OBAMA and HIS
CRIMINAL BANKSTERS – THE LOOTING OF A NATION CONTINUES!
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).
THERE IS A
REASON WHY OBAMA BROUGHT IN BUSH’S ARCHITECT FOR BANKSTERS’ NO-STRING BAILOUTS,
THE DARLING OF WALL ST CRIMINALS, TIM GEITHNER!
AND THE
BANKSTERS LOVE IT! THEIR PROFITS HAVE SOARED UNDER OBAMA!
NO PRESIDENT IN
HISTORY HAS TAKEN MORE LOOT FROM CRIMINAL BANKSTERS THAN BARACK OBAMA! WHILE
HIS DOJ IS OUT HARASSING LEGALS ON BEHALF OF OBAMA’S LA RAZA PARTY BASE OF ILLEGALS,
THE BANKSTER GO UNPUNISHED!
DURING OBAMA’S
FIRST TWO YEARS ALONE, HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTERS’ PROFITS SOARED GREATER THAN ALL
EIGHT UNDER BUSH!
BANKSTERS’ PROFITS
AND CRIMES ARE SOARING… so are foreclosures!
Consider the Obama administration's choices for the four
most important positions in financial sector law enforcement. The attorney
general (Eric Holder) and the head of the Justice Department's criminal
division (Lanny Breuer) both come to us from Covington & Burling,
a law firm that represents and lobbies for most of the major banks and their
industry associations; indeed Breuer was co-head of its white collar criminal
defense practice, and represented the Moody's rating agency in the Enron case.
Mary Schapiro, the head of the SEC, spent the housing bubble in charge of
FINRA, the investment banking industry's "self-regulator," which gave
her a $9 million severance for a
job well done. And her head of enforcement, perhaps most stunningly of all, is
Robert Khuzami, who was general counsel
for Deutsche Bank's North American business during the entire bubble. So zero
prosecutions isn't much of a surprise, really.
Banking Is a Criminal Industry
Because Its Crimes Go Unpunished
Posted: 07/16/2012 8:23 am
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Financial Reform , Financial
Crisis , Financial Crisis , JP
Morgan , Finance , Financial Crimes , LIBOR ,
Business
News
Consider just this month's news in financial services.
First, Barclay's has been manipulating the Libor, the main interest rate
upon which most other interest rates and financial transactions are based,
since 2005. Moreover, Barclay's traders were colluding with traders in many
other banks to assist them in manipulating the Libor too, so that they could all
profit from their bets on it.
Second, JP Morgan Chase is having a really great month. Recent reports
describe how it is resisting Federal
subpoenas related to price-fixing in U.S. electricity markets. It is also
accused (by former employees among others) of deliberately inflating the
performance of its investment funds to obtain business. And finally, JP
Morgan's failed "London whale" trade,
which has now cost over $5 billion, is being investigated to determine whether
the loss was initially concealed from regulators and the public.
Third, HSBC is paying a fine because it
allowed hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of dollars of money laundering
by rogue states and sanctioned firms, including some related to terrorist
activities and Iran's nuclear efforts. But HSBC is only one of at least 12
banks now known to have tolerated, and in some cases aggressively courted,
money laundering by rogue states, terrorist organizations, corrupt dictators,
and major drug cartels over the last decade. Others include Barclay's, Lloyds,
Credit Suisse, and Wachovia (now part of Wells Fargo). Several of the banks
created special handbooks on how to evade surveillance, created special
business units to handle money laundering, and actively suppressed
whistleblowers who warned of drug cartel activities.
Fourth, a new private lawsuit cites documents indicating that
Morgan Stanley successfully pressured rating agencies into inflating the
ratings of mortgage-backed securities it issued during the housing bubble.
Fifth, Visa and Mastercard have just agreed to pay $7 billion
to settle a private antitrust case filed by thousands of merchants, who alleged
that Visa and Mastercard colluded to fix fees and terms of service.
Just another month in financial services. Is it unusual? No, it's not. If
we go back just a little further, we have UBS, HSBC, Julius Baer, and other
banks actively marketing tax evasion services to wealthy U.S. and European
citizens. We have senior executives of several banks (including JP Morgan Chase
and UBS) strongly suspecting that Bernard Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme,
but deciding to make money from him rather than turn him in. And then, of
course, we have the financial crisis and everything that led to it. As I show
in great detail in my book Predator Nation, we
now possess overwhelming evidence of massive securities fraud, accounting
fraud, perjury, and criminal Sarbanes-Oxley violations by mortgage lenders,
investment banks, and credit insurers (including senior executives of
Countrywide, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, AIG, and
Lehman Brothers) during the housing bubble that caused the financial crisis. If
we go back to the late 1990s, we have the massively fraudulent hyping of
Internet stocks, and several banks (including Merrill Lynch and Citigroup)
actively aiding Enron in committing its frauds.
So, July 2012 really isn't abnormal at all. The reason for this is very
simple. Over the past two decades, the financial services industry has become a
pervasively unethical and highly criminal industry, with massive fraud
tolerated or even encouraged by senior management. But how did that happen?
Well, deregulation helped, of course. But something else was far more
important. It is the one critical factor that unites all of the episodes cited
above, including those of this month. This critical unifying factor is the
total number of criminal prosecutions of major firms and senior executives as a
result of all of these crimes combined.
And what is that number?
Zero.
Literally zero. A number that neither President Obama nor Mitt Romney shows
the slightest interest in changing.
Consider the Obama administration's choices for the four most important
positions in financial sector law enforcement. The attorney general (Eric
Holder) and the head of the Justice Department's criminal division (Lanny
Breuer) both come to us from Covington & Burling,
a law firm that represents and lobbies for most of the major banks and their
industry associations; indeed Breuer was co-head of its white collar criminal
defense practice, and represented the Moody's rating agency in the Enron case.
Mary Schapiro, the head of the SEC, spent the housing bubble in charge of
FINRA, the investment banking industry's "self-regulator," which gave
her a $9 million severance for a
job well done. And her head of enforcement, perhaps most stunningly of all, is
Robert Khuzami, who was general counsel
for Deutsche Bank's North American business during the entire bubble. So zero
prosecutions isn't much of a surprise, really.
In contrast, what do you think would happen to you if, as a lone
individual, you were caught supporting Iran's nuclear program? Do you think
that you would get off with a "deferred prosecution agreement" and a
fine equal to a few percent of your annual salary? No?
But that's because you don't live right. You probably haven't been to the
White House a dozen times since President Obama took office, or attended White
House state dinners, like Lloyd Blankfein has. Nor have you probably overseen
millions of dollars in lobbying and campaign donations, or hired senior
administration officials, or sent your executives into the government in senior
regulatory positions, or paid $135,000 for a speech by someone who later became
chairman of the National Economic Council. And, well, you get the law
enforcement that you pay for.
Charles Ferguson is the author of Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals,
Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America.
April 27, 2009
Geithner, Member and Overseer of Finance Club
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.”
*
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
—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
—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
—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
—Thomas E. Woods, Jr., best-selling author of Meltdown and The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to American History
*
·
Hardcover: 256 pages
·
Publisher: Regnery Press (November 30,
2009)
·
Language: English
·
ISBN-10: 1596986123
·
ISBN-13: 978-1596986121
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