Senate report on Wall Street crash: The criminalization of the American ruling class

Senate report on Wall Street crash: The criminalization of the American ruling class


OBAMA PUNKED US BIG TIME WITH HIS PERFORMANCE OF “CHANGE”… MEANWHILE HIS BANKSTER DONORS HAVE CONTINUE THEIR WHOLESALE LOOTING, AND LA RAZA ILLEGALS HAVE POURED OVER OUR BORDERS AND INTO OUR JOBS.


OBAMA HAS VOWED TO BOTH HIS BANKSTER DONORS AND LA RAZA THAT HE’S ONLY JUST BEGUN!

CAN WE AFFORD MORE OF OBAMA’S “CHANGE”???

FROM THE BLOG, PLEASE EMAIL TO YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY, AND POSTS ON CRAIGS LIST.

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Go to http://www.MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com

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NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY HAS TAKEN MORE BANKSTER LOOT THAN BARACK OBAMA! WHAT DID THE BANKSTERS KNOW ABOUT THEIR BOY THAT WE GOT PUNKED ON? NOW FOR 2012, OBAMA WILL ONLY NEED THE VOTES OF LA RAZA! TOWARD THAT END, OBAMA HAS PROMISED LA RAZA OPEN BORDERS, ENDLESS PLOYS FOR BIT BY BIT BY BIT AMNESTY, NO E-VERIFY, AND CONTINUED NON-ENFORCEMENT.

WHEN OBAMA STARTS PERFORMING HIS “CHANGE” FOR 2012, HE WILL TELL THE AMERICAN PEOPLE THAT HE’S EXPORTED 389,000 ILLEGALS BACK OVER OUR BORDERS. WHAT HE WON’T TELL THE AMERICAN PEOPLE IS THAT HE’S LET GO 400,00 MEXICAN CRIMINALS (SEE BOTTOM OF THIS POST)


THE AMERICAN RULING CLASS has long demanded OPEN BORDERS to keep the nation flooded with "cheap" Mexican labor. The Mexican occupation may depress wages from $300 to $400 BILLION PER YEAR. But how cheap is it? In Los Angeles County, illegals make up for the miserable wage with $600 million in welfare! Probably every county in California has soaring welfare costs for illegals. Along the Mexican gang and crime tidal wave. In the small town of Salinas, CA, population about 130K, there have been three dozen gang murders in two years! There are more Mexican gang murders in Los Angeles than all the murders of any E.U. country!

No one in our history has HISPANDERED more than BARACK OBAMA, who has infested his administration with LA RAZA SUPREMACIST, like his rabidly racist LA RAZA PARTY MEMBER, HILDA SOLIS as Sec. of Labor.

When Obama brought in his new chief of staff, DALEY, it was because he was a J.P. Morgan bankster and like Obama, an ADVOCATE FOR OPEN BORDERS. J.P. Morgan is one of Obama's biggest bankster donors and one of the biggest bankster crime waves in American history. If you're not a bankster, or LA RAZA PARTY MEMBER, you're unlikely to get a job in the Obama administration! Even Obama's judge Sonia Sotomayer was nominated because she's a "wise Latina bitch", LA RAZA PARTY MEMBER and panders to the corporate interests as does the entire SUPREME COURT.

CRIMINAL BANKSTERS WELLS FARGO has long had their CALIFORNIA MORTGAGE LICENSE REVOKED (since 2003) for corporate fraud with their mortgage products. WELLS FARGO went back into court and demanded their CA MORTGAGE LICENSE restored. The Court said FUCK YOU! Wells Fargo simply declared itself above CA law, and went on fucking over a nation with their mortgage products. Then just before the collapse of the economy, caused by the very banksters Obama is in bed with, the BANKSTERS demanded supremacy over existing bankruptcy laws and rewrote them so that consumers could not seek redress in Court if victimizes by mortgage products such as those perpetrated by WELLS FARGO. The banksters used one of the most corrupt politicians in American history, BUSH WAR PROFITEER, Obama donor, and LA RAZA ADVOCATE for open borders, SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN fronted the BANKSTERS BANKRUPTCY REFORM bill to law. Voting to support the banksters was BOXER, BIDEN, CLINTON but NOT Obama. In fact, Obama said he would reverse the "reform", but as we've all been witness to, Obama likes to perform his "populist" routine, even as he's in the backroom servicing these bankster donors. When Obama and his bankster infested administration was handing out NO-STRINGS bailouts, he danced around the bankruptcy issue and made sure his bankster donors got any and all they wanted with ABSOLUTELY NO STRINGS. Obama knows to go limp when Wall St. points their fingers to his knees he should fall on!

WELLS FARGO has gone on to make massive profits from the very foreclosures they cause.

WELLS FARGO is a generous donor to the MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA, and has long exploited illegals and the American people by handing out millions of dollars of mortgages to illegals using stolen identities (Mexicans are big time thieves), and fraudulent documents.

WELLS FARGO received a staggering fine for banking services to the MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS.

WELLS FARGO is one of the WAR PROFITEER, Dianne Feinstein's biggest donors!

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Lou Dobbs Tonight

Monday, November 12, 2007

Mortgage giants Wells Fargo and Banks of America are accused of slapping dubious fees on homeowners struggling to save their homes. With fewer new mortgages being written, these

companies appear to be leaning on these lucrative fees to stay profitable—with devastating consequences for homeowners. We’ll have that report.

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“Wells Fargo, for instance, which has leeched $25 billion in bailout money, bought an inadvertently hilarious full-page ad in The Times to whine about the junkets to Las Vegas and elsewhere it was forced to cancel because of public outrage.” --- Maureen Dowd, NTimes
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FROM THE ARTICLE BELOW:
The financial institutions included in the study were Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley, as well as the California Bankers Assn., the California Independent Bankers and the California Mortgage Bankers Assn.

latimes.com

Amid bailouts, banks spent big to thwart foreclosure legislation

The $70 million spent in California on lobbying fees and political contributions came at the same time the banks were getting billions in federal taxpayer bailouts to keep them from collapsing.

By Marc Lifsher, Los Angeles Times

8:25 PM PDT, April 5, 2011

Reporting from Sacramento
Through the depths of the recession, major Wall Street banks and other financial institutions spent nearly $70 million in California to try to defeat or water down California legislation aimed at slowing real estate foreclosures.

The oney, spent on lobbying fees and political contributions, came from 2007 to 2010 — at the same time the banks were getting billions of dollars in federal taxpayer bailouts to keep them from collapsing.

A report commissioned by the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment criticized the banks and mortgage lenders for spending the money in the political arena rather than working harder to keep people in their homes.


There's no doubt that the banking industry is spending millions of dollars in an effort to advance its agenda in Sacramento," said Amy Schur, the alliance's executive director. "Too often, their agenda means less regulation for the banks and more freedom to operate at will.

Dustin Hobbs, a spokesman for the California Mortgage Bankers Assn., defended the lobbying and contributions by banks and their allies.

"Everyone has a right to have a voice in important policy discussions — both consumers and businesses," he said. "In California in recent years, we've seen a tremendous increase in the number of bills proposed that would have an impact on the real estate, finance industry."

"The financial institutions included in the study were Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley, as well as the California Bankers Assn., the California Independent Bankers and the California Mortgage Bankers Assn.

Over the four-year period, banks and financial institutions spent $23.3 million on lobbying and $45.9 million on campaign contributions to candidates, initiative campaigns, political party organizations and other groups.

An example of a bill the banks were against, Schur said, was SB 1275, sponsored by Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) and Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco). It would have required mortgage servicers to complete negotiations aimed at modifying a loan before moving to foreclose.


The bill got only 30 out of 41 needed votes to pass the Assembly, with 12 Democrats failing to vote on the proposal even though Steinberg was a top caucus leader.

"The banking industry and their lobbyists worked very, very hard in killing it," Schur said. The bill has been re-introduced this year.


Hobbs said the California Mortgage Bankers Assn. has supported bills that helped homeowners, including a 2009 measure that required loan servicers and homeowners to talk directly with each other to try to prevent a foreclosure. The bill provided extra time for renters to stay in a house when a landlord had been foreclosed upon and gave cities tools to ensure that foreclosed properties were maintained.

Last year, the association supported a bill that allowed homeowners to sell their properties for less than the value of their original loan and not be required to still owe the difference to the bank, Hobbs said.

Another trade group, the California Bankers Assn., represents all the major banking institutions that operate in the state. Spokeswoman Beth Mills said that members of the group have participated in programs that "helped folks to stay in their homes whenever possible."

There were half a million foreclosures in the state in 2010, and that total isn't expected to change much this year, said Kevin Stein, associate director of the California Reinvestment Coalition, which advocates to bring equality in financial and housing services to low-income citizens.

"The reality is the banks are stronger in the Legislature than the consumer groups," Stein said. "In a time of unprecedented crisis in mortgage lending and foreclosures, we should have seen better and more legislation from the folks in Sacramento."

He said his group and its allies hope that the Democratic majorities in both houses of the Legislature and the new Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, will pass housing-related bills that previously died or were vetoed by former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"I think this year will be different because the problems have only gotten worse," Stein said.

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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1949085/posts

E-Verify for Mortgage Applications (fraudulent claims from illegal immigrant)
Rep. Kenny Marchant Proposes Bill to use E-Verify for Mortgage Applications

Tuesday, February 9, 2010, 9:56 AM EST - posted on NumbersUSA

Rep. Kenny Marchant (R-Texas) has offered the Mortgage E-Verify Act that would require a mortgagor to be verified through E-Verify when applying for a modification of a home loan owned by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.
"As a member of the House Financial Services Committee, I am happy to introduce my bill, the Mortgage E-Verify Act, which would require, as a condition for modification of a home mortgage loan held by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac or insured by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), that the mortgagor be verified under the E-Verify program," Rep. Marchant said in a press release. "My bill will potentially save millions by cutting down on fraudulent claims from illegal immigrants and protect taxpayers from subsidizing the restructuring or renegotiation mortgages of illegal immigrants."

Rep. Marchant's bill is a result of a major case in Nevada where a loan officer submitted false income and employment documentation to help illegal aliens secure FHA loans. The scam totaled $6.2 million in loans with many going into default, costing HUD nearly $2 million. The loan officer was found guilty on 32 counts of submitting false information.

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“Rightly or wrongly, the bankers seem to believe that a return to business as usual is just around the corner.” PAUL KRUGMAN

NEW YORK TIMES
April 27, 2009

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Money for Nothing

By PAUL KRUGMAN

On July 15, 2007, The New York Times published an article with the headline “The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age.” The most prominently featured of the “new titans” was Sanford Weill, the former chairman of Citigroup, who insisted that he and his peers in the financial sector had earned their immense wealth through their contributions to society.

Soon after that article was printed, the financial edifice Mr. Weill took credit for helping to build collapsed, inflicting immense collateral damage in the process. Even if we manage to avoid a repeat of the Great Depression, the world economy will take years to recover from this crisis.

All of which explains why we should be disturbed by an article in Sunday’s Times reporting that pay at investment banks, after dipping last year, is soaring again — right back up to 2007 levels.

Why is this disturbing? Let me count the ways.

First, there’s no longer any reason to believe that the wizards of Wall Street actually contribute anything positive to society, let alone enough to justify those humongous paychecks.

Remember that the gilded Wall Street of 2007 was a fairly new phenomenon. From the 1930s until around 1980 banking was a staid, rather boring business that paid no better, on average, than other industries, yet kept the economy’s wheels turning.

So why did some bankers suddenly begin making vast fortunes? It was, we were told, a reward for their creativity — for financial innovation. At this point, however, it’s hard to think of any major recent financial innovations that actually aided society, as opposed to being new, improved ways to blow bubbles, evade regulations and implement de facto Ponzi schemes.

Consider a recent speech by Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, in which he tried to defend financial innovation. His examples of “good” financial innovations were (1) credit cards — not exactly a new idea; (2) overdraft protection; and (3) subprime mortgages. (I am not making this up.) These were the things for which bankers got paid the big bucks?

Still, you might argue that we have a free-market economy, and it’s up to the private sector to decide how much its employees are worth. But this brings me to my second point: Wall Street is no longer, in any real sense, part of the private sector. It’s a ward of the state, every bit as dependent on government aid as recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a k a “welfare.”

I’m not just talking about the $600 billion or so already committed under the TARP. There are also the huge credit lines extended by the Federal Reserve; large-scale lending by Federal Home Loan Banks; the taxpayer-financed payoffs of A.I.G. contracts; the vast expansion of F.D.I.C. guarantees; and, more broadly, the implicit backing provided to every financial firm considered too big, or too strategic, to fail.

One can argue that it’s necessary to rescue Wall Street to protect the economy as a whole — and in fact I agree. But given all that taxpayer money on the line, financial firms should be acting like public utilities, not returning to the practices and paychecks of 2007.

Furthermore, paying vast sums to wheeler-dealers isn’t just outrageous; it’s dangerous. Why, after all, did bankers take such huge risks? Because success — or even the temporary appearance of success — offered such gigantic rewards: even executives who blew up their companies could and did walk away with hundreds of millions. Now we’re seeing similar rewards offered to people who can play their risky games with federal backing.

So what’s going on here? Why are paychecks heading for the stratosphere again? Claims that firms have to pay these salaries to retain their best people aren’t plausible: with employment in the financial sector plunging, where are those people going to go?

No, the real reason financial firms are paying big again is simply because they can. They’re making money again (although not as much as they claim), and why not? After all, they can borrow cheaply, thanks to all those federal guarantees, and lend at much higher rates. So it’s eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may be regulated.

Or maybe not. There’s a palpable sense in the financial press that the storm has passed: stocks are up, the economy’s nose-dive may be leveling off, and the Obama administration will probably let the bankers off with nothing more than a few stern speeches. Rightly or wrongly, the bankers seem to believe that a return to business as usual is just around the corner.

We can only hope that our leaders prove them wrong, and carry through with real reform. In 2008, overpaid bankers taking big risks with other people’s money brought the world economy to its knees. The last thing we need is to give them a chance to do it all over again.

STAGGERING COST OF ILLEGALS ALIENS IN AMERICA

Aliens In America

Taxpayers Taken To The Cleaners

By Frosty Wooldridge

4-10-8

Illegal alien migration into the United States costs American taxpayers $346 billion annually reported by the National Research Council. While employers of illegal aliens rake-in billions of dollars, the US citizens subsidize what may be called organized "Slavery in 21st Century America."

While Congress facilitates outsourcing, insourcing and offshoring of American jobs by the thousands weekly, that same Congress imports 182,000 legal immigrant monthly who need jobs. Another estimated 100,000 illegal aliens arrive each month without jobs. All those immigrants seize jobs from American citizens at slave wages.

What happens to the American taxpayer?

"Immigrants are poorer, pay less tax, and are more likely to receive public benefits than American citizens," said Edwin Rubenstein, reporting on the National Research Council's new book: "The New Americans: Economic, Demographics and Fiscal Effects of Immigration." The Social Contract Winter 2007-08. www.thesoicalcontract.com

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THE ENTIRE REASON THE BORDERS ARE LEFT OPEN IS TO CUT WAGES!

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The danger, as Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson argues, is that of “importing poverty” in the form of a new underclass—a permanent group of working poor.

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“We could cut unemployment in half simply by reclaiming the jobs taken by illegal workers,” said Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, co-chairman of the Reclaim American Jobs Caucus. “President Obama is on the wrong side of the American people on immigration. The president should support policies that help citizens and legal immigrants find the jobs they need and deserve rather than fail to enforce immigration laws.”

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“Obama’s rejection of any serious jobs program is part of a conscious class war policy. Two years after the financial crisis and the multi-trillion dollar bailout of the banks, the administration is spearheading a campaign by corporations to sharply increase the exploitation of the working class, using the “new normal” of mass unemployment to force workers to accept lower wages, longer hours, and more brutal working conditions.” WSWS.ORG

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OBAMA’S ONLY JOBS PLAN IS CALLED AMNESTY!

Lou Dobbs Tonight

Friday, October 16, 2009

E-Verify- the single most successful federal program aimed at keeping illegal immigrants out of the workforce- is once again threatened. This time, E-Verify was stripped from a Senate Amendment behind closed doors and without explanation. Instead of becoming a permanent program E-verify has been reduced to only three years. Critics are calling this a stall tactic and an attempt at killing an employment enforcement system. We will have a full report tonight.

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“The principal beneficiaries of our current immigration policy are affluent Americans who hire immigrants at substandard wages for low-end work. Harvard economist George Borjas estimates that American workers lose $190 billion annually in depressed wages caused by the constant flooding of the labor market at the low-wage end.” Christian Science Monitor

MOST OF THE FORTUNE 500 ARE GENEROUS DONORS TO LA RAZA – THE MEXICAN FASCIST POLITICAL PARTY. THESE FIGURES ARE DATED. CNN CALCULATES THAT WAGES ARE DEPRESSED $300 - $400 BILLION PER YEAR!

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“On the other side of the social divide is an uninhibited orgy of greed, documented most recently by a Wednesday story in the New York Times (“Signs of Swagger, Wallets out, Wall Street Celebrates.”

Thanksgiving in America

US corporations shatter profit records

25 November 2010

US corporations took in $1.659 trillion in the third quarter, breaking records going back 60 years, according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. It was the seventh consecutive quarter of profit growth at “some of the fastest rates in history” according to the New York Times.

If any more proof were needed, the third quarter profit record exposes the lie promoted by Democrats and Republicans alike that only the “free market” and private businesses can reverse the nation’s 9.6 percent unemployment rate. The corporations and banks are sitting on a cash horde in the trillions of dollars. This money is not being used to hire workers, but to line the pockets of the executives and top shareholders.

The profit bonanza that lasted from July through September eclipsed the old record of $1.655 trillion established in the third quarter of 2006—just as the money-mad speculation of the financial elite was hurtling the US and world economy toward the precipice of its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The resulting financial crisis, which erupted in the autumn of 2008, threatened a total collapse of the global financial system. In response, the governments of the world, led by the US, used the disaster to hand over tens of trillions in public wealth to the very finance houses that triggered the crisis. This process continues, as demonstrated by the International Monetary Fund/European Union-dictated rescue of the Irish banks this week.

The enormous profit realized by US corporations in the third quarter are only the latest indication that the Bush-Obama bailout of the financial and corporate elite has achieved its desired aim of protecting the personal fortunes of the rich:

*Annual bonuses rose by 11 percent for executives at the 450 largest US corporations last fiscal year, according to a recent survey published by the Wall Street Journal. Overall, median compensation—including salaries, bonuses, stocks, options and other incentives—rose by three percent to $7.3 million in 2009. Shareholder returns increased by 29 percent.

*An October survey by the Wall Street Journal found that employees at 35 of the biggest banks, investment banks, hedge funds, money management firms, and securities exchanges will be paid a record $144 billion in 2010.

*According to Forbes magazine, the net worth of the 400 richest Americans increased by 8 percent in 2010, to $1.37 trillion, more than the GDP of India, population 1.2 billion.

These vast fortunes have been made possible through the impoverishment of the working class, the vast majority of the population that must work in order to maintain itself.

*In 2009, 15 percent of all US households, about 50 million people, went part or all of the year without enough food to eat, according to a recent report from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). More than a third of these households, home to one million children, went without meals on a regular basis.

*A record 49.9 million US adults went without health insurance for at least part of the past year, up from 46 million in 2008, according to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The uninsured now constitute 26.2 percent of the total adult population, more than one in four, up from 24.5 percent two years ago.

*Average annual wages for US workers fell by $457 in 2009, and the median annual wage fell by $247 to $26,261, according to recently updated data from the Social Security Administration (SSA).

*The US Census Bureau found that about 44 million Americans were living in poverty in 2009, the highest number on record and an increase of 3.8 million in one year. Nearly 19 million Americans were living in extreme poverty in 2009, defined as half of the official poverty level, an increase of 11 percent in one year.

This sampling—many similar statistics could be cited—paints a portrait of a financial oligarchy literally gorging itself at the expense of the population. Yet this reality, which permeates every aspect of life in the US, has only whetted the appetite of the elite and its political servants.

The holiday season finds the lame duck 111th Congress putting the finishing touches on two years of wealth redistribution to the rich. It is almost certain to extend Bush-era income tax cuts for the richest Americans.

On November 30, five days after the Thanksgiving holiday, unemployment benefits will expire for 1.2 million workers due to Congressional inaction. By Christmas and the New Year, this figure will swell to 2 million. The fate of these workers and the several million children who depend on them, tossed out without cash income into the worst job market in seven decades, is of little consequence to the millionaires and multi-millionaires who populate Congress.

One result of these policies is that more people than ever, including those with jobs, are forced to turn to soup kitchens, even on a day when families traditionally gather for a holiday associated with the “bountiful harvest.” Charities across the country are reporting record demand for help on Thanksgiving—a holiday established at a national level by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 to honor the material abundance of the Republic, even in the midst of the Civil War.

On the other side of the social divide is an uninhibited orgy of greed, documented most recently by a Wednesday story in the New York Times (“Signs of Swagger, Wallets out, Wall Street Celebrates.”) From cosmetic plastic surgery to high-priced art auctions, from rental properties in the Hamptons to bachelor parties that cost tens of thousands of dollars, “Wall Street’s moneyed elite are breathing easier again,” the article states.

The stranglehold over society and the economy exercised by this parasitic social layer, this modern-day aristocracy, must be broken once and for all.

Tom Eley

Wsws.org… get on their free no ads E-NEWS!
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GET THIS BOOK!

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.

Congressman Ron Paul says, “Every libertarian and free-market conservative needs to read Obamanomics.” And Johan Goldberg, columnist and bestselling author says, “Obamanomics is conservative muckraking at its best and an indispensable field guide to the Obama years.”

If you’ve wondered what’s happening to America, as the federal government swallows up the financial sector, the auto industry, and healthcare, and enacts deficit exploding “stimulus packages,” this book makes it all clear—it’s a big scam. Ultimately, Obamanomics boils down to this: every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich, and those somebodies are friends of Barack. This book names the names—and it will make your blood boil.

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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.

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. In this explosive book, Carney reveals:

* The Great Health Care Scam—Obama’s backroom deals with drug companies spell corporate profits and more government control

* The Global Warming Hoax—Obama has bought off industries with a pork-filled bill that will drain your wallet for Al Gore’s agenda

* Obama and Wall Street—“Change” means more bailouts and a heavy Goldman Sachs presence in the West Wing (including Rahm Emanuel)

* Stimulating K Street—The largest spending bill in history gave pork to the well-connected and created a feeding frenzy for lobbyists

* How the GOP needs to change its tune—drastically—to battle Obamanomics

If you’ve wondered what’s happening to our country, as the federal government swallows up the financial sector, the auto industry, and healthcare, and enacts deficit exploding “stimulus packages” that create make-work government jobs, this book makes it all clear—it’s a big scam. Ultimately, Obamanomics boils down to this: every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich, and those somebodies are friends of Barack. This book names the names—and it will make your blood boil.

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Praise for Obamanomics

“The notion that ‘big business’ is on the side of the free market is one of progressivism’s most valuable myths. It allows them to demonize corporations by day and get in bed with them by night. Obamanomics is conservative muckraking at its best. It reveals how President Obama is exploiting the big business mythology to undermine the free market and stick it to entrepreneurs, taxpayers, and consumers. It’s an indispensable field guide to the Obama years.”

—Jonha Goldberg, LA Times columnist and best-selling author

“‘Every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich.’ With this astute observation, Tim Carney begins his task of laying bare the Obama administration’s corporatist governing strategy, hidden behind the president’s populist veneer. This meticulously researched book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how Washington really works.”

—David Freddoso, best-selling author of The Case Against Barack Obama

“Every libertarian and free-market conservative who still believes that large corporations are trusted allies in the battle for economic liberty needs to read this book, as does every well-meaning liberal who believes that expansions of the welfare-regulatory state are done to benefit the common people.”

—Congressman Ron Paul

“It’s understandable for critics to condemn President Obama for his ‘socialism.’ But as Tim Carney shows, the real situation is at once more subtle and more sinister. Obamanomics favors big business while disproportionately punishing everyone else. So-called progressives are too clueless to notice, as usual, which is why we have Tim Carney and this book.”

—Thomas E. Woods, Jr., best-selling author of Meltdown and The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to American History

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• Hardcover: 256 pages

• Publisher: Regnery Press (November 30, 2009)

• Language: English

• ISBN-10: 1596986123

• ISBN-13: 978-1596986121

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ARE AMAZED AT HOW UTTERLY BRAZEN THESE CORPORATE OWNED POLITICIANS ARE?

GET THIS BOOK!

Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies

by Michelle Malkin

Editorial Reviews

In her shocking new book, Malkin digs deep into the records of President Obama's staff, revealing corrupt dealings, questionable pasts, and abuses of power throughout his administration.

From the Inside Flap

The era of hope and change is dead....and it only took six months in office to kill it.

Never has an administration taken office with more inflated expectations of turning Washington around. Never have a media-anointed American Idol and his entourage fallen so fast and hard. In her latest investigative tour de force, New York Times bestselling author Michelle Malkin delivers a powerful, damning, and comprehensive indictment of the culture of corruption that surrounds Team Obama's brazen tax evaders, Wall Street cronies, petty crooks, slum lords, and business-as-usual influence peddlers. In Culture of Corruption, Malkin reveals:

* Why nepotism beneficiaries First Lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are Team Obama's biggest liberal hypocrites--bashing the corporate world and influence-peddling industries from which they and their relatives have benefited mightily

* What secrets the ethics-deficient members of Obama's cabinet--including Hillary Clinton--are trying to hide

* Why the Obama White House has more power-hungry, unaccountable "czars" than any other administration

* How Team Obama's first one hundred days of appointments became a litany of embarrassments as would-be appointee after would-be appointee was exposed as a tax cheat or had to withdraw for other reasons

* How Obama's old ACORN and union cronies have squandered millions of taxpayer dollars and dues money to enrich themselves and expand their power

* How Obama's Wall Street money men and corporate lobbyists are ruining the economy and helping their friends In Culture of Corruption, Michelle Malkin lays bare the Obama administration's seamy underside that the liberal media would rather keep hidden.


Product Details

• Hardcover: 376 pages

• Publisher: Regnery Publishing (July 27, 2009)

• Language: English

• ISBN-10: 1596981091

• ISBN-13: 978-1596981096

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Scarcity of jobs puts more at risk of foreclosure

By ALAN ZIBEL and CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER, AP Business Writers

Thursday, August 26, 2010

(08-26) 14:03 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) --

The jobs crisis is putting more Americans at risk of losing their homes.

One in 10 households is facing foreclosure, and more than 2 million homes have been repossessed since the recession began. Few expect the outlook to improve until companies start to hire steadily again and layoffs ease.

And while there was some good news Thursday — a modest decrease in the number of Americans filing for jobless benefits for the first time in a month — the figure is still too high to bring down the unemployment rate.

So the housing crisis goes on.

"Ultimately, the housing story, whether it is delinquencies, homes sales or housing starts, is an employment story," said Jay Brinkmann, the top economist for the Mortgage Bankers Association.

It's just one of the problems confronting Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke as he speaks Friday at a closely watched conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo. The Fed has mostly exhausted its ammo to give the economy a jolt.

Just under 10 percent of homeowners had missed at least one mortgage payment as of June 30, according to a quarterly report on delinquencies released by Brinkman's trade group. That's more than double the level before the recession.

The percentage of mortgage borrowers receiving foreclosure notices did fall slightly from the previous quarter, the first drop in four years. And the percentage of loans receiving their first notice of foreclosure also dipped.

But many experts say the situation is getting worse. July was the worst month on record for new home sales and the worst in 15 years for sales of previously occupied homes.

The supply of unsold homes on the market keeps getting bigger. At the same time, the growing number of foreclosures keeps pushing down home prices and scaring potential buyers and sellers from the market.

More than 2.3 million homes have been repossessed by lenders since the recession began in December 2007, according to foreclosure listing service RealtyTrac Inc. And 6 million more will be lost to foreclosure over the next three years, by some estimates.

If that happens, home prices will probably sink further, and the economy will suffer. Builders will keep construction to a minimum, and Americans will be less willing to spend because of their lost home values.

"Housing is certainly not going to help the recovery," said Michelle Meyer, a Bank of America economist. "It threatens to hinder it."

A major problem is that many people have homes that are now worth less than they owe on their mortgages. Approximately 11 million homeowners, or 23 percent of those with a mortgage, were "underwater" as of the end of June, real estate data provider CoreLogic reported Thursday. Nevada had the highest number of any state, with 68 percent.

The number of "underwater" mortgages was down from the previous quarter — but only because homes are being repossessed by lenders.

The number of Americans missing payments and falling into foreclosure has gone up along with unemployment. The jobless rate has remained near double digits all year.

First-time requests for unemployment benefits fell last week to a seasonally adjusted 473,000. It was the first decline in a month and came one week after the number hit the half-million mark — the highest level in nine months.

Even with last week's decline, though, the four-week average in unemployment claims, which evens out the week-to-week volatility, rose to 486,750, the most since November 2009. In a healthy economy that number is more like 400,000.

Losing a job or having health problems that lead to high medical bills are among the reasons many people fall behind in their mortgage payments.

Toni Cloyd experienced both and fell behind twice on her monthly mortgage payment of $2,200 — first in 2006 after undergoing surgery and again in 2008 after she lost a job and was out of work for six months.

The Denver woman says she tried to catch up. She enrolled in the Obama administration's main program to help homeowners at risk of foreclosure by lowering their monthly payments. She says she made payments that were never applied, and the bank is still demanding $98,000 in missed payments, lawyer's bills and late fees.

Bank of America says she never provided proper documents and was not approved for the mortgage modification.

The end result came earlier this month. She pulled into the driveway and was embarrassed to find a foreclosure notice tacked to her door.

"It makes us appear to be deadbeats," she said. "We've done everything that we possibly could to resolve this."

Like Cloyd, nearly half of the 1.3 million homeowners who have enrolled in Obama administration program have been cut loose through July, the Treasury Department said last week. The program is intended to help those at risk of foreclosure by lowering their monthly mortgage payments.

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TIMOTHY F. GEITHNER, BUSH’S ARCHITECT FOR BANKSTER BAILOUTS AND LOOTING!

April 27, 2009

Geithner, Member and Overseer of Finance Club

By JO BECKER and GRETCHEN MORGENSON

Last June, with a financial hurricane gathering force, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. convened the nation’s economic stewards for a brainstorming session. What emergency powers might the government want at its disposal to confront the crisis? he asked.

Timothy F. Geithner, who as president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank oversaw many of the nation’s most powerful financial institutions, stunned the group with the audacity of his answer. He proposed asking Congress to give the president broad power to guarantee all the debt in the banking system, according to two participants, including Michele Davis, then an assistant Treasury secretary.

The proposal quickly died amid protests that it was politically untenable because it could put taxpayers on the hook for trillions of dollars.

“People thought, ‘Wow, that’s kind of out there,’ ” said John C. Dugan, the comptroller of the currency, who heard about the idea afterward. Mr. Geithner says, “I don’t remember a serious discussion on that proposal then.”

But in the 10 months since then, the government has in many ways embraced his blue-sky prescription. Step by step, through an array of new programs, the Federal Reserve and Treasury have assumed an unprecedented role in the banking system, using unprecedented amounts of taxpayer money, to try to save the nation’s financiers from their own mistakes.

And more often than not, Mr. Geithner has been a leading architect of those bailouts, the activist at the head of the pack. He was the federal regulator most willing to “push the envelope,” said H. Rodgin Cohen, a prominent Wall Street lawyer who spoke frequently with Mr. Geithner.

Today, Mr. Geithner is Treasury secretary, and as he seeks to rebuild the nation’s fractured financial system with more taxpayer assistance and a regulatory overhaul, he finds himself a locus of discontent.

Even as banks complain that the government has attached too many intrusive strings to its financial assistance, a range of critics — lawmakers, economists and even former Federal Reserve colleagues — say that the bailout Mr. Geithner has played such a central role in fashioning is overly generous to the financial industry at taxpayer expense.

An examination of Mr. Geithner’s five years as president of the New York Fed, an era of unbridled and ultimately disastrous risk-taking by the financial industry, shows that he forged unusually close relationships with executives of Wall Street’s giant financial institutions.

His actions, as a regulator and later a bailout king, often aligned with the industry’s interests and desires, according to interviews with financiers, regulators and analysts and a review of Federal Reserve records.

In a pair of recent interviews and an exchange of e-mail messages, Mr. Geithner defended his record, saying that from very early on, he was “a consistently dark voice about the potential risks ahead, and a principal source of initiatives designed to make the system stronger” before the markets started to collapse.

Mr. Geithner said his actions in the bailout were motivated solely by a desire to help businesses and consumers. But in a financial crisis, he added, “the government has to take risk, and we are going to be doing things which ultimately — in order to get the credit flowing again — are going to benefit the institutions that are at the core of the problem.”

The New York Fed is, by custom and design, clubby and opaque. It is charged with curbing banks’ risky impulses, yet its president is selected by and reports to a board dominated by the chief executives of some of those same banks. Traditionally, the New York Fed president’s intelligence-gathering role has involved routine consultation with financiers, though Mr. Geithner’s recent predecessors generally did not meet with them unless senior aides were also present, according to the bank’s former general counsel.

By those standards, Mr. Geithner’s reliance on bankers, hedge fund managers and others to assess the market’s health — and provide guidance once it faltered — stood out.

His calendars from 2007 and 2008 show that those interactions were a mix of the professional and the private.

He ate lunch with senior executives from Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley at the Four Seasons restaurant or in their corporate dining rooms. He attended casual dinners at the homes of executives like Jamie Dimon, a member of the New York Fed board and the chief of JPMorgan Chase.

Mr. Geithner was particularly close to executives of Citigroup, the largest bank under his supervision. Robert E. Rubin, a senior Citi executive and a former Treasury secretary, was Mr. Geithner’s mentor from his years in the Clinton administration, and the two kept in close touch in New York.

Mr. Geithner met frequently with Sanford I. Weill, one of Citi’s largest individual shareholders and its former chairman, serving on the board of a charity Mr. Weill led. As the bank was entering a financial tailspin, Mr. Weill approached Mr. Geithner about taking over as Citi’s chief executive.

But for all his ties to Citi, Mr. Geithner repeatedly missed or overlooked signs that the bank — along with the rest of the financial system — was falling apart. When he did spot trouble, analysts say, his responses were too measured, or too late.

In 2005, for instance, Mr. Geithner raised questions about how well Wall Street was tracking its trading of complex financial products known as derivatives, yet he pressed reforms only at the margins. Problems with the risky and opaque derivatives market later amplified the economic crisis.

As late as 2007, Mr. Geithner advocated measures that government studies said would have allowed banks to lower their reserves. When the crisis hit, banks were vulnerable because their financial cushion was too thin to protect against large losses.

In fashioning the bailout, his drive to use taxpayer money to backstop faltering firms overrode concerns that such a strategy would encourage more risk-taking in the future. In one bailout instance, Mr. Geithner fought a proposal to levy fees on banks that would help protect taxpayers against losses.

The bailout has left the Fed holding a vast portfolio of troubled securities. To manage them, Mr. Geithner gave three no-bid contracts to BlackRock, an asset-management firm with deep ties to the New York Fed.

To Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel-winning economist at Columbia and a critic of the bailout, Mr. Geithner’s actions suggest that he came to share Wall Street’s regulatory philosophy and world view.

“I don’t think that Tim Geithner was motivated by anything other than concern to get the financial system working again,” Mr. Stiglitz said. “But I think that mindsets can be shaped by people you associate with, and you come to think that what’s good for Wall Street is good for America.”

In this case, he added, that “led to a bailout that was designed to try to get a lot of money to Wall Street, to share the largesse with other market participants, but that had deeply obvious flaws in that it put at risk the American taxpayer unnecessarily.”

But Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, said in an interview that Mr. Geithner’s Wall Street relationships made him “invaluable” as they worked together to steer the country through crisis.

“He spoke frequently to many, many different players and kept his finger on the pulse of the situation,” Mr. Bernanke said. “He was the point person for me in many cases and with many individual firms so that we were prepared for any kind of emergency.”

An Alternate Path

A revolving door has long connected Wall Street and the New York Fed. Mr. Geithner’s predecessors, E. Gerald Corrigan and William J. McDonough, wound up as investment-bank executives. The current president, William C. Dudley, came from Goldman Sachs.

Mr. Geithner followed a different route. An expert in international finance, he served under both Clinton-era Treasury secretaries, Mr. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers. He impressed them with his handling of foreign financial crises in the late 1990s before landing a top job at the International Monetary Fund.

When the New York Fed was looking for a new president, both former secretaries were advisers to the bank’s search committee and supported Mr. Geithner’s candidacy. Mr. Rubin’s seal of approval carried particular weight because he was by then a senior official at Citigroup.

Mr. Weill, Citigroup’s architect, was a member of the New York Fed board when Mr. Geithner arrived. “He had a baby face,” Mr. Weill recalled. “He didn’t have a lot of experience in dealing with the industry.”

But, he added, “He quickly earned the respect of just about everyone I know. His knowledge, his willingness to listen to people.”

At the age of 42, Mr. Geithner took charge of a bank with enormous influence over the American economy.

Sitting like a fortress in the heart of Manhattan’s financial district, the New York Fed is, by dint of the city’s position as a world financial center, the most powerful of the 12 regional banks that make up the Federal Reserve system.

The Federal Reserve was created after a banking crisis nearly a century ago to manage the money supply through interest-rate policy, oversee the safety and soundness of the banking system and act as lender of last resort in times of trouble. The Fed relies on its regional banks, like the New York Fed, to carry out its policies and monitor certain banks in their areas.

The regional reserve banks are unusual entities. They are private and their shares are owned by financial institutions the bank oversees. Their net income is paid to the Treasury.

At the New York Fed, top executives of global financial giants fill many seats on the board. In recent years, board members have included the chief executives of Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, as well as top officials of Lehman Brothers and industrial companies like General Electric.

In theory, having financiers on the New York Fed’s board should help the president be Washington’s eyes and ears on Wall Street. But critics, including some current and former Federal Reserve officials, say the New York Fed is often more of a Wall Street mouthpiece than a cop.

Willem H. Buiter, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science who caused a stir at a Fed retreat last year with a paper concluding that the Federal Reserve had been co-opted by the financial industry, said the structure ensured that “Wall Street gets what it wants” in its New York president: “A safe pair of hands, someone who is bright, intelligent, hard-working, but not someone who intends to reform the system root and branch.”

Mr. Geithner took office during one of the headiest bull markets ever. Yet his most important task, he said in an interview, was to prepare banks for “the storm that we thought was going to come.”

In his first speech as president in March 2004, he advised bankers to “build a sufficient cushion against adversity.” Early on, he also spoke frequently about the risk posed by the explosion of derivatives, unregulated insurancelike products that many companies use to hedge their bets.

But Mr. Geithner acknowledges that “even with all the things that we took the initiative to do, I didn’t think we achieved enough.”

Derivatives were not an altogether new issue for him, since the Clinton Treasury Department had battled efforts to regulate the multitrillion-dollar market. As Mr. Geithner shaped his own approach, records and interviews show, he consulted veterans of that fight at Treasury, including Lewis A. Sachs, a close friend and tennis partner who managed a hedge fund.

Mr. Geithner pushed the industry to keep better records of derivative deals, a measure that experts credit with mitigating the chaos once firms began to topple. But he stopped short of pressing for comprehensive regulation and disclosure of derivatives trading and even publicly endorsed their potential to damp risk.

Nouriel Roubini, a professor of economics at the Stern School of Business at New York University, who made early predictions of the crisis, said Mr. Geithner deserved credit for trying, especially given that the Fed chairman at the time, Alan Greenspan, was singing the praises of derivatives.

Even as Mr. Geithner was counseling banks to take precautions against adversity, some economists were arguing that easy credit was feeding a more obvious problem: a housing bubble.

Despite those warnings, a report released by the New York Fed in 2004 called predictions of gloom “flawed” and “unpersuasive.” And as lending standards evaporated and the housing boom reached full throttle, banks plunged ever deeper into risky mortgage-backed securities and derivatives.

The nitty-gritty task of monitoring such risk-taking is done by 25 examiners at each large bank. Mr. Geithner reviewed his examiners’ reports, but since they are not public, it is hard to fully assess the New York Fed’s actions during that period.

Mr. Geithner said many of the New York Fed’s supervisory actions could not be disclosed because of confidentiality issues. As a result, he added, “I realize I am vulnerable to a different narrative in that context.”

The ultimate tool at Mr. Geithner’s disposal for reining in unsafe practices was to recommend that the Board of Governors of the Fed publicly rebuke a bank with penalties or cease and desist orders. Under his watch, only three such actions were taken against big domestic banks; none came after 2006, when banks’ lending practices were at their worst.

The Citigroup Challenge

Perhaps the central regulatory challenge for Mr. Geithner was Citigroup.

Cobbled together by Mr. Weill through a series of pell-mell acquisitions into the world’s largest bank, Citigroup reached into every corner of the financial world: credit cards, auto loans, trading, investment banking, as well as mortgage securities and derivatives. But it was plagued by mismanagement and wayward banking practices.

In 2004, the New York Fed levied a $70 million penalty against Citigroup over the bank’s lending practices. The next year, the New York Fed barred Citigroup from further acquisitions after the bank was involved in trading irregularities and questions about its operations. The New York Fed lifted that restriction in 2006, citing the company’s “significant progress” in carrying out risk-control measures.

In fact, risk was rising to dangerous levels at Citigroup as the bank dove deeper into mortgage-backed securities.

Throughout the spring and summer of 2007, as subprime lenders began to fail and government officials reassured the public that the problems were contained, Mr. Geithner met repeatedly with members of Citigroup’s management, records show.

From mid-May to mid-June alone, he met over breakfast with Charles O. Prince, the company’s chief executive at the time, traveled to Citigroup headquarters in Midtown Manhattan to meet with Lewis B. Kaden, the company’s vice chairman, and had coffee with Thomas G. Maheras, who ran some of the bank’s biggest trading operations.

(Mr. Maheras’s unit would later be roundly criticized for taking many of the risks that led Citigroup aground.)

His calendar shows that during that period he also had breakfast with Mr. Rubin. But in his conversations with Mr. Rubin, Mr. Geithner said, he did not discuss bank matters. “I did not do supervision with Bob Rubin,” he said.

Any intelligence Mr. Geithner gathered in his meetings does not appear to have prepared him for the severity of the problems at Citigroup and beyond.

In a May 15, 2007, speech to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Mr. Geithner praised the strength of the nation’s top financial institutions, saying that innovations like derivatives had “improved the capacity to measure and manage risk” and declaring that “the larger global financial institutions are generally stronger in terms of capital relative to risk.”

Two days later, interviews and records show, he lobbied behind the scenes for a plan that a government study said could lead banks to reduce the amount of capital they kept on hand.

While waiting for a breakfast meeting with Mr. Weill at the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan, Mr. Geithner phoned Mr. Dugan, the comptroller of the currency, according to both men’s calendars. Both Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase were pushing for the new standards, which they said would make them more competitive. Records show that earlier that week, Mr. Geithner had discussed the issue with JPMorgan’s chief, Mr. Dimon.

At the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insures bank deposits, the chairwoman, Sheila C. Bair, argued that the new standards were tantamount to letting the banks set their own capital levels. Taxpayers, she warned, could be left “holding the bag” in a downturn. But Mr. Geithner believed that the standards would make the banks more sensitive to risk, Mr. Dugan recalled. The standards were adopted but have yet to go into effect.

Callum McCarthy, a former top British financial regulator, said regulators worldwide should have focused instead on how undercapitalized banks already were. “The problem is that people in banks overestimated their ability to manage risk, and we believed them.”

By the fall of 2007, that was becoming clear. Citigroup alone would eventually require $45 billion in direct taxpayer assistance to stay afloat.

On Nov. 5, 2007, Mr. Prince stepped down as Citigroup’s chief in the wake of multibillion-dollar mortgage write-downs. Mr. Rubin was named chairman, and the search for a new chief executive began. Mr. Weill had a perfect candidate: Mr. Geithner.

The two men had remained close. That past January, Mr. Geithner had joined the board of the National Academy Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded by Mr. Weill to help inner-city high school students prepare for the work force.

“I was a little worried about the implications,” Mr. Geithner said, but added that he had accepted the unpaid post only after Mr. Weill had stepped down as Citigroup’s chairman, and because it was a good cause that the Fed already supported.

Although Mr. Geithner was a headliner with Mr. Prince at a 2004 fundraiser that generated $1.1 million for the foundation, he said he did not raise money for the group once on the board. He attended regular foundation meetings at Mr. Weill’s Midtown Manhattan office.

In addition to charity business, Mr. Weill said, the two men often spoke about what was happening at Citigroup. “It would be logical,” he said.

On Nov. 6 and 7, 2007, as Mr. Geithner’s bank examiners scrambled to assess Citigroup’s problems, the two men spoke twice, records show, once for a half-hour on the phone and once for an hourlong meeting in Mr. Weill’s office, followed by a National Academy Foundation cocktail reception.

Mr. Geithner also went to Citigroup headquarters for a lunch with Mr. Rubin on Nov. 16 and met with Mr. Prince on Dec. 4, records show.

Mr. Geithner acknowledged in an interview that Mr. Weill had spoken with him about the Citigroup job. But he immediately rejected the idea, he said, because he did not think he was right for the job.

“I told him I was not the right choice,” Mr. Geithner said, adding that he then spoke to “one other board member to confirm after the fact that it did not make sense.”

According to New York Fed officials, Mr. Geithner informed the reserve bank’s lawyers about the exchange with Mr. Weill, and they told him to recuse himself from Citigroup business until the matter was resolved.

Mr. Geithner said he “would never put myself in a position where my actions were influenced by a personal relationship.”

Other chief financial regulators at the Federal Deposit Insurance Company and the Securities and Exchange Commission say they keep officials from institutions they supervise at arm’s length, to avoid even the appearance of a conflict. While the New York Fed’s rules do not prevent its president from holding such one-on-one meetings, that was not the general practice of Mr. Geithner’s recent predecessors, said Ernest T. Patrikis, a former general counsel and chief operating officer at the New York Fed.

“Typically, there would be senior staff there to protect against disputes in the future as to the nature of the conversations,” he said.

Coping With Crisis

As Mr. Geithner sees it, most of the institutions hit hardest by the crisis were not under his jurisdiction — some foreign banks, mortgage companies and brokerage firms. But he acknowledges that “the thing I feel somewhat burdened by is that I didn’t attempt to try to change the rules of the game on capital requirements early on,” which could have left banks in better shape to weather the storm.

By last fall, it was too late. The government, with Mr. Geithner playing a lead role alongside Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson, scurried to rescue the financial system from collapse. As the Fed became the biggest vehicle for the bailout, its balance sheet more than doubled, from $900 billion in October 2007 to more than $2 trillion today.

“I couldn’t have cared less about Wall Street, but we faced a crisis that was going to cause enormous damage to the economy,” Mr. Geithner said.

The first to fall was Bear Stearns, which had bet heavily on mortgages and by mid-March was tottering. Mr. Geithner and Mr. Paulson persuaded JPMorgan Chase to take over Bear. But to complete the deal, JPMorgan insisted that the government buy $29 billion in risky securities owned by Bear.

Some officials at the Federal Reserve feared encouraging risky behavior by bailing out an investment house that did not even fall under its umbrella. To Mr. Geithner’s supporters, that he prevailed in the case of Bear and other bailout decisions is testament to his leadership.

“He was a leader in trying to come up with an aggressive set of policies so that it wouldn’t get completely out of control,” said Philipp Hildebrand, a top official at the Swiss National Bank who has worked with Mr. Geithner to coordinate an international response to the worldwide financial crisis.

But others are less enthusiastic. William Poole, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis until March 2008, said that the Fed, by effectively creating money out of thin air, not only runs the risk of “massive inflation” but has also done an end-run around Congressional power to control spending.

Many of the programs “ought to be legislated and shouldn’t be in the Federal Reserve at all,” he contended.

In making the Bear deal, the New York Fed agreed to accept Bear’s own calculation of the value of assets acquired with taxpayer money, even though those values were almost certain to decline as the economy deteriorated. Although Fed officials argue that they can hold onto those assets until they increase in value, to date taxpayers have lost $3.4 billion. Even these losses are probably understated, given how the Federal Reserve priced the holdings, said Janet Tavakoli, president of Tavakoli Structured Finance, a consulting firm in Chicago. “You can assume that it has used magical thinking in valuing these assets,” she said.

Mr. Geithner played a pivotal role in the next bailout, which was even bigger — that of the American International Group, the insurance giant whose derivatives business had brought it to the brink of collapse in September. He also went to bat for Goldman Sachs, one of the insurer’s biggest trading partners.

As A.I.G. bordered on bankruptcy, Mr. Geithner pressed first for a private sector solution. A.I.G. needed $60 billion to meet payments on insurance contracts it had written to protect customers against debt defaults.

A.I.G.’s chief executive at the time, Robert B. Willumstad, said he had hired bankers at JPMorgan to help it raise capital. Goldman Sachs had jockeyed for the job as well, but because the investment bank was one of A.I.G.’s biggest trading partners, Mr. Willumstad rejected the idea. The potential conflicts of interest, he believed, were too great.

Nevertheless, on Monday, Sept. 15, Mr. Geithner pushed A.I.G. to bring Goldman onto its team to raise capital, Mr. Willumstad said.

Mr. Geithner and Mr. Corrigan, a Goldman managing director, were close, speaking frequently and sometimes lunching together at Goldman headquarters. On that day, the company’s chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, was at the New York Fed.

A Goldman spokesman said, “We don’t believe anyone at Goldman Sachs asked Mr. Geithner to include the firm in the assignment.” Mr. Geithner said he had suggested Goldman get involved because the situation was chaotic and “time was running out.”

But A.I.G.’s search for capital was fruitless. By late Tuesday afternoon, the government would step in with an $85 billion loan, the first installment of a bailout that now stands at $182 billion. As part of the bailout, A.I.G.’s trading partners, including Goldman, were compensated fully for money owed to them by A.I.G.

Analysts say the New York Fed should have pressed A.I.G.’s trading partners to take a deep discount on what they were owed. But Mr. Geithner said he had no bargaining power because he was unwilling to threaten A.I.G.’s trading partners with a bankruptcy by the insurer for fear of further destabilizing the system.

A recent report on the A.I.G. bailout by the Government Accountability Office found that taxpayers may never get their money back.

The Debt Guarantee

Over Columbus Day weekend last fall, with the market gripped by fear and banks refusing to lend to one another, a somber group gathered in an ornate conference room across from Mr. Paulson’s office at the Treasury.

Mr. Paulson, Mr. Bernanke, Ms. Bair and others listened as Mr. Geithner made his pitch, according to four participants. Mr. Geithner, in the words of one participant, was “hell bent” on a plan to use the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to guarantee debt issued by bank holding companies.

It was a variation on Mr. Geithner’s once-unthinkable plan to have the government guarantee all bank debt.

The idea of putting the government behind debt issued by banking and investment companies was a momentous shift, an assistant Treasury secretary, David G. Nason, argued. Mr. Geithner wanted to give the banks the guarantee free, saying in a recent interview that he felt that charging them would be “counterproductive.” But Ms. Bair worried that her agency — and ultimately taxpayers — would be left vulnerable in the event of a default.

Mr. Geithner’s program was enacted and to date has guaranteed $340 billion in loans to banks. But Ms. Bair prevailed on taking fees for the guarantees, and the government so far has collected $7 billion.

Mr. Geithner has also faced scrutiny over how well taxpayers were served by his handling of another aspect of the bailout: three no-bid contracts the New York Fed awarded to BlackRock, a money management firm, to oversee troubled assets acquired by the bank.

BlackRock was well known to the Fed. Mr. Geithner socialized with Ralph L. Schlosstein, who founded the company and remains a large shareholder, and has dined at his Manhattan home. Peter R. Fisher, who was a senior official at the New York Fed until 2001, is a managing director at BlackRock.

Mr. Schlosstein said that while he and Mr. Geithner spoke frequently, BlackRock’s work for the Fed never came up.

“Conversations with Tim were appropriately a one-way street. He’d call you and pepper you with a bunch of questions and say thank you very much and hang up,” he said. “My experience with Tim is that he makes those kinds of decisions 100 percent based on capability and zero about relationships.”

For months, New York Fed officials declined to make public details of the contract, which has become a flash point with some lawmakers who say the Fed’s handling of the bailout is too secretive. New York Fed officials initially said in interviews that they could not disclose the fees because they had agreed with BlackRock to keep them confidential in exchange for a discount.

The contract terms they subsequently disclosed to The New York Times show that the contract is worth at least $71.3 million over three years. While that rate is largely in keeping with comparable fees for such services, analysts say it is hardly discounted.

Mr. Geithner said he hired BlackRock because he needed its expertise during the Bear Stearns-JPMorgan negotiations. He said most of the other likely candidates had conflicts, and he had little time to shop around. Indeed, the deal was cut so quickly that they worked out the fees only after the firm was hired.

But since then, the New York Fed has given two more no-bid contracts to BlackRock related to the A.I.G. bailout, angering a number of BlackRock’s competitors. The fees on those contracts remain confidential.

Vincent Reinhart, a former senior Federal Reserve official, said a more open process might have yielded a better deal for the taxpayers.

“They may have been able to convince themselves that this was the only way to go, but it sounds to me like nobody stepped back and said, ‘What’s this going to look like to the outside world,’” he said.

Rescues Revisited

As Mr. Geithner runs the Treasury and administration officials signal more bailout money may be needed, the specter of bailouts past haunts his efforts.

He recently weathered a firestorm over retention payments to A.I.G. executives made possible in part by language inserted in the administration’s stimulus package at the Treasury Department’s insistence. And his new efforts to restart the financial industry suggest the same philosophy that guided Mr. Geithner’s Fed years.

According to a recent report by the inspector general monitoring the bailout, Neil M. Barofsky, Mr. Geithner’s plan to underwrite investors willing to buy the risky mortgage-backed securities still weighing down banks’ books is a boon for private equity and hedge funds but exposes taxpayers to “potential unfairness” by shifting the burden to them.

The top echelon of the Treasury Department is a common destination for financiers, and Mr. Geithner has also recruited aides from Wall Street, some from firms that were at the heart of the crisis. For instance, his chief of staff, Mark A. Patterson, is a former lobbyist for Goldman Sachs, and one of his top counselors is Lewis S. Alexander, a former chief economist at Citigroup.

A bill sent recently by the Treasury to Capitol Hill would give the Obama administration extensive new powers to inject money into or seize systemically important firms in danger of failure. It was drafted in large measure by Davis Polk & Wardwell, a law firm that represents many banks and the financial industry’s lobbying group. Mr. Geithner also hired Davis Polk to represent the New York Fed during the A.I.G. bailout.

Treasury officials say they inadvertently used a copy of Davis Polk’s draft sent to them by the Federal Reserve as a template for their own bill, with the result that the proposed legislation Treasury sent to Capitol Hill bore the law firm’s computer footprints. And they point to several significant changes to that draft that “better protect the taxpayer,” in the words of Andrew Williams, a Treasury spokesman.

But others say important provisions in the original industry bill remain. Most significant, the bill does not require that any government rescue of a troubled firm be done at the lowest possible cost, as is required by the F.D.I.C. when it takes over a failed bank. Treasury officials said that is because they would use the rescue powers only in rare and extreme cases that might require flexibility. Karen Shaw Petrou, managing director of the Washington research firm Federal Financial Analytics, said it essentially gives Treasury “a blank check.”

One year and two administrations into the bailout, Mr. Geithner is perhaps the single person most identified with the enormous checks the government has written. At every turn, he is being second-guessed about the rescues’ costs and results. But he remains firm in his belief that failure to act would have been much more costly.

“All financial crises are a fight over how much losses the government ultimately takes on,” he said. And every decision “requires we balance how to achieve the most benefits in terms of improving confidence and the flow of credit at the least risk to taxpayers.”

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GOOGLE GOLDMAN SACHS and BARACK OBAMA…$$$$$$

“Goldman Sachs is expected to pay its employees an average of about $595,000 apiece for 2009, one of the most profitable years in its 141-year history.”

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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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Ralph Nader tells us: Health care reform "weak"; Tea Partiers "nothing"; Obama a "corporatist"...and he hasn't ruled out a 2012 run


Just returned a vmail that "Ralph Nader would like to speak with you." (Oh, go ahead, the taunt is too easy: "Man, he MUST be bored.") Truth is, Nader was pushing a book by a local dude, but more on that some other time. We were itching to ask the first question on your mind. Ralph, with four prez runs under your belt, are you done running for public office?

"It's too early to say," Nader told The Chronicle.

And really, it is, because the former Matt Gonzalez running mate is too worked up about other issues. Like the health care reform package before Congress ("It's very weak"); the financial reform package stuttering through the Capitol ("a thin sheet of ice"); the political potential of the Tea Party movement ("There's nothing there"); and his disappointment in President Obama. "He's a corporatist."

Oh, yeah. And he plugged his latest book.

And now, for the deets:

On the health care package the House and Senate are trying to forge: "It's very weak and deferred. The main thrust of the bill -- to insure the uninsured -- doesn't kick in for four years, with minor exceptions."

"It is horrifically difficult to administer because if you're this age, and not that age you get different treatments. It's such a disaster, that after it's signed into law -- and it keeps getting worse -- there will be an opening for the second round -- which has got to be single payer, Medicare-for-all." (Which Nader supports.)

"It won't control the prices. They (insurance companies) will all design around the good parts of the bill (like not dumping people with pre-existing conditions). They'll just increase the deductible and raise the premiums." Nader starts laughing. "This is child's play for these guys."

Are there any positives in the package?

"You can say that 30 million will be covered...after 180,000 die after four years." (According to a Journal of Public Health study that says 45,000 people die annually due to a lack of health insurance.) "This is an industry with a perverse incentive. It makes more money by gouging people and denying beneifts. The basic virus is still there to rise and rise again. (The insurers) got away with no price regulation."

Financial reform legislation:

"It touched every base -- thin as ice. So it touched the ratings industry -- and didn't do much at all. It didn't do beans on derivatives. (Former Fed chair Paul) Volcker thinks it's absurd."

On the Tea Party Movement:

"There's nothing there. These are people who have other grievances other than the health issue. They're pro-NRA, pro-life, all that, and they're brought in under another umbrella."

"It's good they're speaking out. But it's not new energy. It's old energy. It's people who have already protested in their own way and have been brought together."

Can it become a political force in the 2010 elections?

"Not unless it congeals to break the conservatives off from the corporatists in the Republican Party. That fissure is possible but the Tea Party doesn't do it.

"The Tea Party people were brought in to focus on the government as the ogre but the issue is the corporations who are running the goverment from Wall Street."

On Obama's first year:

"He's a corporatist. Everything I predicted a year ago has turned out worse. But he's gone overboard in the sense that he's turned his back on the liberal and progressive constituency that elected him."

Sounds like somebody is ready to order some "Nader in 2012" signs.


Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/nov05election/detail?entry_id=54588#ixzz0bsQ70jJQ

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latimes.com

Senate panel concludes Goldman Sachs profited from financial crisis

A two-year investigation says the investment bank deceived investors and Congress about its bets against the subprime mortgage market.

By Jim Puzzanghera and Nathaniel Popper, Los Angeles Times

April 14, 2011

After a two-year bipartisan probe, a Senate panel has concluded that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. profited from the financial crisis by betting billions against the subprime mortgage market, then deceived investors and Congress about the firm's conduct.

Some of the findings in the report by the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will be referred to the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission for possible criminal or civil action, said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the panel's chairman.

"In my judgment, Goldman clearly misled their clients and they misled the Congress," Levin told reporters before the report was made public late Wednesday.

Goldman said it disagreed with many of the subcommittee's conclusions and denied its executives misled Congress. The firm agreed last year to pay $550 million to settle a civil fraud case brought by the SEC regarding its actions in the market for mortgage securities. The latest allegations go beyond the conduct covered by the SEC suit.

The giant investment bank was just one focus of the subcommittee's probe into Wall Street's role in the financial crisis. The 639-page report — based on internal memos, emails and interviews with employees of financial firms and regulators — casts broad blame, saying the crisis was caused by "conflicts of interest, heedless risk-taking and failures of federal oversight."

"It shows without a doubt the lack of ethics in some of our financial institutions," said Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), the subcommittee's top Republican, who approved the report along with Levin.

Among the culprits cited by the panel are Washington Mutual, a major mortgage lender that failed in 2008, as well as the Office of Thrift Supervision, a federal bank regulator, and credit rating firms. The report makes 19 recommendations about how to prevent a future crisis, many of which were adopted in last year's overhaul of financial rules.

The subcommittee's conclusions about the cause of the crisis are similar to those of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission created by Congress. But that body's findings were marred by an inability to reach bipartisan consensus.

Much of the report centers on Goldman, whose executives were called before the committee last year for an intensive grilling. Levin was one of the chief inquisitors at that hearing and has been outspoken about Goldman's role in the crisis.

"Goldman was, I think, the only major bank that did well during the recession. We tried to find out, 'How is it they did well?' " Levin said Wednesday. "The tactics that they used … were disgraceful. And sticking it to their own clients violates their own claim that the clients come first."

Asked if he was disappointed that no Wall Street figures had gone to jail in connection with the crisis, Levin responded, "There's still time."

The report could be damaging for Goldman, particularly if it results in fresh charges against the firm. But from a public relations point of view, it's unclear whether the latest allegations will be seen as significant revelations.

"Everyone already kind of has a feeling that whatever the report stipulates, that Goldman has already done that," said Morningstar Inc. bank analyst Michael Wong. "They've already been put through the wringer."

One of the report's main allegations against Goldman was that it deceived clients who bought its mortgage-related securities, failing to tell those investors the firm was betting against those investments at the same time.
The SEC suit that Goldman settled last year alleged that the firm had misled investors in a complex mortgage-related security known as Abacus. The Senate report cites three similar securities that it said Goldman betted against, or shorted, without informing its clients.
The report also says Goldman Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein and other executives misled the subcommittee when they appeared before the subcommittee last April and testified that the investment bank had not consistently tilted its own investments heavily against the housing market — a position known as being "net short."

The subcommittee has estimated that in 2007 Goldman's bets against the mortgage markets more than balanced out the bank's mortgage losses and led to a $1.2-billion profit in the mortgage department alone that year.

Goldman was so focused on shorting the market it even tried a strategy called a "short squeeze" to drive down the price of obtaining short positions, the report said.
In a statement issued Wednesday, Goldman said that during the subcommittee's hearing last year, its executives "repeatedly and consistently acknowledged that we were intermittently net short during 2007. We did not have a massive net short position because our short positions were largely offset by our long positions, and our financial results clearly demonstrate this point."

But the subcommittee report says such denials by Goldman "are directly contradicted by its own financial records and internal communications."

NEW YORK TIMES

January 10, 2010

EDITORIAL

Are They Really?

What’s with the apologies? Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein caught his fellow titans by surprise in November, admitting that “we participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret.” That came less than two weeks after he infuriated pretty much everyone else by declaring that Goldman was “doing God’s work.”

He was not the only banker indulging in the contrition thing. (In March, Bank of America’s Ken Lewis, who presided over the bungled acquisition of Merrill Lynch, issued his own apology and was still pushed out.) Now the former Time Warner chief executive Gerald Levin, who is not even a banker, has plunged into the zeitgeist.

Mr. Levin issued a belated — by a decade — mea culpa for buying AOL and urged others to follow his lead. “I presided over the worst deal of the century, apparently,” Mr. Levin said. “I guess it’s time for those who are involved in companies to stand up and say: You know what, I’m solely responsible for it.”

Wall Street has a lot to apologize for, but contrition would be more convincing if it came with accountability: a resignation or a decision to forswear bonuses and certainly a pledge to stop trying to block desperately needed financial reforms.

Americans come as well equipped to apologize as anybody. Five minutes on the neighborhood playground will confirm that parents still try their best to instill in their children the merits of saying “I’m sorry.”

True contrition is a rare thing in the American corner office, probably because when children become corporate executives they have lawyers who patiently explain how such good manners could get them in trouble in the land of legal liability. In bankers, this is compounded by a sense that they are truly doing God’s work — not merely gambling with taxpayers’ money.

At play here, we suspect, are both tactics and a sense of history. Legend has it that during the reign of King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette responded to her hungry subjects’ demand for bread by declaring, “Let them eat cake.” In hindsight, an apology might have been a better idea. Mr. Blankfein still has his job.

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GOOGLE GOLDMAN SACHS and BARACK OBAMA…$$$$$$

“Goldman Sachs is expected to pay its employees an average of about $595,000 apiece for 2009, one of the most profitable years in its 141-year history.”

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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).”

NEW YORK TIMES

January 10, 2010

Banks Prepare for Bigger Bonuses, and Public’s Wrath

By LOUISE STORY and ERIC DASH

Everyone on Wall Street is fixated on The Number.

The bank bonus season, that annual rite of big money and bigger egos, begins in earnest this week, and it looks as if it will be one of the largest and most controversial blowouts the industry has ever seen.

Bank executives are grappling with a question that exasperates, even infuriates, many recession-weary Americans: Just how big should their paydays be? Despite calls for restraint from Washington and a chafed public, resurgent banks are preparing to pay out bonuses that rival those of the boom years. The haul, in cash and stock, will run into many billions of dollars.

Industry executives acknowledge that the numbers being tossed around — six-, seven- and even eight-figure sums for some chief executives and top producers — will probably stun the many Americans still hurting from the financial collapse and ensuing Great Recession.

Goldman Sachs is expected to pay its employees an average of about $595,000 apiece for 2009, one of the most profitable years in its 141-year history. Workers in the investment bank of JPMorgan Chase stand to collect about $463,000 on average.

Many executives are bracing for more scrutiny of pay from Washington, as well as from officials like Andrew M. Cuomo, the attorney general of New York, who last year demanded that banks disclose details about their bonus payments. Some bankers worry that the United States, like Britain, might create an extra tax on bank bonuses, and Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, is proposing legislation to do so.

Those worries aside, few banks are taking immediate steps to reduce bonuses substantially. Instead, Wall Street is confronting a dilemma of riches: How to wrap its eye-popping paychecks in a mantle of moderation. Because of the potential blowback, some major banks are adjusting their pay practices, paring or even eliminating some cash bonuses in favor of stock awards and reducing the portion of their revenue earmarked for pay.

Some bank executives contend that financial institutions are beginning to recognize that they must recalibrate pay for a post-bailout world.

“The debate has shifted in the last nine months or so from just ‘less cash, more stock’ to ‘what’s the overall number?’ ” said Robert P. Kelly, the chairman and chief executive of the Bank of New York Mellon. Like many other bank chiefs, Mr. Kelly favors rewarding employees with more long-term stock and less cash to tether their fortunes to the success of their companies.

Though Wall Street bankers and traders earn six-figure base salaries, they generally receive most of their pay as a bonus based on the previous year’s performance. While average bonuses are expected to hover around half a million dollars, they will not be evenly distributed. Senior banking executives and top Wall Street producers expect to reap millions. Last year, the big winners were bond and currency traders, as well as investment bankers specializing in health care.

Even some industry veterans warn that such paydays could further tarnish the financial industry’s sullied reputation. John S. Reed, a founder of Citigroup, said Wall Street would not fully regain the public’s trust until banks scaled back bonuses for good — something that, to many, seems a distant prospect.

“There is nothing I’ve seen that gives me the slightest feeling that these people have learned anything from the crisis,” Mr. Reed said. “They just don’t get it. They are off in a different world.”

The power that the federal government once had over banker pay has waned in recent months as most big banks have started repaying the billions of dollars in federal aid that propped them up during the crisis. All have benefited from an array of federal programs and low interest rate policies that enabled the industry to roar back in profitability in 2009.

This year, compensation will again eat up much of Wall Street’s revenue. During the first nine months of 2009, five of the largest banks that received federal aid — Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley — together set aside about $90 billion for compensation. That figure includes salaries, benefits and bonuses, but at several companies, bonuses make up more than half of compensation.

Goldman broke with its peers in December and announced that its top 30 executives would be paid only in stock. Nearly everyone on Wall Street is waiting to see how much stock is awarded to Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman’s chairman and chief executive, who is a lightning rod for criticism over executive pay. In 2007, Mr. Blankfein was paid $68 million, a Wall Street record. He did not receive a bonus in 2008.

Goldman put aside $16.7 billion for compensation during the first nine months of 2009.

Responding to criticism over its pay practices, Goldman has already begun decreasing the percentage of revenue that it pays to employees. The bank set aside 50 percent in the first quarter, but that figure fell to 48 percent and then to 43 percent in the next two quarters.

JPMorgan executives and board members have also been wrestling with how much pay is appropriate.

“There are legitimate conflicts between the firm feeling like it is performing well and the public’s prevailing view that the Street was bailed out,” said one senior JPMorgan executive who was not authorized to speak for the company.

JPMorgan’s investment bank, which employs about 25,000 people, has already reduced the share of revenue going to the compensation pool, from 40 percent in the first quarter to 37 percent in the third quarter.

At Bank of America, traders and bankers are wondering how much Brian T. Moynihan, the bank’s new chief, will be awarded for 2010. Bank of America, which is still absorbing Merrill Lynch, is expected to pay large bonuses, given the bank’s sizable trading profits.

Bank of America has also introduced provisions that would enable it to reclaim employees’ pay in the event that the bank’s business sours, and it is increasing the percentage of bonuses paid in the form of stock.

“We’re paying for results, and there were some areas of the company that had terrific results, and they will be compensated for that,” said Bob Stickler, a Bank of America spokesman.

At Morgan Stanley, which has had weaker trading revenue than the other banks, managers are focusing on how to pay stars in line with the industry. The bank created a pay program this year for its top 25 workers, tying a fifth of their deferred pay to metrics based on the company’s later performance.

A company spokesman, Mark Lake, said: “Morgan Stanley’s board and management clearly understands the extraordinary environment in which we operate and, as a result, have made a series of changes to the firm’s compensation practices.”

The top 25 executives will be paid mostly in stock and deferred cash payments. John J. Mack, the chairman, is forgoing a bonus. He retired as chief executive at the end of 2009.

At Citigroup, whose sprawling consumer banking business is still ailing, some managers were disappointed in recent weeks by the preliminary estimates of their bonus pools, according to people familiar with the matter. Citigroup’s overall 2009 bonus pool is expected to be about $5.3 billion, about the same as it was for 2008, although the bank has far fewer employees.

The highest bonus awarded to a Citigroup executive is already known: The bank said in a regulatory filing last week that the head of its investment bank, John Havens, would receive $9 million in stock. But the bank’s chief executive, Vikram S. Pandit, is forgoing a bonus and taking a salary of just $1.

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Obama Quietly Erasing Borders (Article)

Article Link:

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=240045

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Lou Dobbs Tonight

Monday, September 28, 2009

And T.J. BONNER, president of the National Border Patrol Council, will weigh in on the federal government’s decision to pull nearly 400 agents from the U.S.-Mexican border. As always, Lou will take your calls to discuss the issues that matter most-and to get your thoughts on where America is headed.

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CONTACT THE HISPANDERING LA RAZA PARTY PRESIDENT HERE:

You can contact President Obama and let him know of your opposition to amnesty for illegal aliens:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT/

THESE FIGURES ARE DATED. CNN REPORTS THERE ARE MORE THAN ONE MILLION MEXICAN GANG MEMBERS IN THIS NATION, AND THE MEX DRUG CARTELS HAVE DEEMED OUR BORDER ENTIRELY OPEN. BUT THEN SO DOES LA RAZA OBAMA!

Lou Dobbs Tonight

And there are some 800,000 gang members in this country: That’s more than the combined number of troops in our Army and Marine Corps. These gangs have become one of the principle ways to import and distribute drugs in the United States. Congressman David Reichert joins Lou to tell us why those gangs are growing larger and stronger, and why he’s introduced legislation to eliminate the top three international drug gangs.

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HOW MANY ILLEGAL CRIMINALS ARE ON THE PROWL?

400,000 and they’re just waiting for OBAMA’S LA RAZA AMNESTY!

There are currently over 400,000 unaccounted for illegal alien criminals with outstanding deportation orders. Those are just the ones apprehended. At least one fourth of these are hard core criminals. Nobody knows how many more there are, but they are numerous and roaming your neighborhoods, preying on you and your family. Read more about it here.

Many of these heinous crimes are against children. How many children are being molested, raped, and murdered by illegal aliens? Nobody knows for sure but the numbers are staggering. To give you some idea of the prevalence of the crime, peruse the ICE Public Information News Releases.

While there are numerous reports of individual sexual predators such as Mexican Sex Offender and Six-Time Deportee in ICE Custody or Man Deported Following Conviction For Molesting 6-year-old, you will see many reports of multiple child predators being caught and deported. Some of them over the last two years are as follows:

• 45 child predators arrested in New York City,,

• 36 convicted Orange County child sex offenders face deportation

• ICE arrests 52 child predators in NYC operation

• Four Child Predators Arrested In Rhode Island

• ICE Arrests 16 predators in Westchester County Operation

• ICE Agents Arrest 8 Child Sex Predators In Washington, DC And Virginia

• 18 Predators Nabbed By ICE In Nassau County

• ICE Arrests 25 Child Sex Offenders in Chicago Area

• ICE Arrests 7 in Rockland County, NY

• 12 Child Sex Predators Arrested in Santa Clara County

• ICE Arrests 27 Sexual Predators in Suffolk County

In case you are interested, that is 250 illegal alien child molesters. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

When we talk about the costs to secure our borders, we need to ask "How many crimes against children is acceptable collateral damage?" Isn't that what it is all about? Cheap lettuce versus molested, raped and murdered children - a cost/benefit tradeoff.

Occasionally, the Federal Government decides to actually do something about some of the more violent illegal alien criminals - after they are already here and have committed mayhem! Operation Predator evolved out of ICE's mission to find and deport illegal aliens with the more heinous criminal records. The majority of the arrests under Operation Predator - roughly 85% - involved foreign nationals in this country whose child sex crimes made them removable from the United States. By matching immigration databases with state Megan's law directories, ICE agents have arrested more than 1,800 registered sex offenders.

Digressing for a moment, what the hell was a convicted, illegal alien sex offender even doing out of jail or not immediately deported – even if 63% do come right back - let alone roaming around the neighborhoods while on a registry! Has the judicial system in this country gone insane?

In any case, Operation Predator began on July 9, 2003, and resulted in 6,085 child predator arrests throughout the country - an average of roughly 250 arrests per month and eight arrests per day. While arrests have been made in every state, the most have occurred in these states: Arizona (207), California (1,578), Florida (255), Illinois (282), Michigan (153), Minnesota (190), New Jersey (423), New York (367), Oregon (148) and Texas (545).

While Operation Predator was a noble effort and ICE is to be commended, it only made a small dent in the criminal activity and number of horrific crimes being committed by illegal alien child sexual predators.

It is worth noting that some pedophile statistics report that each pedophile molests average of 148 children. If so, that could be as many as 900,580 victims from just the 6,085 illegal alien predators that were caught. Regardless, how many children being molested is acceptable collateral damage?

In fact, the criminal activity in the illegal alien community is now so bad that illegal aliens are being held for ransom and as slaves by other illegal aliens and smugglers are kidnapping illegal aliens from other smugglers! Then there is the fast growing "sex slave" problem as reported in The Girls Next Door, SEX TRAFFICKING - San Francisco Is A Major Center For International Crime Networks That Smuggle And Enslave, Raid in Tennessee ends girl's captivity as a sex slave Profiling Sex Trafficking: Illegal Immigrants At Risk, Latina Sex Slavery, and Police sting in Colorado shuts down Pacifica brothel

For more crimes committed by illegal aliens and the personal impact it has had on individual citizens see Immigrations Human Cost, Victims of Illegal Aliens, Crime Victims of Illegal Aliens, Escaping Justice, Predatory Aliens, Crimes involving immigrants from around the world, both legal and otherwise, and Victims of Illegal Aliens Memorial. Go to Fallen Heroes for information on a few more cops killed by illegal aliens.

When visiting any of the links and sites, keep in mind that nobody is tracking and reporting the crimes on a national basis and these are just the tip of the iceberg.

While it is a fact that most illegal aliens are law abiding, except for breaking immigration laws, it is also a fact that a significant percentage of illegal aliens have no respect for the rule of law and our legal customs. Many come with anti-American attitudes and philosophies that are totally alien to our culture, a subject addressed later in this paper. The end result is an ever-growing lawlessness among large portions of the illegal alien communities. It only makes sense that illegal alien criminals come to the United States - this is where the money is and our jails are a whole lot nicer than what they have in their home countries.

As previously noted, this report does not go into the property crimes being committed by illegal aliens. However, like the activities of other equal opportunity criminals, many property crimes are drug related, an activity that many illegal aliens, especially illegal alien gangs, are involved in. While violent crimes against one's person are the most serious, if your identity or car is stolen by an illegal alien you won't be too happy about it.

As a small example of property crimes, in 2003, according to the Arizona Department of Motor Vehicles, 57,600 cars were stolen in Phoenix alone. The owner losses are estimated to exceed $864 million. Most of the stolen cars ended up in Mexico and were never recovered. How many of those cars were stolen by illegal alien criminals versus resident criminals is unknown but you can rest assured that illegal aliens had a large part of it..

Next Section: Impacts of Illegal Immigration: Gangs

Previous Section: Impacts of Illegal Immigration: Sex Crimes

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