'reform' would have been wise
By Allan Sloan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 28, 2010; 12:00 AM
Ihave performed a painful annual ritual ever since I began writing a column about 20 years ago: rereading my work for the year and telling you, my audience, about the things I got wrong and the things I wish I had done differently.
This past year, I wish I'd written more about financial reform - or as I call it, financial "reform." I use the quotation marks because I don't think the system is close to being reformed.
I suspected all along that there would be more talk than action - that's how things were after the Enron and WorldCom scandals and how they always seem to be - but I'm shocked by how little we've gotten right.
We didn't fix the major problems that led to the financial meltdown that produced the "Great Recession," obliterating millions of jobs and dreams. We've still got undercapitalized financial companies that are too big and too interconnected to be allowed to fail; trillions of dollars in asset-backed securities that no one except a handful of experts with access to ultra-expensive databases can begin to analyze, and an incentive system that gives Wall Street types huge incentives to take risks with shareholder and taxpayer money.
I wished I'd been louder and more shrill about breaking up these institutions, establishing publicly available real-time databases for asset-backed securities, and giving shareholders and the government five-year clawbacks for compensation paid to top executives and board members if a company fails or needs a bailout. It probably wouldn't have made any difference, but I'd feel better.
My only hope for real change is the consumer-protection operation run by Harvard bankruptcy professor Elizabeth Warren. I've stayed away from that topic because so much has been written about it, and I think so highly of Warren, whom I've known for many years, that I'm not sure I can summon up the requisite skepticism about her operation.
If she can, in fact, create and require institutions to use a brief disclosure statement, in readable type, that a high school graduate can understand in 15 minutes, she'll be doing God's work. She'll also be doing Mammon's, because we ultimately won't have capitalism in this country if we don't have fairness.
I've been unusually nice to the Federal Reserve this year, a contrast to my usual Fed-bashing and Fed-sniping. For much of my career, I've focused on the Fed's omissions and mistakes while most of my competitors kissed up to Alan Greenspan. Now, with the move in Washington to micromanage and restrain the Fed, I realized by rereading this year's columns that I've changed sides.
We need to have at least one Washington institution that can act quickly and decisively; God knows the Treasury, Congress and White House don't seem capable of it. Let's not screw up the Fed with political-correctness requirements. During Greenspan's now-not-so-glorious days as chairman, those requirements came from the left. Now, they come primarily from the ultra-right.
Finally, there's Social Security, a subject about which I've written a lot over the years, and I expect to write a lot more.
This year, I've managed to annoy almost everyone interested in the topic because I don't have a fixed ideological position. I think the Social Security trust fund has no economic value, but we should gradually monetize its $2.6 trillion in bonds to buy time while we change its benefit formula and increase its revenue.
I also think that switching to private accounts is nuts, because Social Security is an intergenerational transfer program designed to protect vulnerable old people, the disabled and orphans. It is not an investment program.
Finally, I've written that the program isn't a Ponzi scheme, because Ponzi promoters deceive you, while Social Security tells you everything you need to know about itself and is run by high-grade, honorable people.
Next year, I hope to do a better job of annoying ideologues; the people who got rich from doing things that created our financial problems, but are still in power; and Wall Street types who whine about how unfair it is to criticize their eight- and nine-digit pay packages from institutions that wouldn't be alive today were it not for taxpayer support.
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