Thursday, April 3, 2014

THE LOOTING of AMERICA: Barack Obama and his Crony Banksters - The Wall Street settlements and the new aristocracy

The Wall Street settlements and the new aristocracy

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Democracy in America and around the world is collapsing
under the weight of immense and ever-growing levels of
social inequality, bound up with the domination of a financial
mafia that uses its political power to enrich itself at the
expense of society. Congress, the White House, the courts,
the regulators, the Democrats and Republicans are all
subservient to this financial aristocracy.

The Wall Street settlements and the new aristocracy

2 April 2014
Last week, Bank of America became the latest major financial institution to announce a multi-billion-dollar settlement with US regulators of charges related to the 2008 financial meltdown. In a settlement worked out with the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the bank agreed to pay $5.83 billion in fines and buy back $3.2 billion in mortgage-backed securities from the government-sponsored mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to whom it sold the toxic assets in the run-up to the Wall Street crash. The settlement involves the largest fine levied by a single federal regulator in US history.

The agreement adds to the more than $100 billion in fines that have been levied by US regulators on major American and global banks since the financial crisis, more than half of which has been imposed over the past year.

The record size of the settlements points to the pervasiveness and scale of the criminality of the banks and their top officials. And yet, not a single leading bank executive has been criminally charged.
This is not for lack of evidence. The 2011 reports by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission document in considerable detail the fact that the 2008 crash was triggered by criminal wrongdoing by bank executives. Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said that the committee had found “a financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing.”
The most egregious crimes by Wall Street and international banks that have led to financial settlements with US regulators include the following:
  •  Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase and other banks sold mortgage-backed securities they knew to be virtually worthless, helping to trigger the 2008 crash. Even as the banks were selling these securities to investors, they were making huge profits by betting against the same securities, without telling those to whom they were palming off the securities.
  •  Major US banks, including Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Bank of America, illegally processed and even forged home mortgage documents in order to more quickly foreclose on the homes of families that had fallen behind on their mortgage payments. The number of people illegally foreclosed on will never be known because the Obama administration put a stop to the tally, but the figure is likely in the millions.
  •  Nearly all of the major US and international banks manipulated the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor), the benchmark global interest rate used to set rates on some $350 trillion in financial assets, including mortgages, credit cards, student loans and bonds. By falsely reporting the interest they paid for loans from other banks, these institutions concealed their losses and increased their profits—at the expense of individual retirees, home and car owners, pension funds and municipalities all over the world.
  •  Major banks, including JPMorgan and UBS, were key partners in the $65 billion Ponzi scheme operated by Bernard Madoff. Earlier this year, JPMorgan, Madoff’s main banker, agreed to pay $2 billion to settle charges that it knowingly profited from Madoff’s scam. The deal shielded JPMorgan and its CEO, Jamie Dimon, from criminal charges through a “deferred prosecution” provision.
The settlements themselves were worked out between the banks and their regulators so as to have the maximum public relations effect, creating the appearance that the banks were being held accountable while minimizing the financial impact on the companies. The banks write off the fines—many of which are tax deductible—as part of the “cost of doing business.”

Not only have no top bankers been prosecuted, no major US banks have been broken up or nationalized. The big banks have grown even bigger and more powerful and have recovered their previous levels of profitability. Even taking into account the settlements with regulators, the six largest US banks made $76 billion in profits last year, just under the record set in 2006 and eclipsing every other year since 2008.

Wall Street pay, too, has hit record levels. The average bonus payout for Wall Street employees grew by 15 percent in 2013, reaching its highest level since the crash. Last week, both Bank of America and Morgan Stanley announced they were nearly doubling the pay of their respective chief executives for 2013.

Prior to the great democratic revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, Europe was dominated by an entrenched economic and political aristocracy that enjoyed special privileges and immunities—enshrined in law—that set it apart from the rest of society.

What has emerged today in the United States and the other capitalist countries is a new, financial aristocracy, consisting of multimillionaires and billionaires who make their wealth through financial speculation and manipulation, diverting untold resources from the development of the productive forces, infrastructure and the well-being of the population into their own bank accounts and stock portfolios.

The refusal of the government of the United States or that of any other major industrialized country to prosecute the bankers whose illegal operations triggered the crash of 2008 and subsequent global recession, or take any action against the banks that they head, demonstrates that society is once again dominated by a parasitic elite that, like the aristocrats of old, is above the law.
The government serves not to oversee and regulate the financial elite, let alone hold it accountable. It is their servant and protector. The regulatory agencies, such as the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission, are themselves filled with former or future employees of the banks they are supposed to regulate.

The Hill reported last week that over two dozen officials who worked on the Obama administration’s Dodd-Frank financial overhaul have moved on to “lucrative jobs in the private sector,” with many working for law firms and consultancies that advise banks how to avoid the very regulations they drafted.

Democracy in America and around the world is collapsing under the weight of immense and ever-growing levels of social inequality, bound up with the domination of a financial mafia that uses its political power to enrich itself at the expense of society. Congress, the White House, the courts, the regulators, the Democrats and Republicans are all subservient to this financial aristocracy.
Holding to account the criminals who are responsible for the crisis is a vital part of the defense of the social rights of the working class and the struggle to break the grip of the financial kleptocracy on social and political life.

This cannot be carried out through appeals to Congress, the courts or the Democratic Party, which is no less subservient to the banks than the Republicans. The stranglehold of the financial aristocracy can be broken only through a mass political offensive by the working class. Such a movement must be based on the perspective of reorganizing society on a socialist basis, in which the banks and corporations are removed from private ownership and control and transformed into publicly owned utilities under the democratic control of the people.

Andre Damon


OBAMA’S LOOTING of AMERICA: The Obamacare Hoax to enrich Wall Street cronies


“An examination of Emanuel’s vision of health care restructuring reveals that Obama’s proposals have been informed by many of its guiding principles. Key among them are the defense of a health system based on private profit and the delivery of class-based, rationed medical care for the majority of Americans.”

SOARING POVERTY IN AMERICA – soaring profits for banksters and Wall Street – IS IT OBAMANOMICS AT WORK?



THE OBAMA and WALL STREET ASSAULT
ON AMERICA… YOUR CITY IS NEXT!

This report is another example of the obscene concentration of wealth in America that has raised inequality to a level not seen in more than a century. Wages for workers in the United States are at their lowest level since the 1950s.

more at this link – post on your Facebook and email broadcast


 

Income inequality grows four times faster under Obama than Bush


The study noted that, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the US undertook policies “during the New Deal [that] permanently reduced income concentration until the 1970s.” In contrast, the study noted a striking absence of any measures to reign in social inequality in the present crisis. Far from it, the Obama administrations’ bank bailouts, austerity program and wage-cutting policies have vastly expanded the prevalence of social inequality.
REALITY of HOPE & CHANGE…. will we survive Wall Street’s ongoing looting?

State of the Union: A bankrupt ruling class talking to itself

30 January 2014

President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech was a cynical propaganda piece, filled with fraudulent claims and promises that no one, least of all his audience at the US Capitol, believes in the slightest.


With Obama’s speech Tuesday night one had more than ever the sense of the president as chief representative of the financial aristocracy that rules America, speaking to a house filled with millionaire congress members and bought-and-paid-for representatives of big business.

NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY HAS TAKEN MORE MONEY FROM CRIMINAL BANKSTERS THAN BARACK OBAMA

Wall Street bonuses up by 15 percent last year

By Andre Damon
14 March 2014
The average bonus payout for Wall Street employees grew by 15 percent in 2013, hitting the highest level since the 2008 financial crash, according to figures released Wednesday by New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli.

The average employee bonus hit $164,530 in 2013, the third-highest figure on record, including both cash bonuses and deferred compensation payouts for earlier years. The total cash bonus pool for Wall Street hit $26.7 billion.

The payout came despite the fact that profits at financial companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange fell by 30 percent, although the profits were “still strong by historical standards,” according to DiNapoli, at $16.7 billion.

The Comptroller noted that the financial sector has posted profits in each of the past five years, and that three of those years set profit records.

The average individual salary in the financial sector was $360,700, not including bonuses, in 2012, five times the average salary in the private sector as a whole (both figures are skewed by the inclusion of the incomes of millionaires and billionaires in the average).

The estimate is based on income tax data, and does not include newly-issued stock options or other deferred compensation on which taxes have not yet been assessed. The growth in total payouts came despite the fact that the number of jobs in the New York City financial sector actually fell by 1.2 percent last year to 165,200 people.

The comptroller estimated that the city received some $3.8 billion in taxes from the $27 billion payout, 27 percent higher than the previous year. While the financial industry makes up only 5 percent of the jobs in New York City, it pays 22 percent of the city’s wages, according to the report.
The figures included major pay increases for top Wall Street executives that had been announced earlier. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was awarded $20 million in pay for 2013, an increase of 74 percent from the previous year, the bank said in a January filing. Dimon has been at the center of a web of scandals resulting from JPMorgan’s criminal activities, which led the bank to make more than $20 billion in legal payouts in 2013.

Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, received stock worth $14.7 million last year, an increase of 11 percent over the previous year’s stock bonus. His total payout is estimated to be $23 million—a ten percent increase—according to the Financial Times. The newspaper noted that this figure does not include additional “long-term incentives that will be disclosed later in the year.”
The payouts came even as leading bank executives cashed out on shares that they had been issued in previous years. For instance, the Wall Street Journal reported that Christopher French, a Goldman Sachs partner, sold 27,366 shares in February, for a total payout of $4.52 million.

The latest round of bonus payouts is fueling a spending binge by Wall Street traders and executives on luxury items such as high-end cars, yachts, art, and real estate. “My Wall Street clients feel like they have money and they want to unload it,” Michele Kleier, the president of a New York real estate firm, told the New York Times. “Now that they have their bonuses, and the bonuses are higher than they thought, they’re spending them on places to live.”

Wednesday’s announcement follows a bumper year for corporate executives and the super-rich more broadly. The twenty executives with the largest stakes in S&P 500 companies saw their wealth grow by a combined $80.9 billion in 2013, according to a study conducted last month by the Wall Street Journal and FactSet.

Warren Buffett, the head of Berkshire Hathaway, saw the value of his Berkshire stock increase by $12.7 billion last year, bringing his total holdings to $60 billion. Jeffrey Bezos of Amazon made $12 billion last year, bringing his total to $33.9 billion, while Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook saw the value of his Facebook holdings nearly double from $11.3 billion to $23 billion.
Bill De Blasio, the Democratic-party mayor of the city who postured as an opponent of income inequality during his campaign, did not publicly comment after the announcement of the record bonuses.
Responding to Wednesday’s figures, the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal think tank, said that the $26.7 billion in Wall Street payouts would have been “enough to more than double the pay for all 1,085,000 Americans who work full-time at the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.”
The announcement came the same day as a gas explosion in the impoverished New York City neighborhood of Harlem killed seven people and injured at least 70 others.

According to initial reports, the explosion was attributable to the decrepit state of infrastructure in New York City, the home of Wall Street and the highest number of billionaires of any city in the world.

OBAMAnomics at work: How Barack Obama looted America for his Wall Street paymasters:


In all, the research team behind the Forbes Billionaires list found a total of 1,645 billionaires worldwide as of February 12, with a combined net worth of $6.4 trillion, an increase of $1 trillion from 2013. The number of new billionaires, at 268, was the highest figure in the report’s history.

OBAMA’S WALL STREET-FUNDED WAR on the AMERICAN PEOPLE:

 

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/02/barack-obama-and-wall-streets-war-on.html

 

The Democrats’ proposal for a trivial increase in the minimum wage comes as social inequality is hitting unprecedented levels. The net worth of America’s billionaires reached $1.2 trillion last year, more than double what it was in 2009. Meanwhile, median household income in the US plummeted by 8.3 percent between 2007 and 2012.


WALL STREET LOOTS!

 

THE STAGGERING COST OF OBAMA’S CORPORATE WELFARE PROGRAM:

 

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-staggering-cost-of-obamas-crony.html

 
LIKE HIS CRONY BANKSTERS, Tech CEOs literally got access to the Oval Office while the bill was being shaped, the New York Times reported in those heady early days of Hope and Change, while the CEOs’ lobbyists met down the hall with top economics aide Jason Furman.

 

OBAMA and his CRONIES BANKRUPT AMERICA… then send the bills for their LOOTING to the AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS

 

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/02/obama-bankrupts-america-while-his_19.html

 

RECALL OBAMA?

 

Over seven in 10 Obama voters, and 55 percent of Democrats, regret voting for President Obama's re-election in 2012, according to a new Economist/YouGov.com poll.


They knew Obama was an unqualified crook; yet they promoted him. They knew Obama was a train wreck waiting to happen; yet they made him president, to the great injury of America and the world. They understood he was only a figurehead, an egomaniac, and a liar; yet they made him king, doing great harm to our republic (perhaps irreparable.)”


THE OBAMA YEARS – THE GOLDEN AGE
OF BANKSTER LOOTING AND BANKSTER
WELFARE…

INCEST! The case of bankster-owned Barack Obama and crony Jamie Dimon of JP MORGAN… their looting continues!


OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS PARTY UP AND STILL GIVE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE THE MIDDLE FINGER


'Not when those foibles had resulted in real harm to millions of people in the form of foreclosures, wrecked 401(k)s, and a devastating unemployment crisis.'


STAGGERING POVERTY IN AMERICA

CAUSED BY OBAMA, HIS CRONIES AND

WALL STREET DONORS…AND THEN

ILLEGALS GET THE JOBS!


http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/09/obamanomics-and-obamas-crony-capitalism.html

According to a new report by University of California Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez, the gulf between the wealthy and the rest of society has sharply expanded under Obama. The richest one percent now monopolize more than 22 percent of all household income in America. The richest ten percent of the population now control more than half of the nation’s income, 50.4 percent—the highest proportion since the government began collecting income statistics in 1917.

Since 2009, the richest one percent has captured a staggering 95 percent of all income gains. The class war policies of the government—including bank bailouts, “quantitative easing” and an attack on wage and benefits for the working class—have led to a 31.4 percent rise in income for the top one percent. The wealthy have more than recovered the losses that came from the Wall Street collapse of 2008.

Meanwhile, the bottom 99 percent has seen a negligible 0.4 percent rise in income. Tens of millions of workers—who never recovered from the record household income drop of 2007 to 2009—continue to reel from the effects of mass job losses, falling wages, home foreclosures, indebtedness and social service cuts.
 
 

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